The Dragon Men

Chapter Eleven

A faint tremble shook the table as Cixi set her teacup on it. Prince Kung paused over his own cup to glance at the ceiling, as if it were at fault.

“The war machines are stomping about,” Kung said. “I wonder if Su Shun will invade even if he does not find Lady Michaels.”

“He cannot hold the throne if he does not invade,” Cixi said. “No emperor can be so disfigured as he. This war is a distraction from his disqualification.”

“He is a warlord, and he intends to prove it to the world.” Prince Kung drained his cup. They were sitting in his chambers, again with the spy holes closed. Zaichun was squirreled away in another room, still in disguise. So far as the servants were concerned, Kung was sheltering a recently widowed cousin, a casualty of the second war over opium. “One wonders what you thought of the conversation with the foreigners.”

Cixi pursed her lips. “It is difficult to discuss anything with such people. They have no manners, and they ask direct questions that make a lady of any delicacy blush. One is forced to say things one would never normally say. It is quite shocking. No wonder they are called barbarians.”

“They say the opposite of us, you know. They claim we never say what we mean and that our faces are inscrutable.” He started to refill his cup from the pot, but Cixi quickly leaned forward to do it for him, automatically taking the role of concubine. “The philosophers remind us that everything must have its opposite. Nothing can exist by itself. Yin and yang.”

“Perhaps,” Cixi conceded. “But I do not see how philosophy is helpful.”

“And there is a seed of each thing in its opposite. We know yin has a spot of yang, and the other way around. You yourself experienced it just now.”

“This is difficult to understand.”

Prince Kung hid a smile behind his hand. “After years of living in the Imperial Court, where one must watch every word and ensure every sentence has two, three, or even four meanings, was it not the tiniest bit refreshing to speak with people who expected you to say exactly what you meant and gave you the same thing in return?”

“Hm.” Cixi toyed with a bit of fish in the bowl before her with her chopsticks and considered. He had a point. Talking to these foreigners had been shocking, but with that had also come a little daring thrill, and afterward she had to admit she found it. . interesting even if their manners were distasteful. “Perhaps a tiny bit refreshing.”

“I found it so as well, before Xianfeng sealed the borders. Another reason why our two worlds must cooperate. Everyone thinks the other side is dreadful, but once the sides begin talking to each other, we inevitably find the other side interesting and refreshing. They are more like us than we know.”

“Lady Michaels is quite devoted to Lord Ennock,” Cixi admitted. “I did not know Westerners felt that way about one another. One hears about. . depravities in their bedchambers, but nothing about deep feeling.”

“Another rumor they spread about us.” Kung shifted on the floor pillow. He still looked strange and unkempt with his hair and beard growing out. “I will need to meet them soon to talk further. Where are they now?”

“On their ship in the third stable. Lord Ennock insisted on examining it, and it seemed to me a good place to hide them. We took them out in a spider palanquin with the curtains shut so the servants wouldn’t see. They are eating. I think even you couldn’t bear to watch that, my lord.”

“I do have my limits. What do you think of Lady Michaels’s idea to take the Jade Hand?”

“It makes me nervous.” Cixi picked up an empty cup and ran her finger around the rim. Her ribs felt tight. “It would be the fastest way to unseat Su Shun.”

“The difficulty is that Su Shun has returned to the Forbidden City and spends all his time within the red walls. My spies tell me he does not leave it for fear someone will seize the throne from him.”

“Which is exactly what we are attempting to do,” Cixi mused. “Can we lure him out?”

“That’s a possibility, though he will surely be heavily guarded if he comes outside. His generals and the Dragon Men speak for him outside the Forbidden City. They are handling most of the day-to-day decisions now.”

Cixi blinked. “Dragon Men?”

“Yes. Su Shun gives them basic orders, but they carry them out in their own fashion.”

“So China is being run by Dragon Men? But they are. . it is. .”

“Yes,” Kung repeated. “They are powerful but not fit to rule. Already in the southern provinces, peasants are being ordered to tear out rice fields and plant lotus instead because Lung Min finds the lotus more aesthetic.”

“But Xianfeng was planning to expand those fields next year. This will cause food shortages!”

“It will. And Lung Chao is causing new roads to be built in characters that spell out mathematical equations. More peasant labor being taken from the fields.”

“He will drain the treasury,” Cixi said tightly. “Why is Su Shun allowing this?”

“Everything is a distraction from his weak position on the throne. And he is busy overseeing the new military. It is quite impressive, as we have already been feeling.”

“China is ruled by lunatics. We must stop this quickly.”

“And for that, we need the Jade Hand.” Kung gestured at the Ebony Chamber, which sat on one corner of the table. The gold dragons chased one another like playful flames across the black wood. “Speaking of the treasury, I have discovered that my own resources are wearing thin. As I am out of favor with the new Imperial Court, I have lost several important contracts. It has also become more expensive to maintain good spies in the Forbidden City. It did not help that we unexpectedly had to dress everyone in the household in white for the emperor’s mourning.”

His hinting couldn’t have been broader. Cixi felt on firmer ground here. She knew what was expected, and she knew what to do.

“Of course.” Cixi slid the box to her. “I took many, many valuable jewels with me when I fled. I am sure even a handful will make up for your losses.”

She spun the phoenix latch wheels to 018 and opened the Chamber.

It was empty.

Ice water ran down Cixi’s back. “This is impossible,” she whispered.

She felt around the box’s interior, then tipped it upside down and shook it, a nonsensical move, but one she couldn’t help. The dragons twisted under her fingertips. Nothing. A fortune in jewels, vanished, and all her hopes gone with them.

“What happened?” Kung asked.

“I do not understand,” she said in horror. “The Chamber never left my sight except when I talked to the foreigners, and then it was locked away in my room. No one can open the phoenix latch. They would have to steal the entire box, and they clearly did not.” Panic swept over her, and only a lifetime of training kept her from bursting into tears. “What will I do? What will we do?”

Kung puffed out his cheeks. His worried eyes looked even more worried now. “We will think.” He paused to do just that. Cixi found her mind couldn’t work at all, and she merely sat. Su Shun would now keep the throne, and eventually he would hunt her down and kill her and Zaichun.

“I will take a moment to be as blunt as a foreigner, since we are in extremis,” Kung said at last. “I have enough money to keep my household running for another two weeks. That is not taking into account spies and bribes and everything else associated with trying to wrest the throne away from Su Shun. Without your jewels, I will have to sell property to remain solvent, and that is a dragon eating its own tail.”

Cixi sat upright, her fingers gripping the table. Now was not the time to panic. Now was the time to act. “Very well, then. We need to do two things. We need to find out what happened to the jewels, and we need to talk to the foreigners. We need to make a plan.”

“A plan,” Kung said, “that does not involve money.”

Gavin poked at the strange food with the two sticks he’d been given to eat with. Clockwork reflexes or no, he couldn’t seem to get the trick of eating with them. Some of the food seemed to be little dumplings folded in half, and he had solved the problem of eating by simply stabbing them with one stick like a single-pronged fork, but anything with rice or bits of chopped vegetables in it were beyond him. Phipps, who was sitting at the table on deck across from him, used the chopsticks with ease, and Alice, though a bit clumsy, was already at least competent. Gloomily he stabbed another damp dumpling and wondered why Lady Orchid hadn’t provided them with the eating spiders he’d seen Yeh and the Chinese ambassador use back in London.

“This is quite good,” Alice said. “I could rapidly get used to this cuisine. What’s in it, do you suppose?”

“I’ve learned the hard way,” Phipps replied, “that it’s best not to ask. Rather like sausage.”

They were sitting on the Lady’s deck, but not outdoors. The ship currently lay hidden within an enormous storage building within Prince Kung’s compound, and they had been given strict instructions not to show themselves outside for fear they’d be discovered. The large storage building around them was warm and stuffy in the August heat, and Gavin was glad for the light silk pajama-style outfit he’d been given, though he refused to wear the round cap indoors. Phosphorescent lanterns gave them light without additional heat.

Since Lieutenant Li’s men already knew what was going on, Prince Kung had posted a handful of them at each of the exits, though whether to keep the foreigners safe or ensure they didn’t escape, Gavin wasn’t quite sure. They showed him a great deal of deference, however, and the salamander made strange weight around his ear. He tried not to think about the bit of machinery it had inserted into his brain or Cixi’s revelation about the clockwork plague, but it was difficult. He found the chopsticks becoming heavy in his hand, and his appetite faded.

The Lady of Liberty herself was partly dismantled. Gavin had arrived in the building to find Kung’s men had deflated her envelope and folded it neatly. The endoskeleton had been collapsed in on itself and rolled up, as it had been designed to do, and both endoskeleton and envelope lined the gunwale. The paraffin oil generator purred to itself and puffed steam. Gavin’s wing harness was attached to it. Now that they weren’t flying anywhere, he could use the generator to charge the battery. Not that he was going to fly anywhere in the near future. He saw a long line of devastating failures stretch out before him: Alice hadn’t been able to spread her cure as they had hoped; he had finished a pair of wings but barely used them; and, not least, he was dying of the clockwork plague.

Damn it, he hated this. He hated feeling unhappy (though who enjoyed it?), and he hated feeling so out of balance. It wasn’t normal. It wasn’t him. It must be the clockwork plague. Or was it? Could he blame all his problems on the disease? It would certainly be convenient, a nice way of avoiding a depressing truth. He poked morosely at his food bowl, the chopsticks clumsy in his hands.

“Having trouble, darling? Here.” Alice plucked a bit of something from her bowl and held it out to Gavin, who wryly accepted it. Click, who was sitting on a stool of his own, watched with vague interest, then licked a paw with his steel wool tongue.

“Delicious,” Gavin pronounced.

“Feeding tidbits to your fiance.” Phipps set her own bowl aside. “I believe the term for that is twee.”

“What’s the point of having a fiance if one cannot indulge in his tweeness?” Alice said.

Gavin choked on the bit of food and coughed wildly. Phipps thumped his back with her brass arm. Alice sipped some tea with a perfectly straight face.

“What?” she said. “You know I’ve always admired your tweeness, Gavin. It’s so noticeable.”

Now even Phipps’s face was turning red. Gavin slapped the table, making the lantern jump and dishes rattle, his face contorted with suppressed laughter.

“You. . didn’t just. . say. .,” he gasped.

“Of course. Why, every woman knows she can judge a man’s worth by his tweeness.”

Gavin lost it. The laughter burst from him in small explosions. His fists pounded the table. Phipps joined in, and at last Alice smiled, then giggled, then laughed. The sound rose on wings to the rafters and disturbed the pigeons roosting above. Gavin felt lighter for it, and he touched Alice’s hand.

“This is quite the reversal,” she said. “Usually you’re the one who keeps my spirits up.”

“The world is upside-down,” he admitted. “Everything is backward.”

One of Alice’s little automatons, a whirligig, sputtered up from one of the hatchways carrying a brass spider. It flitted over to Alice and deposited the spider on the table in front of her. It twitched and tried to walk, but all four of its left legs weren’t working. The whirligig backed away and chittered.

“Now what happened to you?” Alice asked, turning the spider over. “Click, would you bring my tools, please?”

Click regarded her for a moment, then jumped down and trotted away. A moment later, he came back with a black bag in his mouth. Alice accepted it from him with thanks and extracted from it a roll of black velvet, which she unrolled across the table, revealing a set of small, intricate tools. The velvet was embroidered with Love, Aunt Edwina. Alice tried to select a tool with her left hand, but the corks on her fingertips got in the way.

“Bugger this,” she muttered, and pulled the corks off with little squeaking sounds. “No one will see in here.”

Gavin glanced around and lowered his voice. “You could start spreading the cure here, you know. It wouldn’t be difficult to pull one cork away and scratch a servant or two. The cure would spread fairly quickly through Peking after that.”

“That’s my intent.” Alice set the corks aside. “Though I can’t do it here. I’m sure any servant I scratch will let Prince Kung know immediately, and they’ll cut off his head or something equally horrible. I will wait until I can get into the city.”

“Doesn’t Lady Orchid want you to spread the cure?” Gavin said.

“Lady Orchid wants the throne,” Phipps corrected. “I don’t know that she wants Alice to destroy the future of Dragon Men. Lady Orchid promised only to find a cure for Gavin, not reopen the borders or bring Alice’s cure to China. Have you noticed she’s guarding us with men who have already had the plague and can’t spread the cure? Once she puts her son on the throne, she’ll probably want a steady supply of Dragon Men to ensure he stays there. I would. And that means Alice is a potential threat to her regency. She and Prince Kung will either have to send Alice home before she cures anyone. . or kill her.”

“The thought had occurred,” Alice agreed.

Gavin set his jaw against a wave of anger. “I’ll kill them myself first.”

“Thank you, darling,” Alice said, “and I’m not saying you shouldn’t, but let’s hope that won’t be necessary.”

“That was. . bloodthirsty for a baroness,” Phipps opined.

“I long ago decided that it is better for me to live than for enemies to survive,” Alice said primly. “In any case, I do think we’ve decided on the best course-help Lady Orchid get her son on the throne so she can order the Dragon Men to cure Gavin, as she swore to do. Then we’ll flee as quickly as we can.”

She picked up a tool and used it to unfasten a trapdoor on the spider’s underside while the hovering whirligig looked on with concern.

“How do you do it?” Phipps asked. “I never had the chance to ask you, even when you were with the Ward.”

“I honestly don’t know, Lieutenant.” The spider went still as Alice extracted a number of tiny parts from the spider and laid them on the black velvet, where they stood out like little brass stars. Her hands moved gracefully, fluidly, with soft precision. Gavin automatically noted each part, how they went into the spider, the wear marks, the size and shape and weight, how they pressed sensually into the cloth. His heart rate increased, and a coppery tang came into his mouth. It was exciting to see Alice pull apart the little machine, and he felt himself falling into a delightful fugue again.

“Some clockworker inventions can be recreated by normal people,” Phipps was saying, oblivious to Gavin’s interest. “Babbage engines that let machines ‘think’ on a basic level, tempered glass for lightbulbs and cutlasses, dirigible designs. But truly intricate work such as automatons that understand human speech or Gavin’s wings or the Impossible Cube-only a clockworker can create them, even if the clockworker draws diagrams. The Third Ward tried for years even to made basic repairs on them, and we completely failed. But you-”

“Yes, Lieutenant.” Alice was absorbed in her work. She pulled the flywheel out of the spider and held it up with a pair of tweezers. “Off-center. No wonder its legs were paralyzed, poor thing.”

“How do you do it?” Phipps asked again. “You must have some idea.”

“None.” Alice ran her fingers deliciously over the flywheel, and Gavin felt it as if they were running over his own skin. Grasping the flywheel by the piston, she slid it back slowly into place with a click. The spider twitched and Gavin shuddered. “I look into a machine and just know.”

“It’s a singular talent.” Phipps crossed her arms, brass over flesh. Her monocle gleamed in the phosphorescent glow of the lanterns. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“It makes me a little nervous, to tell the truth, Lieutenant.” She replaced more gears and screws with slow, deft twists. Gavin was unable to take his eyes off the muscles and tendons in her hands. His chest ached. “When I was defusing Aunt Edwina’s bomb in the basement of the Doomsday Vault, it occurred to me that my little talent is a version of the clockwork plague-not deadly enough to be plague zombie, not powerful enough to be clockworker. My entire family died of the plague-my mother and brother died of it right away, and it killed my father slowly. Aunt Edwina became a clockworker, of course. So it’s rather difficult to believe that I didn’t contract it.”

“Do you think you contracted some different version?”

“I sometimes wonder,” Alice said. “Aunt Edwina was the world’s greatest expert on the clockwork plague. Did she try an early version of her cure on me when I was young? One that worked only partway? Is that the reason she chose me to carry her final cure?” She held up her spidery hand with its burbling tubules. The spider gauntlet had a surface temperature of ninety-six point five degrees, weighed three pounds, two ounces, and carried two drams of blood, Gavin noted. “It would explain a great deal, including why my talent won’t let me take this spider off. Edwina might have known how to create something even I can’t dissect.”

“Do you want to take it off?” Phipps asked, surprised.

“Well, no,” Alice admitted. “It’s. . dug in. It moves as I do, and those tubules are like my own arteries and veins by now. I don’t know what would happen if I tried to take it apart. And if I did, I wouldn’t be able to cure anyone.”

She finished putting the spider back together, gave it a few quick winds with the key on the chain around her neck, and set it back down again. It quivered, then leaped off the table and skittered away. The whirligig chirped in alarm and swooped after it. Gavin watched the air currents in its wake, how the propeller chopped them into tiny streams that twisted one around the other. He could feel their silky smoothness, see how they intertwined, sense the soft temperature differences between them. He looked closer, examining each eddy’s individual particles. They vibrated and buzzed like invisible bees. The particles themselves were made of smaller particles that were both there and not there, puzzle pieces in shells that twisted through tiny pockets of the universe, refusing to exist, refusing to vanish, and those particles were made of even smaller particles that came in pairs or trios.

“Gavin!”

He tried to shut out the voice and concentrate on the fascinating parade. Each set of particles was carefully balanced. Even as Gavin watched, one particle sent a bit of energy to its partner. For the tiniest breath of time, a seed of the energy lived in both particles, and then they. . changed. He couldn’t put his finger on how, but they did. It was as if two red flowers existed side by side until a bit of pollen blew from one to the other and both flowers became green. It happened with breathtaking precision, a trillion times a trillion times every microsecond, with no guiding hand to ensure it went right. It was entrancing. Exquisite!

But that wasn’t the end of it. Those tiny particles were made of-

“Gavin!”

“The tiny bees exchange pollen and make the flowers change color,” he muttered. “Red becomes green, and each has a piece of the other.”

“No, darling, no. Please come back.”

There was a sharp jerk. Gavin blinked. He was sitting at the table again. Alice was holding his face in both her hands, and her claws pricked his cheeks. Her brown eyes were both frightened and worried. He felt her breath on his chin.

“What?” he said. “What’s wrong?”

“The plague pulled you under again.” Alice let him go and returned to her own seat. “That’s your second fugue today, darling.”

He shook his head. The particles were important; he could feel it. If only he could look at them more closely, watch their patterns and come to an understanding. But when he looked at the path the whirligig had taken, all he saw was empty air.

“Gavin!”

“My second?” he said.

“The painting was your first.”

“I don’t remember,” he said, still staring after the whirligig.

“The Chinese woman by the stream. She held a fan. There was Chinese writing.”

Alice’s voice sounded desperate, but Gavin, still hoping to catch the parade of particles again, couldn’t bring himself to look in her direction. Still, her tone called for some response. “Oh. Right. Yes, now I remember,” he said vaguely, lying. “She held a fan.”

“It’s getting worse,” Phipps said. “You told me a month ago that Dr. Clef said he had two months, perhaps three. But that was an optimistic estimation. It looks like we need to be pessimistic.”

“I refuse to believe we came all this way for nothing, Lieutenant.” Alice pulled a handkerchief from her pocket, and when she did, the little silver nightingale encrusted with gems fell out. Alice picked it up and pressed one of the eyes. The little bird said in Gavin’s voice, “I love you always.”

This cleared Gavin’s head of the half trance he was in. “I. . Hello.”

“Welcome back, darling,” Alice said. “Where were you?”

He shook his head. “I don’t think I can explain it in words. But I can see why Dr. Clef and the others went there. It’s beautiful.”

“Don’t speak that way!” She grabbed his hand. “It frightens me when you do. I’m losing more and more of you every day.”

He looked at her concerned, beautiful face, trying to etch every feature into his mind so he wouldn’t forget her, no matter how much of his mind the plague burned away-her honey brown hair and her small nose and her pointed chin and her warm eyes. He couldn’t possibly forget any of it. Could he? He fingered the salamander that circled his ear and felt a sorrow that threatened to crush him. He had learned of his status as a clockworker only a few months ago, but it felt as if a lifetime had passed, as if he couldn’t remember a time before it. His back ached where the pirate’s whip had left deep, ropy scars after the attack on the Juniper.

“I’m trying to stop,” he said. “I am. It’s very hard to stay aloft.”

“Would you play, then?” She pointed at his fiddle case, which was lying on the deck near his wing harness. “Perhaps it’ll keep you focused. Certainly it gives me pleasure.”

“I wouldn’t mind, either,” Phipps said, “and I’m not in love with you.”

Gavin flashed a smile at that. He set bow to strings and played “The Wild Hunt,” letting the music slide and soar. The song rushed and roared about the deck, pushing at the ropes and rebounding from the envelope. Alice closed her eyes and Phipps tapped her feet. Gavin’s smile widened. He loved getting a listener lost in the music, towing someone along and sharing the beauty. Provided he didn’t make a mistake and spoil the loveliness. A faint hot draft wafted over him, whispering over black silk, and for a moment he was in another place. Cobblestones, clopping horses, and the smell of open sewers. A man with pale hair played flawless fiddle, his fingers flying over the neck. He grinned down at Gavin and started to say something. Then the memory was gone. The song ended, and Gavin lowered the fiddle.

“You were thinking of your father again,” Alice said, not quite accusingly.

“More and more often,” Gavin admitted. His back still ached. For a moment, the spot where the mechanical nightingale had pecked him itched, and he scratched it idly. “When I’m not thinking of you.”

“You know, I think that’s the first time I’ve heard you use flattery, Gavin Ennock,” Phipps said, and Alice laughed.

“All women like flattery,” Alice said, “even when they’re waiting to hear from-”

“Lady Orchid!” Phipps interrupted.

They all turned. Lady Orchid and a worried-looking man in a white cap were coming up the gangplank. Lieutenant Li preceded them, holding a phosphorescent lantern in one hand. In the other, he held a black box with dragons on it.

“We would like to speak,” Lady Orchid said.