The Dragon Men ce-3

by Steven Harper

  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 swar
thy 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.”

  Her right hand hurt. A glance downward told her she was unconsciously gripping Gavin’s hand so tightly, her knuckles were white, and Gavin had set his jaw to avoid crying out. She forced herself to let go.

  “Well,” she said again. “Yes. Best of all possible worlds.”

  “Can we use the Cube to go back?” Phipps asked. “Just a thought.”

  Gavin shook his head. “I wouldn’t even know how to begin. Besides, you saw what happened when I tried to charge it again just now.”

  “You tried what?” Alice asked, bewildered. “When? What happened?”

  “I connected the Cube to the generator while you were sleeping, but it won’t accept a charge,” Gavin explained. “No matter what I do, it stays dark.”

  “Can you repair it?”

  Gavin shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe. If I study it long enough.”

  “Just because something can be done,” Phipps said, her voice still tight, “doesn’t mean it should be done. I tried to put this. . thing into the Doomsday Vault, you may remember. I’d be for dropping it into the ocean if I weren’t afraid it would wash up on shore one day.”

  “Hm,” was all Gavin said.

  “What’s next, then?” Alice asked briskly. “Is it too much to hope that China has reopened the border?”

  “It is.” Gavin sighed. “That’s one of the reasons this place is so busy. It’s one of the last stopping points for Western merchants.”

  “And for smugglers?” Alice asked with a smile.

  But Gavin shook his head. “No. No smugglers. The Chinese have invented automatons to patrol their borders. They don’t eat or sleep or rest. You can’t bribe them or distract them, and when they notice anyone crossing the border-in or out-they run him down with intent to kill. Smugglers from both sides are too frightened to try anything.”

  “Good heavens,” Alice breathed.

  “The border can’t be completely closed,” Phipps said. “What about ambassadors and delegations? And trade? China can’t get along without some outside trading.”

  “I don’t know,” Gavin admitted. “The people I spoke to had limited English, and my Persian is nonexistent. Besides, I couldn’t appear too interested, you know?”

  Alice leafed idly through the newspaper in her lap while they talked, more for something to take her mind off the sudden bad news than anything else, since the writing still made no sense to her. Partway through, she stopped and stared down at the page. There was a head-and-torso drawing of a young woman in a high-necked dress and her hair pulled up in a French twist. She was holding up her left hand, which was encased in an ugly metal gauntlet tipped with razor-sharp knife blades. The woman looked cruel and evil, but she was obviously meant to be Alice.

  “What on earth?” she said, turning the page so Gavin and Phipps could see it. “Is that a notice about me?”

  Phipps looked it over. “My Persian is poor,” she said, “but yes. Here it gives your name and a description, and it names the reward-four hundred pounds of silver, alive only.”

  “Four hundred pounds?” Alice said, affronted despite herself. “Is that all?”

  “Not pounds, the unit of currency. Pounds, the measure of weight. You could bribe the pope and a pair of kings with that much silver. It appears the emperor is still eager to acquire a concubine who can cure the plague.”

  “It’s nice to be wanted,” Alice said tartly. “Though I doubt this is what my father had in mind for me.”

  “It does mean,” Gavin put in, “that there’s some contact between East and West. Without it, how would the reward notice get into the newspaper and how would anyone collect on it?”

  “Good point,” Phipps said.

  “Er, just out of intellectual curiosity,” Alice asked carefully, “
how does one collect this reward?”

  “It says here to contact a man named Bu Yeh at the Red Moon Hotel.”

  “Hm,” Alice said.

  “I still think this a terrible idea,” Gavin hissed.

  “Do you?” Alice said. “I seem to remember hearing those very words directed at someone else recently, someone who ignored them just as I’m about to do.”

  Gavin straightened the glass cutlass at his belt. “Lieutenant, how about some support?”

  “Far be it from me to get in her way,” Phipps said, holding up a metal hand. “According to the great lady here, my sole job is to watch for-”

  “Plague zombie!” Gavin interrupted.

  Alice halted. They were threading their way through the dim, dusty streets of Tehran. A scattering of torches and lamps in odd windows lit the way. Unfamiliar food and spice smells swirled around them, along with the people clad in loose-fitting desert clothes-men in trousers tucked into high boots and long tunics split for riding; women in loose dresses with round, elaborately embroidered caps covering their hair. Alice and Phipps wore similar outfits to blend in better. The undergarments that came with the dresses were shockingly lightweight and brief, and Alice felt half naked even though her outer garments covered more of her than her previous dress had done. It was a strange feeling, and a little daring. And exciting. She and Phipps had both wrapped scarves loosely around their metal limbs to keep them from view, and Phipps had adjusted her cap to hide her monocle. No one paid the slightest attention to them.

  Countless narrow alleys led off the streets, twisting away into noisome darkness. Within one of these stirred the plague zombie. It was-had been-a man, though how old he was, Alice couldn’t guess. His hair had come out in clumps, and open sores leaked pus. His skin had thinned and split, revealing pink and gray muscle. He was gaunt from malnutrition, and his mouth hung open as the plague ate its way through his brain. His clothing hung in filthy rags. Alice would have once recoiled from such a creature, both from the disease and the dreadful sight. Now, however, she saw a person, a patient who had lost everything. She stripped the cloth from her metal-clad hand. The spider’s eyes glowed red to indicate the presence of plague as she reached for the unfortunate man and swiped her clawed fingertips across his chest. Automatically, the tubules that ran up and down the spider’s legs sprayed a fine mist of Alice’s blood across the scratches. The cure, what Aunt Edwina had called a virion, attacked the bacterium that caused the plague and, additionally, turned the patient into a host that would spread the cure with every cough and sneeze, inoculating others he encountered. The virion also worked fairly quickly. When Alice scratched the zombie, he staggered backward. In a few moments, his eyes cleared. He looked at Alice, then held up his pus-speckled hands and stared at them as if seeing them for the first time in years. He made a small sound in the back of his throat. Then he turned and shuffled away, still staring down at his hands.