The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters (74 page)

The guests, he saw, were once again masked and in formal dress, and their snatches of conversation all carried a buzzing current of anticipation and mystery.

“Do you know—it is said they will be married—tonight!”

“The man in the cape—with the red lining—it is Lord Carfax, back from the Baltic!”

“Did you notice the servants with the iron-bound chests?”

“They will give us a signal to come forward—I had it myself from Elspeth Poole!”

“I’m sure of it—a shocking vigor—”

“Such dreams—and afterwards such peace of mind—”

“They will come like trusting puppies—”

“Did you see it? In the air? Such a machine!”

“Fades in a matter of days—I have it on the highest authority—”

“I have heard it from one who has been before—a particular
disclosure
—”

“No one has seen him—Henry Xonck himself was refused!”

“I’ve never heard such screaming—nor right after, witnessed such ecstasy—”

“Such an unsurpassed collection of
quality
!”

“Spoken in front of everyone, ‘is not history best written with a whip mark?’ The Lady is superb!”

“No one has spoken to him for days—apparently he will reveal all tonight, his secret plans—”

“He’s going to speak! The Comte as much as promised it—”

“And then…the work will be revealed!”

“Indeed…the work will be revealed!”

This last was from a pair of thin rakish men in tailcoats and masks of black satin. Chang had penetrated well into the maze of private apartments and presently stood behind a marble pillar upon which was balanced an ancient and delicate amphora of malachite and gold. The chuckling men walked past—he was in a middling-sized sitting room—toward a sideboard laid with bottles and glasses. The men poured themselves whiskies and sipped them happily, leaning against the furniture and smiling at one another, for all the world like children waiting for permission to unwrap birthday presents.

One of them frowned. He wrinkled his nose.

“What is it?” asked the other.

“That smell,” said the first.

“My goodness,” agreed the other, sniffing too. “What could it be?”

“I’ve no idea.”

“It’s really quite horrid…”

Chang shrank as best he could behind the pillar. If they continued toward him he would have no choice but to attack them both. One of them would surely have a chance to scream. He would be found. The first man had taken an exploratory step in his direction. The other hissed at him.

“Wait!”

“What?”

“Do you think they might be
starting
?”

“I don’t understand—”

“The smell! Do you think they’re
starting
? The alchemical fires!”

“O my goodness! Is that what they smell like?”

“I don’t know—do you?”

“I don’t know! We could be late!”

“Hurry—hurry—”

Each tossed back his whisky and slammed down his glass. They rushed unheedingly past Chang, straightening their masks and smoothing their hair.

“What will they make us do?” asked one as they opened the door to leave.

“It does not matter,” the other barked urgently, “you must do it!”

“I will!”

“We will be redeemed!” one called with a giddy chuckle as the door closed. “And then
nothing
shall stop us!”

Chang stepped from his spot. With a shake of his head, he wondered if their reaction would have been any different had he not traveled through the furnace pipes, but merely arrived at a Harschmort drawing room bearing the normal odors of his rooming house.
That
smell they would have recognized, he knew—it had been settled into their social understanding. The hideous smells of Harschmort and the Process carried the possibility of advancement, suspending all natural judgment. Similarly, he saw now the Cabal could be as blunt and open as it wished about its aims of power and domination. The beauty was that none of these aspirants—crowding together in their finery, as if they’d managed an invitation to court—saw themselves as people dominated, though their desperate fawning made it obvious that they were. The unreality of the evening—their
induction
—only served to flatter them more, thrilling themselves with the silks and the masks and scheming—enticing trappings that Chang saw were nothing but the distractions of a circus mountebank. Instead of looking up at the Contessa or the Comte with any suspicion, these people were turned gleefully the other way, looking at all the people—from within their new “wisdom”—they might now dominate in turn. He saw the brutal sense of it. Any plan that trusted for success on the human desire to exploit others and deny the truth about one’s self was sure to succeed.

Chang cracked open the far doors and looked into the corridor Smythe had described, the whole of its length lined with doors. One of these doors had led him to Arthur Trapping’s body. At one end he could see the spiral staircase. He was convinced that Vandaariff’s study must lay in the other direction if it held a way down into the great chamber.

But where to start? Smythe had said the house was full of guests—as he had said the hallway was full of guards…but for this moment it was unaccountably empty. Chang could not expect it to stay so while he tried each of what—at a quick glance—seemed to be at least thirty doors. All this time…was there any hope that Celeste was alive?

He stepped boldly into the hall, striding away from the staircase. He passed the first doors, one after another, with a rising sense of anticipation. If whatever had happened to Aspiche and the Duke (it was difficult for Chang to think of a more loathsome member of the Royal Family) had indeed served to disrupt the ceremony in the great chamber, then Chang was committed to causing as many additional disturbances as he could. He whipped apart his stick—still no one intruded—he was halfway down the hallway. Could everything have already started in spite of what Smythe had said? Chang stopped. To his left one of the doors was ajar. He crept to it and peered through the crack: a narrow slice of a room with red carpet and red wallpaper and a lacquered stand upon which balanced a Chinese urn. He listened…and heard the unmistakable sounds of rustling clothing and heavy breathing. He stepped back, kicked in the door with a crash, and charged forward.

Before him on the carpet was a Macklenburg trooper with his trousers around his knees, desperately trying to pull them up at the same time he hopelessly groped for his saber—the belt and scabbard tangled around his ankles. The man’s mouth was opened in fearful protest and there was just time for Chang to register his expression shifting, from shame to incomprehension as he saw who had surprised him, before driving the dagger to the hilt into the trooper’s throat, choking off any cry of alarm. He yanked the blade free, stepping clear like a bullfighter of the attending spray of blood, and let the man topple to the side, his pale buttocks uncovered by his dangling shirt-tails.

Was there anything that more signified the helplessness of humanity than the exposed genitals and buttocks of the dead? Chang did not think so. Perhaps a single discarded child’s shoe…but that was mere sentiment.

Beyond the dead soldier, lying on the carpet with her dress above her waist was a richly clad woman, hair askew, her face aglow with perspiration around a green beaded mask. Her eyes were wild, blinking, and her breathing coarse and drawn…but the rest of her body seemed unresponsive, as if she were asleep. The man had clearly been about her rape, but Chang saw that her undergarments were yet only half-lowered—he had been surprised in the midst of his attack. Yet the woman’s vacant expression suggested her utter unconcern. He stood for a moment over her, his gaze drawn both to her beauty and by the twitches and spasms that rippled across her frame, as if she lay in the midst of a distended fit. He wondered how long it had taken the soldier to advance from hearing her heavy breathing in the hall, through cautious entry and voyeuristic observation, to outright violation. Chang shut the door behind him—the hall was still empty—and then bent down to restore the woman’s dress. He reached up to pull the hair away from her face and revealed, beneath her head like a pillow, what her apparently unseeing eyes so greedily devoured…a gleaming blue glass book.

The woman’s exhalations rose into a moan, her skin as hot and red as if she had fever. Chang looked at the book and licked his lips. With a decisiveness he did not wholly feel he took hold of the woman beneath her arms and lifted her from it, his eyes flinching from the bright gleam of the uncovered glass. As he pulled her away she whimpered in protest like a drowsing puppy separated from its teat. He set her down and winced—the light from the book stabbed to the center of his head. Chang snapped it closed, his lips stretched back in a grimace, feeling even through his leather gloves a strange pulsing as he touched it and a protesting energetic resistance when he pushed it shut. The woman did not make another sound. Chang watched her, idly wiping his dagger on the carpet—it was already red, what was the harm?—as her breath gradually calmed and her eyes began to clear. He gently pushed aside the hanging mask of beads. He did not recognize her. She was merely another of the great ladies and gentlemen drawn into the insidious web of Harschmort House.

Chang stood and snatched a pillow from the nearby settee. He ripped open one end with the dagger and he brusquely turned the lining inside out, dumping yellowed clumps of cotton wadding onto the floor. He inserted the book carefully into the pillowcase and stood. The lady could take care of herself as she woke—her fingers fitfully groped against the carpet—and forever wonder about her mysterious delivery…and if she started to scream, it would cause the disturbance he wanted. He stepped back to the door and paused, looking behind him at the room. There was no other door…and yet something caught his eye. The wallpaper was red, with a circular decoration of golden rings that looked vaguely Florentine. Chang crossed the room to a section of wallpaper, perhaps as high as his head. In the middle of one of the golden rings the pattern appeared to be frayed. He pressed at it with his finger and the interior of the ring popped through, leaving a hole. A spy hole. Chang strode past the woman—dreamily shaking her head and struggling to raise herself to one elbow—and out to the corridor.

Once more, Chang’s notion that most things are only effectively hidden because no one ever thinks to look for them was confirmed. Once he knew what he sought—a narrow corridor between rooms—it was easy enough to identify what door might lead to it. While it was possible that the other side of the spy hole was in another normal room, Chang felt this went against the entire idea—as he understood it—of Harschmort House, which was the
integrated
nature of the establishment. Why have a spy hole into one room, when one might construct an inner passage that spanned the length of many apartments to either side, so one man with patience and soft shoes could effectively gain the advantage on a whole collection of guests? He chuckled to think that he had here explained Robert Vandaariff’s famed success at business negotiation, his uncanny aptitude for knowing what his rivals were planning—a reputation side by side with his renown as a generous host (especially—Chang shook his head at the cunning—to those with whom he most bitterly strove). Not three yards from the one he’d entered Chang found two doors quite closely set together—or more accurately, one door in the space that, elsewhere in the corridor, was only blank wall.

Chang dug out his keys—first Gray’s and then his own—and struggled to open the lock. It was actually rather tricky, and differed from others he’d found in the house. He looked around him with growing alarm, trying a second key and then fumbling for a third. He thought he heard a rising noise from the far end, near the staircase…applause? Was there some sort of performance? The key did not work. He felt for the next. With a click that echoed down the length of the corridor, a door was opened in the balcony above the staircase—and then the sound of steps, many people…they would be at the railing any instant. His key caught, the lock turned, and without hesitation Chang slipped the door open and darted through into the bitter dark. He closed it as quickly and silently as he could, with no idea if he’d been seen or heard.

There was nothing for it. He turned the lock behind him and felt his way deeper into the blackness. The walls were narrow—his elbows rubbed the dusty brick on either side as he went—but the floor was smoothly laid stone (as opposed to wood that might warp and in time begin to creak). He felt his way along, hampered by his restored stick in one hand and the wrapped book in the other, and by Miss Temple’s boots jostling the walls from his pockets. The spy hole in the woman’s room had been at head height, so he placed his hands there as he walked, to feel for any depression in the brick. Surely it had to be near…his impatience nearly caused him to pitch headlong into the dark as his foot struck a step in the blackness below him and he tripped forward—only saved from falling outright, despite a cruel barking on his knee, by another two steps on top of that. He found himself kneeling on what was effectively a small stepladder spanning the width of the passage. Chang carefully set down his stick and the book, and then felt the wall for the hole, finding it by the small half-circle of light caused by his partial dislodging of its plug from the room. He silently pulled the plug free and peered in. The woman had crawled away from the dead soldier, and crouched kneeling on the carpet. Her hands were under her dress—restoring her undergarments or perhaps attempting to see how far along the dead soldier’s obvious intentions had proceeded. She still wore her mask, and Chang was curious to see that despite the tears on her cheeks she seemed calm and determined in her manner…was this a result of her experience with the book?