The Dragon Men

Chapter Five

A flock of airships hovered over Tehran, hungry as crows for the paraffin oil that poured from the city’s distilleries. The sharp smell of petroleum stung the air, even as high as the Lady was. High towers with golden minarets poked up like gold-tipped fingers all around the city, and the white stone buildings reflected harsh desert sunlight back into Alice’s eyes. The place looked strange. Foreign. When they arrived, she wouldn’t know the language or the customs or any of the rules. That made her anxious and set her on edge.

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.

Well, really! she told herself. Have you learned nothing in the last few weeks? If no one gives you what you want, you must take it.

With that, she strode across the deck, trailing little automatons and snatched the sherry bottle from Phipps’s brass hand with her ironclad one.

“Oi!” Phipps protested. “That’s mine!”

“What the heck?” Gavin said.

“Go away,” Alice snapped at Phipps. “Belowdecks.”

Phipps rose slowly to her feet and stared at Alice for a long moment, the red lens of her monocle glistening bloodred in the late light. Then she nodded once and picked up the dark Impossible Cube from the deck. “I think I’ll stash this and perhaps take a nap. Wake me when we’ve moored.” With that, she went below.

“All of you, too,” Alice said to the automatons, who were chasing one another about the deck. “Now!”

Startled, the flock of automatons froze for a moment, then skittered into an open hatchway. The only one left up top was Click, who pointedly continued staring over the side as if Alice hadn’t spoken.

“Bloody cat,” Alice muttered.

“What was that all about?” Gavin enquired. “We’re almost to the mooring field, you know.”

In answer, Alice grabbed the front of his jacket with her free hand and pulled him in for a long kiss. He smelled of mist and leather, and he tasted of salt. Gavin stiffened, startled. Then his hands left the helm, and his arms went strong around her. She pressed against him, feeling both safe and hungry. Her hand ran through his hair, silky as feathers, and his callused palm caressed her face and neck, then stole over her breast. Her breath quickened, and a warmth spread through her. Then she pulled back.

“Wow,” he said. “What was that for?”

“I call for a toast, Mr. Ennock”-she raised the sherry bottle-“to celebrate our engagement and those brilliant, beautiful wings you invented. If I can’t have you for long, I intend to enjoy your company for every moment we have left.” Her voice quavered for a moment, and she covered by taking a pull directly from the bottle. The sherry, too sweet and too warm, burned all the way down. “To the best damned clockworker in the whole damned world!”

“Why, Lady Michaels,” Gavin laughed, taking the bottle from her, “you foul-mouthed hussy! I never thought I’d see the day!”

“You’ve seen nothing, Mr. Ennock,” she replied, and kissed him again. This time her hands wandered greedily over his chest and back, wanting to touch him, drink him in as she had the sherry. She moved her body against his and felt him harden, which caused her own deep self to pulse.

When they separated, he took a swig from the bottle. “To the best and most talented woman in the goddamned universe!”

“And don’t you forget it, sir,” Alice said. She slid her hands around his strong, solid body again, not wanting to let go for a moment. Never, ever letting go. “I have many talents, some of which I haven’t yet developed.”

He buried his face in her hair. “I look forward to charting unexplored territory.”

They stayed like that for several moments while air and sky played over them. Then Alice reluctantly stepped away. What she intended to say next was difficult, but it needed to be discussed. The words stuck in her throat at first, but she decided she wasn’t having any of that nonsense anymore, and she would speak. The words came in a rush.

“So, what are we going to do about getting you into China, darling? I refuse to let something as petty as an empire stand in the way of finding your cure.”

She gave a short, sharp sigh. A burden she hadn’t realized she was carrying lifted and floated away. What a strange thing-once the words were said aloud, they lost their power.

“I’ve actually been thinking about that,” Gavin replied.

“Have you?” she said with a smile.

“It’s an occupational hazard with clockworkers. We never stop.”

“Truly? This strikes me as more of a social problem,” Alice said. “And with the sole exception of my aunt Edwina, I’ve yet to meet a clockworker who excelled in the social arena.”

“I’m also an airman,” Gavin pointed out, “and you might remember how the Juniper did her share of. . untaxed shipping.”

“Smuggling,” said the newly forthright Alice.

“If you like,” Gavin sniffed. “Anyway, you can’t possibly make a border that big airtight, and I happen to know that for the right price, an untaxed shipper-”

“Smuggler.”

“Smuggler will move anything you like. That includes people. We just need to find such a person.”

“Iffy,” Alice mused. “We’d be putting our trust in a criminal.”

“Not all smugglers are bad people,” Gavin said in a pained voice. “Some of them are just trying to avoid stupidly high tariffs.”

Alice narrowed her eyes. “You’re smuggling right now, aren’t you? What have you hidden on this ship?”

“Well, technically. .”

“Gavin! What are you-?”

They were interrupted by a mechanical yowl. Click was arching his back on the gunwale at a looming airship ten times the size of the Lady. Gavin had taken his hands off the helm during the. . discussion with Alice, and neither of them had noticed the ship veering into danger. Gavin spun the helm with a yelp and Alice slapped switches on the generator. The Lady’s glow dimmed, and the little ship swooped starboard even as it dropped, missing the other ship by a mere few yards. Alice’s stomach lurched, and she caught faint shouts of outrage from the deck of the other ship. The Lady sped away like a minnow fleeing a whale. Gavin caught Alice’s eye. And they both started to laugh. Click pulled his claws out of the decking and turned his back on them in disgust.

“Well, Mr. Ennock,” Alice said, “we seem to have a knack for attracting and averting disaster together.”

“True, Lady Michaels. It’s the second talent that gives me hope.”

Later, they were mooring the ship at the edge of the dusty landing field just outside the walls of Tehran. Hot sunlight mixed with the unpleasant smells from the distilleries, which also clanked and grumbled like metal jungle animals. There were only a few of the enormous, rounded hangars available, and Gavin said the rent for them was atrocious, so they powered down the Lady’s envelope and together staked her to the ground outside among other airships, and even for this there was a fee that set Gavin to grumbling. Puffs of dust rose up like tiny djinn every time Alice took a step.

“You’d better hide in the hold while I pay,” Gavin said. “Al-Noor might have been lying or mad or both, but if there really is a price on your head, we don’t want the controller to be the person who recognizes you. Stay down there until I have the chance to run into town and find something appropriate for you to wear.”

Alice looked down at her modest blue dress. “Appropriate?”

“For a Turkmen woman,” Gavin clarified. “We’re in Persia, you know. You need some native clothing so you can blend in. Don’t let anyone aboard while I’m gone.”

“What are you smuggling, Gavin?” she asked. “Technically?”

“Technically? My wings. The Impossible Cube. And probably you,” he said lightly, and kissed her cheek before sliding down a rope to the ground below.

Alice dutifully climbed up to hide in the hold with Gavin’s new wings at her feet and her automatons perched on her shoulders. She peeped out a porthole while Gavin talked to a swarthy man in red blousy trousers and a tall, furry hat. A considerable amount of money exchanged hands. Alice held her breath, but the man strutted away without demanding to inspect the cargo hold. Gavin followed a moment later, heading toward the city walls and leaving a trail in the dust. She waited for a considerable time in the afternoon heat, but after a short while her eyes started to droop, and she found she couldn’t stay awake. The day’s excitement and the sherry were having an effect. Perhaps she could creep off to her stateroom bunk as Phipps had done. But no-simpler just to curl up on this pile of sacking near the bulkhead. The automatons would wake her if a stranger-

The next thing she knew, Gavin was shaking her awake. Outside the sun had dropped, and it was nearly dark. Phipps was with him, her hair restored to its usual neat twist and her lieutenant’s hat firmly in place above her monocle. She was holding the Impossible Cube, and her expression was grim. Alice’s sleepy languor jerked away, replaced by dread.

“What’s wrong?” she said, instantly alert. The automatons clustered about her with little peeping sounds.

Gavin set a bundle of cloth on the wood next to her little nest and handed Alice a newspaper. “After I bought clothes, I found this. Take a look.”

The curly Persian letters meant nothing to Alice, and for a moment she realized that this was how it felt to be illiterate. It was an odd sensation, being unable even to sound out individual letters. She started to ask why Gavin would give her a paper she couldn’t read. Then her eye lighted at the top-right corner. A string of numbers, the same in English and in this language, tugged at her attention. Her stomach went cold.

“1681,” she said aloud. “That-that can’t be the year, can it?”

“Persian reads right to left.” Her voice was tight, as if she were trying not to fly apart. “Today is August 20, 1861. About three years after we met al-Noor.”

A small sound escaped Alice’s throat. The cargo hold spun, and she put out a hand to steady herself, glad she was still sitting down. Her breath came in short gasps. Automatically, her gaze went to the Cube in Phipps’s hands. It sat there, innocent as a baby. Alice couldn’t wrap her mind round the idea. It was like trying to spin a rope from sand; the harder she tried, the more it fell apart.

“Three years?” she cried. “Holy Mother of God! That thing moved us three years? Why? How?”

“I don’t know.” Gavin knelt next to her and took her hand. His fingers were cold. “Al-Noor’s pistol fed it a lot of strange energy, and I sang one of the notes from my paradox generator. Don’t forget that Dr. Clef used the generator and the Cube to stop time-or he tried to.”

Alice felt the wooden deck pressing against the backs of her legs. She saw her little automatons and heard their little whirs and peeps. Gavin’s white-blond hair fell soft over his forehead, and Phipps stood straight as a yardstick next to him. It all looked perfectly normal, perfectly sane. Yet every scrap, every particle was three years wrong.

Alice’s mind was racing now. She remembered the strange lights and the falling sensation when Gavin had sung into the Cube back in al-Noor’s cave. “Perhaps we didn’t move through time. If a series of notes was instrumental in stopping time everywhere, perhaps one note in the series stopped time. Just for us. Or something.”

“Or something,” Gavin agreed. “God, Alice, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize-”

“Sorry? You’re sorry?” Her words were rising toward hysteria, and she bit them back. Get a grip, woman! Would a tantrum change anything or make the situation better? She forced out a breath and wrenched her thoughts into something resembling rationality. How much did it truly matter?

Alice straightened, and her air of ladyship returned. The more she thought about it, the more she realized this could work to their advantage.

“Well. Yes,” she said. “There’s nothing to be sorry about, darling. Now that I think of it, this is the best of all possible worlds. It explains why al-Noor was gone-he and his squid men couldn’t have survived three years with clockwork plague. They’re long dead, poor souls. We escaped them completely unharmed. Additionally, I’ve managed to elude capture by the Chinese government for three years, so perhaps the reward has expired. At minimum, the furor would have died down.”

Her right hand hurt. A glance downward told her she was unconsciously gripping Gavin’s hand so tightly, her knuckles were white, and Gavin had set his jaw to avoid crying out. She forced herself to let go.

“Well,” she said again. “Yes. Best of all possible worlds.”

“Can we use the Cube to go back?” Phipps asked. “Just a thought.”

Gavin shook his head. “I wouldn’t even know how to begin. Besides, you saw what happened when I tried to charge it again just now.”

“You tried what?” Alice asked, bewildered. “When? What happened?”

“I connected the Cube to the generator while you were sleeping, but it won’t accept a charge,” Gavin explained. “No matter what I do, it stays dark.”

“Can you repair it?”

Gavin shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe. If I study it long enough.”

“Just because something can be done,” Phipps said, her voice still tight, “doesn’t mean it should be done. I tried to put this. . thing into the Doomsday Vault, you may remember. I’d be for dropping it into the ocean if I weren’t afraid it would wash up on shore one day.”

“Hm,” was all Gavin said.

“What’s next, then?” Alice asked briskly. “Is it too much to hope that China has reopened the border?”

“It is.” Gavin sighed. “That’s one of the reasons this place is so busy. It’s one of the last stopping points for Western merchants.”

“And for smugglers?” Alice asked with a smile.

But Gavin shook his head. “No. No smugglers. The Chinese have invented automatons to patrol their borders. They don’t eat or sleep or rest. You can’t bribe them or distract them, and when they notice anyone crossing the border-in or out-they run him down with intent to kill. Smugglers from both sides are too frightened to try anything.”

“Good heavens,” Alice breathed.

“The border can’t be completely closed,” Phipps said. “What about ambassadors and delegations? And trade? China can’t get along without some outside trading.”

“I don’t know,” Gavin admitted. “The people I spoke to had limited English, and my Persian is nonexistent. Besides, I couldn’t appear too interested, you know?”

Alice leafed idly through the newspaper in her lap while they talked, more for something to take her mind off the sudden bad news than anything else, since the writing still made no sense to her. Partway through, she stopped and stared down at the page. There was a head-and-torso drawing of a young woman in a high-necked dress and her hair pulled up in a French twist. She was holding up her left hand, which was encased in an ugly metal gauntlet tipped with razor-sharp knife blades. The woman looked cruel and evil, but she was obviously meant to be Alice.

“What on earth?” she said, turning the page so Gavin and Phipps could see it. “Is that a notice about me?”

Phipps looked it over. “My Persian is poor,” she said, “but yes. Here it gives your name and a description, and it names the reward-four hundred pounds of silver, alive only.”

“Four hundred pounds?” Alice said, affronted despite herself. “Is that all?”

“Not pounds, the unit of currency. Pounds, the measure of weight. You could bribe the pope and a pair of kings with that much silver. It appears the emperor is still eager to acquire a concubine who can cure the plague.”

“It’s nice to be wanted,” Alice said tartly. “Though I doubt this is what my father had in mind for me.”

“It does mean,” Gavin put in, “that there’s some contact between East and West. Without it, how would the reward notice get into the newspaper and how would anyone collect on it?”

“Good point,” Phipps said.

“Er, just out of intellectual curiosity,” Alice asked carefully, “how does one collect this reward?”

“It says here to contact a man named Bu Yeh at the Red Moon Hotel.”

“Hm,” Alice said.

“I still think this a terrible idea,” Gavin hissed.

“Do you?” Alice said. “I seem to remember hearing those very words directed at someone else recently, someone who ignored them just as I’m about to do.”

Gavin straightened the glass cutlass at his belt. “Lieutenant, how about some support?”

“Far be it from me to get in her way,” Phipps said, holding up a metal hand. “According to the great lady here, my sole job is to watch for-”

“Plague zombie!” Gavin interrupted.

Alice halted. They were threading their way through the dim, dusty streets of Tehran. A scattering of torches and lamps in odd windows lit the way. Unfamiliar food and spice smells swirled around them, along with the people clad in loose-fitting desert clothes-men in trousers tucked into high boots and long tunics split for riding; women in loose dresses with round, elaborately embroidered caps covering their hair. Alice and Phipps wore similar outfits to blend in better. The undergarments that came with the dresses were shockingly lightweight and brief, and Alice felt half naked even though her outer garments covered more of her than her previous dress had done. It was a strange feeling, and a little daring. And exciting. She and Phipps had both wrapped scarves loosely around their metal limbs to keep them from view, and Phipps had adjusted her cap to hide her monocle. No one paid the slightest attention to them.

Countless narrow alleys led off the streets, twisting away into noisome darkness. Within one of these stirred the plague zombie. It was-had been-a man, though how old he was, Alice couldn’t guess. His hair had come out in clumps, and open sores leaked pus. His skin had thinned and split, revealing pink and gray muscle. He was gaunt from malnutrition, and his mouth hung open as the plague ate its way through his brain. His clothing hung in filthy rags. Alice would have once recoiled from such a creature, both from the disease and the dreadful sight. Now, however, she saw a person, a patient who had lost everything. She stripped the cloth from her metal-clad hand. The spider’s eyes glowed red to indicate the presence of plague as she reached for the unfortunate man and swiped her clawed fingertips across his chest. Automatically, the tubules that ran up and down the spider’s legs sprayed a fine mist of Alice’s blood across the scratches. The cure, what Aunt Edwina had called a virion, attacked the bacterium that caused the plague and, additionally, turned the patient into a host that would spread the cure with every cough and sneeze, inoculating others he encountered. The virion also worked fairly quickly. When Alice scratched the zombie, he staggered backward. In a few moments, his eyes cleared. He looked at Alice, then held up his pus-speckled hands and stared at them as if seeing them for the first time in years. He made a small sound in the back of his throat. Then he turned and shuffled away, still staring down at his hands.

“What do you think will happen to him?” Phipps asked quietly.

“I’ve no idea.” Alice sighed. “I can only cure them. I can’t give them their old lives back. At least now he has a chance to live. The worst are the children.”

Gavin put an arm around her. “I was hoping that after three years, your cure would have wiped out the plague entirely.”

“Clearly not.” Suddenly she was very tired-tired of travel, tired of strange places, tired of pitiable plague victims and a world that shunned them or used them. It didn’t feel as if she were having any impact whatsoever, and therefore why bother? It all seemed very sad.

“Are you all right?” Gavin asked solicitously.

“I will be,” she said, straightening. She was an English lady. Did the Queen whine to herself? What nonsense! Soldier ahead, girl. Always ahead. “Take me to that hotel now.”

The Red Moon Hotel sat at one corner of a five-way intersection. A pair of towers topped by little minarets flanked the square white building, and strange music mingled with strong tobacco smoke in a courtyard behind it. The place had been fitted with electric lights, and all three stories cast stiff beams of illumination in all directions. The lobby struck Alice as distinctly threadbare, even a little shabby. Before she could lose her nerve, she strode to the battered front desk, where a man in a turban was holding forth.

“Do you speak English?” she asked.

“Yes, little,” he said.

She put a coin on the desk. “I am looking for a man named Yeh.”

“Eat. There.” The coin vanished, and the man pointed to a doorway that seemed to lead into a restaurant. “Wears green.”

Alice swept away with Gavin and Phipps in tow, her regal bearing hiding a pounding heart and a stomach tied in knots. This had the potential to explode in her face, and the closer she came to Bu Yeh, the more she wondered at her chances of success.

You are a baroness, blast it. Act like one.

The restaurant was crowded with customers sitting on cushions at low tables. They ate and drank and pulled fragrant smoke from enormous bulbous water pipes that Alice had never seen outside a storybook illustration. Loud conversation swirled around the room and bounced off the walls. The crowd was largely swarthy Easterners with a sprinkling of white Westerners, and they all gesticulated wildly when they spoke. Alice and Phipps were the only women present. Waiters rushed about with trays of food and silver coffee services. At a corner table by himself sat an enormously fat Chinese man wearing a green embroidered tunic that tied shut over his left shoulder. A large, puffy green hat covered his head, and a black braid ran down his back. His face was clean-shaven but for a sparse mustache and a pointed bit of beard in the center of his chin. On his shoulder sat a brass spider. The man stared about the room with a look of contempt on his round face. Every so often, the spider skittered down his shoulder, hooked a bit of food from one of the plates on the table, and skittered back up the man’s shoulder to pop it into his open mouth. Alice remembered the meal she and Gavin had shared with the Chinese ambassador back in London-had it only been a few months ago? — and the way spiders had fed every morsel to her instead of allowing her to touch anything with fork or fingers.

Before she could lose her nerve, Alice strode across the restaurant and plumped herself down across from him at his table with Gavin and Phipps standing guard on either side of her. Startled, the man reared back, and two large Persian men appeared from the shadows to flank him. One had a pistol, the other a sword. Gavin put a hand on the glass cutlass at his belt.

“No need,” Alice said in a calm voice completely at odds with her churning insides. “Mr. Yeh, I presume?”

“Mr. Yeh does not speak to filthy Westerners,” one of the guards said. His accent was faint.

“He will speak with me.” Alice took out the newspaper page with the dreadful drawing on it and laid it on the table, then unwrapped her spidery hand and laid that on the table as well. “Do you recognize this?”

Yeh’s eyes widened. His mouth fell open. For a moment, no one around the table moved. Then the spider on his shoulder scampered down to the table and flipped a chickpea into Yeh’s mouth. Yeh sputtered and coughed and slurped down some tea.

“You Alice Michaels lady,” he said, recovering. “Angel of death.”

“I wouldn’t put it that way, but yes.”

Yeh’s eyes glittered. “Why come here? Why see me?”

“Isn’t it obvious, Mr. Yeh? I wish to claim the reward.”