The Dragon Lantern Page 6

  “I won’t let you down,” Archie told her.

  Mrs. Moffett smiled. “I know you won’t. Good luck.”

  “C’mon, we’d better get aboard,” said the boy.

  Archie gave Mrs. Moffett a little wave good-bye and followed the young soldier.

  “Name’s Clyde,” he told Archie and Mr. Rivets over his shoulder. “Nobody but Captain Custer and Mrs. DeMarcus ever call me Mr. Magoro. You got a name besides Mr. Dent?”

  “Um, Archie.”

  Clyde turned around and shook Archie’s hand while he walked backward. “Nice to make your acquaintance, Um Archie. That’s a joke. I know your name is just Archie, not Um Archie. Mrs. DeMarcus says that words like ‘um’ are just filler words. Three for engineering, Mr. Yellow Tree! How’s the missus?”

  It took Archie a moment to realize Clyde had shifted from talking to him to talking to the worker manning the elevator up into the scaffolding.

  “Cranky as a wind-up man,” Yellow Tree joked, and Clyde laughed.

  “That’s a fact! You can get inside through a door in the left foot, but then you’ve got to climb six stories up ladders through a lot of machinery,” Clyde said as the elevator rose through the scaffolding. Belatedly, Archie realized Clyde was talking to him again. “Easier to just take the elevator up to the main door in the engine room.”

  The elevator rocked to a stop, and Clyde led them out.

  “Be safe out there, Chief,” Yellow Tree told Clyde.

  “Will do. We’re the last ones aboard, Mr. Turtle At Home,” Clyde said to a man at the hatch to the steam man. “You can close him up when we’re inside.”

  “You got it, Chief,” Turtle At Home said.

  Archie stepped inside Colossus behind Clyde and found himself in a tightly packed room filled with pipes and gauges and levers. Turtle At Home closed the hatch behind them, and the heat hit Archie like a wet blanket. This was the steam man’s boiler room, and it was hotter than a sweat lodge. A narrow metal gangplank led them on a mazelike path through the machinery, and Archie followed along, eager to be out of there as soon as possible. Along the way, they passed two soldiers in grimy overalls—Cheyenne, Archie guessed—both of whom shouted greetings of “Chief!” when Clyde waved at them.

  “Engine room!” Clyde hollered back at Archie over the roar of fire, the clanking of gears, and the hiss of steam. “Hotter than a Cahokia summer, and believe you me, summer in Cahokia on the Plains is no picnic. That’s when you go up to Cahokia in the Clouds, if you’ve got the money or the means. Me, I’ve never been up there. Like Mrs. DeMarcus says, better to keep your feet on the ground than have your head in the clouds. Guess in Colossus I get to do both.”

  There were black people like Clyde in Philadelphia and New Rome, but not many. Mostly they lived in Haitia and Louisiana and New Spain. Archie knew they had once been from different tribes back in Afrika, but there were so few of them now in the New World they all just called themselves Afrikans. The few Afrikans in North America had been just as cut off from their old world as the Yankees had when the Darkness fell a hundred years ago.

  Archie wondered if they were all as talkative as Clyde.

  “You ever been inside a UNSM?” Clyde asked.

  “A…?” Archie asked, trying to keep up.

  “A United Nations Steam Man. UNSM.”

  “Oh,” Archie said. “Just when you picked me up.”

  “Only seven of these in service,” Clyde went on. “One here, two down in Choctaw territory, one up at Fort Detroit, and three up in Council of the Three Fires territory, mostly because of the Sioux. Colossus is the last and best, and that’s a fact.”

  Clyde led them up a ladder from the engine room, and Archie sighed with relief as the heat peeled away from them. The next floor up was long and thin from front to back, right about in the middle of Colossus’s torso. All along the wall were folded-up beds intermixed with rows of oscillating rifles. Four of the gun ports were open, letting in fresh air, and at the far end of the room Archie was surprised to see four soldiers—three men and a woman—eating dinner at a foldout table. A Yankee wearing a cavalry uniform and an apron stirred something in a big pot on a stove behind them.

  “Crew quarters, armory, and mess,” Clyde told them. “We eat in shifts. Early Dinner’s now. You’ll probably eat with the captain during Middle Dinner. All this gets cleared and becomes a gun deck whenever there’s action. Two bathrooms, over there. Shower there. Shower sign-up there. Only one shower a week, Saturday nights. Mandatory. Oh, should have mentioned it—rewinding cabinet for your machine man back down in engineering, right between the central drive shaft and the left arm torque bar.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Mr. Rivets said. “A most kind convenience.”

  “We got all the amenities, Mr. R. What’s the word, Mr. P?”

  The Yankee cook frowned. “The word is ‘harebrained.’”

  “Don’t mind him,” Clyde said. “He’s always grumpy. Mr. Inola,” he said to a Cherokee soldier at the table, “you’re all cleaned up. Got a new lady friend back in Cahokia?”

  The other soldiers at the table hooted and hollered, and Mr. Inola blushed through a halfhearted denial. In the hullabaloo, Clyde leaned in to one of the other soldiers at the table and passed him a small glass container from his backpack. “I got you a salve for that rash,” Clyde whispered.

  The soldier quickly tucked it away. “You’re my hero, Chief,” he said, then joined back in with the jokes and the laughter.

  Up above them, a steam whistle blew out a sequence of three notes that made Archie jump.

  “Uh-oh. Moving out. Better wrap this up quick,” Clyde said. He stowed his pack in a compartment underneath one of the bunks just as the room lurched sideways. Archie went tumbling, but Clyde stayed on his feet and none of the soldiers at the table lost a spoon. Archie was just getting up when the room hitched and lurched the other way, knocking him on his butt again. Another soldier climbed down from above, a broad-shouldered Choctaw with a pair of bandoliers filled with aether grenades across his chest and a long black ponytail down his back, and he laughed meanly at Archie’s clumsiness.

  Clyde jumped to help Mr. Rivets lift Archie to his feet as the room lurched the other way again. “Sorry. Just Colossus walking. Hardest thing to get used to. But you’ll get your walking legs in no time.”

  The Choctaw soldier snickered again and brushed past them, so close that Archie staggered again on the shifting floor.

  “Nice guy,” Archie said.

  “Yeah. I don’t know him yet,” Clyde said. “We picked up a couple of new recruits when we put in at Cahokia. He looks like a rough one, though, and that’s a fact. Come on. I’ll show you where you’ll be sleeping.”

  Archie wobbled to the ladder up to the next level and grabbed onto it like a drowning man grabbing a life preserver. He’d be lucky if he got his “walking legs” before the mission was over. Clyde scurried up the ladder and Archie followed, focusing on climbing one rung at a time.

  The third and final floor inside the steam man’s enormous chest had more bunks, though fewer than the crew deck. Its walls were mostly taken up with three personal balloons, like the one his rescuer had been flying when Archie woke up in his hole. You didn’t ride these balloons, you wore them. Usually they were big, round things that tapered down to narrow openings at the bottom, but right now they were mostly deflated. Beside them, three aeronauts—all Illini—worked at testing and tending to the compressed boiler backpacks they wore when they flew.

  “This is where the officers besides Captain Custer sleep and eat,” Clyde told them. “Just two of them on board: Lieutenant Pajackok, and Sergeant Two Clouds there.” He nodded to the female aeronaut. She nodded back and said, “Hello, Chief.”

  “What about you?” Archie asked, hanging onto the ladder so he wouldn’t fall over. “Everybody calls you Chief.”

  Clyde laughed. “That’s just my nickname. The soldiers gave it to me ’cause I chat up everybody on board like I’m
trying to get elected chief. I don’t do it on purpose. Mrs. DeMarcus says I was probably born talking. You think that’s possible? To be born knowing how to talk?”

  Another whistle sounded—this one less piercing and closer—followed by the canned voice of Captain Custer through a speaking tube from up top.

  “Sergeant Two Clouds, please deploy two scouts,” Custer said.

  Two Clouds pulled a speaking trumpet out from the wall and talked into it. “Two scouts, aye sir.” She nodded to the other two aeronauts, and they got themselves into their harnesses while she opened up big hatches in the roof. Archie saw blue sky through the holes in the steam man’s shoulders. The aeronaut scouts attached the ends of their balloons to hoses coming up through the floor—hot air from the boiler room, Archie guessed. The balloons inflated quickly. Meanwhile, the aeronauts put on belts with lots of pouches and heavy sandbags hanging from them, and clipped on bugles and oscillating rifles. As the balloons filled out, Archie saw that they were red on top and blue-and-white striped on the bottom, with names written in gold in between. One was called Chickenhawk. The other was called Clever Crow.

  In moments, the balloons were filled with enough hot air to pull the aeronauts off their feet. Tethers kept them inside until they did a final check of their gear. The scouts nodded to Two Clouds, and at her signal they pumped the portable bellows strapped to their chests to stoke their backpack furnaces, detached their tethers, and rose up into the air.

  “That is something I just never get tired of watching.” Clyde said. “Come on—I’ll show you the brains of the outfit. Sorry, Mr. R—I think you better stay down here. Not much room for you up top.”

  “As you say, sir,” Mr. Rivets said.

  Archie followed Clyde up a narrow ladder in the middle of the room, passing through the round, armored neck of the steam man. The head of Colossus was two stories tall, and the first of the two levels was a small round room with a retractable bunk, fold-up writing desk, wooden chest, and personal bathroom.

  “Captain’s quarters,” Clyde said in passing. “All this gets stowed when the mouth opens.”

  Archie noticed the thin line of light that crossed the far wall around knee-level—where the giant steam man’s lips parted, he guessed.

  “Can it talk?” Archie asked.

  Clyde laughed. “Naw. Colossus isn’t alive. He’s just a big empty robot. The mouth just opens to get stuff in and out. One time, we caught a Blackfoot pirate ship as it was flying away and we boarded it through here.” He nudged Archie. “Guess we put our army where our mouth was, so to speak. Ha-ha.”

  Clyde climbed on up to the top floor of the steam man. He was right—there wouldn’t have been any room up here for Mr. Rivets. There was barely enough room for Captain Custer, a navigator, the driver, and Archie and Clyde. As it was, Archie had to stand over the porthole to the captain’s quarters. He didn’t want to move around much anyway—the head swayed in the opposite direction of the body as Colossus walked, making Archie steam-sick.

  “Permission to show our guest the bridge, Captain?”

  Custer nodded. “But make it quick, Mr. Magoro. No wise words from Mrs. DeMarcus. We need you in your chair.”

  “Aye, sir. So that’s Lieutenant Pajackok, navigator,” Clyde said, nodding at an Algonquin soldier at a small table with a map spread out on it. “Mr. Pajackok, Archie Dent.”

  The navigator smiled at them. “Chief. Mr. Dent.”

  “And our pilot is Mr. Tahmelapachme.”

  The pilot sat in a padded chair with his hands on complicated levers with all kinds of buttons on them, and his feet strapped into brass pedals he was pumping like a bicycle. No—like a person walking. Colossus was moving in step with Tahmelapachme.

  “Call me Dull Knife,” the pilot said, not taking his eyes off the scene ahead of them.

  And what a scene it was. Archie had been up high before—in his family’s airship, the Hesperus, and even higher in (and above) Cahokia in the Clouds. But looking out through the eyes of Colossus was like being a giant himself, walking along in a make-believe world of little toys. They passed the edge of a forest to their left, the trees brushing against their legs like tall grass in a summer field. To their right was a low-slung, hill-like Pawnee earth lodge, the size of a doll’s house. Tiny toy cattle scurried away like overweight, spotted chipmunks, and two mouse-sized children scrambled to the top of the earth lodge to wave at the giant in their midst. Lieutenant Pajackok gave them a little toot-toot with the steam whistle, and they shouted and waved back happily.

  Captain Custer gave his lieutenant a mildly disapproving look. The navigator cleared his throat and muttered, “Sorry, sir,” but when Custer’s back was turned, he gave the boys in the cockpit a quick smile.

  The steam man lurched awkwardly, and everyone in the cockpit grabbed on to something to steady themselves.

  “Mr. Magoro, if you’re finished with your tour, we could use you at your post. Mr. Tahmelapachme is making a hash of it without you,” Custer said. “Easy march.”

  “Right away, sir!”

  Clyde climbed up into a small chair high above and behind everyone else in the cockpit and swung a snare drum around in front of him. From a pocket beside his chair he produced a pair of drumsticks, gave them a theatric twirl, and then started to beat out a march. Like magic, the pilot fell into a regular rhythm with his steps, and the rocking of the steam man smoothed out considerably.

  “Much better for all concerned,” Custer said without looking back at them. “All right. We’ve officially left United Nations territory. We have a Right of Passage treaty with the Pawnee, but we’ll have to watch our step from now on.”

  Literally, Archie thought as they stepped over a tractor.

  “Pretty great, isn’t it?” Clyde asked Archie as he drummed. “Best way to travel, and that’s a fact. Here—open this rearview hatch and see if they’re there.”

  Archie opened the little horizontal port. It was built for soldiers to look out of, and he had to stand on tiptoe to see out.

  “What am I looking for?” Archie asked.

  “The dogs.”

  Archie shifted his focus lower, and he saw them. There was a pack of them, as small as ants, all yipping and chasing the giant steam man like they were nipping at a steam carriage. Archie laughed.

  “They’re almost always there right after we leave town.” Clyde said. “I love it.”

  “They’re breaking off now,” Archie said. “Most of them, anyway. One little brown one is still chasing us.”

  Clyde laughed. “He’ll tucker out soon and we’ll lose him.”

  “Mr. Dent, you had better go below now,” Captain Custer said. “Settle in. Get some rest. I hope to catch the train by nightfall. Oh, and I’m planning on having Late Dinner in my cabin. If you can wait till then, you’re welcome to join me.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Archie said. “I will.”

  Clyde gave Archie a smile and a salute with one of his drumsticks, and Archie started the long, nauseating climb back down. Hachi would be right at home in the swinging compartment, he thought. And Fergus—Fergus would never have left engineering. He’d still be down there dissecting everything with the engineers.

  Archie wondered where they were now, and if they missed him. He certainly missed them. That, as Clyde would say, was a fact.

  7

  “A first-rate chicken,” Custer told the cook clearing their table. Clyde had called him Mr. P., but his full name was Parsons.

  Parsons grumbled something that might have been a thanks and might have been an insult and went back downstairs.

  Archie sat with Custer at the little writing desk in Custer’s small quarters in the steam man’s head. Custer had opened the mouth a couple of feet, and all through dinner they’d been cooled by the constant breeze of Colossus moving forward. Archie had also been treated to an incredible view of Pawnee territory as they pursued the train. At least he hoped they were pursuing the train; Custer didn’t seem to have them fol
lowing any train tracks.

  Custer glanced at himself in the mirror and smoothed his mustache before settling back in his chair with a cup of coffee. “So,” he said. “You still haven’t told me how you came to survive that fall from Cahokia in the Clouds.”

  Archie looked away, out at the advancing terrain. He had only known what he really was—the Jandal a Haad, “Made of Stone”—for a few weeks. In all that time, he’d told no one else besides Hachi and Fergus, Mrs. Moffett, and his parents.

  The people he called his parents, at least.

  Without realizing he was doing it, Archie put a hand to his arm, covering the crack underneath his shirt. The crack that showed there was nothing but stone underneath his skin.

  “You don’t like to talk about it,” Custer said.

  “No,” Archie said. “I’m sorry.”

  Custer nodded. “I understand. Mrs. Moffett says you’re something different. Something special. But you don’t want to be different and special, do you? You’d rather just be a normal kid doing normal kid things.”

  Archie nodded. Before he’d known what he was, all he’d wanted was adventure. Excitement. He’d gotten that, but the trade-off had been losing everything he believed to be true: that he was his parents’ son; that the Septemberist Society could handle any challenge the Mangleborn threw at them; that he was a human being. He’d been living a lie before, believing in things that weren’t real, but he found himself wishing he could go back to being boring if it meant he could be normal again.

  “So whatever this is that let you survive that fall, you hate it. You’re embarrassed by it,” Custer said. “Well, let me tell you a story, Mr. Dent. I, Captain George Armstrong Custer, was last in my class at West Point Military Academy. Dead last. The other boys laughed at me. Told me I was a joke. That I’d never earn my stripes. But I’m good at things they can’t grade you on. I’m a good leader of men. They may call me Iron Butt because I ride them hard and run a tight ship, but they respect me. They’d follow me into hell if I asked them to.”