Free The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters by Gordon Dahlquist Page B

announced.
    After a moment, the Comte rasped a reply. “And what is that?”
    Miss Temple turned her gaze to the Contessa, for it was she at whom the question was truly aimed. “I should like to know how Cardinal Chang died.”
    The Contessa Lacquer-Sforza looked into Miss Temple’s eyes with a sharp, searching intensity.
    “I killed him,” she declared, and in such a way that dared Miss Temple to speak again.
    Miss Temple was not yet daunted—indeed, if her captor did not want to discuss this topic, it now constituted a test of Miss Temple’s will.
    “Did you really?” she asked. “He was a formidable man.”
    “He was,” agreed the Contessa. “I filled his lungs with ground glass blown from our indigo clay. It has many effective qualities, and in such amounts as the Cardinal inhaled is mortal. ‘Formidable’ of course is a word with many shadings—and physical prowess is often the simplest and most easily overcome.”
    The ease of speech with which the Contessa described Chang’s destruction took Miss Temple completely aback. Though she had only been acquainted with Cardinal Chang for a very short time, so strong an impression had he made upon her that his equally sudden demise was a devastating cruelty.
    “Was it a quick death, or a slow one?” Miss Temple asked in as neutral a voice as she could muster.
    “I would not call it
quick
.…” As the Contessa answered, she reached into a black bag embroidered with hanging jet beads, pulling out in sequence her holder, a cigarette to screw into the tip, and a match to light it. “And yet the death itself is perhaps a generous one, for—as you have seen yourself—the indigo glass carries with it an affinity for dream and for … sensual experience. It is often observed that men being hanged will perish in a state of extreme tumescence—” she paused, her eyebrows raised to confirm that Miss Temple was following her, “if not outright spontaneous eruption, which is to say, at least for the males of our world, such an end might be preferable to many others. It is my belief that similar, perhaps even more expansive, transports accompany a death derived from the indigo glass. Or such at least is my hope, for indeed, your Cardinal Chang was a singular opponent … truly, I could scarcely wish him ill, apart from wishing him dead.”
    “Did you confirm your hypothesis by examining his trousers?” huffed the Comte. It was only after a moment that Miss Temple deduced he was laughing.
    “There was no time.” The Contessa chuckled. “Life is full ofregrets. But what are those? Leaves from a passing season—fallen, forgotten, and swept away.”
    The specter of Chang’s death—one that despite the Contessa’s lurid suggestion she could not picture as anything but horrid, with bloody effusions from the mouth and nose—had spun Miss Temple’s thoughts directly to her own immediate fate.
    “Where are we going?” she asked.
    “I’m sure you must know,” answered the Contessa. “To Harschmort House.”
    “What will be done to me?”
    “Dreading what you cannot change serves no purpose,” announced the Comte.
    “Apart from the pleasure of watching you writhe,” whispered the Contessa.
    To this Miss Temple had no response, but after several seconds during which her attempts to glance out of the narrow windows—placed on either side of their seat, not hers, assumedly to make it easier for someone in her position to either remain unseen or, on a more innocent planet, fall asleep—revealed no clear sense of where in the city she might now be, she cleared her throat to speak again.
    The Contessa chuckled.
    “Have I done something to amuse you?” asked Miss Temple.
    “No, but you are about to,” replied the Contessa. “ ‘Determined’ does not describe you by half, Celeste.”
    “Very few people refer to me with such intimacy,” said Miss Temple. “In all likelihood, they can be counted on one hand.”
    “Are we not sufficiently intimate?”