The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters

Chang could not make out the faces of any other men, though he counted six of them. The canvas sheet was pulled down again and tied, and the men began to climb onto the carts. At a sharp whip crack, they drove off, away from the coaches, down a road that Chang from his place could not see.
    Chang moved quickly after them, pausing to glance into the launch—which told him nothing—and down the road, which was little more than a country path worn through the grass. He thought again about what he was doing. Pursuing the carts meant losing his coach. He resolved himself to being abandoned—worse things had happened to him, after all, and this still might be a perfect opportunity to execute his task. The carts moved much faster than he, however, and soon enough he was walking on his own, alone in the dark. The wind was still cold, and it was at least thirty minutes before he came upon the carts tied up at the kitchen entrance of what looked like a formidable building—though whether it was a dour mansion or a splendid fortress, he could not say. The boxes were gone, as were the men…

    Still annoyed from his interview with Aspiche, Chang walked back into the Raton Marine and was relieved to see that everyone who had been present at the trooper’s arrival was still there. He stood in the doorway a moment, allowing each person to glance up at him, in order to return those glances with a meaningful nod. He then went around to each man—including Nicholas the barman—and placed a gold coin next to his glass. It was all he could do—and if one of them were to go behind his back, it would at least be seen by others as a broken agreement reflecting poorly on the Judas. He ordered another cup of bitter chocolate and drank it outside. For all practical purposes, he was waiting for Aspiche to do something, but Noland Aspiche was at best a fool who hoped to profit from someone else killing his Colonel, or at worst part of the larger intrigue, which meant he had been lying to Chang from the start. In either case, Aspiche was unlikely to act. Despite the wallet in his coat, Chang was regretting the entire affair. He took a swallow of chocolate and grimaced.

    As soon as he’d seen the size of the house, he’d known where he was, for there was only one such dwelling on the coast near the Orange Canal, that of Robert Vandaariff, recently made Lord Vandaariff, the financier whose daughter was famously engaged to a German prince of some small state, Karl-Horst von Somesuch-or-other. Chang couldn’t remember—it was in any number of headlines he’d skipped past—but he was quick to realize, as he pushed his gloved hand through the pane of a delicate glass doorway, that he was trespassing into a rather large social occasion, some kind of formal masked ball. He watched from the shadows until he found a drunken guest from whom he could safely wrestle a mask, and then so covered (though again it meant taking off his glasses) moved out in direct search of Trapping. As most of the men were in formal black topcoats, the red-uniformed Colonel was relatively easy to find. Chang himself attracted attention for the same reason—the willfully brazen figure he cut in his usual environment, where intimidation balanced concealment, hardly lent itself to a fancy-dress party in a lavish mansion. But he simply carried himself with the disdainful air of a man who belonged. It amazed him how many people immediately assumed that, because of an unpleasant arrogance, he possessed more rights than they.
    Trapping was drinking heavily, in the midst of a rather large party, though it did not seem like he took an active part in the conversation. As he watched, he now realized that Trapping stood between two groups. One gathered around a heavy, balding man to whom all the others deferred—most prominently a young man with thick red hair and an exceedingly well-dressed woman (could this possibly be Trapping’s wife, Charlotte Xonck, and the men her brothers Henry and Francis?). Behind this woman was another, whose gown was more demure and who, much like Chang, occupied herself with subtly studying the figures around her—and in this struck him as the figure in the party to most carefully avoid. The other group was made of men, in both formal attire and military uniforms. Chang could not tell if Crabbé was present or not—the masks made it difficult to be sure. As curious as he was to watch such parties gathered around as unimpressive a figure as