The Dragon Men

“Qilin!” Cixi cried.

The Qilin prowled forward, moving with agility that belied its size. It barred their way ahead of the tunnel. The soldiers fell flat on their faces in terror. Cixi herself quivered, and Zaichun huddled against her. Cixi’s mother had told her a number of stories about the Qilin, a creature of power and grace that punished the wicked by roasting them in its fiery breath. The gods themselves smiled upon the Qilin, and only the dragon and the phoenix were more powerful.

“Holy God,” Phipps said. Cixi didn’t know the language, but from her tone she guessed they were words of fear.

Li fired his pistol at it. The orange bolt bounced off the Qilin’s metal hide and gouged a piece out of the painted tunnel wall. The Qilin turned and exhaled at him. Cixi smelled a terrible stench, then heard the click of a spark. Flame burst from the Qilin’s mouth.

“No!” Phipps screamed.

But Li was already moving. He dove straight toward the Qilin and slid under the flames on his belly to fetch up between the creature’s forelegs. Phipps snapped out her brass hand, and a coil of wire snaked from the palm. To Cixi’s amazement, it wrapped round the Qilin’s mouth. Phipps yanked, and the Qilin’s jaws snapped shut. Li scrambled to his feet, his movements slowed by the battery pack on his back. The Qilin reared back, and Phipps was pulled bodily into the air.

Alice barked something directly behind Cixi. She jumped aside as the dragon with Alice behind its head galloped forward. The dragon was barely half the Qilin’s size, but that didn’t seem to faze Alice in the slightest. The wire sword, now glowing blue, was raised high above her head, and she shouted in English. Cixi didn’t know what to make of such a sight.

Phipps slammed into a wall, but she managed to twist so her brass arm took the brunt of it. Still, she was clearly dazed. The Qilin wrenched its mouth open, snapping the wire. Li scrambled around underneath it in a desperate dance to avoid being crushed by its pounding feet. The dragon reared up. Alice swung the sword, and it described an azure arc. With a crack it intersected the Qilin’s shoulder. A chunk of metal fell out and crashed to the floor. The Qilin bellowed, the first sound Cixi had heard it make. It turned on Alice, who waved the sword and shouted again.

The Qilin lashed out with a heavy paw. Alice tried to make the dragon dodge, but the Qilin was faster. Caught by the blow, the dragon crumpled like a paper lantern. Alice gave a scream as her automaton crashed to the floor. Cixi put her hands over her mouth, frightened to death. Zaichun trembled behind her, and the soldiers remained motionless on the floor. The Qilin was overpowering. There was no way to defeat it. Lieutenant Li suddenly appeared again. He had abandoned his pistol and was climbing up the Qilin’s side, using the scales as handholds. He gained a position above the glass dome that housed the creature’s brain and raised both hands in a double fist. Cixi held her breath as he brought them crashing down on the glass.

They bounced aside without even a scratch to show for it. The Qilin shook itself like a dog, tossing Li off like a flea. Cixi heard the hissing sound of its breath. The Qilin would incinerate them all, as it incinerated all sinners and doers of evil.

Sinners. The Qilin-the creature from the fairy tales-punished only sinners. This one had been created by a Dragon Man and was controlled by a human brain, but-

Cixi ran forward. “Wait, holy one!” She flung herself to the ground before the Qilin and knocked her head on the floor as if she were approaching the emperor. The stench of the gas made her dizzy. She held her breath and waited for the click and the terrible pain of the flames.

Nothing happened. She risked a peek between the fingers that covered her face and saw the Qilin had stopped.

“Holy one,” Cixi said, her heart knocking at the back of her throat, “we are not the sinners you seek. I am Lady Yehenara, Imperial Concubine to Emperor Xianfeng. Behind me stands Zaichun, his son, who was deposed by the evil Su Shun. We only wish passage into the Forbidden City so we may right a great wrong and put the rightful emperor on the Celestial Throne. I beseech you, holy one, forgive us our deeds here and grant the blameless young emperor permission to pass.”

The dreadful stench continued. Cixi kept her face down and tried not to tremble. She was risking not only her life, but her son’s. Suddenly she wanted to hold him, embrace him as she hadn’t done since he was a baby. The Imperial Concubine did not show such affection to her son. Affection was a weakness that her enemies might exploit, and the only solution was to enforce a strict distance. But she felt it nonetheless, and right then she prayed hard to all her ancestors and any spirits that might be listening that the Qilin-or whatever brain that believed itself to be a Qilin-would see Zaichun as an innocent, someone who could not be harmed. Or, if they would not answer her prayer, at least take her life instead of his.

The Qilin exhaled more gas. The stones rocked beneath Cixi’s head. She gave a soft moan and waited for the inevitable end. Then there was a creak of moving metal, followed by silence. Cixi peeked again. The Qilin had backed away and was now sitting to one side on its haunches.

Cixi slowly got to her feet. The Qilin didn’t move. She ran to Zaichun, who was still standing paralyzed by the tunnel wall. For a moment she hesitated. Then she embraced him as a mother.

“My Cricket,” she whispered.

“Mother?” he said into her robe.

She drew back. And how would she cut off his hand now? “We must see to the others.”

The soldiers were all unharmed, of course, though somewhat embarrassed by their superstitious response. Alice struggled to free herself from the wreckage of the brass dragon. Two of the soldiers hurried to help. She was limping slightly and favored one arm, but her sword seemed undamaged. The dragon was a total loss. Other soldiers were rushing over to Lieutenant Li and Lieutenant Phipps. Li was completely unharmed, but Phipps staggered about, and Li insisted she lean on him. Her brass arm trailed the broken wire. Once she recovered herself, she held it out to Alice, who cut the wire off with the sword. Throughout it all, the Qilin didn’t move. It may as well have been a statue in the imperial gardens.

“How did you convince it to do that?” Phipps asked.

Cixi threw the Qilin a glance. “Go farther down the hall.”

Everyone quickly marched past the creature. Its pink brain seemed to stare at them from within the little dome, and Cixi wondered to whom it had belonged. Once the creature was out of hearing range, Cixi said, “It seemed to me that any human brain put into a creature like that would either go mad or survive by making itself believe it truly was a Qilin. And the true Qilin punishes only sinners or doers of evil. I convinced it that we were neither one.”

“That was quite a risk,” Alice said, flexing her wounded arm. “I have to say I am impressed, Lady Orchid.”

“No more than I am impressed by the way you attacked it,” Cixi replied. “Tell me, do all Western women act like you and Lieutenant Phipps?”

Alice gave a laugh at that, the first Cixi had heard from her-or any other foreigner, for that matter. How strange to hear, and to realize that foreigners could laugh, too. “Hardly. Though I wish more of us would.”

From overhead came a thudding noise, as if a giant were stomping about. The vibrations traveled through the tunnel stones up through Cixi’s feet. She exchanged looks with Lieutenant Li and knew he was thinking the same thing-Su Shun was making the Dragon Men work long and hard into the night on the machines of war.

They encountered two more sets of eunuchs, but all of them were amenable to the bribes Cixi offered them. In the end, they arrived at a pair of wide lacquered doors guarded by eight robed eunuchs. The doors, Cixi knew, opened into a false storage building not far from the Hall of Mental Cultivation, where the emperor lived. At this time of night, the streets of the Forbidden City would be largely deserted, but anyone who saw them would assume they had a right to be there.

Before the eunuchs could raise the alarm, Cixi identified herself one more time, and each one accepted a priceless piece of jewelry.

“I thought you said no one knew about this secret passage,” Alice said as Cixi closed the Chamber again. “At my count, at least twenty-two eunuchs know of it, not to mention whoever designed it, and the people who built it. Even people who can’t speak can communicate.”