The Dragon Men

silver could be withdrawn from any participating bank in the world, with appropriate notice.

Gavin read through the bonds with Phipps peering over his shoulder. Each was printed on smooth, creamy paper, and the stack of them felt weighty and important. They represented more wealth than he had ever dreamed existed. Odd. This pile of paper could support his entire neighborhood back in Boston for a hundred years. He thought of his grandfather and his mother and his siblings. Gavin’s father had disappeared when Gavin was young, leaving his family to fend for themselves in a two-room flat that didn’t even have running water. Most of Gavin’s childhood memories involved cold, hungr-filled winters.

When he had shown an ability to coax tunes from his grandfather’s battered fiddle at age nine, Gavin took to playing street corners, trying to scratch up a few coins to help out. At first he’d come home every day with sore fingers and little money. Then Patrick, a year his junior, told Gavin to wear the best shirt he could find, and to wash his hands and face at the corner pump, and to smile at every person who passed his corner. “People only give money to the ones who don’t seem to need it,” he said. “Look like a beggar, and they’ll hate you. Look like a musician, and they’ll pay you.”

He was right. When Gavin washed up and smiled, his take for the day tripled. Patrick was so smart, and it broke Ma’s heart that there was no way to send him to school. Gavin missed him terribly. And he missed Jenny, who got a job as a hotel maid and fell in with a window washer who made less money than she did but treated her nicely. And Harry, who tried to be dad and big brother and breadwinner to everyone, but who drank his drover’s paycheck away and stayed too late at dice games. And Violet, who just wanted to help and was frustrated because she was the littlest.

When Gavin was twelve, Gramps had taken him down to the shipyards where sailors moored the floating mountains that were their airships and introduced him to Captain Felix Naismith. As a newly minted cabin boy, Gavin hadn’t earned much, but he was able to send some money home. Later, when pirates had stranded him in London, he had joined the underground police force known as the Third Ward, at a much better salary. That money had allowed his family to install a better stove and buy better food, at least. With a pang, he realized that thanks to the Impossible Cube, they hadn’t heard from him in three years. He had effectively vanished and left them in the lurch, just as his father had. They all probably thought he was dead. Now he was sitting atop a pile of treasure with no way to send any of it to them. Although the silver itself could be transferred from bank to bank with relative ease, the bonds that indicated the silver’s ownership were tied to the physical piece of paper. And thanks to the interference of the Chinese Empire, there was no American embassy in Tehran, no good post office, no trustworthy way to deliver even one of the bonds to his family in Boston. Suddenly the thick paper seemed flat and worthless.

Back at the airfield, Phipps ordered paraffin oil from the nearby petroleum yards, which operated twenty-four hours a day, while Gavin stowed Yeh’s trunk in the Lady’s hold. The bonds he put into a secret compartment in his own cabin. As an afterthought, he put the Impossible Cube in with them. Whether the Cube was working or not, he didn’t want it falling into Chinese hands. As Phipps had already pointed out, he didn’t dare drop it into the sea or bury it somewhere-it would inevitably come to light-and he had no idea how to destroy it safely. He grimaced. It was like traveling with a bomb strapped to the hull.

Yeh puffed up the ladder with Alice boarding behind him. Gavin decided the man must be desperate indeed to return home, since he had only Alice’s word that she wanted to go to China and that the three of them wouldn’t kill him and make off with an empire’s ransom in Chinese silver. Even now, Gavin wondered if that wouldn’t be wiser.

Alice whistled to her automatons, and they scampered over to her. “Guard this man at all times,” she said. “Don’t hurt him, but don’t let him touch anything, either.”

Moments later, the Lady was flying again with Gavin at her helm. Clockworkers slept very little, so it wouldn’t be a problem for him to stay up all night, or even for the next several nights. The moon scattered silver across papery forest leaves, and the cold air smelled spicy. Yeh estimated it would take them two days to pass through Bactria, then another day or two over Samarkand to reach the Chinese border just west of the city of Kashgar, assuming everything went well. After pointing out the route on Gavin’s charts, he waddled below to the cabin Phipps had assigned him, accompanied by his new brass entourage. Phipps went below as well.

“I hope you know what you’re doing,” Gavin said uneasily as the Lady glided through the night.

“For the most part I’m confident,” Alice said. “The emperor is offering an enormous amount of money for me, and he wants me alive. That means it’s safe to hand myself over to him. For now. It’s the only way into Peking with the border sealed.”

“Have you seen the hole in this? The emperor wants you because he wants to ensure you don’t spread the clockwork plague. That means the Chinese don’t have a cure themselves. If they can’t cure the clockwork plague among regular people, how can they cure a clockworker?”

“We’ve been over this before, darling. The British Empire had a cure, but they tried to suppress it for the same reason China is. I think the Chinese have a cure of their own.”

“But if they want to suppress the cure, you’re just handing it to them. I have the feeling the emperor just wants to see you dead personally. That’s why he’s bringing you in alive.”

“That possibility did cross my mind, and I’ve accounted for that.” Alice held out her spidery hand. “I can cure ordinary clockwork plague, but I can’t cure clockworkers. I think the Chinese can do the reverse. It would be yet another reason they want this cure so badly. A total monopoly over the clockwork cure would grant them a great deal of power on the world level. Imagine if a great leader took ill with the plague, and only China could cure it. But I am thinking we can arrange a trade. If they will administer their cure to you, I will give them this one. I am sure their Dragon Men can find a way to take the gauntlet off without injuring me.”

He worked his jaw back and forth. Everything Alice had just said he had pretty much worked out for himself. But there was one question that bothered him quite a lot, and it was difficult to ask aloud. It was like holding a box that contained a paper with the date of his death written on it. In many ways it was better just to leave the box shut and walk away, but in the end, he knew he would have to open it to learn the truth.

“You’re willing to hand your cure over to the Chinese if they can cure me,” Gavin said slowly. “But if you stop scratching people, thousands-maybe millions-of other people would die. Should we be trading their lives for mine?”

Alice didn’t move. Gavin held his breath. The box was open, and the paper lay folded at the bottom. Gavin didn’t want to die, and he definitely didn’t want to go frothing mad, but the thought that he might live only at the expense of all those other lives brought a leaden lump of guilt to his stomach. Did Alice feel the same way? If she did, how could they go through with this? And if she didn’t feel the same way. .

If she didn’t, that would be a cold thing indeed. Could he continue to love someone so cold? And how long before her love for him turned into something icy and dead?

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.”