The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters

never make the stairs—he couldn’t outrun a child. He needed to hide. Svenson stopped and looked around for some niche in the rock when something fell in the dirt some ten yards away. He looked at it—couldn’t tell what it was—and then turned his gaze to where it might have possibly come from. Above him, through the back window of the dirigible’s gondola, he saw a hand against the glass and a pale, half-obscured face. He looked again at what had fallen. It was a book…a black book…leather-bound…he looked up again. It was Elöise. He was an idiot.

    The Doctor charged forward just as the nearest of the men minding the cables finally happened to look his way, but his cry of alarm at the strange, running figure emerged as an inarticulate shout. Svenson lowered his shoulder and cannoned into his midsection, knocking them both sprawling and the cable loose from the grounded spike that had held it. The rope began to snake around them as the dirigible surged against its moorings. The other two men released their own lines, thinking this had been the signal—only realizing their error once the lines had actually been slipped. Svenson struggled to his feet and dove for the whipping cable—he was insane, nearly gibbering with terror—and thrust his arm through the knotted loop at its end. The dirigible lurched upwards and with a shriek Svenson was pulled off his feet, some three feet in the air. The craft surged into the black sky, Doctor Svenson kicking his legs and holding to the rope more tightly than he ever imagined human beings could do. He swept past the crowd on the steps, swinging like a human pendulum. At once he was out of the quarry and over a meadow, the soft grass close beneath him for a sudden tempting moment. Could he drop and survive? His hand was tangled in the rope. Fear had made his grip hard as steel and before he could push another thought through his paralyzed mind the craft rose again, the meadow spiraling farther and farther away.
    Black night above and around him, mocked by a chilling wind, Doctor Svenson looked helplessly at the impossibly distant gondola and began to climb, hand over bloodied hand, gasping, sobbing, all the terrors of hell screaming below his feet, his eyes now screwed shut in agony.

SEVEN
    Royale
    O nce she made a decision, Miss Temple considered it an absolutely ridiculous waste of time to examine the choice further—and so from the vantage of her coach she did not debate the merits of her journey to the St. Royale Hotel, instead allowing herself the calming pleasure of watching the shops pass by to either side and the people of the city all about their day. Normally, this was not a thing she cared for—save for a certain morbid curiosity about what flaws could be deduced from a person’s dress and posture—but now, as a consequence of her bold separation from the Doctor and Cardinal Chang, she felt empowered to observe without the burden of judgment, committed as she was to action, an arrow in mid-flight. And the fact was, she did feel that merely being in motion had stilled the tempest of feeling that had overtaken her in the Comte’s garden and, even worse, in the street. If she was not up to the challenge of braving the St. Royale Hotel, then how could she consider herself any kind of adventurer? Heroines did not pick their own battles—the ones they knew they could win. On the contrary, they managed what they had to manage, and they did not lie to themselves about relying on others for help instead of accomplishing the thing alone. Would she be safer to have waited for Chang and Svenson—however much of the plan was her own devising—so they could have entered the place in force? It was arguable at the very least (stealth, for one) that she alone was best suited for the task. But the larger issue was her own opinion of herself, and her level of loss, relative to her companions. She smiled and imagined meeting them outside the hotel—she chuckled at how long it would take them to find her—vital information in hand and perhaps the woman in red or the Comte d’Orkancz, now utterly subject, in tow.
    Besides, the St. Royale held her destiny. The woman in red, this Contessa Lacquer-Sforza (simply another jot of proof, as if any were needed, of the Italian penchant for ridiculous names) was her primary enemy, the woman who had consigned her to death and worse. Further, Miss Temple could not help wonder at the woman’s role in the seduction—there was