The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters

vacant, cruel, or thoughtful heads of Caesars high and low—Augustus, Vespasian, Gaius, Nero, Domitian, Tiberius. As he passed this last, Svenson stopped. Dimly—though louder than the scream—he heard…
applause
. He spun to place the source of the noise, and saw, cut into the white wall behind the bust of that pensive, bitter emperor, regular grooves running up to the ceiling…
rungs
. Svenson edged behind the pillar and looked up. He looked around him and—taking a breath and shutting his eyes—began to climb.
    There was no hatch. The ladder continued into darkness before his hands found a new surface to grasp. The Doctor opened his eyes and blinked, allowing his eyes to adjust to the dark. He was gripping a piece of wooden scaffolding, the end of a low catwalk. He heard distant voices…and then again the whisper, like a sudden rustle of leaves, of an audience’s applause. Was he backstage at some sort of theatre? The Doctor swallowed, for the dizzying heights from which stagehands operated the lifts and curtains always made him queasy (and his compulsion was to look up again and again, just to torment himself with vertigo). He recalled a performance of Bonrichardt’s
Castor und Pollux
where the triumphant finale, the titular pair ascending to heaven—an excruciatingly extended duet as they were raised (the twins operatically portly, the ropes audibly protesting) some hundred feet from view—had him near to heaving with dread into the lap of the unfortunate dowager seated next to him.
    Doctor Svenson clambered onto the catwalk and crept along it quietly. Ahead he saw a thin glimmer of light, perhaps a distant door set ajar, allowing a single beam to fall into the darkness. What performance might be hosted in Harschmort on a night like this? The engagement party had been a dual event—a public celebration of the engagement of Karl-Horst and Lydia and a private occasion for the Cabal to transact its private business. Was tonight a similarly double-edged event—and could this performance be the respectable side of whatever other malevolence was at work elsewhere in the house?
    Svenson continued forward, wincing at a tightness in his legs and a renewed pain from his twisted ankle. He thought of Flaüss’s boasting words—the Baron was dead, the Duke to follow. The Prince was a fool and a rake, eminently subject to manipulation and control. Yet if the Doctor could prise the Prince from the clutches of the Cabal—Process or no—might there not be yet some hope, providing the ministers around him were responsible and sane?
    But then with a grim snort he recalled his own brief conversation with Robert Vandaariff over Trapping’s corpse. Such was the great man’s irresistible influence that any unfortunate or scandalous occurrence—like the Colonel’s death—was made to disappear. The grandson of Robert Vandaariff—especially if inheriting as a child and requiring a regent—would be the best return the financier could realize on the investment of his daughter. After the child’s birth Karl-Horst would be unnecessary—and, given everything, wholly unregretted at his death.
    But what were Svenson’s choices? If Karl-Horst were to die
without
issue, the Macklenburg throne would pass to the children of his cousin Hortenze-Caterina, the oldest of whom was but five. Wasn’t this a better fate for the Duchy than being swallowed by Vandaariff’s empire? Svenson had to face the deeper truth of his mission from the Baron. Knowing what he did of the forces in play, if he could not prevent the marriage, which seemed impossible, he would have to shoot Prince Karl-Horst down—to be a traitor in service to a larger patriotism.
    The reasoning left the taste of ash in his mouth, but he could see no other way.
    Svenson sighed, but then, like the shift of a mountebank’s con-trick, the line of light in front of him—which he had, in the darkness, taken to be a distant door—was revealed for what it was: the thin gap between two curtains, not two feet in front of his face. He gently pushed it aside, both light and sound flooding through the gap, for the fabric was actually quite heavy, as if it had been woven with lead to prevent fire. But now Doctor Svenson could see and hear everything…and he was appalled.

    It was an
operating
theatre. His catwalk door was perched just to the right of the audience and led across the stage itself at the height of the ceiling—some twenty feet above the raised table and