Glass Books of the Dream Eaters

by Gordon Dahlquist

  Chang smiled again. The coal dust absorbed the light and made him nearly invisible. The men were speaking low to each other. He couldn’t hear them. It didn’t matter. Three were Dragoons, in brass helmets that caught the torchlight, but the one in front was from the household, his head bare, his coat flapping about his knees. The soldiers had torches in one hand and sabers in the other. The man held a torch and a carbine. He planted the torch in the sandy ground and inspected the trap, looking for blood. The man stood up, collected his torch, and quite deliberately scanned the pasture around him. Chang slowly lowered himself—there was no point botching it now—and waited, following the man’s thoughts as clearly as if he saw into his mind. The man knew he was being watched, but had no idea from where. Chang was abstractly sympathetic, but whoever’s idea the traps actually were, this was obviously the man who had set them. While Chang was a killer, he did not admire those whose traffic was agony. He made a point of fixing the man’s face—a wide jaw with grizzled side whiskers and a balding pate—in his mind. Perhaps they would meet indoors.

  After another minute, when it became clear that they were not willing to blunder around searching amongst the unsprung traps, they retreated to the house. Chang let them go, and then very cautiously followed in the safe pathway of their steps, crouching low. At the edge of the grass and the end of his cover, he waited—for all he knew they were watching from a darkened window. He was facing the same side wing, but could not place the window he’d broken through only two nights before. It had already been reglazed. Chang smiled wickedly, and felt around him for a stone. With Mrs. Marchmoor having arrived before him, the only way he was going to get inside was by creating a bit of fuss.

  He rolled to one knee and threw—it was a lovely, smooth stone, and sailed very well—as hard as he could at the window to the right of the doorway where the men had emerged, which shattered with a gratifying crash. Chang ran toward the house, vaulting a border of flower beds, to the left of the door, reaching the wall as he heard cries within and saw answering light flooding out from the broken window. The door opened. He pressed himself flat. An arm appeared holding a torch, and just after it the man with the grizzled whiskers. The torch was between his face and Chang, and the man’s attention—naturally—was toward the broken window, in the other direction.

  Chang snatched the torch from his astonished grasp and kicked him soundly in the ribs. The man went down with a grunt. Behind, through the door, Chang saw a crowd of Dragoons. He thrust the torch in their faces, driving them back until the handle of the door was in reach. Before they could react he threw the torch into the room, against what he hoped was drapery. He slammed the door shut, turned to the grizzled man, who was rising, and slashed the stick against his head. The man cried out, with shock at the impropriety as much as pain, and raised his arms to block another blow. This allowed Chang to kick him again in the ribs, and shoulder him aside, knocking him off balance and down with another squawk of outrage. Chang bolted past him along the wall. With luck the Dragoons would prevent the house from catching fire before giving chase.

  He rounded the corner and kept running. Harschmort was a kind of nearly closed horseshoe, and he was on the far right end. In the center was the garden, and he quickly raced for the depths of its ornamental trees and hedges, putting as much distance as he could between himself and any pursuers. During the day, he was sure the garden gave the impression of being rigid and arid, nature subdued to the strictures of geometry. Now, in his headlong rush to escape, it seemed to Chang a murky labyrinth fabricated solely to provoke collision, as benches, fountains, hedges, and pedestals loomed abruptly up at him through the fog and the night. But if he could elude pursuit here they would be forced to re-group and look for him everywhere, which would mean fewer enemies in any single place—it would give him a chance. He stopped in the shadow of boxed shrubbery, pain rising damnably in his lungs like an undeterred creditor. There were bootsteps somewhere behind. He drove himself forward, keeping low, making a point to tread on the grass paths instead of the gravel. It occurred to him that he was even then moving across the great submerged chamber. Could there be any entrance left through the garden? He had no leisure to look—in any case the fog was too thick—and continued to creep across the garden to the opposite wing. That was where he had first met Trapping, where the great ballroom was. If tonight’s events were indeed of a more secretive nature, perhaps it would be unoccupied.

  The bootsteps were growing unpleasantly closer. Chang listened carefully, waiting, trying to determine how many men there were. Fighting two or three Dragoons with sabers in the open air was suicidal, even without his lungs seething blood. He padded rapidly along a waist-high hedge, bent double, and then across a gravel lane into another ornamental thicket. The few steps on the gravel would draw them like a pack of hounds, and Chang immediately changed direction, angling toward the house and the nearest of the glass garden doors. He reached the cover of another low hedge and listened to the boots converge behind him, gratified that they had not thought to send men around the borders of the garden to trap him from the sides. It was just as he congratulated himself that Chang heard the unmistakable rattle of a scabbard-belt, somewhere ahead of him. He swore silently and drew apart his stick—had he been seen? He didn’t think so. He took a bead on the man’s location…near a short conical pine tree…Chang crept toward it, quiet as a corpse. He inched around the tree and the back of a red coat came into view.

  Whether it was his rasping breath or the smell of the blue crystals that signaled his presence, or merely his own fatigue, Chang knew as soon as his arms shot out for the man that there would be a struggle. His left hand clamped over the Dragoon’s mouth and stifled any scream, but his right arm didn’t cleanly clear the man’s shoulder and so his blade was not at once in position. The man thrashed, his brass helmet falling onto the grass and his saber waving for some kind of purchase. In the next moment Chang pulled him off balance and dug the edge of the dagger into the man’s throat…but in that same moment he also saw that the man whose life he held in his hands was Reeves.

  What did it matter? The 4th Dragoons were his enemies, paid lackeys of the corrupt and wicked. Did he care whether Reeves was merely duped into their service? Chang recalled the man’s kindness in the Ministry and knew the answer, just as he knew any alliance with Smythe would crumble to nothing if he started killing Dragoons. All this went through Chang’s mind—along with an estimate of where the other Dragoons might be and how much noise he was making—in the time it took to place his mouth next to Reeves’s ear.

  “Reeves,” he whispered, “do not move. Do not speak. I am not your enemy.” Reeves stopped struggling. Chang knew there were perhaps seconds before they were found. “It is Chang,” he hissed. “You have been lied to. A woman is in the house. They are going to kill her. I am telling you the truth.”

  He released his hold and stepped away. Reeves turned, his face pale and his hand drifting up to his throat. Chang whispered urgently.

  “Is Captain Smythe at Harschmort?”

  Their attention was drawn by a sharp noise. Reeves wheeled. Over his shoulder Chang saw the grizzled bald man with the carbine step from the shadow of the hedges, along with a knot of Dragoons. They were well away—some twenty yards distant.

  “You there!” the man shouted. “Stand clear!”

  The man whipped the carbine to his shoulder and took aim. Reeves turned to Chang, his face a mask of confusion, just as the shot of the carbine echoed across the garden. Reeves arched his body with a hideous spastic clench and jackknifed into Chang, his face twisting with pain. Chang looked up to see the man with the carbine eject the shell and advance another into the chamber. He slammed the bolt home and raised the weapon. Chang dropped Reeves—whose legs kicked feebly, as if their action might yet undo the damage of the bullet—and dove behind the tree.

  The next shot carried past him into the night. Chang ran, tearing his way into the hedges, trying to reach the house. He had no
illusion it would be any safer, but there would at least be less room for shooting. A third shot rang out, whistling near him and then a fourth, sent he didn’t know where…had he slipped them for a moment? He heard the man’s voice, barking to the soldiers. He reached the far edge of the garden and stopped, gasping. Between where he crouched and the nearest glass door was an open band of grass perhaps five yards across. He would be entirely visible for the time it took to gain the door and—somehow—force it open. It was a fool’s risk. He’d be shot where he stood. He glanced behind him—he could feel the Dragoons getting closer. There had to be another way.

  But Chang’s mind was blank. He was spent with pain, with fatigue, and with the sudden murder of Reeves. He looked at the glass doors, tensing himself—ridiculously—for a reckless, suicidal dash. They were waiting for him to show himself. Above the glass doors the wall rose two stories of sheer granite before there was an elegant bay window set out over the garden. There was no way to reach it. He imagined the view from that window was delightful. Perhaps it was Lydia Vandaariff’s own room. Perhaps it was covered with pillows and silk. She was a lovely young woman, he remembered from his visit to Harschmort. He wondered idly if she was a virgin, and felt a ripple of disgust at the subsequent image of Karl-Horst climbing aboard and crowing like a peacock. The thought brought him instantly, horribly, back to Angelique, the ever-piercing distance between them and his failure to preserve her. He shut his eyes as the final words of DuVine’s Christina rose to his scattered mind:

  What is the pull of a planet to the gravity of care?

  What the flow of time to her unfathomable heart?

  Chang shrugged off his despair—he was drifting again—and found himself staring at the window. Something was wrong with the reflection. Because of the odd angle of the glass he could see part of the garden behind him…and the scraps of fog billowing in the wind. He frowned. There was no wind in the garden that he could feel, or not to cause such billowing. He turned behind him, trying to place the reflected ground. Hope rose in his heart. The wind was coming from below.

  Chang crept quietly along the edge of the garden, on the bordering band of grass, until he could see the wisps of fog shifting, and stepped in to find a row of four large stone urns, each as tall as himself. Three were topped by the withered stalks of seasonal flowers. The fourth was empty and quite obviously the source of a steady exhalation of warm air. He placed his hands on the rim and went on his toes to peer inside. The hot air was foul and set off the raw flesh in his mouth and lungs. He winced and stepped back—his hands now covered in a pale crust of crystalline powder left by the chemical exhaust. Chang kneeled and pulled out his handkerchief. He tied it tightly across his face, stood again, and took a last glance around the garden. He saw no one—they were still waiting for him to run for the house. Tucking the stick under his arm he hoisted himself up and threw a leg over the lip of the urn. He looked down into it. Just below his boot was a wooden lattice-work across the urn, also covered with chemical accretions, in place to prevent the leaves and twigs from the garden that were trapped against it—and now dusted an icy blue—from blowing into the pipe. Chang leaned down and kicked once, very hard, on the lattice. His foot went through with an audible crack. He kicked again, knocking in the entire thing. Behind him there were sounds from the Dragoons—he had been heard, they were converging on the sound. He dropped completely inside, disappearing from their view, pulling apart the last bits of the lattice with his arms. He slid to the base of the urn, pressing against each side of it with his legs to stop himself from sliding down into the dark hole. He had no idea how far it went, if it was a sheer drop, or if it led into a furnace, but he knew it was better than being shot in the back. He lowered himself into the pipe—the steel sides warm to the touch—until he hung by his hands from the bottom edge of the urn.

  Chang let go.

  SIX

  Quarry

  As he stepped from the coach outside the yawning entrance to Stropping Station, Doctor Svenson’s attention was elsewhere. During his ride from Plum Court he had allowed his thoughts to drift, spurred by the poignant quality of Miss Temple’s reckless pursuit of lost love, to the sorrows and vagaries of his own existence. As he descended the crowded staircase his eyes mechanically scanned the crowds for a diminutive figure with chestnut sausage curls and a green dress, but his mind was awash with a particular astringent quality of Scandinavian reproach he had inherited from a disapproving father. What had he made of his life? What more than unnoticed service to an unworthy Duke and his even less worthy offspring? He was thirty-eight years old. He sighed and stepped onto the main station floor. As always, his regrets were focused on Corinna.

  Svenson tried to recall when he had last been to the farm. Three winters? It seemed the only season he could bear to visit. Any other time, when there was life or color in the trees, it reminded him too painfully of her. He had been at sea and returned to find her dead from an epidemic of “blood fever” that had swept the valley. She’d been ill for a month before, but no one had written. He would have left his ship. He would have come and told her everything. Had she known how he felt? He knew she had—but what had been in her heart? She was his cousin. She had never married. He had kissed her once. She’d stared up at him and then broken away…there wasn’t a day he did not find a moment to torment himself…not a day for the past seven years. On his last visit there were new tenants (some disagreement with his uncle had driven Corinna’s brother off the land and into town) and though they greeted Svenson politely and offered him room when he explained his relation to the family, he found himself devastated by the fact that the people living in her house no longer knew—had no memory of, no celebration in their hearts for—who was buried in the orchard. A profound sense of abandonment took hold of him and he had not, even in the depths of this present business, been able to shake himself free. His home—no matter where he had been—had lain with her, both living and in the ground. He had ridden back to the Palace the next day.

  He had since traveled to Venice, to Berne, to Paris, all in the service of Baron von Hoern. He had performed well—well enough to merit further tasks instead of being sent back to a freezing ship—and even saved lives. None of it mattered. His thoughts were full of her.

  He sighed again, heavily, and realized that he had no earthly clue where to find Tarr Manor. He walked to the ticket counter and joined one of the lines. The station buzzed with activity like a wasps’ nest kicked by a malicious child. The faces around him were marked with impatience, worry, and fatigue, people unified in their desperate rushing to make whichever train they sought, relentlessly flowing in awkward clumps back and forth, like the noisome circulatory system of a great distended creature of myth. He saw no trace of Miss Temple, and the place was so thronged that his only real hope was to find the train she sought and search there. In the time it took to light and smoke the first third of another cigarette, he reached the front of the line. He leaned forward to the clerk and explained he needed to reach Tarr Manor. Without pause the man scribbled a ticket and shot it toward him through the hole in the glass and announced the price. Svenson dug out his money and pushed it through the hole, one coin at a time as he counted. He picked up the ticket, which was marked “Floodmaere, 3:02”, and leaned forward again.

  “And at which stop do I get off?” he asked.

  The clerk looked at him with undisguised contempt. “Tarr Village,” he replied.

  Svenson decided he could wait to ask the conductor how long the journey would be, and walked onto the station floor, looking around for the proper platform. It was at the other end of the great terminal hall. He looked up at the hideous clock and judged he did not need to run. His ankle was behaving itself, and he had no desire to aggravate it without reason. He made a point to look in the various stalls as he passed—food, books, newspapers, drink—but in none of them saw the slightest sign of Miss Temple. By the time he got to the train itself, it was clear that Floodmaere was not the most
illustrious of destinations. There were only two cars attached to a coal wagon and an engine that had certainly seen better days. Svenson looked around once more for any woman in green—for a glimpse of green anywhere—but saw no one. He flicked away his cigarette butt and entered the rear of the train, resigned that his was a fool’s errand and that she would be located by Chang. He caught himself. Why the flicker of jealousy, of—he had to admit—peevish possessiveness? Because he’d met her before Chang? But he hadn’t—they’d seen each other on the train…he shook his head. She was so young…and Chang—an absolute rogue—practically feral—not that he or Chang presented any kind of match—not that he even could consider—or in conscience desire…it really was too ridiculous.

  A greying, unshaven conductor, his face looking as if it had been stippled with paste, snatched Svenson’s ticket and brusquely indicated he should walk forward. Svenson did so, reasoning that he could speak to the man later about arrival times, return trips, and other passengers. It would be better to find her himself without drawing attention, if possible. He walked down the aisle of the first car peering into each compartment as he passed. They were empty, save for the rear-most, which held the many members of a family of gypsies, and at least one crate of indeterminate fowl.