The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters

Chang, after making himself familiar with Trapping’s person, the location of his house, his coach, and the regimental barracks, to position himself outside the Foreign Ministry itself, convinced that this was the crucial point of revelation. Such was Chang’s way, and while he performed such investigation to better understand what he was engaged with, it’s also true that he did it to occupy his mind. If he was but a brute murderer, he could have cut Arthur Trapping down at any number of places, simply by following him until he was isolated in the street. The fact that Chang might well end up doing that very thing in the end didn’t alter his desire to understand the reasoning behind his actions. He was not squeamish about his work, but he was well aware that the risk was his, and that a client might always wonder about furthering their own security by arranging things so that Chang too might fall victim to unpleasant circumstance. The more he knew—about the clients and their objects—the safer he was going to feel. In this case, he was keenly aware that the forces involved were far more powerful and vast than Trapping and his bitter Adjutant-Colonel, and he would need to be careful not to provoke their interest. If ’twere done, ’twere best done as invisibly as possible.
    On the afternoon of that first day and again on the second, Trapping’s coach had taken him from the regimental barracks to the Foreign Ministry, where he had spent several hours. At each evening the coach had taken him to his house on Hadrian Square, where the Colonel remained at home, without any notable visitors. On the second night, as he watched Trapping’s windows from the shadow of decorative shrubbery, Chang was startled to see a coach move past, the doors painted with the Foreign Ministry crest. The coach did not stop at Trapping’s door, however, but continued on to a house on the other side of the square. Chang quickly loped after it, in time to see a trim man in a dark coat exit the coach and enter the door of number 14, weighed down with several thick satchels. The coach drove away. Chang returned to his surveillance. The next morning at the Library he again consulted the list of Foreign Ministry staff. The Deputy Minister, Harald Crabbé, made his residence at 14 Hadrian Square.

    On the third day he’d once again gone to the Ministry, passing his time on the edge of St. Isobel’s Square, at a point where he could observe both the coach traffic in front of the building and the intersection where any coach by way of the rear alley would have to exit. By now he’d become familiar with at least some of the Ministry staff, and studied them as they went in and out, waiting for Trapping to arrive. Despite all the suggestions of intrigue around the Colonel, Chang judged the man himself to be a reasonably simple target. If he repeated his pattern of the previous two nights, it would be easy enough to enter through a second-story window (accessible from a drain pipe whose strength Chang had tested the night before) and creep down to Trapping’s chamber (whose location he had established from watching the appearance of light in the windows as Trapping climbed to the third floor to sleep). The precise method wasn’t settled in his mind, and would depend on the exact circumstances in the room. He would have his razor, but also come equipped with a poison that would, to a careless eye, suggest an apoplexy not unheard-of for a man of Trapping’s age. Whether anyone would consider it murder would be one more signifier of the intrigue, and the stakes of Trapping’s elevation. Chang was not overly concerned about anyone else in the house. Mrs. Trapping slept apart from her husband, and the servants, if he chose his time correctly, would be far from the room.
    He crossed the square at two o’clock and bought a meat pie, breaking it into pieces and consuming them one at a time while he walked back to his position. As he passed the sculpture of St. Isobel, he smiled, his mouth full. The truly hideous nature of the composition—garish sentiment, cloying pathos—never prevented him from finding lurid satisfaction in the image of the saint herself, the coiling serpents swarming across her slippery flesh. It amazed him that such a piece had been erected at public expense in such an open space, but he found the blithe veneration of something so obviously rank to be a comfort. Somehow it restored his faith that he indeed had a place in