The League of Seven (33 page)

“Or they got crushed to powder down there in those gears!” Archie said. He pointed at what the moving floor was uncovering: massive, spinning gears that would chew them up if they fell in.

“Locked sprockets, do you see that?” Fergus said, pointing at the clockworks. “That's a gear train there. And look—it goes out underneath the walls. And there, that's a ratchet wheel! See how it disappears there? The whole place must be made of clockworks. We're only seeing a tee-ninsy part of it.”

“We're going to be seeing a lot more of it if we don't figure out how to open the next door,” Archie told him. He hurried across the room to where the dials were and started trying to decipher the writing with Hachi.

“
Quinque, sex, nec timidus, nec audax,
” Archie read aloud. “
Quinque, sex,
that's ‘five, six.' Five, six, pick up sticks—that's what I was taught. But that's not what this says.
Nec timidus, nec audax
. Neither … scared? Neither audacious…? Gah! We have to figure this out!”

“Five, six, neither fearful nor bold,” Hachi translated easily. “It doesn't rhyme in Anglish, but it rhymes in Latin.”

“Probably why it got changed to ‘pick up sticks,'” Fergus said, half paying attention. He was still at the edge of the floor, watching the clockworks below. “Is that a tourbillon? Look at the size of it! That's absolutely brass!”

Archie ignored him. “The phrase doesn't make any sense! It doesn't tell us what to do!” He was starting to panic. The floor was more than halfway gone now.

“Oh, those Romans. Clever, clever lads,” Fergus said. “You could use that pallet level as a seesaw, it's so big.”

“Fergus!” Archie cried.

“There are four dials,” Hachi said. “Each with one through nine in Roman numerals. All we have to do is turn them to the right combination. Five, six. Easy.” She turned the dials.

“But that's only two numbers! There are four dials,” Archie said. “That can't be it, Hachi!”

“Five, six, five six, then,” Hachi said, and she turned the last two dials. Nothing happened.

“It's not that easy!” Archie told her. “The floor's past halfway!”

“Then we add them.”

“Eleven doesn't have enough digits!”

“Eleven eleven then.”

Still nothing.

“Oh no you didn't,” Fergus said. “Oh, you did. But of course! How else keep all this working for a thousand years? Guys, you've got to come see this.
It's self-winding
. The whole place. The puzzle traps. The prison. Do you understand? It winds itself with an eccentric weight the size of—I don't know. Maybe the size of Standing Peachtree. I only saw the edge of it. It must use the Earth's rotation to—”

Archie grabbed Fergus and spun him away from the edge.

“Fergus! Fergus, we need to figure out this puzzle or we're going to
die
, do you understand?” Archie saw a brown-stained gear and pointed to it. “That's not rust!”

Blood. It was blood on the gears, where someone had fallen in and been churned into ground beef.

“How did the wall get so close?” Fergus said. He shook his head like he was trying to clear it. “
Don't ignore what's right for anything.
I need that tattooed on me. All right. What have we got?”

“Five, six, neither fearful nor bold,” Archie told him, hopping up and down. Hachi, meanwhile, was randomly spinning the dials, trying to luck into the answer.

“Right,” Fergus said. “Neither fearful nor bold. That's the two of you, all right. What this needs is some cold, hard science.” He looked at the Latin again. “What about all those numbers then?”

“We've
tried
five and six,” Archie told him. He stamped his foot with a ringing
clang
. “And just about every combination of them we could think of!”

“Nae, nae,
these
numbers,” Fergus said. He pointed at the V, I, V, and X in the first two words—QVINQVE, SEX. “V, I, V, X: five, one, five, ten. They're letters, but they're Roman numerals too.”

Archie and Hachi stared at each other. Archie couldn't believe they hadn't seen it themselves.

“Five, one, five, ten!” Archie said. “Put that in!”

“There's no ten on these dials,” Hachi told them. “Just one through nine.”

Fergus glanced back at the spinning clockworks behind them. They were running out of floor.

“There's more numbers in the other words,” he said. “More ones, fives, tens, Cs, Ds, Ms.”

“Too many!” Archie said. “There are only four dials!”

“The dials only go to nine?” Fergus asked. “Add them. We have to add the numbers! Read them out.”

Fergus kept a count in his head as Hachi read the numbers aloud. Archie backed up against the wall. They only had a yard or so of floor left. More of the gears below had brown stains on them now. They were
not
the first people to have gotten to this room, and if they weren't quick about it …

“Two thousand two hundred and forty-three!” Fergus yelled over the roaring clockwork. “Two, two, four, three!”

“Are you sure?” Archie asked. “That's not how you write two thousand two hundred and forty-three in Roman numerals.”

“Just put it in!” Hachi yelled.

Hachi took the first two dials, Fergus the third, Archie the fourth. There was barely enough room to stand. If Fergus was wrong, if that wasn't the number—

Click!
A little door slid open on the wall below the dials, and Archie now saw the tiny Roman numerals VII, VIII carved into the wall beside it.

“Seven, eight, don't be late!” he cried.

Hachi pushed Fergus and Archie through the door, then dove in behind them as the floor slipped away beneath the wall. They collapsed on the other side, breathing hard.

“That was not fun,” Fergus said.

The door they had come through snapped shut. Something deep in the wall clanked, and the floor began to move
back
in the other direction—at twice the speed.

“Oh, you've got to be kidding me!” Fergus wailed.

Behind them, they heard the sound of more spinning clockworks as the floor uncovered another room full of deadly machinery.

“I think this is the exact same floor, just slid into the next room over,” Fergus said.

Yes, Archie saw the place where he'd stamped his foot and put a dent in the floor.

Wait, how had he put a dent in solid brass?

Hachi was already standing, reading the words above the four dials on this wall. They were different this time.
NOVEM, DECEM, ETIAM ATQVE ETIAM
.

“I don't suppose that says ‘Nine, ten, a big fat hen.'” Fergus said.

“No,” Archie said. “Nine, ten—”

“—again and again,” Hachi finished wearily.

They put in the same numbers as before, but no door opened.

“It's not working!” Archie said. “It's a different combination!”

“All right,” Fergus told them. “Read me the new numbers, and let's do this again.”

 

30

The Roman numerals in “
Novem, decem, etiam atque etiam
,” when added up, equaled four thousand six hundred and twelve. The answer reopened the door back to the room where they'd solved the first number puzzle. Archie worried that “again and again” meant they had to keep going back and forth from room to room, the floor always getting faster each time, but when they slipped through into the first room there was a new door open, with XI, XII written on a wall just beyond it.

Eleven, twelve, dig and delve.

A narrow spiral staircase led them down, down, down into darkness, surrounded on all sides by the clicking, whirring breeze of the giant clockwork machine that powered the complex. Its Roman builders had gone to a great deal of trouble to keep everyone but the League out, and their prisoner in. Archie's parents had made it this far too, and he had to believe the visions meant his parents were still alive.
Save Mom and Dad,
he told himself over and over again.
Save Mom and Dad. Save Mom and Dad. Save Mom and Dad.

Gaslights flickered on as they reached the end of the spiral staircase. The stairs stopped a foot above the floor, which was moving. Not toward a wall, like the rooms above, but around in a circle: The stairs emptied out onto an enormous sideways gear that spun at the speed of a strong river. One by one they stepped onto the moving floor and peered out into a maze of moving gears, some turning lazily, others spinning like saw blades.

“We're more than halfway there,” Archie said. “Now what?” His voice echoed in the vast chamber.

“Here,” Hachi said. The numbers XIII and XIV were carved into one of the teeth of the gear they stood on.

“Thirteen, fourteen, start the machine,” Archie recited. “But it looks like it's already started without us.”

An empty space in the next interlocking gear rotated by, a place where the other gear had no tooth. Etched onto the gear where the missing cog would have been were the Roman numerals XV, XVI.

“Fifteen, sixteen, betwixt and between,” Hachi said.

“Fifteen, sixteen, come out clean,” Archie said. “Oh, slag. We're supposed to go down into those gears.”

“I told you the whole place is clockworks,” Fergus said.

“We'll be crushed!” said Archie.

“Not if we're quick,” Hachi said. She saw the open tooth coming and crouched, ready to leap.

“Nae nae nae! Not this time,” Fergus told her. “Those two gears are different sizes. The hole we saw before won't be the same this time. We've got to time the ratios just right.”

“There has to be a trick to it,” Archie said.

“Aye. We just have to have a basic understanding of clockworks. And be fearless, I suppose. Now … jump!”

Archie hadn't been expecting that. He was almost too late jumping in behind Fergus and Hachi. He slipped in just as the gears closed around them, making a neat little rotating room.

“A little more warning next time!” he told Fergus.

“Now!” Fergus said, and again they were leaping into the free space where a gear had been forged with a missing cog. Hachi helped Fergus with the jump, putting an arm around his waist and helping support his dead leg. Archie hated not being able to help, but he had enough to worry about on his own. They jumped again, and again, Archie's leaps always sloppy and uncoordinated. One gear nipped at the Great Bear's pelt, but he pulled it away in time.

Fergus led them into another gear that was up and down, not side to side, and they had to slip out before they were dumped into the dark machinery below. Their next jump took them to another big sideways gear like the one they had landed on at the beginning, and they all took a minute to catch their breaths.

“We have to be nearly there,” Archie said. “How far do you think we've gone down?”

“Ninety feet? A hundred?” Hachi guessed. “The stairs alone were something like four stories.”

“Here's another set of numbers,” Fergus said. He was standing near the edge of the gear. “Still fifteen and sixteen.”

Archie flopped back onto the gear and closed his eyes, trying to muster the energy he would need for the next series of jumps.

Jandal a Haad
, the Swarm Queen whispered in his head. Before Archie could repeat his mantra and focus his mind he was lost in another dream, the cavern inside the ancient puzzle traps dissolving around him.

*   *   *

Archie stood in a broad field. It was twilight, but the world was on fire—the grass, the trees in the distance, the wrecked hulks of clanker tanks and armored airships, everything burned. Raygun fire crackled in the distance, and the ground was strewn with the bodies of warriors from a dozen nations—Iroquois, Cherokee, Powhatan, Sioux, Muskogee, Yankee, and more. Archie panted, holding a twisted, shattered trunk of a tree that was impossibly huge in his hands. There was no way he should have been able to lift it, but he could.

On the horizon skulked the enormous, unnatural silhouettes of Mangleborn. Three of them, lumbering by, the earth shaking with every step they took.

Wham
. Something smashed down on Archie's head and drove him into the ground, making a boy-sized hole in the earth. The force of it kicked him back up before he fell again with a thud.

“Sorry, Archie!” said a voice he didn't recognize.

He crawled to his feet. Arranged behind him were six people, all around his age. A thin, tattooed girl dressed like a pirate in tall black boots and a weather-beaten old coat, holding a glowing green harpoon. A masked Mexicano boy with an odd-looking turquoise aether pistol and a tin star on his vest. An Afrikan boy looking out of the enormous eyes of the ten-story-tall steam man that had pounded Archie into the ground. A shadowy girl crouching on the steam man's shoulder.