The Dragon Men

Chapter Seven

Yeh laughed and laughed. His jowls jiggled, and he slapped the table, nearly upsetting his teacup. For his part, Gavin nearly whipped his sword from his belt to chop the man’s hand off for such effrontery. His fingers itched to dig into the fat man’s neck and snap his vertebrae one by one. The bastard was-

He ground his teeth and pushed the thoughts back. Not now. Perhaps it was the plague running away with his emotions, or perhaps it was his own reaction to a man mocking his Alice. In any case, he was in control here. He shot a glance at Phipps, who looked perfectly calm, and at the guards, who also remained perfectly calm.

No, wait-that wasn’t true. Gavin studied them sidelong. The one with the pistol. . his left leg was jumping up and down just a little, and tiny movements in his face said he was chewing on the inside of his mouth. He was nervous, very nervous, and trying to hide it. The older man, the one with the sword, was calmer, but he was as coiled as a clockwork spring. They weren’t as in control as they thought.

“You want to claim reward for you,” Yeh snickered. “Funny.”

“The notice does not say anything about who may or may not claim the reward,” Alice replied. “It only offers one such. Are you a man of honor or not?”

Yeh blinked at this. “Why I give you reward? Why I not knock you on head, take you back to Peking?”

Gavin locked eyes with the younger guard, who stared back. Phipps folded her arms and looked at the ceiling, seeming to ignore her own opposite number, but Gavin knew she was keeping an eye on the room. Men continued to eat and laugh and smoke with no indication they understood the world-class drama playing out in the corner nearby. Gavin wondered how many of them would die if-when-a fight broke out.

Alice gave Yeh a little smile and reached delicately across to the table to take his plump hand in both of hers. As if soothing a child, she stroked the back of his hand with her spidery fingertips.

“Mr. Yeh,” she said, “you’re an expatriate, am I right? You are not allowed to cross the border back into your dear homeland, and you are forced to live among us Western barbarians. You find this horrible, I can see.”

“Yes,” Yeh spat, though he didn’t move his hand away.

“Now why is it you have been banished, hm? Is it because you and a few others like you haven’t tracked me down yet? Because someone has to stay outside the borders to coordinate the search for me?”

“It is so.” Yeh leaned forward, his hand still in Alice’s. “We are sacrifices for empire. But now that I find you, I go home. Emperor will use you as he likes.”

“Now, now.” Quick as a flash, Alice jabbed an iron finger into the flesh of Yeh’s hand without quite breaking the skin. He inhaled sharply at the unexpected pain, a sensation he was unaccustomed to. “Do you know what this spider does?”

Yeh trembled, and his eyes rolled until the whites showed. A trickle of sweat ran down the side of his head. The guards tensed, and this time Gavin half drew his cutlass.

“Don’t,” Gavin said, knowing that at least one of the guards spoke English.

“I see you do know, Mr. Yeh,” Alice said. “I also see you’ve worked out what will happen if I break the skin on your hand with this claw. How likely is it the emperor will ever let you reenter your homeland if you carry the cure for the clockwork plague?”

Yeh remained silent, his gaze rooted on Alice’s finger.

“Let me tell you what will happen now, Mr. Yeh,” Alice continued. She sounded like a woman entertaining in her drawing room over tea, and admiration for her swelled in Gavin’s chest. “You will give us that delightfully enormous reward, and we will put it aboard our airship. Then you yourself will board, and we will all fly to China. You will authorize us to cross the border-I assume you can do that-and once we arrive in Peking, you will be hailed as a hero for single-handedly delivering the notorious Alice, Lady Michaels, to the emperor. You will be able to go home, and we will be in Peking for reasons of our own. This offer is nonnegotiable and expires in one minute. If you refuse, we will walk out that door and vanish forever. An airship covers a lot of ground, Mr. Yeh, and you will never have this chance again. The time begins now.”

Phipps pulled out a pocket watch and flipped it open with her metal hand.

“You dictate nothing,” Yeh said. “Filthy white woman.”

“You are quite correct, Mr. Yeh,” Alice said with a nod. “I dictate nothing. I am merely giving you the conditions under which I will surrender myself to you, making it easy for you to return to China a hero. Whether you accept these conditions or not is purely your choice.”

“Forty seconds,” said Phipps.

“Women set no conditions,” Yeh said. “They obey them.”

“As you like, Mr. Yeh. But please note whose claw is digging into your hand.”

“Thirty seconds,” said Phipps.

“How I know you no try to kill me and run with reward?”

“Because I need you, Mr. Yeh. We can’t get to Peking without you.”

“Why you go to Peking?”

“That will have to remain a mystery.”

“I say we leave,” Gavin put in. “This mongrel has no idea what honor is. His country means nothing to him. He wants to live in exile. I think he enjoys living among foreigners, eating our food, and enjoying our women.”

Yeh’s jowls quivered. “You pay for that, boy.”

“I hope so,” Alice said. “In silver, if you please.”

“Ten seconds,” said Phipps.

Alice shifted on her pillow. “Well, it was nice meeting you, Mr. Yeh. A pity we couldn’t come to-”

“Wait,” Yeh said.

“Three seconds.”

“Yes?”

Yeh ground his teeth. “I accept.”

“You are a wise man,” Alice said, and Gavin held back a smile.

The arrangements went quickly and smoothly, mostly because Alice refused to leave Yeh’s side. “One strange move, Mr. Yeh,” she said, “and I’ll poke you in a tender place.” In his rooms at the hotel, he dismissed his guards, packed a trunk, and produced a number of bearer bonds printed in several languages, including Persian, Chinese, and English. Together, they granted the bearer the right to four hundred pounds of silver. With the new telegraph system that allowed bankers and merchants to talk to each other over long distances, that meant the silver could be withdrawn from any participating bank in the world, with appropriate notice.

Gavin read through the bonds with Phipps peering over his shoulder. Each was printed on smooth, creamy paper, and the stack of them felt weighty and important. They represented more wealth than he had ever dreamed existed. Odd. This pile of paper could support his entire neighborhood back in Boston for a hundred years. He thought of his grandfather and his mother and his siblings. Gavin’s father had disappeared when Gavin was young, leaving his family to fend for themselves in a two-room flat that didn’t even have running water. Most of Gavin’s childhood memories involved cold, hungr-filled winters.

When he had shown an ability to coax tunes from his grandfather’s battered fiddle at age nine, Gavin took to playing street corners, trying to scratch up a few coins to help out. At first he’d come home every day with sore fingers and little money. Then Patrick, a year his junior, told Gavin to wear the best shirt he could find, and to wash his hands and face at the corner pump, and to smile at every person who passed his corner. “People only give money to the ones who don’t seem to need it,” he said. “Look like a beggar, and they’ll hate you. Look like a musician, and they’ll pay you.”

He was right. When Gavin washed up and smiled, his take for the day tripled. Patrick was so smart, and it broke Ma’s heart that there was no way to send him to school. Gavin missed him terribly. And he missed Jenny, who got a job as a hotel maid and fell in with a window washer who made less money than she did but treated her nicely. And Harry, who tried to be dad and big brother and breadwinner to everyone, but who drank his drover’s paycheck away and stayed too late at dice games. And Violet, who just wanted to help and was frustrated because she was the littlest.

When Gavin was twelve, Gramps had taken him down to the shipyards where sailors moored the floating mountains that were their airships and introduced him to Captain Felix Naismith. As a newly minted cabin boy, Gavin hadn’t earned much, but he was able to send some money home. Later, when pirates had stranded him in London, he had joined the underground police force known as the Third Ward, at a much better salary. That money had allowed his family to install a better stove and buy better food, at least. With a pang, he realized that thanks to the Impossible Cube, they hadn’t heard from him in three years. He had effectively vanished and left them in the lurch, just as his father had. They all probably thought he was dead. Now he was sitting atop a pile of treasure with no way to send any of it to them. Although the silver itself could be transferred from bank to bank with relative ease, the bonds that indicated the silver’s ownership were tied to the physical piece of paper. And thanks to the interference of the Chinese Empire, there was no American embassy in Tehran, no good post office, no trustworthy way to deliver even one of the bonds to his family in Boston. Suddenly the thick paper seemed flat and worthless.

Back at the airfield, Phipps ordered paraffin oil from the nearby petroleum yards, which operated twenty-four hours a day, while Gavin stowed Yeh’s trunk in the Lady’s hold. The bonds he put into a secret compartment in his own cabin. As an afterthought, he put the Impossible Cube in with them. Whether the Cube was working or not, he didn’t want it falling into Chinese hands. As Phipps had already pointed out, he didn’t dare drop it into the sea or bury it somewhere-it would inevitably come to light-and he had no idea how to destroy it safely. He grimaced. It was like traveling with a bomb strapped to the hull.

Yeh puffed up the ladder with Alice boarding behind him. Gavin decided the man must be desperate indeed to return home, since he had only Alice’s word that she wanted to go to China and that the three of them wouldn’t kill him and make off with an empire’s ransom in Chinese silver. Even now, Gavin wondered if that wouldn’t be wiser.

Alice whistled to her automatons, and they scampered over to her. “Guard this man at all times,” she said. “Don’t hurt him, but don’t let him touch anything, either.”

Moments later, the Lady was flying again with Gavin at her helm. Clockworkers slept very little, so it wouldn’t be a problem for him to stay up all night, or even for the next several nights. The moon scattered silver across papery forest leaves, and the cold air smelled spicy. Yeh estimated it would take them two days to pass through Bactria, then another day or two over Samarkand to reach the Chinese border just west of the city of Kashgar, assuming everything went well. After pointing out the route on Gavin’s charts, he waddled below to the cabin Phipps had assigned him, accompanied by his new brass entourage. Phipps went below as well.

“I hope you know what you’re doing,” Gavin said uneasily as the Lady glided through the night.

“For the most part I’m confident,” Alice said. “The emperor is offering an enormous amount of money for me, and he wants me alive. That means it’s safe to hand myself over to him. For now. It’s the only way into Peking with the border sealed.”

“Have you seen the hole in this? The emperor wants you because he wants to ensure you don’t spread the clockwork plague. That means the Chinese don’t have a cure themselves. If they can’t cure the clockwork plague among regular people, how can they cure a clockworker?”

“We’ve been over this before, darling. The British Empire had a cure, but they tried to suppress it for the same reason China is. I think the Chinese have a cure of their own.”

“But if they want to suppress the cure, you’re just handing it to them. I have the feeling the emperor just wants to see you dead personally. That’s why he’s bringing you in alive.”

“That possibility did cross my mind, and I’ve accounted for that.” Alice held out her spidery hand. “I can cure ordinary clockwork plague, but I can’t cure clockworkers. I think the Chinese can do the reverse. It would be yet another reason they want this cure so badly. A total monopoly over the clockwork cure would grant them a great deal of power on the world level. Imagine if a great leader took ill with the plague, and only China could cure it. But I am thinking we can arrange a trade. If they will administer their cure to you, I will give them this one. I am sure their Dragon Men can find a way to take the gauntlet off without injuring me.”

He worked his jaw back and forth. Everything Alice had just said he had pretty much worked out for himself. But there was one question that bothered him quite a lot, and it was difficult to ask aloud. It was like holding a box that contained a paper with the date of his death written on it. In many ways it was better just to leave the box shut and walk away, but in the end, he knew he would have to open it to learn the truth.

“You’re willing to hand your cure over to the Chinese if they can cure me,” Gavin said slowly. “But if you stop scratching people, thousands-maybe millions-of other people would die. Should we be trading their lives for mine?”

Alice didn’t move. Gavin held his breath. The box was open, and the paper lay folded at the bottom. Gavin didn’t want to die, and he definitely didn’t want to go frothing mad, but the thought that he might live only at the expense of all those other lives brought a leaden lump of guilt to his stomach. Did Alice feel the same way? If she did, how could they go through with this? And if she didn’t feel the same way. .

If she didn’t, that would be a cold thing indeed. Could he continue to love someone so cold? And how long before her love for him turned into something icy and dead?

A long silence hung dark between them. Finally Alice said in a low voice, “I don’t have it all worked out. Perhaps I can persuade them to give you their cure in exchange for all this silver. Or perhaps I can prevail upon their sense of. . fairness. I severely weakened the British Empire, which let China come into greater power, so perhaps the emperor will feel an obligation and grant my request to cure a single clockworker. Or perhaps I will simply scratch a few dozen people on my way to the emperor’s palace and spread the cure no matter what.”

“That’s a lot of ifs, Alice.”

“That’s true.” Her face grew serious. “The problem is, we’re facing a definite when. By that I mean when the clockwork plague gets worse. That is worth facing any number of ifs.” She paused. “I don’t want more innocent people to die when I can save them. But I can’t let you die, either, darling. I’m torn between a lion and a tiger, and I don’t know entirely what to do.”

Gavin put his arm around her shoulders. Strangely, the revelation that she was anything but certain made him feel better. She wasn’t quite willing to trade millions of lives for his, but she was willing to fight for him. The box was open, and he didn’t feel the need to read the date on the paper. The leaden lump evaporated. “Maybe I could cure myself.”

She looked at him. “Could you? Honestly?”

“Probably not.” He sighed. “I’ve thought about it, but I don’t know much about biology. The plague tells me about energy, and sound, and physics, and the mechanics of flight. Sometimes I think it’s all related somehow, at the base level, but not in any way that would help me.”

They stood in melancholy silence for a long moment. Then Alice said, “Do you know what I miss? I miss Kemp.”

“Kemp?”

“Right about now, when I’m feeling unhappy-when we’re feeling unhappy-he would bustle in with a tea tray and demand that we have something to eat or that I put on a pair of slippers. And the way he found a way through the Gonta house in Kiev-masterful! We wouldn’t have gotten this far without him.”

“He was good, wasn’t he?”

“I know he was only an automaton, but. .”

“Yeah. I know.”

Gavin peered forward into the darkness, though the only light was the soft blue glow of the Lady’s envelope. The only way to navigate was by star and compass, and peering ahead was his way of not looking at Alice. His thoughts drifted away from Kemp and back to China again. He was frightened for Alice, and his fear for her chewed at his bones. Gavin had never visited China and knew little about the place, but he did know people, and anyone who offered such a large reward for someone usually had something fairly unfriendly in mind for him-her. He was afraid that if he looked at Alice, he would turn the ship around and fly west toward safety, hang the reward, and hang Yeh. Maybe that would be the best idea anyway.

Alice’s arm slid around his waist. She was still wearing the voluminous Turkmen dress, and the cloth whispered against his white leathers. “I know what you’re thinking,” she said quietly. “And we’re doing the right thing.”

“How do you know?” A lump formed in Gavin’s throat, and the words came out sounding harsher than he intended.

“Because I can’t imagine a world without you in it,” she said. “Because I don’t want to live in such a world, and because I’m quite comfortable risking my life to extend yours.”

“What if we get to China and they kill you?” His arm was still around her shoulders, and he pulled her closer while he stared fiercely ahead. “I can’t live knowing I caused your death. I can’t let anything happen to you.”

“It’s my decision, darling.” Alice leaned into him, and he held tightly to her. The eyes on her spider gauntlet glowed red between them. The clockwork plague was always there.

After a moment, she said, “Play for me?”

Gavin couldn’t have refused her request any more than rain could refuse to fall. Alice took the helm while he retrieved his fiddle from his cabin and tuned it.

“Something quick,” she said. “If you play something slow, I’ll melt. I just know it.”

With a small smile, Gavin took out his fiddle, tuned up, and played the first song that came to mind. His voice rang off the ropes and bounced off the envelope:

Still I sing bonny boys, bonny mad boys

Bedlam boys are bonny

For they all go bare and they live by the air

And they want no drink nor money.

“Tom o’ Bedlam” was the unofficial anthem of all airmen. The endless verses and a tune made for pounding out on a wooden deck teamed with the idea that airmen were handsome, a little bit crazy, and never wanted for drink or money. It created immense appeal, so much so that the ritual for a cabin boy becoming a true airman at age eighteen involved his climbing in his underwear from the lowest deck below to the highest point of the envelope above-going bare and living by the air. Pirates had attacked Gavin’s ship the Juniper and beaten Gavin when he was only a few weeks shy of his eighteenth birthday, and he had missed this ritual. Instead of airman’s wings, he got nightmares and an inability to awaken in the morning without a jolt of fear.

He shook his head and kept singing, the fiddle his accompaniment.

The moon’s my constant mistress,

And the lonely owl my marrow;

The flaming drake and the night crow make

Me music to my sorrow.

And still I sing bonny boys. .

Alice was tapping her hands on the helm to the song, and even though Gavin had played the song a thousand times, he became nervous about making a mistake. He always felt this way when he played for an audience, no matter how sympathetic. It always seemed as if the listeners were waiting for him to make an error, ready to laugh or pounce.

“This is an A, this is an E. Go back and forth between the two. No! Hold the bow right. You can do this.”

For a flicker of a moment Gavin was in a different place. A tall, tall man was standing over him, a man with pale hair and broad shoulders and strong hands. Gavin’s fingers felt tiny on the strings; the bow grew larger. “Keep trying. One day, you’ll play better than your old man, but only if you do better.”

By a knight of ghosts and shadows

I am summoned to a tourney

Ten leagues beyond the wide world’s end-

Methinks it is no journey.

And still I sing bonny boys. .

The memories were little more than shades, but he could almost touch them. For years Gavin had thought he had no memories of his father, but after he had been infected with the clockwork plague, some of them had come back. His father had left long ago, leaving a hole in Gavin’s life. He wanted to know what his father was like, who he had been.

Why he had left.

A deep ache made his ribs hurt. He knew he must have done something terrible to drive his father away. Ma never spoke of him. Gavin didn’t even know his name. It was ridiculous to miss someone he had never really known, and yet he did. The music was a gift left behind by a faceless angel, a man dead and gone.

I now repent that ever

Poor Tom was so disdained

My wits are lost since him I crossed

Which makes me thus go chained

And still I sing bonny boys. .

But a circus fortune-teller named Madam Fabry had told Gavin with absolute certainty that not only was his father still alive, but that their paths would cross soon. He still remembered every detail of the card she had shown him, the fair-haired king holding a cup while water flowed all around him. Gavin didn’t much believe fortune-tellers, but everything else Madam Fabry had predicted had come true. He found he was hoping and dreading at the same time-hoping because he wanted to talk to his father before the plague took him, yet dreading because he knew that finding out the truth about his father’s leaving would hurt in some way.

The song ended. He lowered the bow.

“Thank you, darling,” Alice said. “You saw your father, didn’t you?”

“How do you always know?” he asked, half in complaint.

“I remember what Madam Fabry said, too,” she said, ignoring the question. “If you believe in that nonsense. Which I don’t.”

“Linda’s usually right,” Gavin reminded her. “And Monsignor Adames said flood and plague will destroy us if I don’t cure the world, and he said you have to let me go or the world will die.”

“Now, you see?” Alice sighed. “This is exactly what I mean. I’m the one carrying the cure, not you, and it’s not as if you’re my prisoner to release. Prophecies and fortunes work only in storybooks.”

“God, I hope so. The thought that you and I could be responsible for saving-or destroying-the world-”

“Again,” Alice put in.

“Again,” Gavin agreed with a laugh, but it sounded forced. Suddenly his boots felt heavy, and the ship felt small and confining. He looked at the open sky beyond the ship. “Listen, Alice. .”

“Go,” she said. “I don’t mind.”

“You don’t?”

“I can’t sleep anyway, and you know they work, so there’s no danger.” She corrected their course. “Now what was that about my having to let go?”

Gavin ran down to the hold. Moments later, he reappeared on deck with his new wings strapped on and ready to go. The power dial said the battery was half full, plenty of charge left. Already he felt lighter, freer. He activated the power, and the wings glowed blue with the soft chime that was already becoming familiar. Alice blew him a kiss. He stepped up to the gunwale, wings spread, then from his pocket pulled a small bird. It was a clockwork nightingale made of silver, encrusted with gems. It had been a present from Feng Lung, whose life Gavin had saved last year. It recorded the last thing it heard and returned to the last person who had touched it. Originally the nightingale had been created as a way for lovers to communicate, and Feng had laughed at the confused look on Gavin’s face when Gavin learned of this.

Gavin pressed one of the nightingale’s gleaming eyes and whispered, “I love you always,” to it, then flung the bird into the air. It fluttered fluid wings and zipped across the deck to alight on Alice’s shoulder. Gavin had time to hear it repeat in his own faint voice, “I love you always,” and see Alice’s soft smile before he leaped over the edge.

The trip to Kashgar actually took a week. Not long after they passed out of the forests and into the deserts around Samarkand, a sandstorm swept in, forcing the Lady to climb high above it. Unable to see any landmarks on the ground during the day, Gavin lost his bearings and drifted off course, losing most of a day. They lost another day outrunning another airship that Yeh vociferously said was a notorious pirate vessel. It was Gavin’s first brush with pirates since the loss of the Juniper. During the chase, he found himself sweating with terror, and in that moment, he knew that if the Impossible Cube had still been working, he would have used it, regardless of the consequences.

But in the end, the smaller, lighter Lady escaped, and Alice, who understood what Gavin had been going through, knew better than to say anything, but merely stood next to him at the helm to let him know she was there, and for that he was grateful.

Yeh spent most of the time in his cabin with Alice’s tireless automatons standing guard outside. Click often joined them, crouching near the door as if waiting for a mechanical mouse to emerge from a hole. Phipps spelled Gavin at the wheel. Alice busied herself spotting and making small repairs to the ship. None of them spoke of what was coming, though Gavin’s nerves grew with every passing mile. He didn’t even fly anymore.

Just after dawn, when they were passing over yet more hot desert, a brass nightingale, similar to the one Gavin had given Alice but plainer, fluttered out of the bright sky and landed on the helm in front of Gavin. Startled, he looked at it. The bird cocked its head, staring back. Its eyes were flat and black, but its movements were very lifelike, except for the tiny winding key sticking out of its back. The bird opened its beak and a tinny voice spoke what Gavin assumed was Chinese.

“Alice!” he called. “Go get Yeh!”

A second nightingale landed beside the first one. It spoke the same message. Then the first one repeated the words, and the second one said it again, a second behind, creating a strange echo. Another nightingale landed, and another and another. Gavin stepped back from the helm with a gasp. More and more nightingales arrived, landing on the guylines and gunwale and the envelope and the generator. The sky was agleam with tiny brass bodies and madly fluttering wings, their metallic voices echoing and chattering. The Lady groaned and lost altitude, tipping under the uneven new weight. Gavin frantically maneuvered to keep her upright.

Yeh appeared at Gavin’s elbow with Alice’s flock of brass mechanicals in tow and with Alice and Phipps pale behind him. One of the whirligigs dive-bombed a nightingale, which dodged away and returned with three friends. The whirligig squeaked and fled back to Alice’s shoulder.

Yeh, meanwhile, yelled over the noise. “When they come?”

“Just now!” Gavin yelled back. “Do something!”

Yeh shouted something in Chinese. To his surprise, Gavin understood a few words: bring, lady, border, fly.

When Yeh finished, the birds stopped their chatter, and abrupt silence rushed in to fill the space. Then, as one, they gripped wood and rope in their claws and flew. Wind whistled through thousands of tiny wings all working in concert. The Lady shuddered and seemed to pull back for a moment; then she smoothed out and glided forward. The birds moved in liquid synchronicity, as if guided by a single mind, gently hauling the ship. Gavin’s mouth fell open. He had never seen anything like it, and he longed to pull the birds apart, examine their tiny gears and switches, understand them.

“I know what you’re thinking again,” Alice said beside him, “because I’m thinking it, too.”

“Just one,” Gavin said. He was breathing hard, and copper tanged his mouth. “Just one little bird. No one’ll notice.”

Gavin’s hands were still on the helm. Just to see what would happen, he tried turning it. The Lady shuddered, and the nightingales all shrieked as one. It made a sound like a drill going through glass. The terrible noise ripped through Gavin’s head. He let go the helm and clapped his hands over his ears. The ship smoothed out, and the shrieking stopped.

“What was that for?” Phipps gasped.

“Bad to fight with ship,” said Yeh. “Don’t repeat.”

“Thanks for the warning.”

One of the birds circled Gavin three times, then settled on his shoulder and pecked his neck once, hard enough to draw blood. Gavin yelped and slapped at the little machine. The bird shot away, blood on its beak. It vanished into the sky.

“What did I do to him?” he asked aloud of no one in particular. No one answered.

Phipps shaded her eyes with one hand. “I assume the birds are taking us to Kashgar.”

“No. To border guard. I tell them we have Lady Michaels. He check for truth, kill us if we lie.”

“But we aren’t lying,” Alice said.

“Hope border guard believes you.”