The Dragon Lantern

 

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To my dog, Augie—

I wouldn't have thought of Buster without you!

 

Thirty days hath September.

Seven heroes we remember.

The League of Seven. They were always seven, and always the same: a tinker, a law-bringer, a scientist, a trickster, a warrior, a strongman, and a hero. Seven men and women with incredible powers from all parts of the known world who joined forces to stop the Mangleborn from enslaving humanity.

Different Leagues had saved the world over and over again, but few people knew that. Only the Septemberists remembered, watching for signs that the Mangleborn might escape the elaborate prisons the Ancient League had built for them, and waiting for a new League of Seven to be born.…

1

Archie Dent dangled from a rope twenty thousand feet in the air, watching the blue ribbon of the Mississippi River spin far, far below him. At that moment, he didn't feel scared, or dizzy, or angry.

He felt betrayed.

“Retrieving the Dragon Lantern will be easy for three Leaguers,” Philomena Moffett had told him and his friends Hachi and Fergus. “For that's what you are. The first of a new League of Seven.”

Easy
. That's what the head of the Septemberist Society had called retrieving this lantern thing. Even though it was hidden at the heart of a Septemberist puzzle trap. On top of a giant helium balloon. Twenty thousand feet in the air.

As he hung from his safety line for what had to be the thousandth time in the last three days, all Archie could think was that Philomena Moffett had not been entirely honest with them.

“Haul him up,” Hachi said over the wind.

Archie sighed, his warm breath filling the mask that fit over his leather helmet. Fergus had built the helmets special. A breathing mask, which snapped on just below the brass goggles Archie wore, brought fresh oxygen to him from the tank on his back. They needed them—like the heavy, fur-lined coats and the spider's web of ropes and carabiners they wore—to scale the mountain-sized helium kite high up in the thin atmosphere that held Cahokia in the Clouds afloat.

Archie felt a lurch on his line, and then the familiar
yank-yank-yank
of Fergus' ratchet as he was lifted back up. Soon he was close enough to take Hachi's hand, and she helped him grab hold of the network of ropes that covered the vast canvas of the balloon.

“Archie, you've got to hang on better,” Hachi told him.

Archie flushed in embarrassment under his breathing mask. Hachi Emartha hadn't fallen off once in all the time they'd been at this, but that was to be expected. She'd spent the last three years of her life training to be the greatest warrior who ever lived. Everything she did was graceful, from eating her breakfast to killing Manglespawn. But what really embarrassed Archie was that Fergus MacFerguson had only slipped and fallen twice, and Fergus had only one good leg. His other leg, hobbled by a meka-ninja, now had only two settings—loose and useless, or straight and stiff—which he controlled with a knee harness he'd built himself.

“I'm sorry,” Archie said. “I wasn't made for this. I'm good at punching and being punched. Not hopping around like a monkey.”

“Well, one of these times your safety line's going to give way, and then you'll really be sorry,” Hachi told him. “You do not want to test Fergus's backup plan.”

“Oy,” Fergus said. “The gyrocopters work great. Sure, they're better at going down than up. And they're maybe a little hard to steer. But they're better than falling straight down. Besides, there wasn't room for parachutes in the backpacks with all the oxygen and lamps.”

Archie looked down again, but clouds obstructed his view of the ground.
I'm higher than the clouds,
Archie thought, and then he did feel a twinge of fear creep in.

“Archie doesn't need to worry about falling anyway,” Fergus said. “He'll just hit the ground and bounce back up, like he did before.”

“That was from only half this height,” Hachi reminded him. “And he's not totally invulnerable. We don't know what his limits are, but there's no reason to test them until we have to.”

Archie shifted his grip on the rope, trying not to think about his fall from his family's airship during their midair battle with Edison. Trying not to think about the crack in his arm, the one he'd gotten fighting Edison's lektrical robot body.

The crack that showed Archie was made of stone.

The crack that showed he wasn't entirely human.

“Let's just get on with it,” Archie said.

“Just a little farther, and then we wait for nightfall,” Hachi said.

They were working their way sideways around the broad, gently curved side of the enormous helium balloon on the rope-like rigging that covered it like a giant net. Archie thought of the stuff as “rope-like” because it wasn't really rope—not like the twine rope he knew. It was made of something gray and shiny, like metal, but it stretched and hung like a fiber rope. The gray lines, just like the strange canvas-like material that held the helium trapped inside it, had been invented by Wayland Smith and Daedalus of the Roman League of Seven hundreds of years ago, and the world had yet to rediscover the secrets of their construction.

Fergus ran a hand along the glossy veneer of the canvas. “I can't get over this stuff,” he said. “Helium is so small it escapes from almost anything. Anything light enough to float, that is. But not this. It's been hanging up here in the clouds for almost two millennia.”

“They had to make sure it wasn't going to fall,” Archie said.

“Which you're both going to do if you don't focus,” Hachi told them. “Next section. Go.”

The ropes-that-weren't-ropes formed a grid of squares on the canvas-that-wasn't-canvas, like the latitude and longitude lines on a globe. They were just tall enough for Hachi and Fergus to stand in a grid square on the bottom rope and hold on to the top rope with their hands, but Archie was younger and shorter than both of them. Where they could crab walk across, he had to lunge.

Fergus shuffled his way across the grid square to the next, his kilt flapping wildly in the freezing, howling wind. He'd at least had the sense to put on long underwear underneath it, even though the baggy red long johns looked silly with his blue tartan kilt.

At last he was across, and it was Archie's turn.

“You can do this,” Hachi told him.

Archie focused on the rope at the other side of the grid, took a deep breath of the fresh oxygen pumped into his mask, and dove for it. The wind caught his big coat like a sail and spun him, and he fell. He clawed out blindly with his hands and felt only canvas.
Zip!
He was sliding down again, falling, soon to be dangling from his safety line again—or worse—when at last his hand felt rope, and he snatched at it.
Oof.
He slammed into the canvas and hung there, panting, as he got his breath back.