The Dragon Lantern (29 page)

“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 Moffett.”

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.

“We've been betrayed,” Archie said. “
Again.
” He stepped between his friends and the samurai. “I have to warn you right now,” he told the guards, “this isn't going to work out so great for you. I'm—”

Before he could say “invulnerable,” the floor dropped out from under Archie and he fell into darkness.

24

It was a dark and stormy night.

Fergus watched through the window of Marie Laveau's shop as a hurricane raged over New Orleans. The storm drains were handling the rain so far, but the streets were already little rivers. Soon there would be so much water that the storm drains would back up, and the city would be flooded. And if the levees that held back the Mississippi River or Lake Pontchartrain or the Atlantis Ocean broke …

Fergus shook his head. From an engineering point of view, New Orleans seemed like a terrible place to build a city.

“We have to stop Maman Brigitte,” Marie Laveau said. She was the middle-aged version of herself again and wore a much simpler white dress with a red-and-gold headscarf. Her two creepy masked assistants hovered in the shadows behind her.

“But how?” Hachi asked. She was pacing the shop, her thoughts, as always, on her ultimate goal. “We can't use Fergus's salt vapor trick again. She'll see it coming a mile away.”

“We don't even know where she is,” Fergus reminded her.

“Maybe she's sitting on Theodosia's throne. She's riding her body,” Hachi said.

Laveau shook her head. “Maman Brigitte, she's not like her husband. She doesn't need to put on a show. We're more likely to find her in a cemetery.”

“Then we'll search the cemeteries,” Hachi said, heading for the door.

Fergus stepped in front of her. “Let's come up with a bit better plan than slogging through cemeteries at night in the middle of a hurricane looking for a woman with a Manglespawn spirit riding her, eh?” he said.

Hachi frowned, but she gave in. Fergus knew she would rather do something useless than sit around and do nothing, but she was also smart enough not to go spinning off like a loose shackle bolt.

“Look, since we're not rushing off to go kill an invisible beastie at the moment, maybe it's time I gave you something,” Fergus told Hachi.

He went to his satchel behind the counter and pulled out a small leather-wrapped gift.

Hachi held it in both hands. “What is it?” she asked.

“Well, the general idea with a present is that you unwrap it, and then you find out what's inside it,” he told her.

She frowned at him and pulled loose the knot. The leather fell away, and a little wind-up elephant with wings lay in the palm of her hand.

Hachi choked back a sob and put a hand to her mouth. “Tusker! Tusker—you put him back together!”

“I did better than that,” Fergus said. He took the tiny toy from her hand and turned the key that wound its mainspring. The little elephant awoke as if from a nap and took to the air, his little wings beating like a hummingbird's. He trumpeted happily at Hachi and flew circles around her head.

Hachi threw her arms around Fergus and squeezed him tightly. He could feel the warmth of her tears through his shirt. Before he knew what was happening, Hachi was kissing him, and then just as quickly it was over, and she was ducking away to dry her eyes. Fergus felt a tingle from his head to his toes, and only after a minute or two did he realize it had nothing to do with the lektricity he had stored inside him.

“Thank you, Fergus,” Hachi said. Tusker landed in her hand, and she hugged him close. “I can't—I don't—”

Fergus put up a hand. “Just remember he got broken because you were so obsessed with revenge you couldn't see anything else—or any
one
else—and promise me you won't ever let that happen again.”

Hachi was quiet for a moment. “I promise,” she said finally.

The bell over the door trilled, and a dripping-wet Erasmus Trudeau hurried into the shop, followed by an equally large Haitian woman and two little round children.

“I found her!” he announced.

Hachi pulled her knife on the woman behind him.

“Oh! No,
ch
è
re
. Dis not Maman Brigitte! Dis my wife, Cassandra, and my two darling daughters, Saraphina and Catheline. I bring them here to protect them.”

“I thought you didn't trust Laveau's magical powers,” Fergus said.

Erasmus looked chagrined. “Between Madame Laveau's white magic and Maman Brigitte's black magic, Erasmus choose Madame Laveau's white magic.”

“Your family is most welcome,” Marie Laveau said. She gestured to her two assistants, and they led Erasmus's wife and daughters upstairs.

“But you did find Maman Brigitte? Queen Theodosia?” Hachi asked.

“Oh yes. She on de docks at Lake Pontchartrain, whipping up one helluva nasty storm.”

“Why there? What's she doing?” Fergus asked.

“It doesn't matter,” Hachi said. “Now that we know where she is, we can take her down. Erasmus, you're amazing!”

The Pinkerton agent smiled modestly and shrugged. “Finding people, dat is what I do. Most of de people, dey have left de city. But dere are some who stay, just like dey always do in de storms. Dey stay wit de Voodoo Queen.”

Laveau nodded. “And we have to protect them. But to do that, we have to do the same thing to Maman Brigitte we were trying to do to Baron Samedi. We have to get close enough to get a lock of her hair to make a voodoo doll, and stuff her mouth full of salt.”

“How do we do that when she can blow us away with a flick of her wrist?” Fergus asked.

“We have to distract her,” Hachi said. She was pacing again, with Tusker still flying around her head. She looked up at the little elephant and watched him circle for a few seconds, and her face lit up. “I've got it!” she said. Hachi hurried to the wall of masks, but it was a hat she pulled down, not a mask.

A black top hat.

“What we need is Baron Samedi back.”

*   *   *

The rain blew sideways at the docks on Lake Pontchartrain, making Queen Theodosia's gray hair clump together and wave beside her like she had a head full of snakes. The lake behind her chopped and churned, the brackish water crashing up onto the dock in tall white jets of spray. She stood with her eyes closed, a thick python snake slithering around and between her arms high above her head, entirely focused on creating the hurricane that was drowning New Orleans.

Until Baron Samedi walked up from the city, riding a seventy-year-old Marie Laveau.

He wore his black top hat and a black tuxedo, and had black circles painted around his eyes and black lines like teeth on his lips the way Blavatsky had during the street party. In one hand he carried a bottle of rum, and in his mouth he puffed on a damp cigar.

Baron Samedi's deep, booming laugh broke Maman Brigitte's trance, and the wind and rain slackened as she stared at him in fear and amazement.

“Who are you?” she yelled over the storm. “What is this trick?”

“It is no trick, dearest wife,” Laveau said in Samedi's voice. “Don't you recognize your own husband?”

Maman Brigitte staggered back on the dock and dropped her snake. “No—no! I kill you before you free! I send your soul to the Dreamplanes of Leng, where you be imprisoned for a dozen-dozen years!”

“You think you can kill Baron Samedi so easily?” he said. “Baron Samedi is the King of Death! See now my army of the dead, come to kill you!”

Out of the rain and darkness behind Samedi shambled a ragged zombi army, their clothes tattered and torn, their faces pale and gaunt. When Maman Brigitte saw them, her face went white and the heavy rain and wind dropped to a gentle gale.

“Once upon a time, the goose drank wine,” Samedi sang, doing a little dance. “The monkey played the fiddle on the sweet potato vine. The vine broke, the monkey choked, and they all went to heaven on a nanny goat.”

“No. No!” Maman Brigitte cried. “You dead! I kill you! I kill you once, and I kill you again!”

Maman Brigitte pulled a knife, but up behind her in the dark choppy water loomed an enormous steamboat, the sound of its paddlewheels and steam engines hidden in the storm. It rammed the dock—
crash!
—and the platform exploded, throwing Queen Theodosia's body through the air like a sack of sugar. She hit the ground with a lifeless thud, and the steamboat's drawbridge dropped on top of her, pinning her to the ground.

Hachi ran down the drawbridge, followed by Fergus. Marie Laveau hurried to join them, followed by the hundreds of very alive people from New Orleans they'd recruited to play Baron Samedi's zombi army.