The flash did little damage, but it surprised the monster, granting the other dragons time for a coordinated attack. Xiaoquan let out a billowing jet of steam that shot him backward like a deflating balloon.
The clockwork dragon backed out of the cloud, roaring in confusion, red eyes fogged over.
Biyu came next. She curled into a perfect circle, opened wide, and spewed lava all over the creature’s left wing thrusters. The lava solidified into stone. It occurred to Jack that these dragons did not breathe fire, but the fire he gave them had activated the elements within.
Yes! Fight!
Laohu’s unmistakable thoughts rumbled in Jack’s head. A golden flash exploded from the treetops. A blast of white fire and the whip of a powerful tail sent the clockwork dragon spiraling to the grass.
“Yeah!” Gwen cheered from the top of the wall. “You should have stayed dead!”
Jack’s world suddenly darkened. All sight and sound grew distant.
You should have stayed dead. Gwen had not spoken those words in the vault. But she had said them a dozen times before—in Jack’s nightmares.
This was the moment.
Arrows flew from the battlements. Green-robed long wushi rushed out from the alcoves and converged on the beast, throwing chain-mail nets.
An ugly metallic creak brought Jack’s senses back to full reception, and he saw the clockwork dragon slowly turning its jointed neck to look Gwen’s way. The fog covering its eyes had cleared. The lava stone clogging its thrusters cracked. Chips of black rock fell to the grass.
“Gwen, get out of there!”
The shouting army of long wushi drowned out Jack’s call. Just as in the dream, Gwen couldn’t hear him. And just as in the dream, he couldn’t reach her. Metal nets ripped and dropped away. The clockwork dragon’s wings spread wide and free.
The thrusters flashed bright blue, blowing off the remainder of Biyu’s lava stone, and the monster soared over the wall, snatching Gwen with its talons as it passed.
Jack reached out with a flaming hand. “Gwen!”
The spires of the strange pillar-mountains rang with thunderous laughter. “Lucky Jack, come and save her if you dare!”
Chapter Thirty-Seven
JACK STARED AFTER HIS friend for the longest time, until a resounding boom erupted behind him. He turned to see a massive plume of black smoke rising from the well. Great, shadowy wings beat within. Laohu plunged into the smoke to follow. So did Biyu.
Only Xiaoquan remained. The formerly small dragon, now a giant sky-blue balloon animal, struggled to control his flight. One wing flapped wildly as he rolled upside down. He settled and let his head loll back to look at Jack as if to ask, You coming?
The other dragons had gone the wrong way. Jack pointed after the clockwork creature that had taken Gwen. “I have to go after her. I have to save her.”
Xiaoquan seemed to accept this. The steam dragon flapped the opposite wing to right himself, wobbled his way through an about-face, and undulated off after the rest.
Long wushi surrounded the remaining dragons. Others rushed in with stretchers for the wounded. Fire burned in the trees. As Jack surveyed the aftermath, a few small fingers gently pressed their way into his clenched fist.
“I’m sorry.” Sadie stood beside him, a little island of flower prints and sparkly lavender amid the blowing embers and acrid smoke.
“You can’t be down here. It’s not safe.” But Jack did not let go of her hand.
“ ‘Then matron dies. Then maiden flies.’ ” Sadie’s voice felt distant, both in his ears and in his brain.
“What did you say?”
“ ‘Then matron dies. Then maiden flies.’ Dad’s poem. The Archivist and Gwen.”
Before Jack could fully process the thought, Sadie turned his hand over and pressed a silk-wrapped sphere into his palm. “She dropped this on the wall.”
Gwen. Always thinking ahead. Jack tucked the sphere away as Liu Fai came walking up the dragonite path. He looked haggard, face marred with soot.
The emissary pointed at Jack. “You. Our well is destroyed. Half our dragons have fled. My father is furious. It is all your fault. You are the reason the clockwork dragon returned, aren’t you? It saw you in the vault. It called your name.”
Jack did not deny it. “And when it couldn’t get past the real dragons, it took Gwen instead.”
“Correct. So now Gall has the fan, the key, and a hostage who knows how to use them. He has everything he needs to make a sphere of his own.”
“And once he does . . . ,” said Sadie, resting her head against her brother’s arm.
Jack swallowed back the lump in his throat. “He won’t need Gwen anymore.” He had failed to stop the nightmare. “We need to find her before it’s too late. I should apologize to your dad, ask for his help.”
“No,” said Liu Fai, tapping frost-tipped fingers against his leg. “I will deal with my father. In the meantime, gather your things. Meet me at the delivery gate below the cafeteria.”
Jack was too numb to argue. He and Sadie did as Liu Fai commanded, and barely fifteen minutes passed before the emissary had pulled up to the meeting point, driving a boxy off-road vehicle.
“Get in.”
Liu Fai worked the gears like a pro, powering the jeep out of the high-mountain valley and down the ridge, never saying a word.
“Um,” said Jack when the glaring silence began to eat at him. “It’s kind of cool that your dad let us take this jeep . . . I guess.” He’d been expecting a bit more.
“He didn’t.”
The answer had come from the back seat. Sadie yawned, pressing her fingertips upward into the gray-green morning filtering down through the trees. “His dad doesn’t know we’re gone.”
Knowing his sister’s Merlinian tendencies, Jack accepted the accusation as fact. “You stole a jeep?” He stared at Liu Fai. “What happened to asking your dad for help? We should be setting off to rescue Gwen with an army of long wushi instead of fleeing the scene in a half-rate rust bucket.” He folded his arms and flopped back against his seat. “You should have let me do it.”
Liu Fai slammed on the brakes, nearly planting Jack’s face in the dashboard. A layer of ice formed on the steering wheel. “Oh yes. You would love that—the great Jack Buckles and Liu Hei, Minister of Dragons, fighting side by side. Well, I have news for you. My father might send one or two long wushi after the metal dragon, but you and your sister were never going to leave that compound again. I had to act fast to get us out of there.”
“What are you talking about?” Had Jack managed to make his family the target of another secret ministry? “I mean, I know your dad was angry, but—”
“Angry?” Liu Fai threw his hands in the air. “You called fireballs out of thin air. A squadron of dragons obeyed your commands—”
Jack wiggled his hands. “That part was sort of the other way around.”
“All while I stood by and did nothing.” Liu Fai let out a sardonic laugh. “My father is not angry with you, Jack. He thinks fate has brought him the son I should have been. He wants to adopt you, by force if necessary.”
A horrible silence followed. Liu Fai stared out the dusty windshield, while Jack drowned in a black mire of pure, unadulterated awkward. How was he supposed to respond to that bombshell?
Finally, Liu Fai laughed and muttered, “He’ll probably marry you to one of my sisters, just to make it official. The younger one is eighteen.” He cocked his head to look at Jack. “How do you feel about older women?”
“I . . .” Jack tried to swallow the golf ball in his throat.
“He’s spoken for,” said Sadie from the back seat.
Both boys twisted in their seats to look at her.
“What? Neither of them will admit it, but it’s true.”
“You know what?” Liu Fai pointed through the cracked plastic windshield toward the intersection ahead. “Get. Out. Take a left. In a half mile you’ll find a bus station. You can save Gwen without me
. Good luck.”
Jack pushed open his door. “Okay. We will.”
“Fine.”
Child of fire and child of ice
Must join to win the maiden’s life.
The lines of his dad’s poem bloomed in Jack’s mind like Xiaoquan’s steam. He glanced over his shoulder at Sadie. Had she done that?
She scrunched up her eyes in confusion. Maybe she hadn’t.
“We can’t leave you,” said Jack, closing the door.
Liu Fai dropped his head into his hands, which worried Jack. As stressed as he looked, the telekinetic-human-ice-box might give himself a deadly case of brain freeze. “And why not?”
There were only a few moments in history where anyone had the opportunity to whip out the mother of all answers to the question Why? Jack did not miss his chance.
“The prophecy.”
Liu Fai cut the engine, making the jeep lurch. “What prophecy?”
“It’s more of a poem, really,” said Sadie, leaning forward.
Jack pressed her back again. “You’re not helping.” He looked past Liu Fai at the dwindling sunlight filtering through the trees. They were running out of time. “The poem we told you about in the vault. It turns out some of the lines are predictive. One line predicted the attack on the well. Another predicted the Archivist would die and that Gwen would be carried away.”
“ ‘Then matron dies. Then maiden flies.’ ” Sadie recited the lines from the back seat like a creepy Greek chorus in an elementary school play.
Jack gave his sister a please-stop-talking frown, then returned his gaze to Liu Fai. “The poem implies that you and I need to work together to save Gwen.”
Sadie did the Greek chorus thing again. “ ‘Child of fire and child of ice must join to win the maiden’s life.’ ”
“Stop it,” Jack growled through the side of his mouth. “You’re weirding him out.”
“Yes.” Liu Fai rolled his eyes. “She’s the one weirding me out.”
Jack ignored the implication. “Well? Will you help us?”
“Child of fire. Child of ice.” Liu Fai looked down at his palms, and blue-white crystals formed along the creases. “All right. I’m in. What else does the poem say?”
Sadie obeyed Jack’s request to quit reciting the poem out loud, but he heard her whispering in his brain. Then mountain hermit guides your eyes.
That didn’t sound likely at all.
“Do you . . . happen to know any mountain hermits?”
The question seemed to catch Liu Fai off guard. “No, I do not. But I know where one lives.”
Liu Fai took a left at the intersection, and Jack noted with some ire that the bus station was a good deal farther along than a half mile.
“The hermit is well known to the long wushi.” The emissary fought the wheel to keep the jeep straight on the washboard road. “We have shared this mountain valley for centuries.”
Sadie pulled herself forward, a hand on each of the boys’ seats. “So the hermit is—”
“Immortal, according to local legend.” Liu Fai frowned at the road and then glanced over at Jack. “If one believes such bedtime stories, then it would seem the hermit has already acquired that which Gall desires most.”
Chapter Thirty-Eight
LAKES, TREES, AND HILLS beyond count passed beneath Gwen, and all the while she pounded at the blue-green underbelly of the clockwork dragon. “Put me down, you mechanized monstrosity!”
The creature had her by the shoulders, talons stabbing through her coat and sweater. Gwen channeled the pain into anger and insults. “Set me down and face me like a real . . . whatever you are. I think you’re a chicken. Yes, you’re a great big clockwork chicken!”
To Gwen’s surprise, the chicken bit achieved a result. The dragon tucked its wings and dove for the earth, picking up speed. Perhaps she’d gone too far.
With the sun half set, deep shadows shrouded the hillsides. The dragon aimed for one of these shadows, as if it intended to smash them both to bits.
“I didn’t mean it. You’re not a chicken. And even if you are, that’s no reason to become suicidal.” The hillside rushed to meet them. Gwen threw her arms in front of her face, preparing for impact.
There was no impact.
She peeked over her arm with one eye, and found they were soaring through a cave. No. A tunnel. An instant later they flew out into a forest of tall pines.
The dragon flared its wings, and with a burst from its thrusters it slowed—just enough to drop Gwen and send her tumbling through the underbrush. She came to rest at a bend in a gurgling stream, one leg and one arm hoisted up in thorny vines in the most undignified manner.
The dragon laughed.
Gwen untangled herself from the vines, tearing her tights and cutting her leg in the process. One hand went to her scarf. “You’re going to pay for that.” But as she turned for the showdown, she noticed a man in a black cloak, standing in the bushes only a few feet away.
Ignatius Gall held a wooden book open in his palm—the missing journal of the Qin grand astronomer. He laid a red silk bookmark down the center to mark his place, closed the book with a snap, and scowled at the dragon, clockwork monocle twitching. “I told you to bring me the boy, not this bedraggled, insignificant creature.”
“Insignificant?” asked Gwen. She couldn’t argue with bedraggled, not after her fight with the brambles.
Gall ignored her. He picked up a lantern and approached the dragon, examining a dent in its side. “You ran into trouble.”
The dragon growled, “Long . . . woosh.”
“The long wushi.” Gall emphasized the ee sound the dragon had missed, like a teacher correcting a student. He touched the dent, running his fingers over the rippling imprint left by Laohu’s armored scales. “Their pets, as well. Interesting.” He straightened, shifting his gaze to Gwen. She hated the way his one good eye drifted from her head to her toes and back again. “You could not get to Mr. Buckles, so you brought me a hostage.”
“Boy . . . cares,” growled the dragon.
“True. And he confides in her. So perhaps she is not so insignificant after all.” He opened the book again and stomped through the bushes to the edge of the stream, wiggling his fingers in the air. “Keep an eye on her. I’m busy.”
Gall entered a strange routine of raising the lamp to the trees and lowering it to the overgrowth, consulting the wooden text and mumbling to himself, sometimes in English but more often in Chinese. He acted as if Gwen were not there, a misjudgment she would make him suffer for. Soon.
Keeping one eye on the dragon, Gwen slipped a hand into the left pocket of her coat. The object she desired, a long-handled electric torch, brushed against her fingers.
Uncle Percy had taught Gwen the proper way to ball up a fist while she was still in her pram—a child-rearing choice that had brought her mother no end of grief during Gwen’s nursery school days. Percy had given her some kind of combat lesson nearly every day of her early life. At the ministry, Ash had refined her skills. Gwen knew how to fight.
But she needed to pick her moment.
The bend in the river had carved out a wide cove where the water pooled in dark, lazy eddies. Gall reached its shore and let out a victorious “Aha!” He set the lantern down and parted the overgrowth with a telekinetic wave, uncovering weathered stone blocks. Perhaps the cove was not as natural as it seemed. Intrigued, Gwen followed.
At her first step, the clockwork dragon rumbled.
“Oh, hush it,” she said. “I want to see. That’s all.”
Gall followed the shoreline to a thick, scraggly bush, and without warning slung a green fireball from his clockwork arm.
Gwen gasped. She had learned about his pyrokinetic skills from Jack’s description of the spark at Paracelsus’s alpine cave, but she had never seen them in action.
The bush burned to cinders in a few crackling seconds. Gall blasted the remains away with a telekinetic push to reveal a small statue with the face of a tig
er, the antlers of a deer, and ruby eyes. “A qilin,” said the spook. “One of China’s most ancient creatures. This one has waited here for millennia, ready to judge the wicked that cross its path.”
Gwen snorted. “Then perhaps you should leave it alone.”
Beneath its left hoof, the qilin held a faceted blue jewel the size of a softball. Gall brushed away the last few ashes and gripped it with his prosthetic hand, grunting with effort.
“Seriously, I wouldn’t . . . ,” warned Gwen.
But, as it turned out, Gall was not trying to dislodge the stone. After a short battle, it turned in place. He stood back, looking expectantly at the cove.
A thunk sounded from the stream, followed by the ratcheting of chains. A mossy wall split the water’s surface, separating the cove from the main flow of the stream. The water inside drained away.
Gall grinned at Gwen. “It would seem I passed.” He retrieved his lantern and stepped down onto an uneven, rocky stair, wide enough for even his clockwork dragon to descend. “And now the qilin has offered me a reward.”
A putrid smell of worms and rotting plant life filled Gwen’s nostrils. She watched the poor fish flopping on the steps, slowly dying. “I’m not so sure you can call that a reward.”
Gall slipped his book into a leather bag at his side and pointed at the dragon. “You, stay here. Keep watch until I call for you.” Then he looked at Gwen and his voice deepened. “You, come with me.”
Gwen heard the voice echo in her head, and part of her knew that Gall was using his telepathic prowess to command her. She did not resist. She did not want to. If following Gall into that stinking, watery pit meant separating him from his clockwork henchman—evening the odds—Gwen was all in.
“Right. Where are we going?” she asked as the two stepped down from the stair into a long passage. Their only light was the lantern, which Gall held aloft so that its glow would reach the tunnel’s high ceiling.
He made no answer. Gwen understood. She was not a person to him. She was a tool like the book in his satchel or the lantern in his hand. Gall would only acknowledge her existence when the time came to use her for some evil purpose.
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