Glass Books of the Dream Eaters

EIGHT Cathedral

Chang made a conscious effort to bend his knees—knowing that a rigid leg could easily mean a shattered joint—and did so just as he collided hard with a curving, hot wall of filthy, slippery metal. The actual time in the air, undoubtedly brief, was enough to allow a momentary awareness of suspension, a rising in his stomach which, due to the total darkness in the shaft, was exceptionally disorienting. His mind made sense of the fall—he’d struck a curve in the pipe, after a drop of perhaps ten or fifteen feet—as his body crumpled and rolled, losing all pretense of balance or control, and then dropped again as the pipe straightened into vertical once more. This time he slammed down even harder, knocking the breath from his lungs on a welded corner—he’d struck a gap where his pipe was joined by another, his upper body striking the seam and his legs continuing past, dragging him downwards. He scrabbled for a grip, couldn’t get one on the slick metal—covered with the same slimy deposit caked onto the lattice in the urn—and slid down into the darkness, just keeping hold of his stick as it clattered from under his coat. But the impact had slowed his descent, and he was no longer falling but sliding—this pipe was set at an angle. The air rising up to Chang was more noxious and becoming hotter—it seemed grimly probable that this path would feed him into their furnace. He pressed his legs and his arms to the side of the pipe, grudgingly but surely slowing his descent. By the time he slammed into the next junction he was able to catch hold of the lip and stop himself completely, legs swinging below him in the dark. He pulled himself up with an effort and wedged his torso into the opening, so he was nearly balanced and could relax his arms. Chang caught his breath, wondering how far down he had come, and what in the utter world he had been thinking.

He shut his eyes—he couldn’t see anything anyway—and forced himself to focus on what he could hear. From the pipe below came a steady, metallic rattle, in time with regularly spaced gusts of steaming, chemically fouled air. He leaned into the second, joining pipe, which was not as large—large enough to hold him?—and cooler to the touch. He waited, allowing time for a longer cycle, but heard no such rattle from its depths nor felt any such toxic exhalations. He realized absently that his head hurt. The first tendrils of bilious nausea were rising in his stomach. He had to get out. He wrenched himself around in the narrow space and slipped his feet into the narrower pipe. There was just room to fit, and Chang pushed from his mind the prospect of the pipe getting thinner mid-way down—he did not want to think about trying to claw his way back against the slippery interior. He tucked his stick under his coat and pinned it with his left arm, and eased himself down as slowly as he could, pressing his legs against the side of the shaft. There was less of the greasy accretion and Chang found that he could more or less manage his descent, for the pipe went down at a milder angle. The farther he sank from the main shaft, the clearer became the air, and the less he worried about being dropped into a cauldron of molten glass. The pipe continued for some distance—he stopped even trying to guess—and then flattened out, blessedly without narrowing, so that he was on his back (and doing his best to keep his mind from tales of coffins and live burial). The pipe still curved, but now horizontally…as if, he thought with a smile, it traveled around the floor of a circular room. He inched along feet first—unable to turn—trying to make as little noise as he could, though he was forced to stop once, preventing by sheer force of will the voiding of his stomach—jaw clenched against the rising bile, huffing like a wounded horse through his scarred nasal passages. He pushed himself on until, so suddenly it took his fogged mind a moment to make sense of what he was seeing—that he was seeing anything at all—the blackness above him was punctuated by a chink of light. He reached up to it carefully and felt the underside of a metal clasp, and then by delicately searching around it sketched out the borders and sweetly welcome hinges of some sort of panel.

Chang turned the clasp to the side, slipping the bolt clear, and then brought both hands beneath the panel and slowly pushed. The hinges gave way with a rusted groan. He stopped, listened, and forced himself to listen more, another whole agonizing minute. A dim light poured into the shaft and he could see with disgust how rusted and filthy it was. He pushed again, and with a longer squeal of protest the panel swung clear. Chang gasped at the cleaner air and sat up. Only his head and the tip of one shoulder fit with ease through the gap. He was in some sort of brick-walled machine room—a secondary one, perhaps, thankfully not in use—with several similarly sized pipes coming through the walls from different directions, all converging at an enormous riveted metal boiler, clotted with dials and smaller hoses. He shifted back inside the pipe and extricated his right arm and once again his head and then, over the course of an awkward, desperate minute, he was able to force his left arm and torso through the gap, gouging his ribs and his shoulder in the process. Feeling like an insect emerging from its sticky cocoon—and just as feeble—Chang inched his way onto the floor and took in the room around him. It was really quite small. Hanging from a row of hooks was a collection of syringes and stoppered glass tubes, a pair of leather gloves and one of the infernal brass and leather helmets. Undoubtedly his escape hatch was employed to test whatever liquid or gaseous concoctions would be steeped in the iron cauldron. Next to the hooks was an inset sconce with the lower third of a fat, guttering tallow candle—the source of the dim light that had wormed through the latched panel. That it was alight told Chang that someone had been in the room recently…and would be coming back.

At that moment he did not care about them, the machine, or its purpose. Under the rack of pipes was a dirty leather fire bucket. Chang crawled to it and vomited without any effort at all until his stomach had nothing more to give and his throat was raw. He sat back and dug out a shirt-tail to wipe his mouth, then pulled it out farther to smear the filth of the furnace pipes from his face. Chang forced himself to his feet and looked at his red leather coat with bitter resignation. The pride of his wardrobe was most assuredly ruined. The coal dust could have been cleaned, but as he wiped at the caked chemical deposits he saw the red leather beneath had been discolored and blistered, almost as if the coat itself was burned and bleeding. He scooped away as much of the mess as he could with his fingers and then wiped his hands on his filthy pants, feeling as if he’d just swum through a demonic mire. He took a deep breath. He was still light-headed, pain pounding behind his eyes like a hammer—the kind of pain he knew, barring opium, he would be carrying with him for days. He expected that some sort of pursuit must even now be working its way to these depths of the house, if only to confirm that his bones were cracking and popping in a furnace, or he was choked to death in the pipes above it, stuck like a dead squirrel in a chimney. Chang felt the parch of his throat and the desperate dizziness in his head. He needed water. Without it he would die on the blade of the first Dragoon that found him.

The door was locked, but the lock was old and Chang was able to force it with his skeleton keys. It opened into a narrow, circular corridor of brick lit by a sputtering torch bolted into a metal bracket above the door. He could not see another torch in either direction. He quickly walked into darkness to his right. Just around the curve the way ended at a bricked-in wall whose mortar was noticeably fresher than the side walls or the ceiling. Chang walked back past the boiler room in the other direction, looking up at the oppressive ceiling and the circular path of his corridor. He was sure it corresponded to the side of the larger chamber. It was vital—to give himself some breathing room, and to find Miss Temple—that he find some way to climb.

The next torch was bracketed near an open doorway. Inside was a spiral staircase of stone with a bright iron rail on the inner wall. Chang looked up, but could only see a few yards ahead because of the curving stairs. He listened…there was a sound, a low roar, like the wind, or heavy distant rain. He began to climb.

It was twenty steps to another open doorway and another circular corridor. He poked out his head and saw its ceiling was banked as if it were the underside of a stadium. Chang stepped back into the stairwell and shut his eyes. His throat was burning. His chest felt as if it was being squeezed from within—he could just imagine the grains of glass boring into his heaving lungs. He forced himself into the hall, looking for some kind of relief, following the path back to where, on the floor below, his boiler room had been. There was another door in the exact spot, and he forced the lock just as easily. The room was dark. Chang worked the torch from its bracket and thrust it inside: another boiler with another set of metal pipes coming through the walls—perhaps this was the juncture where he’d been unable to hold his grip. His eye saw another leather fire bucket on the floor. He stepped to it and with relief saw that it held water—filthy, brackish, unwholesome, but he did not care. Chang dropped the torch, pulled off his glasses and splashed it onto his face. He rinsed the filthy taste from his mouth and spat, and then drank deeply, gasping, and drank again. He sat back, leaning against the pipe, and looped his glasses back into place. He hawked up another gob of who knew exactly what and let it fly into a dark corner of the room. It was not a night at the Boniface, but it would do.

Chang was back in the hallway, returning to the stairs. He wondered that no one had come down to search for him—either they were sure he was dead…or he’d fallen farther than he’d thought…or they were concentrating on the most important places he might have landed first…all of which made him smile, for it told him his enemies were confident, and that confidence was giving him time. But perhaps they were only making sure he didn’t reach a particular room to interrupt some particular event—after which it would not matter if they hunted him down at their leisure. It was possible—and it could only mean Celeste. He was a fool. He ran for the stairway and charged up it two steps at a time. Another door. He stepped out—another narrow, dusty hallway with a banked ceiling—and listened. The dull roar was louder, but he was convinced that these were only service corridors, that he was still below the main access. Would he have to go to the absolute top before he could find a way inside? There had to be another way—the path above was sure to be swarming with soldiers. Chang sprinted down the corridor in each direction, first to the right, where his boiler had been—another door to an empty room whose boiler had either been removed or not yet installed—and another dead end. He turned and jogged to the left. The roar became louder, and when he reached its dead end—no door at all in this part of the corridor—he placed his hand on the brick, and felt a faint vibration in time with the rumbling sound.

He raced up another rotation of the circular stairs—how far had he fallen?—and this time came not to an open doorway but a locked metal door. He looked above him, saw no one, and again strained to hear any sort of useful sound. Were those voices? Music? He could not be sure—if so, it told him he was only a few of these levels below the main house itself. He turned his attention to the door. This must be the access he wanted. He nearly laughed out loud. Some idiot had left the key in the lock. Chang took the handle and turned it in the exact instant it was turned from the opposite side. Seizing the opportunity, he kicked at the door with all his strength, driving it into whoever stood on the other side, and charged through, whipping apart his stick. Staggering away from him with a puling cry, clutching his bandaged arm—which had taken the brunt of the door—was the aged Mr. Gray, Rosamonde’s creature who had administered the Process to the unfortunate Mr. Flaüss. Chang slashed him across the face with the haft of the stick, spinning him to the floor, and glanced quickly to either side. Gray was alone. This hallway was wider, the ceiling still banked, but lit with gaslight sconces instead of torches, and Chang could see doors—or niches?—lining the inner walls. Before Gray could raise his head and bleat for help—which Chang could see he was about to do—he dropped onto the man’s chest, pinning Gray’s arms cruelly under his knees, and pressed the haft of his stick hard across his throat. With a venomous hiss that caught Gray’s full attention, Chang laid the tip of his dagger on the old man’s face, pointing directly at his left eye.

“Where is Miss Temple?” he whispered.

Gray opened his mouth to respond but nothing came out. Chang eased up his pressure on the fellow’s windpipe.

“Try again,” he hissed.

“I—I do not know!” pleaded Mr. Gray.

Chang doubled up his fist holding the dagger and slammed it into Mr. Gray’s cheek, knocking his head brutally against the stone.

“Try again,” he hissed. Gray began to weep. Chang raised his fist. Gray’s eyes widened in desperate fear and his mouth began to move, groping for words.

“I—don’t!—I don’t—I have not seen her—she’s to be taken to the theatre—or the chamber—elsewhere in the house! I do not know! I am only to prepare the works—the great works—”

Chang slammed his fist once more into Mr. Gray’s head.

“Who is with her?” he hissed. “How many guards?”

“I cannot tell you!” Gray was weeping openly. “There are many Macklenburgers, Dragoons—she is with the Comte—with Miss Vandaariff—they will be processed together—”

“Processed?”

“Redeemed—”

“Redeemed? ” Chang felt the natural pleasure of violence blooming directly into fury.

“You are too late! By now it will be started—to interrupt it will kill them both!” Mr. Gray looked up and saw his own reflection in the smoked black lenses over Cardinal Chang’s eyes and wailed. “O—they all said you were!—why are you not dead?”

His eyes opened even wider, if that were possible, in shock, as Chang drove the dagger into Mr. Gray’s heart, which he knew would be quicker and far less bloody than cutting the man’s throat. In a matter of seconds Gray’s body had relaxed and gone forever still. Chang rolled back onto his knees, still breathing hard, wiped the dagger on Gray’s coat, and sheathed it. He spat again, felt the stab of pain in his lungs, and muttered darkly.

“How do you know I am not?”

He dragged the body back to the stairwell and down one full curve before propping it up and tipping it over, doing his best to send the un-regretted Mr. Gray all the way to the bottom—wherever it had landed, it was at least out of sight to anyone coming to this door. He pocketed the key Gray had stupidly left in the lock and returned to the corridor, trying to guess what Gray had been doing. Chang sighed. There had been more information to glean from the man, but he was in a hurry, and itching, after being hunted and assailed, to strike some blow in answer. That it was against an aged, wounded man was to Cardinal Chang no matter at all. Every last one of these people was his enemy, and he would not scruple to excuse a single soul.

The niches in the inner wall were old cell doors—heavy metal monstrosities whose handles had been hacked off with a chisel and sealed shut with iron bolts driven into the brick. Chang laced his fingers in the small barred window and strained but could not shift it at all. He peered into the cell. The far wall of bars was draped with canvas. On the other side of the canvas, he knew, was the great chamber, but this was no way for him to reach it. He paced rapidly down the length of the curving hallway. Gray was another fool from the Institute, like Lorenz and the man he’d surprised making the book. As a reader of poetry, Chang believed that learning was dangerous and best suited for private contemplation, not something to put in the service of the highest bidder—as the Institute did, in thrall to the patronage of men with blind dreams of empire. Society was not bettered by such men of “vision”—though, if Chang was honest, was it bettered by anyone? He smiled wolfishly at the thought that it was better without the corrupted Mr. Gray, amused at the notion that he himself might be seen as an engine of civic progress.

At the end of the corridor was another door. Gray’s key turned sharply in the lock and Chang peered into a room scarcely larger than a closet, with seven large pipes running vertically from the ceiling to disappear through the floor, each one set with an access panel similar to the one he’d emerged through downstairs. The room was stiflingly hot and reeking—even to him—with the acrid, chemical excrescence of indigo clay. To the side was another rack of pegs, dangling another collection of flasks, vials, and unsettlingly large syringes. The roar of the machines echoed in the tiny chamber as if he were near the humming pipes of a massive church organ. Chang noticed a narrow slice of light between two pipes, and then, looking closely, saw similar small gaps elsewhere in the wall they formed…and realized that this was literally true—the far wall of the closet was the pipes, and beyond them, its brilliant illumination shining through, lay the great chamber. Chang crouched and removed his glasses, pressing his face to the nearest chink of light he could find. The pipes were hot against his skin, and he could only see the smallest view, but what he saw was astonishing: an opposite wall, high as a cliff-face, thick with more pipes flowing the entire height of a gigantic, vaulted chamber, and then, just on the edge of his sight, what looked like the central tower, like the hub of a wheel, whose sheer face of riveted steel was dotted with tiny vents from which the interior of every cell in the old prison could have been viewed. Chang shifted to another gap on his hands and knees, searching for an angle that showed him more. From here he saw a different segment of the opposite wall. Between the banks of pipes lay a tier of exposed cells—actually several tiers—bars still in place, looking for all the world like viewing galleries in a theatre. He sat back and brushed himself off by habit, wincing at how smeared with filth he was. Whatever was going to happen in the chamber, it was designed to have an audience.

He was back in the spiral staircase, climbing quietly, both hands on his stick. The next and final door did not appear until double the usual number of stairs, and when it did, he was surprised to see it was wood, with a new brass doorknob and lock—consistent with the formal decor of Harschmort. Chang had ascended to the—probably lowest—level of the house proper. Gray had said they thought he was dead—but did that mean back at the Ministry or just now in the furnace pipes? Surely he had been recognized in the garden—did it matter? He was more than happy to play the role of avenging ghost. He opened the door a narrow crack and peered, not into the hallway he expected, but a small dark room, blocked by a drawn curtain, under which he saw flickers of light—flickers matching audible footfalls on the curtain’s other side. Chang eased through the doorway and crept close to the curtain. He delicately pinched the fabric between two fingers, making a gap just wide enough to peek through.

The curtain merely masked an alcove in a large storeroom, the walls lined with shelves and the bulk of the open floor taken up with free-standing racks stuffed full of bottles and jars and tins and boxes. While he watched, two porters shifted a wooden crate of clinking brown bottles onto a wheeled cart and pushed it from sight, pausing to make conversation with someone Chang couldn’t see. After they left, the room was silent…save for bootsteps and a metallic knocking Chang had heard too many times before—the jostling of a saber scabbard as a bored guard paced back and forth. But the guard was hidden on the opposite side of the racks. To reach him Chang would have to leave the curtained alcove and only then decide on his angle of attack—while exposed.

Before he could begin he heard approaching steps and a harsh commanding voice he recognized from the garden.

“Where is Mr. Gray?”

“He hasn’t returned, Mr. Blenheim,” answered the guard—by his accent not one of the Macklenburgers.

“What was he doing?”

“Don’t know, Sir. Mr. Gray went downstairs—”

“Damn him to hell! Does he not know the time? The schedule?”

Chang braced himself—they were certain to search. Without the covering noise of the servants there was no way to slip back through the door without them hearing. Perhaps it was better. Mr. Blenheim would pull the curtain aside and Chang would kill him. The guard might sound the alarm before he fell as well—or the guard might kill Chang—either way it was an additional helping of revenge.

But Blenheim did not move.

“Never mind,” he snapped irritably. “Mr. Gray can hang himself. Follow me.”

Chang listened to their bootsteps march away. Where had they gone—what was so important?

Chang chewed on a handful of bread torn from an expensive fresh white loaf purloined from the storeroom as he walked, recognizing nothing around him from his previous travels through the back passages of Harschmort House. This was a lower story, finely appointed but not opulent. The pipes could have landed him at any point of the house’s horseshoe arc. He needed to work his way to the middle—there he would find the entrance to the panopticon tower, to the great chamber—and do it quickly. He could not remember when he’d eaten such delicious bread—he should have stuffed another loaf in his pocket. This caused Chang to glance down at his pocket, where he felt the knocking weight of Miss Temple’s green ankle boot. Was he a sentimental fool?

Chang stopped walking. Where was he? The truth of his situation penetrated his thoughts as abruptly as a blade: he was in Robert Vandaariff’s mansion, the very heart of wealth and privilege, of a society from which he lived in mutually contemptuous exile. He thought of the very bread he was eating, his very enjoyment of it feeling like a betrayal, a spike of hatred rising at the endless luxury around him, a pervasive ease of life that met him no matter where he turned. In Harschmort House Cardinal Chang suddenly saw himself as he must be seen by its inhabitants, a sort of rabid dog somehow slipped through the door, already doomed. And why had he come? To rescue an unthinking girl from this very same world of wealth? To slaughter as many of his enemies as he could reach? To avenge the death of Angelique? How could any of this scratch the surface of this world, of this inhuman labyrinth? He felt he was dying, and that his death would be as invisible as his life. For a moment Chang shut his eyes, his rage hollowed out by despair. He opened them with a sharp, slicing intake of breath. Despair made their victory easier still. He resumed his pace and took another large bite of bread, wishing he’d found something to drink as well. Chang snorted; that was exactly how he needed to collide with Blenheim, or with Major Blach, or with Francis Xonck—with a bottle of beer in one hand and a wad of food in the other. He stuffed the last of the loaf into his mouth and pulled apart his stick.

As he went he dodged two small parties of Dragoons and one of the black-coated Germans. They all traveled in the same direction and he altered his course to follow them—assuming that whatever event had called Blenheim was calling them as well. But why was no one searching for him? And why did no one look for Mr. Gray? Gray had been doing something with the chemical works, the content of the pipes…and none of the soldiers seemed to care. Was Gray doing something for Rosamonde that none of the others knew about—some secret work? Could that mean division within the Cabal? This didn’t surprise him—he would have been surprised by its absence—but it explained why no one had come. It also meant that Chang had, without intending it, spoiled Rosamonde’s scheme. She would only know that Gray had not returned, but never why, and—he smiled to imagine it—be consumed with doubt and worry. For what if it was the Comte or Xonck who had interrupted her man, men who would know in a moment how she planned to betray them? He smiled to imagine that lady’s discomfort.

Chang shifted his thoughts to the great chamber, recalling the tier of cells, where prisoners—or spectators—could see the goings-on below which must, he assumed, be where he would find Celeste. He estimated how far he’d climbed—that row of cells might be on this level…but how to find it? The curtained alcove had so casually hidden the entrance to the spiral staircase…the door to these cells might be hidden in the same offhand manner. Had he already passed it by? He trotted down the hallway, opening every interior-facing door and peering into blind corners, finding nothing and feeling very quickly as if he was wasting time. Shouldn’t he follow the soldiers and Blenheim—wouldn’t they be guarding the Comte and his ceremony? Couldn’t Celeste be with them just as easily? He’d give his search another minute and then run after them. That minute passed, and then five more and still Chang could not pull himself from what he felt was the right path, rushing on through room after room. This entire level of the house seemed deserted. He unheedingly spat on the pale, polished wooden floor and winced at the gob’s scarlet color, then turned yet another out-of-the-way corner. Where was he? He looked up.

He sighed. He was an idiot.

Chang was in a sort of workroom, set with many tables and benches, racks of wood, shelves stuffed with jars and bottles, a large mortar and pestle, brushes, buckets, large tables whose surfaces were scarred with burns, candles and lanterns and several large free-standing mirrors—to reflect light?—and everywhere stretched canvases of different dimensions. He was in an artist’s studio. He was in the studio of Oskar Veilandt.

There was no mistaking the paintings’ author, for they bore the same striking brushwork, lurid colors, and disquieting compositions. Chang walked into the room with the same trepidation as if he were entering a tomb…Oskar Veilandt was dead…were these his works—more that had been salvaged from Paris? Had Robert Vandaariff made it his business to gather the man’s entire oeuvre? For all the brushes and bottles, none of the paintings seemed obviously in mid-composition—as if the artist was alive and working. Was someone else restoring or cleaning the canvases to Vandaariff’s specifications? On impulse Chang stepped to a small portrait leaning against one of the tables—of a masked woman wearing an iron collar and a glittering crown—and turned it over. The back of the canvas was scrawled, just as Svenson had described, with alchemical symbols and what seemed like mathematical formulae. He tried to locate a signature or a date, but could not. He set the painting down and saw, across the room, a large painting, not leaning but hanging in place, its lowest edge flush with the floor—a life-size portrait of none other than Robert Vandaariff. The great man stood against a dark stone battlement, behind him a strange red mountain and behind that a bright blue sky (these compositional elements reminding Chang of nothing more than a series of flat, painted theatrical backdrops), holding in one hand a wrapped book and in the other a pair of large metal keys. When would it have been painted? Vandaariff had known Veilandt personally—which meant the Lord’s involvement went back at least to Veilandt’s death.

But standing in the midst of so many of the man’s unsettling works, it was hard to believe he was dead at all, so insistent was the air of knowing, insinuating, exultant menace. Chang looked again at the portrait of Vandaariff, like an allegorical emblem of a Medici prince, and realized that it was hung lower than the paintings around it. He crossed and hefted the thing from its hook and set it none-too-gently aside. He shook his head at the obviousness of it. Behind the painting was another narrow alcove and three stone steps leading down to a door.

It opened inward, the hinges recently greased and silent. Chang entered another low curving hallway, light bleeding in through small chinks on the inner wall, like the interior of an old ship, or—more accurately—like the depths of a prison. The inner wall was lined with cells. Chang stepped to the nearest: here too the handles had been chiseled off and the doors bolted to their frames. He pulled aside the viewing slot and gasped.

The far wall of the cell, though blocked off with bars, revealed the entirety of the great chamber. Chang doubted he’d ever seen a place—so ambitiously a monument to its master’s dark purpose—that so filled him with dread, an infernal cathedral of black stone and gleaming metal.

In the center of the room was the massive iron tower, running from the closed ceiling (the chamber’s brilliant light came from massive chandeliers of dangling lanterns suspended on chains) all the way to a floor that was tangled and clotted with the bright pipes and cables that flowed down the walls to the base of the tower like a mechanical sea breaking at the foot of a strangely land-bound lighthouse. The slick surface of the tower was pock-marked with tiny spy holes. As a prisoner in the insect-hive of open cells, it would be impossible to know if anyone inside was watching or not. Chang knew that in such circumstances the incarcerated began to act, despite themselves, as if they were being watched at all times, steadily amending their behavior, their rebellious spirit inexorably crushed as if by an invisible hand. Chang snorted at the perfect ideological aptness of the monstrous structure to its current masters.

He could not see the base of the tower from his vantage point and was about to seek a better view when he heard a metallic clang and spied, in one of the cells opposite him, a flicker of movement…legs…a man was descending into the cell by way of a ladder. Abruptly he heard another clang much nearer, to his right. Before he could see where it exactly was he heard a third directly above his head, from the very cell he peered into. A hatch in the ceiling had been heaved open and the legs of a man in a blue uniform slithered through, feeling for a metal ladder bolted to the wall that Chang hadn’t noticed. All sorts of men and women were climbing into the cells across the chamber, usually a man first who then assisted the ladies, sometimes being handed folding camp chairs, setting up the prison cells as if they were private boxes at the theatre. The air around Chang began to buzz with the excited anticipation of an audience before an unrisen curtain. The man in the blue uniform—a sailor of some sort—called merrily up through the hatch for the next person. Whatever was about to start, Chang wasn’t going to do anything about it where he was. However much he’d just discovered, he’d made the wrong decision as far as locating Celeste. Whatever the Comte had arranged for all of the people to watch, Chang was sure she would be part of it—for all he knew she could be descending the central tower that very minute.

As he ran his lungs met each breath with a crest of small sharp pains. Chang spat—more blood this time—and again cursed his stupidity for not killing the Contessa outright when he had the chance. He drove himself forward—looking for a staircase, some way up to the main level, it had to be near—and saw it at the same time as he heard the sound of steps descending straight toward him. He could not get away quickly enough. He pulled apart his stick and waited, breathing deeply, lips flecked with red.

He did not really know who he expected to see, but it was definitely not Captain Smythe. The officer saw Chang and stopped dead on the stairs. He glanced once above him and then stepped quickly forward.

“Good Lord,” he whispered.

“What’s happening?” hissed Chang. “Something’s happening upstairs—”

“They think you are dead—I thought you were dead—but no one could find a body. I took it upon myself to make sure.”

Smythe drew his saber and strode forward from the stairs, the blade floating easily in his hand.

Chang called to him. “Captain—the great chamber—”

“I trusted you like a fool and you’ve killed my man,” Smythe snarled, “the very man who saved your treacherous life!”

He lunged forward and Chang leapt away, stumbling into the corridor wall. The Captain slashed at his head—Chang just ducking down and rolling free. The blade bit into the plaster with a pale puff of dust.

Smythe readied his blade for another lunge. In answer—there was no way he could possibly fight him with any hope of survival—Chang stood tall and stepped into the center of the corridor, snapping his arms open wide, cruciform, in open invitation for Smythe to run him through. He hissed at Smythe with fury and frustration.

“If you think that is so—do what you will! But I tell you I did not kill Reeves!”

Smythe paused, the tip of his blade a pace or so from Chang’s chest, but within easy range.

“Ask your own damned men! They were there!” snapped Chang. “He was shot with a carbine—he was shot by—by—what’s his name—the overseer—Blenheim—the chamberlain! Don’t be a bloody idiot!”

Captain Smythe was silent. Chang watched him closely. They were close enough that he might conceivably deflect the saber with his stick and get to the Captain with the dagger. If the man persisted in being stupid, there was nothing else for it.

“That was not what I was told…” said Smythe, speaking very slowly. “You used him as a shield.”

“And who told you that? Blenheim?”

The Captain was silent, still glaring. Chang scoffed.

“We were speaking—Reeves and I. Blenheim saw us. Did you even look at the body? Reeves was shot in the back.”

The words landed like a blow, and Chang could see Smythe thinking, restraining his anger by force of will, his thoughts at odds. After another moment the Captain lowered his sword.

“I will go examine the body myself.” He looked back at the stairs and then again to Chang, his expression changing, as if he were seeing him freshly without the intervening veil of rage.

“You’re injured,” said Smythe, fishing out a handkerchief and tossing it to Chang. Chang snatched it from the air and wiped his mouth and face, seeing the dire nature of his wounds reflected in the officer’s concern. Once again the notion that he was truly dying pressed at his resolve to keep on—what was the point, what had ever been the point? He looked at Smythe, a good man, no doubt, bitter himself, but bolstered by his uniform, his admiring men—who knew, a wife and children. Chang wanted to suddenly snarl that he desired none of those things, loathed the very idea of such a prison, loathed the kindness of Smythe himself. Just as he loathed himself for loving Angelique or having come to care for Celeste? He looked quickly away from the Captain’s troubled gaze and saw everywhere around him the luxurious, mocking fittings of Harschmort. He was going to die at Harschmort.

“I am, but nothing can be done. I am sorry about Reeves—but you must listen. A woman has been taken—the woman I spoke of, Celeste Temple. They are about to do something to her—an infernal ceremony, I have seen it—it is beyond deadly—I assure you she would rather die.”

Smythe nodded, but Chang could see that the man was still goggling at his appearance.

“I look worse than I am—I have come through the pipes—the smell cannot be helped,” he said. He offered the handkerchief back, saw Smythe’s reaction, and then wadded it into his own pocket. “For the last time, I beg you, what is happening above?”

Smythe glanced once up the stairs as if someone might have followed and then spoke quickly. “I’m afraid I barely know—I have just now come in the house. We were outside, for the Colonel’s arrival—”

“Aspiche?”

“Yes—it is quite a disaster—they arrived from the country, some sort of accident, the Duke of Stäelmaere—”

“But people are entering the great chamber to watch the ceremony!” said Chang. “There is no time—”

“I cannot speak to that—there are parties of people everywhere and the house is very large,” answered the officer. “All of my men are occupied with the Duke’s party—after they landed—”

“Landed?”

“I cannot begin to explain. But the whole household has been turned over—”

“Then maybe there’s still hope!” said Chang.

“For what?” asked Smythe.

“All I need is to get upstairs and be pointed in the right direction.”

He could see that Smythe was torn between helping him and confirming his story. He suspected that the presence of Aspiche had done as much as anything to spur the officer toward mutiny.

“Our transfer to the Palace…” began Smythe quietly as if this were an answer to Chang’s request, “was accompanied by a significant rise in pay for all officers…life-saving for men who had spent years abroad and were swimming in debt…it should be no surprise when a reward—the money being now spent—turns out instead to be…an entrapment.”

“Go to Reeves,” Chang said quietly, “and talk to your men who were there. They will follow you. Wait and stay ready…when the time comes, believe me, you will know what to do.”

Smythe looked at him without any confidence whatsoever. Chang laughed—the dry croak of a crow—and clapped the man on the shoulder.

“The house is confusing at first,” Smythe whispered to him as they climbed the stairs and crept into the main-floor hallway. “The left wing is dominated by a large ballroom—now quite full of people—and the right by a large hallway of mirrors that leads to private rooms and apartments—again, now quite full of people. Also in the right wing is an inner corridor that takes one to a spiral staircase—I have not climbed it. When I saw it the corridor was lined with Macklenburg guards.”

“And the center of the house?” asked Chang.

“The great reception hall, the kitchens, the laundry, staff quarters, the house manager—that’s Blenheim—and his men.”

“Where is Lord Vandaariff’s study?” asked Chang suddenly, his mind working. “At the rear of the house?”

“It is”—Smythe nodded—“and on the main floor. I have not been there. The whole left wing has been restricted to special guests and a very few trusted staff. No Dragoons.”

“Speaking of that,” said Chang, “what are you doing here? When did you come from the Ministry?”

Smythe smiled bitterly. “The story will amuse you. As my men were relieved from their posts, I received urgent word—from my Colonel I assumed—that we were needed at the St. Royale Hotel. Upon hurrying there—though domestic quarrels are not our usual duty—I was met by an especially presumptuous woman, who informed me that I must accompany her at once to this house by train.”

“Mrs. Marchmoor, of course.”

Smythe nodded. “Apparently she had been agitated by a certain fellow in red—an absolute villain, I understand.”

“I believe we took the same train—I was hiding in the coal wagon.”

“The possibility occurred to me,” said Smythe, “but I could not send a man forward without sending him on the roof—we were forbidden to pass through the iron-bound black railcar.”

“What was in it?” asked Chang.

“I cannot say—Mrs. Marchmoor had the key and went in alone. Upon our arrival at Orange Locks we were met by Mr. Blenheim, with carts and a coach. He went into the black car with his men, under Mrs. Marchmoor’s eye, and they brought out—”

“What was it?” hissed Chang, suddenly impatient to know, yet fearing to hear the words.

“Again, I cannot say—it was covered with canvas. It could have been another of their boxes, or it could have been a coffin. But as they were loading it I distinctly heard Blenheim order the driver to go slow—so as not to break the glass—”

They were interrupted by the sound of approaching bootsteps. Chang pressed himself flat against the wall. Smythe stepped forward and the hallway rang with the unmistakable and imperious voice of Mr. Blenheim.

“Captain! What are you doing apart from your men? What business, Sir, can you have in this portion of the house?”

Chang could no longer see Smythe but heard the tightening of his voice.

“I was sent to look for Mr. Gray,” he answered.

“Sent?” snapped Blenheim with open skepticism. “By whom sent?”

The man’s arrogance was appalling. If Chang were in Smythe’s place, knowing the overseer had just murdered one of his men, Blenheim’s head would already be rolling on the floor.

“By the Contessa, Mr. Blenheim. Would you care to so interrogate her?”

Blenheim ignored this. “Well? And did you find Mr. Gray?”

“I did not.”

“Then why are you still here?”

“As you can see yourself, I am leaving. I understand that you’ve moved my trooper’s body to the stables.”

“Of course I have—the last thing the master’s guests want to see is a corpse.”

“Indeed. Yet I, as his officer, must attend to his effects.”

Blenheim snorted with disdain at such petty business. “Then you will oblige me by vacating this part of the house, and assuring me that neither you nor your men will return. By the wish of Lord Vandaariff himself, it is for his guests alone.”

“Of course. It is Lord Vandaariff’s house.”

“And I manage that house, Captain,” said Blenheim. “If you will come with me.”

Chang struck out as best he could for the Lord of the manor’s study. His look at the prison plans had not been so detailed as he might like, but it made sense that the warden might have personal access to the central viewing tower. Had Vandaariff simply adopted—and no doubt expanded and layered with mahogany and marble—the previous despot’s lair for his own? If Chang’s guess was right, Vandaariff’s study could then get him to Celeste. It was the thought he kept returning to in his mind, her rescue. He knew there were other tasks—to revenge Angelique, to find the truth about Oskar Veilandt, to discover what falling-out between his enemies had led to Trapping’s death—and normally he would have relished the idea of juggling them all together, to carry their evolving solutions in his head as he carried the sifted contents of the Library. But tonight there was no time, no room to fail, no second chances.

He could not risk being seen by anyone, and so was reduced to painful dashes across open corridors, creeping to corners, and scuttling back into cover when guests or servants happened by. With a scoff Chang thought of how nearly everyone in the pyramid of Harschmort’s inhabitants was some sort of servant—by occupation, by marriage, by money, by fear, by desire. He thought of Svenson’s servitude to duty—duty to what, Chang could not understand—and his own doomed notions of obligation and, even if he disdained the word, honor. Now he wanted to spit on them all, just as he was spitting blood on these white marble floors. And what of Celeste—had she been a servant to Bascombe? Her family? Her wealth? Chang realized he did not know. For a moment he saw her, wrestling to reload his pistol at the Boniface…a remarkable little beast. He wondered if she had shot someone after all.

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?

He replaced the plug in the wall and wondered that the stair-step should be built across the entire passage…was there another spy hole on the opposite wall? Chang shifted his position and felt for it, finding the plug easily. He worked it free as gently as he could and leaned forward to gaze into the second room.

A man sprawled with his head and shoulders on a writing table. Chang knew him despite the black band across his eyes—as he came to know any man he’d followed through the street, identifying him from behind or within a crowd merely by his size and manner of being. It was his former client, the man who had apparently recommended his talents to Rosamonde, the lawyer John Carver. Chang had no doubt the secrets Carver held in his professional possession would open many a door to the Cabal across the city—he wondered how many of the law had been seduced, and shook his head at how simple those seductions must have been. Carver’s face was as red as the woman’s, and a pearling bead of drool connected his mouth to the table top. The glass book lay flickering under Carver’s hand. The upper part of his face lay pressed against it, eyes twitching with an idiot rapture, transfixed by its depths. Chang noted with some curiosity that the lawyer’s face and fingertips—the ones touching the glass—had taken on a bluish cast to the skin…almost as if they’d been frozen, though his sweat-sheened face belied that explanation. With distaste he noticed Carver’s other hand clutched at his groin with a spastic, dislocated urgency. Chang looked around the room for any other occupant, or any other useful sign, but saw nothing. He was not sure what such exposure to the book actually gained the Cabal—apart from this insensibility on the part of the victim. Did it re-make them like the Process? Was there something in the book they were supposed to learn? He felt the weight of the book tucked under his own arm. He knew—from the glass in his lungs and Svenson’s description of that man’s shattered glass arms—that the object itself could be deadly, but as a tool, as a machine…he hadn’t even a glimpse into its true destructive power. Chang replaced the plug and felt with his stick for the next set of stairs.

When it came he looked again, prying the plug first from the left, the side where he’d seen the woman. Chang’s conscience gnawed at him—should he not ignore the holes and move directly for the office? Yet to do so was to pass up information about the Cabal he would never be afforded again…he would go more quickly. He peered into the room and suddenly froze—there were two men in black coats helping an elderly man in red onto a sofa. The churchman’s face was obscured—could it be the Bishop of Baax-Saornes? Uncle to the Duke of Stäelmaere and the Queen, he was the most powerful cleric in the land, an advisor to government, a curb to corruption,…and here having the spittle wiped from his chin by malevolent lackeys. One of the men wrapped a parcel in cloth—assuredly another book—while the other took the Bishop’s pulse. Then both turned to a knock at a door Chang could not see and rapidly walked from the room.

Without a further thought for the ruined Bishop—what could he do for him anyway?—Chang turned to the opposite hole. Another man slumped over a book—how many of these hellish objects had been made?—his red face and twitching eyes pressed down into the glowing surface. It was without question Henry Xonck, his customary aura of power and command quite fully absent…indeed, it seemed to Chang that the man’s normal attributes had been drained away…drained into the book? The thought was absurd, and yet he recalled the glass cards—the manner in which they became imprinted with memories. If the books managed the same trick on a larger scale…suddenly Chang wondered if the memories were simply imprinted from the victim’s mind…or actually removed. How much of Henry Xonck’s memories—indeed his very soul—had here been stripped away?

The following spy holes revealed more of the same, and even though Chang didn’t recognize every slumped figure, those he did were enough to reveal a naked assault on the powerful figures of the land: the Minister of Finance, the Minister of War, a celebrated actress, a Duchess, an Admiral, a high court judge, the publisher of the Times, the president of the Imperial Bank, the widowed Baroness who ran the most important, opinion-setting salon in the city, and finally, tempting him to postpone his search even further and intervene, Madelaine Kraft. Each one discovered in the throes of a fitful, nearly narcotic state of possession, utterly absent of mind and unresponsive of body—their only point of attention being the book that had been set before their eyes. In several cases Chang saw masked figures—men and women—monitoring a stricken victim, sometimes collecting the book and starting to wake them, sometimes allowing more time to steep in those blue glowing depths. Chang recognized none of these functionaries. He was certain that but a few days ago their tasks would have been performed by the likes of Mrs. Marchmoor or Roger Bascombe—and a few days before that by the Contessa or Xonck themselves. Now their organization had grown—had absorbed so many new adherents—that they were all freed for more important matters. It was another spur to Chang that something else was happening in the house, perhaps as cover for the subjugation of these particular, spectacularly placed figures, but important enough to draw the Cabal’s leaders. He rushed ahead into the dark.

He ignored the remaining spy holes, driving on to the end of the passageway and hoping that when he got there he would find a door. Instead, he found a painting. His stick struck something with a light exploratory touch that was not stone and his hand reached gingerly forward to find the heavy carved frame. It seemed similar in size to the portrait of Robert Vandaariff that had masked the door to the tier of cells, though the passage was so dark that he’d no idea what it actually portrayed. Not that Chang wasted any time on the matter—he was on his knees groping for a catch or lever that might open the hidden door. But why was the painting on the inside? Did that mean the door rotated fully on each usage and someone had already come through? That was unlikely—a simple concealed hinge, opening and closing normally, would be far easier to use and to hide. But then what was on the canvas that it should remain unseen in the dark?

He sat back on his haunches and sighed. Injuries, fatigue, thirst…Chang felt like a ruin. He could keep on fighting—that was instinctive—but actual cleverness felt beyond him. He shut his eyes and took a deep breath, exhaling slowly, thinking about the other side of the door—the catch would be concealed…perhaps it was not around the frame, but part of it. He ran his fingers along the inside border of the ornately (overly, really) carved frame, concentrating first on the area where a normal doorknob might be…when he found the curved depression, he realized the only trick was the knob being on the left side rather than the right—the kind of silly misdirection that could have easily flummoxed him for another half hour. He dug his fingers around the odd-shaped knob and turned it. The well-oiled lock opened silently and Chang felt the weight of the door shift in his hands. He pushed it open and stepped through.

He knew it was Vandaariff’s study immediately, for the man himself sat before him at an enormous desk, scratching earnestly away at a long page of parchment with an old-fashioned feathered quill. Lord Robert did not look up. Chang took another step, still holding the door open with his shoulder, his eyes darting around at the room. The carpets were red and black and the long room was sub-divided into functional areas by the furniture: a long meeting table lined with high-backed chairs, a knot of larger, more upholstered armchairs and sofas, an assistant’s desk, a row of tall locked cabinets for papers, and then the great man’s desk, as large as the meeting table and covered with documents, rolled-up maps, and a litter of glasses and mugs—all driven to the edge of his present work like flotsam on a beach.

No one else was in the room.

Still, Lord Vandaariff did not acknowledge Chang’s presence, his face gravely focused on his writing. Chang remembered his main errand, a secret way to the great chamber. He couldn’t see it. On the far wall beyond the table was the main entrance, but it seemed like the only one.

As he stepped forward something caught Chang’s attention at the corner of his eye…it was the painting behind him—he hadn’t looked at it in the light. He glanced again at Vandaariff—who gave Chang no attention at all—and opened the door wide. Another canvas by Oskar Veilandt, but no similar sort of image…instead its front was like the back of the Annunciation fragments and other paintings—what at first glance seemed mere cross-hatched lines was in truth a densely wrought web of symbols and diagrams. The overall shape of the formulae, Chang saw more with instinct than with understanding, was a horseshoe…mathematical equations made in the shape of Harschmort House. It was also, he realized with a certain self-consciousness, wondering if the insight was merely the product of his own low mind, perversely anatomical—the curving U of the house and the peculiarly shaped cylindrical figure, longer than he had imagined, of the great chamber clearly inserted within it…whatever else Veilandt’s alchemy intended, it was quite clear that its roots lay as much in sexual congress as any elemental transmutation—or was the point that these were the same? Chang did not know what this had to do with the ceremony in the chamber, or with Vandaariff. And yet…he tried to remember when Vandaariff had purchased and re-fitted Harschmort Prison—at most a year or two previously. Hadn’t the gallery agent told them Veilandt had been dead five years? That was impossible—the alchemical painting on the door was definitely the same man’s work. Could it be that Veilandt hadn’t died at all? Could it be that he was here—perhaps willingly, but given the degree to which Vandaariff and d’Orkancz were exploiting his every discovery it seemed suddenly more likely he was a prisoner, or even worse, fallen victim to his own alchemy, his mind drained into a glass book for others to consume.

And yet—even within his exhaustion and despair Chang could not prevent himself from indulging this tendril of hope—if Veilandt were alive he could be found! Where else might they learn how to resist or overturn the effects of the glass? With a stab into his heart Chang realized this was even a chance to save Angelique. At once his heart was torn—his determination to save Celeste, this last prayer to preserve Angelique—it was impossible. Veilandt could be anywhere—shackled in a cage or drooling in a forgotten corner…or, if he retained his sanity and his mind, where he could best aid the Cabal…with the Comte d’Orkancz at the base of the great tower.

Chang looked again at the painting. It was a map of Harschmort…as it was equally an alchemical formula of dazzling complexity…and also distinctly pornographic. Focusing on the map (for he had no knowledge of alchemy and no time for the lurid), he located to the best of his ability the spot where, within the house, he presently stood. Was there any obvious path depicted to the great chamber and the panopticon column tower within it?

The room itself was signified—he’d had enough Greek to name them—by an alpha and then just above it, as if it were its multiplying power, a tiny omega…and from the omega ran one clear scoring line of paint down to the nest of symbols representing the chamber. Chang looked up from the canvas, feeling foolishly literal. If the room was the alpha—where in it might he find the omega? To his best estimate it lay just beyond Vandaariff’s desk…where the wall was covered by a heavy hanging curtain.

Chang crossed quickly to the spot, watching Vandaariff closely. The man still did not stir from his writing—he must have covered half a long page in the time Chang had been there. This was perhaps the most powerful man in the nation—even on the continent—and Chang could not resist his curiosity. He stepped closer to the desk—by all rights his reeking clothes alone should have shattered a saint’s concentration—to get a look at Vandaariff’s unchangingly impassive face.

It did not seem to Cardinal Chang that Robert Vandaariff’s eyes saw anything at all. They were open, but glassy and dull, the thoughts behind them entirely elsewhere, facing down at the desk top but quite to the side of his writing, as if he were instead inscribing thoughts from memory. Chang leaned even closer to study the parchment—he was nearly at Vandaariff’s shoulder and still there was no reaction. As near as he could tell, the man was documenting the contents of a financial transaction—in amazingly complicated detail—referring to shipping and to Macklenburg and French banking and to rates and markets and shares and schedules of repayment. He watched Vandaariff finish the page and briskly turn it over—the sudden movement of his arms causing Chang to leap back—continuing mid-phrase at the top of the fresh side. Chang looked on the floor behind the desk and saw page after long page of parchment completely covered with text, as if Robert Vandaariff was emptying his mind of every financial secret he had ever possessed. Chang looked again at the working fingers, chilled by the inhuman insistence of the scratching pen, and noticed that the tips were tinged with blue…but it was not cold in the room, and the blue was more lustrous beneath the pale flesh than Chang had ever seen on a living man.

He stepped away from the automaton Lord and felt behind him for the curtain, swept it aside to expose a simple locked door. He fumbled with his ring of keys, sorting out one, and then dropped them all—suddenly full of dread at being in Vandaariff’s unfeeling presence, the pen scratching along behind him. Chang scooped up the keys and with an abrupt, anxious impatience simply kicked the wood by the lock as hard as he could. He kicked again and felt it begin to split. He did not care about the noise or any trail of destruction. He kicked once more and cracked the wood around the still-fixed bolt. He hurled himself against it, smashing through, and staggered into a winding stone tunnel whose end sloped downward, out of view.

Apart from his relentless spidery hand, Lord Vandaariff did not move. Chang rubbed his shoulder and broke into a run.

The tunnel was smoothly paved and bright from regularly placed gas-lit globes above his head. The passage curved gently over the course of some hundred paces, at the end of which Chang was forced to reduce his speed. It was just as well, for as he paused to steady his breath—leaning against the wall with one hand and allowing the gob of bloody spit to drop silently from his mouth—he heard the distant sound of many voices raised in song. Ahead the tunnel took a sharp bank to his right, toward the great chamber. Would there be any kind of guard? The singing drowned out any other noise. It came from below…from the occupants of the overhanging cells! Chang sank to his knees and cautiously peered around the corner.

The tunnel opened into a narrowed walkway, little more than a catwalk, with railings of chain to either side, extending to a black, malevolent turret of iron that rose into the rock ceiling above him. Through the metal grid of the catwalk rose the sound of singing. Chang peered down, but between the dim light and his squinting eyes, could get no true sense of the chamber below. On the far side of the catwalk was an iron door, massive with a heavy lock and iron bar, that had been left ajar. Chang stopped just to his side of it, waiting, listening, heard no one, and slipped into the dark…and onto another spiral staircase, this one welded together from cast iron plates.

The staircase continued up to the roof of the cavern, toward what must be the main entrance to the tower. But Chang turned downwards, his boots’ tapping on steps more sensed than audible over the chorus of voices. He could hear them more clearly, but it was the kind of singing where even if one did know the language the words might well have been those of an Italian (or for all he knew Icelandic) opera, so distended and unnatural was the phrasing imposed by the music. Still, the lyrics he did manage to pick out—“impenetrable blue”…“never-ending sight”…“redemption kind”—only drove him to descend more quickly.

The interior of the tower was lit by regular sconces, but their light was deliberately dim, so as not to show through the open viewing slots. Chang slowed. The step below him was covered by a tangled shape. It was a discarded coat. He picked it up and held it to the nearest sconce…a uniform coat, dark blue at some point but now filthy with dirt and, he saw with interest, blood. The stains were still damp, and soaked the front of the coat quite completely. He did not, however, see any wound or tear in the coat—was the blood from the wearer, or from, perhaps, the wearer’s enemy? Whoever had worn it might have bled from the head or had their hand cut off and clutched the stump to their chest—anything was possible. It was then that—his mind moving so slowly!—Chang noticed the bars of rank on the coat’s stiff collar…he looked again at the cut, the color, the silver braid around each epaulette…he damned himself for a fool.

It was Svenson’s coat, without question, and covered in gore.

He quickly searched around him in the stairwell, and on the wall saw the dripping remains of a wide spray of blood. The violence had happened here on the stairs—perhaps only moments ago. Was Svenson dead? How had he possibly reached Harschmort from Tarr Manor? Chang crab-walked another few steps, face close against the iron. There was a descending trail of blood, but the trail was smeared…not made by a wounded man walking, but a wounded—or dead—man dragged.

Chang threw the coat aside—if the Doctor had dropped it, he hardly needed to carry it himself—and clattered down as quickly as he could. He knew the distance was roughly what he’d previously climbed—two hundred steps, perhaps? What in the world would he find at the base? Svenson’s corpse? What was d’Orkancz possibly doing? And why were there no guards?

Chang’s foot slipped on a splash of blood and he clutched at the rail. It would be all too simple for one mistake to land him at the bottom with a broken neck. He forced himself to concentrate—the voices still soared in song, though he had descended past the tiers of viewing cells and the chorus was above him. But when had Svenson arrived? It had to be with Aspiche! Could the Doctor be the cause of Smythe’s disturbance? Chang smiled to think of it, even as he winced at the likely retribution the Colonel would have delivered to anyone crossing his path. He did not relish the image of the Doctor standing alone against these men—he was no soldier, nor was he an unflinching killer. That was Chang’s place—and he knew he must reach Svenson’s side.

And if Svenson was dead? Then perhaps Chang’s place was to die with him…and with Miss Temple.

He raced down another thirty steps and stopped at a small landing. His lungs were laced with stabbing pains and he knew it was better not to reach the bottom in a state of collapse. One of the viewing slots was near him on the wall and he pulled it aside, grinning with sinister appreciation. The slot was covered with a plate of smoked glass. From the inside, he could see through it, but to any prisoner the glass would mask whether the metal slat had been opened at all. Chang pulled off his spectacles and pressed his face to the glass at the very moment the singing stopped.

Above and opposite him were the viewing cells, full of finely dressed people, all masked, faces pressed to the bars, for all the world like inmates in an asylum. He shifted his gaze down, but could not see the tables. He was still too high.

As he stepped away a voice echoed up from below—unnatural, strangely amplified, deepened, and unquestionably mighty. He did not recognize it immediately…he’d only heard the man speaking a very few words, and those in a rasping whisper to Harald Crabbé, an enormous fur-clad arm enfolding Angelique. But Chang knew…it was the Comte d’Orkancz. Damning his lungs, he began to run, recklessly, his feet flying two and even three steps at a time, hand on the rail with his stick, the other hand holding the wrapped book safely free of collision, his soiled coat flapping behind him, its heavy pockets knocking against his legs. All around him the chamber rang with the Comte’s inhuman voice.

“You are here because you believe…in yourselves…in giving yourselves over to a different dream…of the future…of possibility…transformation…revelation…redemption. Perhaps there are those among you who will be deemed worthy…truly worthy and truly willing to sacrifice their illusions…sacrifice the entirety of their world…which is a world of illusion…for this final degree of wisdom. Beyond redemption is designation…as Mary was made apart from every other woman…as Sarah was made pregnant after a barren lifetime…as Leda was implanted with twin seeds of beauty and destruction…so these vessels before you all have been chosen…designated to a higher destiny…a transformation you will witness. You will feel the higher energies…you will taste this greatness…this ethereal ambrosia…before known only to those creatures who were named gods by shepherds…and by the children we all once were…”

Chang toppled off balance into the rail and was forced to stop, clutching with both hands to prevent a fall. He spat against the wall and groped, gasping, for the viewing slat, ripping off his glasses to look. Below him he saw it all, like an iron cathedral from hell laid out for an infernal mass. At the base of the tower was a raised platform—seemingly suspended on a raft of the silver tubing—holding three large surgical tables, each surrounded by racks and trays and brass boxes of machinery. The tables each bore a woman, held with leather straps just as Angelique had been at the Institute, naked, bodies obscured by a sickening nest of slick black hoses. Each woman’s face was completely covered by a black mask fitted with smaller hoses—for each ear, each eye, the nose and mouth—and their hair completely wrapped in a dark cloth, so that despite their nudity Chang could not begin to guess who might be on which table. Only the woman nearest to the turret, who he could barely glimpse from his angle of sight, was distinguished from the others, for the soles of her feet were discolored blue in an identical manner to Robert Vandaariff’s hands.

Next to her stood d’Orkancz, with the same leather apron and gauntlets he’d worn at the Institute and the same brass-bound helmet, to which he’d attached another hose, hooking it into the metal box that made the mask’s mouth. Into this hose the Comte was speaking, and somehow through its engine his voice was magnified, like a very god’s, to crash against every distant corner of the vast chamber. Behind d’Orkancz stood at least four more men, identically dressed, their faces hidden. Men from the Institute, like Gray and Lorenz? Or could one of these be Oskar Veilandt—present either as prisoner or slave? Chang could not see the very base of the tower. Where were the guards? Where was Svenson? Which table held Celeste? None of the women seemed awake—how could he carry her away?

Chang spun at a sound behind him—a clanking from the staircase itself. The stairs wound around an iron pillar—the noise came from within it. He reached across and felt a vibration. The clanking made him think at once of a hotel’s dumbwaiter…could the pillar be hollow? How else to get things quickly from the top to the bottom? But what was being delivered? This was his chance. When whatever was being sent reached the bottom, someone was going to have to open the tower door to get it—and that would be his moment to break through. He shoved his glasses back into place, set the pillowcase down against the wall and threw himself forward.

The Comte was still speaking. Chang didn’t care—it was all the same nonsense—another stage of the circus act to dazzle the customers. Whatever the real effects of this “transformation”, he didn’t doubt it was but a veil for another unseen web of exploitation and greed. The clanking stopped. As Chang swept around the final curve he saw two men wearing the aprons and gauntlets and helmets bending over the open dumbwaiter, just sliding an iron-bound crate from it and into a wheeled cart. Behind them was the open door to the chamber platform, to either side of it a Macklenburg trooper. Chang ignored the men and the cart and vaulted from the steps at the nearest Macklenburger with a cry, slamming the man across the jaw with his forearm and driving a knee into his ribs, knocking him sprawling. Before the second man could draw his weapon Chang stabbed the stick into his stomach, doubling him over (the man’s face falling near enough to Chang that he heard the brusque click of the fellow’s teeth). He drove the dagger up under the man’s open jaw and just as quickly wrenched it free. He stood—the dead trooper sinking like a timed counterweight—and wheeled back to the first man, planting a deliberate kick to the side of his head. Both troopers were still. The two men in the masks stared at him with the dumb incomprehension of inhabitants from the moon first witnessing the savagery of mankind.

Chang spun to the open door. The Comte had stopped speaking. He was staring at Chang. Before Chang could react he heard a noise behind and without looking threw his body forward out the door—just as the two men in helmets shoved the trolley at his back. The corner clipped him sharply across his right thigh—drawing blood, but not enough to run him down. Chang stumbled onto the platform, the sudden enormity of the cathedral-like void above staggering him with a spasm of vertigo. He groped for his bearings. The platform held four more Macklenburgers—three troopers, who as he watched swept out their sabers in one glittering movement, and Major Blach, calmly drawing his black pistol. Chang glanced wildly around him—absolutely no sign of Svenson or which, if any, of the brass-masked men might be Veilandt—and then up to the dizzying heights and the clustered ring of masked faces peering down in rapt attention. There was no time. Chang’s only path away from the soldiers led to the tables and—striding quite directly to cut him off from the women—d’Orkancz.

The troopers rushed forward. Chang in turn charged directly at the Comte before dodging to the left and ducking beneath the first table, swatting through the dangling hoses to reach the other side. The soldiers careened to either side of d’Orkancz. Chang kept going, crouched low, until he was under and past the second table. He emerged on the other side as the Comte shouted to the soldiers not to move.

Chang stood and looked back. The Comte faced him from the far side of the first table, still wearing the mechanical mask, the first woman swathed in hoses before him. At the Comte’s side stood Blach, his pistol ready. The troopers waited. Svenson was not here. Nor, as best as he could tell, was Veilandt—or not with his own mind, for the two masked men behind the Comte had not stopped in their working of the brass machinery, looking for all the world like a pair of insect drones. Chang looked at the platform’s edge. Below it, on every side, was a steaming sea of metal pipes, hissing with heat and reeking sulphurous fumes. There was no escape.

“Cardinal Chang!”

The Comte d’Orkancz spoke in the same projected, amplified tones that Chang had heard in the tower. Heard this close the words were impossibly harsh, and he winced despite himself.

“You will not move! You have trespassed a place you do not comprehend! I promise you do not begin to understand the penalties!”

Without a thought for the Comte, Chang reached out to the woman on the second table and ripped the dark cloth free that held her hair.

“Do not touch them!” screamed the Comte d’Orkancz.

The hair was too dark. It was not Celeste. He scuttled at once to the far side of the third table. The troopers advanced with him, up to the second table. The Comte and Blach remained on the far side of the first, the Major’s pistol quite clearly aimed at Chang’s head. Chang ducked behind the third woman and pulled the cloth from her hair. Too light and less curled…Celeste must be on the first table. He’d charged past her like a fool and left her in the direct control of d’Orkancz.

He stood. Upon seeing him the troopers stepped forward and Chang detected the briefest flicker of movement from Blach. He dropped again as the shot crashed out. The bullet spat past his head and punched into one of the great pipes, spitting out a jet of gas that hung flickering in the air like a blue-white flame. The Comte screamed again.

“Stop!”

The soldiers—nearly at the third table—froze. Chang risked a slow peek over the raft of black hoses—glimpsing between them pale damp flesh—and met the Major’s baleful gaze.

The chamber was silent, save for the dull roar of the furnace and the high note of hissing gas behind him. He needed to overcome nine men—counting the two with the cart—and get Celeste from the table. Could he do that without harming her? Was that harm possibly worse than what would happen to her if he didn’t? He knew what she would want him to do—as he knew how meaningless any notion of preserving his own life had become. He felt the seething lattice of cuts inside his chest. This exact moment was why he had come so far, this very effort the last defiant, defacing mark he could inflict upon this privileged world. Chang looked up again to the mass of masked faces staring down in suspenseful silence. He felt like a beast in the arena.

The Comte detached the black speaking hose from the mask and draped it carefully over a nearby pedestal box bristling with levers and stops. He faced Chang and nodded—with the mask on it was the gesture of an inarticulate brute, of a storybook ogre—to the woman nearest Chang, whose hair he had exposed.

“Looking for someone, Cardinal?” he called. His voice was less loud, but issuing from the strange mouth box set into the mask, it still struck Chang as inhuman. “Perhaps I can assist you…”

The Comte d’Orkancz reached out and pulled away the cloth that wrapped the final woman’s hair. It cascaded out in curls, dark, shining, black. The Comte reached out with his other hand and swept away the hoses hanging across her feet. The flesh was discolored, sickly lustrous, even more so than Vandaariff’s hand or John Carver’s face when it had lain against the book—pale as polar ice, slick with perspiration, and beneath it, where he had before known a color of golden warmth, was now the cool indifference of white ash. On the third toe of her left foot was a silver ring, but Chang had known from the first glimpse of her hair…it was Angelique.

“I believe you are…acquainted with the lady,” continued d’Orkancz. “Of course you may be acquainted with the others as well—Miss Poole”—he nodded at the woman in the middle—“and Mrs. Marchmoor.” The Comte gestured to the woman directly in front of Chang. He looked down, trying to locate Margaret Hooke (last seen on a bed in the St. Royale) in what he saw—the hair, her size, the color of what flesh he could see beneath the black rubber. He felt the urge to be sick.

Chang spat a lozenge of blood onto the platform and called to the Comte, his hoarse voice betraying his fatigue.

“What will you do to them?”

“What I have planned to do. Do you search for Angelique, or for Miss Temple? As you see she is not here.”

“Where is she?” cried Chang hoarsely.

“I believe you have a choice,” said the Comte in reply. “If you seek to rescue Angelique, there is no human way—for I read the effects of the glass in your face, Cardinal—for you to bear her from this place and then do the same for Miss Temple.”

Chang said nothing.

“It is, of course, academic. You ought to have died ten times over—is that not correct, Major Blach? You will do so now. But it is perhaps fitting that it take place at the feet—if I am correctly informed—of your own hopeless love.”

Staring directly at the Comte, Chang gathered hold of as many of the hoses rising from Mrs. Marchmoor’s body as he could and prepared to rip them free.

“If you do that, you kill her, Cardinal! Is that what you desire—to destroy a helpless woman? At this distance I cannot stop you. The forces at work have been committed! None of these may retreat from their destiny—truly their lot is transformation or death!”

“What transformation?” shouted Chang above the rising roar of the pipes, and the hissing gas behind him.

In answer d’Orkancz reached for the speaking hose and jammed it sharply back into the mask. His words echoed through the vaulted heights like thunder.

“The transformation of angels! The powers of heaven made flesh!”

The Comte d’Orkancz yanked hard on one of the pedestal’s brass levers, and brought his other hand down like a hammer on a metal stop. At once the hoses around Angelique, which had been hanging and lank, stiffened with life as they were flooded with gas and boiling fluid. Her body arched on the table, and the air was filled with a hideous rising whine. Chang could not look away. The Comte pulled a second lever and her fingers and toes began to twitch…a third, and to Chang’s growing terror their color began to change even more, a deadening, freezing blue. D’Orkancz pushed in two stops at once, and shifted the first lever back. The whine redoubled its intensity, ringing within every pipe and echoing throughout the vaulted cathedral. The crowd above them gasped and Chang heard voices shouting from the cells—cries of excitement and delight, hoots of encouragement—that grew into a second buzzing chorus. Her body arched again and again, rippling the hoses like a dog shaking off the rain, and then within the screams and roars Chang heard another tone that pierced his heart like a spike: the rattle of Angelique’s own voice, an insensate moan from the very depths of her lungs, as if the final defenses of her body were expending themselves against the vast mechanical assault. Tears flowed unheeded down the Cardinal’s face. Anything he did would kill her—but was she not being destroyed before his eyes? He could not move.

The whining roar snapped at once to nothing, silencing the entire chamber like a gunshot. With a sudden rippling shimmer that Chang could scarce credit he was seeing, a wave of fluid rushed beneath her skin along each limb from her feet and hands, flooding up to her hips and torso and finally enveloping her head.

Angelique’s flesh was transformed to a brilliant, shining translucent blue, as if she herself…her very body…had been before them all transmuted into glass.

The Comte pulled up his stops and pushed in his final lever. He turned up to the throng of spectators and raised his hand in triumph.

“It has been done!”

The crowd erupted into ecstatic cheering and applause. D’Orkancz nodded to them, raised his other hand, and then turned to Blach, for a moment pulling the speaking hose from its place.

“Kill him.”

The obscenity of what d’Orkancz had perpetrated on Angelique—was it not a rape of her essence?—at once spurred Chang into action and turned his heart to ice. He launched himself around the third table at the two Macklenburg guards at Miss Poole’s head, the lessons of a thousand battles pouring into each relentless, bitter blow. Without the slightest pause he swung at them, a feint—their sabers rising to his chest with the unison of German training—and then swept both blades aside with his stick. He slashed his dagger at the nearest man’s face, laying it open from the tip of the jaw to the nose—a spray of blood against the silver pipes—the trooper wheeled away. The other riposted, stabbing hard at Chang’s body. Chang broke his stick deflecting the thrust past his shoulder, and knew the lunge had brought the trooper too close. He jabbed the dagger beneath the young man’s ribs and ripped it free, already—for each second seemed to arrive from a great distance as he watched—dropping to his knees. Above his head, another bullet from Blach flew into the wall of pipes. The third trooper came around from Miss Poole’s feet, stepping over his fallen companions. Chang turned and dove forward to Angelique. Blach stepped near Angelique’s head to give himself room to shoot. The Comte d’Orkancz stood at Angelique’s feet. Chang was boxed in—the trooper was right behind him. Chang wheeled and cut through a handful of hoses. The hideous, reeking gas, spitting out like a polar flame, flew into the trooper’s face. Chang wheeled, knocked the saber aside, and drove a fist into the fellow’s throat, stunning him where he stood. Before Blach could shoot, he bull-rushed the trooper around the head of the table directly at the Major. A shot crashed out and Chang felt the trooper lurch. Another shot and he felt a burn—the bullet (or was it bone?) blowing through the soldier to graze his shoulder. He shoved the dying man at Blach and immediately dove for the door.

But Blach had done the same thing and they faced each other directly, perhaps two feet apart. Blach swept the gun to bear, firing as Chang slashed at the Major’s hand. The shot went wide as the dagger bit into Blach’s fingers and the pistol fell to the floor. Blach cried out in a rage and leapt after it. The door was still blocked by the metal cart and the two helmeted men behind. Chang shoved with all his strength, driving them several steps—but they caught themselves and pushed back, stranding him within the chamber. Blach scooped up the pistol with his left hand. The Comte was urgently tying off the steaming hoses with rope. Blach raised the pistol. With a sudden shock Chang saw what the cart held, for the top of the metal casket had become dislodged in the commotion. Without a thought he dropped his dagger, seized the nearest object, and whipped it behind him at the Major, flinging himself into the cart as soon as the thing left his hand.

The glass book lanced toward Blach at the same time he pulled the trigger, shattering it in flight. Half of the shards sprayed back at the tower with the force of the bullet, into the iron walls and through the doorway at the two helmeted men, who threw themselves desperately aside. But half kept flying with the momentum of the book itself. The Comte d’Orkancz was shielded by the table, as Angelique—if in her present state the glass could even have had any effect upon her—was shielded by the hoses, and by the Major himself who stood most directly in the way. His unprotected face and body were instantly savaged by gashes small and large.

Chang raised his head from the cart to see the man shaking with spasms, his mouth open and a hideous hoarse croaking scream rising from his lungs like smoke from a catching fire. Patches of blue began to form around each laceration, spreading, cracking, flaking free. The rattle died in his throat with a puff of pink dust. Major Blach fell to his knees with a snapping crunch and then forward onto his face, the front of which shattered on impact like a plate of lapis-glazed terra cotta.

The great chamber was silent. The Comte rose slowly behind the table. His eyes fell upon Chang, clambering awkwardly free of the cart. The Comte screamed with an amplified rage that shook the entire cathedral. He rushed at Chang like a giant rabid bear. Without his dagger (it had fallen somewhere under the iron chest) Chang hurtled the cart—the two men were on their hands and knees, shaken but not in the Major’s straits, their leather aprons having saved them—and shoved the cart behind him into the Comte. Without looking to see its effect he raced to the stairs and began to climb.

Almost immediately, on the seventh step, he slipped on a smear of blood, fell, and looked back, his hand digging into his coat for his razor. The two aproned men were crouched low, still flinching away from the doorway that framed the Comte d’Orkancz, who had snatched up Blach’s pistol and was even then aiming it at Chang. Chang knew there was only one bullet left and that with two steps more he would be out of the Comte’s line of fire, but behind the Comte, on the table, Cardinal Chang’s gaze was fixed on Angelique’s glassy blue right arm…which had begun to move. Chang screamed. Angelique’s hand was flexing, groping. She caught a handful of the hoses and tore them from their seals, shooting blue steam. The Comte turned as she let go and wrenched another handful, pulling at them like weeds in a garden. As d’Orkancz dove for her hand, crying out for his assistants, Chang caught a hideous glimpse, over the large man’s shoulder, of Angelique’s face, eyes still covered by the partially dislodged mask, twisting with fury, her open mouth, tongue, and lips a glistening dark indigo, her blue-white teeth snapping like an animal. Chang ran up the stairs.

It was another turn before he saw the book he’d set against the wall in the pillowcase. Chang snatched it up as he ran, his right hand finally pulling the razor from his pocket. Below he heard a commotion of voices and a slamming door, and then the lurching clank of the dumbwaiter come again to life. In moments it had reached him—Chang’s energy was already beginning to flag—and then sped past. Whoever stood at the upper end would receive warning of his arrival well before Chang could climb. Was it only a matter of moments before he met Blenheim and his men coming down? Chang doggedly kept on. If he could just reach the gangway to Vandaariff’s office…

His thoughts were interrupted by the voice of d’Orkancz, echoing through the chamber to the assembled crowds above.

“Do not be alarmed! As you know yourselves, our enemies are many and desperate—dispatching this assassin to disrupt our work. But that work has not been stopped! Heaven itself could not forestall our efforts! Behold what has been done before your eyes! Behold the transformation!”

Chang paused on the stairs, despite himself, his mind seared with the image of Angelique’s face and arm. He looked behind him down the winding metal depths of the tower and heard outside it, like a rush of wind, a collected gasp of astonishment from the Comte’s audience in the cells.

“You see!” the Comte continued. “She lives! She walks! And you see yourselves…her extraordinary powers…”

The crowd gasped again—a hissing whisper punctuated by several screams—of fright or joy, he could not say. Another gasp. What was happening? Tears for Angelique were still hot on his face but Chang could not help it. He lurched to a viewing slot and pulled it aside. It was ridiculous to stay—his enemies would be gathering above him any minute—and yet he had to know…was she alive? Was she still human?

He could not see her—she must be too close to the base of the tower—but he could see d’Orkancz. The Comte was facing where Angelique must be, and had stepped back to the second table to stand next to another box of levers and stops. Each table had such a box attached to it by way of the black hoses, and Chang was just realizing on a visceral, sickening level that each of the other two women were about to be so transfigured. He looked down at the inert form on the third table and found his heart pricked by the image of Margaret Hooke, savage, wounded, and proud, writhing in agony as her flesh was boiled away to glass. Had she chosen such a fate, or had she merely given herself over to d’Orkancz out of desperate ambition—trusting, because of the first few crumbs of power he had shown her, that his final ends lay in her interest?

The crowd gasped again and Chang felt his knees give, grabbing at the rail to keep balance. His mind spun as sharply as if he’d been kicked in the head, then the moment of nausea passed and he felt himself moving—but it was movement of the mind, a swift restless rushing, as if in a dream, through different scenes—a room, a street, a bed, a crowded square, one after another. Then the momentum of thought eased, settling on one sharp instant: the Comte d’Orkancz in a doorway in his fur, his gloved hand extended and offering a shining rectangle of blue glass. Chang felt his own hand reach out to the Comte, even as he knew it fiercely gripped the iron rail, and saw it touch the glass—the small delicate fingers he knew so well—and felt the sudden rush of erotic power as he—as she—was swept into the memory held within, a rising, impossibly vivid stimulation, irresistible as opium and just as addictive, then quickly, cruelly withdrawn before he could grasp whose sweet memory it had been or even the circumstance. The Comte tucked the card back into his coat and smiled. This had been the villain’s introduction to Angelique, Chang knew, and Angelique was now, somehow, projecting her own experience of that intimate moment into the mind and body of every person within a hundred yards.

The image departed from his mind with another spasm of dizziness and he felt himself abruptly empty and cruelly, cruelly alone—her sudden presence in his mind had seemed a harsh intrusion, but once withdrawn there was a part of him that wanted more—for it was her, and he could feel it was her, Angelique, with whom he had so long desired this exact sort of impossible intimacy. Chang looked again down the twisting stairs, fighting an impulse to return, to fling himself away to an embrace of love and death. A part of his mind insisted that neither mattered, so long as it came from her.

“You feel the power for yourselves! You experience the truth!”

The Comte’s voice broke the spell. Chang shook his head and turned, climbing as quickly as he could. He could not make sense of all he felt—he could not decide what he must do—and so Cardinal Chang retreated, as he often did, into action alone, driving himself on until he found an object for his desolated rage, looking for mayhem to once more clarify his heart.

The rising, grating whine began again, escalating to the heights of the chamber. The Comte d’Orkancz had moved on to the next woman, Miss Poole, pulling the levers to begin her metamorphosis. The sound of screaming machinery was bolstered by cries from the gallery of cells, for now that they knew what they were going to see, the crowd was even more willing to voice encouragement and delight. But Chang was assailed by the image of the woman’s arched back, like a twig bent to its limit before snapping, and he ran from their approval as if he ran from hell itself.

He still had no idea where to find Svenson or Miss Temple, but if he was going to help them, he needed to remain free. The screaming of the pipes abruptly ceased, answered after a hanging moment of rapt attention by another eruption from the crowd. Once again the Comte crowed about power and transformation and the truth—each fatuous claim echoed by another bout of applause. Chang’s lips curled back with rage. The whining rise in the pipes resumed—d’Orkancz had moved on to Margaret Hooke. There was nothing Chang could do. He ascended two more turns of the stairs and saw the door to the gangway and Lord Vandaariff’s office.

Chang stood, breathing hard, and spat. The iron door was closed and did not move—barred from the other side. Chang was to be driven like a breathless stag to the top of the tower. For a final time the roar of the pipes dropped suddenly away and the crowd erupted with delight. All three of the women had undergone the Comte’s ferocious alchemy. They would be waiting for him at the top. He had not found Celeste. He had lost Angelique. He had failed. Chang tucked the razor back into his coat and resumed his climb.

The upper entrance was fashioned from the same steel plates, held together with the heavy rivets of a train car. The massive door swung silently to reveal an elegant bright hallway, the walls white and the floor gleaming pale marble. Some twenty feet away stood a shapely woman in a dark dress, her hair tied back with ribbon and her face obscured by a half-mask of black feathers. She nodded to him, formally. The line of ten red-coated Dragoons behind her, sabers drawn and clearly under command, did not move.

Chang stepped from the turret onto the marble floor, glancing down. The tiles were marked by a wide stain of blood—quite obviously pooled from some violent wound and then smeared by something (the victim, he assumed) dragged through it. The path led straight beneath the woman’s feet. He met her eyes. Her expression was open and clear, though she did not smile. Chang was relieved—he had not realized how sick he’d become of his enemies’ sneering confidence—but perhaps her demeanor had less to do with him than with the bloody floor.

“Cardinal Chang,” she said. “If you will come with me.”

Chang pulled the glass book from the pillowcase. He could feel its energy push at him through the tip of each gloved finger, an antagonistic magnetism. He clutched it more firmly and held it out for her to see.

“You know what this is,” he said, his voice still hoarse and ragged. “I am not afraid to smash it.”

“I’m sure you are not,” she said. “I understand you are afraid of very little. But nothing will be settled here. I do not criticize to say you truly do not know all that has happened, or hangs in the balance. I’m sure there are many of whom you want to hear, as I know there are many who would like to see you. Is it not better to avoid what violence we can?”

The bright blood-smeared marble beneath the woman’s feet seemed the perfect image for this hateful place, and it was all Chang could do not to snarl at her gracious tone.

“What is your name?” Chang asked.

“I am of no importance, I assure you,” she said. “Merely a messenger—”

A harsh catch in Chang’s throat stopped her words. His brief sharp vision of Angelique—the unnatural color of her skin, its glassy, gleaming indigo depths and brighter transparent cerulean surface—was seared into Chang’s memory but its suddenly overwhelming impact was beyond his ability to translate to sense, to mere words. He swallowed, grimacing with discomfort, and spat again, diving into anger to override his tears. He gestured with his right hand, the fingers clutching with fury at the thought of such an abomination undertaken for the entertainment of so many—so many respectable—spectators.

“I have seen this great work,” he hissed. “Nothing you can say will sway my purpose.”

In answer, the woman stepped aside and indicated with her hand that he might follow along. At her movement the line of Dragoons split and snapped crisply into place to either side, forming a gauntlet for him to pass through. Some ten yards beyond them Chang saw a second line dividing itself with the same clean stamping of boots to frame an open archway leading deeper into the house.

Behind in the turret he heard a muted roar—the crowd in the cells crying out—but before he could even begin to wonder why, Chang’s knees buckled with the sudden visceral impact of another vision thrust into his mind. To his everlasting shame, he was presented with himself, stick in hand, his appearance fine as he could make it—a threadbare vanity, with an expression of poorly veiled hunger, reaching to take the small hand extended to him—extended, he now knew (and now felt), with disinterest and disdain. He saw himself for one flashing, impossibly sharp moment through the eyes and heart of Angelique, and stood revealed within her mind as a regretted relic of a former life that she had at all times loathed with every fiber of her being.

The vision snapped away from him and he staggered. He looked up to see each of the Dragoons gathering themselves, blinking and regaining their military bearing, just as he saw the woman shake her head. She looked at him with pity, but did not alter her guarded expression. She repeated her gesture for Chang to join her.

“It would be best, Cardinal Chang,” she said, “that we move out of range.”

They had walked in silence, Dragoons in line ahead of them and behind, Chang’s pounding heart yet to shake free of the bitter impact of Angelique’s vision, his sweetest memories now stained with regret, until he saw the woman glance down at the book in his hand. He said nothing. Chang was caught between fury and despair, physically ruined, his mind drifting deeper into acrid fatalism with each step. He could not look at a soldier, the woman—or at any of the curious well-fed faces from the household that peered at him past the Dragoons as they walked by—without rehearsing in his thoughts the swiftest and most savage angle of attack with his razor.

“May I ask where you acquired that?” the woman asked, still looking at the book.

“In a room,” snapped Chang. “It had transfixed the lady it had been given to. When I came upon her she was quite unaware of the soldier in the process of her rape.”

He spoke in as sharp a tone as he could. The woman in the black feather mask did not flinch.

“May I ask what you did?”

“Apart from taking the book?” Chang asked. “It’s so long ago I can barely recall—you don’t mean to say you care?”

“Is that so strange?”

Chang stopped, his voice rising to an unaccustomed harshness. “From what I have seen, Madame, it is impossible!”

At his tone the Dragoons stopped, their boots stamping in unison on the marble floor, blades ready. The woman raised her hand to them, indicating patience.

“Of course, it must be very upsetting. I understand the Comte’s work is difficult—both to imagine and to bear. I have undergone the Process, of course, but that is nothing compared to what…what you must have seen…in the tower.”

Her face was entirely reasonable, even sympathetic—Chang could not bear it. He gestured angrily behind them to the blood-stained floor.

“And what happened there? What difficult piece of work? Another execution?”

“Your own hands, Cardinal, are quite covered with blood—are you in any place to speak?”

Chang looked down despite himself—from Mr. Gray to the troopers down below, he was fairly spattered with gore—but met her gaze with harsh defiance. None of them mattered. They were dupes, fools, animals in harness…perhaps exactly like himself.

“I cannot tell you what happened here,” she went on. “I was elsewhere in the house. But surely it can only reinforce, for us both, how serious these matters are.”

His lips curled into a sneer.

“If you will continue,” she said, “for we are quite delayed…”

“Continue where?” asked Chang.

“To where you shall answer your questions, of course.”

Chang did not move, as if staying would somehow put off the confirmation of the deaths of Miss Temple and the Doctor. The soldiers were staring at him. The woman looked directly into his dark lenses and leaned forward, her nostrils flaring at the indigo stench but her expression unwavering. He saw the clarity in her eyes that spoke to the Process, but none of the pride or the arrogance. As he was closer to the heart of the Cabal, had he here met a more advanced and trusted minion?

“We must go,” she whispered. “You are not the center of this business.”

Before Chang could respond they were interrupted by a loud shout from the corridor ahead of them, a harsh voice he knew at once.

“Mrs. Stearne! Mrs. Stearne!” shouted Colonel Aspiche. “Where is Mr. Blenheim—he is wanted this instant!”

The woman turned to the voice as the line of Dragoons broke apart to make way for their officer, approaching with another squad of his men behind him. Chang saw that Aspiche was limping. When Aspiche saw him, the Colonel’s eyes narrowed and his lips tightened—and he then pointedly fixed his gaze on the woman.

“My dear Colonel—” she began, but he bluntly overrode her.

“Where is Mr. Blenheim? He is wanted some time ago—the delay cannot be borne!”

“I do not know. I was sent to collect—”

“I am well aware of it,” snarled Aspiche, cutting her off, as if to expunge his previous employment of Chang he would not even allow the speaking of his name. “But you have taken so long I am asked to collect you as well.” He turned to the men who had come with him, pointing to side rooms, barking orders. “Three to each wing—quickly as you can—send back at once with any word. He must be found—go!”

The men dashed off. Aspiche avoided looking at Chang and stepped to the woman’s other side, offering her his arm—though Chang half-thought this was to help his limp, rather than the lady. He wondered what had happened to the Colonel’s leg and felt a little better for doing so.

“Is there a reason he is not in chains, or dead?” asked the Colonel, as politely as he could through his anger at having to ask at all.

“I was not so instructed,” answered Mrs. Stearne—who, Chang realized as he studied her, could not be older than thirty.

“He is uniquely dangerous and unscrupulous.”

“So I have been assured. And yet”—and here she turned to Chang with a curiously blank face—“he truly has no choice. The only help for Cardinal Chang—whether it merely be to soothe his soul—is information. We are taking him to it. Besides, I have no wish to lose a book in an unnecessary struggle—and the Cardinal holds one.”

“Information, eh?” sneered Aspiche, looking around the woman at Chang. “About what? His whore? About that idiot Svenson? About—”

“Do be quiet, Colonel,” she hissed, fully out of patience.

Chang was gratified, and not a little surprised, to see Aspiche pull his head back and snort with peevishness. And stop talking.

The ballroom was near. It only made sense to use it for another such gathering—perhaps already the crowds from the great chamber were convening too, along with those from the theatre at the end of the spiral staircase. Chang suddenly wondered with a sinking heart, not having found her in the great chamber, if this theatre was where Miss Temple had been taken. Had he walked right past her, just close enough and in time to hear the applause at her destruction?

With Aspiche in tow, their pace had slowed. The stamping bootsteps of the Dragoons made it difficult to hear any other movement in the house, and he wondered if his own execution or forced conversion was to be the main source of entertainment. He would smash the book over his own head before he allowed that to happen. To all appearances it seemed a quick enough end, and one equally horrible to watch as to experience. It would be something to at least, in his last moments, unsettle his executioners’ stomachs.

He realized that Mrs. Stearne was looking at him. He cocked his head in a mocking invitation for her to speak…but she was, for the first time, hesitant to do so.

“I would…if I may, I would be grateful—for as I say, I was elsewhere occupied—if, with the Comte…if you could tell me what you saw…down below.”

It was all Chang could do not to slap the woman’s face.

“What I saw?”

“I ask because I do not know. Mrs. Marchmoor and Miss Poole—I knew them—I know that they have undergone—that the Comte’s great work—”

“Did they go to him willingly?” demanded Chang.

“Oh yes,” Mrs. Stearne replied.

“Why not you?”

She hesitated just a moment, looking into his veiled eyes.

“I…I must…my own responsibilities for the evening—”

She was interrupted by a peremptory snort from Aspiche, a clear admonishment at this topic of conversation—or indeed, conversation with Chang at all.

“Instead of you, it was Angelique.”

“Yes.”

“Because she was willing?”

Mrs. Stearne turned to Aspiche before he could snort again and snapped, “Colonel, do be quiet!” She looked back at Chang. “I will go in my turn. But you must know from Doctor Svenson—yes, I know who he is, as I know Celeste Temple—what happened to that woman at the Institute. Indeed, I am led to understand that you yourself were there, even perhaps responsible—I do not mean intentionally,” she said quickly as Chang opened his mouth to speak, “but only that you well know that her state was grave. In the Comte’s mind this was her only chance.”

“Chance for what? You have not seen what—what—the thing she has become!”

“Truly, I have not—”

“Then you should not speak of it,” cried Chang.

Aspiche chuckled.

“Does something amuse you, Colonel?” snarled Chang.

“You amuse me, Cardinal. A moment.”

Aspiche stopped walking and pulled his arm from Mrs. Stearne. He reached into his scarlet coat and removed one of his thin black cheroots and a box of matches. He bit off the tip of the cheroot and spat. He looked up to Chang with a vicious grin and stuck the cheroot into his mouth, fiddling with the matches for a light.

“You see, I was introduced to you as a man of unfettered depravity—a figure without scruple or conscience, ready to hunt and kill for a fee. And yet, what do I find—in your final hours, with your life boiled down to its essence? A man in shackles to a whore who thinks as little of him as she does yesterday’s breakfast, and working in league—the lone wolf of the riverside!—with an idiot surgeon and an even more idiotic girl—or should I say spinster? She is what—twenty and five?—and the only man who’d have her has come to his senses and thrown her aside like a spent nag!”

“They’re alive then?” Chang asked.

“Oh…I did not say that.” Aspiche chuckled, shaking out the match.

The Colonel inhaled through the cheroot’s glowing tip and sent a thin stream of smoke out of the side of his mouth. He offered his arm again to Mrs. Stearne, but Chang made no move to continue.

“You will know, Colonel, that I have just come from killing Major Blach and three of his men—or perhaps five, there was no time to be sure. It would give me as much pleasure to do the same to you.”

Aspiche scoffed and blew more smoke.

“Do you know, Mrs. Stearne,” Chang pitched his voice loud enough that every Dragoon would hear him clearly, “how I was first introduced to the Colonel? I will tell you—”

Aspiche growled and reached for his saber. Chang raised the book high over his head. The two lines of Dragoons all raised their blades in readiness to attack. Mrs. Stearne, her eyes at once quite wide, stepped between them all.

“Colonel—Cardinal—this must not happen—”

Chang ignored her, glaring into Aspiche’s hate-filled eyes, hissing with relish. “I met the Colonel-Adjutant when he hired me—to execute—to assassinate—his commanding officer, Colonel Arthur Trapping of the 4th Dragoons.”

The words were met with silence, but their impact on the surrounding soldiers was palpable as a slap. Mrs. Stearne’s eyes were wide—she had known Trapping as well. She turned to Aspiche, speaking hesitantly.

“Colonel Trapping…”

“Preposterous! What else will you say to divide me from my men?” cried Aspiche, in what, Chang had to admit, was a very credible impression of impugned honor—though Aspiche, being such a blind egotist, had probably already convinced himself that the contract for murder had never occurred. “You are a well-known lying, murdering rogue—”

“Who did kill him, Colonel?” taunted Chang. “Have you found that out? How long will you survive before they do it to you? How much time will the sale of your honor purchase? Did they ask you to attend when they sunk his body in the river?”

With a cry, Aspiche drew his saber in a wide scything arc but then, partially unsteadied by his rage, put his weight on his weak leg and just for a moment tottered. Chang shoved Mrs. Stearne to the side and snapped his right fist into Aspiche’s throat. The Colonel staggered back, hand at his collar, choking, his face red. Chang immediately stepped away, close to Mrs. Stearne, raising his arms in peace. Mrs. Stearne at once shouted to the Dragoons, who were clearly an instant away from running Chang through.

“Stop! Stop it—stop it—all of you!”

The Dragoons hesitated, still poised to attack. She wheeled to Chang and Aspiche.

“Cardinal—you will be silent! Colonel Aspiche—you will behave like a proper escort! We will continue at once. If there is any more nonsense, I will not be responsible for what happens to any of you!”

Chang nodded to her and took another careful step away from the Colonel. He had grown so accustomed to Mrs. Stearne’s calm manner that her genuine authority had surprised him. It was as if she had somehow invoked it from within, like something learned, like a soldier’s automatic response from training—only this was emotion, a force of character that allowed a woman who knew nothing of command to assert control over twenty hardened soldiers—and in the direct place of their officer. Once more, the true impact of the Process left Chang amazed and unsettled.

They continued in silence, turning into another back corridor, skirting the kitchens. Chang looked through every open door or archway they passed, searching for any sign of Svenson or Miss Temple, or any hope of escape. The momentary pleasure at baiting Aspiche had gone, and his mind was once more plagued with doubt. If he could smash the book in the direction of one line of soldiers and then dash through the gap it created, he knew he had a chance—but it was useless if he didn’t know where he was going. A blind rush was likely to lead straight into another band of soldiers or a malevolent crowd of adherents. He’d be cut to pieces without a qualm.

Chang turned at the sound of running steps behind them. It was one of the Dragoons Aspiche had sent to find Blenheim. The trooper made his way through the rear line of soldiers and saluted the Colonel, reporting that Blenheim was still missing, and that the other groups were fanning out through the interior rooms. Aspiche nodded curtly.

“Where is Captain Smythe?”

The trooper had no answer.

“Find him!” snapped Aspiche, as if he had asked for Smythe in the first place, and the trooper was impossibly stupid. “He should be outside—arranging the sentries—bring him to me at once!”

The Dragoon saluted again and dashed off. Aspiche said nothing more and they continued on.

More than once they were forced to wait while a group of guests crossed their corridor, moving on a different path toward—he assumed—the ballroom. The guests were formally dressed and masked, usually all smiles and eagerness—much like the two men he’d overheard in the drawing room earlier, and they tended to stare at the soldiers and the three in their midst—Chang, Aspiche, and Mrs. Stearne—as if they made some strange allegorical puzzle to be read: the soldier, the lady, the demon. He made a point of leering wickedly at anyone who looked for too long, but with each such meeting Chang felt more his isolation, and saw the extreme degree of his presumption to come to Harschmort at all…and the imminence of his doom.

They walked for perhaps another forty yards before they approached a short figure in a heavy cloak and dark spectacles, with an odd sort of bandolier slung across his chest from which hung perhaps two dozen metal flasks. He held up his hand for them to stop. Aspiche shook himself free of Mrs. Stearne and limped forward, speaking low, but not low enough that Chang could not hear.

“Doctor Lorenz!” the Colonel whispered. “Is something amiss?”

Doctor Lorenz did not share the Colonel’s need for discretion. He spoke in a needle-sharp tone directed equally to Aspiche and the woman.

“I require some number of your men. Six will do, I am sure. There is not a minute to spare.”

“Require?” snapped Aspiche. “Why should you require my men?”

“Because something has happened to the fellows detailed to help me,” barked Lorenz. “Surely that is not too much to grasp!”

Lorenz gestured behind him to an open doorway. Chang noticed for the first time a bloody handprint on the wooden frame, and a split in the wood clearly ripped by a bullet.

Aspiche turned and with a finger snap detailed six men from the first line, limping with them through the doorway. Lorenz looked after them but did not follow, one hand idly tapping one of the dangling flasks. His attention wandered to Chang and Mrs. Stearne, and then pointedly settled on the book under Chang’s arm. Doctor Lorenz licked his lips.

“Do you know which one that is?” The question was put to Mrs. Stearne but his gaze did not shift from the glass book.

“I do not. The Cardinal tells me he took it from a lady.”

“Ah,” replied Lorenz. He thought for a moment. “Beaded mask?”

Chang did not answer. Lorenz licked his lips again, nodded to himself.

“Must have had. Lady Mélantes. And Lord Acton. And Captain Hazelhorst. And I believe, actually, originally Mrs. Marchmoor herself. If I recall correctly. Rather an important volume.”

Mrs. Stearne did not reply, which was, Chang knew, her way of saying she was well aware of its importance and not in need of Doctor Lorenz to apprise her.

A moment later Aspiche appeared at the head of his men, all six of them carrying an apparently very heavy stretcher, covered by a sheet of canvas that had been sewn to the frame, sealing in whoever was beneath it.

“Excellent,” announced Lorenz. “My thanks to you. This way…” He indicated a door on the opposite side of the hall to the stretcher-bearers.

“You’re not joining us?” asked Aspiche.

“There is no time,” replied Lorenz. “I’ve lost precious minutes as it is—if the thing’s to be done at all it must be done at once—our supply of ice has been exhausted! Please do offer my respects to all. Madame.” He nodded to Mrs. Stearne and followed the soldiers out.

They walked on to the end of the corridor and stopped again, Aspiche sending a man forward to confirm they were clear to continue. As they waited, Chang shifted his grip on the book. The line of Dragoons in front had diminished now from ten to four. An accurate throw of the book could incapacitate them all and open the way…but the way to where? He studied the backs of the soldiers walking in front of him and pictured how the book might shatter…and then could not but think of Reeves, and of his delicate alliance with Captain Smythe. What had the Dragoons done to him? How could he face Smythe after slaughtering any of his men in such a foul manner? If there was no other way, he would not hesitate…but if there was truly no way out, why should he bother with the Dragoons at all? He would keep the book—either as a way to kill what main figures in the Cabal that he could—Rosamonde or the Comte—or use it to bargain, if not for his own life then Svenson’s or Celeste’s. He had to hope they were alive.

He swallowed with a grimace and saw Mrs. Stearne’s eyes on him. Whether it had been intentional or not, their deliberate passage from the turret had taken long enough that the fire of his rage had faded, leaving his body to bear the full weight of exhaustion and sorrow. He felt something on his lip and wiped it with his glove—a smear of bright blood. He looked back at Mrs. Stearne, but her expression betrayed no feeling at all.

“You see I have very little left to lose,” he said.

“Everyone always thinks that,” commented Colonel Aspiche, “until that little bit is taken away—and feels like the whole of the world.”

Chang said nothing, resenting bitterly the slightest glimmer of actual insight coming from the Colonel.

The Dragoon reappeared in the doorway, clicking his heels and saluting Aspiche.

“Begging your pardon, Sir, but they’re ready.”

Aspiche dropped the cheroot to the floor and ground it with his heel. He limped forward to enter the ballroom at the head of his men. Mrs. Stearne watched Chang very closely as they followed, and had quite subtly drifted beyond the immediate reach of his arms.

When they entered the ballroom, there were so many people gathered that Chang could not see through the throng as their path was opened by the wedge of Dragoons, spectators retreating like a whispering tide of elegance. They made their way to the center, when at a crisp bark from Aspiche, the Colonel and his Dragoons expanded the open area, marching some six paces in each direction, driving the crowd farther back, before wheeling to face Cardinal Chang and Mrs. Stearne, alone in the open circle.

Mrs. Stearne took a deliberate step forward and curtseyed deeply, dropping her head as if she faced royalty. Before them all, standing like a row of monarchs on a raised dais, were the uncrowned heads of the Cabal: the Contessa di Lacquer-Sforza, Deputy Minister Harald Crabbé, and, his arm satisfyingly swathed with bandages, Francis Xonck. To their side was the Prince, with Herr Flaüss, masked and apparently having regained the power to stand, to his left and to his right, clinging smilingly to his arm, a slim blonde woman in white robes and a white feather mask.

“Very well managed, Caroline,” said the Contessa, returning the curtsey with a nod. “You may go on with your duties.”

Mrs. Stearne stood again and looked once more at Cardinal Chang before walking quickly away through the crowd. He stood alone before his judges.

“Cardinal Chang—” began the Contessa.

Cardinal Chang cleared his throat and spat, the scarlet mass flying perhaps half the distance to the dais. An outraged whisper ran throughout the crowd. Chang saw the Dragoons nervously glancing at one another as the guests behind them inched forward.

“Contessa,” said Chang, returning her greeting, his voice now unpleasantly hoarse. His gaze fell across the rest of the dais. “Minister…Mr. Xonck…Highness…”

“We require that book,” stated Crabbé. “Place it on the floor and walk away from it.”

“And then what?” sneered Chang.

“Then you will be killed,” answered Xonck. “But killed kindly.”

“And if I do not?”

“Then what you have already seen,” said the Contessa, “will be a trivial prologue to your pain.”

Chang looked at the crowd around him, and the Dragoons—still no sign of Smythe, Svenson, or Celeste. He was acutely aware of the luxurious fittings of the ballroom—the crystal fixtures, the gleaming floor, the walls of mirror and glass—and the finery of the masked spectators, all in contrast to his own filthy appearance. He knew that for these people the state of his garments and his body were definitive indicators of his inferior caste. It was also what pained him about Angelique—in this place as much a piece of chattel as he, as much a specimen of livestock. Why else had she been first to undergo the hideous transformation—why had she been taken to the Institute to begin with? Because it did not matter if she died. And yet she could not see their contempt—just as she could not see him (but this was wrong, for of course she did—she merely rejected what she saw), nor beyond her own desperate ambition to the truth of how she had been used. But then Chang recalled the great figures of the city he’d found, one after another, slumped over the glass books in the string of private rooms, and Robert Vandaariff, now a parchment-scratching automaton. The contempt of the Cabal was not limited to those of lower birth or insufficient station.

He had to admit a certain equity of abuse.

Yet Chang sneered at the expressions of disdain and fury that pressed at him through the ring of uncertain Dragoons. Each guest had been offered the chance to lick the Cabal’s boots, and now they clamored for the privilege. Who were these people to so easily blind so many?

He thought bitterly that half of the Cabal’s work was done for it already—the fevered ambition that ran through their adherents had always lurked in the shadows of those lives, hungrily awaiting the chance to come forward. That the chance was only as honest as a baited hook never occurred to anyone—they were too busy congratulating themselves on swallowing it.

He held the gleaming glass book in front of him for all to see. For some reason the act of raising his arm exerted pressure on his seething lungs and Cardinal Chang erupted into a fit of agonized coughing. He spat again and wiped his bloody mouth.

“You will make us clean the floor,” observed the Contessa.

“I suppose it’s inconvenient of me not to have died at the Ministry,” Chang hoarsely replied.

“Terribly so, but you’ve established yourself as quite a worthy opponent, Cardinal.” She smiled at Chang. “Would you not agree, Mr. Xonck?” she called, and at least Chang knew she was mocking Xonck’s injury.

“Indeed! The Cardinal illustrates the difficult task that is before us all—the determined struggle we must prepare ourselves to undergo,” answered Francis Xonck, his voice pitched to reach the far corners of the room. “The vision we embrace will be resisted with all the tenacity of the man you see before you. Do not underestimate him—nor underestimate your own unique qualities of wisdom and courage.”

Chang scoffed at this blatant flattery of the crowd, and wondered why it was Crabbé in politics making speeches and not the unctuously eloquent Xonck. He recalled the prostrate form of Henry Xonck—it might not be long before Francis Xonck was more powerful than five Harald Crabbés put together. Crabbé must have sensed this, for he stepped forward, also addressing the whole of the audience.

“Such a man has even this night committed murders—too many to name!—in his quest to destroy our mission. He has killed our soldiers, he has defiled our women—like a savage he has broken into our Ministry and this very house! And why?”

“Because you’re a lying, syphilitic—”

“Because,” Crabbé shouted down Chang’s hoarse voice easily, “we offer a vision that will break the stranglehold this man—and his hidden masters—have over you all, to keep you at bay, offering scraps while they profit from your labor and your worth! We say all this must end—and their bloody man has come to kill us! You see it for yourselves!”

The crowd erupted into a chorus of angry cries, and once more Chang felt he had no real understanding of human beings at all. To him, Crabbé’s words were every bit as idiotic and servile as Xonck’s, every bit as fawning and conjured, patently so. And yet his listeners bayed like hounds for Chang’s blood. The Dragoons were losing ground as the crowd pressed nearer. He saw Aspiche, shoved from behind, looking nervously up to the dais—and then to Chang, self-righteously glaring as if this was all his fault.

“Dear friends…please! Please—a moment!” Xonck was smiling, raising his good hand, calling over the noise. The cries fell away at once. The control was astonishing. Chang doubted that these people had even undergone the Process—how could there have been time? But he could scarce understand such a uniform response from an untrained (or un-German) collection of individuals.

“Dear friends,” Xonck said again, “do not worry—this man shall pay…and pay directly.” He looked at Chang with an eager smile. “We must merely determine the means.”

“Put down the book, Cardinal,” repeated the Contessa.

“If anyone moves toward me I will smash it across your beautiful face.”

“Will you indeed?”

“It would give me pleasure.”

“So petty, Cardinal—it makes me think less of you.”

“Well then, I do apologize. If it helps at all, I would choose to kill you not because you have surely killed me already with the glass in my lungs, but because you are truly my most deadly foe. The Prince is an idiot, Xonck I’ve already beaten, and Deputy Minister Crabbé is a coward.”

“How very bold you are,” she replied, unable to prevent the slightest smile. “What of the Comte d’Orkancz?”

“He works his art, but you determine that art’s path—he is finally your creature. You even weave your plots against your fellows—do any of them know the work assigned to Mr. Gray?”

“Mr….who?” The Contessa’s smile was suddenly fixed.

“Oh, come now—why be shy? Mr. Gray. From the Institute—he was with you in the Ministry—when Herr Flaüss was given the gift of the Process.” He nodded to the portly Macklenburger who, despite the doubting look on his face, nodded back. Before the Contessa could reply Chang called out again. “Mr. Gray’s work was assigned by you, I assume. Why else would I have found him in the depths of the prison tunnels, tampering with the Comte’s furnaces? I have no idea whether he did what you wanted him to do or not. I killed him before we had a chance to exchange our news.”

He had to give her credit. The words were not two seconds from his mouth before she turned to Crabbé and Xonck with a deadly serious hiss, barely audible beyond the dais.

“Did you know about this? Did you send Gray on some errand?”

“Of course not,” whispered Crabbé, “Gray answered to you—”

“Was it the Comte?” she hissed again, even more angrily.

“Gray answered to you,” repeated Xonck, his mind clearly working behind his measured tone.

“Then why was he in the tunnels?” asked the Contessa.

“I’m sure he was not,” said Xonck. “I’m sure the Cardinal is lying.”

They turned to him. Before she could open her mouth Chang pulled his hand from his coat pocket.

“I believe this is his key,” Chang called out, and he tossed the heavy metal key to clatter on the floor in front of the dais.

Of course, the key could have been anyone’s—and he doubted any of them knew Gray’s enough to recognize it—but the palpable artifact had the desired effect of seeming to prove his words. He smiled with a grim pleasure, finally feeling a welcoming coldness enter his heart with this final charade of baiting conversation—for Chang knew there was little more dangerous than a man beyond care, and welcomed the chance to sow what dissension he could in these final, doomed moments. The figures on the dais were silent, as was the crowd—though he was sure the crowd lacked the barest idea of what this might mean, seeing only that its leaders were unpleasantly at a loss.

“What was he doing there—” began Crabbé.

“Open the doors!” shouted the Contessa, glaring at Chang but raising her voice so it cut like a razor to the rear of the room. Behind him Chang heard the sound of bolts being drawn. At once the crowd began to whisper, looking back and then shifting away. Someone else was entering the ballroom. Chang glanced at the dais—they all seemed as fixed on the new entry as the crowd—and then back, as the whispering became punctuated by gasps and even cries of alarm.

The crowd made way at last, clearing the floor between Cardinal Chang and, walking slowly toward him, the Comte d’Orkancz. In his left hand was a black leather leash, attached by a metal clasp to the leather collar around the neck of the woman who walked behind him. Despite everything, the breath clutched in Chang’s throat.

She was naked, her hair still hanging black in lustrous curls, walking pace by deliberate pace behind d’Orkancz, her eyes roving across the room without seeming to fix on any one thing in particular, as if she were seeing it all for the very first time. She moved slowly, but without modesty, as natural as an animal, each footfall carefully placed, feeling the floor deliberately as she looked at their faces. Her body was gleaming blue, shimmering from its indigo depths, its surface slick as water, pliant but still somehow stiff as she walked, giving Chang the impression that each movement required her conscious thought and preparation. She was beautiful and unearthly—Chang could not look away—the weight of her breasts, the perfect proportion of her ribs and her hips, the luscious sweep of her legs. He saw that, apart from her head, there was now no hair on Angelique’s face or body—the lack of eyebrows somehow opening the expression on her face like a blankly beatific medieval Madonna’s, at the same time her bare sex was both impossibly innocent and lewd.

Only the whites of her eyes were bright. Her eyes settled on Chang.

The Comte flicked her leash and Angelique drifted forward. The ballroom was silent. Chang could hear the click of each footfall on the polished wood. He wrenched his eyes to d’Orkancz and saw cold hatred. He looked to the dais: shock on the faces of Crabbé and Xonck, but the Contessa, however troubled, looking at her companions, as if to gauge the success of this distraction. Chang looked back at Angelique. He could not stop himself. She stepped closer…and he heard her speak.

“Car-din-al Chang,” she said, enunciating each syllable as carefully as ever…but her voice was different, smaller, more intense—as if half of what had made it had been boiled away.

Her lips were not moving—could they move?—and he realized with a shock that her words were in his head alone.

“Angelique…” His voice was a whisper.

“It is finished, Cardinal,…you know it is…look at me.”

He tried to do anything else. He could not. She came nearer and nearer.

“Poor Cardinal…you desired me so very much…I desired so very much also…do you remember?”

The words in his mind expanded, like Chinese paper balls in water, blooming out into bright flowers, until he felt her presence overwhelm him and her projected thoughts take the place of his own senses.

He was no longer in the room.

They stood together at the river bank, gazing into the grey water at twilight. Had they ever done such a thing? They had, he knew, once—once they had by chance met in the street and she allowed him to walk her back to the brothel. He remembered the day vividly even as he experienced it again through her own projected memory. He was speaking to her—the words meaningless—he had wanted to say anything to reach her, relating the history of the houses they passed, of his daring experiences, of the true life of the river bank. She’d barely said a word. At the time he had wondered if it was a matter of language—her accent was still strong—but now, crushingly, with her thoughts in his mind, he knew that she had merely chosen not to speak, and that the entire episode had nothing to do with him at all. She had only agreed to walk with him—had deliberately gone to him in the street—so as to avoid another jealous client who had followed her all the way from Circus Garden. She had barely heard Chang’s words, smiling politely and nodding at his foolish stories and wanting solely to be done with it…until they had paused for a moment at the quayside, looking down at the water. Chang had fallen silent, and then spoken quietly of the river’s passage to an endless sea—observing that even they in their squalid lives, by being in that place, for that time, could truly situate themselves at the border of mystery.

For that image of possible escape, that unintended echo of her own vast imagined life, so far removed…she had been surprised. She had remembered that moment, and offered him, here at the end, that much thanks.

Cardinal Chang blinked. He looked at the floor. He was on his hands and knees, bloody saliva hanging from his mouth. Colonel Aspiche loomed above him, the glass book cradled in his hands. Angelique stood with the Comte d’Orkancz, her gaze wandering with neither curiosity nor interest. The Comte nodded to the dais and Chang forced himself to turn. Near the dais the crowd parted again…for Mrs. Stearne. She entered leading by the hand a small woman in a white silk robe. Chang shook his head—he could not think—the woman in white…he knew her…he blinked again and wiped his mouth, swallowing painfully. The robe was sheer, clinging tightly to her body…her feet were bare…a mask of white feathers…hair the color of chestnuts, in sausage curls to either side of her head. With an effort Chang rose up on his knees.

He opened his mouth to speak as Mrs. Stearne reached behind her and pulled the feathered mask from Miss Temple’s face. The scars of the Process were vivid around each grey eye, and burned in a line across the bridge of her nose.

Chang tried to say her name. His mouth would not work.

Colonel Aspiche moved behind him. The force of the blow so spun the room that Chang wondered, in his last moment before darkness, whether his head had been cut off.