The Dragon Men

by Steven Harper

  Although the remedy Alice herself was spreading could heal the plague in zombies and in people who had recently fallen ill, no one in England had managed to cure a clockworker. That meant Gavin was doomed.

  With Gavin’s help, Alice had ended the clockwork plague in England and was spreading the cure across Europe, though her ultimate goal was still China. Britain had never managed to cure a clockworker, but China . . . the Oriental Empire was known for its introspection, doing research about research. If anyone had a clockwork cure, it was the Dragon Men.

  “We are traveling to China, yes,” Phipps said cautiously. “What does it matter to you?”

  “I am doing you a favor. China has recently closed its borders. No one gets in these days. Or out.”

  A pang jolted Alice’s stomach. “What? They can’t do that!”

  “Hm,” al-Noor said. “This is not the place to discuss such things. Come and eat, and I promise—no drugs.”

  A few moments later, the Lady had been dragged to a little stone quay and a contingent of squid men with clammy hands was escorting Phipps and Alice—without her little mechanicals—down a cavern tunnel and into a chilly, high-ceilinged cavern the size of a formal dining room. Stalactites dripped water from the ceiling, and the sandy floor felt gritty under Alice’s feet. The squid men shut and barred a thick door at the entrance to the cavern and brought the two women to a low table surrounded by pillows. Foods Alice couldn’t begin to identify heaped the dishes and filled the air with strange, spicy smells that turned Alice’s stomach. Electric lights clung to the walls to cast a hard, unmoving light over everything. The whole place looked like a dining room designed by, well, a madman. Alice stood unhappily next to the table with Phipps while al-Noor, still in his damp swimsuit and belt, seated himself on a plump pillow. A squid man took his gray cloak, and Alice belatedly realized it was made of sharkskin.

  “Please, sit, eat,” he said as one of the squid men piled food on his plate.

  Alice remained standing. Sitting cross-legged on the floor would put her at a further disadvantage, and she was too tense to sit in any case. Her muscles felt stiff as whalebone, and sweat trickled down her back despite the chill of the cave. She forced herself to relax—or try to. Gavin would come for them. He had the Impossible Cube, the most powerful weapon in the world.

  A weapon they only barely understood. A weapon that had nearly destroyed the entire universe by stopping time. It hadn’t even been two weeks since she and Gavin had faced down plump, merry Dr. Clef at the bottom of the dam in Kiev, not fourteen days since she had watched in horror as he charged up the Impossible Cube with half the power of a city and reached for a switch that would freeze everything forever between two ticks of the universe’s clock. He had been her friend, a kind, slightly eccentric old man with strange theories that bent her mind and made her see the world on different terms. And she had taken a hand in his death. Feng Lung, another dear friend, had died as well, messily and horribly. She often saw the image of their mingled blood hanging in the air before she fell asleep in her bunk at night.

  “Get to it, al-Noor,” Phipps snapped, also refusing to sit. “What do you want?”

  “You are not in a position to shout.” Al-Noor stuffed a wad of flat bread into his mouth. “With a word, my men could kill you. Or perhaps they will pull your brass arm off so I can study it. Have some coconut milk.”

  “My name is Lady Michaels, a peer of the British Empire. You will use that title when you address me.”

  Alice wished Phipps wouldn’t antagonize the man. Although al-Noor clearly wanted them alive, he was a clockworker, and who knew what he might decide to do. The overpowering presence of more than a dozen squid men in the room made her continually nervous, and she found herself fingering her spider gauntlet like a security blanket.

  Stop it, she told herself. You’re better than this. But the slimy squid men and the dank cave continued to press in all around her.

  “Even a lady must eat.” Al-Noor waved away Phipps’s comment with a forkful of noodles. “But it is your prerogative to go hungry if you wish. A pity, when so many others in the world are starving.”

  “What do you want with us, Mr. al-Noor?” Alice asked carefully. “You said something about China’s borders.”

  “I did, I did.” Al-Noor sipped noisily from a porcelain cup, which was instantly refilled by one of the squid men. A bit of slime from its neck tentacles dripped into the cup. Al-Noor drank again, and Alice’s gorge rose. Phipps looked a bit green. “The borders are closed.”

  “They can’t do that,” Alice said again. “The Treaty of Nanking opened free trade between China and England after that fight over opium—what?—nine years ago? Ten?”

  “Nine, yes.” Al-Noor toyed with an oily bit of fish. “But the treaty was not about free trade. It was about letting British merchants ram Indian opium down Chinese throats. And the Chinese finally had enough. Fellow named Prince Cheng teamed up with a Manchu warlord named Su Shun, and they closed the borders, treaty or no.”

  “There’ll be a fight,” Phipps predicted. “A big one.”

  “Yes. I think Cheng and Su Shun are counting on that. You British took Peking by sheer luck. Everyone knows that if General Zexu Lin’s war machines hadn’t broken down at Canton and let the English forces through, the Chinese would have thrown the British out quite handily. And even so, the British took huge losses at Peking before the emperor surrendered. If General Lin had not backed down, the British might have still failed.”

  “Ancient history,” Phipps said. “The Chinese lost. They signed the treaty.”

  “And now they have decided to fight again.” Al-Noor popped something blue and rubbery into his mouth. “Perhaps they have heard that the British are losing their clockworkers and they have decided to flex their muscles. It will be interesting to see how the British fare now that no new clockworker has been spotted in Europe for nearly two months and the ones they already have are dying out. Who will create and repair their engines of war?”

  “So they’ve closed the borders to keep the cure out.” Alice sank to a pillow despite herself.

  “It is what I would do were I ruling China.”

  “But it doesn’t explain why you captured us,” Phipps pointed out.

  “Ah, but it does. In a way.” Al-Noor checked the contents of a serving bowl, discovered it was empty, and made a face. A squid man snatched it up and hurried away with it. “I myself know quite a lot about the clockwork plague. I suffer from it.”

  “Do you?” Phipps said without a trace of sarcasm.

  “It was why my countrymen sent me here. This island is a men’s leper colony, you know. Up top, that is. They also send people who suffer from the clockwork plague here, but we, poor souls, are lepers among lepers and are forced to scuttle about down here. After nearly a year of hard work, I discovered how to alter the plague a bit, combine it with proteins from sea animals.”

  “Squid,” Alice whispered in horror.

  Al-Noor nodded with enthusiasm. “My process changes them. It slows the plague considerably but does not halt it. The two you cured, Lady Michaels”—he gestured at Phipps, and Alice remembered she had scratched the squid men before al-Noor boarded—“have died. Only my altered plague was keeping them alive, and you took that away from them.”

  Guilt engulfed Alice, and she folded her arms across her stomach. The iron spider made a cold, dreadful weight.

  “I still don’t understand why you captured me,” Phipps growled. “And I’m growing impatient.”

  “My research is expensive,” al-Noor replied simply. “Do you have any idea how much I pay in bribes just to get a ship’s captain to land here, let alone bring me what I need? It is ungodly. Fortunately for me, a source of revenue skimmed across my little sea directly at me.”

  “We don’t have much money,” Alice said, not quite lying. “We can pay a little—”

  “Not you,” al-Noor interrupted. “The Chinese.”

  That stopped A
lice. “The Chinese?” she repeated.

  “The emperor, to be specific. His Imperial Majesty Xianfeng is offering four hundred pounds of silver for the capture of Alice, Lady Michaels. Alive.” His eyes glittered. “I can breed a lot of squid with that much money.”

  “Four hundred pounds of silver,” Phipps breathed.

  “Good heavens,” Alice whispered.

  “Wait—he wants me alive?” Phipps said. “So when you were threatening to drown me aboard our ship—”

  “An excellent bluff,” al-Noor agreed. “I’m very good at them.”

  Phipps closed her uncovered eye for a moment. “Why does the emperor want us? Me?”

  “Rumor has it Xianfeng fears the clockwork plague. Perhaps he wants to ensure he avoids it forever. He’s also known for keeping pretty concubines, especially unusual ones. You can keep him occupied in any number of ways, I am sure.”

  A chill slid over Alice, and her fingers automatically went to her spider gauntlet. Phipps caught her eye and gave a tiny shake of her head, which stiffened Alice’s spine.

  “In any case,” al-Noor finished, “once I turn you in, I will have enough silver to buy everything I need for the next stage of my research.”

  “And what is that?” Alice couldn’t help asking.

  “A female squid.”

  “Oh good Lord,” Phipps muttered. “Look, al-Noor, my maid is worthless to you. There’s no need to hold her hostage. Let her go as a sign of good faith, and I’ll do whatever you like.”

  “No.” Al-Noor slurped more tea and held out his cup for a refill, which one of the squid men instantly gave. “I already regret letting that stunning young man go. This maid of yours will guarantee your good behavior. If you try anything strange, she will suffer for it.”

  “I give you my word as a . . . as a lady that I won’t—”

  Al-Noor cut her off with a sharp gesture. “Your pardon if I do not accept your word. I will alert the Chinese border authorities by wireless transmission in a moment, but first I want a demonstration of this cure.”

  A sour worm crawled through Alice’s stomach. Phipps glanced at her again, then said, “I don’t understand.”

  “I want to see this cure at work. You used it on two of my squid men before I arrived on the airship, and I had no chance to study the reaction before the two of them died. I wish to see it now.”

  Alice’s earlier guilt returned in a black cloud. Who had those squid men been? Did they have families? Children? Had they understood what was happening to them? It had been an accident—she’d had no intention of killing them, or even hurting them. But she had done it nonetheless, and they were dead because of her.

  Phipps crossed her arms. She was still standing. “What do you mean by see it?”

  “Cure one of my squid men. Now.”

  Uh-oh. Alice licked dry lips. The masquerade was going sour. She cast about for something to say, something to do.

  “I feel I should ask,” she said, trying to stall, “exactly why you sent that enormous creature out to capture us. My . . . employer, Lady Michaels, is well-known for curing people with the plague. If you had sent her a message to say you had an entire island of plague victims who needed help, Lady Michaels would have sailed into this cave of her own accord and you could have betrayed her at your leisure, no squid necessary.”

  “Oh,” said al-Noor. A long moment of silence followed. Then he added, “But that would have been dull.”

  “Indeed,” Phipps said.

  “In any case,” al-Noor continued, “I must insist that you show me the cure, Lady Michaels.”

  “I am not a circus act, Mr. al-Noor.” Phipps’s posture stiffened. “And in any case, the cure kills your men. I won’t be responsible for more deaths.”

  “They are all dying anyway,” al-Noor replied reasonably. “Fortunately, the mainland sends me a fresh supply of plague victims every few months. They do not even know what becomes of them—nor do they care.”

  “And you don’t, either?” Alice burst out.

  “As we already observed, they are dying anyway. Please, Lady Michaels.”

  “No,” Phipps said.

  Al-Noor snapped his fingers twice, and one of the squid men whipped the cover off a serving platter. On the platter lay an ugly brass pistol with a glass barrel. Almost languidly, al-Noor plucked the pistol from the table and aimed it at Phipps. A thin whine shrilled through the cavern, and the glass snapped with yellow sparks as the weapon powered up. “Cure one of my men or I will shoot.”

  “No, you won’t,” Phipps sniffed. “The reward is to capture me alive. If I’m dead, you get nothing. And if you shoot my maid, I’ll be too upset to cure anyone, so don’t bother threatening her.”

  “Oh, I will shoot you, all right,” al-Noor said. “And you, Lady Michaels,” he added to Alice, “will watch her die. Slowly.”

  This caught Alice completely off guard. She sprang to her feet, not sure if she was more angry or afraid. “What?”

  “I deduced it some time ago. This woman—is her name actually Susan, perhaps?—speaks and carries herself like a military officer and, oh yes, she wears a uniform. Lady Michaels serving in the military? I hardly think so. And you, madam, do not walk or talk like a maid. So, Lady Michaels, demonstrate the cure on one of these men here, or I will shoot your friend. I have the feeling you will prove rather more compliant.”

  “If you shoot her,” Alice said, trying to imitate Phipps’s bravado and not quite succeeding, “I won’t help you.”

  Al-Noor fired. A red energy beam slashed through the air and struck one of the squid men in the chest. It fell to the floor with a terrible squeal amid sizzling skin. The smell of cooked fish filled the air. The squid man twisted and screamed in agony, even though it had no mouth, and Alice watched in horror as its chest melted into a blue mass that bubbled like a witch’s cauldron. The squid man screamed and screamed. Alice clapped her hands over her ears in horror. The spider claws cruelly raked her skin, but she left them there through a century of seconds, until the squid man died. The other squid men remained motionless and impassive, their dark eyes reflecting the mess on the floor.

  “That is setting one.” Al-Noor cranked a dial on the stock of the pistol and aimed at Phipps, who blanched despite herself. “This is setting seven.”

  “Wait!” Alice cried.

  “Yes, Lady?”

  Alice looked down at the table and unhappily ran her hands around the rim of the empty plate before her. The spider’s claws scraped over china. Two awful choices, and no one to hide behind, no one to turn to. Just herself. Just as it always was. A wave of homesickness swept over her, and more than anything in that moment she yearned to be back in London, in the little house she had rented, with Gavin sitting across the kitchen table from her while they shared a meal and talked about nothing in particular. No clockworkers, no squid men, no iron spiders. Just she and Gavin, with his kind voice and blue eyes and that way he had of looking at her that made her feel like the only woman in the entire world. Her fingers continued their crawl around the plate.

  “Very well, Mr. al-Noor,” she said. “I will ‘cure’ one of your squid men. Just don’t—”

  She flung the plate at al-Noor. It glanced off his pistol and shattered. He yelped. The pistol fired, but the beam went wide. Phipps leaped across the table at him, brass arm outstretched. Dishes scattered and broke as she grabbed his fleshy wrist with her metal fingers. Except with the clockwork plague came enhanced reflexes, and al-Noor was quick to recover. He went down beneath Phipps but managed to keep his weapon hand free. The pair rolled across the stone floor as al-Noor brought the pistol around to press against Phipps’s temple. Phipps knocked it aside. Alice threw another plate at him and missed. It crashed next to his ear, and he ignored it. She dashed around the table, cursing her bulky skirts and looking for an opening.

  “Take them, you fools!” al-Noor barked. “Hit this stupid woman!”

  The squid men in the room moved. Two grabbed Alice
from behind, and their cold hands chilled her skin through her dress. Another pair hoisted Phipps straight off al-Noor while a third cracked her over the ear with a hard fist. Phipps staggered, stunned but still conscious.

  Al-Noor hauled himself to his feet. Blood from a split lip spattered his ridiculous swim costume, and Alice loathed him with a black hatred. She struggled within the grip of the squid men, but they held her like iron.

  “That was a mistake.” He spat blood and raised the pistol. “The reward for your dead body is lower, but still sufficient.”

  Alice forced herself to remain calm, though fear and adrenaline zipped through every artery and vein. Think, girl, she told herself. Al-Noor was a clockworker. Clockworkers were geniuses, but their thinking was far from perfect. Remember what happens to Gavin.

  “I like what you’ve done with those droplets of blood,” she said with quiet desperation. “They’re so round, so smooth, so clear. There must be millions, billions, trillions of cells in each drop, spinning, whirling, swirling through liquid. How beautiful, how lovely, how perfect.”

  Al-Noor looked down. Scarlet drops fell from his lip, just as Alice described, glistening in the air before they landed on the broken table, and the sight seemed to grab his attention. A drop fell, and his eyes followed it until it hit the wood with a tiny tip noise. Another followed. A third landed in his cup, spreading like a tiny fractal flower, and his attention remained rooted. He had the same expression on his face Gavin did when he became fascinated by something, and the similarity unnerved Alice. She ground her teeth. Gavin had nothing in common with this man, and he never would.

  “The blood disperses through the water, expanding, flowing, moving. The blood is beautiful, the blood is entrancing,” she forced herself to chant.