The Dragon Lantern (27 page)

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.

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.