The Dragon Lantern (12 page)

Shyly, Archie splashed into the shallow creek, hoping the rest of the men wouldn't see what he was going to try to do. But Custer and Pajackok ruined that by warning the regiment to stay back. By the time they were finished, the entire regiment was standing and watching.

“Mr. Dull Knife?” Archie called in through the hatch in the head. “I'm going to try to lift
Colossus
out.”

“You're
what?”
Dull Knife said.

“Just … be ready,” Archie said.

Archie put his hands under the curve of the machine man's domed head. Was he supposed to pull it up, like lifting someone to slide a blanket under them? He didn't know. He gave the head an experimental tug, and it lifted up out of the water.

“Whoa!”
Dull Knife yelled inside. “Locked sprockets!”

On the creek bank, the regiment took a step back.

Archie let the head back down into the water. He wasn't going to be able to get enough leverage by pulling up. He was going to have to get down low and push up. At his feet, the cold creek water slid by over bedrock. At least he wouldn't sink into the mud.

Archie glanced at the soldiers watching him from the shore. Clyde gave him a double thumbs-up. Taking a deep breath, Archie bent low, put his hands on
Colossus
's head, and pushed up.

The steam man rose out of the water again, dripping on Archie's pants. The brass giant groaned, and Archie grunted, pushing him higher. Soon he could see into the windows, where Dull Knife, strapped into his control chair, gaped at him. Buster ran around them, barking happily. Archie took another step forward, walking his hands along
Colossus
's face and pushing it higher, and the head came completely out of the water.

Mr. Rivets was easy to lift;
Colossus
was not. Archie knew after a few seconds that he would never be able to lift the armored steam man all by himself. Whatever his limit was,
Colossus
was beyond it. But Archie didn't have to lift all of it. Just part of it.

“Dull Knife,” Archie grunted through the broken glass of the left eye. “Get the arm out.”

Dull Knife understood immediately and began trying to work the pinned right arm out from under the weight of
Colossus
. Archie's body shook as he held the head off the ground, but it wasn't enough. The arm was still stuck.

“Hang on,” Archie said. He took another step, almost slipping on the wet bedrock, and moved his hands down
Colossus
's face. Buster, unfazed by a twelve-year-old boy lifting a hundred-thousand-pound steam man off the ground, danced around him in the water, barking and wagging his tail as though Archie was going to toss it and they were going to play fetch. He wanted to tell the dog to go away, to stay safely out of the way, but he was gritting his teeth and shaking so badly now that there was no way he could speak.

Archie kept moving forward until he reached the neck, and then the steam man's chest. The top of the head fell back into the water behind him and he staggered, but kept his feet. He was like a mouse pushing a facedown human being up by the shoulders. He was so short! If he were taller, he could have lifted the fallen steam man even higher. But just getting
Colossus
's chest off the ground was enough. Dull Knife worked the steam man's right arm out from under it, and the regiment cheered. Suddenly, mercifully, Archie felt the immense weight of
Colossus
lift from him as Dull Knife used the freed arm to push the steam man up, and Archie dropped his weary arms.

Archie had done it. He'd lifted
Colossus
. Not all the way off the ground, but enough.

Dull Knife worked the steam man into a sitting position, and the regiment swarmed over to it to crawl inside and assess the internal damage, making sure, Archie noticed, to stay far, far away from him. Only Custer and Clyde came over afterward to congratulate him and thank him.

“Told you you could do it,” Clyde said, slapping Archie on the shoulder. Buster licked Archie's hand.

Archie could hardly feel either one.

Pajackok joined them, adding his congratulations before giving Custer an update.

“Engineering reports it will take at least a day to get him walking again, and longer before he's back up to a hundred percent.”

“She's going to get quite a jump on us,” Custer said. “But at least we're back in the game.”

If Fergus had been there, Archie thought, they'd be back in the game even sooner. But Fergus and Hachi were far, far away by now.

Custer and Pajackok and Clyde hurried back to
Colossus,
leaving Archie all alone and wishing more than anything that he was with his friends, wherever they were.

9

Hachi and Fergus stepped off the steamboat
Joseph Brant
onto the busy docks at New Orleans. Porters swarmed up and down the gangplanks, bearing bags and chests and crates to and from the line of three-decker paddleboats moored in rows on the Mississippi. Most of the porters were men and women, not Tik Toks, and they were a jumble of First Nations, Afrikans, and Yankees. Their shouts and cries were a mixture of Anglish and Acadian, the same Old World language they spoke in Montreal in the far north. Hachi could hear a bit of Spanish in there too, and a little Choctaw, and another language she couldn't recognize. The wild mix of tongues told her right away that New Orleans was going to be a complicated place to deal with.

Fergus, of course, was staring out at the massive steam ships like a little boy. “There's the
Enterprise,”
he said. “She's got six steel boilers and nine engines. Draws only three feet when fully loaded. They say you can sail her on a heavy dew.”

Hachi took his arm and pulled him away. “Later,” she told him.

“You always say that,” Fergus said with a pout, “but we never come back.”

Their trip down the Mississippi River had been uneventful and slow. Fergus had spent almost the entire trip in the engine room, talking boilers and draws and horsepower with the engineers, or tucked away in his room tinkering on something secret. Hachi had spent the whole time thinking about what she was going to do to this Madame Blavatsky person when she found her, and now that they were in New Orleans, Hachi was eager to get on with it.

“I sent Mrs. Moffett a pneumatigram asking her to let the local Septemberists know we were coming,” Hachi said. She scanned the crowd. “I thought somebody might be here to quietly meet us.”

“Miss Hachi!” a man cried, waving to them from the crowd. “Miss Hachi! Over here!”

“Or not so quietly,” Fergus said.

The man was big—not so much tall as wide—with a round body and a friendly round face. He was dark-skinned and bald, and wore a black three-piece suit over a white shirt and black tie. It must have been stifling in the thick, wet heat of the city, Hachi thought. The man waved a white handkerchief like he was surrendering to them, and Hachi and Fergus worked their way through the crowd to hear his terms.

“Miss Hachi,” the man said, shaking her hand. His voice was Creole Acadian, both lazy and hard at the same time. “You look just like your description, right down to de scar on your neck.”

Hachi put a hand to her neck. She usually wore a scarf to hide the nasty scar she'd gotten as a child the night her father was killed, but she had skipped it this time in deference to the humid Louisiana weather. Maybe she would wear one anyway.

“And you must be Miss Hachi's assistant, Fenrick,” the man said.

“Assistant?”
Fergus said. “I'm not her assistant!”

“Erasmus Trudeau, at your service,” the man said. He bowed slightly and mopped his head with his handkerchief.

“Thirty days hath September,” Hachi said, giving him the first half of the Septemberist pass phrase.

Erasmus looked perplexed. “I'm sorry?”

Hachi and Fergus glanced at each other.

“Thirty days hath September,” Hachi said again.

“April, June, and November,” Erasmus said, still confused. “All de rest, dey have thirty-one. Except February, of course.” He smiled awkwardly, not sure why he was repeating a children's rhyme.

Hachi reached for where her knife was hidden, but Fergus put a hand on her arm.

“Who sent you to meet us, Mr. Trudeau?” Fergus asked.

“De agency, of course,” Erasmus said. “De Pinkerton Detective Agency? You hire us to find Helena Blavatsky for you, and we do. Well,
I
do. I'm de Pinkertons' man in New Orleans. Not too hard to find her, her being de queen's bokor and all.”

Hachi relaxed. “Right. Of course. Thank you, Mr. Trudeau.” Fergus looked at her with wide eyes, as if to say, “Don't be so touchy.”

“Call me Erasmus,” he said. “I book you in de Blennerhasset Hotel on Jackson Square. You follow me, and I see you get settled in.”

“So, no Septemberist welcome, I guess,” Hachi whispered to Fergus as they fell in behind the Pinkerton.

New Orleans beyond the docks was just as bustling as its waterfront. Broad green avenues clogged with steam carriages and clanging streetcars divided row after row of three- and four-story brick buildings whose gaslit sidewalks overflowed with men and women in fine, fancy clothes. Like the docks, the thick, humid air here was a soup of different languages, and the people a stew of different shades of brown.

“I didn't know so many Afrikans lived here,” Hachi said to Erasmus.

“Not Afrikans,” Erasmus told them. “Haitians. From de Carib Islands. Many came after de revolution there, like my parents. New Orleans, it a place many people come to. The Chitimacha people, dey come first. Den de Francia of the Old World, it come and push out de Chitimacha. Den de Spain of the Old World, it push Francia out, and den Francia, it push Spain out again.” Erasmus laughed. “Den de Darkness come, and King Aaron, he come and conquer dem all.”

Hachi knew the story: A man named Aaron Burr had raised an army near Cahokia and marched south and taken New Orleans nearly a hundred years ago. It was right after the Darkness fell, which made the seas choppy and unpassable, cutting the colonists off from their Old World nations. Without that support, there had been no one to stop him. Burr was dead now, and his daughter, Theodosia, ruled Louisiana as its queen.

“But New Orleans, she survive like always,” Erasmus said. “Just like when de hurricanes come. Dey knock all de buildings down, but New Orleans, she get right back up again.”

They crossed a canal lined with giant, drooping willow trees, and Hachi had to come back and pull Fergus away from watching the boats. At the base of the bridge she saw a woman in the bright blue-and-yellow uniform of the Louisiana militia with an oscillating rifle on her shoulder. Hachi was about to nod at her, but something about her face gave Hachi goose bumps. The woman was deathly gray and thin, with big dark rings around her eyes. And her mouth—her mouth looked like it was sewn shut with thick black string.

“Did you see that woman back there?” Hachi asked Fergus. “The soldier?”

“Ah, yes,” Erasmus said uncomfortably. “Yes,
de Grande Zombi Armee
. A gift to Queen Theodosia from our new bokor, de Madame Blavatsky.”

“She looked like she was dead,” Hachi said.

“She is. Dey all are. De greatest army in de world, she say. After all, how you kill somebody who already dead?”

They passed another zombi soldier, and Fergus moved a little closer to Hachi.

“Crivens. That is blinking creepy,” he said.

Hachi noticed that none of the living residents of New Orleans made eye contact with the soldiers, and they all gave them a wide berth—some of them even crossing the street to stay away from them.

“Looks like most people tend to agree with you,” she said.

Erasmus nodded. “Dark things are afoot ever since dat bokor come,” he said. “Some people, dey think dere even worse monsters than zombi in New Orleans, and dat dey be rising.”

“Oh, that's just brass,” Fergus said, and he and Hachi shared a knowing look. If there were Manglespawn here—or worse, a waking Mangleborn—then Blavatsky was the least of their problems. And they were without Archie, the one of them who could actually go toe-to-toe with a Mangleborn and survive.

Archie
. Hachi felt a twinge of guilt for letting him go after the lantern alone. She hated to do it. He was right—they
did
make a good team. And she did want to help him find out where he'd come from. But she knew where
she
had come from, and Blavatsky was a part of it she couldn't let get away. And whoever this Blavatsky was, she was even more powerful than Hachi had thought. And more dangerous too.

“Erasmus, we need to get in to see Queen Theodosia,” Hachi said. Wherever Queen Theodosia was, Blavatsky was sure to be close by. “Can you arrange that for us?”