“Easily done,” Kung said.
“What was the lady considering?” asked Li.
Alice touched the little whirligig on her shoulder and thought a moment. “My whirligigs can follow fairly complicated orders if they are worded properly, though Click has a distressing tendency to do as he wishes. If we avoid using him, I think we can create quite a display for our Forbidden City friends, though you two lieutenants would have to work out a few military details.”
“I see.” Phipps turned to her Oriental counterpart. “Can we do that, Lieutenant?”
Li made one more bow. “It would be an honor, Lieutenant.”
Alice looked between them one more time.
Interlude
A pall of oily smoke and steam hung over the Outer Court of the Forbidden City. In the great space between the orderly clusters of red-tiled buildings gathered the machines. Dragons of iron and brass coiled around themselves, hissing and muttering. Copper tigers raked the cobblestones. Mechanical elephants stomped heavy feet and trumpeted to shake the air. Flocks of small birds with sharp, shiny claws, wheeled overhead. Black-clad Dragon Men moved among them with tools, making adjustments, adding weapons, improving engines. At the behest of one Dragon Man, a tiger opened its mouth and a pistol cracked three quick bullets at a wooden target, which vanished in a pile of splinters. Another Dragon Man gestured at a live cow standing to one side of the court, and a hundred brass birds descended on the animal. The cow had time to make a surprised grunt before it was reduced to a pile of wet meat and yellow bones.
General-no, Emperor-Su Shun stood on the snowy steps of the Hall of Supreme Harmony. Creamy clouds covered the summer sun and filtered the light drifting down on the hundreds of buildings, large and small, that made up the Forbidden City, safe behind scarlet walls and an azure moat. The city bustled with activity as it always did, but now a new intensity wove itself into the eunuchs and the maids. They kept their heads down and hurried more quickly about their tasks, trying not to draw attention to themselves. The concubines were especially worried-Su Shun might decide he didn’t want “used” concubines and demand fresh ones, which would put all of them out on the street. Most of them would end their days in brothels, since no one wanted to marry a cast-off concubine.
Su Shun stood above them all in his new suit of yellow armor, yellow for the Celestial Throne, yellow for the emperor, and made a grim smile that covered only half his face. The other half of his face, the brass half, remained immobile. Behind him rose the Hall, with its magnificent scarlet pillars and its gold carvings and its two tiers of swooping tiled roofs, though eunuchs were even now taking away the jade treasures stored within and prying gold from the walls. Su Shun had no use for jade or gold, but both would fetch a high price, and war was costly, especially a war involving Dragon Men.
When Su Shun had given the order to begin the sale, two of the eunuchs had dared to voice mild protest. Su Shun had raised the Jade Hand and spoken to Lung Chao, Emperor Xianfeng’s favorite Dragon Man. The Hand had glowed, and Lung Chao, with his enhanced strength and reflexes, had broken one man’s neck and crushed the other’s windpipe before anyone could move. Now the eunuchs obeyed with alacrity.
Su Shun allowed himself a small smile. The Hall of Supreme Harmony belonged to him, as did the entire Forbidden City and the empire beyond it. A true ruler now ruled the one true empire. It was time to bring China back to the old ways, when emperors were heroic warlords who fought on the field, not opium addicts who simpered behind silk curtains.
He was well aware how tenuous his rule was. Although he came from a noble family, his rebuilt face precluded him from any hope of touching the throne. Only a physically perfect man was considered worthy to receive the Jade Hand; its power would overwhelm a lesser one. That word lesser had irked him for dozens of years. Xianfeng’s father, Emperor Daoguong, had been physically perfect, but he had also been a complete fool. Su Shun had gritted his teeth while the emperor bungled attempt after attempt to keep control of the opium that continued to seep into China thanks to British merchants. But at the height of the old man’s power, more than thirty thousand chests of the sticky black balls glided across the borders every year. Su Shun watched his own father succumb to the darkness, withdrawing from his sons and turning weak as a hollow reed, until one day he simply shuddered and died, the pipe he loved more than his family still in his mouth. Su Shun hated the smell of the smoke, hated the crackle of the little flame, hated the ffffff sound of the smoking going in, deadly as poisoned feathers. He swore he would rid China of the filth, both the opium and those who sold it.
It was clear Daoguong and his family weren’t fit to rule. Daoguong had trouble thinking past China’s borders and had no desire to expand China or put down the British once and for all. Su Shun knew better. And Su Shun had patience.
The Jade Hand twitched, and a twinge of pain threaded up Su Shun’s arm. He kept his expression neutral. He would not show pain here, in the Outer Court. People might mistake pain as an admission that he wasn’t fit to rule, and he hadn’t coddled that spoiled brat Xianfeng for eleven years-eleven years! — to watch it all drift away like so much opium smoke. When the boy had shown an interest in common whorehouses and even the opium dens, Su Shun had encouraged him, helped him disguise himself and move among the lice-ridden prostitutes and smoky drug dens, hoping the little idiot would catch something and die. But the ancestors had smiled on Xianfeng, or perhaps they had frowned on Su Shun. Either way, the limp little prince had minced up to the throne after Daoguong’s death and, after inhaling copious amounts of opium, accepted the Jade Hand while Su Shun gave his false half smile. But still Su Shun waited.
And then the English came, with their ships and their cannons and their clanking clockwork monstrosities, nothing like the elegant masterpieces created by fine Dragon Men. They came with their treaty that allowed them to thrust even more opium down the throats of good Chinese, along with their cheaply made factory goods that put Chinese merchants out of business. The supercilious sneer they gave Su Shun over the treaty table was nearly enough to make him draw sword and pistol to attack right then. But he held himself in check, and that had been for the good. What little will Xianfeng had left seemed to drain out of him after that treaty, and he spent more and more time with his opium pipe and that concubine cow of his, the one who mooed so prettily in his ear and who actually managed to drop a son. How she coaxed a boy child out his opium-laced loins, Su Shun still didn’t understand. He clenched his teeth and spent hours ensuring the emperor had all the opium silver could buy. He encouraged him to smoke more and more of it because opium was of the feminine yin, and it drained away the male yang. He also talked him into using the Passage of Silken Footsteps out of the Forbidden City to spend himself on Peking prostitutes, both male and female, so that none of his seed would reach the concubines or his breathless empress. Both schemes had worked for a while-none of the other concubines had become pregnant, and Su Shun had seen to it that any whore who had thrown babies nine months after a celestial visit had quietly disappeared with their litters. Su Shun would have liked to accuse Cixi of infidelity; he had even dropped a few hints into the Xianfeng’s ear, but the emperor waved them aside as ridiculous. The only thing Su Shun had managed to do was delay Xianfeng in writing the name of his heir for the Ebony Chamber to swallow.
And then fate had played straight into Su Shun’s hands. The English had attacked again, making it all the way to Peking. An idea had come to Su Shun, and he arranged for a decently pretty woman to be infected with the dragon’s blessing and put into a concubine’s guise. The woman was willing enough to die, for the amount of money Su Shun paid her would take care of her entire family for the rest of their lives, and it was easy enough for her to join the evacuation train during the confusion. Su Shun couldn’t even remember her name, but she had done the job admirably. The emperor was dead, and after a bit of scuffling, Su Shun had the Jade Hand.