The Dragon Lantern

by Alan Gratz

  “We’ve been betrayed,” Archie said. “Again.” He stepped between his friends and the samurai. “I have to warn you right now,” he told the guards, “this isn’t going to work out so great for you. I’m—”

  Before he could say “invulnerable,” the floor dropped out from under Archie and he fell into darkness.

  24

  It was a dark and stormy night.

  Fergus watched through the window of Marie Laveau’s shop as a hurricane raged over New Orleans. The storm drains were handling the rain so far, but the streets were already little rivers. Soon there would be so much water that the storm drains would back up, and the city would be flooded. And if the levees that held back the Mississippi River or Lake Pontchartrain or the Atlantis Ocean broke …

  Fergus shook his head. From an engineering point of view, New Orleans seemed like a terrible place to build a city.

  “We have to stop Maman Brigitte,” Marie Laveau said. She was the middle-aged version of herself again and wore a much simpler white dress with a red-and-gold headscarf. Her two creepy masked assistants hovered in the shadows behind her.

  “But how?” Hachi asked. She was pacing the shop, her thoughts, as always, on her ultimate goal. “We can’t use Fergus’s salt vapor trick again. She’ll see it coming a mile away.”

  “We don’t even know where she is,” Fergus reminded her.

  “Maybe she’s sitting on Theodosia’s throne. She’s riding her body,” Hachi said.

  Laveau shook her head. “Maman Brigitte, she’s not like her husband. She doesn’t need to put on a show. We’re more likely to find her in a cemetery.”

  “Then we’ll search the cemeteries,” Hachi said, heading for the door.

  Fergus stepped in front of her. “Let’s come up with a bit better plan than slogging through cemeteries at night in the middle of a hurricane looking for a woman with a Manglespawn spirit riding her, eh?” he said.

  Hachi frowned, but she gave in. Fergus knew she would rather do something useless than sit around and do nothing, but she was also smart enough not to go spinning off like a loose shackle bolt.

  “Look, since we’re not rushing off to go kill an invisible beastie at the moment, maybe it’s time I gave you something,” Fergus told Hachi.

  He went to his satchel behind the counter and pulled out a small leather-wrapped gift.

  Hachi held it in both hands. “What is it?” she asked.

  “Well, the general idea with a present is that you unwrap it, and then you find out what’s inside it,” he told her.

  She frowned at him and pulled loose the knot. The leather fell away, and a little wind-up elephant with wings lay in the palm of her hand.

  Hachi choked back a sob and put a hand to her mouth. “Tusker! Tusker—you put him back together!”

  “I did better than that,” Fergus said. He took the tiny toy from her hand and turned the key that wound its mainspring. The little elephant awoke as if from a nap and took to the air, his little wings beating like a hummingbird’s. He trumpeted happily at Hachi and flew circles around her head.

  Hachi threw her arms around Fergus and squeezed him tightly. He could feel the warmth of her tears through his shirt. Before he knew what was happening, Hachi was kissing him, and then just as quickly it was over, and she was ducking away to dry her eyes. Fergus felt a tingle from his head to his toes, and only after a minute or two did he realize it had nothing to do with the lektricity he had stored inside him.

  “Thank you, Fergus,” Hachi said. Tusker landed in her hand, and she hugged him close. “I can’t—I don’t—”

  Fergus put up a hand. “Just remember he got broken because you were so obsessed with revenge you couldn’t see anything else—or anyone else—and promise me you won’t ever let that happen again.”

  Hachi was quiet for a moment. “I promise,” she said finally.

  The bell over the door trilled, and a dripping-wet Erasmus Trudeau hurried into the shop, followed by an equally large Haitian woman and two little round children.

  “I found her!” he announced.

  Hachi pulled her knife on the woman behind him.

  “Oh! No, chère. Dis not Maman Brigitte! Dis my wife, Cassandra, and my two darling daughters, Saraphina and Catheline. I bring them here to protect them.”

  “I thought you didn’t trust Laveau’s magical powers,” Fergus said.

  Erasmus looked chagrined. “Between Madame Laveau’s white magic and Maman Brigitte’s black magic, Erasmus choose Madame Laveau’s white magic.”

  “Your family is most welcome,” Marie Laveau said. She gestured to her two assistants, and they led Erasmus’s wife and daughters upstairs.

  “But you did find Maman Brigitte? Queen Theodosia?” Hachi asked.

  “Oh yes. She on de docks at Lake Pontchartrain, whipping up one helluva nasty storm.”

  “Why there? What’s she doing?” Fergus asked.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Hachi said. “Now that we know where she is, we can take her down. Erasmus, you’re amazing!”

  The Pinkerton agent smiled modestly and shrugged. “Finding people, dat is what I do. Most of de people, dey have left de city. But dere are some who stay, just like dey always do in de storms. Dey stay wit de Voodoo Queen.”

  Laveau nodded. “And we have to protect them. But to do that, we have to do the same thing to Maman Brigitte we were trying to do to Baron Samedi. We have to get close enough to get a lock of her hair to make a voodoo doll, and stuff her mouth full of salt.”

  “How do we do that when she can blow us away with a flick of her wrist?” Fergus asked.

  “We have to distract her,” Hachi said. She was pacing again, with Tusker still flying around her head. She looked up at the little elephant and watched him circle for a few seconds, and her face lit up. “I’ve got it!” she said. Hachi hurried to the wall of masks, but it was a hat she pulled down, not a mask.

  A black top hat.

  “What we need is Baron Samedi back.”

  * * *

  The rain blew sideways at the docks on Lake Pontchartrain, making Queen Theodosia’s gray hair clump together and wave beside her like she had a head full of snakes. The lake behind her chopped and churned, the brackish water crashing up onto the dock in tall white jets of spray. She stood with her eyes closed, a thick python snake slithering around and between her arms high above her head, entirely focused on creating the hurricane that was drowning New Orleans.

  Until Baron Samedi walked up from the city, riding a seventy-year-old Marie Laveau.

  He wore his black top hat and a black tuxedo, and had black circles painted around his eyes and black lines like teeth on his lips the way Blavatsky had during the street party. In one hand he carried a bottle of rum, and in his mouth he puffed on a damp cigar.

  Baron Samedi’s deep, booming laugh broke Maman Brigitte’s trance, and the wind and rain slackened as she stared at him in fear and amazement.

  “Who are you?” she yelled over the storm. “What is this trick?”

  “It is no trick, dearest wife,” Laveau said in Samedi’s voice. “Don’t you recognize your own husband?”

  Maman Brigitte staggered back on the dock and dropped her snake. “No—no! I kill you before you free! I send your soul to the Dreamplanes of Leng, where you be imprisoned for a dozen-dozen years!”

  “You think you can kill Baron Samedi so easily?” he said. “Baron Samedi is the King of Death! See now my army of the dead, come to kill you!”

  Out of the rain and darkness behind Samedi shambled a ragged zombi army, their clothes tattered and torn, their faces pale and gaunt. When Maman Brigitte saw them, her face went white and the heavy rain and wind dropped to a gentle gale.

  “Once upon a time, the goose drank wine,” Samedi sang, doing a little dance. “The monkey played the fiddle on the sweet potato vine. The vine broke, the monkey choked, and they all went to heaven on a nanny goat.”

  “No. No!” Maman Brigitte cried. “You dead! I kill
you! I kill you once, and I kill you again!”

  Maman Brigitte pulled a knife, but up behind her in the dark choppy water loomed an enormous steamboat, the sound of its paddlewheels and steam engines hidden in the storm. It rammed the dock—crash!—and the platform exploded, throwing Queen Theodosia’s body through the air like a sack of sugar. She hit the ground with a lifeless thud, and the steamboat’s drawbridge dropped on top of her, pinning her to the ground.

  Hachi ran down the drawbridge, followed by Fergus. Marie Laveau hurried to join them, followed by the hundreds of very alive people from New Orleans they’d recruited to play Baron Samedi’s zombi army.

  Hachi put two fingers to Theodosia’s neck and nodded. “She’s still alive.”

  Hachi shoved a handful of salt into Theodosia’s mouth and held it shut while Laveau cut a lock of the queen’s hair and pinned it to the doll she had hidden in her hat.

  “It worked just like you said it would,” Laveau told Hachi. “As soon as she thought Baron Samedi was back, nothing else mattered to her. Even the storm died down.”

  “Fergus gave me the idea,” Hachi said. She glanced up at him. “He reminded me what it is to be so focused on one thing you don’t pay attention to anything else around you. Maman Brigitte was so focused on killing Baron Samedi, she didn’t hear a steamboat chugging up behind her.”

  “Nice job playing Samedi,” Fergus told Laveau.

  “I ought to know him well enough by now,” Laveau said. “He and I go way back.”

  Fergus felt something crawl across his boot and jumped back as Maman Brigitte’s python slithered past. He shuddered. “Big snake,” he said.

  Laveau had just begun to dig the Maman Brigitte doll out of the Theodosia voodoo doll when one of the fake zombi behind them cried out and pointed at the lake. “Li Grande Zombi!”

  Out of the choppy black water rose the giant head of a snake, the black slits of its pupils glistening in the lightning from the storm. A forked tongue the size of the steamboat flicked out and licked the air, and with a hiss like a locomotive emptying its boiler, it opened its mouth and bared its glistening white fangs.

  The Mangleborn in Lake Pontchartrain had awakened.

  25

  “Slag!” Archie cried out before landing with a thunk. The trapdoor quickly snapped shut, and he was in total darkness.

  “Clyde?” he called. “Sings-In-The-Night?” Above him, he heard the scuffles and thrown furniture of a fight. Archie called his friends’ names again, but this time he heard nothing. They had probably been captured without him there to protect them.

  Anger rose in Archie, and he spun in the dark, peering hard to try and make out where he was. He felt out blindly until he came to a cold, damp, earthen wall, and he moved along it until he came to bars. A prison. An underground prison.

  Archie was getting seriously tired of being underground all the time.

  He felt the rest of the way around the room, and as he did, his eyesight got a little better. He was in a small cell, about six feet by six feet wide, with a high ceiling he couldn’t reach and a floor made out of dirt.

  He wasn’t going to be in here for long. Archie pulled his fist back to punch a hole in one of the walls when a voice in the darkness stopped him.

  “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”

  Archie spun. He recognized that voice. He’d heard it before in Cahokia in the Clouds, and again the night of Custer’s last stand. It was the fox girl.

  “You knock down that wall, and you’ll bring the whole place down,” she told him.

  “Why shouldn’t I?”

  “Because there are lots of other people trapped down here just like us, and you don’t want to kill them.”

  “Where are you?” Archie asked. He threw his arms out, trying to find her in the darkness.

  “I’m not in your cell,” the fox girl said. “I’m in the next one over.”

  She rapped on something metal, and Archie went toward the sound. On one of the walls was a small barred window. He could just see her fox-eared shadow on the other side.

  “You expect me to believe you’re in prison,” Archie said.

  “I am,” she told him. “I’m a prisoner of the Daimyo Under the City. He makes me steal for him, and when I’m finished, he puts me back here, in a cell.”

  “Right,” said Archie. “He ‘makes you’ steal. And just how does he do that?”

  The fox girl sniffed. “He … he has my father. If I don’t do whatever he says, he’ll kill him.”

  Archie frowned in the darkness. What she was saying was possible. But everything this girl said and did was a lie. Could he really believe what she was telling him?

  “Why don’t you just trick them, the way you do? Make them see a bear, or a Blackfoot raiding party, or a swarm of bees or something?”

  “The Daimyo Under the City knows all my tricks. He has meka-ninja guards. Tall, thin, black Tik Toks with red eyes and all kinds of weapons and no fail-safes.”

  “Yeah,” Archie said. “I’ve met one before.”

  “But it couldn’t beat you, could it? I’ve watched you. You’re super strong, and nothing hurts you.”

  Almost nothing, Archie thought, putting a hand to the crack in his arm. But he didn’t say it.

  “You’ll help me, won’t you?” the fox girl asked. “If you do, I’ll get that lantern back for you. I don’t care anything about it. I don’t even know what it is, or why it’s so valuable. All it does is shine a bright light.”

  “You opened it?” Archie asked.

  “Of course.”

  “Did it … did it do anything to you?”

  “Do anything?” the girl said. “No. It’s just a lantern.”

  “It’s not just a lantern,” Archie told her. “And I have to get it back.”

  “I gave it to the Daimyo Under the City. If you help me free my father, I’ll help you steal it back. Will you do it?”

  A number of colorful curses came to Archie’s mind, but he put his fingers through the bars and yanked the metal grate out of the wall for her to climb through.

  “I knew you’d help,” the fox girl said as she climbed in.

  “Just no funny business,” he told her. “And you get me the lantern first, and then I help you free your dad.”

  Up close, Archie could see the fox girl pout. “You don’t trust me?”

  “No,” Archie told her.

  The fox girl grinned. “Good. You’re learning already. My name is Ren.”

  “Archie,” he told her. He pulled the door off the wall of the cell as though it was made of cardboard and set it aside.

  “How did you get to be so strong?” Ren asked him.

  “How are you able to make people see things that aren’t there?” Archie asked.

  “I asked you first,” she said.

  “I don’t know,” Archie told her. “But it has something to do with that lantern. That’s why I want it back. What about you?”

  “I was born in the forest and raised by foxes.”

  “I thought you said you grew up on the streets of Cahokia in the Clouds,” Archie said.

  Suddenly the fox girl jumped on his back and wrapped her arms and legs around him.

  “What are you—what are you doing?” Archie cried.

  “The floor outside the cells is covered with glass so people can’t escape,” Ren told him. “I need a ride.”

  Archie took a tentative step outside and heard the sound of crunching glass.

  “Don’t you have shoes?” he asked.

  “They take them away from you when they throw you in here. Unless you come in through the ceiling like you did.”

  “What is this place?” Archie asked.

  “The Shanghai tunnels,” she told him. “They run for miles under the city, connecting all the coffee shops and sake bars and stores and hotels to the submarine docks. At first, it was just to catch people, knock them out, and sell them to sub captains. They call it “Shanghaiing” because most of them ar
e sailing for Shanghai, in Cathay, and no sailors want to go there. Too far, too long. And of course there’s the Darkness. But then everything else illegal in Ametokai moved down here too—the slavers, the prostitutes, the gambling halls, the opium dens. The Daimyo Above the City turns a blind eye to it all.”

  Archie grunted. “Maybe it’s time somebody took him down.”

  “I thought you only fought monsters,” Ren said.

  “What makes you a monster is what’s in your heart,” he said, telling her the same thing he’d told Sings-In-The-Night. “Not what you look like.”

  “Are you saying that for me, or to remind yourself?” Ren asked.

  Archie didn’t answer. They passed a small room stacked floor to ceiling with wooden shelves that doubled as beds, where a mix of Japanese, First Nations, and Yankees lay smoking opium through hookah tubes. In another room, a man took money from a sailor and pointed him to a woman on a bare mattress on the floor before pulling the curtain closed.

  From what Archie could see, there were a lot of monsters in the tunnels beneath Ametokai.

  “Turn right here,” Ren told him, “then take the second left.”

  “You know these tunnels awfully well,” Archie said.

  “I practically grew up down here,” she told him.

  “So which was it, you grew up here, or in the forest, or in Cahokia?”

  “Actually, it was in Don Francisco, in California.”

  “Everything you say is a lie, isn’t it?” Archie said.

  “No,” Ren said.

  “I’ll bet that’s a lie too.”

  “Do you know the Navajo story of the fox and the scorpion?” she asked. “A scorpion wants to get across a river, so he asks a fox if he can ride across on the fox’s back.” Ren shifted, climbing higher on Archie’s shoulders. “The fox says, ‘No way. You’ll sting me, and I’ll drown.’ But the scorpion points out that if he stings the fox, they’ll both drown. So the fox agrees, and the scorpion climbs on his back. Halfway across the river, the scorpion stings him. As the poison spreads through him, paralyzing him, the fox says to the scorpion, ‘Why did you do that? Now we’re both going to drown!’ ‘I know,’ says the scorpion. ‘I couldn’t help it. It’s in my nature.’”