The League of Seven

by Alan Gratz

  “Not now, MacFerguson,” Hachi told him.

  “Thank you all,” Ms. Ambrose said, shaking hands with Archie and Fergus. She hugged Hachi. “It was good to see you again.” They separated, but Ms. Ambrose kept her hands on Hachi’s shoulders. “I wish you had stayed with us and graduated, my dear, but even so, I know Lady Josephine would have counted you one of the academy’s greatest successes. I know I do.”

  They hugged again, and Ms. Ambrose let her go. “I pray you find peace, Hachi—but I can at least rest well in the knowledge that you have found good friends.”

  27

  Standing Peachtree’s Union Station was still lousy with Pinkertons, so Archie, Hachi, Fergus, and Mr. Rivets slipped out of town to catch a train in the little Yankee village of Decatur instead. There was only one Pinkerton agent there, and Freckles the wind-up giraffe distracted him while Hachi laid him out cold with two quick kicks.

  They found an empty compartment in a Pontiac sleeper car on an Iron Chief bound for Orlando, Florida, and Mr. Rivets kept watch for them while they slept. After everything that had happened, Archie expected to be awakened in the night by hired detectives or Edison goons, or maybe even a swarm of locusts. But when Mr. Rivets woke him gently the next morning, it was only to tell him the train had arrived at their destination.

  Orlando was equally anticlimactic. There were no Pinkerton agents waiting for them at the depot, no mobs with torches and pitchforks, no hideous monsters. Just a dusty lane with a falling-down hotel, a small general store, and a combination horse stable/airship park/post office. Mosquitoes buzzed in their ears, and the air smelled of rotten citrus and horse manure.

  “How quaint,” said Mr. Rivets.

  “I forgot you all came by airship the first time,” Hachi said. She alone had gone to Florida the first time by train. “We’ll need to rent an airship or a steam mule. It’s too far to walk. Not if we want to get there before the full moon.”

  Fergus and Mr. Rivets headed for the horse stable/airship park/post office, but Archie stood where he was in the street.

  Malacar Ahasherat was calling to him again. In broad daylight. While he was awake.

  Jandal a Haad. Made of Stone.

  Archie took a step toward the jungle. Toward the voice.

  Jandal a Haad, the Swarm Queen said. Mangleborn.

  He was almost to the line of trees at the edge of the town when something knocked him to the ground. He spat dirt as he struggled to get out from under Hachi.

  “Ow! Hey! What did you do that for?”

  “You were gone. I was talking to you, but you didn’t hear me, and then you started to walk off into the swamp. Did you have another vision?”

  Archie shook his head, trying to clear the fog that laid over his thoughts.

  “No. No vision this time. Just a voice. The Swarm Queen’s voice. Like my mom calling my name when she wakes me up in the morning. You didn’t hear it?”

  Hachi shook her head, a worried look on her face.

  “Why is she picking on me?” Archie asked. His head hurt like he’d fallen on it.

  “I don’t know. But it’s probably only going to get worse, the closer we get. You have to fight it, Archie. Remember your mantra.”

  “Right. Yeah,” he said. Save Mom and Dad. Save Mom and Dad, he told himself as they went into the shop. Even though they’re keeping secrets from me.

  “No airships,” Fergus told them when they joined him. “All they’ve got is a steam mule.”

  “That’ll do,” Hachi said. “I can get us there.”

  Archie wondered if he might be able to lead them there as well, just following the Mangleborn’s voice. It was something he didn’t really want to think about.

  “Be twenty-five dollars a day,” the surly old Seminole man behind the counter told them.

  “Twenty-five dollars! That’s criminal!” Archie said. “We could buy a steam mule for a hundred dollars!”

  “Where?” the old man said. “You want a steam mule, it’s twenty-five dollars a day, plus the price of coal.”

  They didn’t have twenty-five dollars. They had spent most of the money Ms. Ambrose had given them on train tickets. They would have to walk, and they would miss the full moon. They would be too late to stop the Swarm Queen from rising.

  “I guess we’ll have to tell the prince the search is off,” Fergus said.

  “The prince?” said Archie.

  “What prince?” asked the old man.

  “A Nigerian prince. A rich Nigerian prince. He’ll be so disappointed. But if we couldn’t find one of the Seven Cities of Gold, at least we found the Fountain.”

  “The Fountain?” said Archie.

  “The Seven Cities of Gold?” the old man asked.

  “That’s what the Nigerian prince hired us to find.” He turned to Hachi. “We were so close.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, we were,” she said.

  “We were?” said Archie. Hachi kicked him in the shin to tell him to be quiet, but he didn’t understand any of this.

  “Atlantis!” Fergus said. “Just think of what we might have found there!”

  The old Seminole spit tobacco juice into a spittoon. “You trying to tell me some Afrikan prince hired three kids to go looking for the lost city of Atlantis?”

  “Well, we weren’t kids when we started,” Fergus said quietly, like there was anybody else around who might hear him.

  “The Fountain…,” the old man said. “You don’t mean…”

  “The Fountain of Youth,” Fergus said. “Why do you think I’ve got a bum leg at fourteen and Professor Dent here looks like he’s ten years old and still has white hair?”

  “Twelve,” Archie said.

  Hachi kicked him under the counter again.

  The old man squinted at each of them in turn. “I don’t believe you,” he said finally.

  Fergus sighed. “Do you have any mail waiting for Fergus MacFerguson?”

  The old man pulled out a scrolled-up piece of paper. “Got one here for a ‘Lord Fergus MacFerguson, Fifth Earl of Haggis, President of the Powhatan Geographic Society.’”

  “That would be me,” Fergus said. He took the note from the old man and skimmed it. “All right then. The prince wants us to return to New Rome. He’s going to send another team. Airships, steam mules, cartographers, trackers. Dozens of men.”

  “But they’ll all get a stake in the find!” Hachi said. “We were going to split our ten percent three ways!”

  Fergus shrugged. “What can we do? We haven’t got a steam mule.”

  “Lemme see that,” the old man said. He read through the note. “Whoever finds this, they get a percentage?”

  “That was our arrangement, yes,” Fergus said. “But we’re through. Thank you for your time. Mr. Rivets, we’ll need train tickets back to New Rome. We’re done here.”

  “As you say, sir,” Mr. Rivets said.

  They turned to leave.

  “Ah ah ah—wait just a minute,” the old man said. “Suppose I give you that steam mule. In return for one-fourth of your percentage.”

  “One-fourth!” Fergus cried. “That’s highway robbery!”

  “It’s better’n zero, which is what you stand to get if you go back to New Rome and this here Nigerian prince sends down a new team,” the old man said.

  “He’s got a point,” Hachi said.

  Fergus paced the small office like he was thinking it over, then finally relented. “Deal.”

  The old man clapped. “I’ll get the steam mule ready for you!”

  “And I’ll write to the prince at once, to let him know our expedition is back on. You’ll receive an official letter from him, granting you one-fourth of ten percent of whatever we find.”

  The old man hurried out to the steam horse stables, and Archie shook his head. “I’m so confused. What Nigerian prince do we know?”

  “Our old friend Luis, from the sewers,” Fergus said, scribbling a note to the prince. “I thought we might need a little leverage to rent an a
irship or something when we got here, so I had Mr. Rivets pop off the train in Tallahassee and post a letter to Luis.” Fergus finished his note and left it on the counter. “All right. Let’s get out of here. I want to get as far away as we can before the old guy realizes our Nigerian prince wrote that letter on the back of a Cathay take-out menu.”

  * * *

  It was late afternoon when they arrived in the clearing. The remains of the exploded equipment and the bent lightning tower Archie had destroyed still filled the glade.

  Fergus brought the steam mule to a stop and let off its steam. “So. Here we are,” he said. “Back where it all started.”

  Archie knew Fergus was just talking about when the three of them had come together for the first time a few days ago, but Archie couldn’t help but think there was more to it than that. Their lives had all changed in some way in this clearing. They had all been reborn here. Edison’s ceremony had turned Fergus into a lektric engine. Hachi’s life had been transformed when strangers had come here and killed her father, turning her into a weapon of revenge. And Archie—Archie had lost his parents here too and started down a road he never thought he would travel. But there was something else about this glade. Archie didn’t know how, or why, but he had an attachment to this place. A bond. To the clearing, and to the Swarm Queen. He had felt it before he’d ever put his hands into the green flames, and it had only grown stronger since.

  They climbed down from the steam mule, and Archie went to the stone altar in the middle of the clearing. The surface of the ancient rock table had a maze of chiseled lines on it, something like the lines on Fergus’ face. They all led to a small square hole cut straight through to the bottom of the table. Archie traced one of the lines with his fingers, imagining the blood of a hundred men flowing through the maze to its center. What connection did he have with this glade and this stone? Why did he feel as though he had been here before? And what, if anything, did it have to do with that scrapbook Uncle John had been keeping about him?

  Jandal a Haad, Malacar Ahasherat whispered to him.

  Archie looked up to find Hachi staring at him. He pulled his hand away from the stone altar.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “There are no bugs,” Hachi said. “Here in the clearing. No bugs on the ground, and none in the air.”

  “That’s a good thing though, innit?” Fergus asked.

  “No, it’s not,” Archie said.

  Hachi took Ms. Ambrose’s aether pistol and oscillating rifle from the steam mule and tossed the pistol to Fergus. “You said we’d come back with an army, Archie.” She activated the aggregator on her oscillator. “I only see three kids, two rayguns, and a machine man.”

  “We don’t need an army,” Archie said. “We’re a new League. I know it.”

  “But there’s only three of us,” Fergus said.

  “Three Leaguers can take down a Mangleborn,” Archie told them. “The Seven fought armies.”

  “So how do we get down there?” Hachi asked. “To where it’s imprisoned?” A full, pink moon was rising in the late-afternoon sky; they had no time to lose.

  “I didn’t see where my parents went,” Archie said. “It was dark, and there was a meka-ninja.”

  “What about this?” Fergus asked. He stood by a large stone set into a hill, a man-made thing like a wall or a door. The letters I and II were carved into it.

  “One, two,” Hachi read. “Two Roman numerals. Like the XX on the seal in our dreams. Twenty.”

  “One, two,” Archie whispered.

  Jandal a Haad, the Swarm Queen whispered. Made of Stone.

  “Archie?” Hachi said, snapping him out of it. “Archie, focus. Remember your mantra.”

  “I’m sorry. Hachi, if I lose myself … if I forget myself…”

  “That’s not going to happen,” Hachi told him.

  “But if it does—”

  “It’s not going to happen,” Hachi told him.

  “One, two. Maybe they’re coordinates,” Fergus said, his mind not on Archie or Hachi but on the problem. “Or markers, like on a map. Does anybody have a map?”

  “No,” Archie said. “No, I forgot! Mom gave me a clue when we pulled that bug off her. One, two, buckle my shoe!”

  “A nursery rhyme?” said Hachi.

  “What you know as nursery rhymes began as ciphers created by the Mangleborn’s Roman jailers,” Mr. Rivets explained. “They are mnemonics. Simple ways for humans to remember the paths through the puzzle traps in the event that civilization falls and all written records are lost.”

  “You’re saying nursery rhymes are … secret codes?” Fergus asked.

  “In a way, yes, sir. But as times and languages have changed, many of the rhymes have lost their original meanings. The understanding and cataloging of these nursery rhyme clues is the work to which Master Archie’s parents devoted their careers.”

  Just like Atlantis, going from the truth of a power station under a waterfall to the myth of a drowned civilization, Archie thought. Or the Great Bear’s father being a bear, not a six-legged monster with shark teeth and tusks for claws. Another part of humanity’s hidden past.

  “That printer in New Rome, John Douglas. That’s what he was publishing too—books full of nursery rhymes,” Fergus said.

  “Part of the Septemberists’ mission is to keep old nursery rhymes in the public consciousness, so the codes are never forgotten,” Mr. Rivets said.

  “One, two, buckle my shoe,” Archie said, trying to remember his studies.

  “Three, four, knock on the door,” Mr. Rivets said.

  “The version my mother sang to me is different,” Hachi said. “It’s ‘One, two, lace up your shoe.’”

  They looked to Fergus, but he shrugged. “I heard it the same way as Archie.”

  “They both have to do with shoes,” Archie said. “We have to look at our shoes!”

  Archie bent down and started looking at the ground beneath his feet. Fergus and Hachi shared a skeptical look, then got down and searched with him.

  Hachi poked into the dirt with her dagger until she hit something hard.

  “There’s something under here,” she said. She cleared away the moist, woody loam and found more of the carved rock—and a brass plate about the size of a welcome mat.

  “I told you! I told you!” Archie said. He knelt down on the plate, feeling around its edges. “This has to be something. A door, maybe.”

  “Hang on, I’ve got something,” Fergus said. “It’s a handle or a lever or something—”

  “No, wait!” Hachi cried, but Fergus was already pulling it. The brass plate Archie was sitting on fell away, and he dropped into darkness.

  28

  Archie disappeared into the dark hole with a cry of surprise, followed shortly by a thunk.

  “Archie!” Hachi cried.

  “Ow,” Archie said from the darkness.

  “Archie? Are you all right?” Hachi called.

  “Yeah. I don’t think I broke anything. The pelt must have broken my fall again. Whoa, hey. Lights are coming on—”

  Gaslights flickered on in the cavern, and Archie saw the floor and walls all around him were covered with brass picture frames.

  “Hey—hey, it’s that room we saw my parents in! Get down here!”

  Mr. Rivets had already gone to the steam mule for a rope. Hachi shimmied down, then helped hold the rope for Fergus.

  “I’ll just stay up here and wait for you to get back then, shall I?” said Mr. Rivets. There was no way the rope would hold his weight.

  “We’ll be back before you wind down!” Archie called up.

  “Just how long can he go without winding?” Fergus asked quietly.

  The room they had dropped into was certainly strange. The walls, ceiling, and floor were all made of brass just like the picture frames, which were permanently attached.

  “Looks like we’re not the first ones to fall in,” said Fergus. An old iron helmet lay in the corner, and he kicked it with his f
oot. It looked like something from paintings of the old conquistadors. Underneath it was a pile of bones, more metal armor, and a broken sword.

  “Maybe Ponce de Leon found this place instead of the Fountain of Youth.”

  “Looks like he went down fighting, whoever he was,” Hachi said.

  “Aye,” said Fergus, “but fighting what?”

  “The Roman League built these rooms as a way of keeping the Mangleborn in and other people out,” Archie said. “The Septemberists knew how to get through using the nursery rhyme codes, but nobody else did. I guess that didn’t stop other people from trying.”

  Hachi saw something in another pile of bones and picked it up. It was a small pin with the Septemberists’ pyramid eye on it.

  “Guess they didn’t all know how to get through,” Fergus said.

  “Remember, Master Archie,” Mr. Rivets said from above, “the nursery rhymes have changed over time. The meanings may be very different now. You will have to think outside your programming, as it were.”

  “Brass,” Archie said.

  “Well, we got past one and two,” Fergus said. “How many numbers are there in this nursery rhyme, anyway?”

  “Twenty,” Archie said.

  Fergus groaned.

  “At least now I understand why my parents made me memorize all those nursery rhymes,” said Archie. He looked around the room for any clue as to what to do next.

  “There,” Hachi said. She pointed to the numbers III and IV etched into the metal near the ceiling.

  “Three, four,” Archie said.

  “Three, four, cry no more,” Hachi said.

  “The one I learned is ‘Three, four, knock on the door’,” said Archie.

  “So all we have to do is knock on one of these doors?” Fergus said. “That’s easy.” He knocked on one of the framed panels.

  “No! Wait!” Hachi cried.

  Too late. The brass door they’d fallen through in the ceiling snapped shut—clank!—and the door Fergus knocked on slid open. Something inside it began to click and whir, and all three of them took a step backward.

  A clockwork cat the size of a big dog sprang from the opening. Its metal feet clattered on the brass floor, and its red eyes swept the room. Before he could even think to move, it sprang at Archie.