The Dragon Men by Steven Harper

Author:Steven Harper [Harper, Steven]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781101597828
Publisher: Penguin Group, USA
Published: 2012-11-06T08:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

A hatchet was splitting Alice’s head in two. A dull hatchet. With chips in the blade. She groaned and tried to open her eyes, but they were gummy and stuck shut. Her mouth tasted like dry paper.

A gentle grip closed her hand around a cup and pushed it toward her mouth. Alice resisted at first, but her body was tired and heavy and great clods of pain kept thudding about her skull, and she finally drank. The warm liquid was overly sweet and tasted of licorice. Absinthe. Alice grimaced, but after a few swallows, her headache receded and the heaviness left her. The gentle hands helped her sit up, and a damp cloth washed her eyes open. Alice blinked uncertainly. She was sitting on a bed in a smallish room crammed with furniture, most of it red, all of it Chinese. What looked like plain white sheets had been hung over other wall hangings for reasons she couldn’t fathom. A small barred window let in a bit of breeze. The person helping her up was a maid in Chinese dress, though her clothes were white. Her upper lip had been split all the way up to her nose, giving her something of a canine appearance.

In another bed sat Susan Phipps, her uniform rumpled, her hair down and tangled in her monocle. Alice automatically put her hand up to her own head and found herself in a similar state. The corks on her fingertips caught in her hair. She cast about, befuddled. The last thing she remembered was talking to Gavin aboard the Lady.

“Are you all right?” Phipps asked.

“What happened?” Alice said, pulling her hand free. “Where are we?” To the maid, she said, “Who are you?”

A gleam caught her eye. Click was curled up on the bed. Alice felt a little better at seeing him, though she was still confused. Automatically she picked him up and checked his windup mechanism. He was running down. She took the key from around her neck, inserted it, and started winding. He slitted his eyes in contentment.

“How did we get here?” Alice asked Phipps. “Why won’t this woman speak to us?”

“I don’t know. We—”

The door opened, and in came another woman, also dressed in a white Chinese outfit—wide trousers beneath a full-length tunic split in the front and held together with a silver clasp. Her hair was elaborately twisted around her head, and her every movement was graceful as a measure of music. She was Alice’s age and very beautiful. Alice glanced down at her wrinkled, travel-stained clothes and forced herself to sit erect like the baroness she was.

The woman said something in Chinese, and it annoyed Alice now. The lack of understanding made her feel like a lost child.

“She says there’s no point in asking the maid questions,” Phipps said from her own bed. “Her tongue has been torn out.”

“That’s terrible!”

“She’s a former opium addict who probably lied to obtain money for the drug,” Phipps said. “The punishment for opium addiction is to split the upper lip so as to prevent the .

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