The Dragon Lantern Read online

  “I know you’re there,” he said. He held his hands out, trying to feel what he couldn’t see.

  “You’re not bad at playing chase,” she said. The voice came from behind him, and he turned again. “But I grew up here. I know all the backstreets and secret staircases. It’s been fun, but I can’t play anymore.”

  “Why not?” Archie said. “Stay and play.” She seemed to like being chased. Maybe if he could convince her it was a game, she wouldn’t disappear for good, and he’d have a chance to catch her.

  “Can’t. Sorry,” the girl said. She was somewhere else now. Near the door?

  Archie wanted to keep her talking. “Why not?” he asked.

  “Because you might be invulnerable, but I’m not.”

  What did that mean? “I’m not going to hurt you,” Archie said. “I just want—”

  And then he heard it. A hissing sound, coming from his backpack. The sound of gas escaping. Oxygen, from the canister he’d used to breathe from on top of the balloon. When she’d been on his back, she must have pulled loose one of the tubes.

  Fergus’s warning came back to him suddenly: Don’t let the lamp near the oxygen. That would be bad.

  Boom bad.

  Archie scrabbled to turn off the lamp at his shoulder, but too late.

  There was a sucking sound, like water down a drain, and then—

  THOOM!

  Archie’s backpack exploded, blowing a hole in the wall of the warehouse and shooting him out into the clouds.

  5

  Archie blinked awake and put a hand up to block the high, bright sun. He was lying on his back in a hole in the ground, covered with dirt. Where was he? How long had he been here? How did he get here?

  Then he remembered: the fox girl. The explosion. And the fall. The 20,000-foot drop. He’d blacked out on the way down. The hole he was lying in must be the hole he’d made when he hit the ground.

  Hit the ground from 20,000 feet up and survived. Again. A new personal best, he thought ruefully.

  Something round and dark blocked the sun, and he moved his hand away to see it. It was a balloon—a small, upside-down tear-shaped one, and from it hung not an airship but a man. An Iroquois man in a United Nations cavalry uniform.

  “I’ve got ’im!” the man yelled to someone else. “I’ve got ’im, and he’s alive!”

  Archie heard a bugle blare, and then another, and soon the ground began to shake. Thoom. Thoom. Thoom. Thoom.

  No, Archie thought. That sound— He struggled to sit up as dirt rained down on him. Those heavy footsteps, that pounding noise—he’d heard something exactly like it once before, in the underground puzzle traps that held Malacar Ahasherat imprisoned.

  It was the sound of a Mangleborn coming.

  A long, wide shadow fell over him in the hole, and Archie scrambled to the top, ready to fight. But what stood over him wasn’t a Mangleborn. It was a steam man. A giant steam man, as tall as a skyscraper.

  It leaned over to peer at him, and Archie saw a blond Yankee in a cavalry uniform peering out at him from behind the enormous glass eyes of the steam man. The man lifted a speaking tube to his mouth, and his voice boomed out through a speaker in the machine man’s mouth.

  “Archie Dent, I presume. Captain George Custer, U.N. 7th Steam Man Regiment,” the officer said by way of introduction. “Mrs. Moffett said we’d find you in a big hole in the ground, and by Hiawatha, there you are. Hang about and we’ll get you out of there.”

  Custer nodded to someone behind him, and the giant steam man reached down and scooped Archie out of the hole with a brass hand as big as a room.

  Mrs. Moffett was waiting for him in Cahokia on the Plains, and so too were Hachi, Fergus, and Mr. Rivets. Archie had been unconscious for hours, giving them all plenty of time to realize what had happened and to come below to find him. But the real work of searching for him had been done by Captain Custer and the aeronaut corps attached to the Colossus, the ten-story-tall steam man that had delivered him back to Cahokia. Archie descended from the giant steam man with its captain, wearing a steam-cavalry jacket that was ten sizes too big for him. His coat and shirt had been blown off in the explosion.

  “I am relieved to see you survived Master Fergus’s gyrocopter, Master Archie,” Mr. Rivets said.

  Fergus shot Mr. Rivets a frown, then turned to Archie. “Good to see you, kiddo. Told you you’d get right up from that fall.”

  “Found him half-nekkid in a hole about two miles outside the city, as the airship flies,” Custer said. “Or should I say ‘the boy flies’?” Custer tipped the brim of his broad, round steam-cavalry hat back on his head. He was a handsome, neatly dressed man, perhaps a little thin, with long, curly blond hair and a bushy blond mustache and goatee. His eyes were beady and sky blue, and his nose was long and sharp. He wore the dark blue jacket of the United Nations Steam Cavalry, with a red neckerchief tied tight around his collar and gold buttons down his front in two curving lines. A yellow stripe ran down the outside seam of his light blue steam-cavalry pants, and the shiny black boots he wore went all the way up to his knees.

  Custer ran a hand down his mustache to smooth it. “Gonna have to tell me how you managed that one, son.”

  “Later,” Mrs. Moffett said. Her eyes were dark and cold. “There’ll be plenty of time for that on the road.”

  “We’re going home?” Archie asked.

  “No. You’re going after the Dragon Lantern,” Mrs. Moffett told him.

  “But how do we know where she’s going? The fox girl, I mean?”

  “We checked all the outgoing airships,” Hachi said. “She wasn’t on any of them.”

  “So we got the idea to check the trains,” Fergus said.

  “She took a train?” Archie asked. “From Cahokia on the Plains?”

  “She bought her ticket with this,” Hachi said. She put a stack of dollar-sized slips of newspaper in Archie’s hand.

  “Ticket seller swore up and down she’d given him United Nations money with Hiawatha’s picture on it,” Fergus said. “Must have made him think that’s what he was seeing. He couldn’t believe it when he opened his till and pulled out scrap paper.”

  “Why not take an airship wherever she was going?”

  “Well, for one thing, we were checking them all,” Hachi said. “And she had to know that.”

  “And if you’re going to go west this time of year,” Fergus said, “you most definitely do not want to be taking an airship.”

  Custer nodded. “Tornado season.” He picked an invisible piece of lint off his sleeve and gave it a brush. “Rip an airship right outta the sky. Want to get as far as the coast, you take a train to Cheyenne and catch it moving south. From there you gotta take an airship again. Leastways until they finish that Transcontinental Railroad.”

  “The three of you will leave right away on Captain Custer’s steam man,” Mrs. Moffett told them. “I will follow by train. Captain Custer assures me you can catch her train before it reaches Kansa City.”

  “I’m not going,” said Hachi.

  “What?” Archie said.

  “I’m not going,” said Hachi again. “The Pinkertons found Blavatsky in Louisiana. Her name is Helena Blavatsky, and she’s set herself up as some kind of magician at the court of Queen Theodosia. I bought us three tickets to New Orleans on the next steamboat down the Mississippi.”

  “Three tickets?” Archie asked. He pulled Hachi aside, and Fergus and Mr. Rivets came with them. “Hachi, we can’t go to New Orleans now! We have to go after the fox girl and get the Dragon Lantern back.”

  “I went after it once, and I brought it back,” Hachi said.

  Archie reddened. “Oh. So it’s my fault it got stolen, is that it?”

  Hachi softened. “I didn’t mean it like that. I just mean that I was willing to do this when I didn’t know where Blavatsky was. Now I do.”

  “But we have a job to do. We have a responsibility to the Septemberist Society. We’re the League of Seven.”

 
; “You and Mrs. Moffett keep saying that,” Hachi told him. “But where are the other four?”

  Archie glanced imploringly at Fergus, but he looked away.

  “Look, Archie, we may be a League of Seven, or we might not be,” Hachi said. “But I’ve waited my whole life for a lead like this, and I’m not going to put it off for a second. Not for the League of Seven, and not for any Septemberist Society.”

  “What about for a friend?” Archie asked. “This lantern thing is supposed to have something to do with who I am and where I came from. I need you.”

  “I kind of thought that’s why you would come with me to New Orleans,” Hachi said.

  They all stood there for a moment, the three kids and Mr. Rivets, without saying a word. Archie knew Hachi was right to go after Blavatsky, and he knew he should be going with her. But he also knew he had to get the Dragon Lantern back, and that she should be coming with him. But they couldn’t do both at the same time.

  “I … I can’t,” Archie said. “I have to go after the lantern.”

  “And I have to go after Blavatsky,” Hachi said.

  Which just left Fergus. Archie and Hachi looked at him, and he stepped back and raised a finger at them. “Oh nae, don’t put me in the middle!”

  “You have to choose who you’re going to go with,” Hachi told him. “Unless you’re going off on your own too.”

  “Nae! We’re a team, the three of us,” he told them. He looked into their faces, but the looks there told him neither of them was going to back down. Fergus deflated like a ripped airship balloon.

  “Well, I … I suppose I have to … crivens.”

  “It’s okay,” Archie told him. “I know you’re going to go with Hachi.”

  Fergus looked heartbroken, which was exactly the way Archie felt. But as soon as he knew they were splitting up, he had known that Fergus would go with Hachi. Fergus cared too much about her to let her go off alone.

  “I’m sorry, mate. Truly, I am,” Fergus said. “Anyway, it’s not like you need the help. You’re unbreakable.”

  By sticks and stones, maybe, Archie thought. But their words hurt. He wanted to cry, but he fought it off. He was already the youngest. He didn’t want them to think he was a baby too.

  “We’ll find you when we’re done, eh?” Fergus said. “We’ll take care of this Blavatsky lady and you’ll get hold of that Dragon Lantern, and we’ll meet back halfway in between. Somewhere in Texas, eh? Where’d be good, Mr. Rivets?”

  “According to Avery’s Library of Universal Knowledge, there is rather a large city called Houston, near the Gulf of New Spain,” Mr. Rivets said. “Named for the first president of the Republic of Texas, Sam Houston, the city boasts—”

  “That’ll do, Mr. Rivets,” Archie said.

  “Houston it is, then,” Fergus said. “Last one there buys the ice cream. They do have ice cream in this place, don’t they, Mr. Rivets?”

  “Unknown, sir.”

  Archie looked sheepishly at Hachi. He didn’t know what to say.

  “Are you going to kill her? Blavatsky?” he asked.

  “No,” Hachi said, surprising all of them. She put a hand to the long, ugly scar on her neck she’d gotten the night Blavatsky and the others attacked her parents’ village. “I’m going to get her to tell me everybody else who was at Chuluota, and what they were doing. Then I’m going to kill her.”

  A steam whistle blew somewhere across town, toward the river.

  “That’s our ship. We have to go,” Hachi said.

  “Okay. So…,” Archie started, but suddenly Hachi was hugging him. He hugged her back.

  “Be careful,” she whispered.

  “I will. Careful—”

  “‘—is your middle name.’ I know.” She pulled back from him and smiled. Hachi smiling was something that Archie was still getting used to.

  “We were so good together,” Archie told her.

  “We will be again,” Hachi told him. “You can help me get the rest of them.”

  Archie nodded. “I hope you find what you’re looking for,” he told her.

  “You too,” she said.

  The steam whistle blew again, and Hachi picked up her bag and walked away. Archie was surprised she didn’t say good-bye, but then maybe he understood not really wanting to say it.

  Fergus laughed. “I’ll say it. Good-bye, mate, and good luck.” Fergus shook Archie’s hand. “Don’t worry. I’ll watch over her.” Fergus clapped him on the shoulder, then picked up his bag to follow Hachi. “We’ll be back together again before you can say ‘locked sprockets,’” he said as he backed away.

  “Locked sprockets,” Archie said, but it didn’t work.

  He watched them go until it was just him and Mr. Rivets on the sidewalk.

  “You’ll come with me, won’t you, Mr. Rivets?” Archie asked.

  “Of course, sir. Always.”

  Philomena Moffett rejoined him.

  “Hachi and Fergus aren’t coming,” he told her.

  “I see,” she said. “Well, it’s disappointing, but you and Captain Custer’s regiment should be enough to do the job. Come along, Archie. You have an appointment with a giant steam man.”

  6

  The United Nations Steam Man Colossus was ten stories tall and made of gleaming brass. Two blue-uniformed soldiers hung from ropes off its shoulders, buffing it to a blinding shine. You had to crane your neck to see its head, a two-story brass dome with two enormous glass windows for eyes, each as tall as a man. Across its wide round face was the thin line of a mouth, almost like it was smiling. The steam man’s broad chest was dotted with hatches—gun ports, Archie guessed—and two powerful-looking arms hung from ball joints at its shoulders. The upper arms were brass pipes as wide as a person—wider, like the largest of the pneumatic post tubes, the kind Archie had personal experience with. Beneath them hung massive round forearms like cannon barrels with articulated hands at the ends. The chest ended at horizontal, canister-like “hips,” which led to two more brass pillars like the upper arms, and an even bigger pair of barrel-like boots that formed the top part of the feet. The steam man’s left leg was painted blue, with the white tree and four rectangles of the United Nations flag along the bottom like a tribal tattoo. Down its right leg, painted in big blue block letters, was its name: “Colossus.”

  “We’re ’bout ready to go,” Captain Custer told Mrs. Moffett. “Just loading the last of the water and coal in now.”

  Colossus stood up against a specially built scaffold, where a small army of workers loaded him with supplies for the journey.

  “You must catch that train,” Mrs. Moffett told him. To Archie she said, “Find the thief. Retrieve the lantern.”

  “This lantern,” Captain Custer said. “What is it that General Lee would give you a steam man and a whole corps of aeronauts to go after it?”

  General Robert E. Lee was the United Nations’ war chief, the leader of all their armies. He was also secretly the man who sat in the warrior seat on the current Septemberist council. Archie had seen him, along with Philomena Moffett, John Two-Sticks, Frederick Douglass, and the other council members, when he’d gone rushing in to tell them there was a Manglespawn in the basement of the Septemberist Society’s secret headquarters. General Lee was the sole reason Archie was getting a steam-man escort west.

  “It’s a weapon,” Mrs. Moffett said, surprising Archie.

  “It is?” Archie asked.

  “It can be,” Mrs. Moffett said. “You must not treat it lightly, Captain. Nor, under any circumstances, must you try to activate it once you reclaim it.”

  Captain Custer was pulled away to sign requisition forms, and Archie grabbed Mrs. Moffett’s arm.

  “It can be a weapon? You never said that before.”

  Mrs. Moffett looked at Archie’s hand on her arm, and he pulled it away.

  “Why won’t you tell me everything you know?” he asked.

  Mrs. Moffett sighed. “I’m sorry, Archie. I’m not trying to be myste
rious. The fact is, we just don’t know much about it. Most of the records were destroyed. But … I do know the lantern was used on you when you were a child.”

  “Used on me? How? When? I don’t remember that. Who did it? What does it do, exactly?”

  Mrs. Moffett put up a hand. “I don’t know. But I think it’s safe to assume that if it could turn you into … what you are, it is sufficiently dangerous enough to keep it from falling into the wrong hands.”

  “Like this fox girl? What do you think she’s going to do with it?”

  “I don’t understand her motives,” Mrs. Moffett said. “Nor do I care to. All that matters is that you retrieve it from her. Find the lantern, and you will find your answers.”

  Archie nodded, more resolute than ever.

  The steam man gave a piercing whistle, and the soldiers working on and around it started to disappear inside.

  Mr. Rivets joined Archie and Mrs. Moffett. “Sir, it’s time to board.”

  Custer came back and saluted Mrs. Moffett. “We’ll get your lantern back, ma’am. Don’t you worry none. We’ll watch out for this little feller too.”

  “Do not underestimate ‘this little feller,’ Captain,” Mrs. Moffett said. “He is stronger than he looks.”

  Custer squinted at him. “Tougher too, I reckon.”

  Archie felt uncomfortable under their appraising stares.

  “Mr. Magoro!” Custer called suddenly, and a boy with dark skin ran over to them. He couldn’t have been much older than Archie, but he wore a UN Steam Cavalry uniform like the rest of the regiment. Unlike Custer, though, he wore his sleeves rolled up, his collar open wide around a loose red neckerchief, and kept his uniform pants up with a pair of yellow suspenders. Over his shoulder he carried a half-full canvas rucksack.

  “Yessir!” the boy said, snapping to attention.

  “Mr. Magoro, give Mr. Dent and his machine man here a tour of Colossus, then report to your post.”

  “Yessir!” the boy said. He gave Custer a quick salute as the captain left to board the steam man.

  “Remember, Archie,” Mrs. Moffett said, “all that matters is that you bring that lantern back to me.”