The Dragon Men

Dragon Men. Lady Orchid promised only to find a cure for Gavin, not reopen the borders or bring Alice’s cure to China. Have you noticed she’s guarding us with men who have already had the plague and can’t spread the cure? Once she puts her son on the throne, she’ll probably want a steady supply of Dragon Men to ensure he stays there. I would. And that means Alice is a potential threat to her regency. She and Prince Kung will either have to send Alice home before she cures anyone. . or kill her.”

“The thought had occurred,” Alice agreed.

Gavin set his jaw against a wave of anger. “I’ll kill them myself first.”

“Thank you, darling,” Alice said, “and I’m not saying you shouldn’t, but let’s hope that won’t be necessary.”

“That was. . bloodthirsty for a baroness,” Phipps opined.

“I long ago decided that it is better for me to live than for enemies to survive,” Alice said primly. “In any case, I do think we’ve decided on the best course-help Lady Orchid get her son on the throne so she can order the Dragon Men to cure Gavin, as she swore to do. Then we’ll flee as quickly as we can.”

She picked up a tool and used it to unfasten a trapdoor on the spider’s underside while the hovering whirligig looked on with concern.

“How do you do it?” Phipps asked. “I never had the chance to ask you, even when you were with the Ward.”

“I honestly don’t know, Lieutenant.” The spider went still as Alice extracted a number of tiny parts from the spider and laid them on the black velvet, where they stood out like little brass stars. Her hands moved gracefully, fluidly, with soft precision. Gavin automatically noted each part, how they went into the spider, the wear marks, the size and shape and weight, how they pressed sensually into the cloth. His heart rate increased, and a coppery tang came into his mouth. It was exciting to see Alice pull apart the little machine, and he felt himself falling into a delightful fugue again.

“Some clockworker inventions can be recreated by normal people,” Phipps was saying, oblivious to Gavin’s interest. “Babbage engines that let machines ‘think’ on a basic level, tempered glass for lightbulbs and cutlasses, dirigible designs. But truly intricate work such as automatons that understand human speech or Gavin’s wings or the Impossible Cube-only a clockworker can create them, even if the clockworker draws diagrams. The Third Ward tried for years even to made basic repairs on them, and we completely failed. But you-”

“Yes, Lieutenant.” Alice was absorbed in her work. She pulled the flywheel out of the spider and held it up with a pair of tweezers. “Off-center. No wonder its legs were paralyzed, poor thing.”

“How do you do it?” Phipps asked again. “You must have some idea.”

“None.” Alice ran her fingers deliciously over the flywheel, and Gavin felt it as if they were running over his own skin. Grasping the flywheel by the piston, she slid it back slowly into place with a click. The spider twitched and Gavin shuddered. “I look into a machine and just know.”

“It’s a singular talent.” Phipps crossed her arms, brass over flesh. Her monocle gleamed in the phosphorescent glow of the lanterns. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“It makes me a little nervous, to tell the truth, Lieutenant.” She replaced more gears and screws with slow, deft twists. Gavin was unable to take his eyes off the muscles and tendons in her hands. His chest ached. “When I was defusing Aunt Edwina’s bomb in the basement of the Doomsday Vault, it occurred to me that my little talent is a version of the clockwork plague-not deadly enough to be plague zombie, not powerful enough to be clockworker. My entire family died of the plague-my mother and brother died of it right away, and it killed my father slowly. Aunt Edwina became a clockworker, of course. So it’s rather difficult to believe that I didn’t contract it.”

“Do you think you contracted some different version?”

“I sometimes wonder,” Alice said. “Aunt Edwina was the world’s greatest expert on the clockwork plague. Did she try an early version of her cure on me when I was young? One that worked only partway? Is that the reason she chose me to carry her final cure?” She held up her spidery hand with its burbling tubules. The spider gauntlet had a surface temperature of ninety-six point five degrees, weighed three pounds, two ounces, and carried two drams of blood, Gavin noted. “It would explain a great deal, including why my talent won’t let me take this spider off. Edwina might have known how to create something even I can’t dissect.”

“Do you want to take it off?” Phipps asked, surprised.

“Well, no,” Alice admitted. “It’s. . dug in. It moves as I do, and those tubules are like my own arteries and veins by now. I don’t know what would happen if I tried to take it apart. And if I did, I wouldn’t be able to cure anyone.”

She finished putting the spider back together, gave it a few quick winds with the key on the chain around her neck, and set it back down again. It quivered, then leaped off the table and skittered away. The whirligig chirped in alarm and swooped after it. Gavin watched the air currents in its wake, how the propeller chopped them into tiny streams that twisted one around the other. He could feel their silky smoothness, see how they intertwined, sense the soft temperature differences between them. He looked closer, examining each eddy’s individual particles. They vibrated and buzzed like invisible bees. The particles themselves were made of smaller particles that were both there and not there, puzzle pieces in shells that twisted through tiny pockets of the universe, refusing to exist, refusing to vanish, and those particles were made of even smaller particles that came in pairs or trios.

“Gavin!”

He tried to shut out the voice and concentrate on the fascinating parade. Each set of particles was carefully balanced. Even as Gavin watched, one particle sent a bit of energy to its partner. For the tiniest breath of time, a seed of the energy lived in both particles, and then they. . changed. He couldn’t put his finger on how, but they did. It was as if two red flowers existed side by side until a bit of pollen blew from one to the other and both flowers became green. It happened with breathtaking precision, a trillion times a trillion times every microsecond, with no guiding hand to ensure it went right. It was entrancing. Exquisite!

But that wasn’t the end of it. Those tiny particles were made of-

“Gavin!”

“The tiny bees exchange pollen and make the flowers change color,” he muttered. “Red becomes green, and each has a piece of the other.”

“No, darling, no. Please come back.”

There was a sharp jerk. Gavin blinked. He was sitting at the table again. Alice was holding his face in both her hands, and her claws pricked his cheeks. Her brown eyes were both frightened and worried. He felt her breath on his chin.

“What?” he said. “What’s wrong?”

“The plague pulled you under again.” Alice let him go and returned to her own seat. “That’s your second fugue today, darling.”

He shook his head. The particles were important; he could feel it. If only he could look at them more closely, watch their patterns and come to an understanding. But when he looked at the path the whirligig had taken, all he saw was empty air.

“Gavin!”

“My second?” he said.

“The painting was your first.”

“I don’t remember,” he said, still staring after the whirligig.

“The Chinese woman by the stream. She held a fan. There was Chinese writing.”

Alice’s voice sounded desperate, but Gavin, still hoping to catch the parade of particles again, couldn’t bring himself to look in her direction. Still, her tone called for some response. “Oh. Right. Yes, now I remember,” he said vaguely, lying. “She held a fan.”

“It’s getting worse,” Phipps said. “You told me a month ago that Dr. Clef said he had two months, perhaps three. But that was an optimistic estimation. It looks like we need to be pessimistic.”

“I refuse to believe we came all this way for nothing, Lieutenant.” Alice pulled a handkerchief from her pocket, and when she did, the little silver nightingale encrusted with gems fell out. Alice picked it up and pressed one of the eyes. The little bird said in Gavin’s voice, “I love you always.”

This cleared Gavin’s head of the half trance he was in. “I. . Hello.”

“Welcome back, darling,” Alice said. “Where were you?”

He shook his head. “I don’t think I can explain it in words. But I can see why Dr. Clef and the others went there. It’s beautiful.”