The Dragon Lantern (14 page)

“But with destruction comes a rebuilding,” Laveau said.

“Like New Orleans,” Fergus said.

“Yes,” said Marie Laveau. “Exactly like New Orleans. The Maker understands. That which is torn down can be built up again. But only
you
can do the rebuilding, Hachi.”

She moved her hand to the next card—the Five of Cogs. In the picture, a black-cloaked figure stood with her back to them, her head bowed in despair. On the ground at her feet were five gears, three with broken cogs and two that were perfect. “The Five of Cogs is a card of choice,” Laveau told her. “Three of her gears are broken, yet she refuses to see that she has two good ones left. She can continue to mourn over those she has lost and stay where she is, or she can celebrate what she has left and move forward.”

Marie Laveau pointed to the next card: the Queen of Swords. They had come full circle.

“The choice will be yours, Hachi Emartha.”

Hachi shivered. What was the secret of Chuluota? What did Archie have to do with anything? What had happened there that was so awful that learning it would destroy her so completely? And when the time came, could she rebuild herself? Would she even want to?

Marie Laveau stood. The taller of her two assistants took her arm to steady her, and the smaller of the two collected the cards off the table. Their audience with the Voodoo Queen was at an end.

“I will meet you at the palace,” Laveau told them. “Now, if you'll excuse me, I must … change for the evening.”

10

The mood in
Colossus
had definitely changed.

The soldiers in the 7th Steam Man Regiment didn't joke and laugh as they had before the crash. Many of them nursed injuries that kept them from being able to move about easily within the steam man, and instead of sitting in the galley during their down time, they stayed at the forward hatches, searching the terrain ahead of them for more tricks and illusions as
Colossus
pursued the fox girl.

It was the same on the bridge. Custer stood quietly by the right eye—the one that still had a glass window—watching the horizon. Lieutenant Pajackok, one of his legs bandaged and splinted, went over his maps again and again, constantly checking in with the advance scouts who flew ahead of them. All three of the aeronauts were in the air, and would be, Archie guessed, for the rest of the mission. Even Buster was quiet, looking up at Archie sleepily while Dull Knife and Clyde kept them walking along. It was already past dusk and creeping on toward night, and ordinarily they would be stopping to make camp. But they had lost the trail of the fox girl's steam mule in the delay repairing
Colossus
, and Custer was trying to make up for lost time.

“How is she able to do it?” the captain asked. He didn't turn around, but Archie could see the reflection of his face in the glass.

“Make us see things?” Archie said. “I don't know.” He bent low to scratch Buster's tummy. “I only ran into her once before, in Cahokia in the Clouds. She made me see all kinds of stuff—fake walls, crowded sidewalks, a bear.” Pajackok looked up at that one, then quickly went back to reading his maps. “Then she blew me up.”

That made Custer turn.

“But there's something about her power,” Archie went on. “It cuts out whenever she's surprised or stressed. There were times her illusions disappeared, and I was able to see her as she really is. I think.”

“We'll just have to surprise her the next time we see her then,” Custer said.

“That may be sooner than we think,” Lieutenant Pajackok said. He put a hand to the headphones he wore. They were connected by rubber tube to the steam man's “ears”—big inverted speaking trumpets that funneled sound inside
Colossus
's head. “It's the
Screaming Eagle
. They've spotted a bonfire.”

Archie could just hear the hint of the aeronauts' trumpets on the wind through the open left eye. Pajackok gave Dull Knife a new heading, and
Colossus
turned to the north.

“I see it,” Custer said. “Magnify.”

The bonfire the aeronauts had spotted was a glowing orange dot on the horizon until Lieutenant Pajackok activated the right eye's optics. A series of telescopic lenses slid out of the hull just above the right eye, magnifying the view each time.
Click! Click! Click!
When they were all in place, they could see into the low, round canyon that held the flames, even though they were still half a mile away.

The bonfire wasn't a bonfire. There were flames, but they were red, not yellow and orange. Blood red, like the moon. The flames spiraled around a human effigy half as tall as a real man, made out of bundles of sticks. Where the head would have been was an enormous horned animal skull, like that of a buffalo, but much larger and more hideous.

Around the burning buffalo man, a giant herd of buffalo snorted and stomped, stampeding in a circle like they couldn't escape its orbit. Circling around them, lurching and dancing in time to some unheard song, were perhaps two dozen men and women, First Nations and Yankees alike. Their clothes were tattered and torn, and on their faces they wore grotesque masks—crudely carved things with bloody buffalo horns and matted fur that hung from their masks like shaggy beards.

And tied to the stick man in the very center of it all was the fox girl.

“Is that her?” Custer asked.

“Yes,” Archie said, mesmerized. He didn't know which part of the whole thing was the most bizarre. Buster, wakened by all the action, barked at the image on the eye.

“Quite the show she's putting on for us this time,” Custer said. “But we're not going to be so easily fooled. And she's made a mistake hiding out in that canyon with only one way out. Mr. Pajackok, signal the regiment to make ready for ground assault, then have the aeronauts take up points west-northwest, east-northeast, and west-southwest. Mr. Tahmelapachme, move
Colossus
in to take the fourth point, east-southeast of the circle, pointed toward the entrance, but come to a stop just outside it.”

Archie moved closer to the window and frowned at what he was seeing. The fox girl had always made him see people, but they had been normal people, doing normal things—businessmen and nannies walking the gangplanks of Cahokia in the Clouds, a Sioux raiding party attacking from the north. This—this was just
weird
. How was she hoping to sabotage them with this illusion? And there was another thing—

“Why would she show herself?” Archie asked out loud. Custer looked at him. “I mean, why show her real self?”

“You said she showed you her real self in Cahokia,” Custer said.

“But only when she was surprised. What if…” The thought was almost as outlandish as the scene in
Colossus
's telescopic eye, but he had to say it. “What if what we're seeing isn't an illusion at all? What if it's real?”

Everyone else on the bridge looked at Archie like he had suddenly put on one of those masks and started dancing around.

“I'm just saying,” Archie said, “I've seen some pretty weird stuff before…”

Custer shook his head. “She's tricking us again. Luring us in. Or trying to. But I've got a few tricks up my sleeve too. For whatever reason, she's shown herself to us, and I'm not going to let her slip away.”

Colossus
rocked to a stop, and Archie stumbled as he tried to readjust. “All stop, Captain,” Dull Knife said.

“Mr. Tahmelapachme, you and Clyde will stay on
Colossus
. Mr. Pajackok, you'll take half the regiment into the canyon and circle around to the east, leaving a man every two hundred yards. I'll take the other half of the regiment into the canyon and do the same to the west. When we're all in position, I'll give the signal, and we'll close in on her from all points.”

“You're not going to take
Colossus
in?” Archie asked.

“She can slip away from us too easily that way,” Custer said. “We'll surround her on the ground, and then close in like a net. By the time she knows what we're up to, we'll have her fenced in and there'll be no place for her to run, no matter what she makes us see. Mr. Dent, you're with me.”

Archie explained the situation to Mr. Rivets as he switched out the machine man's talent card for a Protector card. He wanted the Tik Tok and his nonhuman eyes with him.

“I wish you could see what's out there from here, and tell us if it's an illusion,” Archie said. “Instead we'll have to wait until we're up close.”

Dull Knife lowered
Colossus
into a squat, and Archie climbed down a ladder onto the ground with the rest of the regiment. Lieutenant Pajackok had already given them their assignments, and each of the soldiers carried oscillating rifles in their arms and rayguns in the holsters at their hips. They looked brave and ready for battle, but Archie knew from the mood before on the steam man that they were nervous and scared.

“This girl, she can fool us. Make us see things that aren't there,” Custer told his men. “We all saw things with our eyes that weren't there the last time, and most of us have the bumps and bruises to prove it,” he said, lifting the arm he carried in a sling. “But we've got her surrounded this time. No matter what you think you see, you ignore it—unless it tries to run. That's our quarry. Everything that isn't trying to run away is make-believe. Understand?”

The men nodded, and Custer waved them into action. Archie and Mr. Rivets followed along behind the captain as he spread his forces out in a wide half-circle. When they met up with Lieutenant Pajackok on the other side, Custer told him to give the signal. Pajackok blew a bugle, and high above them the three aeronauts fired off flares that lit up the dark canyon with brilliant white light.

“Master Archie,” Mr. Rivets said. “I see them—the madmen, the buffalo, the fire, the girl. I can see it all.”

“Wait, what?” Archie got a sick feeling deep in his stomach. “It's real?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Captain Custer!” Archie cried, but Custer didn't hear him. He was already yelling for his men to charge.

Archie caught Custer by the arm. “No! Wait! It's not an illusion! It's all real!” Custer looked down at him in horror, but it was too late.

Shadows emerged from the darkness, oscillators raised, and ran toward the bizarre scene. They charged in among the crazy dancing people, ignoring them like they had been told to, and everything went wrong all at once. The dancers, driven mad by whatever that grotesque skull was in the center of everything, jumped on the soldiers, riding them to the ground in a hail of raygun blasts and screams. Archie ran into the fray, punching one of the insane revelers and sending her flying before she could stick a dagger into Private Inola's back. Another madman jumped on Archie and tried to bite him before Inola blasted him with a raygun.

“They're real!” Inola cried. “They're all real!”

It hardly needed to be said now. Custer's men were taking heavy losses—losses they could have avoided if Custer had just waited a moment longer to give the signal. Archie pulled one of the cultists off another soldier and threw him into the darkness, but the soldier was dead. This was all going horribly, horribly wrong.

And then it got worse.

Behind them, the buffalo at the head of the stampede stopped, and the buffalo following them plowed into them. But instead of trampling each other, they
melded
. Like pieces of molten iron, they stuck together, fusing with each other into one gigantic, monstrous, many-headed, many-legged beast. A stampede become a single creature.

A buffalo herd Manglespawn.

The creature bellowed with an unearthly roar, towering as high as the canyon walls and flickering red and brown from the light of the mystical fire. The insane dancers who remained broke off their attack and began dancing again, some of them moving so close to the monster that they were trampled.

The few soldiers who were left backed away in fear.

“Shoot it! Shoot it!” Archie cried. One or two golden raygun blasts lanced out in the darkness, but most of the men ran. The Manglespawn lurched after them, howling and trampling people, and Archie ran up to it and punched it. The monster staggered back on its dozens of legs, bellowing again, but it just rolled over onto different legs and charged anything that moved.

Archie found Custer in the chaos, staring at the bright red flame in the center of the clearing. Archie grabbed his arm. “Bring in
Colossus!”
Archie cried. Custer said nothing. He just kept staring at the skull and the flames. “Captain! Call in
Colossus
!
”

It was useless. Custer was mesmerized. For all Archie knew, he was going to start dancing around with the cultists. He spied Lieutenant Pajackok struggling to his feet and hurried to help him.