The League of Seven (31 page)

“How quaint,” said Mr. Rivets.

“I forgot you all came by airship the first time,” Hachi said. She alone had gone to Florida the first time by train. “We'll need to rent an airship or a steam mule. It's too far to walk. Not if we want to get there before the full moon.”

Fergus and Mr. Rivets headed for the horse stable/airship park/post office, but Archie stood where he was in the street.

Malacar Ahasherat was calling to him again. In broad daylight. While he was awake.

Jandal a Haad. Made of Stone.

Archie took a step toward the jungle. Toward the voice.

Jandal a Haad,
the Swarm Queen said.
Mangleborn.

He was almost to the line of trees at the edge of the town when something knocked him to the ground. He spat dirt as he struggled to get out from under Hachi.

“Ow! Hey! What did you do that for?”

“You were gone. I was talking to you, but you didn't hear me, and then you started to walk off into the swamp. Did you have another vision?”

Archie shook his head, trying to clear the fog that laid over his thoughts.

“No. No vision this time. Just a voice. The Swarm Queen's voice. Like my mom calling my name when she wakes me up in the morning. You didn't hear it?”

Hachi shook her head, a worried look on her face.

“Why is she picking on me?” Archie asked. His head hurt like he'd fallen on it.

“I don't know. But it's probably only going to get worse, the closer we get. You have to fight it, Archie. Remember your mantra.”

“Right. Yeah,” he said.
Save Mom and Dad. Save Mom and Dad,
he told himself as they went into the shop.
Even though they're keeping secrets from me.

“No airships,” Fergus told them when they joined him. “All they've got is a steam mule.”

“That'll do,” Hachi said. “I can get us there.”

Archie wondered if he might be able to lead them there as well, just following the Mangleborn's voice. It was something he didn't really want to think about.

“Be twenty-five dollars a day,” the surly old Seminole man behind the counter told them.

“Twenty-five dollars! That's criminal!” Archie said. “We could
buy
a steam mule for a hundred dollars!”

“Where?” the old man said. “You want a steam mule, it's twenty-five dollars a day, plus the price of coal.”

They didn't have twenty-five dollars. They had spent most of the money Ms. Ambrose had given them on train tickets. They would have to walk, and they would miss the full moon. They would be too late to stop the Swarm Queen from rising.

“I guess we'll have to tell the prince the search is off,” Fergus said.

“The prince?” said Archie.

“What prince?” asked the old man.

“A Nigerian prince. A
rich
Nigerian prince. He'll be so disappointed. But if we couldn't find one of the Seven Cities of Gold, at least we found the Fountain.”

“The Fountain?” said Archie.

“The Seven Cities of Gold?” the old man asked.

“That's what the Nigerian prince hired us to find.” He turned to Hachi. “We were so close.”

“Yeah. Yeah, we were,” she said.

“We were?” said Archie. Hachi kicked him in the shin to tell him to be quiet, but he didn't understand any of this.

“Atlantis!” Fergus said. “Just think of what we might have found there!”

The old Seminole spit tobacco juice into a spittoon. “You trying to tell me some Afrikan prince hired three kids to go looking for the lost city of Atlantis?”

“Well, we weren't kids when we started,” Fergus said quietly, like there was anybody else around who might hear him.

“The Fountain…,” the old man said. “You don't mean…”

“The Fountain of
Youth,”
Fergus said. “Why do you think I've got a bum leg at fourteen and Professor Dent here looks like he's ten years old and still has white hair?”

“Twelve,” Archie said.

Hachi kicked him under the counter again.

The old man squinted at each of them in turn. “I don't believe you,” he said finally.

Fergus sighed. “Do you have any mail waiting for Fergus MacFerguson?”

The old man pulled out a scrolled-up piece of paper. “Got one here for a ‘Lord Fergus MacFerguson, Fifth Earl of Haggis, President of the Powhatan Geographic Society.'”

“That would be me,” Fergus said. He took the note from the old man and skimmed it. “All right then. The prince wants us to return to New Rome. He's going to send another team. Airships, steam mules, cartographers, trackers. Dozens of men.”

“But they'll all get a stake in the find!” Hachi said. “We were going to split our ten percent three ways!”

Fergus shrugged. “What can we do? We haven't got a steam mule.”

“Lemme see that,” the old man said. He read through the note. “Whoever finds this, they get a percentage?”

“That was our arrangement, yes,” Fergus said. “But we're through. Thank you for your time. Mr. Rivets, we'll need train tickets back to New Rome. We're done here.”

“As you say, sir,” Mr. Rivets said.

They turned to leave.

“Ah ah ah—wait just a minute,” the old man said. “Suppose I give you that steam mule. In return for one-fourth of your percentage.”

“One-fourth!” Fergus cried. “That's highway robbery!”

“It's better'n zero, which is what you stand to get if you go back to New Rome and this here Nigerian prince sends down a new team,” the old man said.

“He's got a point,” Hachi said.

Fergus paced the small office like he was thinking it over, then finally relented. “Deal.”

The old man clapped. “I'll get the steam mule ready for you!”

“And I'll write to the prince at once, to let him know our expedition is back on. You'll receive an official letter from him, granting you one-fourth of ten percent of whatever we find.”

The old man hurried out to the steam horse stables, and Archie shook his head. “I'm so confused. What Nigerian prince do we know?”

“Our old friend Luis, from the sewers,” Fergus said, scribbling a note to the prince. “I thought we might need a little leverage to rent an airship or something when we got here, so I had Mr. Rivets pop off the train in Tallahassee and post a letter to Luis.” Fergus finished his note and left it on the counter. “All right. Let's get out of here. I want to get as far away as we can before the old guy realizes our Nigerian prince wrote that letter on the back of a Cathay take-out menu.”

*   *   *

It was late afternoon when they arrived in the clearing. The remains of the exploded equipment and the bent lightning tower Archie had destroyed still filled the glade.

Fergus brought the steam mule to a stop and let off its steam. “So. Here we are,” he said. “Back where it all started.”

Archie knew Fergus was just talking about when the three of them had come together for the first time a few days ago, but Archie couldn't help but think there was more to it than that. Their lives had all changed in some way in this clearing. They had all been reborn here. Edison's ceremony had turned Fergus into a lektric engine. Hachi's life had been transformed when strangers had come here and killed her father, turning her into a weapon of revenge. And Archie—Archie had lost his parents here too and started down a road he never thought he would travel. But there was something else about this glade. Archie didn't know how, or why, but he had an attachment to this place. A bond. To the clearing, and to the Swarm Queen. He had felt it before he'd ever put his hands into the green flames, and it had only grown stronger since.

They climbed down from the steam mule, and Archie went to the stone altar in the middle of the clearing. The surface of the ancient rock table had a maze of chiseled lines on it, something like the lines on Fergus' face. They all led to a small square hole cut straight through to the bottom of the table. Archie traced one of the lines with his fingers, imagining the blood of a hundred men flowing through the maze to its center. What connection did he have with this glade and this stone? Why did he feel as though he had been here before? And what, if anything, did it have to do with that scrapbook Uncle John had been keeping about him?

Jandal a Haad,
Malacar Ahasherat whispered to him.

Archie looked up to find Hachi staring at him. He pulled his hand away from the stone altar.

“Sorry,” he said.

“There are no bugs,” Hachi said. “Here in the clearing. No bugs on the ground, and none in the air.”

“That's a good thing though, innit?” Fergus asked.

“No, it's not,” Archie said.

Hachi took Ms. Ambrose's aether pistol and oscillating rifle from the steam mule and tossed the pistol to Fergus. “You said we'd come back with an army, Archie.” She activated the aggregator on her oscillator. “I only see three kids, two rayguns, and a machine man.”

“We don't need an army,” Archie said. “We're a new League. I know it.”

“But there's only three of us,” Fergus said.

“Three Leaguers can take down a Mangleborn,” Archie told them. “The Seven fought
armies
.”

“So how do we get down there?” Hachi asked. “To where it's imprisoned?” A full, pink moon was rising in the late-afternoon sky; they had no time to lose.

“I didn't see where my parents went,” Archie said. “It was dark, and there was a meka-ninja.”

“What about this?” Fergus asked. He stood by a large stone set into a hill, a man-made thing like a wall or a door. The letters I and II were carved into it.

“One, two,” Hachi read. “Two Roman numerals. Like the XX on the seal in our dreams. Twenty.”

“One, two,” Archie whispered.

Jandal a Haad,
the Swarm Queen whispered.
Made of Stone.

“Archie?” Hachi said, snapping him out of it. “Archie, focus. Remember your mantra.”

“I'm sorry. Hachi, if I lose myself … if I forget myself…”

“That's not going to happen,” Hachi told him.

“But if it does—”

“It's
not
going to happen,” Hachi told him.

“One, two. Maybe they're coordinates,” Fergus said, his mind not on Archie or Hachi but on the problem. “Or markers, like on a map. Does anybody have a map?”

“No,” Archie said. “No, I forgot! Mom gave me a clue when we pulled that bug off her. One, two, buckle my shoe!”

“A nursery rhyme?” said Hachi.

“What you know as nursery rhymes began as ciphers created by the Mangleborn's Roman jailers,” Mr. Rivets explained. “They are mnemonics. Simple ways for humans to remember the paths through the puzzle traps in the event that civilization falls and all written records are lost.”

“You're saying nursery rhymes are … secret codes?” Fergus asked.

“In a way, yes, sir. But as times and languages have changed, many of the rhymes have lost their original meanings. The understanding and cataloging of these nursery rhyme clues is the work to which Master Archie's parents devoted their careers.”

Just like Atlantis, going from the truth of a power station under a waterfall to the myth of a drowned civilization
, Archie thought.
Or the Great Bear's father being a bear, not a six-legged monster with shark teeth and tusks for claws. Another part of humanity's hidden past.

“That printer in New Rome, John Douglas. That's what he was publishing too—books full of nursery rhymes,” Fergus said.

“Part of the Septemberists' mission is to keep old nursery rhymes in the public consciousness, so the codes are never forgotten,” Mr. Rivets said.

“One, two, buckle my shoe,” Archie said, trying to remember his studies.

“Three, four, knock on the door,” Mr. Rivets said.

“The version my mother sang to me is different,” Hachi said. “It's ‘One, two, lace up your shoe.'”

They looked to Fergus, but he shrugged. “I heard it the same way as Archie.”

“They both have to do with shoes,” Archie said. “We have to look at our shoes!”

Archie bent down and started looking at the ground beneath his feet. Fergus and Hachi shared a skeptical look, then got down and searched with him.

Hachi poked into the dirt with her dagger until she hit something hard.

“There's something under here,” she said. She cleared away the moist, woody loam and found more of the carved rock—and a brass plate about the size of a welcome mat.

“I told you! I told you!” Archie said. He knelt down on the plate, feeling around its edges. “This has to be something. A door, maybe.”

“Hang on, I've got something,” Fergus said. “It's a handle or a lever or something—”

“No, wait!” Hachi cried, but Fergus was already pulling it. The brass plate Archie was sitting on fell away, and he dropped into darkness.