Freed her.
Her wretched, treacherous heart hadn’t cared one bit who he was or where he had come from. Her heart didn’t mind being turned into an outlaw and flung from pillar to post. In fact, and rather surprisingly, she liked it. Good heavens, she loved it. Without him, she would this moment be living in London with a dreary, lifeless husband in a dreary, lifeless mansion, enduring a dreary, lifeless marriage. Instead, she was gadding about the world in an airship with a collection of mechanicals and a disreputable former lieutenant, wanted by both the British and Chinese empires. Chaos personified! She wouldn’t change a single, glorious thing.
Except . . .
One glance at Gavin, stalwart at the helm, told her that the glory was a sham. On the surface, with the wind teasing his white-blond hair and his keen blue eyes scanning the horizon for obstacles and airships, he looked every inch the capable airship captain. But underneath, the red worm that was clockwork plague ate steadily away at him. She saw it nearly every day now, and so did Phipps. The wings he had built in his spare time in Germany and Ukraine were a symptom. He was brilliant, perhaps more brilliant than Dr. Clef, but he was steadily losing touch with reality.
With her.
She had to admit to a certain amount of fear. Clockworkers always turned into lunatics who lashed out at the people around them. Always. She had already encountered him once during a fugue, and he hadn’t even recognized her; he had snarled at her and nearly struck her. The plague made him strong and fast. Would he eventually . . . ?
No. He wouldn’t. Quite impossible. He loved her deeply, just as she loved him. They had fought long and hard to be together. Not even the plague could destroy something so fundamental.
She shook her head. The conflicts were always there—law against chaos, love against fear. She didn’t know how to resolve them. Instead, she kept moving forward. It was a lesson she had learned from Gavin: If you kept moving, you didn’t have to stop and think about why you were moving.
Alice put a hand on Click’s metal head at the gunwale, wanting to feel the familiar pattern of rivets on his skin, as the Lady glided closer to the group of airships hanging over the city of Tehran. The place looked nothing like London, and as she had done in so many other places before it, she would have to find a way to work around her ignorance of the local rules. So far she had learned to live with the nervousness created by that particular problem. A larger issue loomed. Tehran was supposed to be the first step on the road to China.
That road was now closed.
The Lady reached the edge of the city and slid over the top of the ancient walls, gentle as a cloud. Several of her whirligig automatons dashed into the open air as if scouting ahead, then zipped back to the safety of the deck while her spiders clung to the netting and watched with glittering eyes. They were perhaps half a mile from the ground, and a steady updraft from the heated earth tried to push the ship higher. Gavin was compensating by edging the power levels down and making the Lady heavier. The deck rocked, but Alice had long ago earned her air legs and she scarcely noticed. So much was happening so fast, she barely had time to consider any of it.
Al-Noor had claimed China had closed its borders to all foreign traffic, presumably to keep the cure out. Alice flexed her ironclad hand. The spider’s eyes glowed green, indicating no one with the plague was within close range, though her blood continued to burble through the tubes running up and down the spider’s legs. The cure created by her blood could spread from person to person like a cold or influenza, leaping from one body to the next with every cough or sneeze. If no one went in or out of China, her cure couldn’t get anywhere. Still, China couldn’t keep the cure out forever, could it? China did have a reputation for keeping strict order. On the other hand, its border was long, and it took only one person to penetrate the embargo and spread the cure. On yet another hand, that probably didn’t matter. China needed only to delay the cure’s arrival, the longer the better. Every day that China kept the clockwork plague meant one more day that another Dragon Man might arise from the pool of victims and invent fantastic devices for the Chinese Empire. England, meanwhile, had lost the plague—and her clockworkers—entirely. China had the upper hand, and China didn’t much care for England.
All this meant that the three of them weren’t in a position to travel to Peking and beg, borrow, or steal the Chinese clockwork cure, if one even existed. And that meant Gavin would soon—
Unbidden, an image slid into Alice’s mind: the Lady gliding through the sky with an empty space at the helm. Gavin’s mechanical wings lying in a wiry pile on the deck, their owner long since vanished. Alice swallowed the lump that came to her throat and tried to dash at sudden tears with her hand, but the cold spider bumped her face, which only made things worse. She turned her back on Gavin and fumbled for a handkerchief with her good hand, only to discover she had none. With a small choking sound, she leaned over the gunwale as if she were looking at the buildings below and let the tears drop into the city. Click pressed his cool nose against her side.
After a full half minute, she forced herself upright. That’s enough now, she thought. Whimpering like a helpless maiden never gets anything done. Perhaps you can’t get into China, and perhaps the Chinese Empire has put a price on your head. If that’s true, your choices are either to alter your goal or find a new way to attain your current one. Get the information you need and make a plan. Meanwhile, straighten up, girl!
This was supposed to be a happy day, a thrilling day. Gavin had, at long last and after many delays, asked for her hand in marriage. And he had built a successful pair of wings, for heaven’s sake! At the end of such a day, they should be drinking champagne while he slid a ring onto her finger, and then there should be music and dancing, or at least a good meal.
Gavin was still guiding the ship across the city while Phipps watched from her deck chair. The majority of the ships were clumped on the southern side of Tehran, which presumably meant there was a mooring yard over there. Alice could also make out large, round buildings that her experience in Kiev told her were petroleum distilleries. It made sense—dirigibles were a major market for paraffin oil, and there was no sense in paying to haul the stuff any farther than necessary. The ship dipped lower, and the smell of petroleum grew stronger. It was hardly the romantic place she had imagined spending the first night of her engagement.
Well, really! she told herself. Have you learned nothing in the last few weeks? If no one gives you what you want, you must take it.
With that, she strode across the deck, trailing little automatons and snatched the sherry bottle from Phipps’s brass hand with her ironclad one.
“Oi!” Phipps protested. “That’s mine!”
“What the heck?” Gavin said.
“Go away,” Alice snapped at Phipps. “Belowdecks.”
Phipps rose slowly to her feet and stared at Alice for a long moment, the red lens of her monocle glistening bloodred in the late light. Then she nodded once and picked up the dark Impossible Cube from the deck. “I think I’ll stash this and perhaps take a nap. Wake me when we’ve moored.” With that, she went below.
“All of you, too,” Alice said to the automatons, who were chasing one another about the deck. “Now!”
Startled, the flock of automatons froze for a moment, then skittered into an open hatchway. The only one left up top was Click, who pointedly continued staring over the side as if Alice hadn’t spoken.
“Bloody cat,” Alice muttered.
“What was that all about?” Gavin enquired. “We’re almost to the mooring field, you know.”
In answer, Alice grabbed the front of his jacket with her free hand and pulled him in for a long kiss. He smelled of mist and leather, and he tasted of salt. Gavin stiffened, startled. Then his hands left the helm, and his arms went strong around her. She pressed against him, feeling both safe and hungry. Her hand ran through his hair, silky as feathers, and his callused palm caressed her face and neck, then stole over her breast. Her breath
quickened, and a warmth spread through her. Then she pulled back.
“Wow,” he said. “What was that for?”
“I call for a toast, Mr. Ennock”—she raised the sherry bottle—“to celebrate our engagement and those brilliant, beautiful wings you invented. If I can’t have you for long, I intend to enjoy your company for every moment we have left.” Her voice quavered for a moment, and she covered by taking a pull directly from the bottle. The sherry, too sweet and too warm, burned all the way down. “To the best damned clockworker in the whole damned world!”
“Why, Lady Michaels,” Gavin laughed, taking the bottle from her, “you foul-mouthed hussy! I never thought I’d see the day!”
“You’ve seen nothing, Mr. Ennock,” she replied, and kissed him again. This time her hands wandered greedily over his chest and back, wanting to touch him, drink him in as she had the sherry. She moved her body against his and felt him harden, which caused her own deep self to pulse.
When they separated, he took a swig from the bottle. “To the best and most talented woman in the goddamned universe!”
“And don’t you forget it, sir,” Alice said. She slid her hands around his strong, solid body again, not wanting to let go for a moment. Never, ever letting go. “I have many talents, some of which I haven’t yet developed.”
He buried his face in her hair. “I look forward to charting unexplored territory.”
They stayed like that for several moments while air and sky played over them. Then Alice reluctantly stepped away. What she intended to say next was difficult, but it needed to be discussed. The words stuck in her throat at first, but she decided she wasn’t having any of that nonsense anymore, and she would speak. The words came in a rush.
“So, what are we going to do about getting you into China, darling? I refuse to let something as petty as an empire stand in the way of finding your cure.”
She gave a short, sharp sigh. A burden she hadn’t realized she was carrying lifted and floated away. What a strange thing—once the words were said aloud, they lost their power.
“I’ve actually been thinking about that,” Gavin replied.
“Have you?” she said with a smile.
“It’s an occupational hazard with clockworkers. We never stop.”
“Truly? This strikes me as more of a social problem,” Alice said. “And with the sole exception of my aunt Edwina, I’ve yet to meet a clockworker who excelled in the social arena.”
“I’m also an airman,” Gavin pointed out, “and you might remember how the Juniper did her share of . . . untaxed shipping.”
“Smuggling,” said the newly forthright Alice.
“If you like,” Gavin sniffed. “Anyway, you can’t possibly make a border that big airtight, and I happen to know that for the right price, an untaxed shipper—”
“Smuggler.”
“Smuggler will move anything you like. That includes people. We just need to find such a person.”
“Iffy,” Alice mused. “We’d be putting our trust in a criminal.”
“Not all smugglers are bad people,” Gavin said in a pained voice. “Some of them are just trying to avoid stupidly high tariffs.”
Alice narrowed her eyes. “You’re smuggling right now, aren’t you? What have you hidden on this ship?”
“Well, technically . . .”
“Gavin! What are you—?”
They were interrupted by a mechanical yowl. Click was arching his back on the gunwale at a looming airship ten times the size of the Lady. Gavin had taken his hands off the helm during the . . . discussion with Alice, and neither of them had noticed the ship veering into danger. Gavin spun the helm with a yelp and Alice slapped switches on the generator. The Lady’s glow dimmed, and the little ship swooped starboard even as it dropped, missing the other ship by a mere few yards. Alice’s stomach lurched, and she caught faint shouts of outrage from the deck of the other ship. The Lady sped away like a minnow fleeing a whale. Gavin caught Alice’s eye. And they both started to laugh. Click pulled his claws out of the decking and turned his back on them in disgust.
“Well, Mr. Ennock,” Alice said, “we seem to have a knack for attracting and averting disaster together.”
“True, Lady Michaels. It’s the second talent that gives me hope.”
Later, they were mooring the ship at the edge of the dusty landing field just outside the walls of Tehran. Hot sunlight mixed with the unpleasant smells from the distilleries, which also clanked and grumbled like metal jungle animals. There were only a few of the enormous, rounded hangars available, and Gavin said the rent for them was atrocious, so they powered down the Lady’s envelope and together staked her to the ground outside among other airships, and even for this there was a fee that set Gavin to grumbling. Puffs of dust rose up like tiny djinn every time Alice took a step.
“You’d better hide in the hold while I pay,” Gavin said. “Al-Noor might have been lying or mad or both, but if there really is a price on your head, we don’t want the controller to be the person who recognizes you. Stay down there until I have the chance to run into town and find something appropriate for you to wear.”
Alice looked down at her modest blue dress. “Appropriate?”
“For a Turkmen woman,” Gavin clarified. “We’re in Persia, you know. You need some native clothing so you can blend in. Don’t let anyone aboard while I’m gone.”
“What are you smuggling, Gavin?” she asked. “Technically?”
“Technically? My wings. The Impossible Cube. And probably you,” he said lightly, and kissed her cheek before sliding down a rope to the ground below.
Alice dutifully climbed up to hide in the hold with Gavin’s new wings at her feet and her automatons perched on her shoulders. She peeped out a porthole while Gavin talked to a swarthy man in red blousy trousers and a tall, furry hat. A considerable amount of money exchanged hands. Alice held her breath, but the man strutted away without demanding to inspect the cargo hold. Gavin followed a moment later, heading toward the city walls and leaving a trail in the dust. She waited for a considerable time in the afternoon heat, but after a short while her eyes started to droop, and she found she couldn’t stay awake. The day’s excitement and the sherry were having an effect. Perhaps she could creep off to her stateroom bunk as Phipps had done. But no—simpler just to curl up on this pile of sacking near the bulkhead. The automatons would wake her if a stranger—
The next thing she knew, Gavin was shaking her awake. Outside the sun had dropped, and it was nearly dark. Phipps was with him, her hair restored to its usual neat twist and her lieutenant’s hat firmly in place above her monocle. She was holding the Impossible Cube, and her expression was grim. Alice’s sleepy languor jerked away, replaced by dread.
“What’s wrong?” she said, instantly alert. The automatons clustered about her with little peeping sounds.
Gavin set a bundle of cloth on the wood next to her little nest and handed Alice a newspaper. “After I bought clothes, I found this. Take a look.”
The curly Persian letters meant nothing to Alice, and for a moment she realized that this was how it felt to be illiterate. It was an odd sensation, being unable even to sound out individual letters. She started to ask why Gavin would give her a paper she couldn’t read. Then her eye lighted at the top-right corner. A string of numbers, the same in English and in this language, tugged at her attention. Her stomach went cold.
“1681,” she said aloud. “That—that can’t be the year, can it?”
“Persian reads right to left.” Her voice was tight, as if she were trying not to fly apart. “Today is August 20, 1861. About three years after we met al-Noor.”
A small sound escaped Alice’s throat. The cargo hold spun, and she put out a hand to steady herself, glad she was still sitting down. Her breath came in short gasps. Automatically, her gaze went to the Cube in Phipps’s hands. It sat there, innocent as a baby. Alice couldn’t wrap her mind round the idea. It was like trying to spin a rope from sand; the harder
she tried, the more it fell apart.
“Three years?” she cried. “Holy Mother of God! That thing moved us three years? Why? How?”
“I don’t know.” Gavin knelt next to her and took her hand. His fingers were cold. “Al-Noor’s pistol fed it a lot of strange energy, and I sang one of the notes from my paradox generator. Don’t forget that Dr. Clef used the generator and the Cube to stop time—or he tried to.”
Alice felt the wooden deck pressing against the backs of her legs. She saw her little automatons and heard their little whirs and peeps. Gavin’s white-blond hair fell soft over his forehead, and Phipps stood straight as a yardstick next to him. It all looked perfectly normal, perfectly sane. Yet every scrap, every particle was three years wrong.
Alice’s mind was racing now. She remembered the strange lights and the falling sensation when Gavin had sung into the Cube back in al-Noor’s cave. “Perhaps we didn’t move through time. If a series of notes was instrumental in stopping time everywhere, perhaps one note in the series stopped time. Just for us. Or something.”
“Or something,” Gavin agreed. “God, Alice, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize—”
“Sorry? You’re sorry?” Her words were rising toward hysteria, and she bit them back. Get a grip, woman! Would a tantrum change anything or make the situation better? She forced out a breath and wrenched her thoughts into something resembling rationality. How much did it truly matter?
Alice straightened, and her air of ladyship returned. The more she thought about it, the more she realized this could work to their advantage.
“Well. Yes,” she said. “There’s nothing to be sorry about, darling. Now that I think of it, this is the best of all possible worlds. It explains why al-Noor was gone—he and his squid men couldn’t have survived three years with clockwork plague. They’re long dead, poor souls. We escaped them completely unharmed. Additionally, I’ve managed to elude capture by the Chinese government for three years, so perhaps the reward has expired. At minimum, the furor would have died down.”
The Dragon Men Page 9
