The Dragon Men (5 page)

“Oh,” said al-Noor. A long moment of silence followed. Then he added, “But that would have been dull.”

“Indeed,” Phipps said.

“In any case,” al-Noor continued, “I must insist that you show me the cure, Lady Michaels.”

“I am not a circus act, Mr. al-Noor.” Phipps's posture stiffened. “And in any case, the cure kills your men. I won't be responsible for more deaths.”

“They are all dying anyway,” al-Noor replied reasonably. “Fortunately, the mainland sends me a fresh supply of plague victims every few months. They do not even know what becomes of them—nor do they care.”

“And you don't, either?” Alice burst out.

“As we already observed, they are dying anyway. Please, Lady Michaels.”

“No,” Phipps said.

Al-Noor snapped his fingers twice, and one of the squid men whipped the cover off a serving platter. On the platter lay an ugly brass pistol with a glass barrel. Almost languidly, al-Noor plucked the pistol from the table and aimed it at Phipps. A thin whine shrilled through the cavern, and the glass snapped with yellow sparks as the weapon powered up. “Cure one of my men or I will shoot.”

“No, you won't,” Phipps sniffed. “The reward is to capture me alive. If I'm dead, you get nothing. And if you shoot my maid, I'll be too upset to cure anyone, so don't bother threatening her.”

“Oh, I will shoot you, all right,” al-Noor said. “And you, Lady Michaels,” he added to Alice, “will watch her die. Slowly.”

This caught Alice completely off guard. She sprang to her feet, not sure if she was more angry or afraid.
“What?”

“I deduced it some time ago. This woman—is her name actually Susan, perhaps?—speaks and carries herself like a military officer and, oh yes, she wears a uniform. Lady Michaels serving in the military? I hardly think so. And you, madam, do not walk or talk like a maid. So, Lady Michaels, demonstrate the cure on one of these men here, or I will shoot your friend. I have the feeling you will prove rather more compliant.”

“If you shoot her,” Alice said, trying to imitate Phipps's bravado and not quite succeeding, “I won't help you.”

Al-Noor fired. A red energy beam slashed through the air and struck one of the squid men in the chest. It fell to the floor with a terrible squeal amid sizzling skin. The smell of cooked fish filled the air. The squid man twisted and screamed in agony, even though it had no mouth, and Alice watched in horror as its chest melted into a blue mass that bubbled like a witch's cauldron. The squid man screamed and screamed. Alice clapped her hands over her ears in horror. The spider claws cruelly raked her skin, but she left them there through a century of seconds, until the squid man died. The other squid men remained motionless and impassive, their dark eyes reflecting the mess on the floor.

“That is setting one.” Al-Noor cranked a dial on the stock of the pistol and aimed at Phipps, who blanched despite herself. “This is setting seven.”

“Wait!” Alice cried.

“Yes, Lady?”

Alice looked down at the table and unhappily ran her hands around the rim of the empty plate before her. The spider's claws scraped over china. Two awful choices, and no one to hide behind, no one to turn to. Just herself. Just as it always was. A wave of homesickness swept over her, and more than anything in that moment she yearned to be back in London, in the little house she had rented, with Gavin sitting across the kitchen table from her while they shared a meal and talked about nothing in particular. No clockworkers, no squid men, no iron spiders. Just she and Gavin, with his kind voice and blue eyes and that way he had of looking at her that made her feel like the only woman in the entire world. Her fingers continued their crawl around the plate.

“Very well, Mr. al-Noor,” she said. “I will ‘cure' one of your squid men. Just don't—”

She flung the plate at al-Noor. It glanced off his pistol and shattered. He yelped. The pistol fired, but the beam went wide. Phipps leaped across the table at him, brass arm outstretched. Dishes scattered and broke as she grabbed his fleshy wrist with her metal fingers. Except with the clockwork plague came enhanced reflexes, and al-Noor was quick to recover. He went down beneath Phipps but managed to keep his weapon hand free. The pair rolled across the stone floor as al-Noor brought the pistol around to press against Phipps's temple. Phipps knocked it aside. Alice threw another plate at him and missed. It crashed next to his ear, and he ignored it. She dashed around the table, cursing her bulky skirts and looking for an opening.

“Take them, you fools!” al-Noor barked. “Hit this stupid woman!”

The squid men in the room moved. Two grabbed Alice from behind, and their cold hands chilled her skin through her dress. Another pair hoisted Phipps straight off al-Noor while a third cracked her over the ear with a hard fist. Phipps staggered, stunned but still conscious.

Al-Noor hauled himself to his feet. Blood from a split lip spattered his ridiculous swim costume, and Alice loathed him with a black hatred. She struggled within the grip of the squid men, but they held her like iron.

“That was a mistake.” He spat blood and raised the pistol. “The reward for your dead body is lower, but still sufficient.”

Alice forced herself to remain calm, though fear and adrenaline zipped through every artery and vein.
Think, girl,
she told herself. Al-Noor was a clockworker. Clockworkers were geniuses, but their thinking was far from perfect.
Remember what happens to Gavin.

“I like what you've done with those droplets of blood,” she said with quiet desperation. “They're so round, so smooth, so clear. There must be millions, billions, trillions of cells in each drop, spinning, whirling, swirling through liquid. How beautiful, how lovely, how perfect.”

Al-Noor looked down. Scarlet drops fell from his lip, just as Alice described, glistening in the air before they landed on the broken table, and the sight seemed to grab his attention. A drop fell, and his eyes followed it until it hit the wood with a tiny
tip
noise. Another followed. A third landed in his cup, spreading like a tiny fractal flower, and his attention remained rooted. He had the same expression on his face Gavin did when he became fascinated by something, and the similarity unnerved Alice. She ground her teeth. Gavin had nothing in common with this man, and he never would.

“The blood disperses through the water, expanding, flowing, moving. The blood is beautiful, the blood is entrancing,” she forced herself to chant.

Nothing in common? Truly?
An icy finger of doubt slid around her thoughts. Gavin was a clockworker, and clockworkers always went mad. Always. Al-Noor was just further along than Gavin. How would she react if—when—Gavin decided her life was worth less than some new bit of technology?

Her voice faltered. “The blood is . . . is . . . ,” she said, trailing off, tried again, and failed to come up with a single thing to say. All she could see was Gavin's face superimposed over al-Noor's. The squid men, bereft of further orders, remained in place, holding the stunned Phipps upright and keeping Alice in their cold grip. She considered scratching the one on her left with her spider, but that would mean the poor creature's death, and she couldn't bring herself to do it, even to free herself.

Al-Noor looked up. His attention had only been barely diverted, and when Alice stopped chanting, he lost interest in the blood.

“Very good, Lady,” he said. “You have shown yourself more dangerous than I knew. You will die now.”

He aimed the pistol at Alice. The last thing Alice heard was the pistol's high-pitched whine.

Chapter Three

P
eking was burning. The flames lit the night sky with phoenix wings, and smells of smoke and gunpowder stung Cixi's nose, even here at the Mountain Palace for Avoiding Heat, far from the Forbidden City in Peking. Behind her in the spidery palanquin, her maids hid their painted faces in their sleeves and wept. Cixi, the Lady Yehenara, kept a carefully mild expression, as if she were out enjoying an evening ride, though inside she was weeping just like the maids. For a second time the British barbarians had invaded Peking, and now they were doing what they did best—destroy. Automatically she reached down to her lap to stroke one of her dogs for comfort, forgetting that her lap was empty. During the hasty evacuation of the Forbidden City, the eunuchs had thrown all her dear little lion-faced dogs down the well so the barbarians wouldn't be able to touch them. She wondered if any of them were still alive, struggling to stay afloat in the cold water and begging for someone to take them out.

The spider palanquin came to a halt. Its legs lowered it to the ground, stirring the silk curtains that preserved the privacy of the riders. Li Liyang, her chief eunuch, personally helped her out and guided her toward the steps of the Pavilion of a Thousand Silver Stars, her own residence within the palace. The palace wasn't a single building but was actually a compound that took up most of the little town of Chengde. Dozens of pavilions and temples and bridges and palaces lay scattered artfully about the lush lawns and gardens of perfumed flowers chosen for their complementary scents. Cixi, who pronounced her imperial name
kee-shee
in the Manchu fashion, paused at the top of the steps to look at the too-bright sky again. The city was dying as slowly and steadily as her dogs.

“My lady, we should not remain outdoors,” said Liyang in his high-pitched lilt. “It is too upsetting for a delicate constitution.”

“Where is my son?” she asked as she mounted the steps.

“He is safe,” Liyang replied. His head was shaved, and he wore a conical hat of gold silk that matched the elaborate geometric designs on his gold robe. Like most eunuchs, he smelled vaguely of urine—the knife that stripped away a boy's three preciouses took with it the ability to control the bladder, a problem that remained through adulthood and led to the saying “smelly as a eunuch.” At his belt, Liyang carried a pouch with a small jar in it. The jar held his preciouses preserved in oil, and when he died, they would be buried with him so he could join the ancestors as a full man. Cixi thought of her dogs again and wondered how long it would be before such a thing happened to Liyang.

“
Safe
does not tell me where he is, Liyang,” she said. “Bring him to me immediately.”

“My lady—”

“You have disobeyed me, Liyang. Fortunately, you are my favorite eunuch, and these are trying times. Therefore I will not have you beaten for disobedience—
if
my son Zaichun is at my side by the time I reach the front door.”

Liyang scurried away. To be nice to him, Cixi took her time with the steps, pausing to allow her maids to smooth the wrinkles from her silken split-front robe and straighten the wide trousers beneath. Cixi was beautiful and knew it, but in the Imperial Court, beauty was common and cheap. Cixi's lustrous hair, fine features, and smooth skin had gotten her chosen as a concubine of the fifth rank when she was sixteen, but poise, wit, and her skill in the bedroom had caught the emperor's fancy, and by age twenty-two, Cixi had spun that fancy into a pregnancy and finally her current rank as Imperial Concubine. Beauty had its uses, and it had to be maintained, but it was nothing without a mind behind it.

Liyang was lucky that beauty requirements for Manchu women such as Cixi did not extend to binding their feet as some of the concubines did. Otherwise someone would have carried her up the steps in an instant and she would have been forced to have Liyang beaten with bamboo rods regardless of how she felt about him. She supposed she could order it done with the thicker ones that broke bones and left bruises instead of the thinner ones that split skin and laid flesh open. But that might show too much favoritism, even for Liyang, and when things were chaotic, people craved order. It wouldn't do to go back on the rules for any reason. No, if Liyang didn't produce her son within the allotted time, she would have to have the Imperial Master of a Hundred Cries mete out a severe beating with no intervention from Cixi. It would make everyone feel better.

She reached the top of the steps. The Pavilion of a Thousand Silver Stars was three stories tall, bright and airy even in the night. Lacquered pillars held up the portico, which looked out over the serene waters of a lotus pond. She had ordered the pavilion painted a soft pink, the exact shade of an orchid, because her girlhood name had been Little Orchid. Cixi was the name given her on the day she had been chosen as an Imperial Concubine. A year after the birth of her son—so far the emperor's only son—Cixi had been promoted to the position of Noble Consort, which put her second only to the empress. This meant she had the emperor's ear and could do things such as build pink pavilions in the Mountain Palace for Avoiding Heat.

Cixi glanced at the fiery sky again. Last year, just before the signing of the awful Treaty of Tientsin—the treaty that granted the British power to travel within China and sell their filthy opium—a fleet of British ships carrying diplomats, envoys, and thousands of soldiers sailed up the Peiho River near the fortress at Taku. The emperor and his generals didn't want an armed force coming so close to Taku, and so the emperor sent a message asking them to anchor at a harbor farther north. Although the request was perfectly reasonable and not even inconvenient, the English envoy Wright Frederick—or Frederick Wright, as Cixi supposed the barbarians put the name—ordered the fleet to attack Taku to teach the Chinese a lesson. No doubt to the great surprise of the English, the fortress at Taku had turned out to be more heavily fortified than expected. The automatons and soldiers at Taku had turned back the English forces with little effort. The easy victory emboldened the emperor to declare the entire Treaty of Tientsin in abeyance and the borders closed.

Now, a year later, the English responded in force. They fought their way up the river all the way to Peking, despite the best efforts of the emperor's generals. Emperor Xianfeng had been forced to flee to the Mountain Palace for his own safety. A difficult thing it had been, too, with hundreds of soldiers, slaves, and eunuchs, and an equal number of mechanical carts filled with their minimal possessions and treasures, preceded by fifty spiders to sweep the road ahead of the emperor's palanquin and strew the stones with rose petals.

Cixi reached the pavilion doors, gridded with flawless glass, and her maids hurried to slide them open. She glanced about. No sign of Liyang or Zaichun. Ah well. Cixi raised her foot, clad in a bejeweled slipper, to step over the threshold.

“Honored mother!” Her son Zaichun dashed up the steps, his dark eyes sparkling beneath his round cap. He was not quite six, and to him this was a grand adventure that kept him up well past his normal bedtime. Behind him came an entourage of eunuchs and his wet nurse, all of them carrying any toys, foodstuffs, and articles of clothing the boy might need. The servants looked frazzled, and their clothes were in disarray. Cixi made a mental note to have a sharp word with Liyang about that. Servants in the presence of the emperor's son and the Imperial Concubine had no place to appear less than respectable. Disarray led to fear, fear led to panic, and right now, no one could afford to panic.

“You wished to see me, Mother?” Zaichun continued.

“I did, Little Cricket.” She touched his hair, careful not to the let the long jade coverings on her nails jab his face. “I wanted to see for myself that you were safe.”

“I am. I spoke with Father, too. He even let me ride behind his palanquin so I could watch for invaders!”

“That was kind of him. I hope you remembered to give him your thanks.”

“Of course, Mother. I heard him talking to General Su Shun about how well-mannered I was when we entered the palace.”

“That is good to hear, my son, and I am glad to see that you are safe, but perhaps you should sleep in my pavilion tonight.”

“I can sleep in my own pavilion,” he said sulkily, betraying his earlier good manners. “It's bigger. And I'm not sleepy.”

“Mother has had a trying day. She hopes her son won't make things more difficult.”

“I don't like pink. It's for girls.”

“Your words are very interesting.” Cixi's tone remained mild, but her hand dropped to his shoulder, and the points of her nail covers dug into his flesh. He gasped. “But I'm sure you would rather spend the night here, where it's safer. Is that not true?” She tightened her grasp.

“Yes, Mother.” He was struggling not to show the pain, and she was proud that he didn't do so, though she didn't loosen her grip.

“It would be good if the eunuchs knew.”

He cleared his throat. “I believe I will spend the night in my honored mother's pavilion. See to it.”

The eunuchs bowed and swarmed into the pavilion through a series of side entrances—no one but Cixi and her guests used the main door.

“You are a well-mannered boy. Perhaps you would like to run along now.” She released him, and he fled into the pavilion.

She held out her hand and said, “Tea.” A porcelain cup was placed in it, and she let the warm drink wash the road dust from her throat as she strolled across the threshold. Inside the pavilion, a maid carrying a heavy feather bed froze as she realized whose presence she was in. She tried to bow and keep the precious feather bed from touching the floor all at once, though she didn't dare flee without permission. Cixi dropped the cup—a spider caught it before it hit the ground—and was about to enter the pavilion fully when she changed her mind and paused in the doorway again. The bowing maid holding the heavy feather bed bit her lip, and sweat was making her makeup run. A bit of down worked its way out of the feather bed and, caught on a draft, drifted out the open door and away to the east, toward the place known as the Cool Hall on the Misty Lake, the emperor's residence. Cixi watched it go. The fear she had been keeping firmly at bay gave way to a new nervousness she couldn't name. The feather vanished into the darkness.

“Liyang!” she said.

Liyang came to her side. “My lady?”

“What is the latest news of Peking?”

“The Army of a Thousand Tigers continues to fight the English north of Peking, my lady, while Su Shun and the Dragon Men use the Machines of Wind and Thunder in the south.”

“But who is winning?”

Liyang hesitated. “The Tiger Army is . . . rather . . . it is encountering quite a challenge, one worthy of its fighting prowess. The Machines of Wind and Thunder fight bravely under Prince Kung and will do so until nothing is left but a pile of melted brass.”

“I see.” They were losing, but Liyang couldn't say such a dreadful thing to the Imperial Consort. She kept her face calm with effort. “How is the emperor?”

The arms of the bowed maid were now trembling with the effort of holding up the bulky feather bed. Letting the silk cover touch the floor would mean her death. Liyang shot her a glance and said quickly, “I am told he is resting very comfortably.”

Resting comfortably
was Liyang's way of saying Xianfeng had taken a great deal of rice wine.
Very comfortably
meant he had used his opium pipe as well. Cixi knew she shouldn't be surprised. The man had turned thirty only last month, and already he had smoked more opium and drunk more wine than any four emperors before him. Small wonder he had produced only one child, and how lucky for Cixi it had been her son. The maid was panting now, and one corner of the bed drooped toward the floor. Another feather floated away to the east, drawing Cixi's eye with it. The nervousness wouldn't leave her alone. Two feathers in a row. A sign?

“I heard him talking to General Su Shun about how well-mannered I was when we entered the palace.”

Two drifting feathers. Rice wine and opium. Strange. If Xianfeng had been drinking and smoking long enough to be “resting very comfortably,” how could he have been coherent enough to comment on his son's manners?

“I believe I will call on the emperor,” Cixi said, then remembered herself and coughed to cover her lapse. “Rather, please let the emperor know the Imperial Concubine would be pleased and honored to find herself summoned to his heavenly presence.”

“But the emperor is resting— Yes, my lady,” Liyang said. He snapped his fingers, and one of his apprentices, a eunuch of perhaps six or seven, rushed up, clutching at the jar at his own belt. “Run to the Cool Hall on the Misty Lake and deliver the lady's message.”

The boy dashed away. Cixi turned to follow more sedately, and her maids slid the doors shut on the relieved face of the maid with the feather bed.

The palanquin delivered Cixi, her maids, and her eunuchs to the Cool Hall on the Misty Lake, the emperor's residence at the palace. The palanquin skittered faster than the little apprentice eunuch could run, and he would actually not have been able to deliver the message yet, something Cixi was counting on. Cixi swept toward the main doors of the Hall, and the startled eunuchs on duty hurried to slide it open. Again, she halted in the doorway. Why was she here, ahead of the messenger she herself had sent? Foolishness. This was a strange day, and she was on a strange errand. But her instincts told her to continue, and she had learned to trust her instincts.

“The back of the mind is wiser than the front,”
her mother liked to say.

“I wish to proceed completely alone,” she announced, and continued inside.

For the Imperial Concubine,
completely alone
meant her, four maids (one for each sacred direction), Liyang, his three assistants, and a spider to run ahead with a lantern. At one time, the Hall had been fitted for electric lights, with each lightbulb personally designed and blown by one of the Dragon Men at great effort and expense. The lights were an artistic triumph, each one a delicate work of art that captured the sun itself. But the moment Xianfeng entered his new apartments, he fell victim to a headache that lasted three days. The chief eunuch declared electricity was the cause, and he ordered all the wiring pulled out and every bulb smashed. The Dragon Man had drowned himself in a fishpond, and no electric light had been allowed in the Hall since.