The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters

politely and nodding at his foolish stories and wanting solely to be done with it … until they had paused for a moment at the quayside, looking down at the water. Chang had fallen silent, and then spoken quietly of the river’s passage to an endless sea—observing that even they in their squalid lives, by being in that place, for that time, could truly situate themselves at the border of mystery.
    For that image of possible escape, that unintended echo of her own vast imagined life, so far removed … she had been surprised. She had remembered that moment, and offered him, here at the end, that much thanks.
    * * *
    Cardinal Chang blinked. He looked at the floor. He was on his hands and knees, bloody saliva hanging from his mouth. Colonel Aspiche loomed above him, the glass book cradled in his hands. Angelique stood with the Comte d’Orkancz, her gaze wandering with neither curiosity nor interest. The Comte nodded to the dais and Chang forced himself to turn. Near the dais the crowd parted again … for Mrs. Stearne. She entered leading by the hand a small woman in a white silk robe. Chang shook his head—he could not think—the woman in white … he knew her … he blinked again and wiped his mouth, swallowing painfully. The robe was sheer, clinging tightly to her body … her feet were bare … a mask of white feathers … hair the color of chestnuts, in sausage curls to either side of her head. With an effort Chang rose up on his knees.
    He opened his mouth to speak as Mrs. Stearne reached behind her and pulled the feathered mask from Miss Temple’s face. The scars of the Process were vivid around each grey eye, and burned in a line across the bridge of her nose.
    Chang tried to say her name. His mouth would not work.
    Colonel Aspiche moved behind him. The force of the blow so spun the room that Chang wondered, in his last moment before darkness, whether his head had been cut off.

THREE
Provocateur
    A s a surgeon, Doctor Svenson knew that the body did not remember pain, only that an experience had been painful. Extreme fear however was seared into the memory like nothing else in life, and as he pulled himself, hand over agonizing hand, toward the metal gondola, the dark countryside spinning dizzily below him, the freezing winds numbing his face and fingers, the Doctor’s grasp on his own sanity was tenuous at best. He tried to think of anything but the sickening drop below his kicking boots, but he could not. The effort denied him the breath to scream or even cry out, but with each wrenching movement he whimpered with open terror. All his life he had shrunk away from heights of any kind—even climbing ladders aboard ship he willed his eyes to look straight ahead and his limbs to move, lest his mind or stomach give way to even that meager height. Despite himself he scoffed—a staccato bark of saliva—at the very notion of
ladders
. His only consolation, feeble in the extreme, was that the noise of the wind and the darkness of the sky had so far hidden him from anyone looking out of a window. Not that he knew for certain he had not been seen. The Doctor’s own eyes were tightly shut.
    He had climbed perhaps half-way up the rope and his arms felt like burning lead. Already it seemed all he could do to hold on. He opened his eyes for the briefest glimpse, shutting them at once with a yelp at the vertigo caused by the swinging gondola. Where before he’d seen a face at the circular window there was only black glass. Had it truly been Elöise? He had been sure on the ground, but now—now he barely knew his own name. He forced himself upwards—each moment of letting one hand go to stab above him for the rope was a spike of fear in his heart, and yet hemade himself do it again and again, feeling his way, his face locked in a shocking rictus of effort.
    Another two feet. His mind assailed him—why not stop? Why not let go? Wasn’t this the underlying dread behind his fear of heights to begin with—the actual impulse to jump? Why else did he shrink away from balconies and windows, but for the sudden urge to hurl himself into the air? Now it would be so simple. The grassy pastures below would be as good a grave as any sea—and how many times had he contemplated that, since Corinna’s death? How many times had he grown cold looking over the iron rail of a Baltic ship, worrying—like a depressive terrier with a well-gnawed stick—the urge to throw himself over the side?
    Another two feet, gritting his