The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters

different scenes—a room, a street, a bed, a crowded square, one after another. Then the momentum of thought eased, settling on one sharp instant: the Comte d’Orkancz in a doorway in his fur, his gloved hand extended and offering a shining rectangle of blue glass. Chang felt his own hand reach out to the Comte, even as he knew it fiercely gripped the iron rail, and saw it touch the glass—the small delicate fingers he knew so well—and felt the sudden rush of erotic power as he—as she—was swept into the memory held within, a rising, impossibly vivid stimulation, irresistible as opium and just as addictive, then quickly, cruelly withdrawn before he could grasp whose sweet memory it had been or even the circumstance. The Comte tucked the card back into his coat and smiled. This had been the villain’s introduction to Angelique, Chang knew, and Angelique was now, somehow, projecting her own experience of that intimate moment into the mind and body of every person within a hundred yards.

    The image departed from his mind with another spasm of dizziness and he felt himself abruptly empty and cruelly, cruelly alone—her sudden presence in his mind had seemed a harsh intrusion, but once withdrawn there was a part of him that wanted more—for it was her, and he could
feel
it was her, Angelique, with whom he had so long desired this exact sort of impossible intimacy. Chang looked again down the twisting stairs, fighting an impulse to return, to fling himself away to an embrace of love and death. A part of his mind insisted that neither mattered, so long as it came from her.
    “You feel the power for yourselves! You experience the truth!”
    The Comte’s voice broke the spell. Chang shook his head and turned, climbing as quickly as he could. He could not make sense of all he felt—he could not decide what he must do—and so Cardinal Chang retreated, as he often did, into action alone, driving himself on until he found an object for his desolated rage, looking for mayhem to once more clarify his heart.
    The rising, grating whine began again, escalating to the heights of the chamber. The Comte d’Orkancz had moved on to the next woman, Miss Poole, pulling the levers to begin her metamorphosis. The sound of screaming machinery was bolstered by cries from the gallery of cells, for now that they knew what they were going to see, the crowd was even more willing to voice encouragement and delight. But Chang was assailed by the image of the woman’s arched back, like a twig bent to its limit before snapping, and he ran from their approval as if he ran from hell itself.
    He still had no idea where to find Svenson or Miss Temple, but if he was going to help them, he needed to remain free. The screaming of the pipes abruptly ceased, answered after a hanging moment of rapt attention by another eruption from the crowd. Once again the Comte crowed about power and transformation and the truth—each fatuous claim echoed by another bout of applause. Chang’s lips curled back with rage. The whining rise in the pipes resumed—d’Orkancz had moved on to Margaret Hooke. There was nothing Chang could do. He ascended two more turns of the stairs and saw the door to the gangway and Lord Vandaariff’s office.
    Chang stood, breathing hard, and spat. The iron door was closed and did not move—barred from the other side. Chang was to be driven like a breathless stag to the top of the tower. For a final time the roar of the pipes dropped suddenly away and the crowd erupted with delight. All three of the women had undergone the Comte’s ferocious alchemy. They would be waiting for him at the top. He had not found Celeste. He had lost Angelique. He had failed. Chang tucked the razor back into his coat and resumed his climb.

    The upper entrance was fashioned from the same steel plates, held together with the heavy rivets of a train car. The massive door swung silently to reveal an elegant bright hallway, the walls white and the floor gleaming pale marble. Some twenty feet away stood a shapely woman in a dark dress, her hair tied back with ribbon and her face obscured by a half-mask of black feathers. She nodded to him, formally. The line of ten red-coated Dragoons behind her, sabers drawn and clearly under command, did not move.
    Chang stepped from the turret onto the marble floor, glancing down. The tiles were marked by a wide stain of blood—quite obviously pooled from some violent wound and then smeared by something (the