“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 destro
yed 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 her 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?”
At this, the beautiful woman, who had been waiting with hands clasped, spoke at some length. Phipps translated.
“My name is Lady Orchid,” she said. “Please accept my apologies for the way in which you were treated. We had no time to explain. You are in the palace compound of Prince Kung, half brother to Emperor Xianfeng, who died recently. When the prince and I heard you were on your way to Peking, we knew we had to intercept you. Prince Kung sent a number of men with a device that releases a special type of tree pollen that, when breathed, sends one into a deep sleep. Absinthe is the antidote.”
“Why, we have the same thing in England,” Alice said, then shot Phipps a guilty look. The lieutenant had been on the receiving end of the stuff during Alice and Gavin’s raid on the Doomsday Vault last spring. Phipps crossed her arms. Alice coughed and went back to winding Click.
“The device requires an explosion to disperse the pollen over a wide area, and we apologize deeply for this. I hope no one was injured.”
Alice kept winding Click. Nothing hurt that she could tell. “I’m fine. Where’s Gavin?”
“The Dragon Man? He wakes in the room next to yours. You may see him in a moment, if you wish.” Lady Orchid fingered the silver pin that held her tunic shut. “I know you find it difficult to trust us now. Perhaps it will be easier once we have explained.”
“Who is us?” Alice put in. The maid started to comb Alice’s tangled hair.
A hard look crossed Lady Orchid’s face, as if she found Alice’s interruption dreadful in some way. “Prince Kung and me. We have saved your lives, you see. General Su Shun, the pretender who ascended the throne, wants you dead, Lady Michaels.”
Alice gasped and fear tightened her insides. Gavin had been right. Still, she said, “Dead? But the reward-the emperor wanted me alive.”
“That was Emperor Xianfeng. As I said, he died recently.”
Here, Phipps stopped translating. “How did he die, Lady Orchid?”
“The blessing of dragons fell on him, and he did not survive. It was exactly what he was afraid of.”
“Then I’m too late,” Alice whispered. She felt cold, and tears pricked at the edges of her eyes. “If the current emperor won’t trade my cure for-oh good heavens, what will we do now?”
“Why did the new emperor continue the reward?” Phipps asked.
“The new emperor, General Su Shun, wants to personally ensure Lady Michaels’s death. He does not dare invade Europe until he knows his men will not encounter the cure she carries.”
“We were rather afraid that was what he might want,” Alice said. “Still, we were hoping things might be otherwise.”
“Wait-invade?” Phipps said. “Why does he want to invade?”
Orchid sighed. “His hold on the throne is weak. But a war would ensure everyone is looking at battle instead of who occupies the Imperial Seat.”
The maid finished combing out Alice’s hair and piled it high with Chinese combs. Light dawned in Alice’s head. “And you want to put someone else on the throne. That’s why you brought me here. Because I can help you in some way.”
“You are very perceptive for a-you are very perceptive.”
“Perceptive for a what?”
But Lady Orchid didn’t answer. Instead, she said, “I was once a concubine to the emperor, and-”
“A concubine?” Shocked, Alice backed away on the bed, bumping the maid aside. Click made a noise of protest. For all her grace and beauty, this woman was nothing more than a common prostitute. Alice looked down at the coverlet. Had this very bed been used for-?
“Calm down, Alice,” Phipps said. “It isn’t catching.”
“It’s. . repulsive,” Alice replied. “I. . this is. .”
“Another culture,” Phipps told her. “Here it’s considered a perfectly honorable profession-”
“The oldest profession.”
“And for many women, the only avenue to any kind of wealth or power.”
“It’s horrible! Selling oneself to a married man for the chance of-”
“Whereas you,” Phipps interjecte
d, “were only willing to sell yourself to an unmarried man.”
“That was different,” Alice snapped.
“Of course it was,” Phipps said mildly. “This woman succeeded.”
Alice snapped her mouth shut in a fury. Lady Orchid, who had been watching this exchange with polite interest, continued.
“As a concubine of the emperor, I bore him a son. His only son. The boy-we call him Cricket-is the true heir. We need to put him on the throne. He is only six years old, but Prince Kung and I will rule as regents until he is old enough to rule on his own.”
“And why should we help you?” Alice asked, forcing herself back to the subject at hand.
Lady Orchid seemed taken aback. “We saved your lives, Lady Alice.”
“Out of self-interest, Lady Orchid,” Alice shot back. “If you didn’t need me for something, you would have let this Su Shun have me without a second thought.”
“Ah.” Lady Orchid took a white handkerchief from her white sleeve without denying Alice’s statement. “Why did you come to China, Lady Alice? I can’t imagine it was merely to claim the reward.”
Alice thought a long moment before replying. She didn’t trust this Lady Orchid, and not just because of her. . occupation. Lady Orchid was trying to make herself the power behind the throne of an empire, and such a person was automatically difficult to trust. Oh, she claimed she was trying to stop a war and rule the empire benevolently. And perhaps she would. But in the end, she was still a power-seeker, and in Alice’s experience, such people would say or do anything to achieve their aims. It was only good luck that Lady Orchid’s goals and Alice’s goals seemed to correlate. Alice was quite confident that if this woman had wanted Alice dead, there would be no trace of a body, or even a drop of blood, to be found. The thought made Alice both nervous and more determined. She glanced at the other bed. The mute maid was now combing out Phipps’s hair.
“What do you think, Lieutenant?” Alice said, deciding Cixi couldn’t understand her. “Should we say why we’re here?”
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