Glass Books of the Dream Eaters

Chang let that pass, retaining his even tone. “There were marks on Trapping’s face, like burns, around the eyes, but of a regular, precise nature, as if from a brand—”

“A brand?”

“Indeed.”

“On his face?”

“As I said. Further, the room—there was a strange odor—”

“What was it?”

“I cannot say. I have no ability with odors.”

“A poison?”

“It is possible. I do not know.”

Aspiche frowned, thrown into thought. “All this—it makes no sense,” he snapped. “What about these burns?”

“That is my question to you.”

“What does that mean?” said Aspiche, taken aback. “I don’t have a clue.”

They stood in silence for a moment. The Adjutant-Colonel seemed genuinely perplexed.

“My examination was interrupted,” continued Chang. “I was again forced to make my way through the house, this time away from pursuit. I managed to lose my pursuers on my way back to the canal.”

“All right, all right. What was in those carts?”

“Boxes. Of what I don’t know.”

“And his confederates?”

“No idea. It was a masked ball.”

“And this—this substance—you don’t think you killed him?”

“I know I did not.”

Aspiche nodded. “It’s good of you to say. Still, I’ll pay you as if you had. If he turns up alive—”

“He won’t.”

Aspiche smiled tightly. “Then you’ll merely owe me the job.”

He pulled a thin leather wallet from his jacket and handed it to Chang, who tucked it into his coat.

“What happens next?” asked Chang.

“Nothing. My hope is that it’s over.”

“But you know it isn’t,” Chang snarled. Aspiche did not reply. Chang pressed him. “Why has there been no further word? Who else is involved? Vandaariff? The Germans? Any one of three hundred guests? You know the answers or you don’t, Colonel. You’ll tell me what you want to. But someone’s hidden your body, and you’re going to have to know why. You’ve come this far—it’ll have to be finished.”

Aspiche did not move.

As Chang gazed at the man—stubborn and dangerously proud—one of the Persephone fragments rose to his mind:

His willful suit, imperious and cold Pay’d court perfum’d by graves and fetid mold

“You know how to find me…discreetly,” Chang muttered. He turned and stalked back to the Raton Marine.

Chang had spent the previous three days planning the murder of Arthur Trapping for a fee. It had seemed simple enough. Trapping was the ambitious brother-in-law of Henry Xonck, a wealthy arms manufacturer. To find a position fitting to his newly married status, he had with his wife’s money purchased a prestigious commission as commander of the 4th Dragoons, but he was no soldier and his decorations resulted from his mere presence at two provincial engagements. Trapping’s actual exploits were limited to consuming heroic quantities of port and a lingering patch of local dysentery. When his regiment was rewarded with a significant change of duties, Trapping’s executive officer, the long-suffering Adjutant-Colonel—a professional soldier who, if he were to be believed, didn’t desire the command so much for himself, but only to clear the place for any genuinely worthy figure—had taken the quite remarkable step of engaging Cardinal Chang.

Outright assassination was not Chang’s usual line, but he’d done murder before. More often, as he preferred to see it, he was engaged to influence behavior, through violence, or information, or both, as necessary. In recent months, however, he’d felt a growing disquiet, as if there were behind his every step the barely audible ticking of a clock, that his life wound toward some profound accounting. Perhaps it was a malady of his eyes, a general gnawing anxiety that grew from seeing as much as possible in shadow. He did not allow this lurking dread to influence his movements, but when Aspiche had offered a high fee, Chang saw it as an opportunity to withdraw from view, to travel, to disappear into the opium den—anything until the cloud of foreboding had passed by.

Not that he trusted what Aspiche had told him of the job. There was always more to it—clients always lied, withheld. Chang had spent the first day doing research, digging through social registers, old newspapers, genealogies, and as ever, the connections were there for the finding. Trapping was married to Charlotte Xonck, the middle child of three, between Henry, the oldest, and Francis, as yet unmarried and just returned from a lengthy tour abroad. Though poor Adjutant-Colonel Aspiche might assume that the regiment’s rise in stature had been earned by its colonial triumphs, Chang had found that the order to invest the 4th Dragoons as the Prince’s Own (or Drunken Wastrel Whoremongering Sodomite’s Own, as Chang preferred to think of it) was issued one day after the Xonck Armory agreed to lower terms for an exclusive contract to re-fit the cannons of the entire navy and coastal defenses. The mystery was not why the regiment had been promoted, but why Henry Xonck thought it worth such a costly bargain. Love for his only sister? Chang had sneered and sought out another archivist to badger.

The precise nature of the regiment’s new duties was not part of any official document he could find, every account merely parroting what he’d read in the newspaper—“Palace defense, Ministry escort, and ceremonial duties”—which was gallingly vague. It was only after pacing back and forth that it occurred to him to confirm where the announcement had actually been issued. He again dragged the archivist away from his other duties to retrieve the folio of collected announcements, and then saw it on the cover of the folio itself—it was from a Ministry office, but not the War Ministry. He peered at the paper, and the seal at the top. The Foreign Ministry. What business had the Foreign Ministry with announcing—and thus, by inference, arranging—the installation of a new regiment of “Palace defense, Ministry escort, and ceremonial duties”? He snapped at the archivist, who merely stammered, “Well, it does say Ministry escort—and the F-Foreign Ministry is indeed one of the, ah, M-M-Ministry offices—” Chang cut him off with a brusque request for a list of senior Foreign Ministry staff.

He’d spent a good hour wandering through the darkened stacks—the staff had conceded access to Chang, reasoning it was less bother to have him out of their sight than in their faces—pushing these rudimentary pieces around in his mind. No matter what else it did, the most important work of the regiment would be under the aegis of the Foreign Ministry. This could only refer to diplomatic intrigues of one kind or another, or internal government intrigues—that somehow in exchange for Xonck’s lowered fee, the War Ministry had agreed to put the regiment at the Foreign Ministry’s disposal. For Xonck, Trapping would obviously function as his spy, alerting him to any number of international situations that might influence his business, and the rise and fall of the business of others. Perhaps this was reward enough (Chang was unconvinced), but it did not explain why one Ministry would be doing such an outlandish service for another—or why the Foreign Ministry might require its own troops in the first place.

Nevertheless, this much information allowed Chang, after making himself familiar with Trapping’s person, the location of his house, his coach, and the regimental barracks, to position himself outside the Foreign Ministry itself, convinced that this was the crucial point of revelation. Such was Chang’s way, and while he performed such investigation to better understand what he was engaged with, it’s also true that he did it to occupy his mind. If he was but a brute murderer, he could have cut Arthur Trapping down at any number of places, simply by following him until he was isolated in the street. The fact that Chang might well end up doing that very thing in the end didn’t alter his desire to understand the reasoning behind his actions. He was not squeamish about his work, but he was well aware that the risk was his, and that a client might always wonder about furthering their own security by arranging things so that Chang too might fall victim to unpleasant circumstance. The more he knew—about the clients and their objects—the safer he was going to feel. In this case, he was keenly aware that the forces involved were far more powerful and vast than Trapping and his bitter Adjutant-Colonel, and he would need to be careful not to provoke their interest. If ’twere done, ’twere best done as invisibly as possible.

On the afternoon of that first day and again on the second, Trapping’s coach had taken him from the regimental barracks to the Foreign Ministry, where he had spent several hours. At each evening the coach had