The Dragon Lantern Read online

  “More immediate than blasting into a Mangleborn prison?” Archie said. “How close is it to Cheyenne?”

  “The lantern,” Mrs. Moffett said. “I take it you do not have it?”

  “No,” Archie said. “But we think it’s here. The fox girl took an airship from Ton won tonga, and it was headed to the Moving City of Cheyenne.”

  Mrs. Moffett nodded. “That fits the new information we have: that she is taking it to a criminal overlord in Ametokai, in the Japanese colony of Beikoku. We must find her before she leaves this city.”

  “But how?” Archie said. “She can make us see things that aren’t there.”

  “The Dog Soldiers,” Black Kettle said. “If she uses glamours, as Mrs. Moffett has told me, the Dog Soldiers will be able to see through them. They … have ways of seeing things others can’t.”

  Archie didn’t see how that was possible, but when Black Kettle called over the leader of the Dog Soldiers, Tall Bull, there was something about the way he looked through Archie that made him shiver. And that low, rumbling sound—was Tall Bull growling at him? He shrank back behind Mrs. Moffett, forgetting for the moment that he was invulnerable.

  “We will find this fox girl you speak of,” Tall Bull said, his voice a low whisper. “We also offer our services for your dog.”

  “Our dog?” Mrs. Moffett asked.

  “The steam man,” Tall Bull said. “We see the dog spirit within him. A little brown dog with a bandana. Your bandana,” he said to Clyde.

  “Y-yeah, that’s right,” Clyde said. “You can see all that?”

  “I told you, the Dog Soldiers see many things we don’t see,” Black Kettle said. “It’s the mushrooms they eat and the pipes they smoke.”

  “If you could see all that, why’d you attack us with the Howler-On-The-Hill?” Archie asked.

  “Dead dogs do not bite,” Tall Bull said.

  Archie saw anger flash in Clyde’s eyes the same way it had when Nahotabi had shot at Buster from Colossus. He squared off against the much bigger Dog Soldier like he might take a swing at him. “Buster didn’t mean nothing by it! He was just playing! It was just his instincts that took over!”

  “Which is why we will help you train your dog, if you wish,” Tall Bull said, not reacting to Clyde’s aggression.

  “Clyde, training Buster is a good idea,” Archie said. “He may be a little dog at heart, but he’s really a ten-story-tall steam man, and that makes him dangerous if you can’t control him.”

  Clyde calmed down. “Yeah. Okay. Training would be good. Thanks.”

  “Small Wolf will accompany you,” Tall Bull said, and a very tall, very thin Dog Soldier gestured for Clyde to follow him.

  “Uh, okay,” Clyde said. “So, you’re gonna be all right then?” he asked Archie.

  “Go,” Archie told Clyde. “It’s not like you can bring Buster in the city anyway.”

  “All right,” Clyde said. “Just whistle if you need us. I won’t hear it, but Buster will!” Clyde gave them a proper army salute and left with Small Wolf.

  “We will join you in the search for the fox girl,” Mrs. Moffett told Tall Bull.

  “No,” Archie said. “We should go check out this Mangleborn.”

  “You are not in charge here, Mr. Dent,” Mrs. Moffett said. “We search for the lantern.”

  “The Dog Soldiers know this city far better than you do,” Black Kettle said. “They will find your thief. If this Mangleborn is the threat my advisors say it is, isn’t it more important that we protect Cheyenne?”

  Mrs. Moffett’s frown turned into a radiant smile. “Yes. Of course. We’ll go there at once,” she said.

  Archie was glad she had made the right decision, but as he followed her out the door, he couldn’t help feeling that for some reason Mrs. Moffett cared more about the Dragon Lantern than the Moving City of Cheyenne.

  20

  The inside of the Mangleborn cave was tall and wide, just like the final room in Malacar Ahasherat’s puzzle trap in Florida. But this one was crooked. The walls were set at odd angles, the ceiling sloped from left to right, and the floor slanted from right to left. The cavern was carved out of brown rock, and its walls were decorated with primitive images of dogs. Coyotes. They were all dancing around something bigger, something thin and bent and gangly, in the shape of a coyote but standing like a man—a crooked man. Its arms and legs and neck were all cocked at the wrong angles, like all its bones were broken. Instead of fur, it had needles all over it, like a porcupine, and its crooked arms ended in long black claws.

  Archie ran his hand over the carvings and felt a shudder. Whatever this was, it was just beneath their feet, waiting to get out.

  Jandal a Haad, something whisper-sang in his head. Made of stone.

  Archie pulled his hand away.

  “What is it?” Mrs. Moffett said. “You can hear it, can’t you.”

  Archie nodded reluctantly. For some reason he shared a link with the Swarm Queen, Malacar Ahasherat, and that made him sensitive to the whispers and songs of the other Mangleborn. It gave him a connection to the very things he was supposed to fight.

  “Why was this done to me?” Archie asked. “Who did it?”

  “The Dragon Lantern holds the answers,” Mr. Moffett said. She stood in the middle of the room, arms crossed. “That’s what we should be focused on. Where is this engineer we’re supposed to meet?”

  “We found a place on the prairie,” Archie said. “On the way here. We found a place where Septemberists had used the Dragon Lantern on people. On kids.”

  Mrs. Moffett paled. “What?”

  “Sorry to be late!” a Cheyenne man in a black suit and vest called, jogging in. He slowed when he came to the great room with its bizarre images carved into the walls, like he could feel the evil. He took off his wide-brimmed brown hat and walked the rest of the way, watching the pictures on the walls.

  “Sorry,” he said again as he shook their hands. “Name’s Quick Hammer. It was my crew who found this place. At first we thought it might be Ancient Cheyenne, but then we saw the Latin.” He nodded to a giant seal on the floor, in which were carved the words DOMVM PRAVA. House … crooked? Crooked house. That would explain the walls and floor. There was a crooked man, who lived in a little crooked house, Archie thought, remembering one of the nursery rhymes his parents had hammered into him. The nursery rhymes that were the clues to unlocking the puzzle traps where the Mangleborn were kept.

  There was more to the crooked man rhyme. Archie had no idea what any of it meant, how any of the puzzle traps that led to the Crooked Man in his Crooked House were solved. None of it mattered now that the Cheyenne had accidentally blasted their way past all the traps with dynamite.

  “Bury it,” Mrs. Moffett told him. “Why haven’t you already? I saw the crates of dynamite outside.”

  “We were waiting on you, miss,” the engineer said, hat in hand. “And besides, we can’t just go blasting away.” He nodded at the floor again. “We do it wrong, and we’re as like to blow that cover there to pieces as we are to bring down the mountain. We were told that would be bad.”

  “Yes,” Mr. Moffett said. “That would be bad.”

  Bad was an understatement, thought Archie. If that seal broke, the Mangleborn would get free, and the Moving City of Cheyenne would be destroyed.

  “We’ve been surveying the cave, marking the right places to trigger a collapse,” Quick Hammer said. He pointed to painted red Xs all around the cavern. “Once we get it all plotted out, we’ll bore holes in the rock for the dynamite and bring her down.”

  “You should do it as soon as possible,” Archie told him. “And don’t let anybody else in here.”

  “Real shame,” Quick Hammer said. “We were going to bring the railroad tunnel right through here. We’ve had to go round. We’ll be hard-pressed to make next month’s deadline, but we’ll do it. Can’t have all those important folks standing around outside Salt Lake City with no Transcontinental Railroad to open.”

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bsp; “You seem to have everything well in hand,” Mrs. Moffett told him. “Carry on.” A Dog Soldier had just come into the cavern, and she glided over to him. Archie didn’t think anything would be “well in hand” until this Mangleborn was good and buried, but he left Quick Hammer and hurried to Mrs. Moffett’s side.

  “The Dog Soldiers have treed our fox,” Mrs. Moffett said. “It’s time to collect the lantern.”

  * * *

  The fox girl wasn’t up a tree; she was up a gear—the giant spoked Wheel of the Sun that turned at the heart of the Moving City of Cheyenne. She sat in between two of the cogs like she was riding a Ferris Wheel, and she was almost all the way to the top. On her back was slung the canvas bag with the Dragon Lantern in it. Behind her, in the spaces between cogs farther down the gear, sat pursuing Dog Soldiers.

  “Is that safe?” Archie asked.

  “Not entirely,” Tall Bull said. “But it is a Cheyenne rite of passage to ride it from one side to the other.” The gear was like Cheyenne’s main street, running right down the middle of the city, and they stood on the wide sidewalk on one side of it. Expensive shops, restaurants, and hotels faced the big turning gear on either side. A tunnel formed by the hollow axle in its hub allowed people to pass from one side to the other. “Lovers, too, like its views at night,” Tall Bull added. “And its privacy.”

  Archie couldn’t believe anyone would ride that high and that exposed for fun, but the Dog Soldiers seemed as comfortable on the big wheel as the Illini did on the swaying gangplanks of Cahokia in the Clouds.

  The fox girl reached the very top and began her long, slow descent down the other side, where more Dog Soldiers waited for her. But the girl had other plans. She stood and got herself balanced, facing away from them toward a smaller though still enormous gear that turned nearby.

  “She’s going to jump!” Mrs. Moffett cried. “If she gets over there, she’ll be seven levels above us. We’ll lose her again!”

  Tall Bull dispatched a pack of Dog Soldiers with a hand signal, and they ran for an elevator. But they were going to be too late. As the Wheel of the Sun moved her closer to the other gear, the fox girl got ready to jump.

  “Knock her off,” Mrs. Moffett told Archie.

  “With what?”

  “With your fist! Knock her off!”

  Archie hesitated, worried about damaging the big wheel, but decided it was bigger than he could smash. He reared back and punched the big brass wheel with all his strength. THOOM-OOM-OOM-OOM! it echoed. The blow shook it just enough to throw off the girl’s balance as she jumped, and she missed the gear she was aiming for and tumbled through the air, crashing through a canvas teepee roof and disappearing into a building on the other side of the Wheel of the Sun. There were Dog Soldiers on the other side, but not near the building where she had fallen. Tall Bull and his men raced for the tunnel in the center of the wheel.

  “They’ll never make it in time,” Mrs. Moffett said. She backed up, got a running start, and leaped through one of the empty spaces between the Wheel of the Sun’s spokes, soaring to the other side. Archie ran to the gap to follow her across, but pulled up short. There was no way he could make that jump. The Wheel of the Sun had to be fifty feet thick. How in the world had Mrs. Moffett been able to do it?

  Archie followed Tall Bull and his men through the tunnel. The building the fox girl had fallen into was a clothing shop called “Brook Bros. By-Spoke Tailoring.” The Dog Soldiers were almost to the door when suddenly the wooden deck beneath them began to rattle and shake. The air was filled with an incredible wail, like a fire engine siren, and the shaking intensified. Everyone on the sidewalk stopped, trying to stay on their feet, and shoppers up and down the promenade screamed.

  “Earthquake!” Archie heard someone yell. An earthquake? Here? In the Moving City of Cheyenne? The shaking got worse, and Archie fell down. Glass windows shattered, wood splintered, and metal groaned. Then, as suddenly as it had started, the wailing and shaking stopped, and the city was still and quiet again but for the rumble of the Wheel of the Sun and the cries of the injured.

  Tall Bull helped Archie to his feet.

  “Does that happen often?” Archie asked.

  “No,” Tall Bull said. “Never.”

  One of the Dog Soldiers cried out, and they turned. The conical roof on top of the clothiers exploded in a burst of flames as a gas line broke, and the second floor of the shop started to go with it. Archie rushed for the front door.

  “You can’t go in there!” Tall Bull called to him. “It’s going to collapse!”

  “Mrs. Moffett’s in there!” Archie called back. “I have to save her!”

  Archie ran inside. Mr. Moffett was hurrying for the door, but the ceiling above her shuddered, shifted, and collapsed. Mrs. Moffett was knocked to the floor, but Archie caught the roof before it could crush her.

  “Mrs. Moffett! Mrs. Moffett, are you all right?” Archie yelled.

  “Yes—yes. I’m all right,” she said, her voice hoarse. “The fox girl—she was here, but she got away. You must—you must go after her!”

  Archie held the burning ceiling above him. The fire didn’t hurt him, and the weight was nothing, but he knew it could break apart in his hands any second now. “Are there any more people inside?” he asked.

  Mrs. Moffett coughed. “I don’t know,” she said. “Forget them. Get the lantern!”

  “Get to the exit!” he told her.

  Moffett crawled away, and Archie tossed the burning wreckage into a wall full of men’s suits. He would go after the fox girl, but not before he made sure there was no one left in the building. Archie climbed the burning stairs to what was left of the second floor, but he found no one, not even bodies. Fire raged throughout the shop, and he heard the sirens of fire airships. The staircase collapsed as he turned to go, and he jumped out a window into the backstreet instead. The boardwalk cracked as he landed, but it held.

  Huddled in a doorway across the alley were two men and three women wearing tailors’ tape measures around their necks like scarves.

  “Were you in there?” Archie asked. “Did you see a girl with a fox tail?”

  “No,” one of the women said. “But there was a Dog Soldier. He ran upstairs just before the earthquake started. He helped me get out from under a sewing machine that had fallen on me, then got us all out to the fire escape before the gas line exploded. I’d be dead now if it wasn’t for him.”

  Archie knew no Dog Soldiers had been in the building with Mrs. Moffett and the fox girl. That could mean only one thing. “Where’d he go?” Archie asked.

  The woman pointed to a spiral staircase down to the next level, and Archie ran for it. It collapsed when he was partway down it, crashing down on itself for three levels before spitting Archie out in a heap of twisted brass and broken wood into a Harley–Dancing Sun monowheel factory. He looked up into the face of the startled fox girl, and she dashed away.

  “Wait!” Archie called, but she had already jumped into one of the monowheels. It roared to life, and she tore off through the factory, knocking over tables full of parts as she struggled to steer the thing. Archie chased her until she smashed through a wall. Sunlight spilled inside the factory, and the monowheel went sailing through the air. It slammed down onto the hard ground of the prairie, wobbled, balanced itself, and sped away.

  Archie ran to one of the railed balconies along the edge of the city, where he watched the monowheel tear off into the distance, trailing dust and smoke behind it. Around the balcony from one end ran Mrs. Moffett; Tall Bull and the Dog Soldiers ran around from the other side, growling menacingly at him. Archie didn’t understand—were they mad about him letting the thief get away, or because she had torn up five levels of a city block?

  “She’s getting away!” Mrs. Moffett cried, and Archie heard the scary anger in her voice he’d heard before at the Cahokia Arms.

  “We’ll catch her!” Archie said. He put his fingers in his mouth and blew a sharp whistle, and in moments the bald bras
s head of Buster the steam man appeared in front of them, whistling happily.

  “You called?” Clyde’s voice boomed from the steam man.

  “Clyde! Buster! The fox girl, she’s getting away in a monowheel!” Archie pointed at the dust and smoke in the distance.

  “We’re on it!” Clyde said. “Deploying aeronaut scout!”

  The hatch on top of Buster’s head flew open, and Sings-In-The-Night climbed out and spread her great black wings.

  Beside Archie, Mrs. Moffett gasped. “No—no, it can’t be!” she cried. She put her hands up and took a step back like she had seen a ghost.

  Sings-In-The-Night froze, staring at Mrs. Moffett. “Mina?” she said.

  Archie’s skin iced over. Mina was the name of the girl Sings-In-The-Night said had been the leader of their Forged League, one of the children the Septemberists had experimented on. The one who had turned on the humans in Beaver Run, killing them all and destroying their town.

  Mina.

  Philomena Moffett.

  “But—but I saw you die!” Sings-In-The-Night said.

  Archie took a step back toward the Dog Soldiers, and they growled again. But they weren’t growling at him, he realized at last. They were growling at Mrs. Moffett.

  Mrs. Moffett turned on Archie and the Dog Soldiers, her eyes wide and wild. She wasn’t just angry; she was insane. She rose as if lifted by hot air balloon, and that’s when Archie saw them—thick, purple-black tentacles, dozens of them, writhing out from under her enormous floor-length bustle. One of them whipped out, wrapped around Archie’s neck, and tossed him over the side. Sings-In-The-Night caught him before he hit the ground, and Buster caught the Dog Soldiers as she threw them over the side too, but none of them could do anything to stop her from taking a deep breath and shrieking at the mountains they were passing by. Her scream was an ear-splitting wail like the one Archie had heard during the earthquake, and now he knew where it had come from. Tentacles wrapped around the rail, chest thrust forward, fists clenched at her side, Mina Moffett emitted a howl from her throat that warped the air like waves of heat and ripped up the ground like a steam plow. Her shriek widened, churning up more and more ground until it hit the mountain, shaking rocks loose in an avalanche.