The Dragon Men

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.