The Dragon Lantern

by Alan Gratz

  It was all Hachi could do not to cry. How could she not live a life dedicated to avenging her parents’ deaths? Why had she been allowed to live, if not to see that justice was done? She saw the way other people lived, how Fergus lived, full of happiness and hope and aspirations, and knew that was a life she could never have.

  The next card was the Seven of Swords. It showed a person carrying five swords over their back, with two more stuck in the ground. “Your pursuit of Blavatsky will be tricky. And dangerous,” Laveau said. “You must be cautious. If you rush in like usual, you will fail. You must come at the problem from a new direction.”

  Hachi wasn’t too happy to hear that. Charging in was what came naturally, and what she did best.

  “But you will succeed,” Laveau told her, “through determination, skill, and”—she moved a hand to the next card, a young man riding a clockwork horse: the Knight of Cogs—“the help of one who loves you.”

  Hachi was very aware of the fact that she was holding Fergus’s hand right then.

  The next card was an upside-down Five of Swords. A warrior in the foreground held three swords, while two warriors with their backs turned walked away, their two swords on the ground. “But though you find justice,” Laveau said, “you will still be confused and hurt. You will find the answers you seek … but there is one known to you who already has them.”

  “What?” Hachi said. “Who?”

  Marie Laveau pointed to the next card: the Strongman.

  “Archie?” Fergus said. “What’s he got to do with anything?”

  “I don’t understand,” Hachi said. “Archie doesn’t know anything about it, or he would have told me.”

  “The Five of Swords says that deep down, you already know the answers,” the old woman said. “You just don’t want to face them.”

  “But I do want to face them,” Hachi told her. “I want to know why my father was killed. I want to do something about it! Why wouldn’t I want to face it?”

  “Because of this,” Laveau said. She pointed to the next card, a picture of a tower being struck by lightning. Flames poured from its windows, and a man and a woman fell out of it to their deaths on the rocks below. “The Tower means big changes. Catastrophe. When the answers come, they will ruin everything. They will change your life, completely and forever.”

  Hachi pulled her hand away from Fergus and shrank back. No—no, learning what happened to her father was a good thing. It was the only thing. How could knowing what really happened be worse than not knowing?

  “But with destruction comes a rebuilding,” Laveau said.

  “Like New Orleans,” Fergus said.

  “Yes,” said Marie Laveau. “Exactly like New Orleans. The Maker understands. That which is torn down can be built up again. But only you can do the rebuilding, Hachi.”

  She moved her hand to the next card—the Five of Cogs. In the picture, a black-cloaked figure stood with her back to them, her head bowed in despair. On the ground at her feet were five gears, three with broken cogs and two that were perfect. “The Five of Cogs is a card of choice,” Laveau told her. “Three of her gears are broken, yet she refuses to see that she has two good ones left. She can continue to mourn over those she has lost and stay where she is, or she can celebrate what she has left and move forward.”

  Marie Laveau pointed to the next card: the Queen of Swords. They had come full circle.

  “The choice will be yours, Hachi Emartha.”

  Hachi shivered. What was the secret of Chuluota? What did Archie have to do with anything? What had happened there that was so awful that learning it would destroy her so completely? And when the time came, could she rebuild herself? Would she even want to?

  Marie Laveau stood. The taller of her two assistants took her arm to steady her, and the smaller of the two collected the cards off the table. Their audience with the Voodoo Queen was at an end.

  “I will meet you at the palace,” Laveau told them. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must … change for the evening.”

  10

  The mood in Colossus had definitely changed.

  The soldiers in the 7th Steam Man Regiment didn’t joke and laugh as they had before the crash. Many of them nursed injuries that kept them from being able to move about easily within the steam man, and instead of sitting in the galley during their down time, they stayed at the forward hatches, searching the terrain ahead of them for more tricks and illusions as Colossus pursued the fox girl.

  It was the same on the bridge. Custer stood quietly by the right eye—the one that still had a glass window—watching the horizon. Lieutenant Pajackok, one of his legs bandaged and splinted, went over his maps again and again, constantly checking in with the advance scouts who flew ahead of them. All three of the aeronauts were in the air, and would be, Archie guessed, for the rest of the mission. Even Buster was quiet, looking up at Archie sleepily while Dull Knife and Clyde kept them walking along. It was already past dusk and creeping on toward night, and ordinarily they would be stopping to make camp. But they had lost the trail of the fox girl’s steam mule in the delay repairing Colossus, and Custer was trying to make up for lost time.

  “How is she able to do it?” the captain asked. He didn’t turn around, but Archie could see the reflection of his face in the glass.

  “Make us see things?” Archie said. “I don’t know.” He bent low to scratch Buster’s tummy. “I only ran into her once before, in Cahokia in the Clouds. She made me see all kinds of stuff—fake walls, crowded sidewalks, a bear.” Pajackok looked up at that one, then quickly went back to reading his maps. “Then she blew me up.”

  That made Custer turn.

  “But there’s something about her power,” Archie went on. “It cuts out whenever she’s surprised or stressed. There were times her illusions disappeared, and I was able to see her as she really is. I think.”

  “We’ll just have to surprise her the next time we see her then,” Custer said.

  “That may be sooner than we think,” Lieutenant Pajackok said. He put a hand to the headphones he wore. They were connected by rubber tube to the steam man’s “ears”—big inverted speaking trumpets that funneled sound inside Colossus’s head. “It’s the Screaming Eagle. They’ve spotted a bonfire.”

  Archie could just hear the hint of the aeronauts’ trumpets on the wind through the open left eye. Pajackok gave Dull Knife a new heading, and Colossus turned to the north.

  “I see it,” Custer said. “Magnify.”

  The bonfire the aeronauts had spotted was a glowing orange dot on the horizon until Lieutenant Pajackok activated the right eye’s optics. A series of telescopic lenses slid out of the hull just above the right eye, magnifying the view each time. Click! Click! Click! When they were all in place, they could see into the low, round canyon that held the flames, even though they were still half a mile away.

  The bonfire wasn’t a bonfire. There were flames, but they were red, not yellow and orange. Blood red, like the moon. The flames spiraled around a human effigy half as tall as a real man, made out of bundles of sticks. Where the head would have been was an enormous horned animal skull, like that of a buffalo, but much larger and more hideous.

  Around the burning buffalo man, a giant herd of buffalo snorted and stomped, stampeding in a circle like they couldn’t escape its orbit. Circling around them, lurching and dancing in time to some unheard song, were perhaps two dozen men and women, First Nations and Yankees alike. Their clothes were tattered and torn, and on their faces they wore grotesque masks—crudely carved things with bloody buffalo horns and matted fur that hung from their masks like shaggy beards.

  And tied to the stick man in the very center of it all was the fox girl.

  “Is that her?” Custer asked.

  “Yes,” Archie said, mesmerized. He didn’t know which part of the whole thing was the most bizarre. Buster, wakened by all the action, barked at the image on the eye.

  “Quite the show she’s putting on for us this time,” Custe
r said. “But we’re not going to be so easily fooled. And she’s made a mistake hiding out in that canyon with only one way out. Mr. Pajackok, signal the regiment to make ready for ground assault, then have the aeronauts take up points west-northwest, east-northeast, and west-southwest. Mr. Tahmelapachme, move Colossus in to take the fourth point, east-southeast of the circle, pointed toward the entrance, but come to a stop just outside it.”

  Archie moved closer to the window and frowned at what he was seeing. The fox girl had always made him see people, but they had been normal people, doing normal things—businessmen and nannies walking the gangplanks of Cahokia in the Clouds, a Sioux raiding party attacking from the north. This—this was just weird. How was she hoping to sabotage them with this illusion? And there was another thing—

  “Why would she show herself?” Archie asked out loud. Custer looked at him. “I mean, why show her real self?”

  “You said she showed you her real self in Cahokia,” Custer said.

  “But only when she was surprised. What if…” The thought was almost as outlandish as the scene in Colossus’s telescopic eye, but he had to say it. “What if what we’re seeing isn’t an illusion at all? What if it’s real?”

  Everyone else on the bridge looked at Archie like he had suddenly put on one of those masks and started dancing around.

  “I’m just saying,” Archie said, “I’ve seen some pretty weird stuff before…”

  Custer shook his head. “She’s tricking us again. Luring us in. Or trying to. But I’ve got a few tricks up my sleeve too. For whatever reason, she’s shown herself to us, and I’m not going to let her slip away.”

  Colossus rocked to a stop, and Archie stumbled as he tried to readjust. “All stop, Captain,” Dull Knife said.

  “Mr. Tahmelapachme, you and Clyde will stay on Colossus. Mr. Pajackok, you’ll take half the regiment into the canyon and circle around to the east, leaving a man every two hundred yards. I’ll take the other half of the regiment into the canyon and do the same to the west. When we’re all in position, I’ll give the signal, and we’ll close in on her from all points.”

  “You’re not going to take Colossus in?” Archie asked.

  “She can slip away from us too easily that way,” Custer said. “We’ll surround her on the ground, and then close in like a net. By the time she knows what we’re up to, we’ll have her fenced in and there’ll be no place for her to run, no matter what she makes us see. Mr. Dent, you’re with me.”

  Archie explained the situation to Mr. Rivets as he switched out the machine man’s talent card for a Protector card. He wanted the Tik Tok and his nonhuman eyes with him.

  “I wish you could see what’s out there from here, and tell us if it’s an illusion,” Archie said. “Instead we’ll have to wait until we’re up close.”

  Dull Knife lowered Colossus into a squat, and Archie climbed down a ladder onto the ground with the rest of the regiment. Lieutenant Pajackok had already given them their assignments, and each of the soldiers carried oscillating rifles in their arms and rayguns in the holsters at their hips. They looked brave and ready for battle, but Archie knew from the mood before on the steam man that they were nervous and scared.

  “This girl, she can fool us. Make us see things that aren’t there,” Custer told his men. “We all saw things with our eyes that weren’t there the last time, and most of us have the bumps and bruises to prove it,” he said, lifting the arm he carried in a sling. “But we’ve got her surrounded this time. No matter what you think you see, you ignore it—unless it tries to run. That’s our quarry. Everything that isn’t trying to run away is make-believe. Understand?”

  The men nodded, and Custer waved them into action. Archie and Mr. Rivets followed along behind the captain as he spread his forces out in a wide half-circle. When they met up with Lieutenant Pajackok on the other side, Custer told him to give the signal. Pajackok blew a bugle, and high above them the three aeronauts fired off flares that lit up the dark canyon with brilliant white light.

  “Master Archie,” Mr. Rivets said. “I see them—the madmen, the buffalo, the fire, the girl. I can see it all.”

  “Wait, what?” Archie got a sick feeling deep in his stomach. “It’s real?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Captain Custer!” Archie cried, but Custer didn’t hear him. He was already yelling for his men to charge.

  Archie caught Custer by the arm. “No! Wait! It’s not an illusion! It’s all real!” Custer looked down at him in horror, but it was too late.

  Shadows emerged from the darkness, oscillators raised, and ran toward the bizarre scene. They charged in among the crazy dancing people, ignoring them like they had been told to, and everything went wrong all at once. The dancers, driven mad by whatever that grotesque skull was in the center of everything, jumped on the soldiers, riding them to the ground in a hail of raygun blasts and screams. Archie ran into the fray, punching one of the insane revelers and sending her flying before she could stick a dagger into Private Inola’s back. Another madman jumped on Archie and tried to bite him before Inola blasted him with a raygun.

  “They’re real!” Inola cried. “They’re all real!”

  It hardly needed to be said now. Custer’s men were taking heavy losses—losses they could have avoided if Custer had just waited a moment longer to give the signal. Archie pulled one of the cultists off another soldier and threw him into the darkness, but the soldier was dead. This was all going horribly, horribly wrong.

  And then it got worse.

  Behind them, the buffalo at the head of the stampede stopped, and the buffalo following them plowed into them. But instead of trampling each other, they melded. Like pieces of molten iron, they stuck together, fusing with each other into one gigantic, monstrous, many-headed, many-legged beast. A stampede become a single creature.

  A buffalo herd Manglespawn.

  The creature bellowed with an unearthly roar, towering as high as the canyon walls and flickering red and brown from the light of the mystical fire. The insane dancers who remained broke off their attack and began dancing again, some of them moving so close to the monster that they were trampled.

  The few soldiers who were left backed away in fear.

  “Shoot it! Shoot it!” Archie cried. One or two golden raygun blasts lanced out in the darkness, but most of the men ran. The Manglespawn lurched after them, howling and trampling people, and Archie ran up to it and punched it. The monster staggered back on its dozens of legs, bellowing again, but it just rolled over onto different legs and charged anything that moved.

  Archie found Custer in the chaos, staring at the bright red flame in the center of the clearing. Archie grabbed his arm. “Bring in Colossus!” Archie cried. Custer said nothing. He just kept staring at the skull and the flames. “Captain! Call in Colossus!”

  It was useless. Custer was mesmerized. For all Archie knew, he was going to start dancing around with the cultists. He spied Lieutenant Pajackok struggling to his feet and hurried to help him.

  “You have to call in Colossus!” Archie told him.

  Pajackok nodded. He staggered a few feet away and blew on his bugle. In the distance, Archie could hear the giant legs of the steam man begin to piston their way toward them, and he sighed with relief.

  An explosion lit up the air, and Archie flinched. Pajackok had called in the aeronauts in too. They dropped bombs on the Manglespawn, sending it stampeding around the clearing. Another explosion flared, and the buffalo creature turned and charged the effigy in the center.

  The effigy with the fox girl still tied to it.

  Archie had forgotten all about her.

  “Master Archie! The girl!” Mr. Rivets called.

  “I see it! I see it!” Archie called back. Together they converged on the effigy, the Manglespawn still bearing down on them. Archie ripped apart the ropes that bound her and handed her down to Mr. Rivets, but they were too late. The Manglespawn was right on top of them, and moving too fast for Archie to diver
t it. He grabbed the girl and turned his back to the monster to protect her, and then—WHAM!

  The Manglespawn hadn’t hit them. But what—?

  Colossus! The giant steam man stepped over them and took another swing at the Manglespawn, connecting with a left hook. WHAM! The monster bellowed and rolled backwards, its dozens of little buffalo legs wiggling in the half-light like a centipede on its back.

  Archie cheered and turned back to the fox girl.

  “Are you all right?” Archie asked her.

  The girl was in shock, but she was still able to nod. Up close, Archie saw her red fur ears and tail twitch in fear, and he knew then that this girl really was part fox.

  “They—they weren’t fooled,” she stammered. “The crazy people. They—they could see right through my glamours. They caught me. Tied me up. They were going to sacrifice me to that thing!” she said.

  Colossus was still hammering on the monster with one hand while the other disappeared into its arm. Dull Knife was transforming the other arm into a raycannon.

  Archie took the girl by the shoulders. “The lantern,” he said. “Where is it?”

  That brought the girl back to her senses. “Safe,” she told him, and then suddenly she was one of the cultists, a big hulking man in a grotesque mask. Archie broke away, scared in spite of himself.

  “Don’t let her go!” Mr. Rivets said. “She’s still right there!”

  The big madman jumped on Mr. Rivets’s back with the speed and grace of someone much smaller, and suddenly she was the fox girl again.

  In her hands was a pair of daggers.

  “No fair peeking,” she said, and she buried the daggers in Mr. Rivets’s eyes.

  11

  Mr. Rivets was a machine man and could feel no pain. He didn’t cry out as his glass eyes shattered, but Archie did.

  “Nooooooooooooo!” Archie screamed.