The Dragon Lantern

by Alan Gratz

  Slowly, dully, Archie understood what she was doing.

  “Sings-In-The-Night! Fly me back! We have to stop her!” Archie cried.

  But it was too late. The mountain exploded, and the Mangleborn called the Crooked Man crawled up through the rubble and howled.

  21

  Baron Samedi howled with laughter and smacked a serving girl on the bottom. “More rum!” he cried. “More rum for me and my distinguished guests!”

  Samedi’s “distinguished guests” were three pretty young women he’d stolen off the streets. They laughed with him and smiled, but there was fear in their eyes, and they kept stealing glances at the zombi guards at the doors. Samedi grabbed one of them by the wrist and pulled her onto his lap.

  “Drink!” he said, tipping a goblet of rum to her lips. She choked a little as she swallowed, rum dribbling down her chin, and Samedi bellowed again.

  At the other end of the table, watching all this without a hint of emotion, was Queen Theodosia. She sat with her hands in her lap, doing and saying nothing to stop Samedi. She might have been in shock—Hachi couldn’t fault her for that—but Hachi still hated her for not protesting, for not fighting back.

  Hachi nodded to Fergus, and together, dressed in maid uniforms and bonnets to hide who they were, they wheeled in big serving carts filled with silver-plated dishes. Baron Samedi’s palace was crawling with zombi, but the one place he still needed humans was in the kitchen. Zombi didn’t make very good cooks; they liked all their food raw.

  “Dinner is served, my lord,” Hachi said, using a small, frightened voice.

  “Aah! At last!” Samedi said. He pushed the girl off him and rubbed his hands together as Hachi set a covered dish in front of him. She lifted the lid and tried to turn away, but Samedi’s hand whipped out and caught her.

  “Wait,” he said. “I smell salt.”

  Laveau had warned them about this. The taste of salt drove zombi back into their graves, and would make the Lord of the Dead weak enough to push him out of Blavatsky’s body. But Samedi knew his own weakness and was crafty. He’d already gotten rid of every grain of salt in the palace and commanded the kitchen staff never to use it, unless they wanted to join his growing zombi army.

  Samedi pushed the plate of deep-fried crawfish at one of the girls. “Taste it,” he said.

  With a frightened glance at Hachi, the girl picked up one of the crawfish and tasted it.

  “Is it salted?” Samedi asked.

  The girl nodded tearfully, her eyes apologizing to Hachi.

  Samedi pulled back Hachi’s bonnet and roared with laughter when he saw her face. She struggled to pull away, but he held on tightly to her.

  “Oh no, girl. You’re not getting away this time! Guards, lock the doors!” He laughed again as she tried and failed to yank her hand away. “I knew you’d try something like this, girl! Old Baron Samedi, he know all the tricks.” He pulled her closer, his face suddenly dark and serious. “But he also know you, Hachi Emartha. He know you never have just one trick.”

  “You’re right,” Hachi told him. “But I have to admit, this one was Fergus’s idea.”

  “Who’s Fergus?” Samedi asked.

  Near the middle of the table, Fergus lifted the lid of a silver platter with a flourish.

  “Et voila!” Fergus said in a very poor Acadian accent. “Tonight I have prepared for you a meal of sautéed sodium on a bed of finely chopped chlorine.”

  On the plate was a shiny silver block of metal, a little smaller than a lacrosse ball, nestled in an inch of white powder.

  Samedi sniffed. “That’s not salt,” he said. “And whatever it is, you’ll never get me to eat it.”

  “No, it’s not salt. Not yet,” Fergus said. “And I don’t need you to eat it.” Fergus put his finger in a glass of water on the table and flicked one drop onto the block of sodium. It erupted into a ball of fire so big and so bright, it blew all the girls to the floor and sent Fergus spinning away.

  Baron Samedi tried to stand, but Hachi wrenched his hands behind his chair and tied them together. “Oh no, Baron. This time it’s you who’s not going anywhere.”

  Fergus’s chemical reaction roared and grew, catching the table on fire. White-black smoke billowed out from it, filling the air, and Hachi could feel it burning the back of her throat, could taste its sting on her tongue. Sodium plus chloride made NaCl—salt. Or in this case, salt vapor. Samedi didn’t have to eat anything; if they waited long enough, Blavatsky would breathe in enough salt to drive Samedi out of her.

  “Guards!” Samedi choked. “Guards! Kill them! Kill them all!”

  Fergus ducked behind the chair with Hachi, shielding himself from the massive inferno on the table, and they hastily tied bandanas around their faces to block the salt vapor.

  “Nice trick, but you didn’t say it was going to explode in a huge fiery ball of death!” Hachi yelled at him.

  “Right,” Fergus yelled back. “That reminds me. I should warn you, it’s going to explode in a huge fiery ball of death.”

  Samedi tried to call for help again, but Blavatsky’s body was racked by a coughing fit. The zombi guards at the door had heard him the first time, though, and were shambling toward them—including General Andrew Jackson, cutlass drawn.

  Hachi pushed Laveau’s voodoo doll of Blavatsky into Fergus’s hands. “Get Baron Samedi out of her,” Hachi told him. “I’ll take care of the zombi.”

  To kill a zombi well and good, Laveau had told them, you had to stuff its mouth with salt and sew it shut. Either that or kill the bokor who created it. But zombi didn’t breathe, so they weren’t getting the mouthful of salt vapor that Samedi was, and Hachi wasn’t going to kill Blavatsky—not yet—so she couldn’t get rid of them that way either. And because they were dead already, they would keep coming no matter what she did to them.

  But that didn’t mean she couldn’t make it harder for them.

  Hachi pulled a machete out of the serving cart and lopped off the head of the first zombi to reach her. The head went bouncing across the floor and thunked against the wall, its dead, empty eyes staring up at the ceiling. Its body didn’t die, but without eyes to guide it, it wandered away from the table, arms still groping for her.

  Hachi smiled. This was going to be fun.

  As she whacked off the zombi heads, she glanced back to make sure everything was going according to plan with the voodoo doll. Laveau—wearing her old body this time—had sewn the voodoo doll together herself, stuffing it full of a strange assortment of ingredients, including a healthy chunk of Blavatsky’s hair and a tiny doll made to look like Baron Samedi. Fergus had cut into the thing and was pulling the Baron Samedi doll out of it now. If Laveau was right, the salt in Blavatsky’s mouth and the Samedi doll yanked out of her voodoo doll would be enough to knock the Baron off his horse.

  Queen Theodosia snatched a knife up from the table and ran at Fergus.

  “Fergus!” Hachi cried, too far away to protect him.

  He looked up too late to blast her. She raised the knife over her head. Fergus flinched and closed his eyes. Theodosia brought the blade down with a vicious stab.

  Shunk!

  She buried the knife in Blavatsky’s chest.

  “NO!” Hachi cried. No! Blavatsky couldn’t die! Not yet! Hachi ran for Blavatsky, but Theodosia twirled her hand in the air, and suddenly there was a storm in the room. Lighting flashed and thunder boomed, and rain and wind put out the fire and blew the salt vapor away. Hachi put an arm across her face to protect herself, and Fergus hobbled over to join her.

  “Who is she?” Hachi cried out over the storm. “What’s she done?”

  “I am Maman Brigitte, this toekay ragpicker’s wife!” Theodosia said in a rich, thick voice that wasn’t her own. “I come through when he did, and I watch him the whole time while I ride this no-’count ‘queen.’ Always he come to the real world, and when he come back I ask him, ‘You make time with other girls?’ And he say, ‘No, of course not, Maman Brigitte! I got
no other woman but you.’ Liar! I catch you out this time! And now Maman Brigitte, she punish you. Now I kill you before they can push you out, and you not come back for a dozen-dozen years! See if you sorry then!”

  “No!” Hachi said. She pulled away from Fergus, but too late. All around them, the zombi collapsed to the floor. Their bokor, Helena Blavatsky, was dead.

  Maman Brigitte swept up and out the window on a gust of air, cackling, and Hachi ran to Blavatsky. She pulled out the knife and beat on the woman’s chest, trying to bring her back to life. Fergus tried to pull her away, but she fought him off.

  “I can do better!” he told her.

  She backed away and Fergus put his fingers to Blavatsky’s chest. Zap! Blavatsky’s body lurched in the chair, but she didn’t wake up. Fergus did it again—zap!—and again—zap!—but Blavatsky never stirred.

  She was well and truly gone, and with her went Hachi’s only chance at finding out who else was there at Chuluota, and why her father had been killed.

  “I’m sorry,” Fergus told her. He took Hachi into his arms, and she let him, glad of the rain that still poured in the room if only because it hid the tears of anguish that streamed down her face.

  22

  Escaping airships shot into the air from all over the Moving City of Cheyenne as though someone had just let go of handfuls of balloons at a party. But if this was a party, it was the absolute worst one Archie had ever attended.

  The Crooked Man, a hideous, malformed coyote creature standing taller than the city, was climbing its way out of the rubble of its Roman puzzle trap, free once more. Worse, boulders from the smashed mountain had rolled down into the narrow canyon Cheyenne was passing through, blocking the tracks and trapping the city with the monster unless it could back out. The city engineers were trying to bring Cheyenne to a stop, but halting a locomotive the size of a city quickly was impossible.

  “Mina Moffett is probably getting away on one of those airships,” Sings-In-The-Night said, rejoining Archie and Clyde inside Buster.

  “If we want to save Cheyenne, we have to let her go. For now,” Archie said. “That’s why she did it.” Archie watched the Mangleborn pulling itself out of the mountain, which sent more rock avalanching into the city’s path. “We have to get those tracks clear, at least far enough for the city to stop!”

  “We better do something about that big dog too!” Clyde said.

  “I think the Dog Soldiers may have the answer to that,” Archie said.

  High above them, Howler-On-The-Hill, the enormous raycannon, was slowly turning toward the Mangleborn. While it took aim, Buster tossed aside the smaller boulders that lay on the tracks and Archie punched the larger ones into gravel. The giant wheels of the Moving City of Cheyenne crept closer and closer, groaning and squealing as the engineers threw on the brakes.

  “We’re never gonna make it!” Clyde called down to Archie. He was right—they were making more room, but they would never be able to clear the landslide off the tracks completely. Not before the city ran into it.

  “We have to push it!” Archie yelled.

  “Push it? You mean the city? Are you crazy?” Clyde asked.

  “Probably,” Archie muttered.

  Jandal a Haad, a voice boomed in his head, and Archie was staggered by a vision that hit him like a steamhammer. Suddenly it was night, and the Crooked Man stood over the glowing, sparking, lektric wreck of the Moving City of Cheyenne in the distance. Around Archie were six other figures, all much shorter and smaller than he was. Archie recognized one of them: Finn McCool, the Celtic warrior. And another: Robin Hood, the Anglish thief. This was the Medieval League that had risen to put down the Mangleborn a thousand years after the Roman League had beaten the monsters before. But this had to be decades, centuries before Europe had “rediscovered” the New World! How were they here then?

  “Rabbi Loew,” said Sir Galahad, “we have need of our shadow, methinks.”

  An old man wearing a long white beard, a tall round hat, long black robes, and a white prayer scarf reached high up to Archie’s forehead and carved something into his clay skin.

  “Destroy the Mangleborn!” Rabbi Loew told him. “Golem, destroy!”

  Archie felt his arms and legs come to life, and he lumbered forward, swinging his mighty fists at anyone and anything. Kaveh the Blacksmith turned him away with a vibrating shield, and Finn McCool beat him back with his sword until Rabbi Loew could finally get him pointed at the Crooked Man.

  Then Archie was outside himself and saw the golem for what it was: a giant hulking stone man with hollow eyes, no mouth, and metal braces bolted onto its body to keep the cracks in it from splitting wider. This was Rabbi Loew’s monster. The League’s shadow. A mindless creature made of clay: so simple, so inhuman, that it couldn’t even tell its enemies from its friends. This was what the Crooked Man thought Archie was.

  Jandal a Haad, the Crooked Man sang-laughed.

  No. I am not a mindless monster! I am not a creature made of clay. I am a human being! A boy! Archie cried, but no words came from his mouthless clay face.

  “A little help here!” Clyde yelled, and Archie was back in the present, the Crooked Man still freeing itself from its prison and Cheyenne not a smoking wreck but a living, moving city.

  A city that needed saving.

  Buster had his hands on the outside of the city and was pushing against it, trying to slow it, but Cheyenne was still creeping toward the mountain of rock on its tracks. Archie scrambled up the boulders, grabbed a deck of the city as it inched toward him, and pushed. The metal deck bent in his hands, and the city kept coming, but he could feel it slowing.

  “We’re doing it! We’re doing it!” Archie yelled.

  Still the deck kept coming, until it pushed Archie over and pinned him to the rocks behind him. It pushed and pushed, crushing him between the rock and the city, but he didn’t break, and he didn’t die.

  Jandal a Haad, a voice whispered inside him, and this time the voice was his own.

  “I’m not a monster,” Archie cried, shoving and punching the city. “I’m not! I’m not a golem! I’m not a stone robot!” He pushed and punched again and again, wrecking the deck and denting the huge iron belly of the city. “I’m not! I’m not! I’ll destroy you! I’ll destroy you all!”

  “Archie—Archie!” a big brass steam man yelled at him. “Archie, we stopped the city, but you’re wrecking it! Stop!”

  Archie stumbled back among the rocks, losing his footing and falling. That made him madder, and he picked up one of the boulders and hurled it at a bird girl who hovered in the air nearby. She dodged it easily, and Archie picked up another to throw at her, even madder for having missed.

  “Archie!” the bird girl cried.

  He started to throw the giant rock, but the air crackled and exploded—HAROOOOOOOOOOO!—and the Moving City of Cheyenne slammed into him, burying him a hundred yards into the rock pile.

  The next thing Archie knew, Buster and Sings-In-The-Night were pushing and lifting rocks off him.

  “What—what happened?” Archie asked.

  “They shot that giant raycannon at Dog Boy,” Clyde told him.

  “Dog Boy?” Archie said, still dazed.

  “That coyote Mangleborn. Turns out that raycannon’s got one helluva kick. We better clear out before they shoot it again.”

  “It didn’t take it out?” Archie asked Sings-In-The-Night as she lifted him from the rubble.

  “No,” she said. There was fear in her eyes, and doubt written all over her face. Archie knew that look: He’d seen it on Hachi’s and Fergus’s faces after he’d attacked them in Florida.

  “I went crazy again, didn’t I?” he asked her.

  “Yes. I’ve seen all my friends become monsters, just like that,” she told him. “And I don’t want to see it happen to another.”

  “Me either,” Archie told her. He had to find a way to control his anger, or he would do worse than become a monster—he would hurt his friends.

 
; HAROOOOOOOOOOO! The Howler-On-The-Hill roared again, and this time Archie watched its massive blue beam of aether hit the Mangleborn square in the chest.

  It had absolutely no effect.

  “It’s not doing a thing to it!” Clyde said.

  “But … how?” Archie said. A raycannon that big could blow a hole in a mountain.

  There wasn’t time to figure it out. The Crooked Man tore itself free of the rubble and lurched on its broken, mangled legs toward the trapped city of Cheyenne. They had to come up with some other way of defeating it, and fast. If only Hachi were here! She was so good at coming up with plans.

  “The other side of the canyon,” Clyde said when they were back inside Buster. “We have to bring it down on him!”

  “How?” Sings-In-The-Night asked.

  “All that dynamite,” Clyde said. “You said they had crates of it.”

  “Yeah,” Archie said. “But what about Cheyenne? It’ll be buried too!”

  “Not if they turn the Howler on that pile of rocks and get going again,” Clyde said. “Sings-In-The-Night, we’ll need you to set the dynamite up high, on the ridge. I’ll help the Dog Soldiers clear the rocks.”

  The Crooked Man dragged an enormous clawed hand through the other side of the city, shredding metal and wood. Fire exploded from gas lines, and broken bodies spilled from the city.

  “And I suppose I’ll keep the Mangleborn busy,” Archie said.

  Clyde and Sings-In-The-Night had that look on their faces again, like they were amazed by him and scared of him all at the same time, but they didn’t argue with him. That’s what worried Archie the most.

  Sings-In-The-Night flew Archie high above Cheyenne and the Mangleborn. It howled as it tore into the city again.

  “You sure about this?” Sings-In-The-Night asked.

  “It’s what I was made for, however it was I was made,” Archie said. “Let’s just do it.”

  Sings-In-The-Night dive-bombed the Crooked Man, letting Archie go at the last second before pulling up and flying away. Archie threw a punch at the Mangleborn’s face as he collided with it, knocking the thing back. It howled in pain and fury, and Archie grabbed at its tree-branch-sized porcupine spikes to stop his fall. THOOM. THOOM. THOOM. He hammered at the thing’s chest, breaking off some of the spines. He was like a flea in the Crooked Man’s hair, but he was a flea with a heck of a bite.