The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters

lewd.
    Only the whites of her eyes were bright. Her eyes settled on Chang.

    The Comte flicked her leash and Angelique drifted forward. The ballroom was silent. Chang could hear the click of each footfall on the polished wood. He wrenched his eyes to d’Orkancz and saw cold hatred. He looked to the dais: shock on the faces of Crabbé and Xonck, but the Contessa, however troubled, looking at her companions, as if to gauge the success of this distraction. Chang looked back at Angelique. He could not stop himself. She stepped closer…and he heard her speak.
    “Car-din-al
Chang,
” she said, enunciating each syllable as carefully as ever…but her voice was different, smaller, more intense—as if half of what had made it had been boiled away.
    Her lips were not moving—
could
they move?—and he realized with a shock that her words were in his head alone.
    “Angelique…” His voice was a whisper.
    “It is finished, Cardinal,…you know it is…look at me.”
    He tried to do anything else. He could not. She came nearer and nearer.
    “Poor Cardinal…you desired me so very much…I desired so very much also…do you remember?”
    The words in his mind expanded, like Chinese paper balls in water, blooming out into bright flowers, until he felt her presence overwhelm him and her projected thoughts take the place of his own senses.

    He was no longer in the room.
    They stood together at the river bank, gazing into the grey water at twilight. Had they ever done such a thing? They had, he knew, once—once they had by chance met in the street and she allowed him to walk her back to the brothel. He remembered the day vividly even as he experienced it again through her own projected memory. He was speaking to her—the words meaningless—he had wanted to say anything to reach her, relating the history of the houses they passed, of his daring experiences, of the true life of the river bank. She’d barely said a word. At the time he had wondered if it was a matter of language—her accent was still strong—but now, crushingly, with her thoughts in his mind, he knew that she had merely chosen not to speak, and that the entire episode had nothing to do with him at all. She had only agreed to walk with him—had deliberately gone to him in the street—so as to avoid another jealous client who had followed her all the way from Circus Garden. She had barely heard Chang’s words, smiling politely and nodding at his foolish stories and wanting solely to be done with it…until they had paused for a moment at the quayside, looking down at the water. Chang had fallen silent, and then spoken quietly of the river’s passage to an endless sea—observing that even they in their squalid lives, by being in that place, for that time, could truly situate themselves at the border of mystery.
    For that image of possible escape, that unintended echo of her own vast imagined life, so far removed…she had been surprised. She had remembered that moment, and offered him, here at the end, that much thanks.

    Cardinal Chang blinked. He looked at the floor. He was on his hands and knees, bloody saliva hanging from his mouth. Colonel Aspiche loomed above him, the glass book cradled in his hands. Angelique stood with the Comte d’Orkancz, her gaze wandering with neither curiosity nor interest. The Comte nodded to the dais and Chang forced himself to turn. Near the dais the crowd parted again…for Mrs. Stearne. She entered leading by the hand a small woman in a white silk robe. Chang shook his head—he could not think—the woman in white…he knew her…he blinked again and wiped his mouth, swallowing painfully. The robe was sheer, clinging tightly to her body…her feet were bare…a mask of white feathers…hair the color of chestnuts, in sausage curls to either side of her head. With an effort Chang rose up on his knees.
    He opened his mouth to speak as Mrs. Stearne reached behind her and pulled the feathered mask from Miss Temple’s face. The scars of the Process were vivid around each grey eye, and burned in a line across the bridge of her nose.
    Chang tried to say her name. His mouth would not work.
    Colonel Aspiche moved behind him. The force of the blow so spun the room that Chang wondered, in his last moment before darkness, whether his head had been cut off.

NINE
    Provocateur
    A s a surgeon, Doctor Svenson knew that the body did not remember pain, only that an experience had been painful. Extreme fear however was seared into