The Dragon Men

by Steven Harper

  “And so is your ability to invade the rest of the world once British and European builders of clocks have died,” Phipps added with a bitter note. Gavin uneasily concurred. It was the only conclusion.

  Li shrugged. “I do as the emperor commands.”

  At that moment, a single nightingale flittered across the deck. It was carrying something in its claws. The little metal bird dropped the small object in Lieutenant Li’s hand, then perched on his shoulder. Gavin heard a faint voice, though he didn’t catch the words. He glanced at Alice’s pocket, where his silver nightingale currently resided. Li’s face went pale at the nightingale’s recorded message. The military demeanor left him. Slowly, with deference and fear in every movement, he sidled across the deck toward Gavin, the object clutched to his chest and the nightingale on his shoulder. Gavin exchanged puzzled looks with Alice. What now?

  “Do you need something, Lieutenant?” Gavin asked.

  With a lightning movement that caught even Gavin’s clockworker reflexes off guard, Li clapped his hand to Gavin’s left ear. A hot needle pierced his eardrum with white pain. Gavin howled. He snapped out a hand and stiff-armed Li so hard, the man flew backward across the deck. Gavin dropped to his knees, still screaming, his hand on his ear. The hot pain was excruciating. It went on and on. He was vaguely aware that Alice was kneeling next to him with her arm around his shoulder and that most of the soldiers on deck were standing around him with their swords and pistols out. The pain drilled a molten hole through his skull, leaving a trail of coals behind it.

  And then it stopped. The pain vanished as if it had never been. The change was so abrupt, he became light-headed.

  “Gavin!” Alice was saying. “Darling, what’s wrong? What did he do to you?”

  He got to his feet. The hand at his ear was a little warm and sticky, and he felt bumpy metal beneath his fingers. The soldiers kept their weapons at the ready. Outside their circle, Li had already risen. He looked unhappy. Phipps looked furious.

  “How dare you attack him!” she said in Chinese. “You bring shame to your—”

  Gavin brought his hand down, revealing his ear. There was a group gasp. A tinkle and clank of dropped weapons indicated numb fingers all round. Every soldier, including Li, dropped to his knees and knocked his forehead on the decking.

  “What the hell?” Gavin looked at the soldiers, then at the little smear of blood on his palm.

  “Oh!” Phipps wove her way among the kneeling soldiers, who kept their facedown position, and put out a finger to touch Gavin’s ear. “I didn’t even consider. Oh, damn it. I’m sorry, Ennock. I should have thought—”

  “What’s going on?” Alice demanded.

  “Li put a salamander in Gavin’s ear,” Phipps said. “That messenger bird brought it. I’m guessing it also told him Gavin is a clockworker—a Dragon Man.”

  “So?” The salamander lay curled around the outside of Gavin’s ear. He followed its contours with his finger. The tail seemed to be lodged in his aural canal. He tugged at it, and a blinding pain came over him again. He staggered and let go. The pain stopped.

  “Don’t touch it,” Alice cautioned. “Let me have a look.”

  “You can’t take it out,” Phipps said. “Not without killing him.”

  “What?” Gavin almost tugged at it again, then thought better of it. “What do you mean? What’s it for? What’s it doing?”

  “Dragon Men are revered in China.” Phipps gestured at the kowtowing soldiers. “But they’re also feared, and with good reason. Clockworkers—Dragon Men—always put rulers in a tough spot. They have great power, but they’re deadly lunatic. The British Empire coped by creating the Third Ward and building the Doomsday Vault. China has a different solution.”

  “A salamander?” Alice was examining the object as best she could. Gavin remained still, though he felt sick. It seemed as if he could feel the thing’s tail worming into his skull.

  “All Dragon Men in China have to wear one,” Phipps said. “It’s the law. Rogue Dragon Men are executed.”

  “But what does it do?” Gavin demanded.

  “Hold still, darling.”

  Phipps hesitated. “It ties each Dragon Man to the emperor. I’ve never seen it in action myself, but I’m told no Dragon Man can disobey a direct order from the emperor, and it’s the salamander that forces obedience.”

  Gavin was almost panting. He felt panicky, hemmed in. The idea that some despot could give him an order and he’d have to jump at it like a puppet horrified him deeply. He supposed it wouldn’t bother the Chinese or even the British, people who were used to kings and emperors, but Americans didn’t have kings, and he had only recently found his freedom in the air. Now a fiery salamander was going to drag him back down?

  He suddenly remembered Feng Lung again. The Gonta family had captured Feng in Ukraine and experimented on him; into his head they had drilled an enormous spider that forced Feng to obey any orders given to him. He couldn’t even sit down unless someone told him to. In the end, he had let himself die, partly to save Gavin and Alice’s lives, but also to end his own pain. Was this how he had felt? Nausea oozed around Gavin’s stomach, and he took several deep breaths to keep from throwing up.

  “Lieutenant Li was put in a terrible spot,” Phipps continued. “The nightingale brought him the salamander and the news that you were a Dragon Man. No doubt this is what the border guard meant when it said you were special. It must have alerted the authorities, who sent the bird and the salamander.”

  Gavin remembered. Alice’s hand was gentle but insistent on his ear. She could use only one hand because the other had corks on the fingertips. He braced himself for more pain, though it didn’t come. The soldiers didn’t move.

  “It’s illegal for someone of his rank to lay hands on a Dragon Man.” Phipps crossed her arms. “It’s also illegal for a Dragon Man to run about within Chinese borders without a salamander. Clearly, the emperor wants Alice in his hands immediately, so they didn’t want to delay the ship at the border until someone of the correct rank could arrive with a salamander. Someone would have to put this salamander on you now, and that fell to Li.”

  “Good for him,” Gavin growled. “I hope he gets a raise.”

  “You don’t understand, Ennock,” Phipps said. “You’re flying with dead men.”

  Alice dropped her hand, and both she and Gavin looked at Phipps. The soldiers still hadn’t moved. The Lady’s engines purred along, and more farmland coasted beneath them, the fresh green fields below at odds with the conflict in the clouds above.

  “Go on,” Alice said tiredly. “Tell us the rest.”

  “Li laid hands on a Dragon Man,” Phipps said. “It’s a form of treason, really. And when a commanding officer commits treason, he and his men are put to death. All these men will be executed the moment we reach Peking.”

  “But that’s terrible!” Alice protested. “Li only did as he was ordered, and these men did nothing.”

  “In China,” Phipps said, “the emperor’s merest word is more important than a thousand human lives, and every command must be obeyed, even if it means death. They see it as an honor to sacrifice themselves to the emperor, and they’ll be buried with great ceremony.”

  Gavin belatedly realized no one was guiding the ship. He set the Lady to hover and walked over to Li. It felt odd to stand over a kneeling man. “Is this true?” he asked.

  Li said something, but his face was still facing the deck and Gavin couldn’t hear.

  “Get up and talk to me,” Gavin said, not sure whether to be uncomfortable or outraged. The salamander made an unfamiliar weight on his ear.

  Li came reluctantly to his feet and bowed deeply. The treacherous nightingale was still on his shoulder. “My deepest apologies, my lord. You will, of course, want to strike off my head immediately.”

  Phipps translated, and Gavin let her.

  “I will, of course, want to do no such thing,” he said. “What were you thinking?”

  Li looked
stricken. “If I am not properly executed, my lord, my family will live in shame for generations.”

  Gavin thought of his friend Feng and his complicated views on what was just and honorable, and how those views had ultimately cost him his life. He understood, though he didn’t sympathize. He fingered the salamander in his ear. Part of him was furious and wanted to wield the executioner’s sword himself. But how many of these men had wives? Children? How many little ones would cry because Daddy’s head had been cut off? His own father had disappeared, dead or as good as such. Could he take the responsibility for putting all those other children through the same thing?

  No. The person responsible for the salamander was not on board this ship, and it wasn’t right for Gavin to take his anger out on any of them. He thought a long moment with the ship hovering high over foreign farmland. Despite his decision, it was hard to make the words come—the anger was still there.

  “Thank you, Lieutenant,” he said at last, with Phipps translating. The words were clipped and forced.

  “Thank you?” said Li.

  “For delivering the salamander. To me.” The men. The innocent families. He had to think of the families. Abruptly, and to Li’s surprise, Gavin switched to Chinese.

  “I am glad you were able to properly give me my salamander. As I requested. Because I know you would never touch a Dragon Man without his express request. And I clearly requested it.” Gavin ground his teeth. “Because, as we all saw, I wanted the salamander, and I needed your expertise for its insertion. I . . . thank you, Lieutenant.”

  Li dropped to the deck and kowtowed again. “My gratitude, great lord.”

  Gavin couldn’t bring himself to respond. Instead, he strode to the gunwale and stared at nothing for a long time. Eventually, Li and the soldiers rose and silently stole away, as if they were afraid Gavin was a bomb that might go off at any second.

  Alice slipped up beside him without speaking for some time. Then she said, “That was a good thing you did. Phipps tells me that as long as you keep the salamander in, the men’s lives may be spared.”

  “May be?”

  “Nothing’s certain. Phipps says this is a strange area for Chinese law. But you’ve helped, and I know it hurt you a lot.” She stroked his arm. “You’re the bravest man I know, Gavin Ennock.”

  “There’s other difficult news, I think,” he said to change the subject, and he repeated the conversation between Li and Phipps to her, the one about the emperor’s planned invasion of Europe to take place once he was sure the clockworkers were gone and Alice’s cure was neutralized.

  “You’re right,” she said. “That is bad news. The question is, how do we stop it?”

  “I don’t know.” He glanced at the spider on her arm. “You can start the cure spreading through China, if you get the chance.”

  Alice’s face was tight. “If they don’t kill me.”

  “You only have to scratch one person to spread it.”

  “It’s not that simple, and you know it. Any number of factors could slow or even halt the cure entirely. The person I give it to might die or stay home or simply not transmit it to anyone who can carry it. A mountain range can block its passage for years, as could a desert. Or it could simply fade away like some illnesses do. That’s what seems to have happened in Europe, anyway. No one truly understands how diseases spread, and my cure spreads like a disease. I need to ‘infect’ as many people as possible, and even then, there’s no guarantee it’ll reach the entire world.” She sighed sadly. “Sometimes I think the plague will be with us forever.”

  He didn’t know what to say just then, so he kept silent, though he tightened his grip on her hand. Phipps had taken the helm and was piloting.

  “And now it occurs to me to ask,” she continued, “how you learned Chinese so quickly.”

  “The plague is accelerating. A bad sign.”

  “But you haven’t had a fugue in days, darling,” she said. “That must be a good sign. I think it’s those clockworker fugues that are bad for you. They burn out your mind faster, like a candle or even a firework. The more you give in to the plague, the more it takes from you. Perhaps,” she continued hopefully, “you’re going into remission or even getting better.”

  “Don’t do that.” Gavin rapped the wooden helm with his knuckles, then stamped his foot and whistled two notes. “It’s bad luck on an airship to say what you think will happen. It means the opposite will come true.”

  “Is that what that little dance was about?”

  He looked sheepish. “You have to distract the sprites so they don’t remember what you just said.”

  “It certainly distracted me. I thought it was boyishly handsome.”

  Without thinking, he said, “Am I that?”

  She blinked. “Are you what?”

  “A boy. To you?” He hadn’t realized the idea had been bothering him until he said it aloud. Now he held his breath, feeling tense again. Of course she would say he wasn’t. Of course he would pretend to accept what she said at face value. But no matter what she might say, he wasn’t the traditional sort of man, and even though she had left England behind, Alice had brought a great deal of its traditional mind-set with her. She still refused to do more than kiss him until they were married, even though his body ached for her, and he knew she wanted him. Just standing next to her aroused desire in him, even with the soldiers looking on. They hadn’t begun a physical relationship largely because Alice didn’t want to risk getting pregnant, not when Gavin was living under a death sentence. Gavin himself didn’t want to create a child who would grow up without a father as he had done. But he also suspected that Alice was holding back a little. The acceptance of his marriage proposal on the Caspian Sea had been tentative, hesitant. Was her love the same way?

  “Listen to me, Gavin Ennock.” Alice placed her hand atop his on the rail. “When I look at you, I don’t see an airman. I don’t see a fiddler or a singer. I don’t see a nineteen-year-old. The one thing I see is the man I love.”

  Gavin stared ahead into empty sky, not convinced.

  “And not only that, darling.” Alice leaned closer to his ear. “I destroyed one empire for you, and now I’m going to destroy another. How can you doubt anything after you hear that?”

  Something broke inside, and he had to laugh. “All right,” he snorted. “You win.”

  “That’s not a joke, darling.” Her eyes were smoke. “When your strong arm pushed me behind you, I never wanted you more.”

  Desire for her made his skin hot, and he lowered his voice. “Really?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “Now I really wish those soldiers weren’t aboard.”

  She sighed. “As do I, darling. As do I.”

  Lieutenant Li, who was at the front of the ship standing lookout, shouted, “Peking!” just as the explosion knocked Gavin to the deck.

  Chapter Ten

  A hatchet was splitting Alice’s head in two. A dull hatchet. With chips in the blade. She groaned and tried to open her eyes, but they were gummy and stuck shut. Her mouth tasted like dry paper.

  A gentle grip closed her hand around a cup and pushed it toward her mouth. Alice resisted at first, but her body was tired and heavy and great clods of pain kept thudding about her skull, and she finally drank. The warm liquid was overly sweet and tasted of licorice. Absinthe. Alice grimaced, but after a few swallows, her headache receded and the heaviness left her. The gentle hands helped her sit up, and a damp cloth washed her eyes open. Alice blinked uncertainly. She was sitting on a bed in a smallish room crammed with furniture, most of it red, all of it Chinese. What looked like plain white sheets had been hung over other wall hangings for reasons she couldn’t fathom. A small barred window let in a bit of breeze. The person helping her up was a maid in Chinese dress, though her clothes were white. Her upper lip had been split all the way up to her nose, giving her something of a canine appearance.

  In another bed sat Susan Phipps, her uniform rumpled, her hair down and tangled in h
er monocle. Alice automatically put her hand up to her own head and found herself in a similar state. The corks on her fingertips caught in her hair. She cast about, befuddled. The last thing she remembered was talking to Gavin aboard the Lady.

  “Are you all right?” Phipps asked.

  “What happened?” Alice said, pulling her hand free. “Where are we?” To the maid, she said, “Who are you?”

  A gleam caught her eye. Click was curled up on the bed. Alice felt a little better at seeing him, though she was still confused. Automatically she picked him up and checked his windup mechanism. He was running down. She took the key from around her neck, inserted it, and started winding. He slitted his eyes in contentment.

  “How did we get here?” Alice asked Phipps. “Why won’t this woman speak to us?”

  “I don’t know. We—”

  The door opened, and in came another woman, also dressed in a white Chinese outfit—wide trousers beneath a full-length tunic split in the front and held together with a silver clasp. Her hair was elaborately twisted around her head, and her every movement was graceful as a measure of music. She was Alice’s age and very beautiful. Alice glanced down at her wrinkled, travel-stained clothes and forced herself to sit erect like the baroness she was.

  The woman said something in Chinese, and it annoyed Alice now. The lack of understanding made her feel like a lost child.

  “She says there’s no point in asking the maid questions,” Phipps said from her own bed. “Her tongue has been torn out.”

  “That’s terrible!”

  “She’s a former opium addict who probably lied to obtain money for the drug,” Phipps said. “The punishment for opium addiction is to split the upper lip so as to prevent the . . . patient from sucking smoke from a pipe, and the punishment for lying is to cut the tongue out. She was fortunate to be hired here. No doubt she was chosen to wait on us because she can’t tell anyone we’re here.”

  Alice shuddered but set that aside as something she could do nothing about for the moment. “Where are we? Is Gavin all right?”