Glass Books of the Dream Eaters

by Gordon Dahlquist

  Chang swallowed and clumsily replaced the painting on its hook. He glanced at it again, mortified at his reaction, compelled and disturbed anew at the long nails at the tip of each blue finger and the tenderly rendered impressions they made in the woman’s flesh. He turned away to the chaise and collected the green boots from beneath it. They had to belong to Celeste. It was rare enough that Chang felt any obligation to another soul that to have formed such a bond—to so unlikely a person—and then find it so swiftly broken gnawed terribly at his conscience. The poignance of the empty boots—the very idea that her feet could be so small, could fit within such a space and yet enable her willful marching, was suddenly unbearable. He sighed quite bitterly, stricken with regret, and dropped them back on the chaise. The room had one door, which was ajar. He forced himself to push it with the tip of his stick. It opened silently.

  This was clearly Rosamonde’s bedroom. The bed itself was massive, with high mahogany pillars at each corner and a heavy purple damask curtain drawn across each side. The floor was littered with clothing, mainly underthings, but also here and there pieces of a dress, or a jacket, or even shoes. He recognized none of them as belonging to Celeste, but knew that he wouldn’t in any case. The very idea of Celeste’s underthings forced his mind to a place it had not formerly been, which seemed somehow—now that he feared she was dead—transgressive. Perhaps it was just the residual impact of Veilandt’s painting, but Chang found his thoughts—indeed, he wondered, his heart—punctured by the idea of his hands around her slim ribcage…sliding down to her hips, hips unencumbered by a corset or petticoats, the unquestionably creamy texture of her skin. He shook his head. What was he thinking? For all he knew, he was about to part the purple curtains and find her corpse. He forced himself grimly back to the task, to the room and away from his insistent fantasies. Chang took a deliberately deep breath—his chest seizing in pain—and stepped to the bed. He pulled the curtain aside.

  The bedclothes were heavy and tangled, kicked into careless heaps, but Chang could see a woman’s pale arm extending from beneath them. He looked to the pillows piled over the woman’s head and pulled the topmost away. It revealed a mass of dark brown hair. He pulled away another and saw the woman’s face, her eyes closed, her lips delicately parted, the skin around her eyes displaying the nearly vanished looping scars. It was Margaret Hooke—Mrs. Marchmoor. Chang realized that she was naked at about the same moment she opened her eyes. Her gaze flickered as she saw him above her, but her face betrayed no lapse in composure. She yawned and lazily rubbed the sleep from her left eye. She sat up, the sheets slipping to her waist before she absently pulled them up to cover herself.

  “My goodness,” she said, yawning again. “What is the time?”

  “It must be near eleven,” answered Chang.

  “I must have slept for hours. That is very bad of me, I’m sure.” She looked up at him, her eyes dancing with coy pleasure. “You’re the Cardinal, aren’t you? I was told you were dead.”

  Chang nodded. At least she had the manners not to sound disappointed.

  “I am looking for Miss Temple,” he said. “She was here.”

  “She was…,” answered the woman somewhat dully, her attention elsewhere. “Is there no one else you can ask?”

  He resisted the impulse to slap her. “You’re alone, Margaret. Unless you’d prefer that I take you to Mrs. Kraft—I’m sure she’s worried sick over your disappearance.”

  “No thank you.” She looked at him as if she was seeing him clearly for the first time. “You’re unpleasant.” She spoke as if it were a surprise.

  Chang reached out and took hold of her jaw, wrenching her eyes to face his. “I haven’t started to be unpleasant. What have you done with her?”

  She smiled at him, fear fretting at the edges of her expression. “What makes you think she didn’t do it to herself?”

  “Where is she?”

  “I don’t know—I was so sleepy—I am always so sleepy…afterwards…but some people find they want something to eat. Did you ask in the kitchens?”

  Chang didn’t reply to her vulgar implication—he knew she was lying to provoke him, to buy time, but her words were nevertheless a spur to lurid thoughts flickering impulsively across his inner eye…the image of this woman’s mouth flinching with surprise at her own pleasure—and then with disturbing ease that face became Celeste’s, her lips curled in a desperate mixture of anguish and delight. Chang was startled and stepped away from Mrs. Marchmoor, releasing his grip. She threw back the covers and stood, walking toward a pile of discarded clothes on the floor. She was tall and more graceful than he would have thought. Quite deliberately she turned her back to him and bent over at the waist for a robe—rather like a dancer—exposing herself lewdly in the process. As she stood—glancing back to confirm Chang’s appreciation with a smile—he noticed a lattice-work of thin white scars across her back, whip marks. She slipped into her robe—pale silk with a great red Chinese dragon across the back—and tied the sash with a practiced gesture, as if her hands were marking the well-known end, or the start, of some arcane ritual.

  “I see your face is healing,” said Chang.

  “My face is of no consequence,” she answered, nudging her foot through the pile of clothes, finding a single slipper as she spoke and stuffing her foot into it. “The change takes place within, and is sublime.”

  Chang scoffed. “I only see you’ve left the service of one brothel for another.”

  Her eyes became sharp—he had offended her, he saw with great satisfaction.

  “You have no idea,” she said, affecting a lightness he knew was false.

  “I’ve just watched another undergo your hideous Process—quite against his wishes—and I can tell you now, if you’ve done that to Miss Temple—”

  She laughed—contemptuously. “It is no punishment. It is a gift—and the very notion—the very ridiculous notion that—that person—your precious Miss Inconsequent—”

  Chang felt a moment of profound relief, a reprieve from a fear he hadn’t realized was with him—that Celeste would become one of them…almost as if he would rather she were dead. But Mrs. Marchmoor was still speaking. “…cannot appreciate the capacity, the reserves of power…” It was a quality of pride, he knew, especially in those who in their lives have been subject and then elevated—years of withheld speech turned their mouths into arrogant floodgates, and her quick turn from coy seductress to haughty lady made Chang sneer. She saw the sneer. It inflamed her.

  “You think I do not know what you are. Or who she is—”

  “I know you hunted us both through the brothels—without skill or success.”

  “Without success?” She laughed. “You are here, aren’t you?”

  “As was Miss Temple. Where is she now?”

  She laughed again. “You truly do not understand—”

  Chang stepped forward quickly, took a handful of the front of her robe and threw the woman bodily onto the bed, her white legs kicking free as she fell. He stood over her, giving her a moment to shake the hair from her face and look up into his depthless eyes.

  “No, Margaret,” he hissed. “You do not understand. You have been a whore. Giving up your body is no longer cause for delicacy, thus you will understand, given my profession…well, just imagine what no longer causes me to hesitate. And I am hunting you, Margaret. This day I have set Francis Xonck on fire, I have defeated the Prince’s Major, and I have survived the trickery of your Contessa. She will not trick me again—do you understand? In these things—and I know these things—there are rarely second chances. Your people have had their chance to kill me—the only one of you that could—and I survived. I am here to find—quickly—whether you are of the slightest—the slightest—use to me whatsoever. If you are not, then I assure you I don’t have the slightest qualm in exterminating you as if you were just one more rat in a filthy infestation that I am—believe me—going to destroy.”

  He pulled his stick apart as dramatically as
he could—hoping the speech hadn’t been too much—and allowed his voice to become more conversationally reasonable.

  “Now, as I have asked…Margaret,…where is Miss Temple now?”

  It was then that Chang first took in the severity of the Process. The woman was not stupid, she was alone, she possessed reason and experience, and yet, even though her eyes had widened in terror when he had taken out his blade, she began to rant at him, as if the words themselves were weapons to drive him away.

  “You’re a fool! She is gone—you’ll never find her, she is beyond rescue—she will be beyond your comprehension! You live like a child—you are all children—the world was never yours, and it never will be! I have been consumed and reborn! I have surrendered and been renewed! You cannot harm me—you cannot change anything—you are a worm in the mud—get away from me! Get out of this room—cut your own throat in the gutter!”

  She was screaming and Chang was suddenly furious—the deep disdain in her voice pricking his composure like a venomous fang. He dropped his stick and with his left hand took hold of her kicking ankle and yanked her body sharply toward him. She sat up, screaming still, her face quite mad now, not even bothering to fend him off with her arms, spittle flying from her lips. The dagger was in his right hand. Instead of stabbing her, he forced himself to drive a punch into her jaw, his fist bolstered by the cane-hilt. Her head snapped back—his fingers were jarred cruelly—but she did not fall. Her words became more disjointed, there were tears at the corners of her eyes, her hair was ragged.

  “—worth nothing! Ignorant and abandoned—alone in rooms—pathetic rooms of pathetic bodies—kennels—the rutting of dogs—”

  He dropped the dagger and struck her again. She sprawled across the bed with a grunt, her head hanging over the other side, silent. Chang shook his hand, wincing, and sheathed the dagger. His fury was gone. Her contempt for him was so clearly one with her contempt for herself—he remembered Mrs. Kraft saying Margaret Hooke had been the daughter of a mill owner—that he let it pass. He wondered if anyone else in the hotel had heard, and hoped that such screams—judging perhaps by the profusion of empty bottles—were not unusual in the rooms of Rosamonde, Contessa Lacquer-Sforza. He looked down at Margaret Hooke’s body—the gapping robe showed the softness of her belly and the open tangle of her legs, somehow strangely poignant. She was a handsome woman. Her ribs rose and fell with each still-ragged breath. She was an animal like anyone else. He thought of the scars on her back, so different perhaps from the scars on her face—both testament to her submission to the desires of others more powerful, yet each also the mark of some inarticulate groping on her part, for peace of mind. Her vitriolic eruption told Chang she had not found it yet, but merely imprisoned her discontent beneath layers of control. It was perhaps more poignant than anything. He straightened her robe, allowing himself a moment to run his hand along her hips, and made his way unseen from the hotel.

  As he walked in the darkened streets, Chang ran over the words of Mrs. Marchmoor in his mind…“beyond rescue”…which either meant that something had already happened to Celeste, or was so certain to happen that he would be unable to alter it. Her arrogance made him think the latter. He felt the clumping weight of Celeste’s ankle boots in each side pocket of his coat. It was likely, he felt, that they had taken her to some concentration of power—perhaps to convert her with the Process, perhaps to merely kill her—but if that were so, why not already do it? With a sickening thought, his mind went to Angelique and the glass book. Would they dare to repeat that ritual with Celeste? Their attempt with Angelique had been spoiled by his interruption—but what would be a successful outcome? He had no doubt that it was somehow even more monstrous.

  The first question was where they would take her. It would be either Harschmort—where they had taken the boxes—or Tarr Manor—which Rosamonde had asked him about. Both places would offer solitude and space, without any outside interference. He assumed Svenson had reached the Manor, and so perhaps he ought to go to Harschmort…but if such forces were in fact in play, could he rely on the Doctor to effect a rescue? He had an image of that earnest man, an inert Celeste over one shoulder, trying to walk while firing the pistol at a pursuing gang of Dragoons…utterly doomed. He had to know where they had taken her. A wrong guess could destroy them all. He would have to risk a visit to the Library.

  Like most great buildings, the Library was of a size to be without adjacent rooftops that might have removed the problem altogether. The high front double doors and the rear staff entrance both had regular postings of guards inside, even during the night. From a vantage point of forty yards away, Chang could also see the black Macklenburg troopers slouching in the shadow of the columns that lined the front steps. He assumed they were at the rear as well—presenting him with guards within and without. Neither mattered. Chang jogged to a squat stone structure perhaps fifty yards away from the main edifice. The door had a crude wooden bolt, but a minute of concerted effort with the dagger—sliding it through the gap, digging into the bolt, pushing it a fraction of an inch to the side, again and again—had the door open. He stepped in and closed it behind him. In the dim light from the one barred window he saw a stack of lanterns, selected one and checked the oil, and then carefully struck a match. He turned the wick low, allowing just enough of a glow to find the hatch in the floor. He set the lamp down and with all his strength pulled on the handle. The heavy metal hatch creaked on its hinges, but swung open. He picked up the lantern again and stared into the pit below. For the second time in the day he thanked fate for his damaged nose. He descended into the sewers.

  He had done it before during a protracted disagreement with a client unwilling to pay. The man had sent agents into the Library and Chang had been forced to use this most loathsome bolt-hole. He was still dripping sewage when he kicked in the client’s window later that evening—resolving the disagreement at razor’s edge—but that had been in late spring. Chang hoped it was close enough to winter and the water levels still low so he could pass without getting soaked in filth. The hatch led to a slimy set of stone steps, without any kind of rail. He walked down, stick in one hand and lantern in the other, until he reached the sewage tunnel itself. The fetid stream had shrunk since his last visit and he was relieved to see a slippery yard of stone to the side where he could walk. He bent his shoulders beneath the overhang and stepped very carefully.

  It was very dark, and the lantern wick sputtered and sparked in the foul air. He was under the street, and then soon enough—counting his steps—under the Library itself. It was another twenty paces to another set of stairs and another hatch. He climbed up, heaved on the hatch with his shoulder, and entered the lowest Library basement—three floors below the lobby. He scraped his boots as best he could and shut the hatch behind him.

  Keeping the lamp wick low, Chang made his way up to the main floor and darted across the corridor into the stacks. The building itself he knew intimately—indeed, like a blind man. There were three floors of hidden book stacks for each spacious floor of the Library that was open to the public. The stack aisles were crammed, dusty, and narrow, stuffed with seldom used books that could nevertheless never be disposed of. The walls—and floors and ceilings—were no more than iron scaffolding, and during the day one could look up through the gaps, as if through a strange sort of kaleidoscope, to the very top of the building, some twelve levels above. Chang climbed quickly up six narrow flights of stairs to what was the third floor of the Library proper, pushed open the door with his shoulder—it always stuck—and entered the vaulted map room, where he had so recently been hired by Rosamonde.

  Now Chang turned up the wick, knowing there was no chance the guards would see—the map room was well away from the main staircase where light might be glimpsed from below. He set the lantern on one of the great wooden cases and searched for a particular volume on the curator’s desk—the massive Codex of Royal Surveyor’s Maps, and the easiest source for a detailed view of Harschmort and Tarr Man
or. He did not, however, know where each of them was exactly located—or not precisely enough to guess the map that would contain them. He braced himself for the small print of the Codex and found his way to the index of place names, squinting painfully. It took him several minutes to find each, with grid references to the main master map in the front of the Codex. By locating them on the grid-marked master map that unfolded awkwardly from the front of the Codex, he would then have the citation numbers for the detailed surveyor maps, of which there were hundreds and hundreds in the Library’s collection. It was another matter of minutes, closely poring over the master map, and he was off to the surveyor maps, kept in a high bureau of wide, thin drawers. Again, with his face inches from their identifying numbers, he located the two maps in question and pulled them from the bureau. He dragged the maps—each of them easily six feet square—over to one of the wide reading tables and collected the lantern. He rubbed his eyes and began the next step of his search.