The Dragon Men

“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.

“I know what you’re thinking again,” Alice said beside him, “because I’m thinking it, too.”

“Just one,” Gavin said. He was breathing hard, and copper tanged his mouth. “Just one little bird. No one’ll notice.”

Gavin’s hands were still on the helm. Just to see what would happen, he tried turning it. The Lady shuddered, and the nightingales all shrieked as one. It made a sound like a drill going through glass. The terrible noise ripped through Gavin’s head. He let go the helm and clapped his hands over his ears. The ship smoothed out, and the shrieking stopped.

“What was that for?” Phipps gasped.

“Bad to fight with ship,” said Yeh. “Don’t repeat.”

“Thanks for the warning.”

One of the birds circled Gavin three times, then settled on his shoulder and pecked his neck once, hard enough to draw blood. Gavin yelped and slapped at the little machine. The bird shot away, blood on its beak. It vanished into the sky.

“What did I do to him?” he asked aloud of no one in particular. No one answered.

Phipps shaded her eyes with one hand. “I assume the birds are taking us to Kashgar.”

“No. To border guard. I tell them we have Lady Michaels. He check for truth, kill us if we lie.”

“But we aren’t lying,” Alice said.

“Hope border guard believes you.”

Chapter Eight

The trip to Peking was difficult and stressful. They were forced to walk most of the way or beg for rides on the back of farm carts because Cixi didn’t want to call attention to herself by hiring a carriage or a palanquin, and Su Shun would watch the trains. They also had little money. Cixi risked selling the hairpin in Jehol but got only a fraction of its worth because a woman in maid’s clothing selling a noblewoman’s pin must have stolen it, and she could only approach a stingy black market buyer. Cixi didn’t dare sell any more jewelry for fear the jeweler, already nervous, would call a guard. As a further disguise, Cixi traded the maid’s clothing and Zaichun’s eunuch’s clothing in favor of simple peasant garb.

Peking was more than a hundred miles from Jehol, and the journey would take at least two weeks on foot, but there was nothing for it. To stretch out their meager supply of cash, they slept on the ground and begged food from other travelers. It had also been years since she had been required to perform even simple tasks like urinating without at least three maids in attendance, let alone walk so many miles without aid. The hunger and the dust and the unrelenting heat sent Cixi straight back to her youth. What made things worse was the constant fear that a troop of soldiers would descend on them and haul them back to Jehol for a long, painful death.

Zaichun, for his part, became surly as he became hungry and tired, and when at one point he started to complain-and no doubt say something that would have revealed their identity to the farmer on whose cart they were riding-Cixi slapped him hard, as any peasant mother would.

“Shut your foul mouth,” she snapped. “Do not complain when this honored farmer has given us a free ride.”