The League of Seven

by Alan Gratz

  “Gah!” he yelled, dropping to the floor. He cowered under the Great Bear’s pelt as the Tik Tok animal tore and slashed at him, its gears growling and screeching.

  Fergus raised his aether pistol, but Hachi stopped him. “No! The beams will just bounce off the reflective surface.”

  “Do something!” Archie cried. “Ow! I can feel that! Somebody get it off me!”

  “All right, I’ve got an idea,” Fergus said. “All we have to do is—”

  “Circus! Showtime!” Hachi cried. She leaped at the cat and sank her dagger in between the metal plates in the mechanical monster’s side. The blade ground and jerked against the thing’s clockwork insides, but it didn’t stop it. The clockwork cat turned to slash at her. Hachi rolled back and kicked it away, throwing it into the wall with a clatter of metal. Her clockwork menagerie flew with it, fluttering around its head the way they had with Mr. Shinobi. The cat swatted at them like a real cat leaping for butterflies.

  “Okay. Hold up. Here’s what we do—” Fergus said.

  Hachi leaped at the cat. They screeched and clawed and tore at each other, but the mechanical creature was too fast. Too wild. It bit and slashed through Hachi’s defenses. It cut her arms, her face, her chest. She chipped away at it, making dents in it and fouling its clockwork, but she was losing. She fell and the cat pounced, but something jerked it back. Tusker! The little elephant had the tiger by the tail. He flapped his wings and dug in with his feet, slowing the Tik Tok cat down just long enough for Hachi to scurry back to her feet. She got ready for another attack, but the cat spun and snapped at Tusker instead.

  Krunk.

  The mechanical cat crushed Tusker in its metal jaws and spit out the pieces.

  “Tusker!” Hachi cried.

  Fergus snatched the Great Bear’s pelt from Archie and tossed it over the cat like a blanket.

  “Grab the corners!” Fergus cried. Archie dove for one side of the pelt while Fergus picked up the other, and together they brought the ends up like a sack, the mechanical cat kicking and thrashing inside it. It was trapped.

  Hachi dropped to her knees beside the little broken elephant. “Tusker! No, Tusker—no, no, no, no.” She scooped him up in her hands, trying to see if he would be okay, trying to see if she could fix him, but he was smashed to pieces. Hachi wept—great, racking sobs that shook her. Archie and Fergus stood dumbly and watched, not able to let go of the pelt and not knowing what to say.

  The rest of Hachi’s clockwork circus were just as helpless. They fluttered around her trying to understand what was wrong with their companion. Mr. Lion paced back and forth in the air. Jo-Jo the gorilla grunted at Tusker like the elephant could still hear him. Freckles the giraffe prodded Tusker with her head, trying to get him to stand.

  “Hachi, I’m so sorry,” Archie said. The makeshift bag he and Fergus held sagged to the floor, and the mechanical cat’s feet touched the ground through the pelt. It sprang into the air, still inside the sack, and Fergus lost his grip. Archie held on, desperately yanking it back down and slamming the pelt to the floor.

  Krunk. The clockwork cat inside the bag stopped moving.

  All three of them waited a breathless moment before speaking.

  “Maybe it’s playing cat-and-mouse,” Fergus said.

  Archie jiggled the bag, trying to get a reaction from it. Pieces of metal rattled around inside. If it was playing dead, it was putting on a pretty good performance. Archie flipped the sack open and jumped back.

  The clockwork cat was smashed into a hundred pieces.

  “It got what it deserved then,” Hachi said. The sobs had stopped, but tears still ran down her face. She hadn’t left the spot where Tusker had fallen.

  Fergus examined the broken remains of the mechanical cat. “I thought the pelt was supposed to protect you from knocks and such,” he said.

  Archie frowned. Fergus was right. If the pelt protected whoever or whatever was wearing it from harm, how had the cat been smashed inside it? Archie had taken far worse hits in the battle at Lady Josephine’s, and there was no other way he could have survived that fall from the Hesperus. It didn’t make sense.

  The clockwork cat’s door snapped shut and they all jumped. Archie looked around at the dozens of other doors and tried not to panic.

  “There’s gotta be fifty doors in here,” Fergus said like he could read his mind.

  “We’ll never survive them all,” said Archie.

  “Nae,” Fergus said. He knelt beside Hachi. “Especially not if you go throwing yourself at everything that says boo.”

  “I was—”

  “You were getting yourself killed, is what you were doing,” said Fergus. “You blame yourself for your parents dying, or for living when they didn’t, both of which are slagging foolish, and now you’ve got a death wish. You might think you’ve got nothing to lose, but you do. You’ve got friends now, whether you meant to or not.” He took the smashed pieces of Tusker from her reverently. “So I’m telling you straight out: That’ll be enough of that. Either we all make it through, or none of us do. Aye?”

  Hachi wiped the tears from her eyes. “I suppose if I wasn’t around you’d be dead before the next puzzle trap.”

  “There’s that too,” Fergus allowed. “So no more flinging yourself into death’s pointy teeth, right?”

  Hachi nodded.

  Fergus opened the pouch he wore at his waist and slid the broken pieces of Tusker inside.

  Hachi whistled her circus—the three that remained—back to their places on her bandolier. She wiped her nose on the back of her hand and stood, scratching a deep mark on the door the cat had come out of.

  “What’d you do that for?” Archie asked.

  “So we don’t open the same door again next time.”

  “All right then. So which door do we try next?” Fergus asked.

  “Three, four, knock on the door,” Archie muttered. “What did you say yours was?” he asked Hachi.

  “Three, four, cry no more.”

  “Don’t seem like they have much in common to me,” Fergus said. “I wonder if we ought not to try one of those up around where the numbers are. More than likely one of them’s the one that’ll—”

  “Shhh! No—be quiet. Be quiet!” Archie interrupted. “‘Cry no more,’” he whispered. “Don’t talk.”

  When they were all quiet, Archie put an ear to the panel beside him. “I hear ticking!”

  Hachi tried one for herself and nodded.

  “Same here,” Fergus said.

  “We have to find the one with no ticking behind it,” Archie told them.

  Together they moved through the room, listening for ticking behind the panels and scratching a line down each one where they heard something. Hachi used her dagger. Fergus used a screwdriver. Archie listened and scratched his lines with one of the claws on the Great Bear’s pelt.

  “Here. I think I’ve got it,” Archie said, his ear to a panel in the floor. “I don’t hear any ticking behind this one. You guys try.”

  Fergus went first, and shook his head. Hachi put her ear to the cold metal plate. Nothing. They all looked at each other. Between them hung the unspoken question: Do we dare?

  “Archie, be ready with the pelt,” Hachi said. She took up an attack position with her blade. “Fergus, you get behind Archie.”

  “Aye,” Fergus said, limping for cover without argument.

  Archie took a deep breath and nodded. Hachi knocked. The door flipped open. Everyone tensed.…

  But nothing came out.

  Hachi inched her way forward to peer down inside, then relaxed.

  “It’s a ladder,” she told them.

  Fergus clapped his hands. “All righty then! I can’t wait to see what five, six will be!” He put his hands on Hachi’s shoulders and guided her toward the ladder. “But you go first.”

  29

  Hachi went first, followed by Fergus, then Archie. Fergus was slow going with his bad leg. He kept it locked straight, but it would slip
and he’d have to catch himself, hugging the ladder again and again. He muttered colorful curses under his breath as they descended.

  “Oy below,” he said. “No looking up my kilt now.”

  Hachi snorted.

  “Was that a laugh?” Fergus asked Archie.

  “I think it might have been.”

  “The real Hachi would never laugh,” Fergus said. “Quick, push her off! She must have one of them bug things on her neck!”

  “Ha-ha,” Hachi said. She helped Fergus down the last few steps of the ladder, and soon they all stood in a new room. It was small, rectangular, and all brass like the last, but there were no picture frames this time. The sides of this room were seamless except for a set of four dials on the far wall with something written above them in Latin: QVINQVE, SEX, NEC TIMIDVS, NEC AVDAX. Archie struggled to remember his Latin lessons with Mr. Rivets.

  “There are no bones,” Fergus said. “That’s good, innit? Must not be too dangerous then.”

  “Or no one’s made it this far,” Hachi said. She had just taken a step across the middle of the room when the door they had climbed through slid shut and became part of the ceiling again. Something deep within the wall clanked, and the floor lurched and began to move. It slid slowly toward the wall with the dials on it, dragging them with it.

  “Or they got crushed to powder down there in those gears!” Archie said. He pointed at what the moving floor was uncovering: massive, spinning gears that would chew them up if they fell in.

  “Locked sprockets, do you see that?” Fergus said, pointing at the clockworks. “That’s a gear train there. And look—it goes out underneath the walls. And there, that’s a ratchet wheel! See how it disappears there? The whole place must be made of clockworks. We’re only seeing a tee-ninsy part of it.”

  “We’re going to be seeing a lot more of it if we don’t figure out how to open the next door,” Archie told him. He hurried across the room to where the dials were and started trying to decipher the writing with Hachi.

  “Quinque, sex, nec timidus, nec audax,” Archie read aloud. “Quinque, sex, that’s ‘five, six.’ Five, six, pick up sticks—that’s what I was taught. But that’s not what this says. Nec timidus, nec audax. Neither … scared? Neither audacious…? Gah! We have to figure this out!”

  “Five, six, neither fearful nor bold,” Hachi translated easily. “It doesn’t rhyme in Anglish, but it rhymes in Latin.”

  “Probably why it got changed to ‘pick up sticks,’” Fergus said, half paying attention. He was still at the edge of the floor, watching the clockworks below. “Is that a tourbillon? Look at the size of it! That’s absolutely brass!”

  Archie ignored him. “The phrase doesn’t make any sense! It doesn’t tell us what to do!” He was starting to panic. The floor was more than halfway gone now.

  “Oh, those Romans. Clever, clever lads,” Fergus said. “You could use that pallet level as a seesaw, it’s so big.”

  “Fergus!” Archie cried.

  “There are four dials,” Hachi said. “Each with one through nine in Roman numerals. All we have to do is turn them to the right combination. Five, six. Easy.” She turned the dials.

  “But that’s only two numbers! There are four dials,” Archie said. “That can’t be it, Hachi!”

  “Five, six, five six, then,” Hachi said, and she turned the last two dials. Nothing happened.

  “It’s not that easy!” Archie told her. “The floor’s past halfway!”

  “Then we add them.”

  “Eleven doesn’t have enough digits!”

  “Eleven eleven then.”

  Still nothing.

  “Oh no you didn’t,” Fergus said. “Oh, you did. But of course! How else keep all this working for a thousand years? Guys, you’ve got to come see this. It’s self-winding. The whole place. The puzzle traps. The prison. Do you understand? It winds itself with an eccentric weight the size of—I don’t know. Maybe the size of Standing Peachtree. I only saw the edge of it. It must use the Earth’s rotation to—”

  Archie grabbed Fergus and spun him away from the edge.

  “Fergus! Fergus, we need to figure out this puzzle or we’re going to die, do you understand?” Archie saw a brown-stained gear and pointed to it. “That’s not rust!”

  Blood. It was blood on the gears, where someone had fallen in and been churned into ground beef.

  “How did the wall get so close?” Fergus said. He shook his head like he was trying to clear it. “Don’t ignore what’s right for anything. I need that tattooed on me. All right. What have we got?”

  “Five, six, neither fearful nor bold,” Archie told him, hopping up and down. Hachi, meanwhile, was randomly spinning the dials, trying to luck into the answer.

  “Right,” Fergus said. “Neither fearful nor bold. That’s the two of you, all right. What this needs is some cold, hard science.” He looked at the Latin again. “What about all those numbers then?”

  “We’ve tried five and six,” Archie told him. He stamped his foot with a ringing clang. “And just about every combination of them we could think of!”

  “Nae, nae, these numbers,” Fergus said. He pointed at the V, I, V, and X in the first two words—QVINQVE, SEX. “V, I, V, X: five, one, five, ten. They’re letters, but they’re Roman numerals too.”

  Archie and Hachi stared at each other. Archie couldn’t believe they hadn’t seen it themselves.

  “Five, one, five, ten!” Archie said. “Put that in!”

  “There’s no ten on these dials,” Hachi told them. “Just one through nine.”

  Fergus glanced back at the spinning clockworks behind them. They were running out of floor.

  “There’s more numbers in the other words,” he said. “More ones, fives, tens, Cs, Ds, Ms.”

  “Too many!” Archie said. “There are only four dials!”

  “The dials only go to nine?” Fergus asked. “Add them. We have to add the numbers! Read them out.”

  Fergus kept a count in his head as Hachi read the numbers aloud. Archie backed up against the wall. They only had a yard or so of floor left. More of the gears below had brown stains on them now. They were not the first people to have gotten to this room, and if they weren’t quick about it …

  “Two thousand two hundred and forty-three!” Fergus yelled over the roaring clockwork. “Two, two, four, three!”

  “Are you sure?” Archie asked. “That’s not how you write two thousand two hundred and forty-three in Roman numerals.”

  “Just put it in!” Hachi yelled.

  Hachi took the first two dials, Fergus the third, Archie the fourth. There was barely enough room to stand. If Fergus was wrong, if that wasn’t the number—

  Click! A little door slid open on the wall below the dials, and Archie now saw the tiny Roman numerals VII, VIII carved into the wall beside it.

  “Seven, eight, don’t be late!” he cried.

  Hachi pushed Fergus and Archie through the door, then dove in behind them as the floor slipped away beneath the wall. They collapsed on the other side, breathing hard.

  “That was not fun,” Fergus said.

  The door they had come through snapped shut. Something deep in the wall clanked, and the floor began to move back in the other direction—at twice the speed.

  “Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me!” Fergus wailed.

  Behind them, they heard the sound of more spinning clockworks as the floor uncovered another room full of deadly machinery.

  “I think this is the exact same floor, just slid into the next room over,” Fergus said.

  Yes, Archie saw the place where he’d stamped his foot and put a dent in the floor.

  Wait, how had he put a dent in solid brass?

  Hachi was already standing, reading the words above the four dials on this wall. They were different this time. NOVEM, DECEM, ETIAM ATQVE ETIAM.

  “I don’t suppose that says ‘Nine, ten, a big fat hen.’” Fergus said.

  “No,” Archie said. “Nine, ten—
”

  “—again and again,” Hachi finished wearily.

  They put in the same numbers as before, but no door opened.

  “It’s not working!” Archie said. “It’s a different combination!”

  “All right,” Fergus told them. “Read me the new numbers, and let’s do this again.”

  30

  The Roman numerals in “Novem, decem, etiam atque etiam,” when added up, equaled four thousand six hundred and twelve. The answer reopened the door back to the room where they’d solved the first number puzzle. Archie worried that “again and again” meant they had to keep going back and forth from room to room, the floor always getting faster each time, but when they slipped through into the first room there was a new door open, with XI, XII written on a wall just beyond it.

  Eleven, twelve, dig and delve.

  A narrow spiral staircase led them down, down, down into darkness, surrounded on all sides by the clicking, whirring breeze of the giant clockwork machine that powered the complex. Its Roman builders had gone to a great deal of trouble to keep everyone but the League out, and their prisoner in. Archie’s parents had made it this far too, and he had to believe the visions meant his parents were still alive. Save Mom and Dad, he told himself over and over again. Save Mom and Dad. Save Mom and Dad. Save Mom and Dad.

  Gaslights flickered on as they reached the end of the spiral staircase. The stairs stopped a foot above the floor, which was moving. Not toward a wall, like the rooms above, but around in a circle: The stairs emptied out onto an enormous sideways gear that spun at the speed of a strong river. One by one they stepped onto the moving floor and peered out into a maze of moving gears, some turning lazily, others spinning like saw blades.

  “We’re more than halfway there,” Archie said. “Now what?” His voice echoed in the vast chamber.

  “Here,” Hachi said. The numbers XIII and XIV were carved into one of the teeth of the gear they stood on.

  “Thirteen, fourteen, start the machine,” Archie recited. “But it looks like it’s already started without us.”

  An empty space in the next interlocking gear rotated by, a place where the other gear had no tooth. Etched onto the gear where the missing cog would have been were the Roman numerals XV, XVI.