Steven Harper - The Dragon Men

Gavin ground his teeth, and a bead of sweat ran down the side of his head. Damn it, he had to get control of himself. He didn’t really want to kill al-Noor, and the squid men were his innocent pawns. At least now al-Noor wasn’t in a position to destroy the Lady and drown Alice, which freed Gavin to effect a rescue. If he could just find her.

He was putting out his hand to try another door when he heard the crash of breaking crockery. Gavin turned, trying to orient on the sound. A moment later, he heard the scream. An icy spear drove through his heart. Alice! He tried to find the source of the sound, but the tunnel echoed and he couldn’t pinpoint it. Frantic, he ran up and down the stony path. Alice was hurt. Alice was dying. He had all this power, and he couldn’t help her. More than a dozen doors faced him, and he had no clue which was the right one. It was like one of those dreams in which he had something to do but couldn’t do it, no matter how hard he tried.

Another crash brought his head around. This time he was able to get a better sense of the noise-it seemed to come from one of the first doors, some thirty yards behind him, but he still couldn’t tell exactly which one. Gavin didn’t even think. He opened his mouth and sang. A hard, crystalline note streamed from his throat. The Impossible Cube drank the note in, twisted it, changed it into something alien. Power poured out of the Cube in all directions, and the wings on his back quivered with sympathetic vibrations as every door smashed into splinters. Chunks of wood pelted the air. From one of the newly open doorways, light streamed. Gavin cut the note short and dashed into the stony room while bits of sawdust bounced off his face like warm snowflakes.

Al-Noor was aiming a large pistol at Alice across the ruins of a dinner table while two of a group of squid men held a struggling Phipps. The dead squid man on the floor barely registered. A red haze descended over Gavin. The man had threatened Alice. With a snarl, Gavin launched himself at al-Noor. Al-Noor saw him coming. He flicked the pistol around to orient on Gavin and pulled the trigger. Alice screamed. The universe slowed down. Air became fluid as water. His body floated in it. He calculated how fast he was moving, the arc of his travel. He was aware of the temperature heating the barrel of the pistol and how brass and glass expanded with tiny crackling noises. He saw where the pistol barrel was pointed and in a fraction of a second assessed the eventual path of the emerging energy. In midair, his plague-enhanced reflexes lined up the Impossible Cube to match it. A yellow lightning bolt cracked from the pistol, crawled slowly through the air, and struck the Impossible Cube. The Cube sucked the bolt down, and the energy vanished.

The universe snapped back to normal speed. Gavin slammed into al-Noor. Both pistol and Cube went flying. The glass parts of the pistol shattered, but the Cube bounced, unharmed. Both clockworkers rolled across the floor, trading and blocking blows so fast, their hands blurred. Gavin was younger and stronger, but he was hampered by his wings, and al-Noor had the advantage of height and a longer reach. Any thought of plan or strategy fled Gavin’s mind. He didn’t feel any of the hits that landed. Nothing but the animal fury burned in him. Al-Noor’s face was twisted in an equally horrible rictus of rage.

“Sing, damn it!”

“Sing what?”

“Any note! Just sing!”

Gavin remained only vaguely aware of the two female voices speaking somewhere behind him. Al-Noor flicked a fist through Gavin’s defenses and caught Gavin on the chin hard enough to make him see stars. Gavin kneed al-Noor in the belly. Fetid air rushed out of him. Al-Noor straightened his right hand, and a needle sprang from his index fingernail. A clear liquid glistened at the pointed tip. He tried to stab Gavin’s face, but Gavin caught his wrist. The older man forced his hand inward, pressing his weight into Gavin, shoving the needle closer to Gavin’s eye. Gavin gritted his teeth and fought back, but al-Noor had the advantage now. The needle crept toward Gavin’s eye, and the light glittered hard and sharp off the tip. It brushed his eyelashes.

A terrible sound smashed through Gavin’s head. The needle jerked back. Al-Noor and Gavin both screamed and clapped their hands over their ears. The sound tore through Gavin’s mind. It was worse than countless claws screeching across a blackboard the size of a galaxy, and he felt as if his nerves were sizzling in acid. A part of him recognized the horrible noise as a tritone-two notes separated by three full steps. The two notes that made up the tone vibrated against each other at a ratio of one to the square root of two, an irrational, impossible number that couldn’t exist. Like all clockworkers, Gavin had perfect pitch, and the tritone, the idea of the tritone, spun him around, threatened to swallow him in the same way that infinite swallowed a whole number. He screamed and tried to shut the sound out, but his hands couldn’t quite mask it. Al-Noor writhed on the floor beside him, and Gavin was dimly aware that all the squid men had fallen to the floor as well.

And then the sound stopped. The pain ended, but the disorientation continued. Hands hauled him to his feet.

“How did you do that?” he gasped.

“I may not have perfect pitch,” Phipps said in his ear, “but after twenty-five years in the Third Ward, I can make a tritone with any note you-or Alice-can sing. Now, let’s get out of here before al-Noor and his squid men recover.”

“I’m so sorry we had to do that,” Alice said in his other ear as they stumbled toward the doorway. “Are you all right?”

“I–I think so.” Gavin shook off the disorientation and regained enough presence of mind to snatch up the Impossible Cube. It glowed pure azure, and it squirmed in his hands. The lattices twisted in ways he had never seen before, moving over and behind themselves, and his own hands seemed both close and far away at the same time. When he moved forward with Alice and Phipps, he could feel it tugging in his grip like a dog that wanted off its leash.

“The Cube,” he said. “It took in a lot of strange energy. I don’t know what that means.”

Phipps glanced back at the room. The squid men, who were plague zombies in their own way and who were also flattened by tritones, were stirring. Al-Noor was sitting up, his heavy belt askew and his black bathing costume torn. “Unless we want to kill them,” Phipps said, “we need to run now and worry about the Cube later.”

They ran. Phipps, whose monocle let her see best in the dim light, led the way. Alice noted the shattered doors they passed. “Good heavens, darling. Did you-?”

“Yeah.” The rage rose at the memory, and he forced it back down. “I’d do it again. Did he hurt you?”

“No, though he planned to. Your timing was perfect.”

The tunnel opened up into the enormous cavern. Most of the floor was taken up with the ocean, with a rim that ran around the edge. The Lady was moored to the quay, her envelope glowing softly, and he heaved a sigh of relief that she was still there. Bright sunlight outdoors made the mouth of the cave painful to look at.

They hurried aboard the Lady . When they reached the helm, the Impossible Cube twisted almost painfully in Gavin’s hands and began to pulse in colors: red, orange, yellow.

“What is it doing?” Alice asked, unmooring the lines. Her little automatons streamed out of a hatchway to flitter and skitter in a brass cloud around her.

“No idea.” Gavin held up the Cube. The lattices slid and twisted around so fast, he couldn’t watch them. It was like looking at the sun. “It feels like it’s going to go off or something, but I don’t know what to do about it.”