The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters

house, with no idea if this path brought him anywhere near his ostensible targets of rescue. Most likely he was squandering what time he had to save them—he scoffed aloud—like so much else in his life had been squandered. His mind bristled with questions about the Dragoon Captain—he “had seen” Chang (though hadn’t Chang been fleeing Dragoons in the garden?), but how had he known him? If only there had been time to actually
speak
—it was more than likely the man knew the location of Elöise or Miss Temple. For a moment he’d entertained the idea of interrogating Flaüss, but his skin crawled at the man’s physical presence. Leaving him gagged and trussed behind a divan was more than enough time spent with such a toad. Yet he knew Flaüss would be missed—it was frankly odd he’d not been looked for already—and that his period of anonymity inside Harschmort was severely limited. But at the same time, the house was massive, and blundering senselesslythrough its hallways would only waste his temporary advantage.
    The hallway ended at a T junction, with a path to either side. Svenson stood, undecided, like a figure in the forest of a fairy tale, knowing that the wrong choice would lead to the equivalent of a malevolent ogre. One way led to a succession of small parlors, following one to the next like links in a chain. The other opened onto a narrow corridor whose walls were plain, but whose floor was strikingly laid with black marble. Then as he stood, Doctor Svenson quite clearly recognized a woman’s scream … dimly, as if the cry passed through a substantial intervening wall.
    Where had it come from? He listened. It was not repeated. He strode into the black corridor—less comfortable, less wholesome, and altogether more dangerous—for if he chose wrong, the sooner he knew it the better.
    The corridor was pocked with small niches for statuary—mostly simple white marble busts on stone pillars with the occasional limb-free torso. The heads were copies (though, given Vandaariff’s wealth, who knew?) from antiquity, and the Doctor recognized the varyingly vacant, cruel, or thoughtful heads of Caesars high and low—Augustus, Vespasian, Gaius, Nero, Domitian, Tiberius. As he passed this last, Svenson stopped. Dimly—though louder than the scream—he heard …
applause
. He spun to place the source of the noise, and saw, cut into the white wall behind the bust of that pensive, bitter emperor, regular grooves running up to the ceiling …
rungs
. Svenson edged behind the pillar and looked up. He looked around him and—taking a breath and shutting his eyes—began to climb.
    There was no hatch. The ladder continued into darkness before his hands found a new surface to grasp. The Doctor opened his eyes and blinked, allowing his eyes to adjust to the dark. He was gripping a piece of wooden scaffolding, the end of a low catwalk. He heard distant voices … and then again the whisper, like a sudden rustle of leaves, of an audience’s applause. Was he backstage at some sort of theatre? The Doctor swallowed, for the dizzyingheights from which stagehands operated the lifts and curtains always made him queasy (and his compulsion was to look up again and again, just to torment himself with vertigo). He recalled a performance of Bonrichardt’s
Castor und Pollux
where the triumphant finale, the titular pair ascending to heaven—an excruciatingly extended duet as they were raised (the twins operatically portly, the ropes audibly protesting) some hundred feet from view—had him near to heaving with dread into the lap of the unfortunate dowager seated next to him.
    Doctor Svenson clambered onto the catwalk and crept along it quietly. Ahead he saw a thin glimmer of light, perhaps a distant door set ajar, allowing a single beam to fall into the darkness. What performance might be hosted in Harschmort on a night like this? The engagement party had been a dual event—a public celebration of the engagement of Karl-Horst and Lydia and a private occasion for the Cabal to transact its private business. Was tonight a similarly double-edged event—and could this performance be the respectable side of whatever other malevolence was at work elsewhere in the house?
    Svenson continued forward, wincing at a tightness in his legs and a renewed pain from his twisted ankle. He thought of Flaüss’s boasting words—the Baron was dead, the Duke to follow. The Prince was a fool and a rake, eminently subject to manipulation