The Dragon Lantern (30 page)

Hachi put two fingers to Theodosia's neck and nodded. “She's still alive.”

Hachi shoved a handful of salt into Theodosia's mouth and held it shut while Laveau cut a lock of the queen's hair and pinned it to the doll she had hidden in her hat.

“It worked just like you said it would,” Laveau told Hachi. “As soon as she thought Baron Samedi was back, nothing else mattered to her. Even the storm died down.”

“Fergus gave me the idea,” Hachi said. She glanced up at him. “He reminded me what it is to be so focused on one thing you don't pay attention to anything else around you. Maman Brigitte was so focused on killing Baron Samedi, she didn't hear a steamboat chugging up behind her.”

“Nice job playing Samedi,” Fergus told Laveau.

“I ought to know him well enough by now,” Laveau said. “He and I go way back.”

Fergus felt something crawl across his boot and jumped back as Maman Brigitte's python slithered past. He shuddered. “Big snake,” he said.

Laveau had just begun to dig the Maman Brigitte doll out of the Theodosia voodoo doll when one of the fake zombi behind them cried out and pointed at the lake. “Li Grande Zombi!”

Out of the choppy black water rose the giant head of a snake, the black slits of its pupils glistening in the lightning from the storm. A forked tongue the size of the steamboat flicked out and licked the air, and with a hiss like a locomotive emptying its boiler, it opened its mouth and bared its glistening white fangs.

The Mangleborn in Lake Pontchartrain had awakened.

25

“Slag!” Archie cried out before landing with a thunk. The trapdoor quickly snapped shut, and he was in total darkness.

“Clyde?” he called. “Sings-In-The-Night?” Above him, he heard the scuffles and thrown furniture of a fight. Archie called his friends' names again, but this time he heard nothing. They had probably been captured without him there to protect them.

Anger rose in Archie, and he spun in the dark, peering hard to try and make out where he was. He felt out blindly until he came to a cold, damp, earthen wall, and he moved along it until he came to bars. A prison. An underground prison.

Archie was getting seriously tired of being underground all the time.

He felt the rest of the way around the room, and as he did, his eyesight got a little better. He was in a small cell, about six feet by six feet wide, with a high ceiling he couldn't reach and a floor made out of dirt.

He wasn't going to be in here for long. Archie pulled his fist back to punch a hole in one of the walls when a voice in the darkness stopped him.

“I wouldn't do that if I were you.”

Archie spun. He recognized that voice. He'd heard it before in Cahokia in the Clouds, and again the night of Custer's last stand. It was the fox girl.

“You knock down that wall, and you'll bring the whole place down,” she told him.

“Why shouldn't I?”

“Because there are lots of other people trapped down here just like us, and you don't want to kill them.”

“Where are you?” Archie asked. He threw his arms out, trying to find her in the darkness.

“I'm not in your cell,” the fox girl said. “I'm in the next one over.”

She rapped on something metal, and Archie went toward the sound. On one of the walls was a small barred window. He could just see her fox-eared shadow on the other side.

“You expect me to believe you're in prison,” Archie said.

“I am,” she told him. “I'm a prisoner of the Daimyo Under the City. He makes me steal for him, and when I'm finished, he puts me back here, in a cell.”

“Right,” said Archie. “He ‘makes you' steal. And just how does he do that?”

The fox girl sniffed. “He … he has my father. If I don't do whatever he says, he'll kill him.”

Archie frowned in the darkness. What she was saying was
possible
. But everything this girl said and did was a lie. Could he really believe what she was telling him?

“Why don't you just trick them, the way you do? Make them see a bear, or a Blackfoot raiding party, or a swarm of bees or something?”

“The Daimyo Under the City knows all my tricks. He has meka-ninja guards. Tall, thin, black Tik Toks with red eyes and all kinds of weapons and no fail-safes.”

“Yeah,” Archie said. “I've met one before.”

“But it couldn't beat you, could it? I've watched you. You're super strong, and nothing hurts you.”

Almost nothing,
Archie thought, putting a hand to the crack in his arm. But he didn't say it.

“You'll help me, won't you?” the fox girl asked. “If you do, I'll get that lantern back for you. I don't care anything about it. I don't even know what it is, or why it's so valuable. All it does is shine a bright light.”

“You opened it?” Archie asked.

“Of course.”

“Did it … did it do anything to you?”

“Do anything?” the girl said. “No. It's just a lantern.”

“It's not just a lantern,” Archie told her. “And I have to get it back.”

“I gave it to the Daimyo Under the City. If you help me free my father, I'll help you steal it back. Will you do it?”

A number of colorful curses came to Archie's mind, but he put his fingers through the bars and yanked the metal grate out of the wall for her to climb through.

“I knew you'd help,” the fox girl said as she climbed in.

“Just no funny business,” he told her. “And you get me the lantern
first
, and then I help you free your dad.”

Up close, Archie could see the fox girl pout. “You don't trust me?”

“No,” Archie told her.

The fox girl grinned. “Good. You're learning already. My name is Ren.”

“Archie,” he told her. He pulled the door off the wall of the cell as though it was made of cardboard and set it aside.

“How did you get to be so strong?” Ren asked him.

“How are you able to make people see things that aren't there?” Archie asked.

“I asked you first,” she said.

“I don't know,” Archie told her. “But it has something to do with that lantern. That's why I want it back. What about you?”

“I was born in the forest and raised by foxes.”

“I thought you said you grew up on the streets of Cahokia in the Clouds,” Archie said.

Suddenly the fox girl jumped on his back and wrapped her arms and legs around him.

“What are you—
what are you doing?”
Archie cried.

“The floor outside the cells is covered with glass so people can't escape,” Ren told him. “I need a ride.”

Archie took a tentative step outside and heard the sound of crunching glass.

“Don't you have shoes?” he asked.

“They take them away from you when they throw you in here. Unless you come in through the ceiling like you did.”

“What is this place?” Archie asked.

“The Shanghai tunnels,” she told him. “They run for miles under the city, connecting all the coffee shops and sake bars and stores and hotels to the submarine docks. At first, it was just to catch people, knock them out, and sell them to sub captains. They call it “Shanghaiing” because most of them are sailing for Shanghai, in Cathay, and no sailors want to go there. Too far, too long. And of course there's the Darkness. But then everything else illegal in Ametokai moved down here too—the slavers, the prostitutes, the gambling halls, the opium dens. The Daimyo Above the City turns a blind eye to it all.”

Archie grunted. “Maybe it's time somebody took him down.”

“I thought you only fought monsters,” Ren said.

“What makes you a monster is what's in your heart,” he said, telling her the same thing he'd told Sings-In-The-Night. “Not what you look like.”

“Are you saying that for me, or to remind yourself?” Ren asked.

Archie didn't answer. They passed a small room stacked floor to ceiling with wooden shelves that doubled as beds, where a mix of Japanese, First Nations, and Yankees lay smoking opium through hookah tubes. In another room, a man took money from a sailor and pointed him to a woman on a bare mattress on the floor before pulling the curtain closed.

From what Archie could see, there were a lot of monsters in the tunnels beneath Ametokai.

“Turn right here,” Ren told him, “then take the second left.”

“You know these tunnels awfully well,” Archie said.

“I practically grew up down here,” she told him.

“So which was it, you grew up here, or in the forest, or in Cahokia?”

“Actually, it was in Don Francisco, in California.”

“Everything you say is a lie, isn't it?” Archie said.

“No,” Ren said.

“I'll bet
that's
a lie too.”

“Do you know the Navajo story of the fox and the scorpion?” she asked. “A scorpion wants to get across a river, so he asks a fox if he can ride across on the fox's back.” Ren shifted, climbing higher on Archie's shoulders. “The fox says, ‘No way. You'll sting me, and I'll drown.' But the scorpion points out that if he stings the fox, they'll
both
drown. So the fox agrees, and the scorpion climbs on his back. Halfway across the river, the scorpion stings him. As the poison spreads through him, paralyzing him, the fox says to the scorpion, ‘Why did you do that? Now we're both going to drown!' ‘I know,' says the scorpion. ‘I couldn't help it. It's in my nature.'”

Ren pointed to a door on the left. “The lantern's in here,” she said.

Archie turned into a dark room. A metal door slammed shut and bolted behind him, and gaslights suddenly came up. The Dragon Lantern was in the room, all right, but that wasn't all. Archie was in a square room exactly like the one where he'd sat with the Daimyo Above the City, but the samurai guards here wore white, not black, and there were just as many black meka-ninjas as there were humans. On a cushion on a raised platform beside the Dragon Lantern was the same man as above too, with the same black hair and same green glasses, but now wearing white robes. The Daimyo Above the City was the same man as the Daimyo Under the City—and Ren had brought Archie right to him.

“Sorry,” she said. “It's in my nature.”

“Welcome to the city under the city, Mr. Dent,” the daimyo said. “I asked Kitsune to bring you here without a fuss so I could speak to you again. She assures me you're quite capable of destroying everyone and everything down here.”

“‘Kitsune'?” Archie said. She'd told him her name was Ren.

Kitsune shrugged as if to say, “It's in my nature.”

“What do you want with the Dragon Lantern?” Archie asked the daimyo.

The daimyo waved a disinterested hand. “It's not what I want, but what I can get for it. Arcane items such as this are highly prized in
kaiju
-ruled Cathay. This one will make me a very rich man.”

Archie took an angry step toward the daimyo. A room full of meka-ninjas and samurai guards might have scared everybody else, but not him.

“Ah ah ah,” the daimyo said, holding up a finger. “Attack me, and Kitsune's father dies.”

A meka-ninja emerged from behind the dais with a ragged, bearded Japanese man in one arm and a short sword in the other. So—Ren or Kitsune or whatever her name was hadn't been lying about her father, at least. Archie had seen Thomas Edison's meka-ninja kill quickly and efficiently at a single brief command, and he stayed where he was.

“I'm not her father!” the man in the meka-ninja's arms cried.

The daimyo ignored him. “You see, Kitsune and I have an arrangement. She does whatever I ask, and I do not kill her father.”

“I'm telling you—I'm not her father!” Kitsune's father said again.

“Now you and I will have the same arrangement,” the daimyo told Archie. “You will stay here, as my guest, and do … favors for me. Errands. And in return, I will not kill this man.”

Kitsune's father struggled in the meka-ninja's grasp. “You're making a mistake! I'm not her father!”

“I'll never work for you,” Archie said.

“Then I can kill this man?” the daimyo said.

The meka-ninja raised its sword to Kitsune's father's neck.

Archie's blood boiled. He couldn't let the daimyo control him the way he controlled Kitsune.
Wouldn't
let him. How many lives would he hurt—how many deaths might he cause—just to save the life of one man? But he was a hero. Heroes didn't let innocent people die for any reason.

Hero?
a voice whispered inside his head.
You're no hero. You're a monster. Clyde would take that deal—accept a life of slavery and crime just to save the life of one man. But not you. You're the shadow. You're the one who can trade one life for a thousand, and never blink.