The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters (84 page)

Before he was prepared the man was looking right at him, not two yards away: a tall fellow with hanging lank brown hair, Captain of Dragoons, red coat immaculate, brass helmet under one arm, drawn saber in the other. Svenson met his sharp gaze and tightened his grip on the revolver, but did not fire. The idea of killing a soldier went against the grain—who knew what these fellows had been told, or what they’d been ordered to do, especially by a government figure like Crabbé or even Bascombe? Svenson imagined Chang’s lack of hesitation and raised the revolver to fire.

The man’s eyes flicked up and down, taking in Svenson’s uniform, his rank, his unkempt person. Without any comment he turned to look in the other direction and then casually took a step toward Svenson, ostensibly—for the purpose of anyone watching from the room—to examine the door behind him. Svenson flinched—but still could not pull the trigger. Instead, the Captain leaned near to Svenson, reaching past him to the door and confirming it was locked. Svenson’s revolver was nearly pressed against the Captain’s chest, but the Captain’s saber had been deliberately dropped to his side.

“Doctor Svenson?” he whispered.

Svenson nodded, unprepared to form actual words.

“I have seen Chang. I will take these people to the center of the house—please go in the opposite direction.”

Svenson nodded again.

“Captain Smythe?” called Bascombe.

Smythe stepped back. “Nothing unusual, Sir.”

“Were you
speaking
to someone?”

Smythe gestured vaguely toward the door as he walked back, out of Svenson’s sight.

“There are servants in the next room. They’ve seen no one—perhaps their movement was what the Envoy heard. The door is now locked.”

“Undoubtedly,” agreed Lorenz, impatiently. “May we?”

“If you will follow me, gentlemen?” called Smythe. Svenson heard the doors opening, the scuffle and creak of the men lifting the fallen Duke, the
thwop
of water slopping out of the tub, the scuffle of footsteps and finally the closing of the door. He waited. There was no sound. He sighed and stepped around the corner, shoving the revolver back into his coat pocket.

Herr Flaüss stood just inside the far doorway, grinning smugly. Svenson dragged out the revolver. Flaüss snorted.

“What will you do, Doctor, shoot me and announce yourself to every soldier in the house?”

Svenson began to walk deliberately across the wide room toward the Envoy, his aim never wavering from the man’s chest. After all the torments he had passed through, it was bitter to imagine his downfall at the hands of
this
petty and puling creature.

“I knew what I had heard,” smiled Flaüss, “just as I knew Captain Smythe was not telling the truth. I’ve no idea why—and I am indeed curious what power you might have over an officer of Dragoons, especially in your present wholly decrepit state.”

“You’re a traitor, Flaüss,” answered Svenson. “You always have been.”

He was within two yards of the Envoy, the main door perhaps a yard beyond that. Flaüss snorted again.

“How can I be a traitor when I do my own Prince’s bidding? It is true I did not always understand that—it is true that I have been assisted to my present level of
clarity
—but you are as wrong about me, and the Prince, as you have always been—”

“He’s an idiot and a traitor himself,” spat Svenson hotly, “betraying his own father, his own nation—”

“My poor Doctor, you are quite behind the times. Much has changed in Macklenburg.” Flaüss licked his lips and his eyes gleamed. “Your Baron is dead. Yes, Baron von Hoern—his feeble network of operatives was well known—why else should I attend the every move of an obscure naval
physician
? And of course the Duke himself is also very unwell—your brand of patriotism is
passé
—very soon Prince Karl-Horst will
be
the nation, and perfectly placed to welcome the cooperative financial ventures of Lord Vandaariff and his associates.”

Flaüss wore a plain black half-mask across his eyes. With grim recognition Svenson could see the lurid scarring peeking out from the edges.

“Where is Major Blach?” he asked.

“Somewhere about, I am sure—as I am sure he will be most happy at your capture. He and I finally see eye to eye, of course—another blessing! It really is a matter of looking beyond to deeper
truths
. If, as you say, the Prince is not especially gifted in matters of policy, it is all the more important that those who support him are able to make up that lack.”

It was Svenson’s turn to scoff. He looked behind him. Adding another bizarre touch to his confrontation with the mentally altered Envoy, the concealed harpist continued to play. He turned back to Flaüss.

“If you knew I was there, why didn’t you say anything to your
masters,
to Lorenz or Bascombe?” He gestured with the revolver. “Why give me the upper hand?”

“I’ve done nothing of the kind—as I say, you can’t shoot me without dooming yourself. You’re no more a fool than you are a brawler—if you want to stay alive, you’ll give me your weapon and we shall walk together to the Prince—and I will establish myself as trustworthy in my new role. Especially so, I should say—for to get this far, I imagine you must have avoided a great number of ostensible foes.”

The Envoy’s smug expression demonstrated for Dr. Svenson the extent and the limit of the Process’s transformation. Never before would the man have been so bold as to risk an open confrontation—much less so brazen an admission of his secret plans. Flaüss had always been one for honeyed agreement followed by backhanded plotting, for layered schemes and overlapping patronage. He had despised the blunt arguments of Major Blach and Svenson’s own diffident independence as quite equal levels of defiance—and, indeed, personal offense. There was no doubt that the man’s
loyalty
had—as he put it—been “clarified” by his alchemical ordeal and his hesitancies weakened, but Svenson saw that his conniving, narcissistic nature remained quite whole.

“Your weapon, Doctor Svenson,” repeated Flaüss, his voice pointedly yet somehow comically stern. “I have you boxed with logic. I
do
insist.”

Svenson flipped his grip on the revolver, holding on to its barrel and cylinder. Flaüss smiled, as this seemed the first step to politely handing him the butt of the gun. Instead, feeling another uncharacteristic surge of animal capacity, Svenson raised his arm and cracked the pistol butt across the Envoy’s head. Flaüss staggered back with a squawk. He looked up at Svenson with an outraged glare of betrayal—as if in flouting the man’s “logic” Svenson had broken all natural law—and opened his mouth to scream. Svenson stepped forward, arm raised for another swing. Flaüss darted away, quicker than his portly frame would seem to allow, and Svenson’s blow went wide. Flaüss opened his mouth again. Svenson abruptly switched his grip on the revolver and aimed it directly at the Envoy’s face.

“If you scream, I
will
shoot you! I’ll have no more reason for silence!” he hissed.

Flaüss did not scream. He glared at Svenson with hatred and rubbed the welt above his eye. “You are a
brute,
” he insisted. “An outright
savage
!”

Svenson padded quietly down the hallway—now sporting the Envoy’s black silk mask, the better to blend in with the locals—following Smythe’s directions away from the center of the 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 senselessly through 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 dizzying heights 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 and control. Yet if the Doctor could prise the Prince from the clutches of the Cabal—Process or no—might there not be yet some hope, providing the ministers around him were responsible and sane?

But then with a grim snort he recalled his own brief conversation with Robert Vandaariff over Trapping’s corpse. Such was the great man’s irresistible influence that any unfortunate or scandalous occurrence—like the Colonel’s death—was made to disappear. The grandson of Robert Vandaariff—especially if inheriting as a child and requiring a regent—would be the best return the financier could realize on the investment of his daughter. After the child’s birth Karl-Horst would be unnecessary—and, given everything, wholly unregretted at his death.

But what were Svenson’s choices? If Karl-Horst were to die
without
issue, the Macklenburg throne would pass to the children of his cousin Hortenze-Caterina, the oldest of whom was but five. Wasn’t this a better fate for the Duchy than being swallowed by Vandaariff’s empire? Svenson had to face the deeper truth of his mission from the Baron. Knowing what he did of the forces in play, if he could not prevent the marriage, which seemed impossible, he would have to shoot Prince Karl-Horst down—to be a traitor in service to a larger patriotism.

The reasoning left the taste of ash in his mouth, but he could see no other way.

Svenson sighed, but then, like the shift of a mountebank’s con-trick, the line of light in front of him—which he had, in the darkness, taken to be a distant door—was revealed for what it was: the thin gap between two curtains, not two feet in front of his face. He gently pushed it aside, both light and sound flooding through the gap, for the fabric was actually quite heavy, as if it had been woven with lead to prevent fire. But now Doctor Svenson could see and hear everything…and he was appalled.

It was an
operating
theatre. His catwalk door was perched just to the right of the audience and led across the stage itself at the height of the ceiling—some twenty feet above the raised table and the white-robed, white-masked woman bound to its surface with leather straps. The gallery was steeply raked and full of well-dressed, masked spectators, all gazing with rapt attention at the masked woman who spoke from the stage. Doctor Svenson recognized Miss Poole at once, if only by the woman’s irrepressible glow of self-satisfaction.