The Dragon Lantern

by Alan Gratz

  The Mangleborn swiped at him with a claw. It missed Archie and tore a gaping purple wound in itself.

  Archie laughed. “If you’ve got an itch, scratch it. I’ll bet Mrs. DeMarcus used to say that too.”

  HAROOOOOOOOOOO! Archie felt the crackle of the city’s giant raycannon before he heard it, but the beam didn’t hit him. So Clyde had gotten them working on the rockfall already. Good.

  The Crooked Man roared again, but instead of swiping at Archie with its claws, it snapped him up in its huge tooth-filled mouth, shaking him like a rope toy. Archie’s head spun, and he thought he might be sick, but otherwise it didn’t hurt.

  Jandal a Haad! The Crooked Man screamed in his head, no longer laughing or whispering. Jandal a Haad, go away! With a flick of its head, it tossed him into the wall of the canyon. Archie slammed into it, knocking rock loose with him as he fell all the way to the ground with a thud.

  HAROOOOOOOOOOO! The Howler-On-The-Hill fired again, and this time Archie heard a cheer go up from the city. The tracks must have been cleared.

  High above him, the Mangleborn turned its ugly head toward Cheyenne and took a step toward the city.

  Archie dragged himself to his feet. “Wait, Crooked Man. The Jandal a Haad isn’t done with you yet.”

  Archie threaded his fingers together and slammed his fists down on the hard-packed dirt floor of the canyon. WHAM! The earth bucked and rippled, and the Mangleborn lost its balance. THOOM. It slammed into the ground, knocking Archie to the floor with it.

  Archie propped himself up, tired but unbroken, and so did the Mangleborn.

  “Ready for Round Three?” Archie said wearily.

  But then Clyde and Buster were there, straddling the Mangleborn and punching it with both big brass fists. Right, left, right, left—WANG! WANG! WANG! WANG! The Mangleborn swiped at Buster, its claws screeching across his brass chest, but Buster kept on busting.

  “Tag, your turn,” Archie said. He had just let his head thunk to the ground to rest when something big and black fluttered down over him, blocking out the sun. “Time to go?” Archie asked.

  “Only if you don’t want to get buried under a mountain of rock,” Sings-In-The-Night said. She picked him up and flew past Buster, signaling that it was time to run. Behind them, the dynamite began to explode in a chain, following them up the canyon. BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

  Sings-In-The-Night hovered with Archie just beyond the canyon, but Buster hadn’t followed them.

  “What’s he waiting for?” she said. “He’s going to get buried with the monster!”

  Clyde and Buster were still sitting on top of the Mangleborn, but they weren’t punching it anymore. What was Clyde doing? Was he just trying to keep the Mangleborn down until the last possible second? Surely it couldn’t get up in time.

  BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! Rocks and boulders exploded from the canyon wall beside them, and finally Buster started to move. Stone beat down on them, almost knocking Buster over as he ran, but he cleared the avalanche just in time. With an earth-shaking roar that might have been the Mangleborn and might have been the rockslide, the Crooked Man disappeared under a mountain of stone.

  Archie, Sings-In-The-Night, and Clyde watched the rock pile from Buster’s bridge to see if the Mangleborn would rise again, but it didn’t budge.

  “What happened back there?” Archie asked Clyde. “Why’d you wait?”

  “It was Buster,” Clyde said. He ran a hand along a brass rail, as though comforting a frightened dog. “We were whaling on him, givin’ him the old one-two, as Mrs. DeMarcus used to say, and then he just stopped paying attention to me. It’s like … it’s like that big dog thing was mesmerizing him somehow. Talking to him. He locked up, and I couldn’t do a thing with him.”

  “The pictures on the wall, in the Crooked Man’s Crooked House. It showed all these little dogs dancing around him,” Archie said. “That thing must have some kind of crazy effect on dogs.”

  “Well, I thought we were goners, but then suddenly Buster was listening to me again, and we got the heck out of there. I think it was all that training with the Dog Soldiers. You’re such a good dog, Buster.” Clyde patted a console full of gauges. “Good boy!”

  Buster whistle-barked, and they hiked around the Crooked Man’s new prison to rejoin the Moving City of Cheyenne.

  “I can’t tell you how grateful we are,” Chief Black Kettle told them. He had his hands full coordinating rescue and repair efforts, but he and Tall Bull took the time to meet them at the side rail of the city. “Cheyenne owes you an incredible debt.”

  “Just promise me you’ll go back and pile more rocks on that thing,” Archie said.

  “We will,” Black Kettle told them. “And when we lay new tracks, we will go far, far around it.”

  “And Mina Moffett? She’s gone?” Sings-In-The-Night asked.

  Tall Bull nodded. “On one of the airships that fled the city. We know not where.”

  “I do,” Archie said. “Ametokai. The Japanese city in the northwest. If that’s where the lantern is headed, that’s where she’ll go too.”

  “Be careful there,” Black Kettle told them. “Their chief—the daimyo, they call him—rules with an iron fist.”

  “That’s okay,” Clyde said, raising Buster’s fist. “We got two brass ones.”

  Black Kettle smiled. “I would say you do. And now we must go to the aid of our city. Be well, my friends. May your wheel ever turn.”

  Clyde turned Buster northwest. “Well, like Mrs. DeMarcus says, the longest journey begins with the shortest step.”

  Sings-In-The-Night opened the hatch at the top of Buster’s head to go and fly solo again. Before she took off, she looked back at both of them.

  “I’m with you,” she said.

  “You mean you’ll come to Ametokai with us?” Archie asked.

  “I mean, I will join your team,” Sings-In-The-Night said. “We must stop Mina before she hurts anyone else. And we must stop her from getting that lantern.”

  23

  Buster stepped back as a giant brass sword the size of an oak tree whistled by, scraping his chest. Clyde swung the steam man’s huge left fist, but the meka-samurai ducked and slammed the hilt of its sword into Buster’s chest, sending the steam man staggering.

  “Hey! Whoa!” Clyde said through his speaking tube. “I told you! We’re not here to attack you! We want to see the daimyo!”

  The pilot of the meka-samurai either didn’t understand, or didn’t care. He wasn’t going to let Buster get anywhere near the Japanese city behind him. Ametokai stood like a mountain on the shore of the Great Western Sea, an emerald-and-ivory jewel sparkling in the late-summer sun. Whitewashed buildings with curved, peaked roofs hid behind tall green pines and firs, rising in a mound that mirrored Mt. Tacoma in the distance. Aerial tramways hung from low, swooping cables that stretched from the peak of the city down to the patchwork of low-lying rice fields around it, and colorful gaslit signs written in the squiggly, brush-stroke language of the Japans hung from shops in the narrow, crowded streets.

  Atop the city, like Mt. Tacoma’s snowcap, was a tall white castle in the Oriental style, a layer cake of curved roofs and fortified battlements, watching over everything below. Clyde, Archie, and Sings-In-The-Night had traveled for days to get here, but now this meka-samurai threatened to send them packing again.

  While Buster was still righting himself, the meka-samurai lowered its massive shoulder and charged. Clang! Buster teetered and fell backward into a rice field with a fwoosh that sent water over the sides in giant waves, swamping a row of farmers’ houses. Archie went tumbling again, crashing around the captain’s quarters to which he’d just carried Mr. Rivets.

  “Mr. Rivets! Are you all right?” he asked.

  “Yes, Master Archie,” Mr. Rivets said, picking himself up from the smashed ruins of Custer’s writing desk. “And I assume it is pointless to ask you the same question?”

  “Unbroken, as usual,” Archie said. “Come on. We have
to get you to the bridge.”

  Mr. Rivets had put in a Japanese Language talent card (by himself), and Archie was trying to get him to the speaking trumpet, where he could tell the meka-samurai they weren’t an enemy.

  Sings-In-The-Night landed on Buster’s head as Archie pulled Mr. Rivets onto the bridge.

  “It’s the fox girl!” she told them. She pointed to the shoulder of the enormous meka-samurai, and there she was, perched like a cat in a tree. Archie almost thought he could see her smiling at them.

  The meka-samurai lifted its foot to stomp Buster’s head, and Sings-In-The-Night jumped away into the air. Clyde caught the foot in one of Buster’s giant hands. Metal sheered and groaned as the meka-samurai pushed them down farther and farther into the mud.

  “Hang on!” Clyde yelled. The hand holding the foot disappeared into Buster’s enormous forearm, and Archie felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up as the giant raycannon’s aggregators charged. BWAAAAT! The meka-samurai went flying backward with the blast, landing in another rice paddy with a booming splash.

  Clyde hauled Buster to his feet, water and mud and rice plants sluicing off him. Below them, the green-and-brown meka-samurai lay motionless in the mud. It was two or three stories shorter than Buster, but wider, with an armored chest, wide, flaring shoulder guards that came to points, and a metal “skirt” that covered the top part of its legs. Its head was low and wide too, the steam man’s face hidden in a helmet with a large raindrop shape etched into it.

  The fox girl was nowhere to be seen.

  “Tell it we’re not here to attack!” Clyde said.

  Mr. Rivets said something in Japanese through the speaking trumpet, and they waited. The meka-samurai slowly rose to its feet and sheathed its sword. Japanese words boomed back, and they waited for Mr. Rivets to translate.

  “They say we appeared to be a daikaiju, which, roughly translated, means ‘giant strange monster.’ It was this beast they thought they were fighting. They are quite surprised to learn we are not a daikaiju at all, but another steam man like themselves.”

  “The fox girl,” Clyde said. “She must have been making them see something else!”

  “A Mangleborn,” Archie said. “No wonder they attacked us!”

  Mr. Rivets spoke again, and the meka-samurai bowed.

  “What’d you say?” Archie asked.

  “I told them we could explain, and they have granted us an audience with their leader, the Daimyo.”

  Clyde had Buster return the bow, and after Sings-In-The-Night rejoined them, the meka-samurai led Buster to its repair yard on the far side of the city. From there, they could see the choppy, dark Great Western Sea and the submarine docks that connected the Japanese colony to its homeland across the ocean.

  The daimyo of Ametokai met them in a plain, rectangular room with white paper walls and doors. The floors were carpeted with tightly woven reed mats, and they all sat on cushions on the floor instead of chairs. The only decorations in the room were a black-and-white ink-brush painting of Mt. Tacoma on one of the walls and a vase of white roses on the low table in front of them.

  The daimyo was a stern-looking man with light brown skin, a sharp, hawkish nose, and a high, round forehead. He wore a black silk robe, black silk pants, and black socks with reed-and-wood sandals. His jet-black hair was tied up into a tight knot that stuck out the back of his head, and over his eyes he wore a pair of brass glasses with rubber tubes that stuck out the sides, and green lenses that ticked and whirred.

  A clockwork woman made to look as though she was wearing a long, loose robe tied tightly around the waist brought a tray with a teakettle and small handleless teacups and set it on the low table between them.

  “This fox girl, you say she has the power to make one see whatever she wishes?” the daimyo asked. He spoke Anglish with a thick accent, blurring his r and l sounds.

  “Yeah,” Clyde said. He had quickly taken on the role of spokesman for the group, which made Archie both relieved and a little disappointed. “She tricked my whole regiment into thinking we were under attack by the Sioux, just like she made your steam man think we were a Mangleborn.”

  “A daikaiju,” Mr. Rivets interpreted.

  “Ah. Hai. That is why Metal Samurai Gunray was built, along with all the others. To fight the daikaiju.”

  “Others? You mean you got more than one of those samurai steam men?” Clyde asked.

  “Not in Ametokai, no,” the daimyo said. “But in Nippon, our homeland, each city has its own metal samurai to protect it. Edo, our capital, has seven.”

  “And, excuse me,” Archie said. “These daikaiju—what we could call Mangleborn—everybody knows about them?”

  “How can they not?” the daimyo said. “They come up from the ground; they climb out of volcanoes; they emerge from the sea. And always they destroy. Our cities burned in their footsteps until we created the metal samurai to protect us.”

  Archie couldn’t believe it. A whole country—a whole civilization—aware of the Mangleborn, and able to deal with that knowledge? Better, a whole civilization working together to defend themselves against the Mangleborn! The Septemberist Society had kept the existence of the Mangleborn a secret for centuries so people could live their lives without knowing the horrors that lay just beneath the surface. But what if everyone knew, like they did in the Japans?

  “For two hundred years, we closed our borders, fighting off any advance from the daikaiju. We held out, but the Cathay Empire on the mainland did not. There, Darkness has fallen. There, the daikaiju rule.”

  “Just like in Europe,” Sings-In-The-Night said.

  “Nippon is a small island compared to the might of Cathay. We hold, but our resources wear thin. That is why we built the Beikoku colony,” the daimyo told them. “Here in the Americas, where there are no daikaiju, we grow rice to feed our warriors, and in Ametokai we build more metal samurai and send them across the sea to protect Nippon.”

  “Oh, they’re here all right,” Clyde said. “You’ll want to keep that Metal Samurai Gunray on duty 24/7, and that’s a fact. We just fought one of those monsters at the Moving City of Cheyenne.”

  “This is most distressing news,” the daimyo said. “But it is a fox girl you seek in Ametokai, not a daikaiju?”

  Clyde told the daimyo all about the girl, and about Mrs. Moffett.

  “We need to find this fox girl before Mrs. Moffett does,” Archie added.

  “Moffett is a monster,” Sings-In-The-Night said. The daimyo’s green glasses clicked and whirred as he studied her. She had hidden her backward bird legs under a long skirt, but there was no disguising her big black wings, which she kept folded on her back.

  “I am learning that the Americas have many more monsters than at first we thought,” the daimyo said.

  Did he mean Sings-In-The-Night? She looked away, and Archie bristled. He was about to ask the daimyo exactly what he meant when the leader called over one of his human samurai guards.

  “If your thief and monster woman are in the city, they are no doubt with the Daimyo Under the City—or will be soon,” he said.

  “The Daimyo Under the City?” Clyde asked.

  “That is what they call the man who rules the Ametokai criminal underworld,” the daimyo said. “Though we have tried for years, we have been unable to bring him to justice. But we know some of the establishments in which he operates. Take them to the Pike Place Market,” the daimyo told the guard. “Do everything you can to help them find the Daimyo Under the City.”

  The samurai bowed low, and their audience was at an end. The samurai ushered them out, and he and four other samurai led them out of the castle and down into the winding roads of the city.

  “What he said back there, about there being a lot of monsters in the Americas, that was clinker,” Archie told Sings-In-The-Night.

  “Yeah,” Clyde said. “I wanted to give him a big brass knuckle sandwich.”

  “No,” she said. “He’s right. I am a monster, just like M
offett.”

  Archie stopped her. “No. Having bird legs or stone skin doesn’t make you a monster. It’s not Mrs. Moffett’s tentacles that make her evil. It’s what you do that makes you good or bad. The same thing happened to you that happened to her, but she’s using it as an excuse to hurt other people, and you’re using it as a way to help other people. She’s the monster, not you.”

  “Yeah,” said Clyde. “What he said.”

  Sings-In-The-Night didn’t argue, but she didn’t look convinced either.

  On the way to the market, they passed coffee shop after coffee shop.

  “Sheesh, how many coffee shops does one city need?” Clyde asked.

  At last they came to a large market, with row after row of steamwagons filled with fruits and vegetables grown in the countryside and sold in the city. Mixed in among the produce sellers were spice sellers and tinkers, musicians and fishmongers, secondhand Tik Tok sellers and book stalls.

  The samurai led them to an indoor coffee house in the market called Queequeg’s, which had a green-and-white sign featuring a man with a harpoon. Inside were a number of small wooden tables, three of them occupied by scruffy, bearded sailors nursing steaming black cups of coffee. A strange Asian plinking music played on a phonograph in the corner, and a Japanese woman in a plain gray robe wiped down a counter at the back. One of the samurai nodded toward her as though she was the one they should ask about the fox girl and Mrs. Moffett.

  Archie had just stepped up to the bar when he heard the shing of swords being drawn behind them. The samurai guards pointed their swords right at him and his friends.

  “What’s going on?” Clyde asked.

  The other customers in the coffee shop got up and hurried out.