The Dragon Lantern

by Alan Gratz

  “Master Archie,” Mr. Rivets said. “There’s no reason to be rude.”

  There was every reason to be rude. To everyone. Forever. But Archie couldn’t disappoint Mr. Rivets. “I’m sorry,” he told Clyde. “I just—I don’t think there’s anything you could say that would help.”

  “If you don’t want to hear it from Mrs. DeMarcus, then hear it from me, Archie,” Clyde told him. “We need you. I know all this business about how you were made is awful—I ain’t saying it isn’t. I don’t know if I could deal with it myself, and that’s a fact. But the bigger fact is that you’re the only one of us who can go toe-to-toe with Philomena Moffett, and she’s brewing up a mess of trouble. Without you, she beats all the rest of us put together—me, Buster, Kitsune, your two friends back in Houston—and she makes monsters out of half the continent. You got powers, Archie. Superpowers. And you gotta use them to stop her.”

  “But I’m not even strong enough to beat her!” Archie said. “We fought to a standstill every time!”

  “Which is why you’ve got the rest of us,” Clyde said. “The people of the United Nations—of all the nations—they need somebody out there protecting them from Mrs. Moffett and the Mangleborn, and me and Buster are volunteering for duty. We can stop her, but we gotta have all hands on deck. The whole team. What about you, Kitsune?”

  “I’m not volunteering. But I’m in,” Kitsune said. She put a hand to her pearl necklace and glanced at Archie. “I got shanghaied.”

  “All right,” Clyde said. He stuffed his handkerchief in his back pocket. “Buster needs repairs. Repairs I can’t do. I’m a soldier, not an engineer, dang it. I wish we had your tinker friend here right now, but we don’t. So I gotta put in someplace with a machine shop. You got me a place yet?” he asked Kitsune.

  She handed the map down to him. “Ute town called Wasatch. I’ve been there. It’s nice. The bank backs right up onto the railroad tracks. Makes for an easy getaway.”

  “Well, we’ll be coming and going through the front door this time,” Clyde said.

  Kitsune shrugged and grinned, wrapping her fox tail around her legs.

  “So here’s the plan,” Clyde said. “Me and Kitsune will take Buster to Wasatch for repairs. Archie, you and Mr. R. will catch a train south to Houston. Find your friends.”

  Archie opened his mouth to say something, but let it go. He had to admit, Clyde really was a natural-born leader. Archie wanted nothing more than to crawl into a corner and hide there for the rest of his life, but he couldn’t say no to Clyde. To the League.

  “Me and Kitsune will be right on your heels,” Clyde said. “Once we’re all together, we’ll go after Mrs. Moffett as a team. Stop her before she destroys the United Nations. There’s only five of us, not seven, but that’ll have to do.”

  The engine room rocked, and something slammed against the hull. Clang-clang-clang-clang!

  Clyde rapped on one of the pipes with his wrench. “Stop scratching, you big oaf!” he yelled at the steam man. “You don’t have fleas anymore! You’re made of metal!”

  Buster whistled happily to hear Clyde’s voice, and Clyde shook his head. “Dumb thing. Doesn’t even realize he’s not a dog anymore.”

  And that was it, Archie realized. He was Buster. He was a golem who was pretending to be human, just like Buster was a steam man pretending to be a dog. No, not pretending—fooling themselves. Everyone else could see what they really were on the outside. He and the dog were ghosts in the machine, but that’s all they really were—machines.

  “I’m going up top,” Clyde said. “Get us going to Wasatch.” Kitsune hopped down off the water tank to join him. “You coming?” Clyde asked Archie.

  “In a minute,” Archie told him.

  Clyde nodded. He climbed halfway up a ladder and stopped. “For what it’s worth, Archie, I’ve seen what kind of monsters there really are out there, and you’re not nearly the worst of them.”

  Clyde and Kitsune left Archie and Mr. Rivets alone in the engine room. Within minutes, the machinery around them came to life as Buster steamed south, toward Wasatch. Toward Hachi and Fergus.

  Hachi and Fergus. Archie buried his head in his hands. “I know I have to do this, Mr. Rivets. I know I have to find Hachi and Fergus, go after Mrs. Moffett. But how am I going to tell them? What am I going to say? How are they still going to be my friends when I tell them where I came from? How I was made?”

  Mr. Rivets put a hand on Archie’s shoulder. “They can hardly blame you, sir. You had nothing to do with it.”

  “But it had everything to do with me, Mr. Rivets.”

  “I’m sure Master Fergus will understand,” Mr. Rivets told him.

  “And Hachi?”

  “Miss Hachi will be all right too,” Mr. Rivets said.

  Archie stared up at him.

  “… in time,” Mr. Rivets added.

  * * *

  “I will never be all right, ever again,” Hachi said.

  Fergus crossed Hachi’s hotel room to the bed, where she was hastily stuffing her clothes into a satchel.

  “Okay,” Fergus said. “So ‘Are you all right?’ wasn’t the smartest question I’ve ever asked. Of course you’re not. But you can’t just go steaming out of here without telling me where you’re going.”

  “You know where I’m going,” Hachi told him. “I have a list. People to track down. Erasmus has already sent out pneumatigrams to Pinkerton agencies across the continent. I’m going to track down the other people who were with Blavatsky that night, and I’m going to kill them. As slowly and as painfully as I can.”

  Fergus put a hand to her shoulder and she flinched, batting it away with one hand and drawing her knife with the other. Fergus put his hands up in surrender, and she sheepishly put the knife back away.

  “You’re going to have to deal with this eventually,” Fergus told her.

  “I am dealing with it,” she said. “I told you—I’m going to track them down and kill them—”

  “That’s not what I mean, and you know it.”

  Hachi stared at her bag. “Not yet,” she said.

  “Then when?” Fergus said. “We told him we’d meet him—”

  “No.”

  “He’s still our friend,” Fergus said. “It’s not his fault he—”

  “No,” Hachi said. She zipped up the bag, threw it over her shoulder, and turned toward the door. Fergus put a hand to her arm again, but this time she didn’t flinch. Instead she just closed her eyes.

  “I’ll come with you, then,” Fergus said.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “The things I’m going to do—the things I have to do—I don’t want you to see them.”

  “What? Crivens. I’m a big boy, Hachi. I can handle—”

  “No,” Hachi said. “You don’t understand. I don’t want you to see me do them.”

  Fergus hadn’t expected her to say that. Hachi prided herself on her toughness. She wore it like a raygun on her hip, for everyone to be afraid of.

  “Hachi, I love you,” Fergus said.

  She batted his hand away. “I don’t want you to love me! I have a job to do, and I don’t have a place in my life for anything else! I have to kill the people who killed my father. Who killed ninety-nine other men at Chuluota. All so that—all so that—”

  Fergus pulled her into a hug, and she sobbed into his shoulder.

  “I know,” he said softly. “I know.” He let her cry until she had cried herself out, and still Fergus knew it wouldn’t be enough. She had had eleven years to cry every last tear she had for her father and the other ninety-nine men who died at Chuluota, but she was just getting started crying over Archie.

  “Go on without me, then,” Fergus said. “I slipped one of those beeping homing beacon things I hate so much in your bandolier. When you’re … when you’re finished, you turn that on, and I’ll find you. We’ll find each other.”

  Hachi nodded into Fergus’s chest, gave him a quick kiss on the cheek,
and was gone out the door.

  * * *

  The little Cheyenne steamburb of Medicine Bow had stopped at the junction depot it shared with the Transcontinental Railroad and was just settling in for the night. Gaslights glowed in the teepee-shaped houses up and down its seven stories like jars full of fireflies stacked on shelves. Nearby, the herds of buffalo the town tended slept in great brown-black piles against one another.

  The sound of a train in the distance was so familiar, neither herd nor town stirred. Only the stationmaster, frowning at the railroad timetable that listed no trains due to arrive until early the next morning, was there to meet the locomotive as it pulled into the station. The train hauled but one passenger car, and even more mysteriously, no porters or engineers or passengers climbed out when it stopped.

  “Hello in there!” the stationmaster called, raising his lantern to see into the cab. A dark figure moved away from the light. “Hello?” the stationmaster tried again.

  The locomotive blew its steam whistle, making the stationmaster jump. Then it blew again, and again, and again. The Cheyenne and their buffalo were used to train whistles too, but not one that blew over and over again. A train whistle blown like that—any whistle blown like that—meant trouble, and the people of Medicine Bow came out to the rails of their moving village to see what was wrong.

  The stationmaster saw someone climb to the top of the passenger car—no, not climb, he thought, more like glide—with what looked like a lantern in hand.

  “Hello, dear friends,” said a woman’s voice, loud and clear in the prairie night. “For too long, you have lived in darkness. Let me show you the light!”

  The woman opened her lantern, and as the light fell on the people of Medicine Bow, they screamed. They screamed so loudly they didn’t hear the army of monsters that shambled up the tracks behind the locomotive, hooting and howling, following their shadowy leader across the continent to the United Nations of America.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thank you to everyone at Tor/Starscape who has helped to make this book and this series a success: to my wonderful editor, Susan Chang, whose continual enthusiasm for these books makes me keep trying to outdo myself; to Ali Fisher, publishing coordinator, for answering all my crazy requests with such speed and grace; to Leah Withers, publicist extraordinaire, for arranging my first-ever book tour; to Deanna Hoak, copy editor, for reminding me how I spelled all those crazy words in the first book; and of course to Kathleen Doherty, publisher, who took a chance on The League of Seven to begin with. I would be remiss not to thank illustrator Brett Helquist, whose amazing art graces the front cover and chapter headers. Everywhere I go, people tell me they picked up my book because of his awesome illustrations! Thanks too to Linda Marie Barrett and everyone at Malaprop’s Bookstore/Cafe in Asheville, North Carolina, for their continuing support of the series, and to all the students, teachers, librarians, and booksellers I met on tour for book one. Thank you to Bob, and to my friends at Bat Cave and Blue Heaven. And last but not least, thanks again to Wendi and Jo. You’re the aether in my aggregator.

  Read on for a preview of

  THE MONSTER WAR,

  Book Three of The League of Seven

  1

  Archie Dent sat in the shadows in the corner of his hotel room in Houston. This was where he belonged. This was what he was, after all. A shadow. The darkest shadow of them all.

  Mr. Rivets, Archie’s clockwork manservant, tutor, and constant companion, ticked into the room and threw the curtains wide. Archie squinted and threw an arm over his eyes as the bright Texian sun streamed into the room.

  “Don’t!”

  “It is time you roused yourself, Master Archie. Cleaned yourself up. Had some food. You haven’t eaten in days.”

  “Why should I?” Archie asked. “I don’t need to. I can’t die. I don’t even need to breathe. I could sit here forever if I wanted to.”

  “Which would be an incredible waste, sir. It is time you rejoined the world of the living,” Mr. Rivets told him.

  “No,” Archie said. He’d told Mr. Rivets the same thing every day for a week now, ever since they’d arrived in Houston. Ever since he’d learned the horrible truth about how he’d been brought to life. “Close the curtains. I don’t want the light.”

  “There are matters you must attend to, Master Archie. If I were not now self-winding, I would have run down long ago. And you promised Miss Hachi and Master Fergus you would meet them here in Houston. They may be somewhere in the city as we speak, and we must warn them about Philomena Moffett and her Monster Army.”

  “I don’t care. I don’t want to see them. I don’t want to see anyone ever again. I’m done. With everything.”

  “There is something else, Master Archie. Something I have uncovered in my own search for Master Fergus and Miss Hachi. Homeless children are being taken from Houston’s streets.”

  Archie lifted his head. “What?”

  “By masked men with steamwagons,” Mr. Rivets said. “They take the children in broad daylight. I interrupted one such kidnapping only this morning, and alerted the local authorities to the problem. But they are too taxed with the annual Livestock Exhibition and Rodeo currently being held in the Astral Dome. Nor, I think, do they much care about children without families to miss them.”

  “The … what?” Archie shook his head. “No. I don’t care either. It’s not my problem.”

  “I see,” said Mr. Rivets. “I apologize, Master Archie.” His clockworks ticked softly as he considered his young charge. “There is one small matter at least that must be attended to. Your parents have sent us funds via pneumatic post, and the post office requires you be there in person to sign for it.”

  “I don’t care,” Archie said.

  “May I remind you, Master Archie, that without these funds we shall be turned out of the hotel and onto Houston’s streets, where, I can assure you, it is far brighter and hotter than your corner.”

  Archie huffed. Fine. He’d go to the post office and sign for the money. But he wasn’t taking a bath, and he wasn’t eating or drinking anything. He was through pretending to be human.

  Houston was hot and dusty, just like every other part of the Republic of Texas Archie had seen. Mr. Rivets led him along a sweltering wooden sidewalk past saloons, general stores, and steam horse stables. The brown-skinned, black-haired people of Houston kept turning to stare at Archie’s pale white skin and white hair, and he heard one or two whisper his name. Senarens and his clacking League of Seven dime novels were more popular than ever! Archie slipped his brass goggles down over his eyes and dragged Mr. Rivets across to the dark side of the street, where he hoped he’d be less conspicuous, and cooler too. A Wel-suh Fargo steamwagon almost ran over them, but Archie still didn’t care. It would have done more damage to the steamwagon than to him.

  After a few blocks, Mr. Rivets turned off San Jacinto Street and led Archie into a maze of side streets, where at last they came to a narrow, rutted lane squeezed in between two wooden warehouses. A dozen or so half-naked Texian children were playing some kind of game where they tried to bounce a rubber ball through barrel rings they’d nailed to the wall. Farther down the alley, two dogs fought over a scrap one of them had dug out of an overturned trash can, and a pile of empty wooden crates looked as though someone might be living in them. Archie didn’t understand. Where was the post office?

  “I would advise you not to fight at this juncture,” Mr. Rivets told Archie. “You should allow yourself to be captured instead. That way you’ll be taken to the ringleaders of the operation.”

  “What are you talking about?” Archie asked. Had Mr. Rivets slipped a cog?

  The ground rumbled as two steamwagons backed into the lane, one from each direction. Texian men in brown leather pants, denim shirts, and white cowboy hats leaped from the covered beds on the wagons, rayguns in hand and bandanas covering their faces. Kazaaack! An orange beam from one of the pistols blew up the rubber ball, and the children screamed. They trie
d to run, but both ends of the street were blocked by the men and their steamwagons.

  “Mr. Rivets, what’s going on?” Archie asked, but when he turned around the machine man was gone. “Mr. Rivets?”

  Archie heard the blast of another raygun and ducked instinctively.

  “All right, chamacos!” one of the banditos called. “No messing around now! Into the trucks nice and easy, and nobody gets hurt.”

  The banditos circled the kids. A boy tried to escape by crawling under one of the steamwagons, but a bandito caught him by the heel and dragged him back. Whack! The bandito cracked him over the head with the butt of his raygun, and the boy went down in the dirt. After that, nobody tried to run.

  Archie was steaming. First he’d been tricked out of his hotel room by Mr. Rivets, and now these kidnappers were hitting defenseless kids. Slag it all—he wasn’t even supposed to be here! His fists clenched and he started for the bandito who’d knocked the boy down when he felt something hard poke him in the back. It was another of the banditos with a raygun.

  “Hey, mano!” the bandito called. “What about this one? He’s a Yankee.”

  “Are you kidding, güey?” said the bandito who’d hit the kid. “They pay double for gabachos!”

  The raygun in Archie’s back poked at him, nudging him toward the other children. Archie was tempted to turn around and crush the raygun in his fist and punch the bandito through the wall. A raygun blast couldn’t hurt Archie. It wouldn’t even knock him down. He could send all six of these banditos into the next alley before they knew what hit them. But Mr. Rivets was right: That wouldn’t stop whoever was behind this. Cursing Mr. Rivets with names the machine man would have scolded him for, Archie let himself be loaded onto one of the two steamwagons with the other children.

  A few of the children cried as the banditos went through the covered wagon and shackled them, but most looked resigned to their fate. Archie wanted to tell them everything was going to be all right, but he didn’t want to draw attention from the banditos. Not yet.