The Dragon Men (13 page)

A long silence hung dark between them. Finally Alice said in a low voice, “I don't have it all worked out. Perhaps I can persuade them to give you their cure in exchange for all this silver. Or perhaps I can prevail upon their sense of . . . fairness. I severely weakened the British Empire, which let China come into greater power, so perhaps the emperor will feel an obligation and grant my request to cure a single clockworker. Or perhaps I will simply scratch a few dozen people on my way to the emperor's palace and spread the cure no matter what.”

“That's a lot of
ifs,
Alice.”

“That's true.” Her face grew serious. “The problem is, we're facing a definite
when.
By that I mean
when
the clockwork plague gets worse. That is worth facing any number of
ifs.
” She paused. “I don't want more innocent people to die when I can save them. But I can't let you die, either, darling. I'm torn between a lion and a tiger, and I don't know entirely what to do.”

Gavin put his arm around her shoulders. Strangely, the revelation that she was anything but certain made him feel better. She wasn't quite willing to trade millions of lives for his, but she
was
willing to fight for him. The box was open, and he didn't feel the need to read the date on the paper. The leaden lump evaporated. “Maybe I could cure myself.”

She looked at him. “Could you? Honestly?”

“Probably not.” He sighed. “I've thought about it, but I don't know much about biology. The plague tells me about energy, and sound, and physics, and the mechanics of flight. Sometimes I think it's all related somehow, at the base level, but not in any way that would help me.”

They stood in melancholy silence for a long moment. Then Alice said, “Do you know what I miss? I miss Kemp.”

“Kemp?”

“Right about now, when I'm feeling unhappy—when
we're
feeling unhappy—he would bustle in with a tea tray and demand that we have something to eat or that I put on a pair of slippers. And the way he found a way through the Gonta house in Kiev—masterful! We wouldn't have gotten this far without him.”

“He was good, wasn't he?”

“I know he was only an automaton, but . . .”

“Yeah. I know.”

Gavin peered forward into the darkness, though the only light was the soft blue glow of the
Lady
's envelope. The only way to navigate was by star and compass, and peering ahead was his way of not looking at Alice. His thoughts drifted away from Kemp and back to China again. He was frightened for Alice, and his fear for her chewed at his bones. Gavin had never visited China and knew little about the place, but he did know people, and anyone who offered such a large reward for someone usually had something fairly unfriendly in mind for him—her. He was afraid that if he looked at Alice, he would turn the ship around and fly west toward safety, hang the reward, and hang Yeh. Maybe that would be the best idea anyway.

Alice's arm slid around his waist. She was still wearing the voluminous Turkmen dress, and the cloth whispered against his white leathers. “I know what you're thinking,” she said quietly. “And we're doing the right thing.”

“How do you know?” A lump formed in Gavin's throat, and the words came out sounding harsher than he intended.

“Because I can't imagine a world without you in it,” she said. “Because I don't want to live in such a world, and because I'm quite comfortable risking my life to extend yours.”

“What if we get to China and they kill you?” His arm was still around her shoulders, and he pulled her closer while he stared fiercely ahead. “I can't live knowing I caused your death. I can't let anything happen to you.”

“It's my decision, darling.” Alice leaned into him, and he held tightly to her. The eyes on her spider gauntlet glowed red between them. The clockwork plague was always there.

After a moment, she said, “Play for me?”

Gavin couldn't have refused her request any more than rain could refuse to fall. Alice took the helm while he retrieved his fiddle from his cabin and tuned it.

“Something quick,” she said. “If you play something slow, I'll melt. I just know it.”

With a small smile, Gavin took out his fiddle, tuned up, and played the first song that came to mind. His voice rang off the ropes and bounced off the envelope:

Still I sing bonny boys, bonny mad boys

Bedlam boys are bonny

For they all go bare and they live by the air

And they want no drink nor money.

“Tom o' Bedlam” was the unofficial anthem of all airmen. The endless verses and a tune made for pounding out on a wooden deck teamed with the idea that airmen were handsome, a little bit crazy, and never wanted for drink or money. It created immense appeal, so much so that the ritual for a cabin boy becoming a true airman at age eighteen involved his climbing in his underwear from the lowest deck below to the highest point of the envelope above—going bare and living by the air. Pirates had attacked Gavin's ship the
Juniper
and beaten Gavin when he was only a few weeks shy of his eighteenth birthday, and he had missed this ritual. Instead of airman's wings, he got nightmares and an inability to awaken in the morning without a jolt of fear.

He shook his head and kept singing, the fiddle his accompaniment.

The moon's my constant mistress,

And the lonely owl my marrow;

The flaming drake and the night crow make

Me music to my sorrow.

And still I sing bonny boys . . .

Alice was tapping her hands on the helm to the song, and even though Gavin had played the song a thousand times, he became nervous about making a mistake. He always felt this way when he played for an audience, no matter how sympathetic. It always seemed as if the listeners were waiting for him to make an error, ready to laugh or pounce.

“This is an A, this is an E. Go back and forth between the two. No! Hold the bow right. You can do this.”

For a flicker of a moment Gavin was in a different place. A tall, tall man was standing over him, a man with pale hair and broad shoulders and strong hands. Gavin's fingers felt tiny on the strings; the bow grew larger.
“Keep trying. One day, you'll play better than your old man, but only if you do better.”

By a knight of ghosts and shadows

I am summoned to a tourney

Ten leagues beyond the wide world's end—

Methinks it is no journey.

And still I sing bonny boys . . .

The memories were little more than shades, but he could almost touch them. For years Gavin had thought he had no memories of his father, but after he had been infected with the clockwork plague, some of them had come back. His father had left long ago, leaving a hole in Gavin's life. He wanted to know what his father was like, who he had been.

Why he had left.

A deep ache made his ribs hurt. He knew he must have done something terrible to drive his father away. Ma never spoke of him. Gavin didn't even know his name. It was ridiculous to miss someone he had never really known, and yet he did. The music was a gift left behind by a faceless angel, a man dead and gone.

I now repent that ever

Poor Tom was so disdainéd

My wits are lost since him I crossed

Which makes me thus go chainéd

And still I sing bonny boys . . .

But a circus fortune-teller named Madam Fabry had told Gavin with absolute certainty that not only was his father still alive, but that their paths would cross soon. He still remembered every detail of the card she had shown him, the fair-haired king holding a cup while water flowed all around him. Gavin didn't much believe fortune-tellers, but everything else Madam Fabry had predicted had come true. He found he was hoping and dreading at the same time—hoping because he wanted to talk to his father before the plague took him, yet dreading because he knew that finding out the truth about his father's leaving would hurt in some way.

The song ended. He lowered the bow.

“Thank you, darling,” Alice said. “You saw your father, didn't you?”

“How do you always know?” he asked, half in complaint.

“I remember what Madam Fabry said, too,” she said, ignoring the question. “If you believe in that nonsense. Which I don't.”

“Linda's usually right,” Gavin reminded her. “And Monsignor Adames said flood and plague will destroy us if I don't cure the world, and he said you have to let me go or the world will die.”

“Now, you see?” Alice sighed. “This is exactly what I mean. I'm the one carrying the cure, not you, and it's not as if you're my prisoner to release. Prophecies and fortunes work only in storybooks.”

“God, I hope so. The thought that you and I could be responsible for saving—or destroying—the world—”

“Again,” Alice put in.

“Again,” Gavin agreed with a laugh, but it sounded forced. Suddenly his boots felt heavy, and the ship felt small and confining. He looked at the open sky beyond the ship. “Listen, Alice . . .”

“Go,” she said. “I don't mind.”

“You don't?”

“I can't sleep anyway, and you know they work, so there's no danger.” She corrected their course. “Now what was that about my having to let go?”

Gavin ran down to the hold. Moments later, he reappeared on deck with his new wings strapped on and ready to go. The power dial said the battery was half full, plenty of charge left. Already he felt lighter, freer. He activated the power, and the wings glowed blue with the soft chime that was already becoming familiar. Alice blew him a kiss. He stepped up to the gunwale, wings spread, then from his pocket pulled a small bird. It was a clockwork nightingale made of silver, encrusted with gems. It had been a present from Feng Lung, whose life Gavin had saved last year. It recorded the last thing it heard and returned to the last person who had touched it. Originally the nightingale had been created as a way for lovers to communicate, and Feng had laughed at the confused look on Gavin's face when Gavin learned of this.

Gavin pressed one of the nightingale's gleaming eyes and whispered, “I love you always,” to it, then flung the bird into the air. It fluttered fluid wings and zipped across the deck to alight on Alice's shoulder. Gavin had time to hear it repeat in his own faint voice, “I love you always,” and see Alice's soft smile before he leaped over the edge.

*  *  *

The trip to Kashgar actually took a week. Not long after they passed out of the forests and into the deserts around Samarkand, a sandstorm swept in, forcing the
Lady
to climb high above it. Unable to see any landmarks on the ground during the day, Gavin lost his bearings and drifted off course, losing most of a day. They lost another day outrunning another airship that Yeh vociferously said was a notorious pirate vessel. It was Gavin's first brush with pirates since the loss of the
Juniper
. During the chase, he found himself sweating with terror, and in that moment, he knew that if the Impossible Cube had still been working, he would have used it, regardless of the consequences.

But in the end, the smaller, lighter
Lady
escaped, and Alice, who understood what Gavin had been going through, knew better than to say anything, but merely stood next to him at the helm to let him know she was there, and for that he was grateful.

Yeh spent most of the time in his cabin with Alice's tireless automatons standing guard outside. Click often joined them, crouching near the door as if waiting for a mechanical mouse to emerge from a hole. Phipps spelled Gavin at the wheel. Alice busied herself spotting and making small repairs to the ship. None of them spoke of what was coming, though Gavin's nerves grew with every passing mile. He didn't even fly anymore.

Just after dawn, when they were passing over yet more hot desert, a brass nightingale, similar to the one Gavin had given Alice but plainer, fluttered out of the bright sky and landed on the helm in front of Gavin. Startled, he looked at it. The bird cocked its head, staring back. Its eyes were flat and black, but its movements were very lifelike, except for the tiny winding key sticking out of its back. The bird opened its beak and a tinny voice spoke what Gavin assumed was Chinese.

“Alice!” he called. “Go get Yeh!”

A second nightingale landed beside the first one. It spoke the same message. Then the first one repeated the words, and the second one said it again, a second behind, creating a strange echo. Another nightingale landed, and another and another. Gavin stepped back from the helm with a gasp. More and more nightingales arrived, landing on the guylines and gunwale and the envelope and the generator. The sky was agleam with tiny brass bodies and madly fluttering wings, their metallic voices echoing and chattering. The
Lady
groaned and lost altitude, tipping under the uneven new weight. Gavin frantically maneuvered to keep her upright.

Yeh appeared at Gavin's elbow with Alice's flock of brass mechanicals in tow and with Alice and Phipps pale behind him. One of the whirligigs dive-bombed a nightingale, which dodged away and returned with three friends. The whirligig squeaked and fled back to Alice's shoulder.

Yeh, meanwhile, yelled over the noise. “When they come?”

“Just now!” Gavin yelled back. “Do something!”

Yeh shouted something in Chinese. To his surprise, Gavin understood a few words:
bring, lady, border, fly.

When Yeh finished, the birds stopped their chatter, and abrupt silence rushed in to fill the space. Then, as one, they gripped wood and rope in their claws and flew. Wind whistled through thousands of tiny wings all working in concert. The
Lady
shuddered and seemed to pull back for a moment; then she smoothed out and glided forward. The birds moved in liquid synchronicity, as if guided by a single mind, gently hauling the ship. Gavin's mouth fell open. He had never seen anything like it, and he longed to pull the birds apart, examine their tiny gears and switches, understand them.