He lifted the lapel on his jacket to reveal a pin with an image of a human eye atop a pyramid, set inside a seven-pointed star. Dent, giving the Society's secret pass phrase. 'Thirty days hath September,' the Tik Tok captain said. 'Ahoy there,' the Dents' Tik Tok servant called to the machine-man pilot who stood sentry at the wood-and-rope gangplank to the sub. Its name, painted along its side, was the SS Seven Seas. A white plume of smoke and steam rose from a hole on its back like water from a whale's blowhole, and it had great round eyelike windows at the front for the pilot to see out of. The little submarine was whale shaped, with great fins at the back that controlled its position in the water. After his parents delivered their warning to the Society, it would be back to the family estate in Philadelphia again. As much as Archie was looking forward to seeing the Septemberist Society's secret headquarters again, he wished he were boarding one of the enormous submarines, setting off on an adventure that would take him all over the United Nations and beyond. Men in heavy frock coats and neckties and women in crinolines and petticoats waited for clockwork porters to load their steamer trunks onto the subs. The red submarine was dwarfed by its ocean-liner cousins-the massive four-hundred-foot-long, seven-thousand-tonne gray behemoths that carried passengers up and down the East Coast, from Acadia in the north to New Spain and Brasil in the south. That's why they had left their observatory and come to New Rome today: The stars were right for Malacar Ahasherat, the Swarm Queen, to break free of her prison in the Florida swamps, and the Society had to be warned. They were researchers for the Septemberists, both of them, and they spent their days with their noses in old books and their nights with their eyes glued to telescopes, looking for signs that the Mangleborn might be breaking out of their underground prisons. 'And I've asked you before not to use that awful slang.'Īrchie sighed. 'We don't talk about the Society in public, Archie. 'I'll bet the Septemberist Society is under the big statue of Hiawatha in New Rome Harbor,' he told his parents as they wove their way through the crowd down to the submarine docks. His mother and father either didn't know where it was, or they wouldn't tell him.

It might turn right around from the Hudson River Submarine Landing in Jersey and head back to Hackensack territory.

Mannahatta? Staten Island? Breucklen? Queens County? For all he knew, the submarine they took to the group's secret headquarters didn't go to any of New Rome's boroughs at all. Twelve-year-old Archie Dent had been there a dozen times before and still he had no idea where it was.

The secret entrance to the headquarters of the Septemberist Society could only be reached by submarine.

The league of seven lib e alan gratz