The Clockwork Dragon

by James R. Hannibal

  “Recycling.” Gall gave them an instructive nod. “The ingredients and proportions of these previous efforts were correct. Paracelsus and I simply set our ovens to the wrong times and temperatures, so to speak.” He stepped to the side and took hold of the pedestal’s largest lever, shaped as a dragon with emerald eyes. Gall paused to glance around. “Yes, yes. All is set. Here we go.” He pumped his one good eyebrow at Jack and shoved the lever forward.

  The throne slowly descended into the mercury channel.

  Gwen’s shoes broke the silver surface.

  “Don’t!” Jack lurched for her, but the pixiu closed ranks and snarled.

  Bolts of lightning jumped from planet to planet overhead. “Don’t worry!” Gall shouted over the noise. “The mercury won’t kill her, not instantly, anyway. But she’s no tracker, able to soak up data with her bare hands.” The descending throne had sunk Gwen up to her shins. “I’m afraid our best bet for success is full immersion.”

  “Let her go!” Jack shouted back. “Last warning.”

  The mercury reached Gwen’s knees, spilling onto the throne’s seat.

  Buzzing electricity gathered overhead. Every hair on Jack’s arms and neck stood on end. Gall laughed. “Or what?”

  “This.” Jack fired.

  At the same time, thunder cracked. Lightning struck the chalice, blinding them all. When his vision cleared, Jack saw that the clockwork dragon had landed on the platform, the glow of fire ready in its jaws, but Gall held both him and the pixiu back with a raised hand.

  The echo of the thunderclap faded. Jack’s dart rolled off the control pedestal and plinked onto the jasper floor. Gall sighed. “Well, that was . . . pointless.”

  Jack had shot the dragon lever, shifting the throne into reverse. Even as he and Gall stared each other down, it rose, lifting Gwen out of the mercury. She looked no worse, aside from silver leggings and boots. And the throne looked as smooth and clean as before. The only change was the amalgam in the chalice. It had formed into a light green sphere with marble swirls of gold.

  “You insolent child.” Gall returned to the pedestal to check the cranks and dials. “You interrupted my transfer. You reversed the polarity.” He scowled. “But you’ve accomplished nothing more than a delay.”

  “Maybe.” Jack shifted his aim to the spook’s forehead. “I have three more rounds. Want to guess where the next one’s going?”

  Gall let go of the cranks and slowly raised his hands. “What do you want, boy?”

  “I want Gwen safe. And I want you behind bars. So why don’t we all pause for a breath, and then take your secret passage out of here.”

  “And if I refuse?”

  Jack’s gaze flitted from Gwen to the dragon to the pixiu, and back to Gall. He felt the chamber air brush his skin, set in motion by the flowing mercury. He felt the heat pulsating in the clockwork dragon’s jaws. Vectors rose around him in white wisps. He read all the angles. “It’ll go something like this. The first dart is for you. Your clockwork monstrosity will try and roast me, but Liu Fai will stop his fire with a wall of ice—”

  “And my pixiu?” A half grin lifted one corner of Gall’s mouth. “What about them?”

  “You didn’t let me finish.” Jack thrust his chin at the pixiu to his right. “The next dart is going down this one’s throat. I’ll use his brain like a cue ball to knock the other’s loose as well.” He tilted the dart gun in a miniature shrug. “You know I can do it. And in case you hadn’t figured it out yet, Ghost is not on your side. The last dart will occupy the dragon long enough for her to grab Gwen and Sadie, and the four of us will zap our way back to the front gate.”

  “That is an impressive, Rube Goldberg–ian sequence, my boy.” Gall’s grin flattened. He took hold of the dragon lever. “Let’s see if it works.”

  Jack had hoped Gall would give up without a fight, but posturing and threats had failed.

  He pulled the trigger.

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  JACK BECAME AWARE OF four things all in the same instant.

  Fire poured from the clockwork dragon’s jaws, but Liu Fai had thrown up a wall of ice to block it. That’s as far as his predictions had gotten. The pixiu, strangely, had not attacked. This was good, since Jack could not move his arm to fire the third dart.

  He could not move at all.

  Gall seemed taller than before, his shoulders broader beneath the black robe. He held his clockwork arm outstretched with Jack’s second dart captured in his metal fingertips. He brought it close to his monocle, inspecting it, and then tossed it away. “That is the second time a Buckles has attempted to kill me, boy. My patience is wearing thin.”

  Jack still could not move. Two months before, Tanner had frozen his legs in place by using the Timur Ruby to control his nervous system. This felt different, like a force field. Jack could feel a thickness around his limbs, molecules carrying Gall’s telekinetic will. The air wavered between them.

  The gun flew from Jack’s hand and skipped across the stone. Liu Fai dropped to a knee, arms steaming.

  The pixiu parted, and in an effortless, unnatural movement, Gall leaped over the quicksilver channel to stand between them. “Your mind is special, Jack. But you cannot contend with me.” He flicked both hands out at his sides. Sparks flew from his fingers, telekinetic on one side, mechanical on the other. White flame sprang up in his right hand, green in his left. “This is going to hurt us both, I admit. But it will hurt you far more. Come Here.”

  Jack’s feet skidded across the travertine, the way his grandfather’s feet had skidded in the cave. He could not stop his momentum.

  Or could he?

  Lady Ravenswick had spun the chair and formed spheres from dust. Will had made rolls fly. Both drew their telekinetic ability from the Arthurian bloodline, same as Gall.

  Same as Jack.

  He stopped straining his muscles and dug in with his senses. Jack felt the air molecules, the way he felt molecules when sparking or making fire. He prodded the layer closest to his skin, fighting to understand the power controlling it, and then he tracked that power back to its source.

  As his toes bumped into the edge of the platform, Jack stopped his momentum. He raised his eyes.

  The sneer on Gall’s face fell away. The furrow of his brow deepened, and he pulled harder.

  Jack pulled back. He took one step up onto the platform and stopped again.

  Neither moved. With sweat beading at his brow, Jack put his arms out at his sides to match his rival. Blue flames sprang up in each palm. “Contend with this.”

  Jack and Gall each threw a fireball, and they slammed together in a multicolored explosion. With their concentration split, tracker and spook slid together like magnets, stopping as they thrust their hands down again, new flames ready.

  “Watch out, Jack!” shouted Sadie, reaching for her brother.

  “Let. Go.” The voice echoed in Jack’s head. Now it was mental. This was the Merlinian side of Gall, overpowering Jack’s will. His hold on the air slipped. He skidded so close that he could see every gear, link, and rod in Gall’s clockwork eye.

  The spook pushed his head forward against the little resistance Jack had left. “Not. This. Time. Tracker.” His flaming hands crept together, rising toward Jack’s skull.

  “No!” screamed Ghost.

  Zzap.

  Zzap.

  A compression blast like none Jack had ever felt knocked him clear off the platform.

  “Huh.” Sadie wiped her eyes and sniffed, looking around. “That, I did not see coming.”

  Jack’s flames were gone. Gall was gone. Ghost was gone.

  The pixiu attacked.

  Liu Fai sprayed the creatures with frost while Jack dove for the dart gun. He rolled over on his back and fired two rounds. Each struck a white ball, sending them rolling across the platform. The frozen creatures crashed to the stones and shattered into piles of quicksilver shards.

  “You know,” said Jack, breathing hard, “once you’ve figured
out the white-ball-brain thing, those two are more of an annoyance than anything else.”

  Liu Fai grabbed his elbow and yanked him to his feet. “That did not play out at all as you said it would.”

  “You’re too funny.” Jack pushed the emissary away as fire torched the air between them. The two boys split, running for the cover of the columns. The clockwork dragon crashed into the roof above. Gold tiles rained down.

  Sadie ducked behind the jasper table. “What happened to Gall?”

  “Don’t know.” Jack pushed his senses through the racket and found a muted, angry shouting within the emperor’s bronze sarcophagus. He bobbled his head. “Sounds like Ghost put him in a box with his hero. She must have figured out how to zap through solid metal.”

  “So where is she now?” asked Liu Fai, pressing himself against a column as more flames streamed past.

  “Not a clue. I—” Jack’s reply caught in his throat. The clockwork dragon, the thing that plagued his nightmares, had landed behind the throne. It spread its metal wings, steel jaws open, hanging over Gwen.

  “Come and save her.”

  Jack tried his new telekinetic skill, but the wavering molecules at his fingertips fizzled. Before, he had used the molecular strings of Gall’s telekinetic power as a guide. He didn’t know enough to work without them. His eyes drifted from the creature’s face to Gwen’s, in peaceful repose on the throne.

  He couldn’t save her.

  Fireballs wouldn’t work. He’d tried that already, with an army of long wushi and three real dragons to back him up.

  Real dragons.

  “Wait,” he said out loud, holding up a hand as if asking for a time-out.

  Off through time and space I soar

  Through forest green, through planet’s core.

  Am I the answer? Can I destroy

  The monster that still haunts the boy?

  “Sadie, call the dragons—the way you called them in the forest.”

  His sister, still hiding under the jasper table, scrunched up her nose. “The gate is closed. They can’t get down here.”

  “Actually, one of them can.”

  Red eyes flared. Jack fired his last dart into the left one, and it sparked and sizzled. The creature roared, reeling back.

  Jack had bought some time. He tried to buy a little more. “You wanted fire, right? That’s what I took from you. Well, now you can have it back!” He shot fireball after fireball.

  Liu Fai added ice, and steam billowed from the blue-green armor.

  With a single beat of its wings, the creature jumped up onto the roof behind the throne. “Burn, Jack. Burn all!” Fire crackled in its jaws.

  Friend. The thought was not Sadie’s. It was deep, reverberating, threatening to split Jack’s brain in two. A torrent of blue flame, the color of a starry midnight sky, flashed out from behind him and eradicated the clockwork beast.

  The golden roof collapsed on three of its ten sides. Mercury bubbled up from an exposed pump beneath the broken travertine. Quicksilver would soon flood the jasper platform.

  The long wushi’s matriarch dragon settled into the decagon, her massive obsidian wings casting their protective shadow over Gwen. The dragon lowered her head, curling her great long neck, and allowed Sadie to place a hand on her nose.

  Friend.

  Jack winced at the pain. “One day we’ll have to do something about that inner voice of hers. Right now we have to get out of here.”

  Liu Fai understood. He took Sadie’s hand and the two of them climbed up onto the matriarch’s back. At the same time, Spec emerged from Jack’s pocket and carefully lifted the green sphere from the chalice on the throne.

  Jack touched Gwen’s arm. “Wake up. Please wake up.”

  Quicksilver brimmed over the edges of the platform, inches from the pixiu’s white spheres.

  “Try this.” Liu Fai bent down and spread a thin layer of frost over Jack’s palm, sending goose bumps up his arm. Jack laid the icy hand against Gwen’s cheek.

  It worked.

  Gwen’s eyes fluttered open. “Jack? How did you get here?” As the fog cleared, her gaze broadened to take in the massive creature behind him. “Scratch that. How did she get here?”

  Jack helped her off the throne. “No time to explain. Just get on the dragon.”

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  THE DRAGON ROSE FROM the broken circle, drops of quicksilver falling from her wings. As the mercury flooded the platform, the two snarling pixiu took form. One immediately jumped for the dragon’s tail, claws flared, and got more than it bargained for.

  The matriarch gave the little monster a dismissive glance, whipped her tail in a circle, and smashed the white sphere out of its head. The other pixiu watched the whole episode and reconsidered its own attack. It ran off to chase the ball instead.

  “What about Ghost and Gall?” asked Liu Fai.

  Jack’s gaze tracked along the plateau to the bronze sarcophagus. He could swear he saw it quiver. “Gall made his bed, so to speak. And if Ghost has figured out a way to zap through walls, she’ll find her own way out.”

  Pearl stars flashed by. Planets crackled with electricity. Jack bent close to the dragon’s head and pushed a single thought. Speed.

  The matriarch weaved left and right to through the mercury waterfalls, hugging the rim of the dome. Down below, the lakes spilled over their shores.

  “What are we doing?” asked Liu Fai.

  Jack held on tight as the dragon banked over the golden stairway to start another circuit, still picking up speed. “Remember that vial of blue liquid you used to create the dragon portal?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “The fire it made matches this dragon’s fire. It has to be an extract from the matriarch.” They reached the northernmost point of the chamber. The falls were coming up again, and still the dragon accelerated. Jack could feel her jubilation. Heat welled up within her. He glanced over his shoulder and shouted at his sister. “Sadie, think of home!”

  The silver falls were coming up too fast for the dragon to avoid them. Her scales burned Jack’s legs through his jeans. “Now?” he asked her, using speech and thought at the same time.

  Now.

  The dragon let out a burst of blue fire that exploded into a circle filled with twinkling stars. An instant later, they crashed through.

  Galaxies passed overhead, so much deeper and more colorful than the jewel dust in the emperor’s mausoleum. A flat plane of liquid rushed toward them.

  “Tell me that’s not Liu Fai’s liquid iron,” said Gwen. “Tell me we’re not headed for the long wushi landing bay.”

  Jack could not imagine that going well. Thankfully, the rippling liquid did not look like the long wushi’s iron deceleration pond. It looked like . . . a river.

  The obsidian dragon burst through the water, going straight up into a full moon. A bridge with two towers passed by. Even soaked and disoriented, Jack knew its shape. He shook the water from his eyes and saw Parliament and the green glow of Big Ben.

  Home.

  The thought came to him. Jack winced at the force of it and laughed. “Yes. Home. Sadie, you should have specified which home, ours or the dragon’s.”

  His sister leaned out from behind Liu Fai and shrugged. “I did.”

  In no time at all, the familiar awnings of Baker Street appeared beneath them. Jack was thankful for the late hour. A shiny purple-black dragon landing on top of the Lost Property Office might have drawn more than a few stares.

  The matriarch did not linger. After a few hugs and a kiss on the nose from Sadie, she flew off into the night.

  “Extract?” asked Sadie, watching her go. “So you’re saying some long wushi has to milk the giant dragon?”

  Jack hadn’t thought about it in quite so much detail. “Um . . . Sure.”

  “Well, that’s kind of a short-straw chore, isn’t it?”

  As the dragon disappeared in a halo of blue fire, it dawned on Jack that Liu Fai was still standing beside
him. “You didn’t want to go back to China with the matriarch?”

  Liu Fai stepped out in front of him, shoes crunching on the gravel roof. “I did. But you and Gwen still have much to face.” He took Jack’s shoulders, squeezing them with a strong and slightly frosty grip. “You will want your friends beside you.”

  Jack found his mother asleep in the chair at his father’s bedside, and he lit the gas lamp on the nightstand to brighten the room—using a match, if only to feel a little normal.

  She sat up in the chair, yawning. “You’re back.”

  The others filed in, with Spec hovering at Gwen’s shoulder, clutching the green-and-gold sphere. Sadie pressed her head against her mother’s chest. “We all are. How’s Dad?”

  Jack got the answer from his mother’s face. Not good.

  “He hasn’t woken up since you left. Doc Arnold is afraid he hasn’t much time.”

  Jack took the sphere from Spec. “We’ll see about that.”

  Gwen stayed beside him as he walked to the bed. “A green sphere. The red sphere siphoned off your consciousness. The white spheres of the pixiu were neutral, used as their brains. Green must transfer a consciousness out of the stone and into another mind.”

  “Gall did say that I had reversed the polarity.” Jack gently lifted his dad’s hands onto the covers and placed the sphere into his right palm. He covered it with the left, then pressed both his father’s hands between his own. “Dad?”

  No one breathed. There was no sound but the slow, steady beep of the heart monitor.

  The beeping spiked. John Buckles convulsed, body arching over the mattress.

  “Hold him down!” cried Jack’s mom, coming out of her chair. “Get that thing away from him!”

  Too late. Jack could not unclench his father’s fingers. A tube came out of his arm, and the IV stand crashed to the floor. Sadie, Gwen, Mary, and Liu Fai together could not control the fit. The beeping accelerated until the pulses merged into a single, unthinkable tone. The pattern of orange spikes on the monitor flattened into a line.