he saw a stack of lanterns, selected one and checked the oil, and then carefully struck a match. He turned the wick low, allowing just enough of a glow to find the hatch in the floor. He set the lamp down and with all his strength pulled on the handle. The heavy metal hatch creaked on its hinges, but swung open. He picked up the lantern again and stared into the pit below. For the second time in the day he thanked fate for his damaged nose. He descended into the sewers.
He had done it before during a protracted disagreement with a client unwilling to pay. The man had sent agents into the Library and Chang had been forced to use this most loathsome bolt-hole. He was still dripping sewage when he kicked in the client’s window later that evening—resolving the disagreement at razor’s edge—but that had been in late spring. Chang hoped it was close enough to winter and the water levels still low so he could pass without getting soaked in filth. The hatch led to a slimy set of stone steps, without any kind of rail. He walked down, stick in one hand and lantern in the other, until he reached the sewage tunnel itself. The fetid stream had shrunk since his last visit and he was relieved to see a slippery yard of stone to the side where he could walk. He bent his shoulders beneath the overhang and stepped very carefully.
It was very dark, and the lantern wick sputtered and sparked in the foul air. He was under the street, and then soon enough—counting his steps—under the Library itself. It was another twenty paces to another set of stairs and another hatch. He climbed up, heaved on the hatch with his shoulder, and entered the lowest Library basement—three floors below the lobby. He scraped his boots as best he could and shut the hatch behind him.
Keeping the lamp wick low, Chang made his way up to the main floor and darted across the corridor into the stacks. The building itself he knew intimately—indeed, like a blind man. There were three floors of hidden book stacks for each spacious floor of the Library that was open to the public. The stack aisles were crammed, dusty, and narrow, stuffed with seldom used books that could nevertheless never be disposed of. The walls—and floors and ceilings—were no more than iron scaffolding, and during the day one could look up through the gaps, as if through a strange sort of kaleidoscope, to the very top of the building, some twelve levels above. Chang climbed quickly up six narrow flights of stairs to what was the third floor of the Library proper, pushed open the door with his shoulder—it always stuck—and entered the vaulted map room, where he had so recently been hired by Rosamonde.
Now Chang turned up the wick, knowing there was no chance the guards would see—the map room was well away from the main staircase where light might be glimpsed from below. He set the lantern on one of the great wooden cases and searched for a particular volume on the curator’s desk—the massive
The map of Tarr Manor—and Lord Tarr’s quite expansive grounds—showed it to be in the county of Floodmaere. It was easy enough to find the quarry, some five miles from the main house, where the Lord’s estate claimed a low range of craggy hills. The manor house itself was large but not abnormally so, and the immediate grounds did not strike any particularly suspicious chord: orchards, pasture, stables. The land seemed generally wild, without notable cultivation or building. The map did show a number of small outlying structures at the quarry itself, but were they large enough to contain the Comte’s experiments?
The map of Harschmort was similarly inconclusive. The house was larger, certainly, and there were the nearby canals, but the surrounding land was fen and flat pasture. He had been in the house itself—it was not especially high. He was looking for any place where they might replicate the great sunken building at the Institute, which had been set well into the earth, but in these places must mean some kind of high tower. He could see no such location on either map. Chang sighed and rubbed his eyes. He was running out of time. He returned his attention to the map of Harschmort, for that had been where Aspiche’s Dragoons had taken the Cabal’s boxes, looking for anything he might have missed. He could not see the far edge of the map, and rotated it on the table to bring it closer to the light. In his haste, his fingers tore at the lower corner. He swore with annoyance and glanced at the damage. There was something there, something written. He peered closer. It was a citation to another map, a second map of the same area. Why another map? He noted the number in his head and crossed back to the
It was only a moment before he found the clue he sought. The present house was a ring of buildings around an open center occupied by a substantial formal garden in the French geometrical style. In the prison map, this center was dominated by a circular structure that—Chang’s mind raced to take it in—descended many floors, a panopticon of prison cells arranged around a central observation tower, all of it sunk under the earth. He looked again at the map of Vandaariff’s Harschmort…there was no visible trace of it at all. Chang knew in an instant that it was still there, underground. He thought of the Institute chamber, the mass of pipes running down the walls to the table where Angelique had lain. The prison panopticon could be easily re-made for the same purpose. There could be nothing like it at Tarr Manor—the expense would be well beyond the income of such a middling estate. He left the maps where they were and strode back to the stacks with the lantern. For all he knew Celeste was in that table’s embrace at Harschmort even then.
By the time he descended into Stropping it was after midnight. If anything, the spectacle of the place was even more infernal than he remembered (for Chang disliked leaving the city and so the station was invariably colored by annoyance and resentment)—the shrieking whistles, the fountains of steam, the glowering angels to either side of the awful clock, and below them all a desperate handful of driven souls, even at this hour, isolated under the vast iron canopy. Chang raced toward the large board that detailed the trains and their platforms and destinations, forcing his eyes to focus as he ran. He was half-way across the floor when the blurred letters congealed into a shape he could read—platform 12, leaving at 12:23 for Orange Canal. The ticket counter was closed—he would pay the conductor—and he dashed for the platform. The train was there, steam rising from the stack of its red engine.
As he came nearer he noted with a stab of wariness a line of finely dressed figures—men and women— boarding at the rear car. He slowed to a walk. Could it be another ball? After midnight? They would not be arriving at Harschmort until nearly two o’clock in the morning. He loitered until the last of the line had boarded—he recognized none of them—and approached the rear carriage himself, unseen. Perhaps twenty people had entered. He looked up at the clock—it was 12:18—and allowed another minute for them to clear the rear car before he climbed the steps and entered. The conductor was not there. Had he escorted the others forward? Chang took a few steps farther in and looked around. No one was in the rear-most compartments. He turned back to the door and froze. Advancing toward the train across the marble floor of Stropping Station was the unmistakable form of Mrs. Marchmoor, in a dress of dramatic black and yellow, and marching behind her a group of some fifteen red-coated Dragoons, their officer at her side. Chang spun on his heels and dashed forward into the car.
The compartments were empty. At the far end of the corridor Chang pulled open the door and closed it behind him, moving steadily ahead. This car seemed to be empty as well. It wasn’t surprising for so late an hour, especially since the people boarding seemed to make up a single large party. They would undoubtedly be seated together—and Chang had little doubt that Mrs. Marchmoor would be joining them, once she had established to her satisfaction he was not to be found. He reached the end of the second car and plunged on into the third. He looked back with a start, for through the glass doors and down the length of two corridors, he could see the reddish shapes of the Dragoons. They were aboard. Chang broke into a run. These compartments were equally empty—he was barely bothering to look into them as he passed. He reached the end of the third car and stopped dead. This door was different. It opened onto a small open platform with a handrail of chain on either side. Beyond it, just a short step away, was another car, different from the others, painted black with gold fittings, with a forbidding doorway of black-painted steel. Chang reached out for the handle. The door was locked. He turned to see red coats at the far
