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 bloodstained 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.
r /> “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, s
kirting 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.