Glass Books of the Dream Eaters

“Not that it mattered—I could have cared less who killed Trapping—if this romantic idiot hadn’t killed Lorenz and our crewmen—much less set off my own anger—we could be sharing tea. All of this for nothing! Nothing! I merely want people I can control! But now—just listen!” She gestured at the grinding machinery and scoffed. “We’re all finished! It makes me so very…savage…”

She stepped closer, and Miss Temple raised her pistol—she was still looking into the wheelhouse from the stairs. The Contessa saw the revolver and laughed. Her hand shot out to a lever and wrenched it down. With a shudder that shook the airship to its very frame—and threw Miss Temple all the way to the bottom of the staircase, her stinging fall broken only by the distressing cushion of the first crewman’s body—the spinning momentum reversed direction. A broken chopping sound erupted from one of the propellers. The grinding from the wheelhouse rose nastily in pitch and volume, and as she shook her head Miss Temple heard the Contessa’s footsteps coming down the iron steps.

She clawed her way free of the body—she was moving too slowly, she had dropped her revolver—and looked ahead of her, hair hanging in her eyes. The hatch was closed, but the sudden jolt had knocked everyone off their feet. Chang sat on the floor with Eloise, cutting her bonds. Svenson was on his knees, facing Lydia and the Prince, skulking in a corner just beyond his reach. Miss Temple pulled herself toward them, feeling stiff as a tortoise.

“Cardinal!” Miss Temple gasped. “Doctor!”

Ignoring Miss Temple utterly, the Contessa’s voice shot out from above.

“Roger Bascombe! Wake up!”

Chang and Svenson turned as Roger did just that, returning to awareness in an instant. Roger leapt to his feet, took in Xonck and the Comte on the floor, and threw himself at the open cabinet of weapons. Chang raised the saber—Miss Temple was dismayed to see still more blood around Chang’s mouth—and struggled to stand. Doctor Svenson collected his own cutlass and reached his feet with the help of a brass wall bracket. He shouted to the Contessa.

“It is finished, Madame! The airship is falling!”

Miss Temple looked back, relieved she was not dead, but having no idea why it was so. The Contessa had paused on the little landing mid-way down the stairs, where in a small alcove—emblematic of the cunning use of space so necessary aboard vessels of all kinds—her minions had lashed into place an enormous steamer trunk.

Miss Temple heaved herself to her knees. She saw her revolver, slid half-way across the floor, and screamed at the Doctor as she flung herself toward it.

“She has the books! She has the books!”

The Contessa had both hands in the trunk and when she pulled them out each held a book—in her bare fingers! Miss Temple did not know how the woman did it—indeed the Contessa’s expression was ecstatic—how was she not swallowed up?

“Roger!” called the Contessa. “Are you alive?”

“I am, Madame,” he replied, having retreated at Chang’s approach to the other side of the unmoving Francis Xonck.

“Contessa,” began Svenson, “Rosamonde—”

“If I throw this book,” the Contessa called, “it will surely shatter on that floor, and some of you—particularly those under-dressed and sitting—will be killed. I have many of them. I can throw one after another—and since the alternative means the end of every book, I will sacrifice as many as I need. Miss Temple, do not touch that gun!”

Miss Temple stopped her hand, hovering above her revolver.

“Every one of you,” cried the Contessa. “Drop your weapons! Doctor! Cardinal! Do it now or this book goes right…at…her!”

She glared at Miss Temple with a wicked smile. Svenson dropped his cutlass with a clang, and it slid with the tipping of the craft toward the Prince, who snatched it up. Chang did not move.

“Cardinal?”

Chang wiped his mouth and spat, his blood-smeared jaw like the painted half-mask of a red Indian or a Borneo pirate, and his bone-weary voice from another world altogether.

“We are finished anyway, Rosamonde. I’ll be dead by the end of the day no matter what, but we’re all doomed. Look out the windows…we’re going down. The sea will smother your dreams along with mine.”

The Contessa weighed a book in her hand. “You’ve no care for your Miss Temple’s painful death?”

“It would be quicker than drowning,” answered Chang.

“I do not believe you. Drop your weapon, Cardinal!”

“If you answer a question.”

“Don’t be ridiculous—”

Chang shifted his grip on the saber and pulled back his arm, as if to throw it like a spear.

“Do you think your book will kill me before I put this through your heart? Do you want to take that chance?”

The Contessa narrowed her eyes and weighed her options.

“What question then? Quickly!”

“To be honest, it is two questions.” Cardinal Chang smiled. “First, what was Mr. Gray doing when I killed him? And second, why did you take the Prince from his compound?”

“Cardinal Chang—why?” asked the Contessa, with a sigh of unfeigned frustration. “Why possibly do you want to know this now?”

Chang smiled, his sharp teeth pink with blood.

“Because one way or another, I shan’t be able to ask you tomorrow.”

The Contessa laughed outright and took two steps down the stairs, nodding Svenson and Miss Temple toward Chang, her expression darkening at Miss Temple’s quite brazen snatch of her pistol before she went.

“Join your comrade,” the Contessa hissed at them, then looked at Eloise with disdain. “And you, Mrs. Dujong—one wonders if you are professionally helpless for a living— hurry!” She turned to the Prince, her tone sweetening. “Highness…if you would climb to the wheelhouse and do what you can to slow our descent—I believe most of the panels have helpful words on them…Lydia, stay where you are.”

Karl-Horst darted up the stairs as the Contessa continued down, stepping over the crewman, to face all four of them in the doorway. The Doctor had pulled Eloise to him and held her hand, while Miss Temple stood—feeling rather alone, actually—between the Doctor and Chang. She glanced once over her shoulder at Roger in the far doorway, his face pale and determined, another expression she had never seen.

“What a gang of unlikely rebels,” said the Contessa. “As I am a rational woman I must recognize your success—however inadvertent—just as I can find myself truthfully wishing that our circumstances were other than they are. But the Cardinal is right. We will most likely perish—all of you will, certainly— just as I have lost my partners. Very well, Mr. Gray…it is no secret now—not even to the Comte, were he still alive. The mixture of indigo clay was altered to decrease the pliability of the new flesh of his creations. As a defense, you see, if they became too strong—they would be more brittle. As it happened, perhaps too brittle…ah, well…it seems I was rash.” She laughed again—even at this extremity a lovely sound—and sighed, going on in a whisper. “As for the Prince—well, I do not like him to overhear. In addition to taking the opportunity of implementing my own control phrase for His Highness, he has also been introduced with a poison for which I alone have the antidote. It is a simple precaution. I have secretly made an adherent of his young cousin’s mother—the cousin who must inherit if the Prince dies without issue. With Karl-Horst so dead, Lydia’s child—and the Comte’s dire plan for their offspring—is swallowed in a battle for the succession that I shall control. Or perhaps the Prince shall live, continuing to consume the antidote in ignorance—it is all preparation.”

“And all of it rendered academic,” muttered Svenson.

Above them the Prince had found a helpful switch, for one chopping propeller switched off, followed a moment later by the other. Miss Temple looked to the windows, but they were still covered with curtains—were they still losing altitude? The cabin righted itself, and grew silent save for the whistling outside wind. They were adrift.