The League of Seven (26 page)

“You were there to kill Mr. Edison,” Mr. Rivets said. “And then … to attempt to destroy the Mangleborn? With the dynamite?”

“Yes.”

“Killing yourself as well, I must point out.”

Hachi looked away into the darkness. “I should be dead already, Mr. Rivets. I should have died that night, with the rest of my people. With my family.”

“You'll forgive me, miss, if I fail to see the logic in that.”

“Why me, Mr. Rivets? Why did my mother and my father and my grandmother and my whole tribe die, but I didn't?”

“Why should some not survive?” Mr. Rivets asked. “If Master Archie's ancestors had all died out when the first among them died, I would not have been able to serve many more generations of Dents. It is undoubtedly a tragedy your parents died as they did. When viewed another way, however, it is a miracle that you survived. And if you will permit the observation, miss, you have not just survived, you have flourished. Like a tempered steel blade hardened in the blacksmith's forge, you have come out stronger and sharper than before. You are, in short, the most extraordinary thirteen-year-old I have known in more than one hundred years of service.”

“Slag it all, I don't want to be tempered steel! I don't want to be the greatest warrior who ever lived!” Hachi told him. “I want to go to school, and worry about homework, and clothes, and boys. I want to laugh and play and live like other kids.” Tears streamed down her face now. “
I want my parents back, Mr. Rivets.
”

“Of course, miss. But choices like that are not ours to make. I too feel responsible for the loss of my family. Ever since our encounter with Mr. Edison and Mr. Shinobi in the glade, I have continually played out the variables in my clockworks to determine if another course of action might have saved them.”

Hachi sniffled, trying to regain control. “I'm so sorry. You've lost everyone too, haven't you? Mr. and Mrs. Dent, and now Archie. What happens to machine men when their owners die?”

“Tik Toks are property, miss. Like the rest of the Dent estate, I will most likely be put up for auction to pay off their creditors—but I am not convinced Mr. and Mrs. Dent are dead. Master Archie assured me he had seen them in his dreams, and I trust his intuition, as I have none.”

“They are,” Hachi told him. “They're alive. I've seen them in my dreams too.”

“Then I shall go back to Florida,” Mr. Rivets said. “I will go back to where I lost them, and I will do whatever I can to rescue them—or wind down trying.”

“It's hopeless,” Hachi told him.

“Hope—and its antithesis—are not part of my programming, miss.”

Hachi nodded through her tears. They weren't part of her programming either. Not anymore.

“If I told you about the men of my tribe who died, Mr. Rivets, if I recited the hundred names,” Hachi asked, “would you record them on your memory cards?”

“It would be my honor, miss,” said Mr. Rivets.

 

23

Archie roared. His club rang out on Brynhildr's shield, knocking her back into the shallow water. The Yellow Emperor lit a rocket that screamed at him and exploded, setting the pelt on his back on fire. A ruby raygun blast cut through the darkness, searing him. He felt the pain and screamed, but it didn't kill him. It didn't even hurt him.

Nothing could hurt him.

He was the Great Bear.

This is your birthright
, Malacar Ahasherat whispered in his head as he destroyed the Yellow Emperor's South-Facing Chariot.
You are Mangleborn,
she told him as he swiped his club at one of Eshu's ghost-images of himself.
You are the Jandal a Haad
, she sang as Archie kicked the Atlantean hero Cadmus before he could sow the teeth of Yog-Lerna and summon his Spartoi warriors.

The Yellow Emperor's chemicals burned on his hunched, heaving back, making him look like a crackling orange demon glowing in the night. He howled at the red moon as his friends fell beneath his club.

He was the Great Bear. He was unbeatable. He was the Jandal a Haad.

He was a monster.

*   *   *

“I'm not a monster!” Archie cried out, sitting up straight.

“I am glad to hear it,” an old Cherokee man said, sitting cross-legged beside him. He wore a white shirt under a black vest, with a bright red scarf tied around his head to hold back his stringy black hair. Wrinkles lined his brown face, but his eyes were young and alight with mischief.

Archie panted, bathed in sweat. He had been dreaming. He had dreamed he was the Great Bear, fighting his friends. Fighting the League. He was the Great Bear, but Malacar Ahasherat had called him Jandal a Haad. Was she talking to him, Archie the dreamer, or to the Great Bear in the dream? Or both?

Archie tried to focus on the here and now. He was naked underneath a woven blanket, in a hot, smoky room filled with jars and medical equipment and books. The air smelled like herbs and dirt. A fire smoldered in the center of the room, and here and there cots were lined with animal skins. He recognized one of them right away: the Great Bear's pelt.

The pelt—the pelt was the last thing he remembered about falling from the
Hesperus
. He had lost his grip on it and it ripped from his fingers, fluttering up and away as the airship grew smaller and the world below him got closer and closer.

Archie put his hands to his head, his chest, his legs.

“Looking for injuries?” the Cherokee man asked him. “Your little friend hasn't let me get too close, but from what I can see, you haven't any.”

“My little friend?”

A tiny clockwork elephant with wings fluttered up in front of Archie and trumpeted.

“Tusker!”

The elephant landed on top of Archie's blanket protectively, guarding him from the old man across the room as if the little wind-up toy were a full-sized elephant. Tusker had survived the fall! But that made sense. Tusker had wings.

Archie didn't. So how was he still in one piece?

Archie looked around again at the cots and the books and the jars. “Are you a doctor?” he asked.

“Yes,” the man told him. “Not that you need one. I daresay you've never needed a doctor in your entire life, have you?”

Archie frowned. He'd never been to the doctor, no, but that wasn't so unusual, was it? Not every boy got broken arms and legs or cuts that needed sewing up. But now that he thought about it, he couldn't remember the last time he'd even been sick.

The old man smiled. “My name is Hul-lih, but you may call me John Otter.”

“How did I—the last thing I remember was—but that's impossible,” Archie whispered.

“Two young lovers away in the woods saw you fall from the sky.” John Otter clapped his hands. “
Smack!
You left a boy-sized hole.”

The old man crossed the room toward him. Tusker tensed, raising his little tusks defiantly. “Your clothes were ripped and shredded,” John Otter said. “All that survived intact were this overly protective clockwork marvel, that curious white animal skin, and you. Three wonders, each more incredible than the last.”

The pelt must have protected me,
Archie thought.
That's what saved me. I was wrapped up in it, and it absorbed the impact. Broke my fall.
But Archie distinctly remembered losing it in midair. Watching it slip away. Somehow he must have gotten it back … or lucked into falling on it?

John Otter bent over to pick up a kettle, and Archie caught a glimpse of a black tattoo on his arm: a pyramid eye inside a seven-pointed star.

“That tattoo,” Archie said. “You're a Septemberist!”

“Oh, do you know it?” John Otter said casually. He hung the kettle over the fire and pulled two pottery cups from a cabinet. “Yes. My family have fought the Mangleborn for many generations. As the medicine men of my clan, it is our duty to watch the Earth for signs of their return, and to do what we can to prevent it. As have your family in their way, I take it? Your adopted family, I mean.”

“Adopted? What? I—no.” What a strange old man! “I mean, yes, my family have been Septemberists for centuries. When I grow up I'm going to be a member too. But I'm not adopted.”

“Ah, I see,” he said lightly. “So, tell me how you and your little friend came to fall from the sky.”

Archie was glad to finally have an adult who was interested in hearing his story. Someone who knew what the Mangleborn were capable of, who could help him get his parents back. He started with the thing in the basement of Septemberist headquarters and brought John Otter with him up to the present, leaving nothing out. John Otter was quiet until Archie was done, moving only to pour them tea when the water boiled.

“It is quite a story already, even though it is not yet finished,” John Otter said. He rubbed the white pelt of the Great Bear between his fingers, thinking. “What you have told me about the Mangleborn rising does not surprise me. There have been signs. Weaker men feel their stirrings and become monsters themselves, though they know not why. Cherokee warriors have made raids on Muskogee villages, and Muskogee warriors have responded in kind,” John Otter told him. “So far they have been isolated incidents, but now there are rumblings of war. A war between the tribes.”

“A war between the Muskogee and the Cherokee?”

“And the Shawnee, and the Choctaw, and the Illini, and the Powhatan. And the Yankees. A war between the nations. A civil war that will undo all that the Iroquois did to bring peace to this land. That is, if the Mangleborn are allowed to escape their bonds.”

“We have to do something. The
Septemberists
have to do something,” Archie said. “A new League maybe, like the seven heroes of old. A new League of Seven.”

“If I am not much mistaken, a new League is already forming,” John Otter said.

“Where? Who? Do you mean me and Fergus and Hachi? That's what I told them! It's us, isn't it! I knew it! Fergus is the tinker, Hachi is the warrior, and I'm the leader! Who else is there? Where do we find them?”

“Come,” John Otter said, slapping Archie on the knee. Tusker fluttered up from the blanket and trumpeted angrily. “Get dressed and join us for our circle dance. I think you will enjoy it. It's dark yet besides. We shall return you to your extraordinary friends in Standing Peachtree by daylight tomorrow. From the sound of it, they will be as surprised to find you alive as
you
were.”

Archie wanted to keep talking about the League, but John Otter ignored his questions and instead urged him to get dressed in the Cherokee-style pants and shirt he'd given him. Why was it so hard to get adults to tell him anything? To trust him? Archie wanted to scream:
The Mangleborn are waking, and we need an army to stop them!
But all John Otter wanted to talk about was a woman named Sally Wah-yeh he hoped to see at the circle dance.

The entire village assembled for the dance around an unlit fire pit. The trunk of a tree that looked like it had been split apart by lightning was carried ceremoniously to the fire pit and was lit, its flickering orange flame fighting off the darkness that fell around them. Men and women in costumes decorated with beads and feathers and animal skins danced around it in a circle, while the spectators beat drums and chanted in Cherokee.

“They dance to celebrate Selu, the Corn Mother,” John Otter told him, leaning in close to be heard over the singing. An old woman bowed in front of them, offering Archie and John Otter bowls of what smelled like beef stew. Archie thanked her and took the bowl hungrily. It felt like weeks since he had eaten anything. The woman winked at John Otter, and went to serve more food.

John Otter nudged Archie with his elbow. “Sally Wah-yeh,” he said. “I think she is sweet on me.”

Archie had seconds—and then thirds—of the stew while he watched the dancing. When the food was gone he was handed a dry, hollow gourd with small rocks inside it, which he shook in time with the dance like others around the circle. John Otter took a drum made from a hollow log and a deerskin and beat on it with his palms. Archie didn't know what most of the dances meant or what they were for, but it was easy to get caught up in the thumping energy, the push and pull of the ceremony, like the rhythmic sway of a train ride or a submarine voyage.

Or a Mangleborn vision.

John Otter nudged him again. “Pay attention now,” he told Archie. “I think you'll like this next part especially.”

Archie tried to recapture the thrill of the dance, to lose himself again in the hypnotic stomping and singing, but the thought of the Swarm Queen's dreamsongs had chilled him. Now he watched, distantly, as a man on stilts wearing a shaggy shirt and a buffalo mask danced into the circle. Archie didn't see what this had to do with him until the buffalo man was joined by seven others: a blindfolded man with a “seeing stick” to help him find his way; a handsome warrior wearing armor and wielding a sword; a laughing woman with the head and wings of a raven; a limping man with a hammer; a woman with war paint on her face, carrying a bow and arrow; another woman wearing big goggles and carrying a book; and, hidden among them and hard to see, a huge man in black carrying a club.