The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters

and a lingering patch of local dysentery. When his regiment was rewarded with a significant change of duties, Trapping’s executive officer, the long-suffering Adjutant-Colonel—a professional soldier who, if he were to be believed, didn’t desire the command so much for himself, but only to clear the place for any genuinely worthy figure—had taken the quite remarkable step of engaging Cardinal Chang.
    Outright assassination was not Chang’s usual line, but he’d done murder before. More often, as he preferred to see it, he was engaged to influence behavior, through violence, or information, or both, as necessary. In recent months, however, he’d felt a growing disquiet, as if there were behind his every step the barely audible ticking of a clock, that his life wound toward some profound
accounting
. Perhaps it was a malady of his eyes, a general gnawing anxiety that grew from seeing as much as possible in shadow. He did not allow this lurking dread to influence his movements, but when Aspiche had offered a high fee, Chang saw it as an opportunity to withdraw from view, to travel, to disappear into the opium den—anything until the cloud of foreboding had passed by.
    Not that he trusted what Aspiche had told him of the job. There was always more to it—clients always lied, withheld. Chang had spent the first day doing research, digging through social registers, old newspapers, genealogies, and as ever, the connections were there for the finding. Trapping was married to Charlotte Xonck, the middle child of three, between Henry, the oldest, and Francis, as yet unmarried and just returned from a lengthy tour abroad. Though poor Adjutant-Colonel Aspiche might assume that the regiment’s rise in stature had been earned by its colonial triumphs, Chang had found that the order to invest the 4th Dragoons as the Prince’s Own (or Drunken Wastrel Whoremongering Sodomite’s Own, as Chang preferred to think of it) was issued one day after the Xonck Armory agreed to lower terms for an exclusive contract to re-fit the cannons of the entire navy and coastal defenses. The mystery was not why the regiment had been promoted, but why Henry Xonck thought it worth such a costly bargain. Love for his only sister? Chang had sneered and sought out another archivist to badger.
    The precise nature of the regiment’s new duties was not part of any official document he could find, every account merely parroting what he’d read in the newspaper—“Palace defense, Ministry escort, and ceremonial duties”—which was gallingly vague. It was only after pacing back and forth that it occurred to him to confirm where the announcement had actually been issued. He again dragged the archivist away from his other duties to retrieve the folio of collected announcements, and then saw it on the cover of the folio itself—it was from a Ministry office, but not the War Ministry. He peered at the paper, and the seal at the top. The Foreign Ministry. What business had the Foreign Ministry with announcing—and thus, by inference, arranging—the installation of a new regiment of “Palace defense, Ministry escort, and ceremonial duties”? He snapped at the archivist, who merely stammered, “Well, it
does
say Ministry escort—and the F-Foreign Ministry is indeed one of the, ah, M-M-Ministry offices—” Chang cut him off with a brusque request for a list of senior Foreign Ministry staff.
    He’d spent a good hour wandering through the darkened stacks—the staff had conceded access to Chang, reasoning it was less bother to have him out of their sight than in their faces—pushing these rudimentary pieces around in his mind. No matter what else it did, the most important work of the regiment would be under the aegis of the Foreign Ministry. This could only refer to diplomatic intrigues of one kind or another, or internal government intrigues—that somehow in exchange for Xonck’s lowered fee, the War Ministry had agreed to put the regiment at the Foreign Ministry’s disposal. For Xonck, Trapping would obviously function as his spy, alerting him to any number of international situations that might influence his business, and the rise and fall of the business of others. Perhaps this was reward enough (Chang was unconvinced), but it did not explain why one Ministry would be doing such an outlandish service for another—or why the Foreign Ministry might require its own troops in the first place.
    Nevertheless, this much information allowed