Feng abandoned Gavin after his second pint. “The angel over there can provide me with far more pleasure than you,” he said, and slid away. A moment later, Feng and his laughing female companion were strolling out the front door, arm in arm. Gavin ignored them and took a pull from his third pint. The ale here was stronger, and it hit Gavin a little harder than he was used to, but that was fine with him. Last spring, he had watched his friends die on the airship Juniper, a pirate had tried to rape him, and the first mate had flogged him senseless for fighting back. Now the high-and-mighty baroness was pissed at him, and he was sick with the clockwork plague. In a few weeks, he’d lose his grip on reality, spiral into a fascinated trance while studying a ladybug on a grass stem, and die in a ditch as his brain liquefied into sludge. If all that didn’t deserve a few drinks, nothing did.
He took another sour gulp of red Luxembourger ale. It swirled like pale blood, though it was only red malt and vinegar that reflected red light from the lamps. The ale was more like wine than beer and would have fetched a pretty penny back home in Boston as an exotic treat, but Gavin was slugging it down like water. It made him feel light, as if he might float away. The other patrons in the bar seemed strangely happy, too. They were all happy, despite the plague around them. A small group sang a cheery tune in one corner, and laughed uproariously at every chorus. The noise floated up, taking Gavin’s pain with it. It was a fine thing to be drunk and happy in Luxembourg. For the moment he felt like he had just escaped Purgatory and was now staring at a set of fine gates made of gold.
Gavin tapped the mug on the table, creating vibrations on the surface of the liquid. Everything slowed, and he tracked the tiny motions like chaotic imps that danced across the redness. Fascinating. He tapped again, muscles moving slow as granite, now able to predict where each wave of vibration would appear. Each rose and rippled precisely where he foresaw—or commanded. He tapped yet again, tilting the mug to get a different pattern, and then another and another, a sorcerer making demons dance. A machine, the right machine, would produce the same patterns, and those patterns could be used to—
A hand grabbed his arm. The spell broke and the world snapped into normal speed. Alice was standing next to him. Near her, hovering like a brown butterfly, stood a woman Gavin didn’t know. He felt the literal iron in the grip beneath her glove and instantly knew she was exerting five pounds and six ounces of pressure on his biceps.
“I knew you’d come back,” he said, and tried a grin, but it came out a sloppy grimace.
“Come along, darling,” she said with a wide smile and without moving her lips. “We’re leaving.”
“I paid for this. I’m finishing it,” he said. Around them, other drinkers pointed and winked. A few jeered. The henpecked husband and his domineering wife. Feng was nowhere in sight. He had apparently found a heaven of his own.
“Oh, good heavens.” Alice snatched up the mug and drained it. A number of customers burst into applause. “There. Let’s go.”
He should have been annoyed, but a mild haze had descended over him and nothing could bother him now. “What the hell,” he muttered, catching up his fiddle case. It weighed two pounds, nine ounces. The silver nightingale in his pocket weighed three ounces. “I’m out of money anyway.”
She towed him to the door and outside. Light, laughter, and the woman in brown followed them. He felt a little less muddled in the cooler air but not entirely himself.
“Where’s Feng?” Alice asked.
“There’s a hotel across the street.” Gavin gestured vaguely with the fiddle case. “He got a room with someone. Wanna do the same?”
Alice made a disgusted sound. “Do you do this often?”
“Argue with a pretty woman or get drunk?”
“Never mind. At least you’re coherent. I need to show you something. This is Madame Nilsen. She doesn’t speak English.”
The woman, who was carrying a lantern, smiled shyly at the mention of her name, and Gavin gave her a lopsided grin. “Hi. I’m dying, you know. Not that she cares.”
Mme. Nilsen shook her head. Alice spoke to her in French, and the other woman led the way with her tin lantern. Gavin said, “Do you think the clockwork plague will let me learn French? Or Chinese? It sure as hell won’t do anything else useful.”
“You’re maudlin. I’ve never seen you maudlin.”
“Yeah.” He rumpled his hair. “Imagine.”
“Just keep walking,” Alice said. “It’ll sober you.”
“I don’t want to be sober. I deserve to be drunk.”
“But I don’t deserve you to be drunk. Keep walking or I’ll show you how sharp these claws can be.”
Gavin almost sat on the street in a childish pique, but changed his mind and continued walking with his arms folded instead. After some time, they arrived at the top of a winding street. The climb put Gavin a little out of breath, and, as Alice predicted, cleared his head a bit. On the hills below and above, the city had darkened completely. Street- and houselights made a field of stars on wrinkled velvet, as if the night sky had fallen and shattered on the ground around them. Mme. Nilsen selected a tall, narrow house, knocked, and called out. After some time, the door opened, and a man and woman, both middle-aged, appeared. They wore nightshirts and caps. Mme. Nilsen spoke to them in rapid French, and Alice joined in. The couple looked mystified, then hopeful. At their gestured invitation, everyone entered the long, narrow house that smelled of bread and ashes.
“What’s going on?” Gavin asked as they climbed a steep staircase. In Luxembourg, they were always climbing.
“There’s plague here, but they don’t want anyone to know,” Alice murmured. “If word of it gets out, the house will be quarantined until the family throws the victims into the street.”
“Why do I have to be here?”
“I want you to watch what I’m doing.”
Now puzzled, Gavin followed the group into a bedroom. A boy lay on a bed, twitching in fever sleep. Loose hanks of pale blond hair lay on the pillow. Automatic fear touched Gavin when he recognized the clockwork plague, even though he was already dying of the disease in his own way. The boy’s parents looked on with worried expressions as Alice pulled off her glove, revealing the spider. Its eyes glowed red when she touched the boy’s bare arm. Then she swiped his skin with the claws, drawing blood and spraying a bit of her own. The parents gasped as one, but Mme. Nilsen talked to them and they calmed, though they remained watchful. Alice touched each of them in turn, but the spider eyes glowed green. The mother sat on the bed and stroked her son’s forehead, her cheeks wet with tears. Gavin’s throat thickened as he felt her sorrow, fear, and love.
“There,” Alice said. “Now we wait.”
Mme. Nilsen slipped out to go home. Gavin rocked on his feet, waiting uncertainly.
“Perhaps you should sing, Gavin,” Alice said.
He stopped rocking. “What?”
“Sing. It’ll pass the time.” She turned her brown eyes on him. “Sing the moon song for me. Please.”
Argument or no argument, he couldn’t refuse her any more than the sun could refuse to rise.
I see the moon, the moon sees me
It turns all the forest soft and silvery.
The moon picked you from all the rest
For I loved you best.
As Gavin sang for Alice and the boy, a boy who struggled to heal as Gavin himself had done so many weeks ago, something inside him broke, shifted, and re-formed. The plague hurt a great many people, more than just himself, and Gavin, flying high above the earth or wrapped in music, had forgotten that. He pulled out his fiddle to accompany himself for the second verse.
I once had a heart as good as new
But now it’s gone from me to you.
The moon picked you from all the rest
For I loved you best.
The leering eyes and sticky blood of Madoc Blue faded a little. The sharp memory of Tom Danforth’s lifeless corpse falling from the rigging dulled around the edges. The opaque stone walls that trapped him in Edwina’s tower thinned. And then another memory came back to him. He himself was lying sick in bed, hot with fever. A woman—Ma—bent over him, bathing his face with a cool cloth. A man with pale hair played the fiddle and sang just for Gavin, his voice rich and low and perfect, and Gavin felt better, enveloped in the soft love of both parents.
I have a ship, my ship must flee.
Sailing o’er the clouds and on the silver sea
The moon picked you from all the rest
For I loved you best.
The memory vanished when the song ended. The boy’s twitching eased. His breathing evened out, and the fever faded. He opened his eyes and looked straight at Gavin for a long moment. A connection between them held for a second that lasted an age, and Gavin felt that the boy somehow understood what had just happened. Then the boy smiled and dropped back into sleep. Tears wet and refreshed Gavin’s cheeks, and he felt both exhausted and exhilarated. The boy’s mother flung her arms around him, weeping with joy, and his father swiped at his eyes with his sleeve. He said something to Alice in a choked voice, and she answered gracefully. They spoke at some length, and Alice nodded.
“What’s going on?” Gavin wiped his own face and put his fiddle away as the father padded quickly out of the room.
“He knows of someone else who has the plague,” Alice said. “Do you think I should refuse?”
Gavin put a hand on her shoulder. “I never wanted you to stop helping, Alice,” he said. “I just don’t want you to get hurt because you don’t know when to stop. Look at you—you didn’t even take a wrap, and you’re shivering.”
Even though she didn’t speak English, the mother seemed to notice the same thing and with a firm gesture that she was to keep it, gave Alice a quilt to pull around herself. Alice accepted.
“You have to watch yourself,” Gavin added, “or I’ll tell Kemp on you.”
Alice gave a little bark of laughter at that. “Then come with me.”
“Anywhere. You know that.”
The father returned, dressed, and led Alice and Gavin outside to another house, where two adult brothers were down with the plague. Alice, the quilt still pulled around her, cured both of them while Gavin played, and one of them begged Alice to go to his niece’s house. Along the way, they encountered a pair of plague zombies rooting through a rubbish heap, and Alice swiped at them as well. At the niece’s house, Gavin stopped Alice and demanded that she be given food and drink, which the newly cured niece was happy to give before asking Alice to visit yet another house. And so it continued. As the night wore on, Alice hurried from home to home under cover of darkness, her quilt drawn around her like a cloak while she cured a number of people with the clockwork plague, and each one seemed to know someone else who was sick. The chain of people took them all through Luxembourg, to homes rich and poor, lonely and crowded, wood and stone. Gavin made sure Alice was given a bite to eat and a sip to drink in every household. Alice cured priests and drunkards, bankers and thieves, doctors and patients. Some offered money, always hesitantly, as if they might offend. Alice tried to turn them down, but Gavin stepped in and accepted.
“If they can spare it, we can take it,” he said, fiddle in hand.
“I won’t turn down someone who can’t—”
“Of course not,” Gavin said. “But even saints have to eat. And get to China.”
When dawn checkered the eastern sky, they left the final house. The air was crisp and clean and bright. Morning noises—horse traffic, food sellers, factory whistles, doors opening and closing, people shouting and talking—filled the street. Housewives and storekeepers swept the cobblestones in front of their homes and shops. Gavin noticed with a start that Alice was pale and shaky from the slow but steady blood loss, and she kept the quilt wrapped tightly around her body and head. Gavin himself didn’t feel tired in the least—clockworkers entering the later stage of the plague often went days without sleep—and he mentally kicked himself for not remembering earlier that Alice did need rest, especially after everything she’d been doing.
He flagged down a cab and gave directions back to the pub where he’d been drinking the night before. Alice leaned against him and dozed off, and he was surprised at how light she felt.
The pub was closed, but Gavin found the cheap hotel where Feng had gotten a room and used the money Alice had earned to get them a room while Alice collapsed into a lobby chair. At the last second he remembered not to give his real name and signed them in as Mr. and Mrs. Tom Danforth, in honor of his late friend. He had no intention of actually sharing a room with Alice—Feng’s room would have to do when Gavin finally felt a need for sleep and he would have to hope Feng didn’t have a woman with him—but it was easier to fabricate a married relationship than explain to the clerk, who only spoke a few words of English.
They met Feng, alone, on the way up the dark and creaking stairs, which saved Gavin the trouble of tracking him down. Explanations followed, and Alice went into her room without further discussion.
“You will not follow her?” Feng said. He was wearing his scarf and goggles and on his back he wore the pack with the precious jar of fireflies in it. “My lady friend last night enjoyed herself immensely, and I can give you advice, if you need it.”
Gavin sighed as they squeaked back downstairs on threadbare carpet. Although he was getting used to Feng’s forthrightness and his interest in… romance, it was still a little unsettling, and he could understand why Feng’s father had despaired of him ever becoming a diplomat. Feng’s undeniably exotic good looks doubtless made matters worse—Gavin imagined he found it easy to sweet talk his way into any number of beds. Fortunately, he did seem to understand that showing even the slightest interest in Alice would result in a personal and rather brief experiment with the force of gravity from the deck of the Lady of Liberty, either at Gavin’s hands or Alice’s.
“I won’t share… quarters with her,” Gavin said. “Not until I can make an honest woman of her.”
“And when will that be?”
They reached the little lobby again and a glimmer of brass caught Gavin’s eye. His blood went cold and he nearly dropped his fiddle case. Susan Phipps and Simon d’Arco were talking to the clerk.
“Run,” he whispered hoarsely, and bolted back up the steps.
They both smashed straight into Alice’s door. It splintered open. She lay on the bed and she was still dressed, a fact for which Gavin felt grateful. He scooped Alice up while Feng grabbed the bedspread from underneath her. Alice squawked as footsteps pounded on the stairs leading up to their floor. Gavin glanced at the window, but they were three stories up. No escape that way. They would have to fight their way out. He frantically assessed the room. Bed. Bare wood floor. Window. Thin curtains. Chamber pot. Washstand. Mirror. Light. Feng. Bedspread. Sheets. Fiddle case.
“Put me down!” Alice barked.
Gavin flung her back on the bed along with his fiddle case. He ripped the curtains off the wall with one hand and snatched up the room’s paraffin oil lamp in the other. Then he dug into his pockets for a match. Simon burst into the room, and Feng, who was standing beside the door, flung the bedspread over him like a net and kicked his legs out from under him. Simon went down with a muffled yelp. Phipps appeared in the doorway, more cautious. She held a pair of tuning forks in her hands.
“You!” Alice cried from the bed.
“Caught you,” Phipps said, “you son of a—”
Gavin threw the lamp at her. She automatically parried it with her metal arm, and the cheap glass shattered, covering both her and the bedspread with lamp oil. Gavin popped the match alight with his thumbnail and applied it to the sheer curtain he was holding. Fear clenched his every nerve as it began to burn. Fire was the enemy of every airship, and to die in flame was the secret nightmare of every airman. He remembered Captain Naismith aiming a blazing crossbow bolt at the envelope of the Juniper, and how close he had come to dying in an inferno. His hands shook, making the fire dance.
“You won’t,” Phipps said flatly, and moved to strike the forks.
Gavin ran straight for her, trailing flame. Phipps leaped backward, her eyes wide with fear, an expression Gavin had never seen on her before. Alice recovered herself and bolted after him with Feng right behind her. A bit of blazing curtain flapped behind them, preventing the oil-soaked Phipps from pursuing right away if she wanted to avoid bursting into flame. Smoke and heat scorched Gavin’s face and heated his hands. The clerk stared at the trio from behind his desk as they fled outdoors.
The sun shone on the bright, cobblestoned street. In the distance, calliope music played and people applauded. Traffic and pedestrians were currently giving the hotel a wide berth, though, because Glenda was standing on the sidewalk in one of the big mechanicals.
“Wotcha,” she said, and reached for Gavin and Alice with big metal hands.
“Shit!” Gavin flung the flaming ball of cloth at Glenda’s head. It bounced off the clear bubble encasing her, but the woman jerked out of reflex, which gave Gavin, Alice, and Feng a chance to dodge around the machine.
“This way!” Gavin grabbed Alice’s hand and ran.
Glenda recovered quickly and spun to face them. Gavin jumped into a nearby cab, pulling Alice with him. The startled driver didn’t even have time to protest before Gavin shoved him out with a “Sorry!” and snapped the reins. The horses, already nervous about the mechanical, leaped forward. Feng managed to leap aboard as well, despite the rucksack that weighed him down.
The cab jolted down the street with the mechanical in pursuit. Brass footsteps thundered behind them. Alice shouted at people to get out of the way, and Gavin grimly steered the frantic horses. Glenda swiped at the cab, missed, and gouged a chunk out of the street. People and horses screamed and scattered. Other automatons skittered out of the way. Fear gripped Gavin’s heart. Even if they got away now, their situation remained dire. Phipps was a bulldog, willing and able to track them, and Gavin’s conspicuous airship made the situation worse. They had to escape, not only now but in the long term.
“Where should we go?” Alice cried, echoing his thoughts. “How do we get away?”
And then he knew. It came to him in a flash of inspiration, and he had no idea whether it was inspired by the clockwork plague or his own imagination, but either way, it might work. Hope replaced some of the fear.
“I have an idea,” he said. “But we left my fiddle.”
“I have it,” Alice said, brandishing it. “Didn’t you notice?”
“God, I love you.”
“Faster!” Feng shouted behind them.
Glenda swiped at the cab again, and this time she clipped it. The cab yawed sideways, and Alice clung grimly with her free hand. Gavin hauled on the reins, turning the yaw into a full-out left turn around a corner. The cab tipped on two wheels, then righted itself with a crash that slammed Gavin’s teeth together. The move caught Glenda by surprise, and she had to back up to make the turn, which bought Gavin a bit of lead. He shouted at the horses, but they were already going flat out.
“Glenda!” Alice called over her shoulder. “You don’t have to do this! The Third Ward is dead!”
But Glenda either didn’t hear or didn’t care. The mechanical came after them with implacable determination. The horses were slowing, tired, allowing Glenda to make up the lost time. Gavin listened. The streets here were nearly empty and the calliope music was growing louder. He pulled the horses to a stop and jumped out of the cab.
“Jump!” he said as Glenda brought both mechanical hands down. Feng and Alice leaped free as the mechanical smashed the cab to pieces. The panicked horses galloped away, dragging the remains with them. Glenda turned to face the trio, her expression stony.
“What are you doing?” Feng demanded, but Gavin was already moving.
“Come on!” He dashed down a side street, giving Alice and Feng no choice but to follow. There were still no people in evidence, but the narrow street was cluttered with front stoops, carts, piles of coal, and other street detritus. The trio leaped and twisted around it all, but Glenda was forced to slow a little.
“I’ll catch you eventually,” she shouted. “You can’t keep running!”
Gavin burst out onto a main street and into a crowd lining it. The calliope music leaped into full volume. Coming up the street was a man in a red top hat and a red-and-white striped shirt with garters just above the elbows. He wore a cloak flung back over his shoulders and he carried a silver-topped cane. Behind him lurched a great brass elephant, puffing steam from its tusks. Its gait was oddly uneven. Scarlet signs on the animal’s sides spelled out Kalakos Cirque International du Automates et d’Autres Merveilles in graceful, garish letters. Behind that came a horse wagon with an calliope on it played by an automaton, followed by the rest of the circus—clowns and acrobats and lion cages and girls on mechanical horses, all waving and smiling. The crowd that had gathered to watch stared, unsure if Gavin’s actions might be part of the show.
Without a pause, Gavin shoved through the crowd and made for the ringmaster at the front of the parade. He snatched the man’s hat off, revealing sandy hair.
“What the hell?” the ringmaster said, then blinked. “Gavin?”
“Great to see you, Dodd.” Gavin flicked the cloak free. “Just go with this and I’ll explain later.”
“Gavin, what are you—?” Alice began, but he shoved the top hat on her head, tossed the cloak around her shoulders, and ran around the other side of the lurching elephant without looking to see if Feng and Alice followed him. They did, however, and that was fortunate. Glenda reached the mouth of the side street, but her view of her quarry was blocked by the elephant, who bumbled along as if the people didn’t exist. Up top, the mahout looked down at them warily.
“Take off your goggles and scarf and your shirt,” Gavin whispered to Feng, keeping pace with the elephant. “The circus has Chinese. You’ll look like an acrobat. Give me the rucksack.”
“What about you?” Alice buttoned the cloak and drew it around herself, hiding her body and Gavin’s fiddle case. “And how do you know these people?”
Feng handed Gavin the rucksack, pulled off his shirt, and wrapped it around his head in a crude turban. He had a build that could pass for acrobatic, at a distance. Several people in the crowd had noticed Glenda’s mechanical, but they seemed to think it was part of the parade. They pointed and gasped with amazement. Glenda was momentarily stymied. She couldn’t move forward without crushing people or sweeping them aside and hurting them, which Gavin didn’t think she’d be willing to do.
A clown in white makeup, orange wig, and blue nose hurried up with a broom and a bucket. “What are you three doing? Do you speak English?”
“Bonzini!” Gavin said. “Remember me?”
“Gavin?” the clown gasped. “What in—?”
“I’m looking for two men and a woman!” Glenda boomed from the mechanical. “They just came this way. There’s a reward!”
“That’s torn it,” Alice said.
“No,” Feng said. “The crowd speaks French and German.”
“Thanks, Bonzini.” Gavin plucked the wig and nose from the clown, jammed them onto his own head and face, and grabbed Bonzini’s broom and bucket. The pack with the firefly cure in it went on Gavin’s back.
“Hey!” Bonzini protested.
But Gavin was already moving farther back, now using the calliope wagon and then a lion cage for cover. Alice and Feng came with. Glenda gave up on the crowd and was now nudging people aside so she could move onto the street. The calliope continued to hoot out something in D-major.
“Split up,” Gavin said.
“Why can’t we just keep hiding behind the calliope?” Alice hissed.
“The wagon’s high enough for her to see our feet.” Gavin brandished the broom. “Hide in plain sight. Smile and wave and tell anyone who asks that Dodd said it was all right.”
Gavin followed the lion cage with the broom over his shoulder, taking care that the bristles blocked Glenda’s view of his face. Behind Gavin, a pair of jugglers tossed clubs and balls. Alice and Feng dropped farther back into the parade, smiling and waving as they went. The parade moved ahead with aching slowness. The horse drawing the lion cage dropped manure onto the street right in front of the spot where Glenda had finally worked her way through the parade audience to the curb. Gavin swallowed hard and kept his head down as he paused and swept the smelly stuff into the bucket. Glenda scanned the street with flat, hard eyes. Gavin felt her gaze rest on him for a moment, and he forced himself to put a jaunty spring into his step, though tension dried his mouth and tightened his knuckles on the bucket. He was just a lowly sweeper clown. Not worth examining closely. Glenda narrowed her eyes and her mechanical took a step forward. Gavin held his breath. Then Glenda turned and stomped away. The crowd cheered and pointed at her, still sure she was part of the parade. Gavin let out his breath and stole a glance over his shoulder. Alice and Feng smiled and waved near a troop of acrobats. The automaton on the calliope finished its song and swung into another one. Gavin continued on his way with the bucket full of manure.
Eventually the parade made its way to a field at the edge of town. The big striped tent—called the Tilt, Gavin remembered—rose up among a number of smaller tents and circus wagons. Off to one side waited the red locomotive and bright boxcars Gavin had seen from the airship earlier just before a clockworker fugue had taken him away. If not for the clockwork plague and the unexpected memory of his father, he might have recognized the train right away instead of recalling it later. He had also seen the flyers for the Kalakos Circus plastered about Luxembourg by the advance man, but they were in French and he hadn’t paid close attention to them. He wasn’t sure how he had missed the name; the French version wasn’t so very different.
The parade continued right up to the complex of tents. Behind the parade came an enormous crowd, all ready to see the show. The performers quickly scattered, some toward the Tilt, some to the sideshow tents, and others to direct the oncoming crowd toward the ticket sellers, who wore stovepipe hats with oversized tickets attached to the top so people could locate them. An intricately decorated mechanical clock at the entrance of the Tilt ran backward, counting down the minutes until the performance began. A life-sized female automaton was attached to the clock, and even as Gavin watched, she jerked to life. She had only head, chest, and arms, and Gavin assumed this made her sufficiently inhuman to make her legal under Luxembourg law.
“Mesdames et messieurs!” she called in a voice that carried from one end of the circus to the other. “Le spectacle commencera dans cinquante-cinq minutes! Mesdames et messieurs! Le spectacle commencera dans cinquante-cinq minutes!” And then she went still.
Nearly an hour before the show, according to the clock. The extra time, Gavin recalled, gave the audience a chance to buy tickets, then get bored and decide to spend money at the sideshow.
A firm grip took Gavin’s elbow. “The ringmaster wants to see you in his car,” said Bonzini, “and you better not have sneezed inside my nose.”
The ringmaster kept an entire train car to himself. Alice took off the red top hat. Feng pulled on his shirt and tried to smooth out the wrinkles. Bonzini ushered the three of them inside, but didn’t enter himself. The car had a large bed, comfortable chairs, two wardrobes, a small stove, full bookshelves, and a perfectly functional bar. It hadn’t changed since Gavin had seen it more than two years ago. Neither had Dodd, who was waiting for them.
“Good God, Gavin,” he said, his face split into a wide grin. “I hope you have a good explanation for nearly wrecking my parade today. Who are these people? And where’s Cousin Felix?”
He pulled Gavin into a warm embrace without waiting for an answer, and Gavin suddenly found himself at the top of an upswell of emotion. His throat thickened, and words wouldn’t come. The memory of Captain Felix Naismith’s last moments slammed through Gavin, and he saw the captain’s expression as a pirate’s glass fléchette sliced his flesh and ended his life. He heard the small sound that escaped the captain’s throat and felt the thud as the captain’s body slammed into the deck.
Dodd read Gavin’s expression. “No.”
“Yeah,” Gavin said thickly. “Uh, this may take a while to explain.”
“Mesdames et messieurs! Le spectacle commencera dans cinquante minutes!”
“I have fifty minutes,” Dodd said.
Alice set Gavin’s fiddle and the rucksack with the cure in the corner and everyone sat down. Gavin introduced Alice and Feng and then started in with the loss of the Juniper to pirates, moving to the death of Dodd’s cousin, Captain Felix Naismith. Dodd’s face hardened as the story progressed. Alice went to the little bar and came back with a half-full glass, which Dodd drained with a shaky hand when Gavin finished.
“I haven’t seen him in almost two years,” Dodd said in a hoarse voice. “I had no idea he was dead. Oh, God. What am I going to do?”
Gavin didn’t know what to say. Alice and Feng, who didn’t know Dodd at all, sat in uncomfortable silence.
“Mesdames et messieurs! Le spectacle commencera dans vingt minutes!”
“We go months without contact,” Dodd said, “but that was all right. I was so glad when he got off that stupid scow he played second mate for and got on a real ship, and he was so happy when Boston Mail gave him his own command. Youngest captain in their fleet, he is. Was. Now he’s gone. Shit.”
Alice coughed, and Dodd raised his glass to her in apology, then stared off into space. Dodd was young himself for a circus ringmaster, barely thirty, with large brown eyes that made him look even younger, despite the side whiskers. Gavin glanced at him, then around the little car. Whenever the Juniper was in a European port, Captain Naismith checked to see if the Kalakos Circus was in town too, and if it was, he always took Gavin and Tom with him to visit. The cousins caught up while the cabin boys got free run of the show. After the performance, Dodd gave them treats from the grease wagon, or even a windup toy from his workshop.
“I’m sorry to bring bad news,” Gavin said. “I miss him, too. And Tom. But there’s more.”
Gavin gave a thumbnail sketch of how Alice’s aunt Edwina had used her cure for the clockwork plague to manipulate Gavin and Alice into joining the Third Ward so Edwina could destroy it, and how Lieutenant Phipps was now chasing them—
“Wait,” Dodd interrupted. He pointed at Alice. “You’re a baroness who can cure the clockwork plague?” He pointed at Gavin. “And you’ve become a clockworker?”
Gavin nodded. “Yes. Now we—”
“What do you do?” Dodd interrupted again, this time pointing at Feng. “Walk on water?”
“With a good running start,” Feng replied.
“Mesdames et messieurs! Le spectacle commencera dans cinq minutes!”
A sharp knock came at the door, and a red-haired man with startling blue eyes poked his head into the car. He wore an Arran fisherman’s sweater and a cloth cap. “Dodd? Show’s on. Are you— Gavin! Good Lord, lad, it’s been ages. Where are Tom and Felix?”
Dodd rose a little unsteadily. “They’re dead, Nathan.”
“Oh, Jesus.” Nathan strode in and caught Dodd in an embrace that went on for rather longer than most Englishmen or Irishmen felt comfortable with. Gavin suddenly put together a number of cues that had completely escaped him when he was younger. He glanced at Feng, who cocked his head, and the ridiculousness of the situation occurred to him. A baroness with an iron spider on her arm, a plague-infested airman, and an undiplomatic Chinaman hiding from a giant mechanical with a circus ringmaster who fell in love with men. A wave of mirth suddenly overcame Gavin, and inappropriate laughter bubbled in his throat. Alice glared at him. Feng looked surprised. The laughter bubbled up again, and this time Gavin couldn’t stop it. He laughed and laughed and pounded the little table with his fist and laughed some more. The odds of any of this happening were so high, they were impossible to calculate. Just the idea that his own ancestors would meet and produce offspring that would end in him while Alice’s and Feng’s own families were doing the same thing, completely unaware that the culmination of their work and toil and sex would end in a circus with a ringmaster who dabbed it up with men. Trillions upon trillions of events, both enormous and minuscule, had to take place in perfect sequence in order for this meeting to occur and if any one of them had failed to happen, the three of them would be somewhere else—or perhaps they wouldn’t even exist. Best of all, they wouldn’t even know the difference. Maybe they didn’t know the difference now.
Gavin doubled over, cackling and howling at the joke. Voices and faces swirled in a twisted rainbow around him. A slight stinging to his face told him he’d been slapped, but it didn’t faze him in the slightest. He laughed and laughed and then the world went black.
Sometime later, Gavin bolted awake. He always bolted awake. The attack by the pirate Madoc Blue and the lashing Gavin had endured afterward had destroyed peaceful sleep and gradual waking. By now, he had forgotten what it was to slip calmly out of slumber and greet the day without sweat on his forehead and his heart in his mouth. He sat up and found he was on the bed with his shoes off.
The sunlight had moved, and the car was dimmer. At the little table sat Nathan Storm, his sunset hair gleaming in the low light. The man was smoking a pipe, and the pungent tobacco smoke floated in a blue cloud near the ceiling. Everyone else was gone.
“Nice to see you among the living.” Nathan puffed gently.
“Where’s Alice?” Gavin asked.
“Exploring the midway. She slept and then wanted some air.” He drew on the pipe again. “That was interesting. You were cackling like…”
Gavin found his shoes on the floor and laced them on. “Like a lunatic? Yeah. Clockworkers are mad. You know that.”
“What’s it like?” Nathan said.
“It’s hard to describe.” Gavin sighed. “The plague shows me things, strange things, true things. I’m not insane. Not really.”
“You sounded pretty mad. You really hurt Dodd.”
Gavin winced. “Shit. Oh, shit. I’m sorry, Nathan.”
His pipe went out, and he tapped it into a bowl on the table. “You’re apologizing to the wrong person.”
“He and Felix aren’t—weren’t—really cousins, were they?”
That earned him a short bark of laughter. “You were young, weren’t you? They met in Hamburg when Felix was working some leaky old airship and Dodd was still winding spiders for Viktor Kalakos. They tried to stay together, meeting up in whatever large cities they could, but it just didn’t work. They did stay close friends. Dodd doesn’t have any other family, so he started calling him Cousin Felix, and it stuck.”
“And now you two…”
“Not ‘now,’ Gavin. For years. Since before Felix started bringing you to visit.”
“Right.” Gavin rubbed his face and remembered Simon, whose romantic tastes ran in the same direction. What were the chances? The corners of his mouth quirked, and he quickly ended that line of thought. “Even clockworkers can be stupid.”
“Damn right. You want something to eat? I’ve got beans and bread here, unless you’d fancy a candyfloss.”
At the mention of food, Gavin’s stomach growled, and he went light-headed. “How long was I… away?”
“All the way through the first show. The second starts in a few minutes.”
Nathan brought him a plate at the bed as if he were an invalid, but Gavin got up and ate at the table. He felt perfectly fine, except for the hunger.
“Where’s Dodd?” he asked around a mouthful.
Nathan looked surprised. “Dodd’s in the ring. The show must go on. If you’re done eating, let’s go find your two friends so you can tell me what you’re really here for. I don’t think you hid in the parade just to have an excuse to deliver bad news.”
Outside, afternoon was fading into evening. The Tilt and the tents cast canted shadows over brightly painted wagons. Gavin knew from his previous visits that the wealthier performers lived in the wagons, which were rolled into the train’s boxcars when circus left town. Poorer performers lived in tents. Other tents housed the sideshow exhibits and the animal cages. Smells of fried food and cooking sugar mingled with calliope music. Men, women, and children wandered about. A few stood in line outside the main entrance of the Tilt, handing over their tickets so they could file inside to find seats as the clock automaton shouted in French that the show would begin in one minute. The performers were out of sight behind the Tilt, awaiting cues and entries.
“There you are!” Alice threw her arms around his neck in a near choke hold and kissed him. “You scared the life out of me. Us.”
“I’m sorry. I need to apologize to Dodd.”
“You must wait,” Feng said. “The performance will begin soon. Mr. Storm, could we go into the main tent? We should not be out in the open in case Phipps has tracked us here.”
Nathan nodded and took them past the ticket taker into the Tilt. Inside, tall rows of bleachers were bent around a wide red ring, and chatting, laughing people filled most of the spaces. Sawdust lay scattered on the ground. Food sellers moved among them with trays of rich-smelling roasted peanuts and pink cotton candy. Off to one side, the automaton played its calliope. Just as the group arrived on one side of the ring, the tent flaps on the opposite side exploded open and Dodd strode into the Tilt. He had his red hat back, and his silver-topped cane waved in time to the music. Behind him came the mechanical elephant, its feet thudding unevenly on the packed earthen floor. The mahout looked a little seasick at the uneven footsteps. Then came a rainbow explosion of clowns and a group of horses, both live and mechanical, accompanied by slender girls in white feathered dresses, and behind them came acrobats in tight red shirts. A trainer led a lion on a leash and made it roar. For the hell of it, Gavin snatched the recording nightingale from his pocket and pressed the left eye just as the trainer made the lion roar a second time. Then he held the nightingale to his ear and pressed the right eye. It opened its beak and roared like a little lion, which made the real lion look around, startled. Alice shot him a hard look. Oops. He hadn’t realized it would be so loud. Gavin stuffed the nightingale into his pocket and looked innocent. The parade, a smaller one than the one in town, stomped round the ring and stormed out to cheers and applause from the audience while Dodd went into the center and leaped onto a small platform with stars on it.
“Bienvenue,” he said, “au le Kalakos Cirque International du Automates et d’Autres Merveilles!”
The audience, pleased that Dodd spoke their language, burst into more applause just as a troupe of clowns somersaulted into the ring. Dodd got out of the way, and the show began in earnest. He caught sight of Nathan and his entourage lurking at the edge of the bleachers and trotted over.
“I’m sorry,” Gavin said before he could speak. “We clockworkers do stupid things sometimes. It’s not an excuse, just an explanation. I’m sorry.”
Dodd nodded. “You’re my last link to Felix, Gavin. I can’t be angry with you.”
“I need help, Dodd,” Gavin told him. The audience laughed. “And only you can give it.”
The ringmaster looked wary. “How?”
In the ring, a clown pedaled around on a unicycle with a bucket of whitewash, which he threatened to toss over the audience. Gavin swallowed, suddenly nervous. Dodd was part of the idea he’d gotten earlier, when Glenda was chasing them with the mechanical. He hadn’t had time to think about it further since the chase had started, and now that everything had slowed down, the day’s events were catching up with him. He glanced at Alice. She and Feng were counting on him. If Dodd refused to help, they’d be in serious trouble.
“We found out that plague cures have been invented or discovered more than once,” Gavin said, “but England and China have suppressed them. English cures were never able to cure clockworkers, only regular victims, but the Chinese ambassador told us the Dragon Men—Chinese clockworkers—might have a full cure.”
The clown flung his bucket, but turned it aside at the last moment. The audience whooped at him, half laughing, half fearful.
“So you need to get to China,” Dodd said. “I’m sorry, Gavin. We aren’t going to China.”
Gavin shook his head. “We don’t need to go that far. I have an airship, but she’s easy to spot and track. It’s how Phipps and the others followed us to Luxembourg. We need to lose them and earn enough money to fuel the ship for a flight to Peking.”
“What’s that to do with me?”
“The circus is a perfect cover,” Gavin blurted out. “You’re heading east. I can hide the ship on the train, and we can hide among you, do some work to earn money. Once we get far enough along, we’ll leave.”
“Oh, Gavin—I don’t know,” Dodd said. “I like you. Hell, you’re almost like a little brother to me. But the coppers already give us the hairy eye when we come to town.”
Feng muttered something in Chinese that sounded like a swear word, and Gavin’s heart sank. The clown drew his bucket back one more time. “Phipps has no real jurisdiction outside England,” Gavin said, still trying.
“Doesn’t seem to stop her. And I don’t know that I have any paying work for you. Look, I want to help, but—”
“How long has that elephant been lurching like that?” Alice interrupted. The clown threw the bucket’s contents, but all that came out was confetti. The audience laughed and cheered.
“What?” Dodd said. “Uh… two months, perhaps three. We bought it from a clockworker several years ago, but it seems to be breaking down. No one knows how to fix it.”
“Is that so?” Alice said.