The Dragon Lantern (26 page)

Tall Bull helped Archie to his feet.

“Does that happen often?” Archie asked.

“No,” Tall Bull said. “Never.”

One of the Dog Soldiers cried out, and they turned. The conical roof on top of the clothiers exploded in a burst of flames as a gas line broke, and the second floor of the shop started to go with it. Archie rushed for the front door.

“You can't go in there!” Tall Bull called to him. “It's going to collapse!”

“Mrs. Moffett's in there!” Archie called back. “I have to save her!”

Archie ran inside. Mr. Moffett was hurrying for the door, but the ceiling above her shuddered, shifted, and collapsed. Mrs. Moffett was knocked to the floor, but Archie caught the roof before it could crush her.

“Mrs. Moffett! Mrs. Moffett, are you all right?” Archie yelled.

“Yes—yes. I'm all right,” she said, her voice hoarse. “The fox girl—she was here, but she got away. You must—you must go after her!”

Archie held the burning ceiling above him. The fire didn't hurt him, and the weight was nothing, but he knew it could break apart in his hands any second now. “Are there any more people inside?” he asked.

Mrs. Moffett coughed. “I don't know,” she said. “Forget them. Get the lantern!”

“Get to the exit!” he told her.

Moffett crawled away, and Archie tossed the burning wreckage into a wall full of men's suits. He would go after the fox girl, but not before he made sure there was no one left in the building. Archie climbed the burning stairs to what was left of the second floor, but he found no one, not even bodies. Fire raged throughout the shop, and he heard the sirens of fire airships. The staircase collapsed as he turned to go, and he jumped out a window into the backstreet instead. The boardwalk cracked as he landed, but it held.

Huddled in a doorway across the alley were two men and three women wearing tailors' tape measures around their necks like scarves.

“Were you in there?” Archie asked. “Did you see a girl with a fox tail?”

“No,” one of the women said. “But there was a Dog Soldier. He ran upstairs just before the earthquake started. He helped me get out from under a sewing machine that had fallen on me, then got us all out to the fire escape before the gas line exploded. I'd be dead now if it wasn't for him.”

Archie knew no Dog Soldiers had been in the building with Mrs. Moffett and the fox girl. That could mean only one thing. “Where'd he go?” Archie asked.

The woman pointed to a spiral staircase down to the next level, and Archie ran for it. It collapsed when he was partway down it, crashing down on itself for three levels before spitting Archie out in a heap of twisted brass and broken wood into a Harley–Dancing Sun monowheel factory. He looked up into the face of the startled fox girl, and she dashed away.

“Wait!” Archie called, but she had already jumped into one of the monowheels. It roared to life, and she tore off through the factory, knocking over tables full of parts as she struggled to steer the thing. Archie chased her until she smashed through a wall. Sunlight spilled inside the factory, and the monowheel went sailing through the air. It slammed down onto the hard ground of the prairie, wobbled, balanced itself, and sped away.

Archie ran to one of the railed balconies along the edge of the city, where he watched the monowheel tear off into the distance, trailing dust and smoke behind it. Around the balcony from one end ran Mrs. Moffett; Tall Bull and the Dog Soldiers ran around from the other side, growling menacingly at him. Archie didn't understand—were they mad about him letting the thief get away, or because she had torn up five levels of a city block?

“She's getting away!” Mrs. Moffett cried, and Archie heard the scary anger in her voice he'd heard before at the Cahokia Arms.

“We'll catch her!” Archie said. He put his fingers in his mouth and blew a sharp whistle, and in moments the bald brass head of Buster the steam man appeared in front of them, whistling happily.

“You called?” Clyde's voice boomed from the steam man.

“Clyde! Buster! The fox girl, she's getting away in a monowheel!” Archie pointed at the dust and smoke in the distance.

“We're on it!” Clyde said. “Deploying aeronaut scout!”

The hatch on top of Buster's head flew open, and Sings-In-The-Night climbed out and spread her great black wings.

Beside Archie, Mrs. Moffett gasped. “No—no, it can't be!” she cried. She put her hands up and took a step back like she had seen a ghost.

Sings-In-The-Night froze, staring at Mrs. Moffett.
“Mina?”
she said.

Archie's skin iced over. Mina was the name of the girl Sings-In-The-Night said had been the leader of their Forged League, one of the children the Septemberists had experimented on. The one who had turned on the humans in Beaver Run, killing them all and destroying their town.

Mina.

Philo
mena
Moffett
.

“But—but I saw you die!” Sings-In-The-Night said.

Archie took a step back toward the Dog Soldiers, and they growled again. But they weren't growling at him, he realized at last. They were growling at Mrs. Moffett.

Mrs. Moffett turned on Archie and the Dog Soldiers, her eyes wide and wild. She wasn't just angry; she was insane. She rose as if lifted by hot air balloon, and that's when Archie saw them—thick, purple-black tentacles, dozens of them, writhing out from under her enormous floor-length bustle. One of them whipped out, wrapped around Archie's neck, and tossed him over the side. Sings-In-The-Night caught him before he hit the ground, and Buster caught the Dog Soldiers as she threw them over the side too, but none of them could do anything to stop her from taking a deep breath and shrieking at the mountains they were passing by. Her scream was an ear-splitting wail like the one Archie had heard during the earthquake, and now he knew where it had come from. Tentacles wrapped around the rail, chest thrust forward, fists clenched at her side, Mina Moffett emitted a howl from her throat that warped the air like waves of heat and ripped up the ground like a steam plow. Her shriek widened, churning up more and more ground until it hit the mountain, shaking rocks loose in an avalanche.

Slowly, dully, Archie understood what she was doing.

“Sings-In-The-Night! Fly me back! We have to stop her!” Archie cried.

But it was too late. The mountain exploded, and the Mangleborn called the Crooked Man crawled up through the rubble and howled.

21

Baron Samedi howled with laughter and smacked a serving girl on the bottom. “More rum!” he cried. “More rum for me and my distinguished guests!”

Samedi's “distinguished guests” were three pretty young women he'd stolen off the streets. They laughed with him and smiled, but there was fear in their eyes, and they kept stealing glances at the zombi guards at the doors. Samedi grabbed one of them by the wrist and pulled her onto his lap.

“Drink!” he said, tipping a goblet of rum to her lips. She choked a little as she swallowed, rum dribbling down her chin, and Samedi bellowed again.

At the other end of the table, watching all this without a hint of emotion, was Queen Theodosia. She sat with her hands in her lap, doing and saying nothing to stop Samedi. She might have been in shock—Hachi couldn't fault her for that—but Hachi still hated her for not protesting, for not fighting back.

Hachi nodded to Fergus, and together, dressed in maid uniforms and bonnets to hide who they were, they wheeled in big serving carts filled with silver-plated dishes. Baron Samedi's palace was crawling with zombi, but the one place he still needed humans was in the kitchen. Zombi didn't make very good cooks; they liked all their food raw.

“Dinner is served, my lord,” Hachi said, using a small, frightened voice.

“Aah! At last!” Samedi said. He pushed the girl off him and rubbed his hands together as Hachi set a covered dish in front of him. She lifted the lid and tried to turn away, but Samedi's hand whipped out and caught her.

“Wait,” he said. “I smell salt.”

Laveau had warned them about this. The taste of salt drove zombi back into their graves, and would make the Lord of the Dead weak enough to push him out of Blavatsky's body. But Samedi knew his own weakness and was crafty. He'd already gotten rid of every grain of salt in the palace and commanded the kitchen staff never to use it, unless they wanted to join his growing zombi army.

Samedi pushed the plate of deep-fried crawfish at one of the girls. “Taste it,” he said.

With a frightened glance at Hachi, the girl picked up one of the crawfish and tasted it.

“Is it salted?” Samedi asked.

The girl nodded tearfully, her eyes apologizing to Hachi.

Samedi pulled back Hachi's bonnet and roared with laughter when he saw her face. She struggled to pull away, but he held on tightly to her.

“Oh no, girl. You're not getting away this time! Guards, lock the doors!” He laughed again as she tried and failed to yank her hand away. “I knew you'd try something like this, girl! Old Baron Samedi, he know all the tricks.” He pulled her closer, his face suddenly dark and serious. “But he also know you, Hachi Emartha. He know you never have just one trick.”

“You're right,” Hachi told him. “But I have to admit, this one was Fergus's idea.”

“Who's Fergus?” Samedi asked.

Near the middle of the table, Fergus lifted the lid of a silver platter with a flourish.

“Et voila!”
Fergus said in a very poor Acadian accent. “Tonight I have prepared for you a meal of saut
é
ed sodium on a bed of finely chopped chlorine.”

On the plate was a shiny silver block of metal, a little smaller than a lacrosse ball, nestled in an inch of white powder.

Samedi sniffed. “That's not salt,” he said. “And whatever it is, you'll never get me to eat it.”

“No, it's not salt. Not yet,” Fergus said. “And I don't need you to eat it.” Fergus put his finger in a glass of water on the table and flicked one drop onto the block of sodium. It erupted into a ball of fire so big and so bright, it blew all the girls to the floor and sent Fergus spinning away.

Baron Samedi tried to stand, but Hachi wrenched his hands behind his chair and tied them together. “Oh no, Baron. This time it's
you
who's not going anywhere.”

Fergus's chemical reaction roared and grew, catching the table on fire. White-black smoke billowed out from it, filling the air, and Hachi could feel it burning the back of her throat, could taste its sting on her tongue. Sodium plus chloride made NaCl—salt. Or in this case,
salt vapor
. Samedi didn't have to eat anything; if they waited long enough, Blavatsky would breathe in enough salt to drive Samedi out of her.

“Guards!” Samedi choked. “Guards! Kill them! Kill them all!”

Fergus ducked behind the chair with Hachi, shielding himself from the massive inferno on the table, and they hastily tied bandanas around their faces to block the salt vapor.

“Nice trick, but you didn't say it was going to explode in a huge fiery ball of death!” Hachi yelled at him.

“Right,” Fergus yelled back. “That reminds me. I should warn you, it's going to explode in a huge fiery ball of death.”

Samedi tried to call for help again, but Blavatsky's body was racked by a coughing fit. The zombi guards at the door had heard him the first time, though, and were shambling toward them—including General Andrew Jackson, cutlass drawn.

Hachi pushed Laveau's voodoo doll of Blavatsky into Fergus's hands. “Get Baron Samedi out of her,” Hachi told him. “I'll take care of the zombi.”

To kill a zombi well and good, Laveau had told them, you had to stuff its mouth with salt and sew it shut. Either that or kill the bokor who created it. But zombi didn't breathe, so they weren't getting the mouthful of salt vapor that Samedi was, and Hachi wasn't going to kill Blavatsky—not yet—so she couldn't get rid of them that way either. And because they were dead already, they would keep coming no matter what she did to them.

But that didn't mean she couldn't make it harder for them.

Hachi pulled a machete out of the serving cart and lopped off the head of the first zombi to reach her. The head went bouncing across the floor and thunked against the wall, its dead, empty eyes staring up at the ceiling. Its body didn't die, but without eyes to guide it, it wandered away from the table, arms still groping for her.

Hachi smiled. This was going to be fun.

As she whacked off the zombi heads, she glanced back to make sure everything was going according to plan with the voodoo doll. Laveau—wearing her old body this time—had sewn the voodoo doll together herself, stuffing it full of a strange assortment of ingredients, including a healthy chunk of Blavatsky's hair and a tiny doll made to look like Baron Samedi. Fergus had cut into the thing and was pulling the Baron Samedi doll out of it now. If Laveau was right, the salt in Blavatsky's mouth and the Samedi doll yanked out of her voodoo doll would be enough to knock the Baron off his horse.