Jack hated the memory of severing the psychopath’s hand, but it had been the only way to stop him. That was when the villain had fallen from the tower. “You left me no choice.”
“Heh.” The Clockmaker sneered at him. “So you say, greedy child. But you wanted the fire of the Ember for yourself. I saw your eyes light up as you watched it pour from my hand.”
“No. I only wanted to stop you. I had to save the city, save my dad and Gwen.”
“Denying the truth changes nothing. You are who you are.” The Clockmaker pointedly lowered his gaze, and Jack glanced down at his own fists. He opened them. A tongue of green fire sprang up in each palm. He caught his breath and squeezed his hands closed again, snuffing the fire out.
The flame.
Jack’s eyes snapped up. The Clockmaker’s voice had changed into a deep, horrifying cackle—an echo in Jack’s mind. The psychopath grew into a dragon, as big as the white beast from the Archive but formed of gears and gold, with huge blue-green wings.
The flame is in your blood, boy. And one day it will be mine!
The dragon surged forward, shattering crystals and sending up spurts of green fire. Steel jaws opened wide to swallow Jack whole.
The flame, Jack! The flame!
“Jack, wake up!”
“What?”
Jack felt a lurch. He heard a sputter. His eyes popped open and he found he was lying on the couch, forearms shielding his face from a nonexistent mechanical dragon. Gwen was shouting at him from the flight deck. “The engines are flaming out. I need your help!”
“Right.” He rolled off the cushion. “Coming.”
Gwen had been busy. The carpet of the flight deck was littered with old maps, and she had one of them laid out across the controls. The header read Badakhshan, 1914. “Yeah. Like that’s gonna help,” he said, coming up beside her.
She pushed the map aside. “It may be a tad out-of-date, but the basic geographic features haven’t changed. Besides, navigation isn’t our problem, Jack. It’s thrust. We’re out of fuel.”
He glanced out the windscreen. The snowy white hills had become stony gray mountains dotted with scrub, and they looked a lot closer. The airship was lower than before. “Gwen, what did you do?”
She chewed her lip. “The tanks ran dry. We were losing speed, so I diverted some hydrogen from the airship’s envelope.”
“And . . .”
“And I diverted too much. Jack, we’re going down.”
Chapter Fifty-Three
THE SHADOW of the airship drifted across the scrub, growing larger by the second—and slowing. Jack stared out at a ridgeline rising in the windscreen. They were moving at a good clip, but momentum would only carry them so far. “How close will we come to the tomb?”
“Close enough.” Gwen showed him their position on the map. “After this ridge, we should see a lake, here. This hill at the southern end is one of the three ‘subjects’ from the legends, bowing down before the tomb. And that has to be Temujin’s glade just beyond. If we clear the ridgeline, we’ll be high enough to clear the hill as well. We can land in the glade.”
Jack rested a hand against the windscreen. “That’s a big if.”
What had looked like scrub before, now proved to be sage-colored trees. And every inch of ground beneath them was covered in jagged rocks.
The ridge continued to rise.
Jack couldn’t see all the vectors and angles, but he could see enough. “Pull up,” he said, breathing out the words.
“There is no ‘pull up,’ Jack. It’s an airship, not a plane.”
“Then give us another burn. Sacrifice more gas.”
“We’ll lose altitude even faster.”
He turned to face her. “Do it, Gwen.”
She didn’t waste any more time. Gwen spun a valve on the control panel and shoved the throttle to ahead full. Streams of fire shot from the pipes, and the airship lurched forward.
After a full second, Gwen started to turn the valve back.
Jack grabbed her hand. “Not yet.” He watched the motion outside—ridge coming up, trees and rocks passing below. “Wait for it . . .” He let go. “Now!”
Gwen cut the gas and yanked back on the throttle.
Both of them held their breath as the airship sailed over the rocks, skimming the trees. Bristly leaves brushed the underside of the gondola. And then they were clear.
Gwen collapsed into the captain’s chair. “Well, that was exciting.”
“It’s not over.” Jack pointed at the near end of the lake that now stretched out before them. There was an airfield—little more than a couple of hangars and a control tower. A black jet sat parked on the apron. “Tanner’s here.”
“That’s a lot closer than I’d hoped.” Gwen handed him the binoculars. “Look for a helicopter or a car. He has to get to the tomb somehow.”
Jack raised the glasses.
Airfield: no helicopters, not even an ultralight. A single car sat parked beneath the tower.
A road running south along the lake: no cars or trucks, no traffic of any kind.
A speck hovering above, turning in a circle: too small to be a helicopter—a hawk, maybe. Why was it circling? What was it so interested in?
Jack shifted the binoculars down and saw a white streak on the water. “I’ve got him.” He pulled Gwen up by the arm and pressed the binoculars into her hand. “He’s in a boat, and we’re gaining, but not for long. We have to stop him.”
“How?” she asked, glancing over her shoulder as Jack stormed back into the cabin.
“I don’t know. We can drop an empty tank on him or something.”
The tank idea was a bust. They were all welded to the rafters, along with the pipes. As Jack was staring up at them, trying to come up with something else, the airship banked. He fell sprawling to the carpet as a brilliant ball of orange flew past the window. “Hey!”
“Tanner’s spotted us,” called Gwen, righting the craft. “He shot a flare at us.”
Jack pushed himself up on one arm, frowning at her. “It’s not like it was a Stinger missile. How much damage could it do?”
“Whatever gas is left in that envelope above us is hydrogen, Jack. Extremely flammable. Remember the Hindenburg?”
A photograph from a long-forgotten textbook flashed in Jack’s mind. He saw a zeppelin falling from the sky in a huge ball of flame. “Great.”
About the time Jack got his feet underneath him again, Gwen banked the other way. Another flare rocketed past. He stumbled into the couch and found a lever on the arm. Small white lettering was stenciled beneath it: PULL FOR EMERGENCY ANCHOR.
What did he have to lose?
He pulled the lever and the couch rolled forward, exposing a ladder down to a steel grate platform. Right in the middle was something that looked very much like a cannon. He glanced up toward the flight deck. “Gwen, I think I’ve got something.”
Jack grabbed the rails and jumped—rather than climbed—down, landing on the toothy metal grate. The water rushed by beneath his sneakers, two hundred feet or more below.
The cannon was mounted on a swivel, with a set of crosshairs on the nose and a huge serrated arrowhead sticking out the front. A pair of voice tubes with flared ends hung down from the gondola behind it. Jack held on to a wooden handrail for dear life. He pressed one of the tubes to his lips and the other to his ear. “Gwen?”
No response. Jack switched the tubes. “Gwen!”
He heard the sound of bumps and jostles—someone scrambling for the mouthpiece. “Jack? Where are you?”
“The outer deck. I found a sort of cannon-anchor thing.”
“Which side?”
“Left.”
“You mean port.” He could practically hear her rolling her eyes through the interphone.
Jack rolled his eyes right back at her, not caring that she couldn’t see him. “Whatever. How close are we to Tanner?”
“Close enough that if he shoots another flare, I might not be able to dodge
it.”
“Can you turn me broadside?”
A long pause.
“Gwen?”
“We’ll lose all our speed and make ourselves a bigger target.”
“Then I’d better make the shot count. Can you do it?”
The airship banked, throwing him back against the rail. “I’ll take that as a yes.”
For a few seconds, Jack saw nothing but blue sky and the red griffin roaring at him from the wing. Then the lake rose into view. He saw the boat, and Tanner’s evil grin. Jack tried to push himself off the rail.
He went nowhere.
His arms were pinned to his side.
The professor had his left hand outstretched, using the strange power in the Timur Ruby to hold Jack’s upper body captive. The grin Jack had planned to wipe from his face grew even wider, and with his other hand, Tanner raised a double-barrel flare gun.
Chapter Fifty-Four
AS THE AIRSHIP SETTLED, Jack staggered up to the cannon. But try as he might, he could not command his arms or hands to take the handles. He could not so much as flex his fingers.
Tanner took his time, refining his aim.
The airship was a sitting duck.
Jack saw the professor’s finger shift back to hook the trigger, and he prepared himself for the worst. But then something fluttered down from the hatch above him. The wooden bird from the library tucked its wings and made a power dive at the boat, bronze beak catching the sun.
Tanner shifted his aim and fired, and in the same instant, Jack regained control of his body. He grabbed the handles, swiveled the cannon to put the sight a few feet in front of the boat, and jerked back on the trigger.
There was an earsplitting bang. Black smoke, stinking of powder, billowed back into his face. Steel wire whipped and whistled as it uncoiled from the gun.
He rubbed the soot from his eyes in time to see Tanner bailing over the side, with the huge arrow-anchor blowing through the hull right next to him. The wooden dove, unharmed, circled back toward the shore. Jack let out a cheer.
It was a tad premature.
He was watching the sinking boat pass beneath them, searching the waves for Tanner, when the anchor line went taut. The airship dug in, dumping him over the side. With one hand, he caught the metal platform. The sawtooth edge tore into his fingers.
“Gwen!”
Jack doubted she could hear him through the interphone.
“Cut the line, Jack!”
Or maybe she could.
The anchor had tethered the falling airship to the lakebed, bringing it down that much faster.
“Cut it now, Jack! Do you hear me?”
The cannon had a D-ring on the side that looked a lot like a parachute ripcord. Grunting against the effort and pain, Jack pulled himself high enough to yank it free. The anchor line zipped away. The airship snapped back to level, slinging him up onto the platform. He rolled over and saw the hill coming up to meet them.
There was no time to get inside the ship. Jack hugged the wooden rail, but the strength of his arms was no match for the raw physics of the crash. The gondola slammed down onto the hillside. He went flying off through the cloud of dust.
Trees.
Rocks.
Dirt.
Blinding pain.
Darkness.
* * *
Jack awoke to find the tingling sensation had returned, along with a serious headache. It was aggravated by the sound of sandpaper being dragged across more sandpaper—an odd noise for an arid hillside. With effort, he opened his eyes. A blaring white sun washed everything into a blur of tan and brown, but not all of the forms were stationary. The nearest mass of brown swayed back and forth with mesmerizing rhythm. And then it paused . . . and hissed.
Everything came into focus at once.
The pain in Jack’s head and limbs was no match for the need to get away from an angry cobra. He scrambled to his feet and stumbled back against a big rock—the same rock, he realized, that had so abruptly stopped his roll after the crash. The moment he touched it, the cobra uncoiled to twice its former height and hissed even louder.
Jack raised his hands. “Right. Your rock. Not my rock.” He shifted ten feet or so to the left and started walking in a wide arc. “Seriously, I don’t even like that rock. It’s all yours.” He gave the snake a final wave and then staggered off toward the wreckage. “Gwen!”
The airship had carved a broad swath through the scrub and lay canted to one side. The near wing and its griffin were mangled beyond recognition. The half-deflated envelope sagged at both ends.
“Gwen, are you in there?” Jack crawled up through the cannon hatch, squinting toward the flight deck. She was still in the captain’s chair, head slumped to the side. He struggled forward across the dusty carpet and saw that a trickle of blood colored her hair at the temple. Her eyes were closed. He knelt beside her. “Gwen?”
Her eyes popped open. She shot forward, grabbing the wheel. “Trees! Rocks! Debris!”
“Take it easy,” said Jack, breathing a sigh of relief. He eased her back into the cushion. “It’s okay. We’re sort of past that part now.”
Consciousness slowly took hold. “How . . . how long have I been out?”
“Don’t know. I was out too. But Tanner’s still headed for the tomb. You can be sure of it.”
Gwen nodded, wincing. “Then we have to get moving.”
“I have to get moving.” Jack eyed the wound above her temple. A decent-size goose egg had started to form. The sword he had left beside the couch lay at his feet, thrown forward to the flight deck during the crash. He picked it up. “You’re hurt. I’ll go on without you.”
Gwen let out a pained laugh, using the navigation wheel to pull herself out of the chair. “Don’t be absurd. You couldn’t possibly.”
Of course, having Gwen along meant she took charge of their route to the tomb. She argued that the fastest way to the glade would be to work west across the hill to the narrow stream valley, rather than up and over. “It’ll be a longer hike but quicker progress,” she said as Jack tugged her to the side to guide her around the cobra’s rock. “And Tanner will have to walk up the same valley to get to the tomb from the lake.”
Her instinct paid off. As soon as they reached the trail beside the stream, Jack noticed a pattern of discolorations on the stones. “Footsteps,” he said, handing one of the stones to Gwen so she could feel its wetness. “Tanner passed this way already. He’s ahead of us.”
“Not by much.” She tossed the stone behind her. “Wet footprints don’t last long in this climate.”
“Why wouldn’t he use his ankle thrusters? Wouldn’t that be faster than walking?”
“He couldn’t,” said Gwen, continuing on. “You gave him a severe dunking, remember? And quantum thrusters don’t play nice with water.” After a beat, she added, “I’ve heard it helps to immerse them in a bucket of rice, but I doubt he had one handy.”
Jack shot her a sideways glance.
Gwen gave him a freckle bounce.
The wet footprints led them up the stream valley and disappeared into a flat expanse of sage-colored grass. The glade looked little different than it had in the black-and-white hologram in the count’s library, though the stream meandered a bit more.
“Jack, look,” said Gwen, nodding toward a monolithic rock formation guarding a waterfall across the glade. A protrusion near the top looked a lot like a beak. “That’s the hawk-rock we saw in the photos. If Temujin’s personal guard really diverted a river to conceal the tomb, the entrance will be nearby, under the stream.”
They stayed close to the water, but they saw no sign of Tanner, and nothing beneath the surface but weeds and pebbles. Even the deeper section before the waterfall was a bust.
“Maybe the entrance is the hawk,” offered Jack, running his hands along the stone.
But there were no hidden triggers or panels.
After that, they tried pushing the whole rock. That effort was equally futile, and they
quickly gave up, backs resting against it, breathing heavy and staring at the hillside waterfall.
“They diverted a stream to conceal the entrance,” muttered Gwen.
Jack was still catching his breath. “You already said that.”
“Yes. But do we actually know what it means?” She pushed off and waded into the water. “We assumed Temujin’s men dug his tomb in the flat ground—so that the stream runs over it. But who’s to say they didn’t bore straight into the hillside. In that case, the water would have to pour down over the entrance.”
She glanced back at him, and they both said it together. “The waterfall.”
Chapter Fifty-Five
FRIGID WATER BIT into Jack’s shins as he and Gwen waded into the shallow pool. The cold mixed with the constant tingling in his skin to form a strange and altogether unpleasant mix of white-and-silver flashes. “Tanner’s in there,” he said, glaring at the waterfall and hooking a thumb in the pocket where he had stashed the zed.
Gwen pulled his hand away from it. “Yes. And we’re going to face him together.” She intertwined her fingers with his, and they waded through the icy curtain.
Ancient steps led out of the water, up into a long, curving tunnel that ended at a perfectly circular chamber. Twelve stone arches had been cut into the black stone wall, marking twelve new tunnels leading off in every direction.
“Twelve choices,” said Gwen. “That, I didn’t see coming.”
Pots of burning oil, presumably lit by the professor, cast flickering light across a single beast carved over each doorway. The shifting shadows made the creatures appear to move and breathe, so that Jack could almost believe they were alive. He turned in a slow circle, surveying their options—monkey, ox, snake, horse. “Which one do we—? Whoa!”
Jack clawed the air near Gwen’s sleeve until he finally caught hold of it and spun her around. Resting in alcoves on either side of the entry were skeletons in leather armor. Rusty swords lay at their sides. He found his voice. “Guards, maybe? Left here to stop tomb raiders?”
“Left here to stop traitors, more likely.” Gwen crept up to one of the dead men cautiously, as if he might suddenly wake. “This tomb was well hidden. I’m guessing these two were left behind as a deterrent to those who knew of its existence. A great honor. They must have been among Temujin’s most trusted men.” Seemingly oblivious to the myriad issues with touching a dead body, she reached beneath its leather skirt and snapped off a femur.