The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters

street, and then soon enough—counting his steps—under the Library itself. It was another twenty paces to another set of stairs and another hatch. He climbed up, heaved on the hatch with his shoulder, and entered the lowest Library basement—three floors below the lobby. He scraped his boots as best he could and shut the hatch behind him.
    Keeping the lamp wick low, Chang made his way up to the main floor and darted across the corridor into the stacks. The building itself he knew intimately—indeed, like a blind man. There were three floors of hidden book stacks for each spacious floor of the Library that was open to the public. The stack aisles were crammed, dusty, and narrow, stuffed with seldom used books that could nevertheless never be disposed of. The walls—and floors and ceilings—were no more than iron scaffolding, and during the day one could look up through the gaps, as if through a strange sort of kaleidoscope, to the very top of the building, some twelve levels above. Chang climbed quickly up six narrow flights of stairs to what was the third floor of the Library proper, pushed open the door with his shoulder—it always stuck—and entered the vaulted map room, where he had so recently been hired by Rosamonde.
    Now Chang turned up the wick, knowing there was no chance the guards would see—the map room was well away from the main staircase where light might be glimpsed from below. He set the lantern on one of the great wooden cases and searched for a particular volume on the curator’s desk—the massive
Codex of Royal Surveyor’s Maps,
and the easiest source for a detailed view of Harschmort and Tarr Manor. He did not, however, know where each of them was exactly located—or not precisely enough to guess the map that would contain them. He braced himself for the small print of the
Codex
and found his way to the index of place names, squinting painfully. It took him several minutes to find each, with grid references to the main master map in the front of the
Codex
. By locating them on the grid-marked master map that unfolded awkwardly from the front of the
Codex,
he would then have the citation numbers for the detailed surveyor maps, of which there were hundreds and hundreds in the Library’s collection. It was another matter of minutes, closely poring over the master map, and he was off to the surveyor maps, kept in a high bureau of wide, thin drawers. Again, with his face inches from their identifying numbers, he located the two maps in question and pulled them from the bureau. He dragged the maps—each of them easily six feet square—over to one of the wide reading tables and collected the lantern. He rubbed his eyes and began the next step of his search.

    The map of Tarr Manor—and Lord Tarr’s quite expansive grounds—showed it to be in the county of Floodmaere. It was easy enough to find the quarry, some five miles from the main house, where the Lord’s estate claimed a low range of craggy hills. The manor house itself was large but not abnormally so, and the immediate grounds did not strike any particularly suspicious chord: orchards, pasture, stables. The land seemed generally wild, without notable cultivation or building. The map did show a number of small outlying structures at the quarry itself, but were they large enough to contain the Comte’s experiments?
    The map of Harschmort was similarly inconclusive. The house was larger, certainly, and there were the nearby canals, but the surrounding land was fen and flat pasture. He had been in the house itself—it was not especially high. He was looking for any place where they might replicate the great sunken building at the Institute, which had been set well into the earth, but in these places must mean some kind of high tower. He could see no such location on either map. Chang sighed and rubbed his eyes. He was running out of time. He returned his attention to the map of Harschmort, for that had been where Aspiche’s Dragoons had taken the Cabal’s boxes, looking for anything he might have missed. He could not see the far edge of the map, and rotated it on the table to bring it closer to the light. In his haste, his fingers tore at the lower corner. He swore with annoyance and glanced at the damage. There was something there, something written. He peered closer. It was a citation to another map, a second map of the same area. Why another map? He noted the number in his head and crossed back to the
Codex,
searching