The Magnificent 12 (6 page)

“Hey, look at the time!” he said, glancing at his wrist only to discover that watches had not been invented yet. “I, uh . . . There are some things . . . Hmm, I have a thing to do. Some, uh . . . writing. Yeah.”

“Is it a love poem?”

“What? Yeah, that's right. You guessed it! I was going to write you a love poem. Aww, now you ruined the surprise, but I'm still going to write you, like, a fantastic poem.”

“Then get to it, silly,” Risky said.

Gil exited the temple with the intention of writing a poem, all right, but not a love poem. And also he would be writing it a long, long way from Babylon.

He raced to the holding pen full of sacrificial animals and yelled, “Are there any horses here?”

One of the humans reclassified as sacrificial “goats” said, “If it means getting out of here, I can pretend to be a horse!”

Which was how Gil Gamesh ended up riding for his life from Babylon on the back of a cheesemaker's curd-skimmer slave named Enkidu.

They rested for a moment atop a nearby hill and looked back just in time to see a massive pillar of oily smoke rising from the desert on the other side of the city. Inside that greasy black smoke was a fell beast of incredible size—the world's sole surviving apatosaurus. It walked with a slow, shambling gait. Atop that apatosaurus on a slightly unsteady canopied saddle rode the Pale Queen. An army of monsters walked before her and behind her.

“Okay,” Enkidu said brightly after seeing what was coming. “I've rested plenty!”

“Let's get out of here,” Gil agreed.

Nine

V
alin's plan was obvious: he clearly wanted Mack to find some way to rewrite history. He would hold Stefan's and Xiao's lives hostage to ensure that Mack did not flee.

Mack definitely would have fled if given half a chance. For one thing, the Cossacks struck him as a bunch of guys who would just as soon cut your head off as say hello. In fact they were so heavily armed all the time that if you happened to just accidentally bump into one, you were in danger of losing a hand.

The other reason Mack wanted out was that he didn't think it was a good idea to mess with time travel. Who knew what damage he might do? What if he did manage to convince Sean Patrick O'Flanagan MacAvoy to continue seeing Boguslawa? What if they got married? What if they had kids? What if those kids became evil and altered the course of history? Or for that matter, what if they were great and amazing geniuses who invented cars way too early?

On the other hand, obviously whatever he did couldn't change the future too much, could it? After all, if he changed the future so much that he himself was not born, then he wouldn't have existed to come back in time and cause himself not to be born. Would he?

These kinds of thoughts brought on headaches, and when he explained them to his friends, they were no help.

Xiao, who was constantly guarded by two Cossack warriors, simply said, “These things are unknowable. You must do what you feel in your heart is right.”

And Stefan, who was guarded by nine Cossack warriors, said, “Huh,” which in this case meant, “I don't like paradoxes.” And he would threaten to punch Mack if Mack insisted on trying to talk metaphysics.
32

Mack missed Sylvie. She totally would have talked about paradoxes with him.

Mack decided to focus on simply getting himself and his friends out of trouble. The easy way seemed to be to convince Sean Patrick O'Flanagan MacAvoy to remain true to Boguslawa.

All he had to do was change the future in such a way that Valin did not become the descendant of someone named Izmir the Clown.

So . . . change the future, but without changing the future.

Headache pills were still hundreds of years away from being invented, so Mack shrugged it off, said, “Whatever,” and at the first opportunity introduced himself to Sean Patrick O'Flanagan MacAvoy.

“Hey, my name's Mack.”

It was a couple of days after Mack had been rudely shanghaied to the seventeenth century, and they were watching a game of polo. Polo is a game where men on horses hit a ball using long-handled hammers. In Cossack polo the ball was a head. Yes, they were a pretty tough bunch of guys, the Cossacks.

“
Cad ba mhaith leat
?” Sean Patrick replied. Because he was Irish and spoke only Irish, and just enough Russian to converse with his Cossack girlfriend.

Mack was reluctant to use up any of his
enlightened puissance
—after all, anything might happen—but he had no choice, so he used a Vargran spell that allowed him to understand what Sean Patrick was saying, and to be understood in return.

It turned out all Sean Patrick had said was, “What do you want?”

“Oh, um, just . . . hi.”

“Hello, fellow.”

“So. Your girlfriend. She's hot, huh?” This was an amazingly stupid thing to say, and Mack was relieved that the Cossacks standing around didn't stab him right then and there. This was, after all, the daughter of Taras Bulba he was calling “hot.”

“She should step outside if she's hot,” Sean Patrick said. “It's chilly outside.”

Having dodged that bullet, Mack wondered how to proceed. “So. Um. You two are tight, right? I mean, you're totally going to marry Boguslawa. Right?”

Sean Patrick stuck his thumbs in his belt and puffed out his chest and said, “I have pledged my undying love.”

“Good. And nothing could possibly change that, right?”

“Why? What have you heard?”

There was a loud roar of approval as out on the polo field one of the Cossacks swung his mallet and sent the battered head-ball flying. The horses thundered toward the goal.

So far this was going badly for Mack. But things were about to go much worse. Because not all those thundering hooves were from Cossack polo ponies. There was a host of horsemen rushing from the south, and judging by the beards and turbans, they were not Cossacks.

Suddenly arrows were sprouting in the chests of Cossack polo players. Which is a poetic way of saying that they were getting killed by bows and arrows from the attacking army.

Valin rushed to Mack, grabbed his arm, and hissed, “We have to get out of here! Sean Patrick, get Boguslawa!”

But Sean Patrick was already beating feet toward the distant woods. An arrow passed so close to Boguslawa that the feathers smeared her lipstick.

“Ah!” Mack cried. He grabbed Boguslawa's hand and yelled to Xiao and Stefan, “Let's get out of here!”

Their Cossack guards had bigger problems than chasing them right then, so the four of them—a boy-hero and his bully-bodyguard from twenty-first-century Sedona and a dragon-girl from twenty-first-century China and a Cossack princess-babe from seventeenth-century Russia—all ran into the Punjabi woods just ahead of a guru-general's army.

It was all very confusing, but when there are arrows and spears flying, it's pretty easy to focus on fleeing.

Ten

H
ere's what was going on. Mukhlis Khan was invading India and Guru Hargobind was trying to stop him. Taras Bulba was just there to see if he could get a job working for one side or the other. He was your average, hardworking savage warlord and he needed a job.

Valin was there helping Taras Bulba and trying to rewrite history.

Paddy “Nine Iron” Trout was there trying to get Valin to kill Mack.

None of this will be on the test. Just understand this: Valin would never join the Magnificent Twelve so long as he blamed Mack for being descended from Izmir the Clown.

Okay, that didn't really explain much. One more try.

Mack, Xiao, Stefan, and some girl named Boguslawa were in the woods, scared, damp, and shoeless. No one knew what had happened to Valin.

Oh, and here's where things go really bad:

Boguslawa, panting, breathless, her black hair blowing in the breeze, threw her arms around Mack's neck and said, “Вы спасли мнe жизнь!”

Which, translated, means, “You saved my life!”

And then she kissed Mack on both cheeks.

Stefan and Xiao both stared.

“I weel not marry Sean Patrick MacAvoy,” Boguslawa said breathlessly. “He is run away. I weel marry you. My hero!”

“Huh,” Stefan said, meaning, “Uh-oh.”

“What. Wait. What?” Mack squeaked. “No. Wait.”

“I am wanting man who is strong and brave,” Boguslawa insisted. “Not frighten lady-boy Sean Patrick, run away poof!”

They could have discussed it in more detail but they heard pounding hooves and deep, manly shouts, and there was no way to know if they were good guys or bad guys. For that matter, how did they even know which side were the good guys?

So they ran. Twigs and thorns tore at Mack's unprotected feet, but that was better than waiting around to get a sword stuck in him.

To Xiao, Mack said, “Can you carry the three of us?”

“I don't think so,” she said. “But I can probably scare off our pursuers.”

Sure enough, she transformed into her real self and slithered neatly through the trees. Within a few minutes Mack heard confused shouts of terror and the loud whinnying of scared horses. Xiao, in human form again, came back more slowly, leading two horses.

To keep the weight balanced equally on the horses, they put their largest person (Stefan) and their smallest person (Xiao) together on one horse while Mack and Boguslawa shared the other.

Which meant Boguslawa riding with her arms around Mack's waist and her head resting on his shoulder while he desperately considered how he was going to get out of this mess.

At least Valin wasn't with them, and with any luck at all, he would never see them.

They kept on through the woods with no real idea where they were going, and Mack was beginning to despair. “We have to get back to our own time. The Pale Queen is coming and we're, like, four hundred years away from it. Besides, I don't want to live in the seventeenth century. We have a job to do. We're supposed to save the world—four hundred years from now!”

“I never even got any lentils,” Stefan said.

“There may be food in the saddlebags,” Xiao suggested.

So they looked. Some sort of jerky and . . . yes, lentils!

“That's lentils?” Stefan asked, disappointed. “Huh.”

“Listen, Boguslawa, you have to marry Sean Patrick.” Mack really wished he had shoes while giving an impassioned speech from horseback. He half turned in the saddle so she could see his face. “The fate of the world depends on it. If you don't marry Sean Patrick, all that is good and decent will die.”

“I am marry you, Meck. Sean Patrick he is baby crying and run away. Meck is brave like lion.”

“Wait. What if . . . What if it was Sean Patrick who was brave and I was a coward?”

Boguslawa shrugged. “I am daughter of Taras Bulba. I must marry brave man, not coward.”

Mack sighed. “We have to find Valin and Sean Patrick.”

Xiao shook her head. “If we find Sean Patrick, we will find Valin, too, I believe.”

And so they rode off toward the east, not realizing that was the wrong way. They really had no idea where they were going. But there was no one to ask directions of, and horses just do not come with a built-in navigation system.

Mack even tried the maps app on his phone. He knew it wouldn't work, but it comforted him somehow to have this shiny object from the future as a reminder.

Then he saw that he'd had a call. And a voice mail. Both from the golem. Sadly the message could not be played because, well, pretty much every single thing that would make voice mail possible didn't exist yet.

It worried him. But then, he had plenty of other things to worry about. The golem would have to manage on his own.

Eleven

MEANWHILE, 7,831 MILES (AND 400 YEARS) AWAY, IN SEDONA, ARIZONA

C
amaro lay dying.

But she didn't die.

Oh, she should have. The Skirrit lance had pierced her heart, and that is the kind of thing that causes death. But the bleeding had been slowed by the detached finger of the golem. It seemed to be nothing but mud; however, there's a big difference between mud mud and mud that's been fashioned into a golem and given magical life.

The golem's magic stopped the bleeding. It knit torn veins and arteries back together. It fused flesh. It melded the strands of muscle.

When Grimluk shaped the golem, he did so with mud and twigs and one more ingredient: the magic of the Vargran tongue when spoken by one who possesses the
enlightened puissance
. It was that magic that kept the golem alive and functioning and basically immortal. And now a bit of the golem was working to heal Camaro Angianelli.

Ten minutes after being fatally stabbed, Camaro took off the oxygen mask the emergency medical technicians had put on her, and ripped the needle from her arm, and stood up and said, “I really do not like that redhead.”

Camaro wasn't dead, but she was definitely worn out, so she went home and had a good night's sleep.

The next morning she set out in search of “Mack,” but the golem could not be found. She went to his house, knocked on the door, and asked Mack's father if he knew where Mack was.

“Hmmm,” Mack's father said thoughtfully. “Is today his football practice?”

Today was not his football practice. Because Mack was not on the football team. So, obviously, neither was the golem.

Camaro didn't want to upset the MacAvoy family, so she did not tell them of her suspicion that “Mack” was about to be made the unwitting slave of an evil demon goddess. For one thing, there was no way for her to explain it without sounding jealous of Risky.

Camaro was not jealous. Though it was true that Risky was stunningly beautiful while she, Camaro, was merely cute edging toward pretty, she was not jealous.

No way. Why would she be?

She thought all this through as she walked the streets of Sedona, occasionally yelling, “Mack! Mack!” Though she wished she could call out, “Golem!”

Camaro searched everywhere, all through the neighborhoods and all up and down 89A, which was the main road through town.

Finally, dusty, hot, thirsty, and discouraged, she became far more discouraged when she ran into a woman she knew outside the run-down, sleazy, disreputable Arpaio Motel at the farthest limits of the town. Camaro bought a bottle of water and recognized the manager.

“Hey, aren't you Mrs. Lafrontiere?”

“That's me, honey.” She was an older woman, if by “older,” you meant “in her forties.” She was drinking a cup of tea and gazing off toward the red limestone hills that surround Sedona.

“I'm looking for someone,” Camaro said. “One is a kind of monsterlike thing, and the other is a redhead.”

Mrs. Lafrontiere—who, like much of the population of Sedona, was also a clairvoyant spiritual healer as well as motel manager—nodded. She looked closely, suspiciously at Camaro. “I saw them. It was late last night. A frightening creature ten feet tall. And a girl with red hair. She had the most extraordinary green eyes, perfect pale skin, a wonderful body—”

“Yeah, that's them,” Camaro interrupted. Frankly she'd heard enough about Risky's looks.

“She was an incomparable beauty with—”

“She's not that pretty,” Camaro snapped.

“Like an angel, she was.”

“Yeah, whatever. Where did they go?”

The woman pointed a heavily bejeweled hand toward the hills. “Up Schnebly Hill.” She shivered then, and met Camaro's gaze. “Where else would a demon goddess and a golem go?”

Camaro pointedly ignored the reference to a golem. No one should know that, but Mrs. Lafrontiere was a clairvoyant after all. She looked up at the hill. It was quite red in the slanting rays of the sun. Many believed it was a place of special power, of mysticism, a nexus of supernatural manifestation.

It scared Camaro a bit. But worse yet, there was no way to walk that far. So sadly, reluctantly, she turned back toward town. In the end, she knew, the golem would return as the Destroyer.

“This isn't going to end well,” Camaro said.