The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters (57 page)

The quarry itself was deeply excavated, its sheer orange stone walls betraying an even higher concentration of iron than he had seen from the train. The density of the reddish color made his scattered mind wonder if he had been transported in secret to the Macklenburg mountains. The floor was a flattened bed of gravel and clay, and around him he could see piles of different mineral substances—sand, bricks, rocks, slag heaps of melted dross. On the far side was a series of chutes and grates and sluices—the quarry must have some supply of water, native or pumped in—and what might have been a shaftway descending underground. Near this—far away but still close enough to bring sweat to Svenson’s collar—was a great bricked kiln with a metal hatch. At the hatch crouched Doctor Lorenz, intent as a wicked gnome, once again wearing his goggles and gauntlets, a small knot of similarly garbed assistants clustered around him. Opposite these actual mining works of the quarry, and sitting on a series of wooden benches that reminded Svenson of an open-air schoolroom, were the men and women from the train. Facing them and giving some sort of low-voiced instruction was a short, curvaceous woman in a pale dress—it could only be Miss Poole. Installed alone on the backmost bench, Svenson was startled to see the Bascombe woman, her wig restored and her face—if perhaps a little pale and drawn—almost ceramically composed.

He heard a noise and looked up. Directly above him on the wide, first landing of the staircase, which made a balcony from which to overlook the quarry, stood the party of black-coated men: the Royal personage, Crabbé, and to the side, his complexion the color of dried paste, Mr. Phelps, his arm in a sling. Behind them all, smoking a cheroot, stood a tall man with cropped hair in the red uniform of the 4th Dragoons, the rank of a colonel at his throat. It was Aspiche. Svenson had not attracted their notice. He looked elsewhere in the quarry—not daring to hope that Elöise had escaped—scanning for any sign of her capture. On the other side of the stairs was an enormous, stitched-together amalgamation of tarps, covering something twice the size of a rail car and taller, some kind of advanced digging apparatus? Could it being covered mean they were
done
with digging, that the seam of indigo clay was exhausted? He looked back to the kiln for a better sense of what Lorenz was actually doing, but his eyes were stopped by another single tarp, thrown over a small heap, near the large stacks of wood used to stoke the oven. Svenson swallowed uncomfortably. Sticking out from the tarp was a woman’s foot.

“Ah…he has awakened,” said a voice from above.

He looked up to see Harald Crabbé leaning over the rail with a cold, vengeful gaze. A moment later he was joined by the Royal, whose expression was that of a man examining livestock he had no intention to buy. “Excuse me for a moment, Highness—I suggest you keep your attention on Doctor Lorenz, who will no doubt have something of great interest to demonstrate momentarily.” He bowed and then snapped his fingers to Phelps, who slunk after his master down the stairs. After another taste of his cheroot, Aspiche ambled after them, allowing his saber to bang on each step as he went. Svenson wiped his mouth with his free left hand, did his best to hawk the phlegm from his throat and spat. He turned to face them as Crabbé stepped from the stairs.

“We did not know if you would revive, Doctor,” he called. “Not that we cared overmuch, you understand, but if you did it seemed advantageous to try and speak with you about your actions and your confederates. Where are the others—Chang and the girl? Who do you all serve in this persistently foolish attempt to spoil things you don’t comprehend?”

“Our conscience, Minister,” answered Svenson, his voice thicker than he’d expected. He wanted very much to sleep. Blood was creeping into his arm, and he knew abstractly that he was going to be in agony very soon as the nerves flooded back to life. “I cannot be plainer than that.”

Crabbé studied him as if Svenson could not possibly have meant what he said, and therefore must be speaking in some kind of code.

“Where are Chang and the girl?” he repeated.

“I do not know where they are. I don’t know if they’re alive.”

“Why are you here?”

“And how’s the back of your head?” chortled Aspiche.

Svenson ignored him, answering the Minister. “Why do you think? Looking for Bascombe. Looking for you. Looking for my Prince so I can shoot him in the head and save my country the shame of his ascending its throne.”

Crabbé twitched the corners of his mouth in a sketch of a smile.

“You seem to have broken this man’s arm. Can you set the bones? You
are
a doctor, yes?”

Svenson looked at Phelps and met his pleading eyes. How long had it been? Hours at least, with the raw fractures cruelly jarred with each step the poor fellow took. Svenson raised his shackled wrist. “I will need out of this, but yes, certainly I can do something. Do you have wood for a splint?”

“We have plaster, actually—or something like it, Lorenz tells me—they use it for mining, or for shoring up crumbling walls. Colonel, will you escort the Doctor and Phelps? If Doctor Svenson diverges from his task in the slightest, I’ll be obliged if you would hack off his head directly.”

They walked across the quarry, past the impromptu schoolroom, toward Lorenz. As they passed, Svenson could not help but glance at Miss Poole, who met his eyes with a dazzling smile. She said something to her listeners to excuse herself and a moment later was walking quickly to catch him.

“Doctor!” she called. “I did not think to meet you again, or not so soon—and certainly not here. I am
told
”—she glanced wickedly at Aspiche—“that you have made yourself a most deadly nuisance, and have nearly slain our guest of honor!” She shook her head as if he were a charmingly disobedient boy. “They say that enemies are often closest in character—what separates them is but an attitude of mind, and as I think we all must see, those are eminently flexible. Why not join us, Doctor Svenson? Forgive me for being blunt, but when I first saw you in the St. Royale, I had no idea of your status as an adventurer—your legend grows by the day, even to the heights of your unfortunate friend Cardinal Chang, who I am led to understand is, well, no longer your competition in heroic endeavors.”

Svenson could not help it, but at her words he flinched. To the obvious anger of Colonel Aspiche, Miss Poole draped her arm in Svenson’s and clucked her tongue, leaning in to his face. Her perfume was sandalwood, like Mrs. Marchmoor’s. Her soft hands, the overwhelmingly delicate scent, the sweat around his neck, the hammering in his skull, the woman’s galling
blitheness
: Doctor Svenson felt as if his brain would boil. She chuckled at his discomfort.

“
Next
of course you will tell me you are a rescuer and defender of women—I have heard as much this very evening. But look”—she turned and waved to the Bascombe woman, sitting on the bench, who immediately waved back with the hopeful vigor of a whipped dog’s wagging tail—“there is Pamela Hawsthorne, the present Lady of Tarr Manor, and happy as can be, despite the unpleasant
misunderstanding
.”

“She has undergone your Process?”

“Not yet, but I’m sure she will. No, she has merely been exposed to our powerful science. Because it
is
science, Doctor, which I hope as a scientific man you will credit. Science advances, you know, just as must the moral fiber of our society. Sometimes it is dragged forward by the actions of those more knowledgeable, like a recalcitrant child. You
do
understand.”

He wanted to offend her, call her a whore, to crassly violate this pretense of companionable flirtation, but he lacked the presence of mind to form the appropriate insult. Perhaps he could vomit from dizziness. Instead, he tried to smile.

“You are very persuasive, Miss Poole. May I ask you a question—as I am a foreigner?”

“Of course.”

“Who
is
that man?”

Svenson turned and nodded to the tall figure next to Crabbé on the stair landing, looking over the quarry as if he were a Borgia Pope sneering down from a Vatican balcony. Miss Poole chuckled again and patted his arm indulgently. It occurred to him that she had not possessed this sort of power before the Process, and still searched for its proper expression—was he a child to her, a pupil, an ignorant tool, or a trainable dog?

“Why, that is the Duke of Stäelmaere. He is the old Queen’s natural brother, you know.”

“I did not know.”

“Oh yes. If the Queen and her children were to perish—heaven forbid—the Duke would inherit the throne.”

“That’s a lot of perishing.”

“Please don’t misunderstand me. The Duke is Her Majesty’s most trusted sibling. As such he works most
intimately
with the present government.”

“He seems intimate with Mr. Crabbé.”

She laughed and was about to make a witticism when she was brusquely interrupted by Aspiche.

“That’s enough. He’s here to fix this man’s arm. And then he’s going to die.”

She bore the intrusion gracefully and turned to Svenson.

“Not much of a prospect, Doctor. I would consider a switch in alliances, if I were you. You truly do not know what you are missing. And if you never do, well…won’t that be too sad?”

Miss Poole gave him a smiling, teasing nod of her head and returned to her benches. Svenson glanced at Aspiche, who watched her with evident relish. Had she been groping Aspiche or Lorenz in the private dining room at the St. Royale? Lorenz, he was fairly sure—though it looked as if Lorenz was quite occupied with his smelting and could not be bothered. Svenson saw the man empty one of the bandolier flasks into a metal cup that his assistants were preparing to stuff into the raging kiln. He wondered what the chemical process really was—there seemed to be several distinct steps of refinement…were these for different purposes, to convert the indigo clay to distinct uses? He looked back at Miss Poole, and wondered where her glass book was now. If he could manage to capture that…

He was interrupted again by Aspiche, tugging his tingling arm toward Mr. Phelps, who was painfully attempting to take off his black coat. Svenson looked up at Aspiche, to ask for splints and for some brandy at least for the man’s pain, when he saw, looming in the orange kiln-light like the tattoos of an island savage, the looping scars of the Process scored across his face. How had he not noticed them before? Svenson could not help it. He laughed aloud.

“What?” snarled the Colonel.

“You,” answered Svenson boldly. “Your face looks like a clown’s. Do you know that last time I saw Arthur Trapping—which was in his coffin, mind you—his face was the same? Do you think, just because they have expanded your
mind,
that you are any less their contingent tool?”

“Be quiet before I kill you!” Aspiche shoved him toward Phelps, who began to move out of the way and then flinched with pain.

“You’ll kill me anyway. Listen—Trapping was a man with powerful friends, he was someone they needed. You can’t pretend to that—you’re just the man with the soldiers, and your own elevation should demonstrate how easily you too could be replaced. You mind the hounds when they need to hunt—it’s servitude, Colonel, and your expanded mind ought to be
broad
enough to see it.”

Aspiche backhanded Doctor Svenson viciously across the jaw. Svenson sprawled in a heap, his face stinging. He blinked and shook his head. He saw that Lorenz had heard the sound and turned to them, his expression hidden behind the black goggles.

“Fix his arm,” said Aspiche.

In fact the “plaster” was some kind of seal for the kiln, but Svenson thought it would work well enough. The breaks were clean, and to his credit Phelps did not pass out—though to Svenson this always seemed a dubious credit indeed. For, if he
had
passed out it certainly would have gone easier for them all. As it was, the man was left trembling and spent, sitting on the ground with his arm swathed in his cast. Svenson had curtly apologized for the inconvenience of breaking his arm—assuring him that it was the Duke he had wanted to strike—and Phelps had answered that, of course, given the circumstances, it was entirely understandable.

“Your companion…,” Svenson began, wiping his hands on a rag.

“I’m afraid you have done for him,” replied Phelps, his voice somehow distant for all the pain, with the delicate, whispered quality of dried rice paper. He nodded to the tarp. Now that they were closer, Svenson saw that in addition to the woman’s foot, there was also a man’s black shoe. What had been his name—Starck? The weight of the killing settled heavily on the Doctor’s shoulders. He looked to Phelps, as if he should say something, and saw the man’s eyes had already drifted elsewhere, biting his lip against the grinding of his broken bones.

“It’s what happens in war,” Aspiche sneered with contempt. “When you made the choice to fight, you made the choice to die.”

Svenson’s gaze returned to the hidden stack of bodies, trying desperately to recall Elöise’s shoes. Could that be her foot? How many people—dear God—were under the tarp? It had to be at least four, judging by the height, perhaps more. He hoped that, with him captured, they would not bother to search the inn or the train platform in the morning, that she might somehow get away.

“Is he going to live?” This was the arch, mocking call of Doctor Lorenz, walking over from the kiln, the goggles pulled down around his neck. He was looking at Phelps, but did not even wait for an answer. His eyes roamed over Svenson once, a professional estimation that revealed nothing save an equally professional depth of suspicion, and then moved on to Aspiche. Lorenz gestured to his assistants, who had followed him over from the kiln.

“If we’re to dispose of this evidence, then now is the time. The kiln is at its hottest, and will only burn lower from this point on—for all that we wait, the remains shall be more legible.”

Aspiche looked across the quarry and raised his arm, getting the attention of Crabbé. Svenson saw the Minister peer, then realize what the Colonel was pointing to and give him an answering wave of approval. Aspiche called to Lorenz’s men.