Glass Books of the Dream Eaters

by Gordon Dahlquist

  The alley separated two large houses, without any doors that he could see, or windows lower than the second story. With a sinking feeling he realized that if he were cut off at the other end, it would turn into another trap. His only immediate consolation came from knowing that the soldiers’ boots were even less suited to this than his own, and even more prone to slipping on the slimy broken surface. He cleared the alley at a full run, saw no coach, and paused—his momentum carrying him well out into the street, lungs heaving—to grope for his bearings, for any sign or landmark he knew. He was in a part of the city where decent people lived—the last place he would know. Then, ahead of him, as sweetly welcome as a child’s answered prayer, he saw that the next road began to slope down. The only downward slope in the city went toward the river, which at least told him where he was on the compass. He pushed himself after it—looking back to see the first trooper clearing the alley—for that almost certainly meant pushing himself into fog.

  He raced down the street, careening a bit as the slope began to alter his balance. He could hear the troopers clattering after him, their determination positively Germanic. He wondered if Black and the Doctor were in league and if the soldiers were part of Karl-Horst von Maasmärck’s retinue. Ragnarok was a Norse legend of destruction—it would have been adopted as a badge by only the harshest of regiments—and he could not immediately associate that with the intemperate insensible Prince. The Doctor he could understand—someone having personal charge of a Royal made a certain sense—but the Major? What interest of the Prince (or the Prince’s father?) was served by killing Chang, or by hunting Isobel Hastings? Yet who else could he serve? How else could he be in a foreign country in such force? The first wisps of fog drifted over his feet as he ran. He inhaled the moist air in gulping lungfuls.

  The road turned and Chang followed it. Ahead of him he saw a small plaza with a fountain and like a key turning open a lock he knew where he was—Worthing Circle. To the right was the river itself, to the left the Circus Garden, and straight ahead the merchants’ district and beyond it the Ministries. There were people here—Worthing Circle was a place of some nefarious business after nightfall—and he veered to the right, for the river and the thicker fog. It was nearly his death. The coach was there in wait. With a whip crack the horses leapt forth, charging directly at him. Chang threw himself to the side, clawing his way clear. He was cut off from the river, and from the merchants—he scrambled to his knees as the coachman wrestled with the horses, trying to make them turn. Chang reached his feet and heard a shot whistle past his head. Black leaned out of the coach window with a smoking pistol. Chang cut across the plaza just ahead of the three troopers, once more right on his heels, and toward the Circus Garden into the heart of the city.

  His legs were on fire—he had no idea how far he’d run, but he had to do something or he was going to die. He saw another alley and barreled into it. Once in he stopped and threw himself against the wall, pulling apart his stick. If he could take the first of them by surprise—but before he’d even finished the thought the first trooper charged around the corner, saw Chang, and raised his saber in defense. Chang slashed at his head with the stick, which the man parried, and then lunged with the dagger—but he was too slow and off target. The blade ripped along the man’s front, cutting his uniform, but missing its mark. The trooper seized Chang’s dagger arm around the wrist. The other troopers were right behind—a matter of seconds before someone ran him through. With a desperate snarl, Chang kicked at the man’s knee and felt a horrible snap as it gave. The man shrieked and fell into the legs of the trooper behind. Chang wrenched his arm clear and stumbled back, his heart sinking as the third man hurtled past his struggling comrades, saber extended. Chang continued to retreat. The trooper lunged at him—Chang beat the weapon aside with the stick and stabbed with the dagger, his reach nowhere near the trooper. The trooper lunged again—again Chang beat it aside—and then followed with a sweeping cut at Chang’s head. Chang raised the stick—it was all he could do—and saw it splintered to pieces. He dropped the broken fragment and ran.

  As Chang careened away through the alley he told himself that in the loss of his stick he had divested himself of one trooper, but a dagger against a saber was no fight at all. Ahead of him he saw the alley’s ending, and a knot of people in silhouette. He screamed at them, an inarticulate howl of menace, which had the desirable effect of making them turn and then scatter—but not quickly enough. Chang cannoned into the rearmost figure—a man who, as Chang actually took in the group of people, must have been in negotiation with one of the fleeing women—and seized the back of his collar. He twisted the man behind him and with a brutal thrust sent him directly into the nearest pursuing trooper. The soldier instinctively did his best not to run the fellow through, raising the saber out of the way and clubbing at him with his other arm, but Chang had turned as well, advancing behind his impromptu shield. The moment the bystander was knocked aside Chang’s way was clear and he drove his dagger into the trooper’s chest. Without looking back he pulled it free and wheeled, running again. He heard the women’s screams behind him. Was the third trooper still coming? Chang glanced over his shoulder. He was. Cursing all military discipline, Chang dodged across the road into another narrow alley—the last thing he wanted to see again was the coach.

  He’d lost track of his exact location—nearer to the Circus, at least. This alley was cluttered with boxes and barrels, and as he ran he passed more than one doorway. The third trooper was lagging behind, if still determined. Momentarily out of his sight, Chang dashed up the next block in a low crouch until he found what he wanted, a sunken shop front whose entrance was below the street. Chang vaulted the handrail and went to his knees as he landed at the foot of a small set of stairs, dropping his head and doing his best to stifle his heaving breath. He waited. The street was dark and drifting with fog and generally empty—if he had been seen, it was still possible no one would point him out to the soldier. He was sheathed in sweat—he couldn’t remember when he’d run as far, or last been in such an idiotic fix. Why had he thrown away the pistol? If it was going to come to murder, why hadn’t he shot them all in the coach? He waited. Unable to bear it further, he inched up the steps and peeked into the road. The trooper stood in the street, his saber out, looking up and down the road. He too was unsteady on his feet—Chang could hear the man’s ragged breathing and see it clouding in the cool night air—and clearly unaware which direction Chang had fled, taking a few steps one way, craning his head, and then walking back the other. Chang narrowed his eyes, his desperation simmering down closer to cold fury. He quietly transferred the dagger to his left hand, and fished out the razor with his right, flicking it open. The trooper still had his back to him, and stood perhaps fifteen yards away. If he could get up to the street in silence, he was sure that, at a dead run, he would cover half the distance before the man heard…another few yards while he turned…the final gap as the man raised his blade. The trooper would have one blow, and if Chang could avoid it, it would be over.

  And if he didn’t avoid it…well, it would be over either way—“in each instant tenderness, and ash”, to quote Blaine’s Jocasta. He paused, balancing the outrage of being hunted like an animal through his own streets by a gang of foreign louts against patience and sanity…and then shifted his feet on the stairs, preparing to charge (he had promised to kill them). Suddenly he threw himself down into cover. A coach clattered near…and then stopped next to the trooper. Chang waited, listening. He heard the harsh interrogation from the Major, in German, then silence, and then a moment later the sweet metallic rush of the trooper sheathing his blade. Chang looked up in time to see the trooper hoisting himself onto the driver’s bench, and the coach pulling away into the fog. He looked down at his hands and relaxed his grip on his weapons. His fingers ached. His legs ached, and his head was throbbing behind his eyes. He folded the razor into his pocket and tucked the dagger into his belt. He mopped his face with his bloody handkerch
ief—already the sweat on his neck and back was turning cold. He remembered dully that he had no place to sleep.

  Chang crossed the road and entered the next alley, looking purposefully for the proper point of entry. He was between a pair of large buildings he didn’t recognize in the dark, but knew this was a district of hotels and offices and shops. He located a first-story window near enough to a stack of barrels and climbed on top of them. The window was in reach. He wedged the dagger under the sill and twisted it, popping the window up, and then opened it the rest of the way with his hands. He stuck the dagger back into his belt and with an embarrassing amount of effort—his entire body wavering in the air as his arms nearly failed him—pulled himself through. He crawled gracelessly onto the floor of a dark room, and pulled the window closed. He groped around him. It was a supply room—shelves stacked with candles, towels, soaps, linen. He managed to find the door and open it.

  As Chang walked down the carpeted hallway, paneled with polished wood and aglow with welcoming, warm gaslight, he found his mind chopping the figures of his day into factions. On one side there was Crabbé and the man in fur, who were responsible for the strange burns, so with them he placed Trapping, Mrs. Marchmoor, and Prince Karl-Horst. On the other was Major Black…perhaps with Karl-Horst’s Doctor. Scattered between them were far too many others—Vandaariff, Xonck, Aspiche, Rosamonde…and of course, Isobel Hastings. The list always ended with her, the one person about whom he’d never seemed to learn a thing.

  The hallway led him into the hushed silence of a lovely vaulted room, decorated with potted palms and walls of plate mirror, with a wide wooden reception desk and a man in a frogged coat behind it. He had broken into a hotel. Chang nodded briskly at the man and reached into his coat for the wallet. Over the day he’d managed to spend nearly everything Aspiche had given him, and this would take the rest of it. He didn’t care. He could sleep, have a bath, a proper shave, a meal, and be fresh for the day to come. Tomorrow he could always fetch the saber in the attic and sell it for cash. This made him smile as he reached the desk, dropping the wallet onto the inlaid marble surface.

  The desk clerk smiled. “Good evening, Sir.”

  “I hope it’s not too late.”

  The clerk’s eyes flicked to the wallet. “Of course not, Sir. Welcome to the Hotel Boniface.”

  “Thank you,” answered Chang. “I should like a room.”

  THREE

  Surgeon

  Doctor Abelard Svenson stood at an open window overlooking the small courtyard of the Macklenburg diplomatic compound, gazing at the thickening fog and the few sickly gaseous lights of the city bright enough to penetrate its fell curtain. He sucked on a hard ginger candy, clacking it against his teeth, aware that a lengthy brood about his current situation was a luxury he could not indulge. With a shove from his tongue he pushed the candy between his left molars and smashed it to sharp pieces, smashed these pieces again, and then swallowed them. He turned from the window and reached for a porcelain cup of tepid black coffee, gulping it, finding a certain pleasure in the mix of sweet ginger syrup coating his mouth and the bitter beverage. Did they drink coffee with ginger in India, he wondered, or Siam? He finished the cup, set it down and dug for a cigarette. He looked over his shoulder at the bed, and the still figure upon it. He sighed, opened his cigarette case, stuck one of the dark, foul Russian cigarettes in his mouth, and took a match from the bureau near the lamp, striking it off of his thumbnail. He lit the cigarette, inhaled, felt the telltale catch in his lungs, shook out the match, and exhaled longingly. He couldn’t put it off anymore. He would have to speak to Flaüss.

  He crossed the room to the bolted door, skirting the bed, and—sticking the cigarette into his mouth to free both hands to pull the iron bolt clear—glanced back at the pale young man breathing moistly underneath the woolen blankets. Karl-Horst von Maasmärck was twenty-three, though pervasive indulgence and a weak constitution had added ten years to his appearance. His honey-colored curls receded from his forehead (the thinness especially visible with the hair so clumped together by sweat), his pallid skin sagged below his eyes and around his family’s weak mouth and sunken jaw, and his teeth were already beginning to go. Svenson stepped over to the insensible man—overgrown boy, really—and felt the pulse at his jugular, antic despite the laudanum, and once more cursed his own failure. The strange looping pattern seared into the Prince’s skin around the eyes and across his temples—not quite a burn, not exactly even raw, more of a deep discoloration and with luck temporary—mocked Doctor Svenson’s every previous effort to control his willful charge.

  As he looked down, he resisted the impulse to grind the cigarette into the Prince’s skin and chided himself for his own mistaken tactics, his foolish trust, his ill-afforded deference. He’d focused on the Prince himself and paid far too little attention to those new figures around him—the woman’s family, the diplomats, the soldiers, the high-placed hangers-on—never thinking he’d be tearing the Prince away from them at pistol-point. He barely even knew who they were—far less what part in their plans had been laid aside for the easily dazzled Karl-Horst. All that had been the business of Flaüss, the Envoy—which had either gone horribly wrong or…hadn’t. Svenson needed to report to Flaüss on the Prince’s health, but he knew that he must use the interview with the Envoy to determine whether he was truly without allies in the diplomatic compound. He noticed his overcoat slung across the bedpost and folded it over his arm—heavier than it ought to be from the pistol tucked into the pocket. He looked around the room—nothing particularly dangerous should the Prince wake up in his absence. He pulled the bolt on the door and stepped into the hall. Next to the door stood a soldier in black, carbine at his side, stiffly at attention. Doctor Svenson locked the door with a large iron key and returned the key to his jacket pocket. The soldier’s attention did not waver as the Doctor walked past and down the hallway, nor did the Doctor think twice about the guard. He was used enough to these soldiers and their iron discipline—any question he had would be aimed at their officer, who was unaccountably still absent from the compound.

  Svenson reached the end of the hall and stood on the landing, his gaze edging over the rail to the lobby three floors below. From above he could see the black and white checkerboard pattern of the marble floor—an optical illusion of staircases impossibly leading ever upwards and downwards to one another at the same time—with the crystal chandelier hovering above it. For Svenson, who did not like heights, just seeing the chandelier’s heavy chain suspended in the air before him gave him a whiff of vertigo. Looking up to the high top of the stairwell, where the chain was anchored above the fourth floor landing—which he could not help but do, like an ass—made him palpably dizzy. He stepped away from the rail and climbed to the third floor, walking close to the wall, his eyes on the floor. He was still staring at his feet as he walked past the guards at the landing and outside the Envoy’s door. With a quick grimace he squared his shoulders and knocked. Without waiting for an answer, he went in.

  When Svenson had returned from the Institute with the Prince, Flaüss had not been present—nor could anyone say where he’d gone. The Envoy had burst into the Prince’s room some forty minutes later—in the midst of the Doctor’s squalid efforts to purge his patient of any poison or narcotic—and imperiously demanded what Doctor Svenson thought he was doing. Before he could reply, Flaüss had seen the revolver on the side table and then the marks on Karl-Horst’s face and began screaming. Svenson turned to see the Envoy’s face was white—with rage or fear he wasn’t sure—but the sight had snapped the last of his patience and he’d savagely driven Flaüss from the room. Now, as he entered the office, he was keenly aware that of Conrad Flaüss he actually knew precious little. A provincial aristocrat with pretensions toward the cosmopolitan, schooled for the law, an acquaintance of a royal uncle at university—all the qualifications required to meet the diplomatic needs of the Prince’s betrothal visit, and if a permanent embassy were to result from the m
arriage, as everyone hoped it would, to take over as the Duchy’s first full ambassador. To Flaüss—to everyone—Svenson was a family retainer, a nurse-maid, essentially dismissible. Such perceptions generally suited the Doctor as well, creating that much less bother in his day. Now, however, he would be forced to make himself heard.

  Flaüss was behind his desk, writing, an aide standing patiently next to him, and looked up as Svenson entered. The Doctor ignored him and sat in one of the plush chairs opposite the desk, plucking a green glass ashtray from a side table as he went past and cradling it on his lap as he smoked. Flaüss stared at him. Svenson stared back and flicked his eyes toward the aide. Flaüss snorted, scrawled his name at the base of the page, blotted it, and shoved it into the aide’s hands. “That will be all,” he barked. The aide clicked his heels smartly and left the room, casting a discreet glance at the Doctor. The door closed softly behind him. The two men glared at each other. Svenson saw the Envoy gathering himself to speak, and sighed in advance with fatigue.