Word may be left in my name at the St. Royale Hotel and I shall respond directly. In this I am your humble and obedient servant,

Caroline Stearne

There was nothing else in the envelope. Chang crouched down, leaning his face closer to Rawsbarthe.

“Where is the rest of it?” he asked.

“I've no idea!” the man squeaked.

“Who is your immediate superior after Bascombe?”

“M-Mr. Phelps!”

This was going nowhere.

“Why give him this? Of all her things? The truth—or I shall cut off your nose.”

“Because it mentions Mrs. Trapping! And she has vanished!”

“Vanished as of when?”

“Three days ago.”

“Then who is in charge of the Xonck family interests?”

Rawsbarthe shook his head. “Stewards, directors, factory managers—but no one can step forward. They all wait for Henry Xonck to recover, though the Doctors give no hope—but the nation's defense, our capacity for military action—”

“I am not aware of any need for war.”

Rawsbarthe sputtered. “Simply because you are not aware does not mean that genuine threats—”

Chang snapped the envelope at Rawsbarthe's nose.

“What ‘misguided efforts’ was Charlotte Trapping engaged in? Is she being blackmailed? By someone who wants her newly expanded share of the Xonck empire?”

“I've n-no idea!”

“Do you know this Caroline Stearne?”

“Unfortunately not—however, as soon as you allow me to leave I assure you that one of my very first points of business will be to inquire for her at that very hotel.”

“Do not bother. The woman's throat has been cut ear to ear this last week.”

Chang stood. If only the letter had a date! How had Caroline Stearne known to write Elöise? When had she known? Such a warning may have steered Charlotte Trapping away from discovering the Cabal's plot, but might it not also have protected the woman when her husband and older brother were both marked for ruin? Serious and stable like Bascombe, Caroline Stearne had been in the first rank of the Cabal's minions, but Chang had no illusion that she would do such a thing on her own impulse… so who amongst the Cabal had directed her?

Chang turned to Rawsbarthe, who had grown rather accustomed to looking up at the ceiling.

“Where is Colonel Aspiche?” asked Chang.

“Who?”

“Colonel of Dragoons—the 4th Dragoons.”

“How on earth should I know?”

“Is he alive?”

“Is there a reason he wouldn't be?”

Chang dropped to his knees and drove his fist hard across Rawsbarthe's jaw, knocking the man senseless once more. He stood, flexed the fingers in his glove, and tucked the envelope into the inner pocket of his coat. He'd been in the Trapping house far too long.

FIVE MINUTES later Chang was on the street, unseen and unremarked, threading his way toward the White Cathedral, itself no particular destination but on the way to others he had not yet chosen between. One possibility would be the Palace—Stäelmaere House itself—to find firsthand about the Duke and the glass woman. Charlotte Trapping had been missing for three days… yet for the Captain and his soldiers to reach Karthe, they must have been sent well before that, soon after the airship had set forth. He was sure the true sequence of events would tell him who lay behind it, and their real intentions… but it was very late and the pleasure Chang had felt from his encounter with Sapp and Horace had faded before the unremarkable complexity of what he had learned of Elöise. She was an intelligent woman, but the idea that an intelligent woman would make the choices her room had spelled out, as he knew perfectly intelligent people did every day of the week, was nevertheless dismaying.

He reached the Cathedral and kept on, up St. Margaret's to the Circus Garden, but turned well before he reached its lights—even at this hour burning bright—wending by habit back toward the Library. In another five minutes he reached the squat hut housing the sewer entrance, and ten minutes after that heaved open the hatch in the Library basement. He climbed the inner staircases in silence, located the pallet in the dark—quietly displacing the bottles around it (the spot was used in the afternoons by an especially gin-steeped catalog clerk)—and gratefully stretched the whole of his frame onto its welcome softness. He laid his coat over his body like a stiffened blanket and folded his glasses into the outside pocket. He exhaled in the dark, feeling the bones in his shoulders settle into the pallet, the edges of his mind already beginning to fray into dream… he recalled a stanza from the Coeurome retelling of Don Juan, extending the story into the new world—“that eternal optimism of desire/persistent as plague”—but then the words blurred, flowing from line to line like a bubbling stream of broken ink… then the lines became smoke against a white sky, Doctor Svenson's cigarettes, curling up… smoke rising from Angelique's shattered torso… from the Contessa's lacquered cigarette holder. Chang's last thought was of that same smoke, exhaled from the Contessa's mouth into the ear of Celeste Temple, still feverish on her bed. Then Celeste opened her eyes, the whites swirling with the filth that had been blown into each blinking globe.

CHANG WOKE to shafts of dimmest morning falling five floors through a lattice of metal catwalks and staircases, all the way from skylights of thick streaked glass on the roof. The effect was very much like a prison—or how Chang imagined a prison to be—but he enjoyed it nevertheless, taking pleasure in willful limitation. He padded his way to the archivist's closet, where he found water, a mirror, and a chamber pot. The water was not hot, so he did not shave, but rinsed his neck cloth, wrung it out, and then draped it across his shoulders to dry. He grimaced at the state of his once-fine leather coat, ruined first by passage through the furnace pipes of Harschmort and second by immersion in the sea. But Chang had no money to replace it. As the lining was whole and the coat still kept him warm, he resigned himself to being mistaken, with his glasses, for a blind beggar.

Morning ablutions as complete as they were ever going to be, Chang climbed to the ninth floor of stacks, emerging on the third floor of high vaulted public rooms. He crossed to the Document Annex, where the government publications were housed. Like every public room in the Library, the Annex was graced with a pink-streaked marble floor and a large cartouche above the door bearing the arms of the aristocratic family funding that particular room's construction (in this case the extinct and unregretted Grimps). In direct opposition to its opulent trappings, the Annex, owing to its ever-expanding contents, had been crammed with shelving, covering the walls and in free-standing rows, some fifteen feet tall, requiring ladders and the help of Library staff to find anything whatsoever.

For Chang, the collection was a ready source of information about land holdings, changes in law, marriages, estates, legacies, census surveys—anything (which meant everything) the dogged grind of the government decided ought to be set down for posterity. He started at the beginning. The Duke was alive, which meant his puppet mistress, Mrs. Marchmoor, must be as well. Charlotte Trapping was not in her house, and the Palace bureaucracy sought her. By all accounts she was no idiot (unless one took into account her marriage), only a woman who had been routinely shunted aside from her family's power…

Chang rolled a wooden ladder into position and climbed to its highest rung. On the top shelf was a wooden tray holding the newest reports not yet of a quantity to be bound. Chang scooped up the contents and stepped easily down the ladder with his arms full, sure as a cat, crossing to a wide table. He dropped the pile onto it without ceremony.