The League of Seven (32 page)

28

Archie disappeared into the dark hole with a cry of surprise, followed shortly by a
thunk
.

“Archie!” Hachi cried.

“Ow,” Archie said from the darkness.

“Archie? Are you all right?” Hachi called.

“Yeah. I don't think I broke anything. The pelt must have broken my fall again. Whoa, hey. Lights are coming on—”

Gaslights flickered on in the cavern, and Archie saw the floor and walls all around him were covered with brass picture frames.

“Hey—hey, it's that room we saw my parents in! Get down here!”

Mr. Rivets had already gone to the steam mule for a rope. Hachi shimmied down, then helped hold the rope for Fergus.

“I'll just stay up here and wait for you to get back then, shall I?” said Mr. Rivets. There was no way the rope would hold his weight.

“We'll be back before you wind down!” Archie called up.

“Just how long can he go without winding?” Fergus asked quietly.

The room they had dropped into was certainly strange. The walls, ceiling, and floor were all made of brass just like the picture frames, which were permanently attached.

“Looks like we're not the first ones to fall in,” said Fergus. An old iron helmet lay in the corner, and he kicked it with his foot. It looked like something from paintings of the old conquistadors. Underneath it was a pile of bones, more metal armor, and a broken sword.

“Maybe Ponce de Leon found this place instead of the Fountain of Youth.”

“Looks like he went down fighting, whoever he was,” Hachi said.

“Aye,” said Fergus, “but fighting what?”

“The Roman League built these rooms as a way of keeping the Mangleborn in and other people out,” Archie said. “The Septemberists knew how to get through using the nursery rhyme codes, but nobody else did. I guess that didn't stop other people from trying.”

Hachi saw something in another pile of bones and picked it up. It was a small pin with the Septemberists' pyramid eye on it.

“Guess they didn't
all
know how to get through,” Fergus said.

“Remember, Master Archie,” Mr. Rivets said from above, “the nursery rhymes have changed over time. The meanings may be very different now. You will have to think outside your programming, as it were.”

“Brass,” Archie said.

“Well, we got past one and two,” Fergus said. “How many numbers are there in this nursery rhyme, anyway?”

“Twenty,” Archie said.

Fergus groaned.

“At least now I understand why my parents made me memorize all those nursery rhymes,” said Archie. He looked around the room for any clue as to what to do next.

“There,” Hachi said. She pointed to the numbers III and IV etched into the metal near the ceiling.

“Three, four,” Archie said.

“Three, four, cry no more,” Hachi said.

“The one I learned is ‘Three, four, knock on the door',” said Archie.

“So all we have to do is knock on one of these doors?” Fergus said. “That's easy.” He knocked on one of the framed panels.

“No! Wait!” Hachi cried.

Too late. The brass door they'd fallen through in the ceiling snapped shut—
clank!
—and the door Fergus knocked on slid open. Something inside it began to click and whir, and all three of them took a step backward.

A clockwork cat the size of a big dog sprang from the opening. Its metal feet clattered on the brass floor, and its red eyes swept the room. Before he could even think to move, it sprang at Archie.

“Gah!” he yelled, dropping to the floor. He cowered under the Great Bear's pelt as the Tik Tok animal tore and slashed at him, its gears growling and screeching.

Fergus raised his aether pistol, but Hachi stopped him. “No! The beams will just bounce off the reflective surface.”

“Do something!” Archie cried. “Ow! I can feel that! Somebody get it off me!”

“All right, I've got an idea,” Fergus said. “All we have to do is—”

“Circus! Showtime!” Hachi cried. She leaped at the cat and sank her dagger in between the metal plates in the mechanical monster's side. The blade ground and jerked against the thing's clockwork insides, but it didn't stop it. The clockwork cat turned to slash at her. Hachi rolled back and kicked it away, throwing it into the wall with a clatter of metal. Her clockwork menagerie flew with it, fluttering around its head the way they had with Mr. Shinobi. The cat swatted at them like a real cat leaping for butterflies.

“Okay. Hold up. Here's what we do—” Fergus said.

Hachi leaped at the cat. They screeched and clawed and tore at each other, but the mechanical creature was too fast. Too wild. It bit and slashed through Hachi's defenses. It cut her arms, her face, her chest. She chipped away at it, making dents in it and fouling its clockwork, but she was losing. She fell and the cat pounced, but something jerked it back. Tusker! The little elephant had the tiger by the tail. He flapped his wings and dug in with his feet, slowing the Tik Tok cat down just long enough for Hachi to scurry back to her feet. She got ready for another attack, but the cat spun and snapped at Tusker instead.

Krunk
.

The mechanical cat crushed Tusker in its metal jaws and spit out the pieces.

“Tusker!”
Hachi cried.

Fergus snatched the Great Bear's pelt from Archie and tossed it over the cat like a blanket.

“Grab the corners!” Fergus cried. Archie dove for one side of the pelt while Fergus picked up the other, and together they brought the ends up like a sack, the mechanical cat kicking and thrashing inside it. It was trapped.

Hachi dropped to her knees beside the little broken elephant. “Tusker! No, Tusker—no, no, no, no.” She scooped him up in her hands, trying to see if he would be okay, trying to see if she could fix him, but he was smashed to pieces. Hachi wept—great, racking sobs that shook her. Archie and Fergus stood dumbly and watched, not able to let go of the pelt and not knowing what to say.

The rest of Hachi's clockwork circus were just as helpless. They fluttered around her trying to understand what was wrong with their companion. Mr. Lion paced back and forth in the air. Jo-Jo the gorilla grunted at Tusker like the elephant could still hear him. Freckles the giraffe prodded Tusker with her head, trying to get him to stand.

“Hachi, I'm so sorry,” Archie said. The makeshift bag he and Fergus held sagged to the floor, and the mechanical cat's feet touched the ground through the pelt. It sprang into the air, still inside the sack, and Fergus lost his grip. Archie held on, desperately yanking it back down and slamming the pelt to the floor.

Krunk
. The clockwork cat inside the bag stopped moving.

All three of them waited a breathless moment before speaking.

“Maybe it's playing cat-and-mouse,” Fergus said.

Archie jiggled the bag, trying to get a reaction from it. Pieces of metal rattled around inside. If it was playing dead, it was putting on a pretty good performance. Archie flipped the sack open and jumped back.

The clockwork cat was smashed into a hundred pieces.

“It got what it deserved then,” Hachi said. The sobs had stopped, but tears still ran down her face. She hadn't left the spot where Tusker had fallen.

Fergus examined the broken remains of the mechanical cat. “I thought the pelt was supposed to protect you from knocks and such,” he said.

Archie frowned. Fergus was right. If the pelt protected whoever or whatever was wearing it from harm, how had the cat been smashed inside it? Archie had taken far worse hits in the battle at Lady Josephine's, and there was no other way he could have survived that fall from the
Hesperus
. It didn't make sense.

The clockwork cat's door snapped shut and they all jumped. Archie looked around at the dozens of other doors and tried not to panic.

“There's gotta be fifty doors in here,” Fergus said like he could read his mind.

“We'll never survive them all,” said Archie.

“Nae,” Fergus said. He knelt beside Hachi. “Especially not if you go throwing yourself at everything that says boo.”

“I was—”

“You were getting yourself killed, is what you were doing,” said Fergus. “You blame yourself for your parents dying, or for living when they didn't, both of which are slagging foolish, and now you've got a death wish. You might think you've got nothing to lose, but you do. You've got friends now, whether you meant to or not.” He took the smashed pieces of Tusker from her reverently. “So I'm telling you straight out: That'll be enough of that. Either we all make it through, or none of us do. Aye?”

Hachi wiped the tears from her eyes. “I suppose if I wasn't around you'd be dead before the next puzzle trap.”

“There's that too,” Fergus allowed. “So no more flinging yourself into death's pointy teeth, right?”

Hachi nodded.

Fergus opened the pouch he wore at his waist and slid the broken pieces of Tusker inside.

Hachi whistled her circus—the three that remained—back to their places on her bandolier. She wiped her nose on the back of her hand and stood, scratching a deep mark on the door the cat had come out of.

“What'd you do that for?” Archie asked.

“So we don't open the same door again next time.”

“All right then. So which door do we try next?” Fergus asked.

“Three, four, knock on the door,” Archie muttered. “What did you say yours was?” he asked Hachi.

“Three, four, cry no more.”

“Don't seem like they have much in common to me,” Fergus said. “I wonder if we ought not to try one of those up around where the numbers are. More than likely one of them's the one that'll—”

“Shhh! No—be quiet. Be quiet!” Archie interrupted. “‘Cry no more,'” he whispered. “Don't talk.”

When they were all quiet, Archie put an ear to the panel beside him. “I hear ticking!”

Hachi tried one for herself and nodded.

“Same here,” Fergus said.

“We have to find the one with no ticking behind it,” Archie told them.

Together they moved through the room, listening for ticking behind the panels and scratching a line down each one where they heard something. Hachi used her dagger. Fergus used a screwdriver. Archie listened and scratched his lines with one of the claws on the Great Bear's pelt.

“Here. I think I've got it,” Archie said, his ear to a panel in the floor. “I don't hear any ticking behind this one. You guys try.”

Fergus went first, and shook his head. Hachi put her ear to the cold metal plate. Nothing. They all looked at each other. Between them hung the unspoken question:
Do we dare?

“Archie, be ready with the pelt,” Hachi said. She took up an attack position with her blade. “Fergus, you get behind Archie.”

“Aye,” Fergus said, limping for cover without argument.

Archie took a deep breath and nodded. Hachi knocked. The door flipped open. Everyone tensed.…

But nothing came out.

Hachi inched her way forward to peer down inside, then relaxed.

“It's a ladder,” she told them.

Fergus clapped his hands. “All righty then! I can't wait to see what five, six will be!” He put his hands on Hachi's shoulders and guided her toward the ladder. “But you go first.”

 

29

Hachi went first, followed by Fergus, then Archie. Fergus was slow going with his bad leg. He kept it locked straight, but it would slip and he'd have to catch himself, hugging the ladder again and again. He muttered colorful curses under his breath as they descended.

“Oy below,” he said. “No looking up my kilt now.”

Hachi snorted.

“Was that a laugh?” Fergus asked Archie.

“I think it might have been.”

“The real Hachi would never laugh,” Fergus said. “Quick, push her off! She must have one of them bug things on her neck!”

“Ha-ha,” Hachi said. She helped Fergus down the last few steps of the ladder, and soon they all stood in a new room. It was small, rectangular, and all brass like the last, but there were no picture frames this time. The sides of this room were seamless except for a set of four dials on the far wall with something written above them in Latin:
QVINQVE, SEX, NEC TIMIDVS, NEC AVDAX
. Archie struggled to remember his Latin lessons with Mr. Rivets.

“There are no bones,” Fergus said. “That's good, innit? Must not be too dangerous then.”

“Or no one's made it this far,” Hachi said. She had just taken a step across the middle of the room when the door they had climbed through slid shut and became part of the ceiling again. Something deep within the wall clanked, and the floor lurched and began to move. It slid slowly toward the wall with the dials on it, dragging them with it.