The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters

like a blue-white flame. The Comte screamed again.
    “
Stop
!”
    The soldiers—nearly at the third table—froze. Chang risked a slow peek over the raft of black hoses—glimpsing between them pale damp flesh—and met the Major’s baleful gaze.
    The chamber was silent, save for the dull roar of the furnace and the high note of hissing gas behind him. He needed to overcome nine men—counting the two with the cart—and get Celeste from the table. Could he do that without harming her? Was that harm possibly worse than what would happen to her if he didn’t? He knew what she would want him to do—as he knew how meaningless any notion of preserving his own life had become. He felt the seething lattice of cuts inside his chest. This exact moment was why he had come so far, this very effort the last defiant, defacing mark he could inflict upon this privileged world. Chang looked up again to the mass of masked faces staring down in suspenseful silence. He felt like a beast in the arena.
    The Comte detached the black speaking hose from the maskand draped it carefully over a nearby pedestal box bristling with levers and stops. He faced Chang and nodded—with the mask on it was the gesture of an inarticulate brute, of a storybook ogre—to the woman nearest Chang, whose hair he had exposed.
    “Looking for someone, Cardinal?” he called. His voice was less loud, but issuing from the strange mouth box set into the mask, it still struck Chang as inhuman. “Perhaps I can assist you …”
    The Comte d’Orkancz reached out and pulled away the cloth that wrapped the final woman’s hair. It cascaded out in curls, dark, shining, black. The Comte reached out with his other hand and swept away the hoses hanging across her feet. The flesh was discolored, sickly lustrous, even more so than Vandaariff’s hand or John Carver’s face when it had lain against the book—pale as polar ice, slick with perspiration, and beneath it, where he had before known a color of golden warmth, was now the cool indifference of white ash. On the third toe of her left foot was a silver ring, but Chang had known from the first glimpse of her hair … it was Angelique.
    “I believe you are … acquainted with the lady,” continued d’Orkancz. “Of course you may be acquainted with the others as well—Miss Poole”—he nodded at the woman in the middle—“and Mrs. Marchmoor.” The Comte gestured to the woman directly in front of Chang. He looked down, trying to locate Margaret Hooke (last seen on a bed in the St. Royale) in what he saw—the hair, her size, the color of what flesh he could see beneath the black rubber. He felt the urge to be sick.
    Chang spat a lozenge of blood onto the platform and called to the Comte, his hoarse voice betraying his fatigue.
    “What will you do to them?”
    “What I have planned to do. Do you search for Angelique, or for Miss Temple? As you see she is not here.”
    “Where is she?” cried Chang hoarsely.
    “I believe you have a choice,” said the Comte in reply. “If youseek to rescue Angelique, there is no human way—for I read the effects of the glass in your face, Cardinal—for you to bear her from this place and
then
do the same for Miss Temple.”
    Chang said nothing.
    “It is, of course, academic. You ought to have died ten times over—is that not correct, Major Blach? You will do so now. But it is perhaps fitting that it take place at the feet—if I am correctly informed—of your own hopeless love.”
    Staring directly at the Comte, Chang gathered hold of as many of the hoses rising from Mrs. Marchmoor’s body as he could and prepared to rip them free.
    “If you do that, you kill her, Cardinal! Is that what you desire—to destroy a helpless woman? At this distance I cannot stop you. The forces at work have been committed! None of these may retreat from their destiny—truly their lot is transformation or death!”
    “What transformation?” shouted Chang above the rising roar of the pipes, and the hissing gas behind him.
    In answer d’Orkancz reached for the speaking hose and jammed it sharply back into the mask. His words echoed through the vaulted heights like thunder.
    “The transformation of
angels
! The powers of heaven made flesh!”
    The Comte d’Orkancz yanked hard on one of the pedestal’s brass levers, and brought his other hand down like a hammer on a metal stop. At once the hoses around Angelique, which had been hanging and lank, stiffened with life as they were