“Certainly not a chance at mutilation,” Alice snapped.
“Your poor starve in the streets, from what I hear.” Lady Orchid waved her fan. “Along with those who contract the blessing of dragons. Here, we cherish such people.”
“You cherish the Dragon Men,” Gavin corrected. “What about zombies?”
“They are rounded up and put in a place where they can await their time. They certainly don’t wander like lost toddlers.”
“Now, look,” Alice began.
“I think,” Li put in, “it might be best if we discussed these things at another time. We need a plan for the Jade Hand.”
Alice glanced at Gavin. He had grown up half starved in the streets himself. Would he willingly have traded that part of himself for the guarantee of a job? Given the chance, would his mother have allowed it? No, of course not. She was being ridiculous.
“You said the Forbidden City has thousands of people in it,” Gavin was saying. “They have to eat. How does food get in? And messages?”
“Food, cloth, animals, and other market items are brought to the gates.” Lady Orchid continued to fan herself. “The eunuchs receive everything and make payments at the gate. Merchants and messengers never set foot inside the city. Not only are they male; they are not worthy. The only other way in is through the Passage of Silken Footsteps.”
Click jumped into Alice’s lap. She idly touched his head. “And what might that be?”
“A secret passage that leads out of the Forbidden City. It was built in case the emperor needed a hasty emergency exit. But it is also heavily guarded by both eunuchs and machines. No one is allowed near it. I am one of the few people who even know it exists.”
“The walls are also impregnable,” Li said. “A number of Dragon Man inventions keep watch round the perimeter. Anyone who tries to climb over is instantly killed. The only weak points are the gates, and they are just as heavily guarded with machinery.”
Gavin cracked his knuckles. “Machinery is our specialty.”
“But not if we have no chance to study it first,” Alice mused.
“There is, of course, a much simpler way,” Lady Orchid said.
Phipps raised an eyebrow, the one not covered by a monocle. “And?”
“Bribery. The eunuchs are quite corrupt. For the right price, anyone can gain entry to the Forbidden City.”
“Why didn’t you say that earlier?” Alice cried. “That makes everything much easier!”
Kung hesitated. “Sufficient funds are . . . not available.”
“I have money,” Alice replied promptly. “More than enough, I’m sure.”
Here even Lady Orchid bolted upright. “You have?”
“Certainly.” And she explained about the reward. The silver bonds would easily provide enough to bribe their way into the Forbidden City, perhaps even get them close to Su Shun, and then—
“Unfortunately I do not believe that will work,” Kung said. His hands were clenched around a cup. He seemed to notice and made himself relax. “I have heard all about those reward bonds. They were issued outside China and can be used only outside China. The borders are sealed, as you may remember, and those bonds are actually illegal here. They are worthless.”
Alice wanted to slump in her chair. Why was it every time they came up with an idea, something happened to destroy it? Sometimes it felt as if the world didn’t want them to succeed. Even the clockwork plague had abandoned them—Gavin seemed to feel no urge to come up with a brilliant or outrageously creative plan.
And then something else occurred to her.
“Why did you bring up bribery at all,” she asked, “if you have no money?”
“I had money, but it seems to have . . . vanished,” said Lady Orchid.
“Does it have something to do with that box?”
Here Lady Orchid hesitated. “It is called the Ebony Chamber.” And here she spun what seemed to Alice a very strange story about a box and a missing declaration for the heir to the throne and an equally missing lot of priceless jewelry.
“May I?” Alice said, and at Lady Orchid’s nod, she pulled the box to herself and picked it up to examine it from all sides. Her brow furrowed as her hands wandered over it. Click put out a paw and batted at it.
“You’re a dear,” Alice told him, “but don’t touch, please.”
“What is she doing?” Li asked.
“Alice is talented with clockwor—Dragon Man inventions,” Gavin supplied. “She’s the only person we know of who can reassemble or repair them.”
Kung looked impressed. “We must keep this fact from Su Shun, or he will add her as a concubine.”
Alice decided she was too busy with the Chamber to react to this outrageous idea. She opened it and looked inside, then closed it again. There was much more to this box than a simple lock. Without knowing quite why, she brought the box up and lowered it over her own head. Instantly she became dizzy. Darkness swirled around her, but it was darkness with texture, like silk and sandpaper together. Layers of it slid over her, stealing her breath away. She felt hundreds of places all at once, and for a second she understood what a clockwork fugue was like for Gavin.
She jerked the box away, and the world abruptly returned to normal.
“Are you all right?” Gavin asked.
“Perfectly,” Alice replied, trying not to pant. “Though I am not in a hurry to try that again.” The dragons shimmered and twisted, laughing in their golden silence, and the phoenix latch glimmered enticingly. She ran her fingers over it. “Did you say the combination number was oh-one-eight?”
“Yes.”
“Because the latch is not set to oh-one-eight. The last number is set between seven and eight.”
“Why would that matter? The lock opened.”
“It matters quite a bit,” Gavin murmured. “Oh, how it matters.”
As if in a dream, he moved his finger toward the phoenix latch and flicked the number fully to 018. Sudden weight pulled the Ebony Chamber down, and it dropped from Alice’s hands to land with a thud on the table.
“Thank you, darling,” Alice said with satisfaction. “And now . . .”
With a magician’s flourish she opened the box. Everyone crowded around to look. The phosphorescent light gleamed off a pile of jewels.
Lady Orchid gasped and pulled the box to her. “My jewels! Where did they come from?”
“That may be difficult to explain.” Gavin cleared his throat. “For a while, the Third Ward housed a clockworker named Viktor von Rasmussen. He discovered that there are different universes that exist side by side with this one. We can’t see or hear them, but they still exist. Dr. Rasmussen even found a way to bring different versions of himself from those universes into this one.”
Phipps shuddered at this. “Took forever to persuade him to send them back.” she said. “Caused no end of trouble, and a long line at the privy,”
“This box was created somehow like the Impossible Cube,” Gavin said. “It bends time and space around itself and creates . . . a gate into other universes. Though I don’t understand how it works without a power source.”
“Anything you put into the box doesn’t actually exist in our universe anymore,” Alice put in. “When you set it to oh-one-eight, anything you put inside goes into a . . . a piece of universe number eighteen, for want of a better way to put it. Change the lock to another number, and you’re looking into a different universe. You have a thousand universes to choose from—more than that, if you count the half spins and quarter spins that seem to affect the box as well.”
Gavin rose and said vaguely, “I’ll be right back.” And he went below.
“I am not worthy to understand,” Li said with a shake of his head. “This is very confusing.”
“Let me demonstrate.” Alice picked up Click and dropped him into the box. He yowled with surprise and disappeared inside, even though he was a bit larger than the box and the box was already filled with jewelry. Alice shut the lid on him before he
could jump back out, noted the latch—it was still set to 018—and spun it at random. The numbers landed on 365. The yowling ended. Alice opened the box again. It was empty of both cat and jewels. Lady Orchid made a sound of protest.
“It’s all right,” Alice told her. “Click is still here, but he’s also gone elsewhere. You could say that he exists and does not exist at the same time.”
“How much material will fit in there?” Kung asked.
“I’m not sure, though it looks to me like this box is the embodiment of an infinite set. You can add an infinite set to an infinite set any number of times and still have room for more infinite sets, so I think you could add an infinite amount of material to this box and still have room.”
“Fascinating,” said Lady Orchid tightly. “Please bring back my jewelry.”
“Of course.” Alice reached for the latch.
“When you do,” Phipps put in, “point that thing away from me. I have a feeling your cat won’t be very happy.”
Alice reset the phoenix latch to 018. It belatedly came to her that she might be wrong and that she might have condemned Click to a terrible destruction. Her rash actions were almost like a clockworker’s, and she didn’t enjoy that thought in the slightest.
She opened the box. Click sprang out and rushed away with another yowl. He fled belowdecks past Gavin, who was coming up with the Impossible Cube, its lattices still dark. He set the Cube on the table opposite the Ebony Chamber. The Chamber was still filled with jewels. The Cube was filled with empty space.
“What are we to do with this?” Li said.
“I’m not sure,” Gavin said. “I just . . . wanted it nearby.” He paused a moment. “Who created the Ebony Chamber?”
“Lung Fei,” answered Kung. “The same Dragon Man who created the Jade Hand and the salamanders. They are all connected.”
Lady Orchid, meanwhile, carefully tipped the jewels out of the Ebony Chamber. They made a gleaming hoard of stiff beauty on the tabletop. She was setting the box down again when she froze. “Connected. No.”
“What is wrong?” Kung asked, looking worried again.
“They are all connected. Kung, I know why the Chamber was empty, why there was no paper proclaiming the heir’s name.” She put her hand inside the box to feel around, then withdrew it with a sharp gasp. “What—?”
“It feels odd, yes.” Alice leaned toward her. “What did you mean just now?”
“I have seen Xianfeng open the Ebony Chamber more than once. But whenever he did so, he placed the Jade Hand over the phoenix latch. Like so.” She put her palm over the latch, covering it completely. “I thought it was to hide the numbers from the eunuchs. But now . . . if the Chamber is connected to the Hand . . . I wonder.”
“The Hand creates another infinite set,” Gavin said with a nod. “There’s oh-one-eight and oh-one-eight-A.”
Lady Orchid shut the box and tried other numbers—009, 005, 000. Every time she opened the Chamber, it was empty. This only seemed to confirm what she was thinking. “I believe he did declare an heir—my son—but we need the Jade Hand to open the Ebony Chamber to the correct . . . place.”
“All of which only reinforces our—your—need to lay hands on the Hand, so to speak,” said Alice. “We became rather sidetracked.”
“Yeah. An infinite set in an infinite set.” Gavin slowly turned the Ebony Chamber open again and held the Impossible Cube over it. “So, what would happen . . .”
Electricity arced blue from the Chamber to the Cube. It snapped and hissed like a nest of snakes. Alice’s hair rose, and she felt it prickle across her neck. A low rumble built swiftly into a high whine, and air moved through the stable.
“Gavin!” Alice cried. “Stop!”
But Gavin seemed caught in a trance. He lowered the Cube closer to the box. The whine grew louder and more shrill, a dragon screaming its own death. Power twisted and writhed around Gavin’s hands and spilled onto the table. The cups and dishes shattered. Jewelry flew in all directions. Everyone, including Phipps, seemed stunned. Alice moved. She shoved the table hard. The Ebony Chamber went flying, and one of the table legs caught Gavin’s thigh. His hands jerked, and the Impossible Cube bounced across the deck in the opposite direction. The whine faded and the electricity stopped. The Chamber remained dark except for the limned dragons dancing across it, and the Impossible Cube carried a soft blue glow except for a few dark places where the lattices crossed one another. A blanket of silence dropped over the deck.
“Goddamn it!” Phipps pounded the table with her brass fist. “And damn it again! Ennock, if you ever do that again, I shall rip your bollocks off and stuff them up your arse!”
Alice flushed at the dreadful vulgarity, the worst she’d heard in her life. “Lieutenant! There’s no call for—”
“Not the time, Michaels.” Phipps had lost her hat yet again and cast about for it. “Is everyone all right?”
Everyone reported that they were, including Gavin. Kung and Orchid gathered up the jewelry and piled it on the table again. Li scooped Phipps’s hat from the deck where it had fallen and returned it to her with something in Chinese that no one bothered to translate for Alice. Phipps responded from her chair, and Li bowed to her. He stayed bowed for a little longer than strictly necessary, or so it seemed to Alice, and Phipps gave him a long look with an expression Alice had never seen before as she put her hat back into place. Then she caught Alice looking at her, and her expression went wooden again.
“I’m sorry,” Gavin said. “The plague was . . . I’m sorry. I won’t do that again.”
He wouldn’t meet Alice’s eyes, and she knew they were both thinking the same thing—three fugues in one day now. Her stomach felt cold and sick, and more than anything she wanted his arms around her for just a moment, but not in front of all these people.
“What happened, then?” Alice asked.
“I don’t fully know.” Gavin gave the Impossible Cube an uneasy glance. “The two of them seem to share a connection.”
“Two infinite sets,” Alice agreed.
“Two sets of infinite.” Gavin’s voice was dreamlike. “One gives power; the other takes it. I can see it down to the matching particles. What one does, the other matches. When these two are one, they can split the particles in pieces, change gravity, tilt the world and slosh the oceans. It calls to water. Always water. Tilt the glass and slop it over, flood the land, flatten mountains, and we’ll all be underwater.”
“Flood and plague will destroy us if you don’t cure the world.” The words of Monsignor Adames echoed from the Church of Our Lady in Belgium and slammed through Alice with the force of twelve hammer blows.
“Gavin, you’re frightening me.” Her voice was shaking. “Snap out of it.”
“Together they can flood the continents with their infinite. Tilt the world, slosh the glass. Tilt the axis, flood the—”
Phipps slapped him on the face with a crack. Gavin started, then blinked at them all with wide blue eyes.
“What’s the matter?” He put a hand to his cheek. “What did—?”
“We shall keep the Cube and the Chamber separated until we can study the phenomenon further,” Alice said briskly over the thickness in her throat. “Right now, we need to plan our way into the Forbidden City.”
This remark was met with general assent, though everyone found it difficult to keep their eyes off the Cube and Chamber, squatting like hungry lizards only a few paces away. Even the impressive pile of jewelry on the table couldn’t compete.
“Flood and plague will destroy us if you don’t cure the world,” Alice thought. But we’ll never put them together, so that so-called prophecy won’t come true, Monsignor Adames. Of that, you may be sure.
“The secret passage goes under the moat and both walls,” Lady Orchid said. “One end is found in Jingshan Park, which is outside the northern wall of the Forbidden City. The other end emerges just behind the Hall of Mental Cultivation, the emperor’s residence. Eunuchs guard several points al
ong the entire passageway, and we will need to kill or bribe each one.”
“Can they all be bribed?” Alice asked doubtfully.
“I doubt it very much. Some will raise an alarm no matter what we do.”
“I thought you said you were one of only a few people who even knew the passage existed.” Gavin drew up a chair again. “What about all these eunuchs?”
Lady Orchid waved this aside with her fan. “Their tongues have been cut out so they cannot reveal its existence, and neither can they read or write. This is why they are easy to bribe—many are unhappy with their situations.”
“I can imagine,” Gavin growled.
“Once you have emerged from the passage, you will find more guards and servants,” Kung said. “They are everywhere. And then you will have to enter the palace, find Su Shun, and take the Hand from him.”
“I can build us some weapons,” Gavin said doubtfully, “but I don’t think we can do this alone.”
“The young lord is correct.” Li had taken up a position behind Phipps’s chair now. “You will need men to fight when you are in the passage, and men to fight when you are in the Forbidden City. The fighting will serve as a distraction for the guards so you can find Su Shun and take the Hand. Once you have given the Hand to Prince Zaichun, he can end the battle.”
“Where would we find someone suicidal enough to—oh.” Alice stopped herself. “Are you . . . volunteering, Lieutenant Li?”
He bowed to her. “My men and I stand ready, Lady Michaels.”
She shook her head. “We can’t ask you to do that.”
“You saved our lives, Lady Michaels. I only ask that you do not disappoint us with refusal. My men and I only wish to serve you and, if necessary, die with honor.”
“We accept, Lieutenant,” Gavin said before Alice could object again. “And thank you. You and your men honor us with your service.”
Yet another bow from the lieutenant. Alice abruptly found the air too close. She got up and stalked toward the front of the ship, picking her way around the rolled-up endoskeleton and the piles of silk. One of the whirligigs flitted up from below to land on her shoulder, and she touched it with an absent gesture. Thoughts swirled through her head. So much was happening so fast, and she couldn’t take it all in.
The Dragon Men Page 19
