The Dragon Men

“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.

“What do you think will happen to him?” Phipps asked quietly.

“I’ve no idea.” Alice sighed. “I can only cure them. I can’t give them their old lives back. At least now he has a chance to live. The worst are the children.”

Gavin put an arm around her. “I was hoping that after three years, your cure would have wiped out the plague entirely.”

“Clearly not.” Suddenly she was very tired-tired of travel, tired of strange places, tired of pitiable plague victims and a world that shunned them or used them. It didn’t feel as if she were having any impact whatsoever, and therefore why bother? It all seemed very sad.

“Are you all right?” Gavin asked solicitously.

“I will be,” she said, straightening. She was an English lady. Did the Queen whine to herself? What nonsense! Soldier ahead, girl. Always ahead. “Take me to that hotel now.”

The Red Moon Hotel sat at one corner of a five-way intersection. A pair of towers topped by little minarets flanked the square white building, and strange music mingled with strong tobacco smoke in a courtyard behind it. The place had been fitted with electric lights, and all three stories cast stiff beams of illumination in all directions. The lobby struck Alice as distinctly threadbare, even a little shabby. Before she could lose her nerve, she strode to the battered front desk, where a man in a turban was holding forth.

“Do you speak English?” she asked.

“Yes, little,” he said.

She put a coin on the desk. “I am looking for a man named Yeh.”

“Eat. There.” The coin vanished, and the man pointed to a doorway that seemed to lead into a restaurant. “Wears green.”

Alice swept away with Gavin and Phipps in tow, her regal bearing hiding a pounding heart and a stomach tied in knots. This had the potential to explode in her face, and the closer she came to Bu Yeh, the more she wondered at her chances of success.

You are a baroness, blast it. Act like one.

The restaurant was crowded with customers sitting on cushions at low tables. They ate and drank and pulled fragrant smoke from enormous bulbous water pipes that Alice had never seen outside a storybook illustration. Loud conversation swirled around the room and bounced off the walls. The crowd was largely swarthy Easterners with a sprinkling of white Westerners, and they all gesticulated wildly when they spoke. Alice and Phipps were the only women present. Waiters rushed about with trays of food and silver coffee services. At a corner table by himself sat an enormously fat Chinese man wearing a green embroidered tunic that tied shut over his left shoulder. A large, puffy green hat covered his head, and a black braid ran down his back. His face was clean-shaven but for a sparse mustache and a pointed bit of beard in the center of his chin. On his shoulder sat a brass spider. The man stared about the room with a look of contempt on his round face. Every so often, the spider skittered down his shoulder, hooked a bit of food from one of the plates on the table, and skittered back up the man’s shoulder to pop it into his open mouth. Alice remembered the meal she and Gavin had shared with the Chinese ambassador back in London- had it only been a few months ago? — and the way spiders had fed every morsel to her instead of allowing her to touch anything with fork or fingers.

Before she could lose her nerve, Alice strode across the restaurant and plumped herself down across from him at his table with Gavin and Phipps standing guard on either side of her. Startled, the man reared back, and two large Persian men appeared from the shadows to flank him. One had a pistol, the other a sword. Gavin put a hand on the glass cutlass at his belt.

“No need,” Alice said in a calm voice completely at odds with her churning insides. “Mr. Yeh, I presume?”

“Mr. Yeh does not speak to filthy Westerners,” one of the guards said. His accent was faint.

“He will speak with me.” Alice took out the newspaper page with the dreadful drawing on it and laid it on the table, then unwrapped her spidery hand and laid that on the table as well. “Do you recognize this?”

Yeh’s eyes widened. His mouth fell open. For a moment, no one around the table moved. Then the spider on his shoulder scampered down to the table and flipped a chickpea into Yeh’s mouth. Yeh sputtered and coughed and slurped down some tea.

“You Alice Michaels lady,” he said, recovering. “Angel of death.”

“I wouldn’t put it that way, but yes.”

Yeh’s eyes glittered. “Why come here? Why see me?”

“Isn’t it obvious, Mr. Yeh? I wish to claim the reward.”

Chapter Six

The emperor was dying. Everyone knew it, but no one would say it. Everyone also knew Su Shun had arranged for the emperor to sleep with a false concubine who carried the blessing of dragons. No one would say that, either. Su Shun was powerful, and there was no real proof. The official prognosis was smallpox, and the imperial physicians could only ensure that Xianfeng rested very comfortably until the end came. The only people allowed to see the emperor were eunuchs who had survived the blessing and were therefore unable to transmit it. They, and Su Shun.

“It’s a disaster,” Liyang said, wringing his soft hands. “A disaster! Cheng defeated the British in Peking, but Su Shun has already taken credit for it, just as you predicted, and now Su Shun intends to use this bit of popularity as an excuse to take the Celestial Throne.”

Cixi tried not to grimace. “We are definitely in trouble. Su Shun is indeed popular at the moment, and the emperor has not publicly declared Zaichun as his heir. So unless Xianfeng put Zaichun’s name in that box, my son’s claim on the throne will be tenuous at best. At least Xianfeng has not publicly declared Su Shun his heir, either. That’s something, at least.”

“It pains me to say it, my lady,” Liyang said, “but the emperor isn’t. . he hasn’t been at his strongest. . ”