The Dragon Lantern (3 page)

“Planets move. The light doesn't,” Hachi said. “We may not run into any more in the right position to fool us,” she added, “but if we do, we'll wait and watch.”

“And all the while get closer to dawn,” Fergus said.

“We should be moving, not talking,” Hachi said.

“Are you sure you're strong enough?” Fergus asked.

In answer, Hachi climbed up to the next grid.

“So, she's strong enough, then,” Fergus said to Archie.

Together they climbed, sometimes moving up, sometimes side to side, sometimes back down, but all the while working their way around and up the giant dome of helium. The sheer vertical face of the balloon gradually gave way to the gentle slope of the top of the balloon, and they crawled along on hands and knees, still clinging to the ropes so the wind wouldn't tear them off.

Archie heard someone scream, and he froze.

“Crivens! What's that?” Fergus asked. “There can't be anyone else up here!”

But someone was up ahead of them. Lots of someones, from the sound of screams coming to them over the wind. It sounded like someone being tortured.

“I can see silhouettes against the stars,” Hachi said, crouching low. “Something's coming. Something's coming right at us!”

Archie ducked with Hachi and Fergus, then remembered he was the Heracles, the strongman of the team. Whatever was coming, it was his job to meet it head-on so the others wouldn't be hurt. But that didn't mean he wasn't scared. Still holding the rope, he raised himself up, closed his eyes, and turned his head away.

“Honk-honk-honk!” the thing cried as it got closer.

Honk-honk-honk?

Something flapping and feathery smacked Archie in the face and he fell over, glancing up in time to see a big white bird launch itself off the side of the balloon and disappear into the dark night sky.

“It's birds,” he said. “Geese!”

Fergus lit his oil lamp and shined it forward to have a look. The top of the balloon was covered with bird nests! There had to be hundreds of them, scattered here and there among the grid lines of the rope net that covered the giant balloon.

“You know what this means?” Hachi said.

“Aye,” Fergus said. “If this thing is covered with birds, it's also covered with bird poop.”

“No,” Hachi said. “I mean, yes, probably, but that's not what I meant. Look at
where
they have their nests.”

Archie scanned the nests, trying to see what Hachi saw. All he noticed was that the birds were packed into just a few of the grid squares, when they had lots more empty ones they could have been using. No—wait. He understood!

“Oh, brass! They're nesting in the grid squares that aren't booby trapped!”

“Exactly,” Hachi said.

Sure enough, Archie was able to trace a path from where they stood all the way to the top, where something small and red glowed in the night sky.

The Dragon Lantern
.

2

A few snapping geese couldn't hurt Archie, who had once been stomped on by a giant iron robot and gotten right back up again. But these geese were annoying enough. They honked and they flapped. They bit and they chased. By the end Archie was kicking the clacking things out of his way before they could bite him.

And then they were there. At the very top of the balloon.

At the Dragon Lantern.

The geese didn't nest here. There was something about it they didn't like. Something about it that made Archie's skin crawl. It was made of a shiny silver metal, like titanium, and shaped like a little house. A little Oriental house—at least the ones Archie had seen pictures of. The Mu artifact was a little bigger than a regular lantern, but rectangular instead of round, with a four-sided roof that curled up at each corner. At the very top, forming a handle, was a little dragon curled in a circle, and up the sides, climbing each corner like pillars, were four more snakelike dragons, all scaly and whiskered and breathing fire. Between them, in horizontal rows up and down the four faces of the lantern, were little shutters that looked like they could be opened by degrees, letting out as little or as much as you wanted of lantern light.

Or whatever this “lantern” held.

“It's a power source,” Fergus told them. “Not lektricity, or I'd feel it. But definitely energy. You can hear it.”

Fergus was right. Archie could hear the thing thrumming. Or rather, he could
feel
it. It was like how your stomach felt when it was growling, but all through your body. Like it was alive. And hungry.

Archie reached for the dragon handle, but Hachi grabbed his hand. “Let us check it for booby traps first.”

Archie took a step back as Hachi and Fergus examined it. At last they gave the okay, but neither of them moved to lift it.

That was Archie's job.

Archie took hold of the handle, expecting a shock, an explosion, a trapdoor—something. But except for an audible click of the lantern being removed from its custom-fitted base, there was no reaction at all. He lifted it and looked at it more closely.

One of the dragons seemed to be laughing at him.

“Clever, clever,” Fergus said. He was on his knees, examining the slot the lantern had come out of. It was filled with the same kind of lines that covered Fergus's skin, what the Septemberist scientist Nikola Tesla had called “circuits.”

“Whoever designed this, they used the energy of the dingus to power the puzzle traps,” Fergus said. “I don't ken how they converted the energy to lektricity, but they did. That's some serious blinking engineering there.”

As astounded as Fergus was, Archie was sure that, given time, Fergus could reverse-engineer the converters—maybe even the lantern itself. Fergus was maybe the greatest tinker in the world. Or would be one day. That's why he was a Leaguer.

“Wish we could open it,” Fergus said.

“Mrs. Moffett was very clear that we should
not
do that,” Hachi said. She took the lantern from Archie, slid it into a canvas sack, and clicked a lock through the grommets at the top, sealing it.

“Aw, you don't have to do all that,” Fergus said. “I just said I
wished
we could open it, not that I was
going to
.”

Hachi gave him a look that told him she wasn't so sure about that. “It's not to keep you out,” she told him. “It's to keep it safe and sound while we get back down.”

Hachi opened Archie's coat and latched the sack to his belt. She must have figured that even though he was a klutz, he had the best chance of keeping the thing safe. Archie had proven himself over and over again in their adventures together, but he still warmed at the thought of Hachi trusting him to do something right.

“Well, getting back down should be a lot easier without this attached to the system to power it,” Archie said.

“We could always take the gyrocopters,” Fergus said hopefully.

“We climb down,” Hachi told them.

“Aw, you're never any fun,” Fergus said, and they started down for Cahokia in the Clouds.

*   *   *

The city of Cahokia in the Clouds had been founded long ago when one of the many airships that docked beneath the giant balloon kite first decided to stay. More airships joined it, creating a village in the sky, and as it became a trading post and waystation in the air, it continued to grow. Houses and lodges and shops that were never meant to be airships were hauled up by balloon, and Cahokia in the Clouds grew down from its old town center like a dripping stalactite in a cave. Some people said it was a mile tall—the Mile High City, they called it—but no one had ever really measured it. It was always changing anyway. Every day, new pieces were attached and old pieces sprouted balloons and floated away, moving up and down the city with the prevailing winds and real estate prices.

Archie, Hachi, and Fergus climbed down a rope ladder into Level 1, the oldest of the Old Town levels. The locals this high up didn't need oxygen masks, but if you didn't grow up here, you could very quickly find yourself tired out and dizzy, with a clanking headache to boot. Most visitors stayed in Midtown, near the Cahokia Man, which was where their lodge was. It was a long way from Level 1 to Midtown, so Archie, Hachi, and Fergus waited for a cable car.

Cahokia in the Clouds stayed where it was in the heart of the North Americas because of an enormous cable made of some material that, like the canvas and rope of the giant balloon, no one knew how to make anymore. It was ancient tech, a relic from a civilization long gone, and it ran 20,000 feet down through the middle of Cahokia in the Clouds all the way to Cahokia on the Plains, the ruins of a once-great city on the ground where the new city in the sky was anchored.

Along that giant tether, the people of Cahokia in the Clouds had attached lifelines to the ground. One tube carried water up. Another carried waste down. Pneumatic tubes along its length connected the Mile High City to the air-powered, cross-continent postal network, and a gas main brought light to the city in the sky. But for getting
people
up and down inside the city itself, its clever Illini designers had built steam-powered cars that traveled along the cable like streetcars turned on their ends.

A cable car came up through the platform in the Level 1 station, the corkscrew-like worm gear on its back squeaking along a greased, brass-toothed track on the tether. Six rows of red padded seats, a couple occupied by Cahokians on their way uptown, climbed past them until the bottom row was level with the platform. The cable car stopped with a
clank
, and a Mark II Machine Man like the Dent family's Mr. Rivets (only this one wearing a brass conductor's cap instead of a bowler hat) pulled open a metal gate for them to climb on board.

“First-row priority seating is reserved for city elders and persons with disabilities,” the machine man told him. “This is a downtown cable car bound for Statue Park and Midtown. Next stop, Level 2.”

It had taken them so long to crawl back down off the balloon that it was almost the morning rush hour, and Archie, Hachi, and Fergus boarded the cable car with a few commuters sipping coffees and reading newspapers. Level after level of floating city went by, until at last they came to the head of Statue Park. Literally. Hanging out away from the tether cable from the bottom of the giant balloon above, plumb with the ground, was the ugly head of the statue that Statue Park was named for. Archie leaned out to look down the length of the thing, which hung in a great wide space in the heart of Cahokia in the Clouds. It was more than a hundred levels tall, and surrounded on all sides by a ring of apartments and hotels with expensive views.

The Cahokia Man, as the statue was called, was made of rough, reddish-brown stone. It was a grotesque imitation of a human man, with two squat, powerful legs, four thick, burly arms, and a flat, wide head that looked like it had been pounded down into his shoulders with a sledgehammer the size of the Emartha Machine Man Building in New Rome. The Cahokia Man had been hung here by whatever ancients had created the giant balloon-kite that bore it aloft, trussed up and bound like a prisoner to its own helium ball and chain. For centuries people had gazed up at the Cahokia Man and his giant balloon and wondered who he was supposed to be, and what had possessed the ancients to hang him 20,000 feet in the air. But Archie knew who he was, and why he was there.

The Cahokia Man was a Mangleborn.

Archie knew because his parents knew. They were researchers for the Septemberist Society, and it was their job to learn everything they could about the Mangleborn. When the Mangleborn rose, it was the League of Seven who came together and put them down again—the league the Septemberists had been set up to support. But the Mangleborn couldn't be killed. At least, no one had yet figured out how to kill one. Instead, they were trapped. Imprisoned. Usually underground, sometimes underwater.

And, very rarely, in the sky.

The Cahokia Man's real name was Antaeus. Like all Mangleborn, it fed on lektricity, the energy source in lightning, the power the Septemberists worked to keep the world from rediscovering lest the Mangleborn rise again. But in the same way that the Mangleborn Malacar Ahasherat had a connection to the insect world, so too did the Mangleborn Antaeus have a connection to the Earth. As long as Antaeus touched the ground, it was unbeatable. The Roman League knocked it down, only to watch it get up again and again. At last, so the Septemberist legends went, the Roman League's shadow and strongman, Heracles, held it off the ground while the League's scientist, Daedalus, and their tinker, Wayland Smith, hooked it to the tethered balloon they had created to separate it from the Earth forever.

Or at least as long as people left it alone.

The story, of course, like most stories of the League and the Mangleborn they fought, had been rewritten over the centuries, in part because people forgot, and in part because people
wanted
to forget. Wanted to sweep the memory of the Mangleborn and their horrors under the rug of mythology. And so the League of Seven defeating Antaeus the earth elemental became Heracles defeating a wrestler on the way to one of his Twelve Labors, and a giant Mangleborn hanging in plain sight in the sky at the border of Illini and Pawnee territory became a tourist attraction.