The Dragons of Babel (28 page)

Try though he might, he could make no sense out of what he had been through.

He could not even cry.

For an undeterminable length of time, he wandered in the darkness. Sometimes he slept. Then, finally, he awoke to find that the pain was not gone but manageable.

So Will returned to Niflheim Station and hunted up the cache where he had stashed his old clothes. He'd packed them away in cedar chips salvaged from the trash bin out back of a lumber supply store, so they were still good. He shaved and washed himself in the men's room of the Armory subbasement (it was one of many that he could reach via the steam tunnels without going up to the streets), and he had a new pair of boots from a consignment of hundreds that three of his soldiers had jacked from a sidelined boxcar. When he was finished dressing, he no longer looked like the infamous Captain Jack Riddle. He could pass for a respectable citizen.

He went upstairs and into the street, only to discover that it was spring. He'd passed the entire winter underground.

W
ill had a pocketful of change, casually extorted from an adventurer who had wandered deeper into the darkness than he ought, so on an impulse he caught an Uptown train to the Hanging Gardens.

Justly famed were the Hanging Gardens, whether considered as park, arboretum, or simply as a collection of horticultural displays. They included a small carnival with a merry-go-round and a Ferris wheel, public swimming pools,
and a boardwalk through simulated wetlands where abatwa stalked water dragons no longer than Will's foot with toothpick-sized spears. The aviary had a hundred species of hummingbirds, thirteen of cranes, and a dozen varieties of pillywiggins to be seen nowhere else on the continent. Sullen fauns sold balloons on the greensward. But what Will liked best was the esplanade. Leaning over the concrete railing, he looked down on the far-below docks where giants stood thigh-deep in the water and slowly unloaded containerized cargo from freighters. A salt breeze blew in from world-girding Oceanus. Gulls wheeled over the water, white specks as small as dust motes.

A hippogriff flew past, trailing laughter.

It came so close to Will that he could smell its scent, a pungent mixture of horse sweat and milky pin-feathers, and feel the wind from its wings. Its rider's hair streamed out behind her like a red banner.

Will stared up at her, awestruck. The young woman in the saddle was all grace and athleticism. She wore green slacks with matching soft leather boots and, above a golden swatch of abdomen, a halter top of the same green color.

She was glorious.

The rider glanced casually down and to the side and saw Will gawking. She drew back on the reins so that her beast reared up and for an instant seemed to stall in midair. Then she took the reins between her teeth and with one hand yanked down her halter top, exposing her breasts. With the other hand, she flipped him the finger.

Then, jeering, she seized the reins again, pulled up her top, and was gone.

Will could not breathe. It was as if this stranger had taken a two-by-four to his heart. All in an instant, he was hers.

And he had no idea who she was or if he would ever see her again.

In that fabulous, confused instant, one thought rose up from within Will: He'd been wasting his life. Down below, he'd been a hero—but to what purpose? He'd led an army that would not come out of the tunnels, because they feared the light.

He found he did not want to go back.

Instead, he turned his back on the Gardens and walked into the city, sometimes taking an elevator upward, sometimes a stairway down. Lacking purpose, he found himself in a gray neighborhood and on an impulse, he stepped into the nearest bar. It was a dive called the Rat's Nose. He would walk up to the tappie and ask for work. Even if it was just washing dishes and sweeping the floor, it would be a start.

A little girl crawled out from under a table and beamed up at him. “Hello,” she said. “My name is Esme. Who are you?”

Nat looked up from his newspaper and smiled. “There you are! I was beginning to think you were never going to show up.”

12 A S
MALL
R
M IN
K
B
LDT
WN

“Okay, okay, who's it gonna be next?” Nat threw a card down on the folding table. “You give me five, I give you ten. You give me ten, I give you twenty, you're a winner!” He threw down a second card. “Pick the queen, the black queen,
la reine de la nuit
, you're a winner!” He threw down a third card, and flipped them all over. A pair of red deuces, and the queen of spades. “Woddaya got, woddayagot? Forty gets you eighty, fifty a hundred. It's so easy a child could play! Woddaya got?” He switched the cards around once, twice, thrice. “There's always a winner.”

A crowd had gathered under the marquee of the derelict Roxy Movie Theater where he'd set up the pitch. They were hobs and haints mostly, with a scattering of red dwarves. Will stood in their midst, pretending to watch the cards but surreptitiously looking for a trout. Haints made good trouts because they expected to be broke at the end of the week anyway and would watch their money disappear with stoic grace. Dwarves liked to gamble but tended to be sore losers. Usually they weren't worth the trouble. Hobs, on the other hand, were tightfisted but they were plungers. Will had his eye on one hob in particular who stood on the fringe of the crowd, scowling skeptically but clearly fascinated.

A haint passed a ghostly gray hand over the card table. Two crumpled dollar bills appeared in its wake. “That one,” he said, pointing.

“Not this one, you say?” Nat flipped over the two of diamonds. “Nor this?” The two of hearts. “You chose the queen, you're a winner! Two gets you four. Pony on up, pony on up. Ten gets twenty, twenty gets forty. Woddaya got, woddaya got?”

Flip, flip, flip went the cards. The haint left the four dollars on the table without adding to them, and chose again. Nat turned over the card. “It's not the diamond deuce, no sirree! Two cards a winner, five'll get you ten. Double up, double up, the more you bet the more you win.” Nat switched the two cards around and then back to their original positions.

The haint shook his head obstinately and jabbed a smoky finger at his card again. They weren't going to get anything more out of him, Will saw. Nat had obviously reached the same conclusion, for he switched the cards around again, sliding the queen up his sleeve and replacing it with a second two of hearts.

“Final call, double up? No? And it's… the deuce!”

Nat pocketed the money. “Who's next, who's next? Bet big, win big, woddaya say?” The hob was starting to turn away now and nobody else was stepping forward, so Will pushed his way up close to the front. “Three cards down, one two three. Three cards over, three two one. Woddaya got? Twenty forty fifty a hundred.” The queen was in the middle. Nat swapped the deuces, then switched the queen with one of the twos.

Will threw a twenty down on the table. “That one,” he said, pointing to the center card.

The crowd gave out a soft moan as he chose what all of them could see was a losing card.

Nat grinned. “You're sure, now? You don't wanna bet on this one? Double your winnings, easy as pie.” He pointed
at the facedown queen. “No? All right then, I flip the cards—one, two, and… the queen is mine!”

“Oh, man!” a nearby haint said. “The queen, she right there. Anybody seen that.”

“Hey,” Will said testily. “Bet your own money, buddy, if you're so smart.” The hob was watching intently, his body no longer half-turned to leave. He was beginning to think there was money to be won.

He'd taken the hook. Now to set it.

“Twenty gets you forty, forty gets you eighty,” Nat crooned. “Pick the queen, you win, black always wins. Twenty forty, fifty a hundred. Easy to win, easy as sin!” He threw down the three cards and flipped them face up.

“Let me see that queen!” Will snatched up the card, examined both sides, and reluctantly set it down again. As he did so, Nat turned his head to the side and sneezed.

Swiftly, Will bent up one corner of the queen. When Nat swept up the cards again, apparently without noticing, Will winked cockily at the haint who'd criticized his last bet. By no coincidence at all, the trout was in a position to notice.