“So, what are you thinking, concubine woman?” Lung Fan asked. “You look as if you swallowed a frog.”
“I do not wish to say.”
Lung Fan grinned, and the expression looked ghoulish in the bright lights. “I actually know what you’re thinking. And I think you’re right. Can I be reassigned to someone else?”
Cixi didn’t answer. For a long time, she waited in tense silence. The only sound was the dripping of the water clock and the clicking of the spider against the serpent in Lung Fan’s lap and the footsteps of the maids who were gathering feathers. Eventually, Liyang rushed back into the room with his apprentices panting behind him.
“Where is the girl?” Cixi asked without waiting for formalities.
“She is dead, my lady. Drowned in a lotus pool. Already the story is going about that she killed herself because she displeased you, or that you yourself are directly responsible.”
Cixi waved this aside. One fewer low-ranking concubine was of no importance. “And where did she come from?”
“That is the startling thing, my lady. No one seems to know. All the records are in disarray, thanks to the evacuation, of course, but no one I talked to seems to remember her, or when she joined the Imperial Court.”
“I thought as much,” Cixi muttered. “Su Shun arranged for her to slip into the evacuation caravan. Where is the body?”
“I anticipated your wishes, my lady, and my assistants are bringing her here. She is on the back lawn.”
A feather drifted across Cixi’s nose as she rose to her feet. “Come, Lung Fan. Bring your device.”
The dead girl was still soaked through. Her hair had come undone and lay tangled about her neck and shoulders. She huddled on her side in her ruined green robe on the grass. Cixi guessed she was no more than sixteen, the same age Cixi had been when she became a concubine. Lung Fan squatted next to her and punctured her skin with the serpent’s teeth. The lights along the serpent’s back glittered, then settled into a steady scarlet glow.
“Well?” Cixi asked. “Was I thinking right?”
“Were we thinking right?” Lung Fan corrected. “And yes. The girl was in the early stages of the blessing of dragons.”
Cixi stepped back, as did all the maids and eunuchs. The girl carried the blessing of dragons, and Su Shun had arranged for the girl to share Xianfeng’s bed. Thanks to Su Shun, the emperor now had the plague.
Chapter Four
Gavin slipped down the dark tunnel, the Impossible Cube clutched tight to his chest. The sandy floor ground unpleasantly beneath his boots, and he was uncomfortably aware that he stood out like a torch with his white leathers and blue wings. Fortunately, he hadn’t met any squid men. For once the clockwork plague worked in his favor-clockworkers sometimes became so engrossed in something fascinating that they forgot mundane duties, such as posting guards.
Back in the main cavern behind him, the Lady was moored at a small stone quay, her half-lit envelope glimmering like a tethered star. The giant squid that had towed her there was nowhere to be seen. Gavin had slipped aboard and quietly reconnected the generator so her envelope would lift her again, but he didn’t power the machine up fully to avoid calling attention to the situation. Now he just had to rescue his reason to escape.
Doors faced the tunnel, all of them heavy, all of them shut. He tried one and found it unlocked. On the other side was a laboratory-sharp glassware, smoking burners, gooey things in jars, a rubbery segment of tentacle on a dissecting table. An operating table with blue bloodstains hunkered in the corner amid a nauseating smell of sulfur. The sight oozed over Gavin’s skin and made him shiver. Thank God Alice and Phipps weren’t here. He slipped back into the tunnel.
The Cube shifted in Gavin’s hands, almost as if it resisted being moved. Dr. Clef had once said the Cube always stayed in a fixed point in space and time, that it never actually went anywhere and instead forced the universe to move around itself, like a rock in a river. It rather felt to Gavin that if he lost control of the Cube, it might go spinning away from him, punching holes in space-time like a hot needle, and the possibility unnerved him.
His fingers tightened around the Cube’s springy surface as he slipped down the long cave, trying to listen, but the heavy doors trapped sound and light. The only noise was the soft clink of metal wings on his back and his heart pounding in his ears while he searched. He was always looking for something. It had started when pirates attacked the Juniper, the airship on which he had spent most of his childhood. That attack had stranded him in London, forcing him to search for a way home. Then he had met Alice, and he had found himself constantly searching for a way to have her in his life. Then he had been infected with the clockwork plague, and he searched for a cure. And just lately, he had learned from a woman who could see the future that his father, the man who had abandoned him, was still alive and his destiny was somehow “entwined” with Gavin’s. The thought both thrilled Gavin and angered him beyond measure. He wanted to find his father and grab him in a big bear hug even as he wanted to punch him in the gut.
To his horror, he realized he was singing under his breath:
I picked a rose, the rose picked me,
Underneath the branches of the forest tree.
The moon picked you from all the rest
For I loved you best.
He stopped himself. Gavin used to think his grandfather had taught him that song, but lately he’d begun to wonder if it had come from his father instead, if his father hadn’t sung it to his mother when they were young and in love. If so, it was more than a little unsettling that Gavin had gotten Alice to fall in love with him by singing it to her. Or maybe that was just fitting. He would have to ask his father. If he could find him.
Tension tightened every muscle and joint, and anger burned in his belly. Alice. Al-Noor would pay for touching Alice. The thought of the man laying a hand on her unleashed a red, snarling fury and made his fists clench until they ached. He wanted to storm through the caves, brandishing the Impossible Cube like Zeus with a bucketful of thunderbolts. The Cube bit into his fingers.
Calm, he told himself. Calm. He had a right to be angry about al-Noor taking Alice, but actual murder. . That still lay beyond him. Not even the plague could make him into a murderer. Not yet. Though it was true that he could use the Cube to bring down the entire cave and peel the flesh from al-Noor’s bones with-
Gavin ground his teeth, and a bead of sweat ran down the side of his head. Damn it, he had to get control of himself. He didn’t really want to kill al-Noor, and the squid men were his innocent pawns. At least now al-Noor wasn’t in a position to destroy the Lady and drown Alice, which freed Gavin to effect a rescue. If he could just find her.
He was putting out his hand to try another door when he heard the crash of breaking crockery. Gavin turned, trying to orient on the sound. A moment later, he heard the scream. An icy spear drove through his heart. Alice! He tried to find the source of the sound, but the tunnel echoed and he couldn’t pinpoint it. Frantic, he ran up and down the stony path. Alice was hurt. Alice was dying. He had all this power, and he couldn’t help her. More than a dozen doors faced him, and he had no clue which was the right one. It was like one of those dreams in which he had something to do but couldn’t do it, no matter how hard he tried.
Another crash brought his head around. This time he was able to get a better sense of the noise-it seemed to come from one of the first doors, some thirty yards behind him, but he still couldn’t tell exactly which one. Gavin didn’t even think. He opened his mouth and sang. A hard, crystalline note streamed from his throat. The Impossible Cube drank the note in, twisted it, changed it into something alien. Power poured out of the Cube in all directions, and the wings on his back quivered with sympathetic vibrations as every door smashed into splinters. Chunks of wood pelted the air. From one of the newly open doorways, light streamed. Gavin cut the note short and dashed into the stony room while bits of sawdust bounced off his face like warm snowflakes.
<
br /> Al-Noor was aiming a large pistol at Alice across the ruins of a dinner table while two of a group of squid men held a struggling Phipps. The dead squid man on the floor barely registered. A red haze descended over Gavin. The man had threatened Alice. With a snarl, Gavin launched himself at al-Noor. Al-Noor saw him coming. He flicked the pistol around to orient on Gavin and pulled the trigger. Alice screamed. The universe slowed down. Air became fluid as water. His body floated in it. He calculated how fast he was moving, the arc of his travel. He was aware of the temperature heating the barrel of the pistol and how brass and glass expanded with tiny crackling noises. He saw where the pistol barrel was pointed and in a fraction of a second assessed the eventual path of the emerging energy. In midair, his plague-enhanced reflexes lined up the Impossible Cube to match it. A yellow lightning bolt cracked from the pistol, crawled slowly through the air, and struck the Impossible Cube. The Cube sucked the bolt down, and the energy vanished.
The universe snapped back to normal speed. Gavin slammed into al-Noor. Both pistol and Cube went flying. The glass parts of the pistol shattered, but the Cube bounced, unharmed. Both clockworkers rolled across the floor, trading and blocking blows so fast, their hands blurred. Gavin was younger and stronger, but he was hampered by his wings, and al-Noor had the advantage of height and a longer reach. Any thought of plan or strategy fled Gavin’s mind. He didn’t feel any of the hits that landed. Nothing but the animal fury burned in him. Al-Noor’s face was twisted in an equally horrible rictus of rage.
“Sing, damn it!”
“Sing what?”
“Any note! Just sing!”
Gavin remained only vaguely aware of the two female voices speaking somewhere behind him. Al-Noor flicked a fist through Gavin’s defenses and caught Gavin on the chin hard enough to make him see stars. Gavin kneed al-Noor in the belly. Fetid air rushed out of him. Al-Noor straightened his right hand, and a needle sprang from his index fingernail. A clear liquid glistened at the pointed tip. He tried to stab Gavin’s face, but Gavin caught his wrist. The older man forced his hand inward, pressing his weight into Gavin, shoving the needle closer to Gavin’s eye. Gavin gritted his teeth and fought back, but al-Noor had the advantage now. The needle crept toward Gavin’s eye, and the light glittered hard and sharp off the tip. It brushed his eyelashes.
A terrible sound smashed through Gavin’s head. The needle jerked back. Al-Noor and Gavin both screamed and clapped their hands over their ears. The sound tore through Gavin’s mind. It was worse than countless claws screeching across a blackboard the size of a galaxy, and he felt as if his nerves were sizzling in acid. A part of him recognized the horrible noise as a tritone-two notes separated by three full steps. The two notes that made up the tone vibrated against each other at a ratio of one to the square root of two, an irrational, impossible number that couldn’t exist. Like all clockworkers, Gavin had perfect pitch, and the tritone, the idea of the tritone, spun him around, threatened to swallow him in the same way that infinite swallowed a whole number. He screamed and tried to shut the sound out, but his hands couldn’t quite mask it. Al-Noor writhed on the floor beside him, and Gavin was dimly aware that all the squid men had fallen to the floor as well.
And then the sound stopped. The pain ended, but the disorientation continued. Hands hauled him to his feet.
“How did you do that?” he gasped.
“I may not have perfect pitch,” Phipps said in his ear, “but after twenty-five years in the Third Ward, I can make a tritone with any note you-or Alice-can sing. Now, let’s get out of here before al-Noor and his squid men recover.”
“I’m so sorry we had to do that,” Alice said in his other ear as they stumbled toward the doorway. “Are you all right?”
“I–I think so.” Gavin shook off the disorientation and regained enough presence of mind to snatch up the Impossible Cube. It glowed pure azure, and it squirmed in his hands. The lattices twisted in ways he had never seen before, moving over and behind themselves, and his own hands seemed both close and far away at the same time. When he moved forward with Alice and Phipps, he could feel it tugging in his grip like a dog that wanted off its leash.
“The Cube,” he said. “It took in a lot of strange energy. I don’t know what that means.”
Phipps glanced back at the room. The squid men, who were plague zombies in their own way and who were also flattened by tritones, were stirring. Al-Noor was sitting up, his heavy belt askew and his black bathing costume torn. “Unless we want to kill them,” Phipps said, “we need to run now and worry about the Cube later.”
They ran. Phipps, whose monocle let her see best in the dim light, led the way. Alice noted the shattered doors they passed. “Good heavens, darling. Did you-?”
“Yeah.” The rage rose at the memory, and he forced it back down. “I’d do it again. Did he hurt you?”
“No, though he planned to. Your timing was perfect.”
The tunnel opened up into the enormous cavern. Most of the floor was taken up with the ocean, with a rim that ran around the edge. The Lady was moored to the quay, her envelope glowing softly, and he heaved a sigh of relief that she was still there. Bright sunlight outdoors made the mouth of the cave painful to look at.
They hurried aboard the Lady. When they reached the helm, the Impossible Cube twisted almost painfully in Gavin’s hands and began to pulse in colors: red, orange, yellow.
“What is it doing?” Alice asked, unmooring the lines. Her little automatons streamed out of a hatchway to flitter and skitter in a brass cloud around her.
“No idea.” Gavin held up the Cube. The lattices slid and twisted around so fast, he couldn’t watch them. It was like looking at the sun. “It feels like it’s going to go off or something, but I don’t know what to do about it.”
“Are we cast off?” Phipps threw switches on the generator, and it rumbled to full power. Electricity scrambled up the wires to feed the endoskeleton, which came to blue life. Gavin set the Cube down and took the helm. The Lady shuddered once and rose gracefully toward the cavern ceiling, streaming water from her lower hull. The nacelles were unaffected by their seawater bath, and Gavin spun the helm, pointing her toward the mouth of the cave and freedom. The Cube pulsed green.
“No!” Al-Noor was standing on the quay, alone. His cloak was missing, his hair rumpled, his silly swimsuit still torn. His belt was crooked. “Return at once! I will have the reward! I will!”
The rage threatened again, but Gavin still kept it under control. Al-Noor had no weapons in his hands and was no threat. The plague would kill him in a few months. No point in risking Alice’s life over further retaliation. Gavin spun the dial that cranked up the power to the nacelles and felt the Lady thrum forward. She skimmed toward the cave opening. Gavin felt himself relax a little. Alice was unhurt, and soon they’d be in open air again, on their way toward China. The Cube pulsed blue, then indigo.
“What’s the bloody Cube doing?” Phipps called.
With the sound of a hundred waves rushing the shore, the giant squid rose from the water in front of the ship. Alice screamed. Phipps yelled. The squid reached for the Lady with its dripping tentacles. Gavin snatched up the Impossible Cube and held it out before him. It pulsed violet. His wings snapped open, quivering and ringing out a clear blue tone.
“Gavin!” Alice cried. “What are you-?”
Gavin sang one note, the first note that came to mind. It was the note Alice had sung back in al-Noor’s lair, a D-flat. Only later would he remember that he had also used a D-flat as the base for the paradox generator, which Dr. Clef had stolen and hooked to the Impossible Cube as part of his scheme to halt time. The Cube absorbed the clear tone and TWISTED.
Blackness engulfed Gavin, and for a horrible moment he was falling through ice water. Then the world exploded in a billion colors that pulled him downward into a pattern that became more complicated as he dropped toward it, the tiny particles themselves made of tiny particles made of tiny particles made of tiny particles. He sho
uted as he fell, not knowing if he would ever stop. He had no wings, no clothing, no body. He was nothing but a voice tumbling endlessly through chaotic patterns. The colors swarmed and drew together into a single pinpoint of light that exploded in all directions, and Gavin tried to hold his breath, but he could no longer breathe or move. Intense heat and brilliance flashed around him-
And then he was lying facedown on the hard deck of the Lady. Wood mashed against his cheek. He lay there a moment, unwilling to move. His sleeve blocked his view. A blob of grease marred the white leather. The generator puffed and rumbled nearby, and the soft vibration of the nacelles purred through him. Ropes creaked. His wings and the power pack pressed down on his back. He became aware that he was breathing, pulling air steadily into his lungs and pushing it back out again. His heart beat in his chest. He blinked, then cautiously moved his arms, bracing himself for pain. He got none. Well, that was a relief. After this kind of thing, Gavin had come to expect blinding, tearing pain, and then he wondered when he had become the kind of man who regularly participated in events that caused blinding, tearing pain.
He pushed himself upright and immediately looked around for Alice. She lay curled on her side in a puddle of blue skirts with her mechanicals scattered around her. Phipps was on her hands and knees nearby, shaking her head. Gavin was about to run over to see to them when he remembered the squid. He tensed and glanced at the bow of the ship. Empty cavern, empty air. The squid was gone. Puzzled and relieved, he ran to the gunwale to make sure. The water beneath the ship lapped calmly at the stones. There was no sign of the giant squid, or even any indication that such a monster had ever existed. Behind the ship, the little quay was also empty. Al-Noor had disappeared as well.
Reassured but mystified, he hurried over to Alice and Phipps. Alice was already stirring, and he helped both women to their feet. The mechanicals came to life as well. The whirligigs started their propellers in short spurts and hovered uncertainly in the air while the spiders staggered about the deck like sailors on three-day leave.
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