The Dragon Lantern Page 17

  Cursing everything, Hachi took a lock of Blavatsky’s hair in her hand and sliced it off with her knife.

  Shing! Hachi heard the sound of a blade behind her and spun, yanking twice on her rope. It dangled uselessly in her hand. The other half, still connected to the airship, was held by a stout reveler in a skeleton costume and mask. In the reveler’s other hand was the machete that had cut her rope.

  The reveler laughed—a deep, booming chuckle—and Hachi knew immediately who it was.

  Baron Samedi.

  Hachi looked down at the lock of hair she held and saw that her hand was covered with black shoe polish. The hair was somebody else’s, painted to look black. Hachi spun the person she’d thought was Blavatsky around and stared into an old, weathered face she recognized from his portrait in the throne room. It was Aaron Burr—Theodosia’s father, and the first king of Louisiana—who’d died years ago.

  Baron Samedi—the real Baron Samedi—laughed again and tore away his skeleton mask.

  “Yes, it’s King Aaron!” Blavatsky said with Samedi’s voice. Blavatsky’s face was painted white, with big black circles around the eyes and vertical lines drawn on her lips like the masks on Laveau’s assistants. Like the string that sewed the zombi soldiers’ mouths shut. “I thought I’d bring the old fool back. A zombi king, for a zombi nation! And he makes a good stand-in for me too, don’t you think? Though there’s nothing like the original.”

  Hachi tossed the shoe-blacked hair aside and stood ready for whatever Samedi threw at her.

  “Not talkative, eh?” Samedi said. “What’s the matter, they cut out your tongue when they slit your throat? Oh—wait. No. I know exactly what happened,” Samedi said. He tapped his head with the point of his machete. “It’s all right here, in this fool Blavatsky’s head! Oh yes. I see what they did. Oho!” He laughed long and hard. “Oh, it’s too wonderfully terrible. I’m tempted to tell you, just to see the look on your face. That would take the steam out of you!”

  “Why don’t you tell me, then,” Hachi said.

  “Ho-ho! Brave girl. But then you would just kill this body, yes? And I’m not finished with it. No, I think I’ll wait—and so will you.” He tugged at the rope, and it shot from his hand back up into the air, leaving Hachi stranded with him on the float.

  “Now,” Samedi said. “I believe you came for a lock of my hair, yes? I thought my new old friend Laveau would be cooking up something like that.” Samedi, in Blavatsky’s body, crouched low and brandished his machete. “You’re a great warrior, Hachi Emartha. But are you good enough to defeat the Loa of Death?”

  “No,” Hachi said. “But I’m good enough to trick him.”

  Samedi yowled and clapped a hand to the back of his neck, but he was too late—Jo-Jo, Mr. Lion, and Freckles each had a lock of his hair. He swatted at them, trying to catch them, but they buzzed up and away from him into the air.

  “Enjoy the rest of your time in New Orleans,” Hachi told Samedi. “It’s going to be a short visit.”

  Hachi grabbed a rope, looped it around her wrist, and leaped off the prow, swinging like a buccaneer over the heads of the porters to the dragon float ahead of them. Behind her, she could hear Baron Samedi howling out a magic incantation.

  Hands caught her on the dragon float, and she fell into their embrace.

  “You give him a trim?” Fergus asked her.

  Hachi smiled up at him as her clockwork menagerie appeared, clumps of Samedi’s hair in their little mouths.

  “That’s my girl,” Fergus said.

  “Where’s Laveau?” Hachi asked.

  Fergus pointed to the stern, where a girl about Archie’s age leaned over the rail. Hachi looked at Fergus like he had a gear loose, but he shrugged. “Tell me it’s not,” he said.

  The girl turned, and Hachi saw Fergus was right. The girl was the very image of Marie Laveau, only younger still. Instead of the elegant white dress she had worn the night of the séance, she wore a simple white smock and a gold handkerchief tied over her dark hair, which hung down in the back.

  “You changed again,” Hachi told her.

  “Samedi’s already seen my older faces,” the young Laveau said. “I didn’t want him to recognize me too soon.”

  Hachi collected Samedi’s hair from her menagerie and held it out to Laveau. “This enough?”

  Laveau’s eyebrows went up. “Plenty. But we’d better get out of here, and fast. That spell he just cast—it’s to summon the dead.”

  “You mean all the zombi soldiers?” Fergus asked.

  “No. I mean all the dead Blavatsky didn’t already raise. He’s waking all the dead in New Orleans!”

  There was a scream on the edge of the crowd, then another, and the air was filled with panicked cries. Hachi clambered up a rope ladder to get a better view and saw hordes of zombi shambling into the crowd, clawing and biting anyone living.

  “Looks like this party just got ugly,” she called down.

  “It was ugly already!” Fergus said, zapping a zombi off the side of the float with a lektric blast.

  Hachi scrambled back down to the deck. “I’ll cut the lines!” she said.

  “Wait! We can’t leave all these people!” Laveau said.

  On the streets below, anyone who couldn’t get away was penned in, surrounded on all sides by flesh-eating zombi.

  Hachi cursed. Nothing was ever easy. “Get into the floats!” she cried, but no one could hear her above the screaming.

  Suddenly there was a bright blue-white flash, and all eyes in the crowd turned to Fergus, who stood clinging to a rope on one of the low walls. Lektricity still crackled between his fingers from where he’d generated the flash.

  “Everyone who isn’t dead already, get into the floats!” he announced, his voice booming down Canal Street through some kind of lektrical amplification. Hachi was impressed despite herself—he’d been experimenting with his powers. He had new tricks even she didn’t know about.

  The crowd got the message loud and clear, and suddenly their float rocked and sank as people grabbed the sides and climbed on board. Hachi and Laveau helped people onto the float while Fergus ran to the furnace, stoking it for more hot air. When they had all they could carry, they cast off their lines and rose into the air, the other floats not far behind them.

  “Now what?” Hachi asked Laveau as they stood together beside the rail.

  “Now we have to get Baron Samedi to eat salt,” she said.

  Below them on the street, the zombi hordes massed around Baron Samedi’s float, creating a moat of undead around him. Hachi sighed. They had his hair for Laveau’s voodoo doll, for whatever good that would do, but getting to Samedi again to make him eat salt—to make him do anything—was going to be even more difficult than before.

  Whatever they had to do, Hachi would do it. She knew now it was worth it, no matter what. Blavatsky had the answers she wanted. Samedi had seen them inside her.

  But for the first time, she wondered if she really did want to know. What could be so terrible—so much worse than what she already knew—that Samedi had almost told her just to hurt her?

  19

  The Moving City of Cheyenne was an impressive sight. It was an immense city of gleaming brass, stained wood, and iron girders, level upon level of houses and shops and offices shaped like the teepees the founders’ ancestors had lived in long ago when they roamed the Great Plains on horseback. Now the Cheyenne migrated with the buffalo and the seasons in their moving city, built on enormous wheels as tall as Buster. The giant wheels rode on massive steel tracks a half a mile wide, laid by Cheyenne engineers generations before the Romans rediscovered the New World. Driving the city, fueled by the raging furnaces that poured black smoke into the air day and night, was a gargantuan cog wheel called the Wheel of the Sun that eclipsed everything else. It ran down the middle of the city, rising high above even the tallest cone-shaped building like a second sun on the horizon. While the wheel still turned, the City of Cheyenne still lived, or so the sayi
ng went, and it was turning now, moving Cheyenne south before winter set in.

  Sings-In-The-Night was the first to see it, and she came flying back to Buster with the news. “It’s incredible!” she said. “I heard stories, but I never thought—never imagined!” It was as many words as she had said to either of them in the days since they had left Dodge City, but as quickly as she had appeared, she flew away again.

  Archie had tried to talk to her on the trip to draw her out. But she was still too scarred by what had happened twenty-five years ago, which for her, frozen in amber all that time, still felt like yesterday. One day she had seen her friends become monsters and watched them kill and be killed; the next she had awakened in Archie’s arms, where he’d immediately asked her to join his new League. He cursed himself for being such a flange. The only one she’d spent any real time with was Buster, flying off alone with him each night while he was “getting his wiggles out,” as Clyde called it.

  “She just needs time,” Clyde said, like he could read Archie’s mind. Even Clyde, with his smooth tongue and ability to make friends with just about anyone, had failed to get through the wall Sings-In-The-Night had built around herself. “It’s like Mrs. DeMarcus always says, time heals all—whoa!”

  Buster suddenly lurched, and Archie had to grab a brass pipe to steady himself. The levers and pedals bucked under Clyde’s hands and feet, like he was having trouble keeping control.

  “What is it? What’s wrong?” Archie asked.

  “It’s Buster. I don’t know what he’s doing, but—Buster! Heel! Heel, Buster! Heel!”

  Buster didn’t heel. He got down on all fours and bounded toward the City of Cheyenne, which had just become visible in the distance.

  The Moving City of Cheyenne.

  “Clyde—Clyde, he’s chasing it!” Archie said. “He’s chasing it like he did Colossus when he was a dog!”

  Buster gave a whistle-bark and ran headlong for the city. He was like a real dog chasing a steam car through town—only this dog was ten stories tall and weighed 100,000 pounds, and the car he was chasing could run over Dodge City and keep going.

  “Whoa, Buster! Heel! Heel, boy!” Clyde called out, but it was a lost cause. Buster’s greatest love was chasing things, and his instincts took over. The steam man ran up alongside the moving city, whistling and nipping at the thing’s wheels. It was so silly that Clyde started laughing, and soon Archie was laughing too.

  They stopped laughing when the raycannons started hitting them.

  Archie ran to the windows and looked up. “They’re shooting at us! They have raycannons mounted all along the wheel wells!”

  Clyde wrenched at the controls and managed to drag Buster away from the moving city, and they could see the powerful blue aether beams carving the ground around them. They could also see Cheyenne’s legendary Howler-On-The-Hill, the largest raycannon ever built, its barrel as wide as Buster’s head, slowly twisting their way from the top of the city.

  “We ain’t gonna survive that!” Clyde said. “We gotta let them know we come in peace!”

  Clyde got on the speaking trumpet, trying to get the attention of one of the lower gunners, and Archie threw open the hatch at the top of Buster’s head and hung outside, waving a white handkerchief. But Buster pulled away from Clyde again and ran in at the wheels, biting and barking, and the raycannons peppered them again. The Howler-On-The-Hill began to charge.

  Archie scanned the skies for Sings-In-The-Night and flagged her down.

  “I need you to fly me up there!” Archie hollered. “If they shoot that thing, Buster’s toast!”

  Sings-In-The-Night looked doubtful, like she didn’t want to get involved, but finally she swooped in, dodged a raycannon blast, and picked Archie up under his arms. With a mighty beat of her wings they were flying. It was all Archie could do not to whoop with joy, and he understood why Sings-In-The-Night spent so much time in the air.

  “Drop me up there!” Archie called, pointing to the deck where soldiers with painted faces and elaborate feather headbands were aiming the Howler-On-The-Hill.

  Sings-In-The-Night swooped down. Her great black wings beat more quickly as she landed Archie on the deck, as smoothly as if he’d just stepped out of bed. For a moment, the soldiers did nothing but stare incredulously at the girl with bird wings. Then, just as she shot back up into the air, they regained their senses and aimed oscillators at Archie.

  “Don’t shoot!” he said, raising his arms. “We come in peace!”

  The soldiers shot anyway. The rifle blasts burned for a second and torched his clothes, but they did about as much to his body as a stiff breeze. He put a hand up to his face to keep the beams out of his eyes and took a step forward.

  The soldiers stopped shooting and stared at him with as much wonder as they had Sings-In-The-Night.

  “I said don’t shoot! We come in peace,” he told them again.

  “Then why does your steam man attack our city?” one of them said.

  “He’s … he’s like a big dog. He’s not attacking. He’s chasing it. For fun.”

  The soldiers looked down at Buster, who was still running alongside the city, darting in and out along with the other dogs who chased Cheyenne. While they watched, he bit a brass railing and stripped it away, whipping it around the way he had the rock monsters in the canyon. The soldiers ran back to the Howler-On-The-Hill.

  “Wait wait wait wait!” Archie cried. “All we have to do is distract him; then my friend can get him back under control. I don’t suppose you have a big bone lying around anywhere, do you?”

  The soldiers stared at him out from under their feathered headbands.

  “Right, no. Of course not,” Archie said. His eyes fell on a flagpole at the top of the city, bearing the Cheyenne tribal flag: a bright blue background with a white gear on it. That would do! He snapped the pole off at the base, causing more stares from the soldiers. “Um, sorry,” Archie told them. “I’m just going to borrow this.”

  “Buster!” Archie cried. “Buster! Hey Buster! Fetch!”

  Archie was countless stories up—too far for any human being to hear him—but not too far for a dog. Buster looked up at him and whistled, and Archie hurled the flagpole like a stick, sending it hundreds of yards away. Buster suddenly broke off his pursuit of the moving city and sped after the flagpole, and the soldiers on the deck powered down the Howler.

  “So hey,” Archie said. “My name’s Archie Dent. I don’t suppose any of you have seen a girl with a fox tail anywhere, have you?”

  * * *

  The strangely dressed warriors were called Dog Soldiers, even though they looked nothing like dogs. They wore brown pants and moccasins and blue shirts, all covered by ceremonial beaded bone armor. Their faces were painted white below their eyes and black above, making their eyes disappear like they were wearing masks, and each wore a feathery headdress that looked like a turkey had exploded on their heads.

  The Dog Soldiers were silent as they marched Archie, Clyde, and Mr. Rivets to the council chamber at the heart of the Moving City of Cheyenne. Sings-In-The-Night had apparently had all the public contact she wanted for the week and had decided to stay with Buster, who was sleeping off his big adventure.

  All through the city, people stopped and pointed at Archie. Had everyone seen him throw the flagpole? Cheyenne was a big place. Word of his strength couldn’t have gotten around that fast, could it?

  The big room where the Cheyenne Council of Forty-Four met was dominated by a table in the shape of an enormous gear, with spaces in between the cogs for forty-four chairs. An elderly Cheyenne introduced himself as Chief Black Kettle and officially welcomed them to Cheyenne.

  “We are sorry for firing on your steam man,” Black Kettle said.

  “I’m the one who should be doing the apologizing, charging your city with a United Nations Steam Man,” Clyde said, shaking the chief’s hand. “He’s got a mind of his own. I gotta get Buster better trained, and that’s a fact.”

  One o
f the clerks passing through the room stared openly at Archie and whispered to a friend on the way out. Archie frowned.

  “You’ll have to forgive them, Mr. Dent,” Black Kettle said. “You’re something of a celebrity.”

  “Just for throwing a flagpole?” Archie asked.

  “Ah, no,” the chief said. “For your starring role in the dime novels. They’re very popular here. The League of Seven and the Peril of Standing Peachtree, and all the others. My grandchildren have read them all. Hachi’s their favorite.”

  Senarens! He was still writing pulp stories about Archie, Hachi, and Fergus. Before he was finished, everybody in North America would know their secrets.

  “Yes, you’re not exactly keeping a low profile,” said a familiar voice.

  “Mrs. Moffett!” Archie said. She swept into the room wearing a burgundy dress that once again covered her from top to bottom, billowing out into a bell-like bustle at the bottom.

  “When you didn’t return right away, I set out for Kansa City, hoping to meet up with you there,” she said. “That’s when word came from Chief Black Kettle that he needed the Society’s help with a little problem they’ve dug up cutting a tunnel through the mountains for the new Transcontinental Railroad.”

  Black Kettle frowned. “If you call stumbling onto a Mangleborn a ‘little problem.’”

  “A Mangleborn?” Clyde said. “One of them big monster things Archie was telling me about?”

  “Wait, you know about them?” Archie asked Black Kettle.

  “It comes with the job,” he told them. “I’m not a Septemberist, but we have people on the council who are. When we blasted our way into that thing’s prison, they found me fast enough to tell me what they knew.”

  “Blasted your way into a Mangleborn prison?” Archie said.

  Mrs. Moffett held up a hand. “Our more immediate concern is the Dragon Lantern.”