The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters

matter was finished.
    “You will oblige me, Miss Temple,” said the Comte d’Orkancz, “by removing your shoes and stockings.”

    She had walked in her bare feet—a simple stratagem to prevent her from running away with any speed through the ragged filthy streets—down the stairs and out of the St. Royale Hotel. Mrs. Marchmoor remained behind, but all of the others descended with her—the soldier, the stout scarred fellow, and the older man going ahead to arrange coaches, the Comte and Contessa to her either side, the Prince behind with Miss Vandaariff on his arm. As she walked down the great staircase, Miss Temple saw a new clerk at the desk, who merely bowed with respect at a gracious nod from the Contessa. Miss Temple wondered that such a woman had need of the Process at all, or of magical blue glass—she doubted that anyone possessed the strength or inclination to deny the Contessa whatever she might ask. Miss Temple glanced to the Comte, who gazed ahead without expression, one hand on his pearl-topped stick, the other cradling the wrapped blue book, like an exiled king with plans to regain his throne. She felt the prickling of the carpet fibers between her toes as she walked. As a girl her feet had once been tough and calloused, used to running bare throughout her father’s plantation. Now they had become as soft and tender as any milk-bathed lady’s, and as much a hindrance to escape as a pair of iron shackles. With a pang of desolating grief she thought of her little green boots, abandoned, kicked beneath the divan. No one else would ever again care for them, she knew, and could not but wonder if anyone would ever again care for her either.
    Two coaches waited outside the hotel—one an elegant red brougham and the other a larger black coach with what she assumed was the Macklenburg crest painted on the door. The Prince, Miss Vandaariff, the soldier, and the scarred stout man climbed inside this coach, with the older man swinging up to sit with the driver. A porter from the hotel held open the door of the brougham for the Contessa, and then for Miss Temple, who felt the textured iron step press sharply into her foot as she went in. She settled into a seat opposite the Contessa. A moment later they were joined by the Comte, the entire coach shuddering as it took on his weight. He sat next to the Contessa and the porter shut the door. The Comte rapped his stick on the roof and they set forth. From the time of the Comte’s demand for her shoes to the coach moving, they had not spoken a word. Miss Temple cleared her throat and looked at them. Extended silence nearly always strained her self-control.
    “I should like to know something,” she announced.
    After a moment, the Comte rasped a reply. “And what is that?”
    Miss Temple turned her gaze to the Contessa, for it was she at whom the question was truly aimed. “I should like to know how Cardinal Chang died.”
    The Contessa Lacquer-Sforza looked into Miss Temple’s eyes with a sharp, searching intensity.
    “I killed him,” she declared, and in such a way that dared Miss Temple to speak again.
    Miss Temple was not yet daunted—indeed, if her captor did not want to discuss this topic, it now constituted a test of Miss Temple’s will.
    “Did you really?” she asked. “He was a formidable man.”
    “He was,” agreed the Contessa. “I filled his lungs with ground glass blown from our indigo clay. It has many effective qualities, and in such amounts as the Cardinal inhaled is mortal. ‘Formidable’ of course is a word with many shadings—and physical prowess is often the simplest and most easily overcome.”
    The ease of speech with which the Contessa described Chang’s destruction took Miss Temple completely aback. Though she had only been acquainted with Cardinal Chang for a very short time, so strong an impression had he made upon her that his equally sudden demise was a devastating cruelty.
    “Was it a quick death, or a slow one?” Miss Temple asked in as neutral a voice as she could muster.
    “I would not call it
quick
….” As the Contessa answered, she reached into a black bag embroidered with hanging jet beads, pulling out in sequence her holder, a cigarette to screw into the tip, and a match to light it. “And yet the death itself is perhaps a generous one, for—as you have seen yourself—the indigo glass carries with it an affinity for dream and for…sensual experience. It is often observed that men being hanged will