Steven Harper - The Dragon Men

Knowing the rules made life possible for Alice. When you knew the rules, you knew what you were about, what to do, what to say. Everything was regular and straightforward as a clockwork automaton. True, not all situations were likeable. Regular wasn’t the same as pleasant. Regular trains got their passengers to their destinations on time, but they didn’t care if they ran over a cat on the tracks. Still, you knew the train was coming and had time to get yourself out of the way.

And then a year ago Gavin had blasted into Alice’s life, like a fox into a covey of quail. He broke every rule Alice knew. At the time, Gavin owned a bare eighteen years to Alice’s stately twenty-two. He was a fallen airman turned ragged street musician to her titled ladyship. He declared his love for her when she was already engaged to someone else. He should have disgusted her, horrified her, sent her fleeing to the safety of her then-fiance’s arms. Instead, she found Gavin excited her, exhilarated her.

Freed her.

Her wretched, treacherous heart hadn’t cared one bit who he was or where he had come from. Her heart didn’t mind being turned into an outlaw and flung from pillar to post. In fact, and rather surprisingly, she liked it. Good heavens, she loved it. Without him, she would this moment be living in London with a dreary, lifeless husband in a dreary, lifeless mansion, enduring a dreary, lifeless marriage. Instead, she was gadding about the world in an airship with a collection of mechanicals and a disreputable former lieutenant, wanted by both the British and Chinese empires. Chaos personified! She wouldn’t change a single, glorious thing.

Except. .

One glance at Gavin, stalwart at the helm, told her that the glory was a sham. On the surface, with the wind teasing his white-blond hair and his keen blue eyes scanning the horizon for obstacles and airships, he looked every inch the capable airship captain. But underneath, the red worm that was clockwork plague ate steadily away at him. She saw it nearly every day now, and so did Phipps. The wings he had built in his spare time in Germany and Ukraine were a symptom. He was brilliant, perhaps more brilliant than Dr. Clef, but he was steadily losing touch with reality.

With her.

She had to admit to a certain amount of fear. Clockworkers always turned into lunatics who lashed out at the people around them. Always. She had already encountered him once during a fugue, and he hadn’t even recognized her; he had snarled at her and nearly struck her. The plague made him strong and fast. Would he eventually. .?

No. He wouldn’t. Quite impossible. He loved her deeply, just as she loved him. They had fought long and hard to be together. Not even the plague could destroy something so fundamental.

She shook her head. The conflicts were always there-law against chaos, love against fear. She didn’t know how to resolve them. Instead, she kept moving forward. It was a lesson she had learned from Gavin: If you kept moving, you didn’t have to stop and think about why you were moving.

Alice put a hand on Click’s metal head at the gunwale, wanting to feel the familiar pattern of rivets on his skin, as the Lady glided closer to the group of airships hanging over the city of Tehran. The place looked nothing like London, and as she had done in so many other places before it, she would have to find a way to work around her ignorance of the local rules. So far she had learned to live with the nervousness created by that particular problem. A larger issue loomed. Tehran was supposed to be the first step on the road to China.

That road was now closed.

The Lady reached the edge of the city and slid over the top of the ancient walls, gentle as a cloud. Several of her whirligig automatons dashed into the open air as if scouting ahead, then zipped back to the safety of the deck while her spiders clung to the netting and watched with glittering eyes. They were perhaps half a mile from the ground, and a steady updraft from the heated earth tried to push the ship higher. Gavin was compensating by edging the power levels down and making the Lady heavier. The deck rocked, but Alice had long ago earned her air legs and she scarcely noticed. So much was happening so fast, she barely had time to consider any of it.

Al-Noor had claimed China had closed its borders to all foreign traffic, presumably to keep the cure out. Alice flexed her ironclad hand. The spider’s eyes glowed green, indicating no one with the plague was within close range, though her blood continued to burble through the tubes running up and down the spider’s legs. The cure created by her blood could spread from person to person like a cold or influenza, leaping from one body to the next with every cough or sneeze. If no one went in or out of China, her cure couldn’t get anywhere. Still, China couldn’t keep the cure out forever, could it? China did have a reputation for keeping strict order. On the other hand, its border was long, and it took only one person to penetrate the embargo and spread the cure. On yet another hand, that probably didn’t matter. China needed only to delay the cure’s arrival, the longer the better. Every day that China kept the clockwork plague meant one more day that another Dragon Man might arise from the pool of victims and invent fantastic devices for the Chinese Empire. England, meanwhile, had lost the plague-and her clockworkers-entirely. China had the upper hand, and China didn’t much care for England.

All this meant that the three of them weren’t in a position to travel to Peking and beg, borrow, or steal the Chinese clockwork cure, if one even existed. And that meant Gavin would soon-

Unbidden, an image slid into Alice’s mind: the Lady gliding through the sky with an empty space at the helm. Gavin’s mechanical wings lying in a wiry pile on the deck, their owner long since vanished. Alice swallowed the lump that came to her throat and tried to dash at sudden tears with her hand, but the cold spider bumped her face, which only made things worse. She turned her back on Gavin and fumbled for a handkerchief with her good hand, only to discover she had none. With a small choking sound, she leaned over the gunwale as if she were looking at the buildings below and let the tears drop into the city. Click pressed his cool nose against her side.

After a full half minute, she forced herself upright. That’s enough now, she thought. Whimpering like a helpless maiden never gets anything done. Perhaps you can’t get into China, and perhaps the Chinese Empire has put a price on your head. If that’s true, your choices are either to alter your goal or find a new way to attain your current one. Get the information you need and make a plan. Meanwhile, straighten up, girl!

This was supposed to be a happy day, a thrilling day. Gavin had, at long last and after many delays, asked for her hand in marriage. And he had built a successful pair of wings, for heaven’s sake! At the end of such a day, they should be drinking champagne while he slid a ring onto her finger, and then there should be music and dancing, or at least a good meal.

Gavin was still guiding the ship across the city while Phipps watched from her deck chair. The majority of the ships were clumped on the southern side of Tehran, which presumably meant there was a mooring yard over there. Alice could also make out large, round buildings that her experience in Kiev told her were petroleum distilleries. It made sense-dirigibles were a major market for paraffin oil, and there was no sense in paying to haul the stuff any farther than necessary. The ship dipped lower, and the smell of petroleum grew stronger. It was hardly the romantic place she had imagined spending the first night of her engagement.