back, kicked in the door with a crash, and charged forward.
Before him on the carpet was a Macklenburg trooper with his trousers around his knees, desperately trying to pull them up at the same time he hopelessly groped for his saber—the belt and scabbard tangled around his ankles. The man’s mouth was opened in fearful protest and there was just time for Chang to register his expression shifting, from shame to incomprehension as he saw who had surprised him, before driving the dagger to the hilt into the trooper’s throat, choking off any cry of alarm. He yanked the blade free, stepping clear like a bullfighter of the attending spray of blood, and let the man topple to the side, his pale buttocks uncovered by his dangling shirt- tails.
Was there anything that more signified the helplessness of humanity than the exposed genitals and buttocks of the dead? Chang did not think so. Perhaps a single discarded child’s shoe…but that was mere sentiment.
Beyond the dead soldier, lying on the carpet with her dress above her waist was a richly clad woman, hair askew, her face aglow with perspiration around a green beaded mask. Her eyes were wild, blinking, and her breathing coarse and drawn…but the rest of her body seemed unresponsive, as if she were asleep. The man had clearly been about her rape, but Chang saw that her undergarments were yet only half-lowered—he had been surprised in the midst of his attack. Yet the woman’s vacant expression suggested her utter unconcern. He stood for a moment over her, his gaze drawn both to her beauty and by the twitches and spasms that rippled across her frame, as if she lay in the midst of a distended fit. He wondered how long it had taken the soldier to advance from hearing her heavy breathing in the hall, through cautious entry and voyeuristic observation, to outright violation. Chang shut the door behind him—the hall was still empty—and then bent down to restore the woman’s dress. He reached up to pull the hair away from her face and revealed, beneath her head like a pillow, what her apparently unseeing eyes so greedily devoured…a gleaming blue glass book.
The woman’s exhalations rose into a moan, her skin as hot and red as if she had fever. Chang looked at the book and licked his lips. With a decisiveness he did not wholly feel he took hold of the woman beneath her arms and lifted her from it, his eyes flinching from the bright gleam of the uncovered glass. As he pulled her away she whimpered in protest like a drowsing puppy separated from its teat. He set her down and winced—the light from the book stabbed to the center of his head. Chang snapped it closed, his lips stretched back in a grimace, feeling even through his leather gloves a strange pulsing as he touched it and a protesting energetic resistance when he pushed it shut. The woman did not make another sound. Chang watched her, idly wiping his dagger on the carpet— it was already red, what was the harm?—as her breath gradually calmed and her eyes began to clear. He gently pushed aside the hanging mask of beads. He did not recognize her. She was merely another of the great ladies and gentlemen drawn into the insidious web of Harschmort House.
Chang stood and snatched a pillow from the nearby settee. He ripped open one end with the dagger and he brusquely turned the lining inside out, dumping yellowed clumps of cotton wadding onto the floor. He inserted the book carefully into the pillowcase and stood. The lady could take care of herself as she woke—her fingers fitfully groped against the carpet—and forever wonder about her mysterious delivery…and if she started to scream, it would cause the disturbance he wanted. He stepped back to the door and paused, looking behind him at the room. There was no other door…and yet something caught his eye. The wallpaper was red, with a circular decoration of golden rings that looked vaguely Florentine. Chang crossed the room to a section of wallpaper, perhaps as high as his head. In the middle of one of the golden rings the pattern appeared to be frayed. He pressed at it with his finger and the interior of the ring popped through, leaving a hole. A spy hole. Chang strode past the woman—dreamily shaking her head and struggling to raise herself to one elbow—and out to the corridor.
Once more, Chang’s notion that most things are only effectively hidden because no one ever thinks to look for them was confirmed. Once he knew what he sought—a narrow corridor between rooms—it was easy enough to identify what door might lead to it. While it was possible that the other side of the spy hole was in another normal room, Chang felt this went against the entire idea—as he understood it—of Harschmort House, which was the
Chang dug out his keys—first Gray’s and then his own—and struggled to open the lock. It was actually rather tricky, and differed from others he’d found in the house. He looked around him with growing alarm, trying a second key and then fumbling for a third. He thought he heard a rising noise from the far end, near the staircase… applause? Was there some sort of performance? The key did not work. He felt for the next. With a click that echoed down the length of the corridor, a door was opened in the balcony above the staircase—and then the sound of steps, many people…they would be at the railing any instant. His key caught, the lock turned, and without hesitation Chang slipped the door open and darted through into the bitter dark. He closed it as quickly and silently as he could, with no idea if he’d been seen or heard.
There was nothing for it. He turned the lock behind him and felt his way deeper into the blackness. The walls were narrow—his elbows rubbed the dusty brick on either side as he went—but the floor was smoothly laid stone (as opposed to wood that might warp and in time begin to creak). He felt his way along, hampered by his restored stick in one hand and the wrapped book in the other, and by Miss Temple’s boots jostling the walls from his pockets. The spy hole in the woman’s room had been at head height, so he placed his hands there as he walked, to feel for any depression in the brick. Surely it had to be near…his impatience nearly caused him to pitch headlong into the dark as his foot struck a step in the blackness below him and he tripped forward—only saved from falling outright, despite a cruel barking on his knee, by another two steps on top of that. He found himself kneeling on what was effectively a small stepladder spanning the width of the passage. Chang carefully set down his stick and the book, and then felt the wall for the hole, finding it by the small half-circle of light caused by his partial dislodging of its plug from the room. He silently pulled the plug free and peered in. The woman had crawled away from the dead soldier, and crouched kneeling on the carpet. Her hands were under her dress—restoring her undergarments or perhaps attempting to see how far along the dead soldier’s obvious intentions had proceeded. She still wore her mask, and Chang was curious to see that despite the tears on her cheeks she seemed calm and determined in her manner…was this a result of her experience with the book?
He replaced the plug in the wall and wondered that the stair-step should be built across the entire passage…was there another spy hole on the opposite wall? Chang shifted his position and felt for it, finding the plug easily. He worked it free as gently as he could and leaned forward to gaze into the second room.
A man sprawled with his head and shoulders on a writing table. Chang knew him despite the black band across his eyes—as he came to know any man he’d followed through the street, identifying him from behind or within a crowd merely by his size and manner of being. It was his former client, the man who had apparently recommended his talents to Rosamonde, the lawyer John Carver. Chang had no doubt the secrets Carver held in his professional possession would open many a door to the Cabal across the city—he wondered how many of the law had been seduced, and shook his head at how simple those seductions must have been. Carver’s face was as red as the woman’s, and a pearling bead of drool connected his mouth to the table top. The glass book lay flickering under Carver’s hand. The upper part of his face lay pressed against it, eyes twitching with an idiot rapture, transfixed by its depths. Chang noted with some curiosity that the lawyer’s face and fingertips—the ones touching the glass—had taken on a bluish cast to the skin…almost as if they’d been frozen, though his sweat-sheened face belied that explanation. With distaste he noticed Carver’s other hand clutched at his groin with a spastic, dislocated urgency. Chang looked around the room for any other occupant, or any other useful sign, but saw nothing. He was not sure what such exposure to the book actually gained the Cabal—apart from this insensibility on the part of the victim. Did it re-make them like the Process? Was there something
When it came he looked again, prying the plug first from the left, the side where he’d seen the woman. Chang’s conscience gnawed at him—should he not ignore the holes and move directly for the office? Yet to do so
