The Clockwork Dragon

by James R. Hannibal

  Shaw doubled over, resting his hands on his knees and panting. “Good . . . idea. I’ll wait ’ere . . . Keep an eye out . . . Like you said, eh?”

  Gwen pointed up the mountainside with her cane as Jack caught up to her. “This is it. This is the valley. We’ve been on the edge of it since we left the trees.”

  Another hundred yards up the slope, the ice chapel came into view, partially masked by the snow. Era after era of wind and meltwater had formed a network of caves in a permanent mass of ice. The openings were stacked among the mountain outcroppings like doors and windows in a church.

  Jack and Gwen climbed up to the mouth of the largest, sixty feet wide and eighty high. Walls of translucent blue towered above them, filtering sunlight like stained glass.

  “Now we know why they call it an ice chapel,” said Gwen, leaning on her stick. “Of course, no one should ever enter an ice cave. They’re notorious death traps.”

  Jack dug his spiked cane into the drifts and kept going. “We don’t have a choice.”

  In the shelter of the cave, the snowdrifts dissipated, giving way to a gravelly slope. Freezing winds whistled and howled through countless side tunnels.

  “Where to now?” asked Gwen, raising her voice.

  Her photo had gotten them this far. The rest was up to Jack, but at that moment his tracker senses felt useless. The extreme cold numbed all feeling and suppressed all scent. The wind masked all sound.

  “Jack?”

  He held up a hand. “Just . . . give me a sec.” He closed his eyes.

  Frozen air: a white sheet covering the data like the snow covered the mountain.

  Smell of ice and rock: stale and gray, hardly scents at all.

  Howling wind: a half dozen streaks of pink and red, ripping across a white background, glittering with gold and silver flecks.

  Glittering?

  The sound of wind had never looked metallic to Jack. He focused on the streaks and realized only one was glittering. With his concentration, the white of the cold faded. The pink and red faded as well, leaving a lone ribbon of gold and silver. It pulsated in sharp, steady waves—a mechanical noise, riding the wind like leaves on a river.

  Jack let out a laugh and took off at a brisk hike, chasing the trail. “Follow me.”

  A series of lefts and rights took them deep into the maze, where the glowing blue walls darkened. Gwen flipped on a light—the eyes of her owl. “Slow down, Jack. We won’t know how to get out.”

  “Trust me.”

  Another left, another right, and there it was, a titanium disc mounted on a knee-high post. Three counter-rotating blades turned within, sending out their pulsating whine.

  Gwen gasped. “A whinger.” She rushed over and crouched beside the device, holding her fingers close to the fans. “I’ve read about these in the Quartermaster’s Guide to Gadgets. Trackers use them as markers.”

  “Grandpa left it here. And that means the alchemist’s stash must be close.”

  Gwen flipped off the owl’s eyes, engulfing them in a thick, blue darkness.

  Jack frowned. “Hey!”

  “Outside the box, Jack. Remember?” She pulled him into a crouch beside her. “Let your eyes adjust. Tell me what you see.”

  A few seconds later, he understood. Without the owl’s artificial beams, he could sense the sunlight reaching down through the ice. The walls glowed a deep blue—all but one. “Over there,” said Jack, pointing. “That has to be the mountainside.”

  Using Herr Arnulf’s torches, Jack and Gwen melted random spots until they found empty space. Soon they had uncovered a low arch in the rock wall. A rough-hewn staircase led up to a furnished cave much brighter than the chamber below. At the opposite end, the afternoon sun streamed in through a cluster of icicles. The place was trashed. A wooden workbench lay overturned. A rusty iron stove sat crumbling in one corner. Rotting shelves had fallen from the walls, littering the floor with shattered beakers and brass instruments.

  “This cave wasn’t Paracelsus’s stash,” said Gwen, lifting a brass ladle and shaking off the glass. “It was his lab.”

  Jack peered out between the icicles covering the mouth of the cave and saw nothing but blue sky. “We’re pretty high up, maybe on a cliff face.” He knelt and touched a black smudge at his feet. Streaks of soot formed a radial pattern. “Are these scorch marks?”

  “A bad sign,” said Gwen. “And so is that.” She pointed with her owl toward globs of ice spreading out from cracks in the ceiling. “Ice has infested the rock, Jack, breaking it up. This whole place could go at any moment.”

  At the center of the scorch marks, Jack found an iron spike stuck into the floor. He pried it loose and held it to his nose. “Gunpowder. A bomb. This is the evidence we need. Gall laid a trap for my grandpa.” He tossed the spike to Gwen. “That’s the obvious deduction, right?”

  Gwen turned the spike over and back, chewing her lip.

  “Well? Isn’t it?”

  “You’re not making a deduction, Jack. You’re jumping to a conclusion. We haven’t got one shred of evidence that Gall was ever here.”

  “Then we’ll find some.” Jack stood, ripping off his gloves and heading to the only group of shelves still hanging. He picked up pots and crucibles at random, slamming them down again.

  “Be careful, Jack.”

  He didn’t want to be careful. He didn’t want to go slow. He was sick of delays and dead ends. “Careful of what?” He thumped an astrolabe down on the shelf, earning a crick and sending up a small cloud of dust.

  Gwen took a big step backward.

  With an unbearable creak, the shelf collapsed, taking out the one beneath it. Beakers, flasks, and all manner of instruments crashed to the floor. Dust filled the cave.

  “Of that.” Gwen waved a hand in front of her face, coughing. “I told you—” She stopped, eyes shifting to the center of the wreckage. “Oh, Jack. Look.”

  One of the ruined shelves had been hiding a secret drawer. Amid shards of wood and tatters of red satin, a silver blade gleamed—the sword from the painting. The golden hilt terminated in an eagle claw, spread wide as if to catch its prey.

  Jack gingerly lifted the weapon from the wreckage. “Do you have it?”

  “Need you even ask?” After a bit of rummaging in her pockets, Gwen produced the zed, still wound in a strip of silk from Genghis Khan’s tomb. It had turned white after the battle with Tanner, as if some evil had been banished from within.

  Jack held up the sword, and she placed the sphere in the claw.

  The talons snapped closed—a perfect fit.

  “That’s it, then. Theory confirmed.” Gwen thumbed a catch on the hilt and the claw snapped open again. “The zed is definitely the Mind.”

  She offered the artifact to Jack, but he shook his head. “Put it away, please.”

  Jack turned away to right the overturned workbench. “So that’s one answer found, but what about the scorch marks? What about the evidence against—”

  A flash of yellow-green caught his eye. The crashing shelf had blown the dust off a walnut-size jewel lying in the corner. Trackers used such gems for training or passing messages across time. Forgetting to put his glove back on—forgetting the dangers such gems posed—Jack picked it up.

  Chapter Fourteen

  JEWELS OFFERED A TRACKER the ultimate in sparks. The hard, clear, crystalline structure held memories for centuries, perhaps millennia, with images and sounds so perfectly preserved they took on a life of their own. That quality made large gems infinitely useful.

  It also made them infinitely dangerous.

  The rocky floor evaporated into smoke and Jack dropped into darkness. He did not panic. This was nothing like the spark at the trial. He was not standing on a podium in front of Gall, the Royal Arbiter, and the whole of the Elder Ministries. Gwen would look out for him. And this spark might give him much-needed answers.

  A gloved hand peeled away, as if from a camera lens, revealing a haggard face. The grandfather Jack had ne
ver met looked up with a weary smile, eyebrows frosted. He must have set the gem on the shelf a moment before. “Son,” he said, brushing snow from the arms of a bombardier’s jacket, “relay this message to Alistair Drake. Tell him I found the Mind.”

  The older John Buckles glanced toward a sunlit ledge at the mouth of the cave. The icicles had not yet grown in. Worry creased his brow. “I took too long surveying the mountainside. Gall is nipping at my heels. If I don’t make it back, bring Drake’s men and uncover what remains of this lab.” His gaze drifted to another shelf with a collection of mismatched artifacts—an obelisk, a Chinese fan, a piece of clay tablet, and others. “Paracelsus left us more than just the Mind.”

  Uncover what remains of the lab. The phrase stuck in Jack’s brain. What did his grandfather mean? The lab had no fallen shelves or upturned tables, and no cracks or scorch marks—not yet.

  The alchemist’s sword lay on the workbench along with two wrinkled squares of brown wrapping paper, a cane with a pewter bear for its handle, and two halves of a titanium sphere.

  Jack’s grandfather held up the Mind. “This is what Gall wants, and what he must never get.” He wrapped the artifact in a square of paper and drew a canted Z on top, pressing it all into the bottom half of the sphere. “I’ve made an arrangement with a village boy. With any luck, you’ll have both the Mind and this message within—”

  Jack heard a scraping of stone.

  His grandfather heard it too. “Someone’s coming.” The older John Buckles shoved the sword back in its drawer and snatched up the second slip of paper. He made a grab for the jewel, but only succeeded in knocking it to the rocky floor. The impact smashed into Jack’s brain like the cracking of thunder.

  The vision tumbled. There were shouts, a scuffle. Jack saw not one but two pairs of legs and little else. The workbench, still standing, blocked his view.

  A simple spark was a lot like looking through a telescope, offering only one narrow perspective. Getting out could be as simple as backing away from the lens. But once a tracker pushed beyond that observation point, into the memory, all the rules changed. Pushing into a vision was risky. One wrong move might leave him trapped in the jewel’s memories forever.

  Jack made the leap anyway. He needed to see.

  With the mental equivalent of heaving open a trapdoor, Jack forced his way up from the floor. His grandfather had backed up to the sunlit ledge, one hand behind his back, holding the bear cane like a sword in the other. The intruder calmly reached up and lowered a hood trimmed with fur.

  Gall.

  The spook looked two decades younger, with neither the clockwork monocle nor the clockwork arm. Those injuries, it seemed, were yet to come. “Hand it over, John,” he said, taking a step forward. “Let us be friends, you and I. We could be powerful allies.”

  “I don’t think so.” Jack’s grandfather stabbed the air in a fencer’s lunge to keep Gall back.

  Spike or not, the cane did not intimidate Gall. He stood his ground. His voice deepened, reverberating in Jack’s head. “Give me the Mind, John.”

  “No.” John Buckles grit his teeth, fighting to get the word out. He turned, straining as if moving through molasses, and hurled the titanium sphere into the sunlight.

  “Don’t!” Gall reached out with an open hand, but spinning blades popped open and the copter scout flew away, vanishing into the glare.

  The tracker gave him a grim smile. “Give it up, old boy. You don’t have that kind of reach.”

  “Don’t I?” Gall shifted his hand, and John Buckles lurched forward, boots scraping along the floor. “You’re going to tell me exactly where that scout is going.” The spook’s other hand flicked open. A blue flame hovered at his palm. “You know what I can do.”

  “Yes.” The tracker stabbed his cane down into the rock to stop his momentum. “I know. But let’s see if you’re more powerful than gravity.” He pushed against his makeshift anchor. His feet inched back toward the ledge.

  For a fraction of a millisecond John Buckles the Eleventh looked toward his grandson, or perhaps the jewel, and smiled. Then he threw his arms back and plunged into oblivion.

  “No!” Jack and Gall’s voices merged into one.

  A cloud passed over the sun, and Jack saw the cane, still rigid, without its master. The eyes of the pewter bear flashed red. A steady beeping filled the cave, growing faster by the second.

  Acting on instinct, Jack dove to the back of the cave. Gall was right behind him. The spook knocked over the workbench to use as a shield, but he wasn’t fast enough.

  The bear exploded.

  A black cloud of sound rumbled across Jack’s senses, with a yellow-orange bolt at its center. The bolt looked familiar, but Jack had little time to consider it. Immediately after the explosion, the walls and floor took on a green, crystalline sheen. His mind was becoming trapped. He heard a distant boom. The ground shook. He had to get out of the memory. Fast.

  He knew how. Tanner, of all people, had taught him. Find an exit and think of nothing but escape. Jack broke into a run and leaped from the same ledge that had claimed his grandfather.

  “Jack!”

  A bright light.

  A ringing in his ears.

  Another boom, distant and gray.

  “Wake up, Jack!”

  The light shrank to become the mouth of the cave. The icicles had broken away. He was back, and Gwen was dragging him across quaking ground. Jack tried to gain a footing and tripped, smacking his wrist on the floor. The jewel skittered off into the debris.

  Gwen hauled him up again. “We have to get out of here!”

  The cave shook. A long crevice split the floor, racing between Jack’s feet. Snow tumbled past the ledge, glittering in the sunlight. Chunks of rock fell from the ceiling.

  “It’s an avalanche!” shouted Gwen, trying to break through his confusion. “The cave is breaking up.”

  Something in the present had started an avalanche. And Paracelsus’s lab, weakened by the explosion and two decades of encroaching ice, would not survive. If he and Gwen did not get out of there, they would not survive either.

  The two rushed out onto the ledge. Looking up, Jack could see a great cloud of snow rolling down the mountainside. They had seconds. Maybe.

  Gwen drew out the pillbox and tossed Spec into the air. He hummed away.

  “You’re worried about the drone?” asked Jack, covering his head as more snow fell past.

  Instead of answering, Gwen clutched the front of his jacket and pointed to an outcropping twenty yards away. “Use your cane!”

  His cane. By some miracle, Jack was still clutching it in his left hand. He aimed and fired. The spike shot out, trailing its microfilament wire, and stuck in bare stone. “Grab on!” The two leaped out over the ice and snow. Rock and dust billowed out of the cave behind them.

  They swung into a crusted snowdrift, landing with a hefty crunch, and scrambled up into the shelter of the outcropping. A white cloud enveloped them, accompanied by an unbelievable roar.

  “Stay close and swim to the top!” Jack knew what to do in an avalanche. Every kid raised in Colorado did. He wrapped an arm around Gwen’s waist and clung to the cane with all his might, fighting to keep them both close to the rocks.

  He failed.

  Overpowered by the torrent, Jack and Gwen tumbled away from their shelter. Snow and ice poured over them like dirt poured over a grave.

  Chapter Fifteen

  JACK AWOKE WITHIN AN icy cocoon, not sure if he’d been out for a millisecond or an hour. Herr Arnulf’s amazing shirt had activated, turning all his previous kinetic energy into heat that kept him from freezing. He tried to call out, but the snow muted his voice to nothing.

  Nevertheless, a blue light appeared, filtering through the grainy gloom. It began to spin.

  Spec.

  Snow pelted Jack’s face, followed by a burst of sunlight as the drone burrowed through. Spec floated down and booped him on the nose.

  “I’m . . . okay. A li
ttle stuck is all. Thanks.”

  The drone’s engines flared in victory. It raced around the rim, widening the hole, and shot out again.

  “Well, don’t just leave.” But Spec was long gone. Jack sighed. “Drones.”

  He wiggled out of his cocoon onto a powdery field, and saw Gwen’s hand poking out a short distance away. Spec hovered over her, LEDs flashing red and yellow. There were rocks in the snow. The drone was having trouble reaching her.

  “Relax. I’ve got her.” Jack crawled over and dragged Gwen out, and they collapsed side by side, coughing in the freezing air.

  The coughing turned to a long fit of laughter, until they both gasped at once. “Shaw!”

  Perhaps Jack didn’t look quite as hard as he should have. So it was Spec who found the warden—pinned against a tree trunk and buried up to his armpits. Shaw glowered at the drone circling his head as Jack and Gwen came trudging through the drifts. “I’d like to go ’ome now, eh?”

  They spent another night at the White Horse Inn and took another ride in coach class the following day with Shaw snoring, big shoulders deep in Jack’s personal space. And when they arrived at Heathrow, a senior clerk drove them into London and ushered them straight to a conference room on the Keep’s Baker Street level. She wouldn’t tell them the reason for the rush, only that an urgent matter had arisen.

  Mrs. Hudson waited at the far end of an absurdly long mahogany table inlaid with bronze. And she was not alone. An Asian boy with ice-blue eyes stood a short distance behind her, wearing the gray overcoat and red scarf of the Ministry of Dragons.

  “Do I know you?” asked Jack.

  Mrs. Hudson did not give the boy a chance to reply. “Welcome home, Mr. Buckles. Miss Kincaid. Shaw.” She gestured for the three of them to take their seats and raised her spectacles. “How was your first mission?”

  Jack sank into the chair closest to her. “Mrs. Hudson, we—”

  “Botched it? Bungled it? Mucked it all up?”

  So she knew. Jack shouldn’t have been surprised.

  Gwen sat down beside him. “Not exactly. You see, Jack and I—”