The Dragon Men

would reach the shore in less than five minutes.

“What are you going to do with the Cube?” Alice asked tightly.

“I have to charge it. No one’s touched it since Kiev.” Gavin knelt next to the small generator that puffed and purred on the deck, exuding steam and the smell of paraffin oil exhaust. Needles on readout dials flicked back and forth, indicating strength of current and health of machinery. A set of heavy-duty cables snaked from one side, across the deck, up the rigging, and into the center of the envelope. Trying not to think about the monster grasping his ship, Gavin set the Impossible Cube on the deck, pulled on a pair of rubber gloves, and snatched tools from the box. A moment’s work with a wrench loosened one of the cables from the generator.

“Whatever you’re going to do, hurry up!” Phipps called. “We’re nearly at the shore!”

His fingers protected by rubber, Gavin jerked the cable free of the generator. Instantly, a large section of the envelope’s endoskeleton went dark, and the Lady, unable to retain proper buoyancy, dropped straight down. Gavin’s stomach lurched, his feet left the deck for a moment, and his wings automatically snapped open to slow his fall. Alice yelped. Gavin reached for her, though he was too far away to do anything. But four of the whirligig automatons caught at her arms and shoulders, the propellers spinning madly to keep her aloft. Phipps gave a shriek such as Gavin had never heard from her and dropped with the ship.

“Phipps!” Gavin shouted, but the lieutenant was already in action. A wire whipped out of her brass palm and wrapped around one of the tentacles still encircling the ship. The Lady hit the water with a spectacular boom. Water exploded in all directions. Phipps flicked the wire around her wrist, bent at the waist, and swung in a graceful arc to land beside Alice and Gavin, who had come down on the deck as well. With a jerk, Phipps released the wire from the tentacle, and it sucked itself back into her palm. Then she smacked Gavin on the back of the head. He grunted.

“Idiot,” she said.

“Sorry.”

The two women exchanged a glance they thought Gavin didn’t see. The glances said clockwork plague in silent, pointed words. The plague killed most of its victims. It usually crippled survivors, though in most cases it ate the flesh from their bones and chewed through their brains, leaving behind demented, oozing zombies that shambled through shadows, spreading the disease even further. But in the brains of a tiny minority, the plague burned like a star and illuminated the dark corners of the universe, revealing impossible secrets and allowing the victim to create inventions both terrifying and benign. But such stars consumed themselves quickly, and Gavin’s time was growing short. He was already finding the tiny details of what was before him more and more intriguing, and he tended to forget the bigger picture, such as the fact that diverting power to the Impossible Cube would drop the Lady of Liberty several feet into the Caspian Sea. Gavin’s mentor, Dr. Clef, had felt sorry for Gavin and Alice and had tried, quite literally, to give them more time together, but he hadn’t considered that by doing so he would destroy the universe. Gavin hadn’t traveled quite that far down the clockwork road, but he could feel his grip slipping, and he hated that Alice and Phipps had noticed. It also scared the hell out of him.

The Lady was now floating on the water. Her partially charged envelope continued to hover above her, though it couldn’t lift the hull any longer, and the creature still held the ship firmly in its grip. Wood groaned, and the rubbery stench of the sea creature stung Gavin’s nose. Beneath his boots, the deck moved sickeningly up and down in a completely unnatural motion for an airship. The shore was now perhaps a hundred yards away. An enormous cave gaped like an open mouth, and the ship was moving inexorably toward it, skimming over the waves.

Alice looked over the gunwale again, her automatons following like a flock of nervous birds. “I don’t think we’ve harmed the creature by landing on it. More’s the pity,” she said with forced calm. “How did a clockworker create something so large? That’s biology, not physics.”

Phipps growled, “Strange questions coming from a woman whose aunt could cure clockwork zombies. You’ve seen what they can do with biology.”

“Not on this scale.” She grimaced. “Or tentacle.”

“Can you see any damage to the Lady?” Gavin called. Now that Alice had come up unharmed, his concerns had shifted.

“No, though I’m no expert.” The breeze from the monster’s towing had pulled Alice’s long, honey brown hair out of its twist and it blew in soft waves around her face. She was so beautiful, even when she was disheveled and nervous. He wanted to scoop her off the deck and fly her to a secluded hilltop where she would be safe, but he hadn’t tried carrying another person yet and didn’t know if the wings could take it.

Alice added, “Now that you nearly killed us, darling, perhaps you could get that Cube charged? If that’s what you insist on doing.”

Her tone was artificially light, and it didn’t take clockwork genius to read the grim undertone. Gavin jammed the business end of the live wire against the Impossible Cube. Electricity cracked and fizzled, and the Cube glowed a faint blue that grew brighter as the object powered up. While it did so, it grew lighter and lighter until it was floating within Gavin’s hands, for it was forged of the same alloy as Gavin’s wings and the Lady’s endoskeleton. The Cube was a truly singular object. Dr. Clef, its inventor, had claimed it had no parallel object in any other universe; it twisted gravity and energy and even time itself in ways Gavin was only beginning to understand. As a side effect, the Cube converted sound waves into other forms of energy, making it a potent weapon for anyone with a good set of tuning forks-or perfect pitch.

The Cube continued to drain the generator. Ahead of them loomed the dark cave, and the Lady seemed to groan in fear. Gavin thought about telling the women to swim for it while he stayed behind to defend the ship, but one glance at Alice’s heavy gauntlet and Phipps’s equally heavy brass arm reminded him that neither of them was effective in the water.

“Hurry up.” Phipps’s jaw was tense. “That cave won’t be a holiday resort.”

Gavin gritted his own teeth. “I can’t make the power flow faster, Lieutenant.”

The black tentacles continued to hold the Lady in bands of iron. Alice hovered anxiously over Gavin, and her automatons hovered over her.

“What are you going to do with it once it’s charged?” she asked.

“Something horrible,” he said shortly. The initial shock of fear had worn off, and he was getting angry again. This monster had taken his ship and threatened his fiancee. It was his duty to fend off the beast and set things right. Waves spumed and broke on rocks as the Lady reached the mouth of the cave and slid inside. The light faded. Beneath the surface, the dark creature squirted along under the ship, hauling her forward by orders understood only to itself. The Impossible Cube glowed a full sapphire blue that indicated it had reached a full charge just as the Lady glided into the cave entrance. Gavin disconnected it from the wire and held it aloft in triumph at the exact moment the squid men attacked.

Chapter Two

Alice, Lady Michaels, jumped away from the gunwale as the first squid man shot from the ocean in a fountain of water and landed on the deck with a rubbery thwap that echoed through the huge cave. The creature had a man’s body, though its skin was covered in greenish blue slime, and its head was that of a squid. Tentacles formed a horrid squirming bush around its neck, and enormous dark eyes too round and large to be human glistened in the half-light of the cave. Its fingers and toes were webbed, and they dripped more slime. Although it was naked and had a male build, it showed no male accoutrement. With a frightened squawk, Alice stepped back and bumped into Gavin as another squid man vaulted onto the deck, and another and another and another. In seconds, the deck was teeming with more than two dozen of them.

The sight of those doll-like eyes, the smell of the oozing slime, and the sound of the writhing tentacles crawled over Alice’s skin like cold worms. The creatures spoke no words and closed in around the trio with outreaching arms and faint squishing sounds. A fear she didn’t know she possessed poured ice water down Alice’s back and froze her voice. She had faced down zombies, gargoyles, and a mechanical war machine several stories tall, but these creatures touched something primordial. She wanted to leap behind Gavin and Phipps, or even hide in