The Clockwork Dragon Read online

  “What makes you think that dot is the observatory?”

  Gwen shifted her finger to a sketch in the margin. “This is a telescope house. And this”—she traced a line of longitude that bisected the fragment—“is the Prime Meridian.”

  Chapter Twenty

  JACK AND GWEN TOOK a Thames river bus to Greenwich, the safest boat ride Jack had experienced in a year—and the funniest. The young skipper had a pun or a snide comment for every historical point on the waterfront.

  “You don’t have to laugh at all his jokes,” said Gwen. “They’re the same on all the river buses, on every trip, a thousand times a day.”

  Jack laughed as the skipper, who had just pointed out the obelisk known as Cleopatra’s Needle and added that Cleopatra’s Thread, Spool, and Thimble could all be found in a very large room at the British Museum. “Maybe, but I’m hearing them for the first time.”

  She looked away. “A year later, and you’re still such an American.”

  The setting sun outpaced them in the long trek across Greenwich Park, descending into the barren trees. By the time Jack and Gwen reached the top of the observatory hill, the gates to the seventeenth-century complex were closed. Gwen tried the lock.

  “Sorry, miss,” said a boy coming over to the fence. “No new entries. The last visitors for the night are already passing through.”

  Gwen snapped her fingers at Jack.

  Jack presented his platinum card.

  The boy jumped to attention. “Apologies, miss,” he said, rushing to unlock the gate. “Right this way. Anything you need, just ask. Khalil’s the name.”

  With Khalil standing off at a respectful distance, the two paused in the observatory courtyard and opened Gall’s journal. The spook had drawn a couple of recognizable symbols in the space around the map fragment. One was an octagon.

  “I’d say that represents the Octagon Room”—Gwen thrust her chin at a brick tower with tall windows—“built by Sir Christopher Wren. It was supposed to be this magnificent chamber where the royal astronomers would designate the Prime Meridian.”

  “Supposed to be?” asked Jack as she took off, striding toward its steps.

  They pushed through a glossy black door and hurried up a narrow stair to an octagonal room with twenty-foot windows. A family of four, the last of the day’s tourists, was taking turns at one of three antique telescopes. Jack and Gwen waited for them to move on.

  “Supposed to be?” whispered Jack, repeating the question.

  “Wren fouled it up. None of the windows face the correct chunk of sky.” Gwen nodded at a few grand paintings of royalty and snickered. “The astronomers brought the money men here to look through the telescopes, but the real observations were made from the garden outhouse.”

  Unnerved by the whispering pair, the family left. Gwen opened the journal again. “According to Archivipedia, Paracelsus believed in the alchemical power of astronomical alignments. Perhaps Gall does too.”

  “Which means?”

  “He does experiments here.” She glanced around the room. “And Gall’s not fool enough to play the mad scientist in front of all these windows. There must be a second chamber.”

  They checked the journal. Not far from the octagon sketch, Jack found a sphere with a curving arrow, like a rotating globe. Neither of them knew what it meant.

  “It’s tracker time,” said Gwen.

  Jack blanched at the phrase.

  “Too much?”

  “Definitely.”

  He let the quiet of the tower settle over him.

  Scent of oiled wood: the wainscoting was well taken care of.

  Click and whir of the clocks: there were five—three set into the wall on either side of the door and two grandfather clocks between the southern windows.

  Shadows: slow and drifting, marking the last, vanishing rays of the sun. But odd.

  Jack zeroed in on the darkest corner of the room. The window there was set back from the wooden wainscoting instead of flush, creating a hidden alcove—an illusion of Wren’s design. That meant empty space behind the walls. Could it be a coincidence that the grandfather clocks were placed on either side?

  “The clocks,” said Jack. “One of those grandfather clocks is a door.”

  The clock to the right didn’t look like any Jack had ever seen. The face was a mash-up of compasses, with a big dial around the outside, a medium-size dial at the high center, and a small window of tick marks off to the right.

  “Three hundred sixty degrees of longitude,” said Gwen. “This clock measures time by the earth’s rotation.”

  “The earth.” Jack took the journal from her hands, searching the notes. “That explains the rotating sphere. This is the door, but how do we unlock it?”

  “How else?” Gwen opened the winding hatch and turned a crank. All three compasses rotated backward. “You can read this clock as time, but also as location. You know. Longitude. And what famous longitude are we standing on?”

  He slapped the journal closed. “The Prime Meridian.”

  The clock reached zero, zero, zero, and a heavy clank sounded within. Gwen pumped a fist and then swung the case away from the wainscoting. She disappeared behind it.

  And immediately let out a squeal.

  “Gwen?” Jack stuck his head around the corner to find her straddling a well, face pale.

  “It’s nothing more than a manhole and a ladder,” she gasped.

  “What’d you expect? Some fur coats and a forest? You’re up against an exterior wall.” A flutter of gray skittered across Jack’s brain. He recognized the sound as rapid footfalls. “The stairs. Someone’s coming.” He squished into the tiny space with Gwen and pulled the clock-door closed.

  They stood in the dark, nose to nose, feet pressed into the two-inch lip on each side.

  “Well, this is awkward,” whispered Gwen.

  Jack said nothing, trying not to meet her gaze.

  She crossed her eyes at him. “What?”

  “Your hair has a certain . . . scent.”

  “So? What’s wrong with it?”

  Nothing. Long ago, the pinkish-purple strawberry haze of Gwen’s hair had become Jack’s favorite scent amid the flood of sensations in his world. Of course, he couldn’t tell her that. “I mean, is it a shampoo? Or a hairspray or something?”

  Her eyebrows scrunched together. “Shut up and go down the ladder.”

  At the bottom, Gwen drew a monstrous flashlight—what she called a torch—from her pocket, illuminating a chamber like a small section of railway tunnel. Wood shelves and iron tables were strewn with instruments, powders, and bones. Endless scrawls of red chalk marred the brick—symbols both pagan and mathematical. Gwen followed a string of them to a crisscrossed circle at the ceiling’s apex. “These are formulas.”

  Jack picked up a ceramic crucible and sniffed the white residue inside. He cringed at an acrid scent, like a thousand yellow razor blades, and set it down again. “What kind of formulas?”

  “I think we could hazard a guess.”

  Her light fell on a broad copper pedestal at the far end of the room. Three objects rested on a jade platter—a broken clay tablet, a folded Chinese fan, and a black obelisk with a jeweled crane on each side, rising in progression. “Those are the artifacts from Paracelsus’s lab,” said Jack, rushing over.

  “Are they, now?” Gwen snapped a picture with her phone.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Feeding them into Archivipedia.” Her thumbs flashed over the screen. “Starting with the obelisk.”

  Jack watched her slide the picture into the search box. He shook his head. “How do you even have a signal down here?”

  “It’s all about the right data plan.”

  A half second later, Archivipedia coughed up a result. “ ‘The Obelisk of Bennu,’ ” read Gwen. “ ‘Whereabouts unknown.’ ” She raised an eyebrow. “Not anymore, right? According to this, Bennu is the Egyptian phoenix, and the obelisk is a relic of Heliopolis, bear
ing Ra’s recipe for the scarabs he fed to the immortal bird.”

  Jack shrugged. “Okay.”

  The tablet was next, and Archivipedia tagged it as a missing fragment of The Epic of Gilgamesh, said to hold the elemental formula for a life-giving plant. “ ‘Gilgamesh learned of the plant from Utnapishtim,’ ” read Gwen, “ ‘a Sumerian immortal.’ ” She panned the flashlight across the walls, with their jumbles of red symbols. “Some of these look Sumerian, and others Egyptian. I think Gall’s been taking bits and pieces from all these artifacts. It’s an alchemical mash-up.”

  “With some Chinese mixed in. Try the fan.”

  Gwen snapped a picture and frowned. “No result. But perhaps if we spread it out.” With ginger movements, she carefully opened the fan, revealing the painting on the silk folds. She drew a breath, never taking the picture. “It can’t be.”

  “Can’t be what?” Jack leaned in to see. The artist had painted a beautiful scene in gold, ivory, and blue. Eight robed figures floated in the clouds, some playing instruments, others lounging in long wooden boats. It was pretty, but not enough to get that kind of reaction—not out of Gwen. “I don’t get it.”

  Gwen held the light below her chin, illuminating her face. “Eight figures, Jack. Eight figures on a fan.” She slid the artifacts into her pockets. “We need to get back to the Keep. Your dad’s rantings aren’t as random as we thought.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  THE TWO ARRIVED AT House Buckles to find Jack’s dad still mumbling away, with Sadie at his bedside and Jack’s mother watching from the high-backed chair. As they entered the room, a nurse poked the IV with a syringe, thumb resting on the plunger.

  “Stop!” said Jack, waving his arms.

  Doc Arnold did not bother looking up from his clipboard. “It’s only a sedative, Jack. Your father needs to rest if he’s to have any chance of recovery.”

  “Yeah? Well, I need him awake.” Jack glanced at his mom, using his help-me eyes. “And . . . alone.”

  His mom didn’t hesitate. “Out. The lot of you.”

  “Oh, not again.” Doc Arnold lowered his clipboard. “Mary, please.”

  She stood, waggling her hands at the nurses and the poor warden, whose head was canted against the plaster between a pair of ceiling timbers. “I’m sorry, Arnold, but I insist.”

  “Never in all my years . . .” Doc Arnold hung the clipboard on the end of the bed and marched out, his small entourage following after.

  The moment they were gone, Gwen laid the three artifacts on the comforter. “Mr. Buckles, can you see these? Do you know what they are?”

  Jack’s dad kept mumbling. “Am I the answer? Can I destroy the monster that still haunts the boy?”

  “The artifacts, Dad.” Jack raised his voice, even though he didn’t mean to. He joined Gwen and picked up the clay tablet and the obelisk. “Have you seen them before?”

  “Stars above that never wheel, hide the truth from mortal man.”

  Sadie looked at the three of them, then backed away to stand beside her mother.

  Gwen sat back on her haunches. “It’s no good.”

  Desperate, Jack opened his dad’s hand and placed the tablet in his palm.

  John Buckles frowned. Without the slightest glance at the artifact, he tossed it away.

  “No!” squealed Gwen, watching the priceless piece of history fly across the room.

  It landed in Sadie’s waiting hands.

  Gwen laughed. “How did you—?”

  “Any reaction is a good reaction, right?” said Jack. He tried the obelisk, curling his dad’s fingers around it.

  Mechanically, his dad brought the obelisk up to his ear and lobbed it at the door.

  Once again, Sadie had positioned herself to intercept. Jack and Gwen gave her questioning looks. She set both artifacts down on a shelf. “What?”

  “Never mind,” said Gwen, shaking her head. “One thing at a time.” She unfurled the fan, exposing the scene with the eight figures, and gave it to Jack’s father.

  “Wait,” said Jack before she let go. He checked on Sadie. She hadn’t moved. “Um . . . Okay.”

  The second Gwen let go, John Buckles snapped the fan closed, gripping it hard and speaking fast. “Eight figures on a fan hide the truth from mortal man. The first king knew, and though he tried, he took the pills and so he died.”

  “It’s . . . a poem . . . ,” said Jack’s mom.

  “Oh, brilliant!” Gwen snatched up the clipboard and ripped off Doc Arnold’s chart, holding a pen poised on the blank page beneath. “The lines were all jumbled up before, but giving him the fan has fixed one of the stanzas.” She recited the line as she wrote. “ ‘Eight figures on a fan hide the truth from mortal man—’ ”

  “The first king knew and though he tried, he took the pills and so he died,” answered Jack’s father, staring into space.

  “Well done, Mr. Buckles. Well done!” said Gwen, writing the second half down. Her pen slowed. “But what does it mean?” After a long stare at the fan, she gently pried it away from Jack’s dad and laid it open on the bed to snap a picture.

  “Well?” asked Jack.

  Gwen shook her head. “Still not in the database. I’ll need you to tell me its origin.”

  “And how am I supposed to do that?”

  She closed the fan and pressed it into his hands. “You know how.”

  Jack did know, though he didn’t want to admit it. Gwen had often told him how cool his tracker abilities were—how amazing it must be to look into the past simply by touching stone or steel. Experience had taught Jack better. Nearly every spark went horribly wrong. He’d woken up from his last in the middle of an avalanche. And he doubted that a mysterious artifact they’d stolen from the lair of a maniacal villain would prove any safer.

  But this was for his dad. Jack sat back on his heels, reaching with his senses into the cold hard jade.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  JACK LANDED WITH A thud on scorched dirt, sending clouds of mist billowing out in all directions. Mounted riders surrounded him, wearing armor of silk and painted leather. Given his elevated perspective, Jack, or at least the person with the fan, seemed to be mounted as well.

  The mist covered everything, obscuring his view, but down the hill at the intersection of two rivers, Jack could make out a city, walled with timber and stone. Thousands of men with dozens of war machines camped before it on burned and blackened ground. Jack had dropped into a siege.

  Murmurs drifted through the ranks of the army, nothing more than the grumbles of a large crowd. There were no battle cries. The war had grown quiet.

  Odd.

  Usually the first spark brought Jack to the most terrifying or deadly moment in an object’s history. He thought perhaps the mist had something to do with the muted mood, until he noticed its green tint. He focused on the drifting vapors. Some passed right through the men and machines. The horses left trails of gray-green particles, their hooves and flanks indistinct. The mist was not a weather phenomenon. It was a trick of the jade, clouding the vision.

  What was the fan doing at a battle, anyway? Did the owner carry it as a good-luck charm, like a rabbit’s foot?

  The ethereal white streak of a long whistle drew Jack’s attention to the sky. An arrow the size of a lamppost drilled through the mist, heading right for him. He let out a cry of surprise and jumped out of the way as it buried itself in the dirt.

  The sound of Jack’s own voice caught him off guard.

  “Great,” he said out loud, half in protest and half to confirm his suspicion. The ability to speak during a vision meant only one thing—Jack had stepped away from the safety of the fan’s observation point, putting his mind at risk of getting stranded in the memory. He had chosen the same risk at the alpine cave. This time it was an accident—unnecessary and much more dangerous.

  The only way out was to find a physical exit, as he had done by diving out of the cave. But this memory took place outside, and there weren’t a
lot of exits outside.

  A mounted man with black-and-gold robes over his armor had shifted his horse out of the big arrow’s way. The men around him aimed crossbows at the wall to return fire, but he waved a calming hand and spoke in a language Jack assumed was a form of Chinese. The men lowered their weapons.

  With a subtle change in his voice, the commander—the king, Jack decided—issued an order. A rider immediately shouted and waved a tall black flag. Matching flags answered from camp. Bells rang. The army pulled up stakes and backed away from the city. Shirtless warriors whipped oxen to drag the war machines up the slope, trailing green clouds as they went.

  A confused buzz of voices rose from the wall, and then a cheer.

  Had it been that easy? Was the king giving up merely because an archer had almost skewered him? As he wondered, Jack turned from the retreating army to see the king galloping toward the crest of the hill, the fan bouncing at his belt. The other riders turned to follow.

  The last time the events of a vision had separated Jack from an artifact—a famous ruby from England’s Crown Jewels—the whole vision had gone crystalline, threatening to trap his consciousness. Jack looked down. The soft black dirt turned to cloudy green stone and began creeping up his legs. He closed his eyes. “Not again.”

  “Aaaggh!” With a shout, Jack broke free of the jade and sprinted after the nearest rider, grabbing hold of the bridle. His heels bounced across crystalline formations growing out of the soil, inches from the pounding hooves. Grunting and growling, he clawed his way up the rider’s back, until he finally hauled himself into a semi-stable position behind the saddle.

  Neither rider nor horse acknowledged him. They were part of the memory, their every action predetermined by history.