“What? You want me to open your app?”
Spec did a flip.
The other two gathered close, and Spec circled around them all to watch over their shoulders.
A jittery video played—a haphazard flight through a dark hall with Spec’s white spotlight grazing bronze faces, falling axes, and flying arrows.
Jack coughed. “So . . . not that way, then.”
Liu Fai glanced up at the drone. “But this is the only passage. Where else can we—” He caught himself and frowned. “Why am I talking to a drone?”
The drone answered him anyway. Spec flew to the left of the arch and shaped his light into a rectangle the size of a door, shining it on the wall.
Jack looked closer. Hairline gaps broke the smoothness of the paint along the projection’s entire perimeter. He pushed. The door gave way, and an unremarkable hallway followed.
The three came out of the passage on the rounded upper landing of a gold brick stairway. Liu Fai breathed out the one word they were all thinking.
“Incredible.”
The claustrophobic feeling of the tunnels vanished from Jack’s senses, as if he had escaped into open air under a clear night sky. “This one room must be the size of a football field.”
“Two,” countered Liu Fai. “Perhaps three when you consider the width.”
Below them, silver rivers snaked through jade forests and curved around jagged mountains of pure onyx. There were roads, bridges, and multistory houses. Painted terra-cotta subjects stood frozen in time, tending jasper flower gardens or looking out from pagodas, all within a replica of the Great Wall that wrapped around the entire cavern.
Liu Fai pointed at a large pool of mercury, shaped like a phoenix in flight. “That is Dongting Hu, one of the largest lakes in China, where dragon boat racing was born.” He traced the line of a river to a second lake close to the wall, dotted with perhaps a hundred jade islands. “And that is Tai Hu, near the eastern sea. This place represents the whole of the First Emperor’s domain.”
“But where is Gwen?” asked Sadie.
“Up there.” Jack thrust his chin at a plateau a good fifty feet above the faux landscape. Tiered yellow roofs implying a palace complex peaked above a high red wall. Torches burned at each tower with unnatural flames of pink, green, and blue. Spec tucked himself away in Jack’s pocket, dimming his thrusters. Whatever waited for them up there, it scared the drone.
As the three climbed a winding road to the plateau, Sadie tilted her head back, gazing upward at pearl constellations and gold and silver planets. A great swath of jewel dust stretched across the ceiling from horizon to horizon, glimmering in the strange flicker of the torches. “This must be the world’s largest planetarium.”
“A creepy planetarium.” Jack did not look up. His eyes kept moving from shadow to shadow. “Haunted by a psychopath and his pet monster.”
His roving gaze caught a glint of silver on the rim of the plateau, headed their way. “Quick.” Jack slapped the back of his hand into Liu Fai’s chest to stop his progress. He snapped his fingers. “Give me an ice ball.”
Liu Fai glanced down at the hand. “Tell me you did not just do that.”
The familiar scritchety-scritch reached Jack’s ears. The pixiu was coming fast, scrambling across the vertical face of the plateau as if gravity made no difference. “Not now, Frosty.” Jack snapped again. “We have bigger issues.”
Another scritchety-scritch rose up from below, and Jack glanced over the edge of the road to see a second creature galloping up a stone pylon. “Aaaannd the other one’s back too.”
“You can’t kill them,” said Sadie.
“We can try,” countered Jack. “Ice ball. Now!”
Liu Fai pressed his hands together, formed a frozen baseball, and plopped it into Jack’s waiting hand. “Happy?”
“Not really.” Jack gauged the distance to the nearest pixiu, the one galloping up the pylon, let his tracker senses read the vectors, and dropped to a knee, chucking the ice ball straight down.
Clack! The ice knocked the white sphere through the back of the thing’s soft, mercury head. The creature dissolved into silver goop.
The other one had reached the road, flying toward them in impossible leaps. Liu Fai slapped a second ice ball into Jack’s hand and cast out a mist of frost to slow the creature down. Jack stepped into his throw and fired the ice ball through the cloud.
The pixiu’s frozen teeth shattered. The white sphere tumbled from its mouth and the creature crashed to the ground, skidding to a stop less than two feet away. It looked up at them, utterly shocked, and then melted into a line of quicksilver, running through the gaps in the pavers.
“How did you know to aim for the spheres?” asked Liu Fai.
Jack rubbed a cold wet palm on his jeans. “They’re like the creatures’ brains, I think—precursors to the emperor’s immortality device.”
“But knocking a sphere away only slows them down.” Sadie pointed to one of the white balls, bouncing through a grove of jade trees below. “Watch.”
Like a golf ball on an extremely expensive putt-putt course, the sphere pinged off a jade tree, made a lazy half-circle around a jasper flower, rolled down an onyx bank, and plunged into a river of quicksilver.
Sadie held up a finger. “Wait for it.”
A silver tiger-Doberman head broke the surface, and a brand-new pixiu clawed its way up the bank.
“Oh, that’s just great,” said Jack.
The pixiu lowered a snuffling mercury snout to the onyx and took off through the forest.
“That’ll be the dog part of him,” said Sadie.
Liu Fai squinted. “What is he looking for?”
The pixiu nosed something out from behind a tree.
“The other white sphere, it seems,” said Jack.
The creature set one paw down beside its prize and looked up at the three invaders.
Jack shook his head. “Please don’t.”
With an obnoxious flick, it knocked the sphere into the river.
“And that’d be the cat part,” said Sadie.
The second pixiu climbed out of the river, and Jack pressed the others into a run. “Time to go.” They raced up the road and through the palace gate.
The upper compound had its own pagodas and quicksilver streams, tended by colorful terra-cotta figures. White travertine pavers gave it the feel of an eastern Mount Olympus.
With the pixiu huffing and snarling behind, the three sprinted toward the largest structure in the compound—a circular temple with a two-tiered roof of golden tiles. Serpentine dragons spiraled up its columns.
“An octagon?” asked Jack between breaths.
Liu Fai puffed beside him. “A nonagon, most likely. Nine sides.”
The pixiu were right on their heels. Liu Fai supplied Jack with a pair of ice balls and the two turned to face the danger. The creatures slowed, spreading out, backing their prey into the shadow of the golden roof.
Sadie glanced up at Liu Fai from beneath her brother’s arm. “Why nine?”
“What?”
“Why nine sides?”
Liu Fai kept his eyes off the shifting pixiu. “The number nine represents the Chinese emperors. It is the last single-digit number before—”
“Ten,” said a voice behind them. “The number of completion—the number reserved for immortals.”
The pixiu attacked, white spheres spinning behind their fangs.
Chapter Fifty-Two
JACK HAULED BACK AN arm to throw an ice ball, but the voice behind him shouted, “Enough!”
The creatures reeled to a stop. Both sat down like well-trained dogs, and the three slowly turned around.
Ignatius Gall stood on a raised platform, forearm resting on the high back of a jade throne. The throne was occupied. Gwen sat slumped there with her eyes closed, head fallen to one side, a trickle of dried blood on her earlobe. Jack took a step, reaching for her. “Gwen!”
“Ah, ah, ah . . .” Gall held up a jade cylinder etche
d with Chinese script, and the pixiu sprang to life, scrambling up onto the platform to bar Jack’s way. “Don’t try it,” said Gall. “You don’t stand a chance.”
“What did you do to her?”
Gall strolled to the edge of the platform, looking up at the golden roof as if he had not heard the question. “Liu Fai was wrong, Jack. This temple is a decagon. There are ten sides, instead of nine. Emperor Qin Shi Huang fully intended to walk among the immortals.”
It took Jack a moment to tear his eyes away from his friend. The sight of her in that state reminded him of the way he’d found his father at the top of Big Ben. “The First Emperor was crazy,” he growled. “Like you.”
“Was he?” Gall pointed with his cylinder at a bronze sarcophagus behind the throne, sealed with dozens of rivets as if to make sure the occupant would never escape. It looked out of place, an afterthought that was never meant to be there.
“Qin Shi Huang was far ahead of his time,” said Gall. “The effort to transfer his mind into an immortal stone was no different from the work of today’s scientists, attempting to squeeze the data that makes us human into a computer and declare victory over death.”
Victory over death. Something about that phrase took Jack back to the moments he had shared with a fragment of his father before the battle with Tanner. We are more than data, son. We are spirit and soul, and nothing can imprison those.
Gall walked to a semicircular table, red jasper, like the platform and the columns. Among the odds and ends gathered there were a wooden text, a chalice of glistening white stone, and the jade disk and fan from the long wushi vault—all artifacts stolen by the clockwork dragon. One of the stolen artifacts, if Jack remembered correctly, seemed to be missing.
His gaze drifted to the cylinder in Gall’s hand. “You have the First Emperor’s seal. That’s how you’re controlling the pixiu. They recognize its authority.”
Gall dropped the jade cylinder into the folds of his robe. “It is the only thing they recognize, apart from each other. They are early examples of the emperor’s work, not terribly clever.”
Both pixiu snarled at their master.
“Oh, shut up. It’s true.” Gall rummaged among the items on the table, picking up parchments and beakers as if looking for something. “My studies into Paracelsus led me to believe that the emperor had made additional progress, and that Paracelsus had completed the work.”
Jack picked up movement among the columns. A hooded figure ducked into the shadows. Ghost. She was still with them. He had to keep Gall talking until he could figure out her plan. “So that’s why you wanted the Mind.”
“An artifact your greedy family withheld from me for far too long.” Gall paused in his searching to examine his prosthetic arm, turning it over and back before his clockwork eye. “After I survived your grandfather’s bomb, I discovered the fan, and with its formula I made my own mind transfer device.” The creases in his forehead relaxed. He lifted a small white pyramid with golden caps on each corner. “This device, in fact. Optimum experimentation required a subject with an advanced neural network, amenable to data transfer.”
“You mean a tracker.” Sadie scrunched her face into a scowl. “Our dad.”
Gall took no offense to her tone. He seemed impressed with her ability to interpret his scientific lingo. “That’s right, my dear. The Clockmaker brought him to me, but”—he held the pyramid up into the light—“our experiments together proved . . . unsuccessful.”
“And now you have done the same to Gwen,” said Liu Fai.
“What?” Gall looked shocked. “Oh no. I merely asked your new friend a few questions in my own”—he fixed Jack with an evil stare—“special way.”
The words reverberated in Jack’s head in a dozen versions of Gall’s voice, from the loudest scream to the softest whisper. Jack could feel the situation unraveling.
It did not get any better when Ghost walked boldly up onto the platform. She made no move to attack.
“Ah. There you are,” said Gall, waving her closer. “I’ll be needing the Mind now.”
She strolled over and dropped the Mind of Paracelsus into Gall’s waiting hand, giving Jack a sneer. She had played him.
Jack’s body shook with rage. “You—”
“Thief?” asked Ghost with a mocking flick of her eyes. “Get over it, yeah?”
Gall took no interest in their sidebar. He picked up the moonstone chalice, placed both the sphere and the pyramid in its bowl, and continued with his explanation. “Your father’s sacrifice was not entirely wasted, Jack. I did manage to use what I’d learned from him to help poor Robert Hubert, the man you call the Clockmaker.”
“You helped him? By transferring his mind into a metal monster?”
Gall’s pretense of civility fell away. “I saved him.” He shook his prosthetic fist, squeezing so tight that Jack could hear the gears grinding. “I restored him to a semblance of life after you sent him flying from the bell tower.”
A roar split the air, and the thing that was once the Clockmaker flew up from below, landing on the golden roof so heavily that Jack feared its weight would buckle the columns. The dragon looked his way. “Jack.”
Sadie snorted. “You call that saving him?” She pointed at the pixiu. “He’s just like them.”
The dragon’s red eyes flared. He cocked his head to look at the girl. “Ssssadie.”
She rolled her eyes. “Yeah. We get it. You can talk. You’re sooooo much smarter.”
An ominous rumble sounded from the creature’s metal chest, but Gall held up a hand. “Wait, my friend. Please. If the transfer with Miss Kincaid fails, I will still have need for the rest.”
“Is that what we are?” asked Liu Fai. “Fodder for your experiments?”
“Most of you. But not all.” Gall returned to Gwen. He pushed the chalice down into a receptacle at the peak of the throne and went about positioning his hostage like a life-size doll, straightening her head and shoulders and folding her hands in her lap.
Jack lowered his chin and growled. “Stop. Touching. Her.”
Gall frowned at him over his shoulder. “Oh, relax. This is pure science—an experiment.”
“And if the experiment fails?” asked Liu Fai.
“We start again, and you get your turn in the chair.” Gall finished positioning Gwen. “And little Miss Sadie next. But not Jack. Not him.” He slipped both hands into the folds of his robe. “Jack, did you know that Qin Shi Huang first came to power at the age of thirteen? Does that sound familiar?”
Jack knew what he was implying. He wouldn’t play along. “I have no power.”
“Oh, don’t be modest. Your brain is top of the line, thanks to both Arthurian and Merlinian heritage. Think of it as a computer—from the same manufacturer as mine.”
Jack swallowed. Gall had managed to make top of the line sound terrifying. “I don’t get it.”
“Don’t you?” Gall held up the emperor’s seal, rotating it before his eyes in admiration, and then pressed it into a receptacle on the throne. “The technology of mind transference goes so far beyond long life. He who controls such technology can be anyone, anywhere.” He gave the cylinder a clockwise turn, and a clanking of bronze shook the chamber.
Mercury poured from shafts in the eastern slope of the dome, setting the rivers into motion. The platform split down the middle, and a flood of mercury rushed through a channel beneath the throne. A pillar with ornate gears, cranks, and levers rose from the floor.
“Those under my control will be prime ministers, Jack. Heads of commerce. But I”—Gall’s one good eye stared at him, widening in a whole new level of nutso—“I will be you. Your powerful tracker brain will become my home for a time, and then your son’s, and his son’s.” He spread his hands wide. “For all eternity!”
Amid the racket of the machinery and the crazy man’s jubilation, Jack heard a familiar zzap. He felt the punch of a compression wave.
Ghost reappeared at the edge of the platform, looking
as if she had never moved.
A slight shift in his own weight manifested in Jack’s tracker brain—an amorphous gray mass at the bottom right corner of his vision. Ghost had slipped something into his pocket. As subtly as he could, Jack reached in and felt the wooden grip of a dart gun.
The thief gave him a subtle nod.
Chapter Fifty-Three
JACK KNEW THE WEAPON in his pocket by the dings and scratches on its pistol grip. To be sure, he pressed the heel of his palm against its copper baseplate and sparked.
Darkness tumbled around him. The weapon clattered on an iron grate platform, and the vision settled into a skewed, sideways perspective of the Tinkers’ Guild hyperloop station in Moscow. Jack saw Ghost’s brother, Arthur, struggling to his knees as the first orange flash of the bomb lit the platform—a bomb ordered by Gall. Arthur threw his body over Ghost’s, and the two vanished in the yellow glare of the blast. Jack’s body jerked as he dropped out of the vision. He blinked. Gall had returned to his work with the chalice and the control pedestal.
The dart gun in Jack’s pocket had come from the Buckles armory, and Ghost had carried it for a while in Moscow. She must have reclaimed it while searching his room for the Mind. It must have seemed like poetic justice to her. Jack had been the root of her conflict with Gall, and she would make Jack end it. Her way.
“All creation is the alchemist’s laboratory, Jack.” Gall turned cranks and shifted levers on the pedestal at a furious pace. The light reflecting off the quicksilver rivers made the jewel-dust Milky Way flow across the ceiling. “Qin Shi Huang knew this, and he leveraged that knowledge to complete his recipe for a mind transfer stone—his ‘elixir of immortality,’ if you like. He built this entire chamber to replicate the earthly and the heavenly conditions required.”
While Gall-slash-weird-science-guy droned on about stars, rivers, and refracted light, Jack eased the dart gun out of his pocket, hiding it behind his back.
The spook returned to the chalice on Gwen’s throne, sprinkled a red powder over the sphere and the pyramid, and touched the bowl with a long match. Jack and the others shielded their eyes from a purple flash. When the smoke cleared, the objects were gone, reduced to a uniform gray amalgam.
The Clockwork Dragon Page 21
