The Impossible Cube: A Novel of the Clockwork Empire (4 page)

“That is called a warning shot,” bellowed a voice from above. “I believe my energy cannon can manage another. The
boom
may not be so large or exciting, but it will suffice.”

Over the road and just above the trees hovered a familiar dirigible the size of a generous cottage. A gondola shaped like an unmasted sailing ship hung from a cigar-shaped envelope that was clearly too small to
provide enough lift for such a mass. A lacy blue endoskeleton Gavin had forged and bent himself glowed like captured sky beneath the envelope’s thin skin, and a long rope dangled from the stern, which sported the words
The Lady of Liberty.
Leaning over the gunwale was a portly man in a white coat and heavy goggles over a bulldog face. He was pointing a small cannon down at the road. Phipps, Glenda, and Simon didn’t move. A river of relief swept over Gavin.

“Dr. Clef!” he shouted. “You’re my favorite German.”

“Very glad to see you are safe, my boy.”

Alice looked calm and unruffled, but Gavin read a symphony of strain holding her upright. “I don’t suppose,” she called up, “that you could provide a ladder?”

Seconds later, one end of a rope ladder tumbled down. Alice clambered up first, and Gavin followed with Click. The whirligig flew.

“We can still follow you,” Phipps shouted up at them. “We found you now, and we’ll find you again!”

Ignoring her, Gavin pulled himself over the edge to join Alice. His shoes came down on solid planking, and he felt some of the tension drain away. The airship, the
Lady
, was his place, his home. Wood and hemp made their familiar creak as the envelope strained against her ropes, trying to pull the ship higher while her lacy skeleton gleamed a magnificent azure blue. The generator that ran on paraffin oil muttered and mumbled to itself on the deck, emitting steam and feeding a steady stream of power to the
Lady
’s skeleton and to her propellers. Dr. Clef, a clockworker once captured
by the Third Ward, had developed the alloy that pushed against gravity when it was electrified, but Gavin had been the one to put it into the envelope of a dirigible.

At the helm stood a stocky, sharp-faced Oriental dressed in a pirate shirt that suited him perfectly. He was just over eighteen. His trousers were tucked into his boots, and like Alice, he kept a glass cutlass sheathed at his belt. He saluted Gavin with a rakish grin that made him even more handsome than before.

“No, no,” Dr. Clef was calling down. He continued to aim his power cannon at the ground. “Don’t move, please. My finger trigger, it itches.”

“That’s trigger finger,” Gavin said. “And you let
Feng
pilot the
Lady
?”

“It was that or give him the cannon,” Dr. Clef replied mildly. “I did consider pulling apart the clicky kitty’s brain and using it to create a wireless device that would allow me to control the ship from a distance, but the young woman wouldn’t hear of it.”

“Bloody right.” Alice picked up Click and let the whirligig land on her shoulder. “Feng, get us out of here!”

“Which way?” said Feng Lung with a trace of China in his words.

“Any way, as long as it’s east,” Alice said.

Feng swung the helm around. The propellers on the
Lady
’s nacelles hanging from the outer hulls whirled to life, and she picked up speed, still trailing the rope. Alice set Click down and pulled it in.

“You slid all the way down
that
to get into the greenhouse and rescue me?” Gavin said. “I must be awfully special.”

“Indeed you are, Mr. Ennock.” Alice coiled the rope on the deck, then turned and collapsed into Gavin’s surprised arms. Her body shook against his, and wet, sloppy tears dampened his shirt. “Don’t you ever do that to me again, you… you
cad.
”

His own throat thickened and he held her, clumsily at first, then tightly. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” After a moment, he added, “What did I do?”

Alice gave a hiccupping laugh and straightened. “Oh, Gavin. Dear God. You scared me half to death, that’s what.”

“So true,” Feng said from the helm. “After you went missing from the hotel, she went mad. Berserk. She would not sleep; she would not eat. When we tracked you to the greenhouse, she almost rammed it with the ship. I insisted to be pilot then.”

“Oh. I’m sorry,” he said again. “Should I write letters in the sky to warn you when I’m going to be captured?”

“Certainly.” Alice pulled off her leather gloves, revealing a metal spider wrapping her left hand from forearm to fingers. Its legs ended in claws that tipped Alice’s own nails, and tubules running up and down the spider’s legs flowed scarlet with her blood. The dark iron gleamed, and the spider’s eyes glowed red, indicating that she had just touched someone infected with the clockwork plague—Gavin, in this case. It was another of the daily reminders that he was dying, and it was inextricably linked to the woman he loved. The thought made him both sad and angry, and he wanted to wrench the spider off her, even though he knew it wouldn’t work. The spider’s joints squeaked slightly
as Alice fumbled at her sleeve for a handkerchief, and then she remembered she wasn’t wearing a woman’s blouse. She reached into her pocket for one instead and dabbed at her eyes. “I’ll
kill
the next one who captures you. I swear it.”

“There’s going to be a next one?”

Alice cuffed him lightly on the shoulder, then knelt in front of him to pull up his pant cuffs. “If Phipps has her way, there will be.”

“Uh… what are you doing?”

“I need to check your ankles. Those horrible chains Antoine kept you in couldn’t have been good for them. This will be easier if you sit down.”

He sank into a deck chair and let her pull off his shoes, wincing as the leather came away from swollen flesh. Alice made a low sound.

“I wish you’d been wearing your boots instead of just shoes,” she muttered. “They might have protected you better. Does this hurt?” She gently massaged his ankles.

“Yes,” he hissed through clenched teeth. “But don’t stop.”

She looked up at him, and he saw tenderness in her eyes. It melted the pain and relaxed every muscle in his body. He slumped in the chair, unable to move as her strong, careful fingers went over his feet and worked at the muscles.

“Oh my God, I love you,” he groaned. “Always and always.”

“And I love you always,” she replied. “Even when you blaspheme.”

“You blasphemed just a second—”

“Now you need to explain what happened, starting from the moment Antoine took you.”

“Not yet, Madam.” A mechanical man emerged from belowdecks. His features were only painted on, as was his black-and-white outfit, yet he carried himself as if he were starched and fully clothed. The only hint of expression lay in the flickering firefly lights that made up his eyes. He set a laden tea tray on a deck table beside the spot where Alice knelt. “You haven’t eaten since Sir was captured. And then you must have a massage yourself to ease the tension.”

“Wonderful, Kemp.” Dr. Clef rubbed his hands together. “Do you have any of those lacy sugar cookies? I have had quite a craving, and the patterns twist through dimensional rifts on golden wings.”

“You have had your tea, Doctor,” Kemp said. “I will make more if I have time, but I have more important concerns at the moment.”

The cake and sandwiches on the tray sent up smells that called to Gavin’s stomach, though he wasn’t yet willing to move away from Alice’s ministrations. “What time is it?” he asked, trying to get a glimpse of the sun around the envelope.

“Two fifteen,” Kemp replied. “Tuesday.”

Gavin bolted upright, and Alice released his foot. “Tuesday? How long was I—?”

“You’ve been missing for three days, darling.” Alice took a teacup, which rattled in her metallic hand. “It’s been hell.”

“Three
days
?” Gavin sank back onto the chair and bit into a ham sandwich without really paying attention to it. “I thought it was only a night.”

“Antoine has powerful sleep drugs,” Feng said.

Gavin stared past Alice at calm, blue infinity. He should feel safe, at home in the ship he had created with his own hands. She ignored gravity, soared silent currents, explored the limits of daylight. Set him free. But all he felt was violated, stripped of his clothes and then his skin. He wondered how long he had hung unconscious in Antoine’s greenhouse, a piece of meat in the hands of a twisted homunculus. His gorge rose, and then he was at the gunwale, the few bites of sandwich falling to the forest far below. The pieces seemed to fall slowly, pushing aside the billions of tiny bits that made up the air. The bits rubbed against the falling pieces and raised their temperature as they fell closer to hell.

“We could harvest the energy of the pieces,” he said. “The billions of bits would make a hellfire and cook twisted hunks of homunculus.”

“Sir?” Kemp handed him a cup of tea. Gavin swished and spat over the side. The tea spread in both droplets and a stream, both wave and particle. He watched it, an eternity caught in a split second. Then the tea vanished.

“Wave to particles,” he muttered. “Wave them away.”

Alice had had the good sense to keep her seat, though her face tightened as Gavin sat back down in his own chair. “You’re talking like a clockworker,” she said, her voice heavy with worry. “It’s already starting, isn’t it?”

“It’s all mixed up inside me, Alice.” He rubbed a hand over his face and tried to cheer up, but the violation and the fear dragged him down. “I’m sorry. Your
aunt knocked me out, locked me in that tower of hers, and infected me with this plague. She treated me like a piece of meat. So did the pirates who captured the
Juniper
and made me fiddle for them. Now I learn Antoine held me for longer than I knew. He stole time from me, and I don’t have time to steal.”

She took his hand across the tea tray. “We’ll get to China. If anyone can cure clockworkers, they can.”

“The Dragon Men are very powerful,” Feng agreed from the helm. “They can do anything.”

“Hmm.” Dr. Clef opened a chest and unrolled an enormous chart on a table near the helm. “Peking is approximately seven thousand miles away, if we fly over Istanbul and the Gobi Desert. We could detour south into India, around the Himalayas, but that would add another four thousand miles or so. This ship’s top speed is fifty miles per hour. If we travel for twelve hours each day, the journey will take us approximately twelve days.”

“That’s all?” Alice said. “It doesn’t seem like—”

“This is also assuming,” Dr. Clef continued, “that the ship always travels at top speed—it cannot—and that we have the wind behind us—we do not—and that the engines or helium extractors never break down—they will—and that the sky never sends us any bad weather—it shall—or that any number of other delays do not delay us. I believe it will take closer to two months, perhaps three.”

“Oh.” Alice nibbled her sandwich as a cloud drifted past. “Well, that will still be plenty of time. He was infected last May. It’s only late August.”

“It is not much time,” said Dr. Clef. “He is already
beginning to babble. You see things, don’t you, boy? Beautiful things. Like the universe is handing you its keys, one by one.”

Gavin thought about his vomit and the falling tea water. “Yes.”

“And you love and hate the tritones,” Dr. Clef continued. “Square root of two, lovely and deadly as infinity.”

Just the memory of that horrible, enticing number and the brain-bending sound that went with it made him shudder. He nodded.

“I shouldn’t be so far along,” Gavin said quietly.

Dr. Clef shrugged. “There is a range. Some clockworkers last only a few months, others last for two or three years. Edwina’s version of the plague was experimental, so who knows what it was like? You shouldn’t have become a clockworker, but you did. You should have shown no symptoms for several weeks, but you have. Losing yourself and talking about what you see is a sign of the final phase, where I am. You have about three months left. Four months if you are lucky. You will be a raving lunatic by the time we reach Peking, and then Alice will still have to find a Chinese clockworker who can cure you, and that assumes such a clockworker even exists. So you will die, my boy. But don’t worry.” He clapped Gavin on the shoulder. “They say once we clockworkers go completely mad, we do not even know what is happening, and we enjoy it. We can go mad together, yes?”

“Why did you bring him with you?” Feng asked.

“He jumped on board the ship while we were
running away from the Third Ward headquarters,” Alice said dully. “Perhaps I should have kicked him off.”

“No.” Gavin straightened. “I’m not going to give in to this. We’ll find a way to get to Peking, and we’ll find a Chinese clockworker—”

“Dragon Man,” Feng interrupted. “We call them Dragon Men.”

“Dragon Man,” Gavin continued, “who has a cure. If we can’t find time, we’ll
make
time.”

An odd look came over Dr. Clef’s bulldog face. “Make time.”

“But we do have a more powerful problem.” Feng moved the
Lady
’s helm to adjust for a current. “This ship is very easy to see. Many airships fly, but none of them glow blue.”

“She’s very beautiful,” Gavin said, feeling defensive. The motor gave a pleased-sounding hiccup and went back to its normal quiet murmur.

“True. But beauty has its price,” Feng said. “Hers is that she attracts attention. Also, if Third Ward agents are spreading word and money to look for us, we have more trouble. How do they do it so quickly?”

“Several clockworkers in England and in Europe invented wireless communication devices,” Gavin said. “You can send messages at the speed of light to any other wireless device that listens to the same frequency. They’re better than a telegraph because you don’t need to raise poles or string wires.”

“We can’t outrun such a message,” Feng pointed out. “As it is, we lost three days when you were captured. I imagine that was what your Lieutenant Phipps
wanted—to catch us up. It is fortunate she seems to have no airship.”

“Yeah. We’ll have to think of some way to hide better. I just wish we had more time.”

“You said that.” Alice set her cup down with a clink of metal on china and came around behind his chair to put her arms around his neck. The iron gauntlet was chilly. “And you’re right, darling. We’ll find a way. We’ll find time.”