The Dragon Lantern

by Alan Gratz

  “Come on,” Hachi told them. “I’ll stay one square ahead.”

  Archie and Fergus followed her, and Hachi waited for them to catch up each time she moved ahead. Right again, then up, up, and up, then left, then up again, and slowly they made their way through the maze toward the top.

  “What’s the rest of it?” Hachi asked.

  “The rest of what?”

  “The rest of the nursery rhyme. Let’s hear it again.”

  “Oh,” Archie said, focusing on his feet. “Let’s see. Um, ‘In the dark blue sky you keep, and often through my curtains peep, for you never shut your eye, till the sun is in the sky.’ Then the rest of it is kind of the same. ‘As your bright and tiny spark, lights the traveler in the dark, though I know not what you are, twinkle, twinkle, little star.’ Then the last stanzas are the first one over again.”

  “You never shut your eye till the sun is in the sky. So we’ve got until sunup to get there. No problem,” Fergus said.

  “We’ve got until sunup to get there and back again,” Hachi reminded him.

  “Oh. Aye. Moving right along then.”

  “Twinkle, twinkle, little star,” Archie said. “Why do they twinkle?”

  “It’s the atmosphere,” Fergus said. “The light from the stars gets all wonky when it comes through the air, making our eyes see it as a flicker. Doesn’t work the same way for planets. They’re closer, so they don’t—”

  Hachi screamed and spasmed, jerking back and forth on the rope in the next grid. Blue-hot energy crackled over her gloves and up her coat, sparking in the fur lining of her coat.

  Lektricity!

  “Hachi!” Fergus cried. He lunged for her and fell. Archie caught Fergus’s safety line with one hand and hung on to the rope maze with the other, using his massive strength to keep Fergus from falling. As though he were lifting a wooden toy at the end of a bit of string, Archie raised Fergus back up to Hachi.

  “Higher!” Fergus cried.

  Archie lifted him up until Fergus could stand again on his own and grab the rope that Hachi still clung to. As soon as Fergus touched it, the lektricity shifted from Hachi to him. Archie knew that right then, underneath Fergus’s layers of winter clothing, the black lines that covered his friend’s skin like tattoos were rearranging themselves, turning Fergus into a syphon for all the lektricity.

  Without the lektric charge to hold her to the rope, Hachi’s hands went slack and she fell.

  “Catch her!” Fergus cried.

  Archie fumbled for her safety line and caught it. Hachi jerked to a stop, and he hauled her back up.

  Fergus pulled his hand away from the lektrified rope. The blue-hot lightning followed him, finally disconnecting and slinking back into its hidden home in the rope.

  “Crivens! I thought I could wait out the charge, but it kept coming! What’s powering that thing?”

  “Here, help me get Hachi back up,” Archie said. She was awake, which was good, but she was still groggy. Archie lifted her higher, and Fergus helped Hachi get her hands back on the safe ropes in their grid.

  “So,” Hachi mumbled. “Planets don’t twinkle.”

  “What?” Fergus said. “Oh … yeah.”

  Hachi punched Fergus, but there wasn’t much strength in it. “You might have said so before I followed one.”

  Hachi leaned into Fergus, and he hugged her with one arm while he held tight to the rope with the other. Hachi and Fergus put their heads together, and Archie looked away. Blech. Hachi and Fergus had become close in their adventures together, and though neither of them said so, they were practically boyfriend and girlfriend. It always made Archie feel a little weird to see them when they got like this. But a little jealous of how close they were as friends too.

  At last they separated. “I don’t know how we’re going to tell the difference between our guiding light and the planets,” Fergus said.

  “Planets move. The light doesn’t,” Hachi said. “We may not run into any more in the right position to fool us,” she added, “but if we do, we’ll wait and watch.”

  “And all the while get closer to dawn,” Fergus said.

  “We should be moving, not talking,” Hachi said.

  “Are you sure you’re strong enough?” Fergus asked.

  In answer, Hachi climbed up to the next grid.

  “So, she’s strong enough, then,” Fergus said to Archie.

  Together they climbed, sometimes moving up, sometimes side to side, sometimes back down, but all the while working their way around and up the giant dome of helium. The sheer vertical face of the balloon gradually gave way to the gentle slope of the top of the balloon, and they crawled along on hands and knees, still clinging to the ropes so the wind wouldn’t tear them off.

  Archie heard someone scream, and he froze.

  “Crivens! What’s that?” Fergus asked. “There can’t be anyone else up here!”

  But someone was up ahead of them. Lots of someones, from the sound of screams coming to them over the wind. It sounded like someone being tortured.

  “I can see silhouettes against the stars,” Hachi said, crouching low. “Something’s coming. Something’s coming right at us!”

  Archie ducked with Hachi and Fergus, then remembered he was the Heracles, the strongman of the team. Whatever was coming, it was his job to meet it head-on so the others wouldn’t be hurt. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t scared. Still holding the rope, he raised himself up, closed his eyes, and turned his head away.

  “Honk-honk-honk!” the thing cried as it got closer.

  Honk-honk-honk?

  Something flapping and feathery smacked Archie in the face and he fell over, glancing up in time to see a big white bird launch itself off the side of the balloon and disappear into the dark night sky.

  “It’s birds,” he said. “Geese!”

  Fergus lit his oil lamp and shined it forward to have a look. The top of the balloon was covered with bird nests! There had to be hundreds of them, scattered here and there among the grid lines of the rope net that covered the giant balloon.

  “You know what this means?” Hachi said.

  “Aye,” Fergus said. “If this thing is covered with birds, it’s also covered with bird poop.”

  “No,” Hachi said. “I mean, yes, probably, but that’s not what I meant. Look at where they have their nests.”

  Archie scanned the nests, trying to see what Hachi saw. All he noticed was that the birds were packed into just a few of the grid squares, when they had lots more empty ones they could have been using. No—wait. He understood!

  “Oh, brass! They’re nesting in the grid squares that aren’t booby trapped!”

  “Exactly,” Hachi said.

  Sure enough, Archie was able to trace a path from where they stood all the way to the top, where something small and red glowed in the night sky.

  The Dragon Lantern.

  2

  A few snapping geese couldn’t hurt Archie, who had once been stomped on by a giant iron robot and gotten right back up again. But these geese were annoying enough. They honked and they flapped. They bit and they chased. By the end Archie was kicking the clacking things out of his way before they could bite him.

  And then they were there. At the very top of the balloon.

  At the Dragon Lantern.

  The geese didn’t nest here. There was something about it they didn’t like. Something about it that made Archie’s skin crawl. It was made of a shiny silver metal, like titanium, and shaped like a little house. A little Oriental house—at least the ones Archie had seen pictures of. The Mu artifact was a little bigger than a regular lantern, but rectangular instead of round, with a four-sided roof that curled up at each corner. At the very top, forming a handle, was a little dragon curled in a circle, and up the sides, climbing each corner like pillars, were four more snakelike dragons, all scaly and whiskered and breathing fire. Between them, in horizontal rows up and down the four faces of the lantern, were little shutters that looked like they co
uld be opened by degrees, letting out as little or as much as you wanted of lantern light.

  Or whatever this “lantern” held.

  “It’s a power source,” Fergus told them. “Not lektricity, or I’d feel it. But definitely energy. You can hear it.”

  Fergus was right. Archie could hear the thing thrumming. Or rather, he could feel it. It was like how your stomach felt when it was growling, but all through your body. Like it was alive. And hungry.

  Archie reached for the dragon handle, but Hachi grabbed his hand. “Let us check it for booby traps first.”

  Archie took a step back as Hachi and Fergus examined it. At last they gave the okay, but neither of them moved to lift it.

  That was Archie’s job.

  Archie took hold of the handle, expecting a shock, an explosion, a trapdoor—something. But except for an audible click of the lantern being removed from its custom-fitted base, there was no reaction at all. He lifted it and looked at it more closely.

  One of the dragons seemed to be laughing at him.

  “Clever, clever,” Fergus said. He was on his knees, examining the slot the lantern had come out of. It was filled with the same kind of lines that covered Fergus’s skin, what the Septemberist scientist Nikola Tesla had called “circuits.”

  “Whoever designed this, they used the energy of the dingus to power the puzzle traps,” Fergus said. “I don’t ken how they converted the energy to lektricity, but they did. That’s some serious blinking engineering there.”

  As astounded as Fergus was, Archie was sure that, given time, Fergus could reverse-engineer the converters—maybe even the lantern itself. Fergus was maybe the greatest tinker in the world. Or would be one day. That’s why he was a Leaguer.

  “Wish we could open it,” Fergus said.

  “Mrs. Moffett was very clear that we should not do that,” Hachi said. She took the lantern from Archie, slid it into a canvas sack, and clicked a lock through the grommets at the top, sealing it.

  “Aw, you don’t have to do all that,” Fergus said. “I just said I wished we could open it, not that I was going to.”

  Hachi gave him a look that told him she wasn’t so sure about that. “It’s not to keep you out,” she told him. “It’s to keep it safe and sound while we get back down.”

  Hachi opened Archie’s coat and latched the sack to his belt. She must have figured that even though he was a klutz, he had the best chance of keeping the thing safe. Archie had proven himself over and over again in their adventures together, but he still warmed at the thought of Hachi trusting him to do something right.

  “Well, getting back down should be a lot easier without this attached to the system to power it,” Archie said.

  “We could always take the gyrocopters,” Fergus said hopefully.

  “We climb down,” Hachi told them.

  “Aw, you’re never any fun,” Fergus said, and they started down for Cahokia in the Clouds.

  * * *

  The city of Cahokia in the Clouds had been founded long ago when one of the many airships that docked beneath the giant balloon kite first decided to stay. More airships joined it, creating a village in the sky, and as it became a trading post and waystation in the air, it continued to grow. Houses and lodges and shops that were never meant to be airships were hauled up by balloon, and Cahokia in the Clouds grew down from its old town center like a dripping stalactite in a cave. Some people said it was a mile tall—the Mile High City, they called it—but no one had ever really measured it. It was always changing anyway. Every day, new pieces were attached and old pieces sprouted balloons and floated away, moving up and down the city with the prevailing winds and real estate prices.

  Archie, Hachi, and Fergus climbed down a rope ladder into Level 1, the oldest of the Old Town levels. The locals this high up didn’t need oxygen masks, but if you didn’t grow up here, you could very quickly find yourself tired out and dizzy, with a clanking headache to boot. Most visitors stayed in Midtown, near the Cahokia Man, which was where their lodge was. It was a long way from Level 1 to Midtown, so Archie, Hachi, and Fergus waited for a cable car.

  Cahokia in the Clouds stayed where it was in the heart of the North Americas because of an enormous cable made of some material that, like the canvas and rope of the giant balloon, no one knew how to make anymore. It was ancient tech, a relic from a civilization long gone, and it ran 20,000 feet down through the middle of Cahokia in the Clouds all the way to Cahokia on the Plains, the ruins of a once-great city on the ground where the new city in the sky was anchored.

  Along that giant tether, the people of Cahokia in the Clouds had attached lifelines to the ground. One tube carried water up. Another carried waste down. Pneumatic tubes along its length connected the Mile High City to the air-powered, cross-continent postal network, and a gas main brought light to the city in the sky. But for getting people up and down inside the city itself, its clever Illini designers had built steam-powered cars that traveled along the cable like streetcars turned on their ends.

  A cable car came up through the platform in the Level 1 station, the corkscrew-like worm gear on its back squeaking along a greased, brass-toothed track on the tether. Six rows of red padded seats, a couple occupied by Cahokians on their way uptown, climbed past them until the bottom row was level with the platform. The cable car stopped with a clank, and a Mark II Machine Man like the Dent family’s Mr. Rivets (only this one wearing a brass conductor’s cap instead of a bowler hat) pulled open a metal gate for them to climb on board.

  “First-row priority seating is reserved for city elders and persons with disabilities,” the machine man told him. “This is a downtown cable car bound for Statue Park and Midtown. Next stop, Level 2.”

  It had taken them so long to crawl back down off the balloon that it was almost the morning rush hour, and Archie, Hachi, and Fergus boarded the cable car with a few commuters sipping coffees and reading newspapers. Level after level of floating city went by, until at last they came to the head of Statue Park. Literally. Hanging out away from the tether cable from the bottom of the giant balloon above, plumb with the ground, was the ugly head of the statue that Statue Park was named for. Archie leaned out to look down the length of the thing, which hung in a great wide space in the heart of Cahokia in the Clouds. It was more than a hundred levels tall, and surrounded on all sides by a ring of apartments and hotels with expensive views.

  The Cahokia Man, as the statue was called, was made of rough, reddish-brown stone. It was a grotesque imitation of a human man, with two squat, powerful legs, four thick, burly arms, and a flat, wide head that looked like it had been pounded down into his shoulders with a sledgehammer the size of the Emartha Machine Man Building in New Rome. The Cahokia Man had been hung here by whatever ancients had created the giant balloon-kite that bore it aloft, trussed up and bound like a prisoner to its own helium ball and chain. For centuries people had gazed up at the Cahokia Man and his giant balloon and wondered who he was supposed to be, and what had possessed the ancients to hang him 20,000 feet in the air. But Archie knew who he was, and why he was there.

  The Cahokia Man was a Mangleborn.

  Archie knew because his parents knew. They were researchers for the Septemberist Society, and it was their job to learn everything they could about the Mangleborn. When the Mangleborn rose, it was the League of Seven who came together and put them down again—the league the Septemberists had been set up to support. But the Mangleborn couldn’t be killed. At least, no one had yet figured out how to kill one. Instead, they were trapped. Imprisoned. Usually underground, sometimes underwater.

  And, very rarely, in the sky.

  The Cahokia Man’s real name was Antaeus. Like all Mangleborn, it fed on lektricity, the energy source in lightning, the power the Septemberists worked to keep the world from rediscovering lest the Mangleborn rise again. But in the same way that the Mangleborn Malacar Ahasherat had a connection to the insect world, so too did the Mangleborn Antaeus have a connection to the Earth
. As long as Antaeus touched the ground, it was unbeatable. The Roman League knocked it down, only to watch it get up again and again. At last, so the Septemberist legends went, the Roman League’s shadow and strongman, Heracles, held it off the ground while the League’s scientist, Daedalus, and their tinker, Wayland Smith, hooked it to the tethered balloon they had created to separate it from the Earth forever.

  Or at least as long as people left it alone.

  The story, of course, like most stories of the League and the Mangleborn they fought, had been rewritten over the centuries, in part because people forgot, and in part because people wanted to forget. Wanted to sweep the memory of the Mangleborn and their horrors under the rug of mythology. And so the League of Seven defeating Antaeus the earth elemental became Heracles defeating a wrestler on the way to one of his Twelve Labors, and a giant Mangleborn hanging in plain sight in the sky at the border of Illini and Pawnee territory became a tourist attraction.

  At the stop where they got off, a family of Wichita asked Archie to take their picture in front of it.

  Their lodge, located right across from one of the Cahokia Man’s lower armpits, was called the Cahokia Arms. Why Philomena Moffett had booked their rooms so close to one of the greatest monsters in the world, Archie couldn’t understand. It gave him the creeps. Maybe it was because Mrs. Moffett had never seen a living one the way Archie and Hachi and Fergus had, had never had a nightmare come to life in front of her. Just seeing a Mangleborn in his dreams had scared Archie so badly it had turned his hair completely white, and now for the last three nights he’d had to sleep with one right outside the window with a view they’d paid extra for.

  “We would have been here a lot sooner if we’d used the gyrocopters,” Fergus said as they went inside.

  “We would have been pancakes in Cahokia on the Plains if we’d used those things,” Hachi told him.

  The Dent family Tik Tok hurried across the lobby to welcome them back, and Archie smiled. Mr. Rivets was an Emartha Corporation Mark II Machine Man, the old brass kind that had to be wound with a key on his back and had interchangeable talent cards that let him do different specialized tasks. He was taller than the average person, weighed nearly a thousand pounds, and had a torso and head forged to look like a stout and redoubtable manservant, complete with riveted vest, tie, mustache, and bowler hat. He had been in service with the Dent family for nearly a hundred years, and had been Archie’s caretaker, guardian, and teacher his entire life. But more importantly, he was Archie’s best friend.