The Dragon Lantern (16 page)

“Uh-oh,” Clyde said.

“What do you mean ‘uh-oh'?” Archie asked. “What's ‘uh-oh'?”

“I mean
that
uh-oh!” Clyde said.

Archie glanced quickly over his shoulder, then did a double-take.

Colossus was moving.

The rock creatures pounded on Archie's back while he stared, openmouthed, at what he was seeing.
Colossus
the steam man put a hand to the ground, heaved itself up, and stood, towering over them.

Which was impossible, because no one was sitting in the driver's seat.

“Uh-oh,” said Archie.

12

“Uh-oh,” Fergus said.

A Haitian guard wearing a blue tunic emblazoned with the large gold fleur-de-lis of Louisiana put up a white-gloved hand, and he and his partner, a Karankawan guard in the same getup, crossed their spears to bar Hachi and Fergus from entering the throne room. Blue aether crackled around the blades of the spears.

“I'll kill the one on the right. You kill the one on the left,” Hachi whispered.

Fergus knew she was kidding. At least he
hoped
she was kidding. “We're here as guests of Marie Laveau,” he told the two guards.

The guards didn't move their spears. “The Voodoo Queen, she never visits the royal court,” the Haitian guard said.

“Tonight I'm making an exception,” said a deep, smooth voice behind them.

As promised, Marie Laveau had changed. She wore a striking white dress that swept down off her right shoulder and back up over her left shoulder like a Roman toga, and on her head she wore a matching white headscarf done up so that it made seven points at the top, like a cloth crown on her head.

She also wore a new body.

The Marie Laveau Fergus and Hachi had met earlier was replaced with a younger version, perhaps half her age. The high cheekbones and striking eyebrows were the same, but the wrinkles were gone. Her skin was light brown and glistened slightly in the gaslight. She was still full-figured, but now she was thinner and firmer, and, Fergus couldn't help but observe, jaw-droppingly gorgeous.

“She changed,” he said. “She said she was going to change first, and
she changed
.”

Beside him, Hachi frowned at the woman, doubting what her eyes were seeing. But Fergus knew it was Laveau, and so did the guards.

“Madame Laveau!” the Karankawan said.

Marie Laveau strode forward with the confident, measured gait of a thirty-five-year-old woman and took Fergus and Hachi by the arms.

“I am here to see Queen Theodosia, by open invitation,” she told the two guards. “And tonight I am joined by two companions. I'm sure Her Majesty will not object.”

“No! Of course!” the Haitian guard said, and he and his partner quickly raised their spears to let them pass.

Laveau swept them inside and down a short corridor to the throne room.

“You told me my fortune today,” Hachi said to Laveau. “You said I was going to go on a long journey.”

“I told you no such thing,” Laveau said. “I said you will defeat Blavatsky, but that the answers you seek already lie with the Strongman. You test me. You doubt who I am. But believe me when I tell you,
I am Marie Laveau.
”

There were two more guards just inside the door to the queen's throne room, but unlike the guards at the front door, these were more zombi. Their dead, hollow eyes stared straight forward, and Fergus caught a whiff of dead animal, artlessly covered by a heavy dose of perfume. Marie Laveau's arm stiffened as they walked past.

“Zut alors.
Black, evil magic that is,” she whispered. “These are dark times for New Orleans.”

In the throne room, all the whispering was about Marie Laveau. Every eye in the room watched her, either in sly sideways glances or open stares. Fergus stared at everyone else. Besides a handful of zombi servants carrying plates of food and drinks around, there were perhaps thirty people in the room—men and women, First Nations and Haitians and Yankees—all dressed in a fashion Fergus had never seen before. Unlike Hachi's simple, understated red dress, the women wore big crinkly dresses of all colors that had acres of fabric on the bottom and tight, low bodices and poofy sleeves on top. The men weren't much better. They had poofy sleeves too, and wore what looked like thick, round rugs over their shoulders and tights on their legs. For once Fergus didn't feel like the oddest-dressed person in the room in his kilt and boots and white button-down shirt.

The chamber itself was as gaudily attired as the people in it. Tall blue columns separated windows whose fancy carved molding was gilded with fading gold paint. Blue-and-yellow drapes as ratty as the carpet in the long hall were tied back from the windows, and elaborate candelabras dripped melted wax onto tables throughout the room. Fergus picked at the flaking gold paint on one of the candlesticks and found iron underneath. Everything here had been gilded to make it look beautiful and expensive, but the illusion was wearing thin.

As was the queen. Theodosia was a frail old woman in her eighties, with a plain face and a broad round chin. On her gray head she wore a jewel-encrusted crown, but otherwise she was dressed like the rest of the women in her court. Her voluminous blue-and-yellow dress looked like it was made out of the same heavy material as the drapes. At a glance, Fergus figured the getup must weigh fifty pounds. How the old lady could walk was a mystery.

Queen Theodosia's entrance was announced by heralds with trumpets, and the court bowed to her as she came in. Fergus shot Hachi a questioning glance—
do we bow?
Hachi grimaced and rolled her eyes, but gave a little half-hearted bow, and Fergus followed suit.

Theodosia was followed by a skeletal-looking man in a long black jacket with a tall, wrinkled, ugly face and a thin, wild widow's peak of white hair. Fergus didn't believe in the Grim Reaper, but if he did, this fellow could give him a run for his money.

“General Andrew Jackson,” Laveau whispered. The Andrew Jackson who had defended New Orleans against a New Spain invasion in 1815 and again against a Galveston pirate attack in 1823, and whose statue and name graced the square in front of the palace.

The Andrew Jackson who had died twenty-five years ago and been resurrected by Madame Blavatsky as a zombi.

Theodosia swept across the room and made right for them.

“Madame Laveau, you honor us again after all these years with your presence!” Queen Theodosia said. She put out her hands, and Laveau took them and bowed again. “How long has it been?” the queen asked.

“Almost forty years, Your Majesty,” Laveau said. “I was here for your inauguration.”

“Of course,” Theodosia said. “And of course you don't look a day older than you did then. We would ask you how you do it, but our bokor tells us she has discovered how.”

“Your Majesty?” Laveau said.

Queen Theodosia said something in Acadian that had Blavatsky's name in it, and Fergus saw Hachi tense. They were bringing her in. Fergus stepped closer to Hachi, more as a show of support than anything. Tonight was supposed to be a fact-finding mission. Hachi wasn't supposed to go after Blavatsky right away, not until they'd found a way to get her alone. But this was a woman who was there when Hachi's dad and ninety-nine other men from his village were murdered. Hachi's need for revenge might override her good sense—and if it did, there was nothing Fergus could do to stop her. Maybe nothing anybody could do. Not even zombi Andrew Jackson.

The crowd of upholstered courtiers parted, and Madame Blavatsky strode into the throne room. She was a stark contrast to the beautiful Creole women around her: a solid, serious-looking, middle-aged Yankee woman with her hair parted down the center and pulled back into a tight bun. She wore a simple black dress over her ample bosom and big hips, and the only jewelry she wore was a thick copper necklace looped loosely many times around her neck.

Blavatsky bowed low to her queen.

“Madame Marie Laveau, may we introduce you to our royal bokor, Madame Helena Blavatsky,” Queen Theodosia said.

“The pleasure is mine,” Blavatsky said. “Your power is spoken of all over the city.”

“As is yours,” Laveau said, though Fergus didn't think she meant it the same way. “And may I introduce my companions—Fergus MacFerguson and Hachi Emartha.”

“Of Chuluota,” Hachi said.

Fergus thought he saw a flicker of something like surprise cross Blavatsky's face, but then it was gone, replaced by a soft smile.

“Any friends of Madame Laveau's are friends of mine,” Blavatsky said.

“Well said!” Theodosia told her. “And now, Madame Bokor, if you are in readiness, we are eager to proceed with tonight's ceremony. Who wouldn't be?” she asked, and her courtiers tittered.

“Which is what?” Laveau asked.

“Tonight I steal a page from the Voodoo Queen's book of spells,” Blavatsky announced to the assembled audience, with a nod to Laveau. “Through Theosophic methods, I shall call upon the loa of Baron Samedi to make our beloved queen young again!”

Two zombi wheeled a mechanical cart into the middle of the room. It was a wooden box with brass fittings, covered all over with gauges and brass pipes and speaking trumpets. To Fergus's eye, it was a combination of aether aggregator and ancient computer, like the kind he'd seen the madman Thomas Edison use to try to raise a Mangleborn. Alarm bells rang inside Fergus's head.

“In my quest for knowledge, I have traveled the world,” Blavatsky told the crowd. “When the Corsican brought the Darkness to my beloved homeland of Russia, I fled to the east, through Hindustan and into Tibet, the roof of the world, where I discovered the secret doctrine that links the world we know to every great civilization of the past—Rome, Atlantis, Lemuria, Mu, even the First Men—to a deeper, more primeval root race of godlike beings I call the Hidden Masters.”

A deeper, more primeval root race of godlike beings called the Hidden Masters
sounded an awful lot like the Mangleborn to Fergus, and they were nothing you wanted to discover in Tibet or anywhere else. He looked worryingly at Hachi, but she was locked in to what Blavatsky was saying like a clutch disc on a flywheel, analyzing every word for answers.

“This root race was the bearer of esoteric and mystical knowledge far in advance of our own,” Blavatsky explained. She drew arcane symbols on the floor around the machine with black powder as she spoke. “They knew all the unexplained laws of nature—of aether and life and lektricity—and held the keys to unlocking the latent powers buried within us all. And they are still with us, these Hidden Masters, if only we will search for them. That is what I have done, moving ever east, from Russia into the Japans, into California, across the Great Plains of North America, and south to Louisiana.”

With a brief detour to Florida when Hachi was a baby,
Fergus thought.

“Here in New Orleans, I found a place where the Hidden Masters are closer to the surface, where the power of the root race is strongest,” Blavatsky said. “Tonight, I will reach out to that power.” She held up her necklace, which had a fetish of a young woman on it. “Tonight, I will call forth the astral power of Baron Samedi, one of the intermediary aspects of the Hidden Masters, he whose power to heal and resurrect I used to create
le Grande Zombi Armee
. I will trap his loa in this charm, and with this around her neck, our beloved Queen Theodosia will not only become young again, she will be
immortal
!
”

Marie Laveau grabbed Fergus and Hachi and pulled them away from the babbling crowd.

“Whatever this is, whatever Blavatsky means to do,
it will not work
,
”
Laveau warned them. “What she proposes can't be done.”

“But you did it,” Fergus said. “You figured out a way to be young again.”

“Not like this,” Laveau said. “Never like this. This is
Mangleborn
science.” Laveau strode to the edge of Blavatsky's markings, careful not to step inside them. “Blavatsky, stop this. You do not understand the power you toy with.”

“Why should the secrets of long life be yours alone, Laveau?” Blavatsky threw back at her. “Will you not share them with your queen?”

The men and women of the court watched Laveau. She stood straight and proud. “Those secrets are mine alone,” she said.

“I shall not be so selfish,” Blavatsky said, and she threw a switch on the machine.

The air crackled and the ancient engine hummed, gathering aether to it. But what else was it doing? Fergus longed to get a look inside the thing. By the way it was shaking and the amount of aether it seemed to be aggregating, they would
all
get a look inside it soon when it blew up in their faces.

“Legba Atibon, guardian of the crossroads,” Blavatsky said, her voice raised over the growing din of the machine, “Legba, guardian of path and gate, open the door.”