The Dragon Men

by Steven Harper

  Gavin dove toward the water a moment longer, until the glow and the chime reached the very tips of his wings. In that moment, the alloy pushed against gravity itself, and abruptly he was swooping back up, up, and up, and by God he was rising, climbing, ascending, flying, and the wind pushed him higher with an invisible hand, and the deck with Alice and Phipps upon it flashed by so fast, Gavin barely had time to register their surprised expressions, and then the Lady’s curli-blue envelope plunged toward him like a whale falling onto a minnow, and the wind tore his surprised yell away as a sacrifice, giving him just enough time to twist his body and turn the unfamiliar flapping wings—God, yes, they were wings—so that he skimmed up the side of the envelope so close, his belly brushed the cloth, and with dizzying speed he was above the ship, looking down at her sleek envelope and her little rudder at the back and the fine net of ropes that cradled the ship like soft fingers, and his body stretched in all directions with nothing below or above him. Every bit of his spirit rushed with exhilaration, flooded with absolute freedom. His legs in white leather and his feet in white boots hung beneath him, deliciously useless. His muscles moved, and the wings, made of azure light, flapped in response, lifting him into the cool, damp air, with bright brother sun calling to him, lifting body and soul. A rainbow of power gushed through him, and he was part of the heavens themselves, a whole note streaking through infinity, cleansed by wind and mist and shedding worries like grace notes. Gavin yelled and whooped, and his voice thundered across distant clouds as if it might split them in two. This was what he’d been born for. This was home.

  He hung in the blue nothing for a tiny moment. His wings glowed and sang softly behind him. The clouds spread a cottony pasture far away, and he could almost—almost—see gods and angels striding across them. A calm stole over him. It didn’t matter how many trillions of particles held him aloft or how gravity failed to function. It didn’t matter that a disease was coursing through his body and killing him bit by bit. Here was blessed nothing. His mind slowed and joined the stillness. The wind sighed, and Gavin hummed a soft note in response as the breeze curled about his white-clad body. Harmony. Peace. How perfect it was here.

  A shadow below caught his eye. The Lady was still hovering just above the surface of the calm Caspian Sea. This was at Phipps’s insistence—if Gavin’s wings had failed, he wouldn’t have fallen far, and the ocean would have provided a more pleasant landing than hard ground. Perhaps five miles ahead of the ship lay a sliver of an island, and just beyond that, a rocky coast. The shadow was moving beneath the water, growing larger and larger beneath the Lady as whatever cast it moved up from the bottom of the sea. The thing was nothing natural. Unease bloomed quickly into concern and fear. Gavin tucked and dove, his wings pulled in tightly. He didn’t dare dive too quickly—he didn’t know how much the harness could take, even though his mind was automatically calculating foot pounds and stress levels. He shouted a warning to Alice and Phipps and felt the vibration of his vocal cords, sensed the compression of air, knew the sound would scatter helplessly long before it reached Alice’s eardrums, and still he shouted.

  Half a mile below him, a pair of enormous black tentacles rose up from the shadow and broke the surface of the water. At seven or eight feet thick, they easily looped themselves up and around the Lady with incredible speed, even though she was the size of a decent cottage. Fear chased Gavin’s heart out of his rib cage as he dove closer. He could hear Alice shrieking and Phipps yelling in thin, tinny voices that were ballooning into full volume. Air burned his cheeks as he dove past the envelope, now wrapped in suckered black flesh, and he caught the rank smell of ocean depths and old fish.

  Instinct rushed him ahead. He had to reach Alice. He had no other thought but to reach her, get her to safety. Even the Lady’s distress didn’t matter.

  Below and just behind the ship, a black island rose from the waves. Eight other tentacles trailed in oily shadows beneath the ship, and a wicked horned beak large enough to crack an oak tree snapped open and shut. A single eye the size of a stagecoach stared up at Gavin, and he caught his own reflection in the dark iris. Inside Gavin, a monster equal to the one below him roared its anger. For a mad moment, he wondered if he could dive into the eye, punch both fists straight through the cornea into vitreous goo, and force the creature away. Grimly, he ended that line of thought as foolish. Instead, he made himself fling his wings open and end the dive with a sharp jerk that sent a red web of pain down his back and into his groin, where the flight harness was strapped to his lower body. He skimmed through a gap in the tentacles and the rope web that supported the Lady’s hull, twisting his body in ways that were already becoming reflexive, until he could drop to the deck. His wings folded back into a metallic cloak that dragged at his back and shoulders once the blue glow faded and the chime stopped.

  Susan Phipps had drawn a cutlass of tempered glass—only fools used sparking metal on an airship—and was hacking at one of the loops of tentacle that encircled the ship in a rubbery tunnel. Her mouth was set in a hard line, and her graying black hair was coming loose from under her hat and spilling over her blue lieutenant’s uniform. The blade gleamed liquid in the sun and it distorted the black tentacle as Phipps slashed again and again, but the edge made only shallow cuts in the rubbery surface, and if the creature noticed, it gave no indication.

  Alice, meanwhile, kicked open a hatchway on deck, and a finger of relief threaded through Gavin’s anger when he saw she wasn’t injured.

  “Are you all right?” he demanded.

  “I’m fine,” she barked, then shouted into the hatchway, “Out! Out, out, out!”

  From belowdecks burst a cloud of little brass automatons. Some skittered on spider legs; others flew on whirligig propellers. They sported arms and legs and other limbs of varying sizes and shapes, but most had points, and a little pride fluttered in Gavin’s chest at the way they obeyed Alice. She pointed at the tentacle above Phipps’s head with her gauntleted hand. “Attack!”

  The little automatons rushed at the tentacle. Their blades and pincers slashed and poked. The cuts oozed bluish ichor but otherwise seemed to have no impact. Wood creaked in protest beneath the smelly tentacles, and Gavin felt the Lady’s distress as his own. His stomach tightened. Water sloshed below, and a breeze stirred.

  “We told you we knew something like this would happen, Ennock!” Phipps shouted. She was still slashing at her tentacle with the help of the little automatons. “We told you dropping this close to the water in unknown territory was foolish.”

  “Does that matter now?” Alice yelled back. She cast about the deck, looking for something to do, then flung her arms around Gavin’s neck. “I’m so glad you’re all right. I was terrified the entire time you were up there.”

  Suddenly the squid didn’t matter. He held her even as wood and rope creaked all about them and seawater dripped from loops of black tentacle; his wings, no longer glowing and heavy now that he had landed, cupped protectively around them both. For a tiny moment, he let himself feel as if he had created a safe island for them both, and Alice was warm against him. It seemed they never really had moments to themselves, when they could enjoy just being together. Their time together burned away like a dying candle, and Gavin hated it. He just wanted to spend time alone with Alice, love her, raise children with her, but one crisis after another stormed over them. For one moment, at least, he held her, and she let him.

  “Oi! Lovebirds!” Phipps called over her metallic shoulder. The red lens of her monocle was hard as a ruby. “We need to figure out how to handle this before it drags us under!”

  “The creature isn’t dragging us down.” Gavin released Alice. “It’s towing us.”

  Phipps stopped hacking, and even the little automatons above her paused for a moment. “What?”

  Alice ran to the gunwale and peered over. The ship shuddered and creaked, moving forward instead of down. The creature’s tentacles were towing the Lady the way a child carried a balloon on a string. “G
ood heavens—he’s right. How did you know, darling?”

  “I felt the breeze. Besides, this thing could crush the Lady in seconds,” Gavin said. “It hasn’t, which means it doesn’t want to, or someone is stopping it from doing so. I don’t think this creature is natural. Someone made it. Someone’s controlling it. Someone who wants to capture us, not kill us.”

  “That makes me feel so much better,” Phipps snapped. “Instead of being crushed or drowned, we’re being kidnapped by someone who breeds giant squid for private amusement.”

  Jaw set hard, Alice swatted controls on a deck panel, sending the nacelles into full reverse. The engines whined and protested. The Lady bucked and shuddered, fighting the creature’s grip, but the towing barely slowed. Alice was growing desperate. Gavin knew she hated and feared being unable to control her world, and her fear made him angry at whoever—whatever—was causing it.

  “We need more weapons,” she said, still pounding at the controls. “What do we have?”

  Gavin shook his head. The Lady used to have a number of weapons, but they’d all been destroyed or rendered useless during recent events in France and Ukraine, and Gavin hadn’t had time to make any more. In fact, the only real weapon they had was—

  His blue eyes met Alice’s brown ones, a meeting of sky and earth. In that instant, the same thought went through both their heads; Gavin could see it.

  “No,” Alice said. Her eyes showed the whites.

  “We don’t have anything else,” Gavin countered.

  “No.”

  The Lady picked up speed. Ahead of them lay the island, thin as a knife, and it was growing larger.

  “No what?” Phipps demanded. Then she got it. “Oh. Oh God. No, Gavin. We can’t. Can we?”

  “Do we have a choice?”

  The Lady bucked again as Alice revved the nacelles with her spider-gauntleted hand, but it didn’t slow one iota. Gavin glanced at the island and ran automatic calculations. Ten minutes, nine seconds at their current rate of speed, assuming the island was their destination.

  “Go,” Phipps ordered. “Get the Cube.”

  Wings clutched tightly to his sides, Gavin ran to the main hatch Alice had kicked open and dropped into the dark hold. Halfway down, his plague-enhanced reflexes let him snag a ladder rung that broke his fall and allowed him to sidestep the next hatchway that would have dropped him farther belowdecks. He ran down the narrow passageway past facing doors to the end. With every hurried step, the Lady moaned in the creature’s grip.

  The door at the end of the corridor opened into Gavin’s laboratory, a small but efficient space with two little worktables, floor-to-ceiling shelves and cupboards, and several racks of scientific equipment. He yanked open one of the cupboards. Inside sat the dented brass head of a mechanical man with flat, motionless features, lightbulbs for eyes, and a speaker grill where his mouth should have been. The lightbulbs were dark, and one was shattered.

  “’Scuse me, Kemp,” Gavin muttered, and reached for the shelf above. It held a cube-shaped object of struts and mesh made from the same blue metal as his wings. The cube was the size of a hatbox and felt light and springy in Gavin’s hand. It also twisted the eye and made it go strange places. One of the rear struts seemed to fold over the front of the cube, or perhaps it was that one of the front struts was slipping behind the rear. At the same time, the top overlapped the bottom, which similarly overlapped the top. The Impossible Cube. Dr. Clef, Gavin’s friend and mentor, himself a clockworker, had nearly destroyed the universe with it, and Gavin had nearly killed himself last month using it to save the citizens of Kiev from a devastating flood. He hadn’t touched it since then out of fear and respect. Gavin hesitated for a fraction of a second, then fled the lab with it, along with a small box of tools.

  Topside, the Lady was now skimming along just above the flat waters at greater speed than before. Below, the creature knifed through the water, pulling the ship with thoughtless power. Its stagecoach eye stared up, flat and expressionless. The island was less than half a mile ahead of them, and they would reach the shore in less than five minutes.

  “What are you going to do with the Cube?” Alice asked tightly.

  “I have to charge it. No one’s touched it since Kiev.” Gavin knelt next to the small generator that puffed and purred on the deck, exuding steam and the smell of paraffin oil exhaust. Needles on readout dials flicked back and forth, indicating strength of current and health of machinery. A set of heavy-duty cables snaked from one side, across the deck, up the rigging, and into the center of the envelope. Trying not to think about the monster grasping his ship, Gavin set the Impossible Cube on the deck, pulled on a pair of rubber gloves, and snatched tools from the box. A moment’s work with a wrench loosened one of the cables from the generator.

  “Whatever you’re going to do, hurry up!” Phipps called. “We’re nearly at the shore!”

  His fingers protected by rubber, Gavin jerked the cable free of the generator. Instantly, a large section of the envelope’s endoskeleton went dark, and the Lady, unable to retain proper buoyancy, dropped straight down. Gavin’s stomach lurched, his feet left the deck for a moment, and his wings automatically snapped open to slow his fall. Alice yelped. Gavin reached for her, though he was too far away to do anything. But four of the whirligig automatons caught at her arms and shoulders, the propellers spinning madly to keep her aloft. Phipps gave a shriek such as Gavin had never heard from her and dropped with the ship.

  “Phipps!” Gavin shouted, but the lieutenant was already in action. A wire whipped out of her brass palm and wrapped around one of the tentacles still encircling the ship. The Lady hit the water with a spectacular boom. Water exploded in all directions. Phipps flicked the wire around her wrist, bent at the waist, and swung in a graceful arc to land beside Alice and Gavin, who had come down on the deck as well. With a jerk, Phipps released the wire from the tentacle, and it sucked itself back into her palm. Then she smacked Gavin on the back of the head. He grunted.

  “Idiot,” she said.

  “Sorry.”

  The two women exchanged a glance they thought Gavin didn’t see. The glances said clockwork plague in silent, pointed words. The plague killed most of its victims. It usually crippled survivors, though in most cases it ate the flesh from their bones and chewed through their brains, leaving behind demented, oozing zombies that shambled through shadows, spreading the disease even further. But in the brains of a tiny minority, the plague burned like a star and illuminated the dark corners of the universe, revealing impossible secrets and allowing the victim to create inventions both terrifying and benign. But such stars consumed themselves quickly, and Gavin’s time was growing short. He was already finding the tiny details of what was before him more and more intriguing, and he tended to forget the bigger picture, such as the fact that diverting power to the Impossible Cube would drop the Lady of Liberty several feet into the Caspian Sea. Gavin’s mentor, Dr. Clef, had felt sorry for Gavin and Alice and had tried, quite literally, to give them more time together, but he hadn’t considered that by doing so he would destroy the universe. Gavin hadn’t traveled quite that far down the clockwork road, but he could feel his grip slipping, and he hated that Alice and Phipps had noticed. It also scared the hell out of him.

  The Lady was now floating on the water. Her partially charged envelope continued to hover above her, though it couldn’t lift the hull any longer, and the creature still held the ship firmly in its grip. Wood groaned, and the rubbery stench of the sea creature stung Gavin’s nose. Beneath his boots, the deck moved sickeningly up and down in a completely unnatural motion for an airship. The shore was now perhaps a hundred yards away. An enormous cave gaped like an open mouth, and the ship was moving inexorably toward it, skimming over the waves.

  Alice looked over the gunwale again, her automatons following like a flock of nervous birds. “I don’t think we’ve harmed the creature by landing on it. More’s the pity,” she said with forced calm. “How did a clockworker create
something so large? That’s biology, not physics.”

  Phipps growled, “Strange questions coming from a woman whose aunt could cure clockwork zombies. You’ve seen what they can do with biology.”

  “Not on this scale.” She grimaced. “Or tentacle.”

  “Can you see any damage to the Lady?” Gavin called. Now that Alice had come up unharmed, his concerns had shifted.

  “No, though I’m no expert.” The breeze from the monster’s towing had pulled Alice’s long, honey brown hair out of its twist and it blew in soft waves around her face. She was so beautiful, even when she was disheveled and nervous. He wanted to scoop her off the deck and fly her to a secluded hilltop where she would be safe, but he hadn’t tried carrying another person yet and didn’t know if the wings could take it.

  Alice added, “Now that you nearly killed us, darling, perhaps you could get that Cube charged? If that’s what you insist on doing.”

  Her tone was artificially light, and it didn’t take clockwork genius to read the grim undertone. Gavin jammed the business end of the live wire against the Impossible Cube. Electricity cracked and fizzled, and the Cube glowed a faint blue that grew brighter as the object powered up. While it did so, it grew lighter and lighter until it was floating within Gavin’s hands, for it was forged of the same alloy as Gavin’s wings and the Lady’s endoskeleton. The Cube was a truly singular object. Dr. Clef, its inventor, had claimed it had no parallel object in any other universe; it twisted gravity and energy and even time itself in ways Gavin was only beginning to understand. As a side effect, the Cube converted sound waves into other forms of energy, making it a potent weapon for anyone with a good set of tuning forks—or perfect pitch.