actually managed to drop a son. How she coaxed a boy child out his opium-laced loins, Su Shun still didn’t understand. He clenched his teeth and spent hours ensuring the emperor had all the opium silver could buy. He encouraged him to smoke more and more of it because opium was of the feminine yin, and it drained away the male yang. He also talked him into using the Passage of Silken Footsteps out of the Forbidden City to spend himself on Peking prostitutes, both male and female, so that none of his seed would reach the concubines or his breathless empress. Both schemes had worked for a while-none of the other concubines had become pregnant, and Su Shun had seen to it that any whore who had thrown babies nine months after a celestial visit had quietly disappeared with their litters. Su Shun would have liked to accuse Cixi of infidelity; he had even dropped a few hints into the Xianfeng’s ear, but the emperor waved them aside as ridiculous. The only thing Su Shun had managed to do was delay Xianfeng in writing the name of his heir for the Ebony Chamber to swallow.
And then fate had played straight into Su Shun’s hands. The English had attacked again, making it all the way to Peking. An idea had come to Su Shun, and he arranged for a decently pretty woman to be infected with the dragon’s blessing and put into a concubine’s guise. The woman was willing enough to die, for the amount of money Su Shun paid her would take care of her entire family for the rest of their lives, and it was easy enough for her to join the evacuation train during the confusion. Su Shun couldn’t even remember her name, but she had done the job admirably. The emperor was dead, and after a bit of scuffling, Su Shun had the Jade Hand.
He held it out before him, as he had done many times before in the last few days. His right arm still hurt, and sometimes the pain flared as if it had been dipped in molten brass. But the spikes at the top of the Hand had snapped into his flesh, and the brass-bound green fingers twitched. Most of the time he felt nothing in it, but occasionally it seemed he could feel an ache in his missing palm. He could no longer hold a sword or fire a pistol, but perhaps he would learn to do so with his left. The pain flared again. Su Shun gestured, and one of the eunuchs kneeling around him held out a bowl. Xianfeng had used opium to dull the affliction, but Su Shun was not so foolish. Su Shun tapped the bowl, and the eunuch drank half of it. Su Shun waited a moment, and when the eunuch didn’t topple over dead, he accepted the bowl and drained it dry.
Another eunuch hurried up to the bottom of the stairs, dropped to his knees, and knocked his forehead on the stones. Su Shun snapped his fingers, and the eunuch rose again. His head was fuzzy from lack of proper shaving, and his robe was still white. The hundred days of mourning for Xianfeng were still in effect, and Su Shun didn’t dare shorten that time period, though it grated-he would have preferred to stuff Xianfeng into his tomb and pretend the idiot had never existed. People had short memories, and the faster he could shove Xianfeng aside, the more entrenched Su Shun’s rule would become. Even now he could feel the Jade Hand sinking deeper into his flesh, becoming one with him. Soon nothing would release it.
“What is it?” he asked the eunuch. “Tell me you’ve found Cixi and that whelp of hers.”
The eunuch hesitated, which told Su Shun the answer. “I bring news of a different kind, Imperial Majesty,” he said in his high, fluting voice. “Rumors are circulating around the city about Lady Michaels and Lord Ennock.”
A bit of excitement flicked through Su Shun, tinged with a bit of fear, though he kept both away from his face. Alice Michaels-the woman with the cure. He glanced at the war machines in the Outer Court. The only reason they and the army and the rest of the machines waiting outside the Forbidden City weren’t marching west was that Su Shun was afraid of the men encountering her and her infamous cure. It had all but died out on its own since she had vanished three years ago. Lung Hun, who specialized in the blessing of dragons, said it was a strange paradox-the cure destroyed the disease, but the cure eventually died out without the disease to play host to it. If he could destroy Alice Michaels, he could destroy the cure and keep the Dragon Men safe for his invasion.
“Proceed,” he said tightly.
“Your Imperial Majesty knows that Michaels and Ennock were captured at the border and were on their way here, as your Imperial Majesty ordered, and Ennock was fitted with a salamander to make him a Dragon Man, but both of them vanished before they reached the city, with no sign of where they-or our troops-went.”
“Yes, yes, get on with it.”
The eunuch prostrated himself again. “As your Imperial Majesty demands,” he quavered. “I am only a messenger, and I pray you will not have this humble servant whipped or burned or-”
“I will not have you beaten,” Su Shun growled, “if you just tell me what you learned.”
“They hide somewhere in Peking,” the eunuch said to the ground. “We do not yet know where.”
Su Shun’s eyes went wide. He strode down the steps and hauled the shaking eunuch to his feet by the collar of his white mourning robe. The eunuch squealed.
“M-m-m-majesty. .”
“Speak!” Su Shun bellowed. “Or I will tie your entrails to a rock and throw them down a well!”
The eunuch’s eyes were wild with fear, and a smell of fresh urine permeated the air. “Th-there is no sign of the cure in Peking, M-majesty.”
“Do not lie to save your skin,” Su Shun hissed into the man’s face, “for I will nail it above my bed if you are.”
“It is the truth, Celestial One.”
Su Shun released the eunuch so abruptly, he fell and tumbled partway down the stone steps. Facedown, he lay there, still quivering.
“Send the army into the city,” Su Shun ordered. “Begin house-to-house searches. I want her found and brought to me immediately. Alive. The reward of four hundred pounds of silver for her still stands. And I want Cixi and her little bastard brought with her. Go!”
The eunuch scrambled away, barely remembering to knock his head at the bottom of the stairs. Su Shun raised the Jade Hand. A tingle ran down his arm, and power flared across the brass inlays. The salamanders, curled around the ear of every Dragon Man, made an answering glow, and they stopped working.
“Lung Chao!” Su Shun boomed in the voice he used when addressing legions of troops. “Bring your birds!”
Below, Lung Chao turned away from the mess of cow he had been examining and ran lightly toward the steps. He bounded up the white marble without pausing, and Su Shun wanted to kick him back down the stairs, even strike off his head, for not kowtowing properly. But Lung Chao was a Dragon Man, and immune to Imperial protocol. Su Shun needed every Dragon Man he could get, and it would be foolish to execute one for forgetting to bow. He might as well as throw a magic sword into a volcano. At least Lung Chao remembered to kneel when he reached the emperor.
“Majesty,” Lung Chao said. His deadly flock of birds clattered to a noisy landing on the Hall steps, and they peered up at Su Shun with eerie, blank eyes.
“Can your birds search the city from above?”
“They can, Imperial Majesty. They are very much like my border guards.”
“Then take them out to search for Alice Michaels and Gavin Ennock and Lady Cixi.”
Lung Chao paused. “Are you positive you want this?”
The direct address caught Su Shun off guard. “What are you talking about?”
“They will come to you. Like worms. Like serpents. Like rabbits and moles wearing silken slippers, they will come. The balance is wrong, and it will correct itself.”
“The balance?”
“Yin and yang, you and she. You and Cixi, hand in hand.” Lung Chao gestured toward the Jade Hand. “The right is wrong and must be righted.”
If one of his commanders had spoken to him this way, Su Shun would have smashed him across the face and had him beaten with thin rods. But he needed to think less like a general and more like a ruler. And this was a Dragon Man. Instead, Su Shun held up his right hand, the Jade Hand, and said, “Silence.”
The Hand glowed, as did the salamander in Lung Chao’s ear. Lung Chao’s words ended.
“Do as I bid you. And kowtow when you leave.”
Lung Chao obeyed. His little flock of birds followed him, and suddenly this gesture seemed too small, so unworthy of an emperor. Once again he held up the Jade Hand, and the familiar tingle came with the glow. The Dragon Men turned to face him. Su Shun only wished the Jade Hand’s range reached farther than a long bowshot; the Hand could summon any Dragon Man within its range, and it gave Su Shun the power to command any Dragon Man who could hear his voice, but this Ennock boy was beyond the reach of both. For the moment.
