The Dragon Lantern (40 page)

“Hello in there!” the stationmaster called, raising his lantern to see into the cab. A dark figure moved away from the light. “Hello?” the stationmaster tried again.

The locomotive blew its steam whistle, making the stationmaster jump. Then it blew again, and again, and again. The Cheyenne and their buffalo were used to train whistles too, but not one that blew over and over again. A train whistle blown like that—
any
whistle blown like that—meant trouble, and the people of Medicine Bow came out to the rails of their moving village to see what was wrong.

The stationmaster saw someone climb to the top of the passenger car—no, not climb, he thought, more like glide—with what looked like a lantern in hand.

“Hello, dear friends,” said a woman's voice, loud and clear in the prairie night. “For too long, you have lived in darkness. Let me show you the light!”

The woman opened her lantern, and as the light fell on the people of Medicine Bow, they screamed. They screamed so loudly they didn't hear the army of monsters that shambled up the tracks behind the locomotive, hooting and howling, following their shadowy leader across the continent to the United Nations of America.

 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thank you to everyone at Tor/Starscape who has helped to make this book and this series a success: to my wonderful editor, Susan Chang, whose continual enthusiasm for these books makes me keep trying to outdo myself; to Ali Fisher, publishing coordinator, for answering all my crazy requests with such speed and grace; to Leah Withers, publicist extraordinaire, for arranging my first-ever book tour; to Deanna Hoak, copy editor, for reminding me how I spelled all those crazy words in the first book; and of course to Kathleen Doherty, publisher, who took a chance on
The League of Seven
to begin with. I would be remiss not to thank illustrator Brett Helquist, whose amazing art graces the front cover and chapter headers. Everywhere I go, people tell me they picked up my book because of his awesome illustrations! Thanks too to Linda Marie Barrett and everyone at Malaprop's Bookstore/Cafe in Asheville, North Carolina, for their continuing support of the series, and to all the students, teachers, librarians, and booksellers I met on tour for book one. Thank you to Bob, and to my friends at Bat Cave and Blue Heaven. And last but not least, thanks again to Wendi and Jo. You're the aether in my aggregator.

 

Read on for a preview of

THE MONSTER WAR,

Book Three of The League of Seven

1

Archie Dent sat in the shadows in the corner of his hotel room in Houston. This was where he belonged. This was what he was, after all. A shadow. The darkest shadow of them all.

Mr. Rivets, Archie's clockwork manservant, tutor, and constant companion, ticked into the room and threw the curtains wide. Archie squinted and threw an arm over his eyes as the bright Texian sun streamed into the room.

“Don't!”

“It is time you roused yourself, Master Archie. Cleaned yourself up. Had some food. You haven't eaten in days.”

“Why should I?” Archie asked. “I don't need to. I can't die. I don't even need to breathe. I could sit here forever if I wanted to.”

“Which would be an incredible waste, sir. It is time you rejoined the world of the living,” Mr. Rivets told him.

“No,” Archie said. He'd told Mr. Rivets the same thing every day for a week now, ever since they'd arrived in Houston. Ever since he'd learned the horrible truth about how he'd been brought to life. “Close the curtains. I don't want the light.”

“There are matters you must attend to, Master Archie. If I were not now self-winding, I would have run down long ago. And you promised Miss Hachi and Master Fergus you would meet them here in Houston. They may be somewhere in the city as we speak, and we must warn them about Philomena Moffett and her Monster Army.”

“I don't care. I don't want to see them. I don't want to see anyone ever again. I'm done. With everything.”

“There is something else, Master Archie. Something I have uncovered in my own search for Master Fergus and Miss Hachi. Homeless children are being taken from Houston's streets.”

Archie lifted his head. “What?”

“By masked men with steamwagons,” Mr. Rivets said. “They take the children in broad daylight. I interrupted one such kidnapping only this morning, and alerted the local authorities to the problem. But they are too taxed with the annual Livestock Exhibition and Rodeo currently being held in the Astral Dome. Nor, I think, do they much care about children without families to miss them.”

“The …
what?”
Archie shook his head. “No. I don't care either. It's not my problem.”

“I see,” said Mr. Rivets. “I apologize, Master Archie.” His clockworks ticked softly as he considered his young charge. “There is one small matter at least that must be attended to. Your parents have sent us funds via pneumatic post, and the post office requires you be there in person to sign for it.”

“I don't care,” Archie said.

“May I remind you, Master Archie, that without these funds we shall be turned out of the hotel and onto Houston's streets, where, I can assure you, it is far brighter and hotter than your corner.”

Archie huffed. Fine. He'd go to the post office and sign for the money. But he wasn't taking a bath, and he wasn't eating or drinking anything. He was through pretending to be human.

Houston was hot and dusty, just like every other part of the Republic of Texas Archie had seen. Mr. Rivets led him along a sweltering wooden sidewalk past saloons, general stores, and steam horse stables. The brown-skinned, black-haired people of Houston kept turning to stare at Archie's pale white skin and white hair, and he heard one or two whisper his name. Senarens and his clacking League of Seven dime novels were more popular than ever! Archie slipped his brass goggles down over his eyes and dragged Mr. Rivets across to the dark side of the street, where he hoped he'd be less conspicuous, and cooler too. A Wel-suh Fargo steamwagon almost ran over them, but Archie still didn't care. It would have done more damage to the steamwagon than to him.

After a few blocks, Mr. Rivets turned off San Jacinto Street and led Archie into a maze of side streets, where at last they came to a narrow, rutted lane squeezed in between two wooden warehouses. A dozen or so half-naked Texian children were playing some kind of game where they tried to bounce a rubber ball through barrel rings they'd nailed to the wall. Farther down the alley, two dogs fought over a scrap one of them had dug out of an overturned trash can, and a pile of empty wooden crates looked as though someone might be living in them. Archie didn't understand. Where was the post office?

“I would advise you not to fight at this juncture,” Mr. Rivets told Archie. “You should allow yourself to be captured instead. That way you'll be taken to the ringleaders of the operation.”

“What are you talking about?” Archie asked. Had Mr. Rivets slipped a cog?

The ground rumbled as two steamwagons backed into the lane, one from each direction. Texian men in brown leather pants, denim shirts, and white cowboy hats leaped from the covered beds on the wagons, rayguns in hand and bandanas covering their faces.
Kazaaack!
An orange beam from one of the pistols blew up the rubber ball, and the children screamed. They tried to run, but both ends of the street were blocked by the men and their steamwagons.

“Mr. Rivets, what's going on?” Archie asked, but when he turned around the machine man was gone. “Mr. Rivets?”

Archie heard the blast of another raygun and ducked instinctively.

“All right,
chamacos
!” one of the banditos called. “No messing around now! Into the trucks nice and easy, and nobody gets hurt.”

The banditos circled the kids. A boy tried to escape by crawling under one of the steamwagons, but a bandito caught him by the heel and dragged him back.
Whack!
The bandito cracked him over the head with the butt of his raygun, and the boy went down in the dirt. After that, nobody tried to run.

Archie was steaming. First he'd been tricked out of his hotel room by Mr. Rivets, and now these kidnappers were hitting defenseless kids. Slag it all—he wasn't even supposed to be here! His fists clenched and he started for the bandito who'd knocked the boy down when he felt something hard poke him in the back. It was another of the banditos with a raygun.

“Hey,
mano
!” the bandito called. “What about this one? He's a Yankee.”

“Are you kidding,
g
ü
ey
?” said the bandito who'd hit the kid. “They pay double for
gabachos
!”

The raygun in Archie's back poked at him, nudging him toward the other children. Archie was tempted to turn around and crush the raygun in his fist and punch the bandito through the wall. A raygun blast couldn't hurt Archie. It wouldn't even knock him down. He could send all six of these banditos into the next alley before they knew what hit them. But Mr. Rivets was right: That wouldn't stop whoever was behind this. Cursing Mr. Rivets with names the machine man would have scolded him for, Archie let himself be loaded onto one of the two steamwagons with the other children.

A few of the children cried as the banditos went through the covered wagon and shackled them, but most looked resigned to their fate. Archie wanted to tell them everything was going to be all right, but he didn't want to draw attention from the banditos. Not yet.

The steamwagon shuddered as they got underway. A bandito shackled Archie's right leg to the left leg of the boy sitting beside him. Archie wasn't worried about the chain—he could rip it off whenever he wanted to—but the boy he was shackled to looked frightened. He was a Texian about Archie's age, and just as small, with light brown skin and black hair. He was grubby like he lived on the streets, but, unlike the other children, at least had blue denim pants, a cowboy shirt that used to be white, and a well-worn pair of brown leather boots. The boy stared straight forward, his eyes distant like so many of the others'.

“Everything's going to be okay,” Archie and the boy told each other at the same time.

Archie blinked. This homeless kid was telling
him
everything was going to be okay?

“My name's Gonzalo,” the boy said, still staring straight forward. “What's yours?”

Archie didn't want to tell the kid his real name. He might have read one of Senarens's dime novels and start talking. “It's, um, George,” Archie lied.

Gonzalo turned his head at that, almost like he didn't believe him, but he didn't say anything. “Where you from, George?” Gonzalo asked.

“Philadelphia,” Archie said, telling the truth this time.

“You're a long way from home.”

“What about you?” Archie asked.

“Austin, originally,” Gonzalo said. “Now kind of all over. Where are your parents?”

The couple who'd raised Archie, Dalton and Agatha Dent, lived just outside Philadelphia, in Powhatan territory. He'd thought of them as his parents for the first twelve years of his life, but technically he didn't have parents, because he wasn't human. The thought chilled him all over again, and he longed for the seclusion of his dark corner in the hotel.

“I … I don't have any parents,” Archie told him, which was true and wasn't true.

“Me either,” Gonzalo said.

“So you've been living on the streets?” Archie asked.

Gonzalo nodded, still staring straight ahead.

Archie looked around at the other children. They probably all had similar stories. It was bad enough that they were orphans with no place to go, no clothes to wear, and no food to eat. Now they were being rounded up by kidnappers and hauled off to who-knows-where, to do who-knows-what.

As to what, Archie had a guess. In his experience, it always came down to the Mangleborn, the giant prehistoric creatures that stirred every few hundred years to drive humanity mad and destroy everything they'd built. Some Mangleborn-worshipping cultists needed children's blood for sacrifices, or wanted to turn them into hideous half-human/half-animal Manglespawn, or meant to feed them to a Mangleborn or Manglespawn. Archie shook his head. Whatever it was, he would stop it, and then he was done. For good. And nothing Mr. Rivets could say or do would change his mind.

Archie heard a roar outside the steamwagon as it slowed to a stop.
Here we go,
Archie thought.
A Manglespawn with a bat's wings and a bear's body. Or maybe a Mangleborn with a thousand snakes for arms and rooster legs for feet.
Archie popped his neck and got ready to fight.

“Sounds like a crowd,” Gonzalo said. “A big arena. The Astral Dome, maybe.”

Archie blinked. Now that Gonzalo mentioned it, it
did
sound like the roar of a crowd.