The Trap (The Magnificent 12 #2)(24)

Then it stopped beside a dock. Xiao led the way off the barge. She paused to thank the creature. Then began a long climb up a spiral staircase. At the top of about a thousand steps (actual number 812), a tube hung from the arched stone ceiling. It was brass and green and ended in eyepieces. Xiao took a look through the eyepieces.

“It’s clear,” she said.

Now they climbed a bronze ladder. Xiao pushed up against what looked like a blank stone ceiling. It lifted with surprising ease.

They climbed out onto a wall. But not just any wall. The Great Wall of China.

This was a wall that, back in the days when it was all still standing, ran more than five thousand miles. About ten feet thick, maybe thirty feet tall except for the frequent towers.

Steep, green, triangular mountains tumbled together. They weren’t that tall, but there were a lot of them. Like a bunch of fuzzy green blocks all jumbled together.

The wall snaked right across these mountains, up one side, down the next, up again, down again, and whee, around to catch the next mountain.

It reminded Mack a little of the dragons. Sinewy and snakelike and strong, with stones and cobbles making the scales.

“Big wall,” Stefan commented.

“Yes,” Xiao agreed. “An enormous structure built by humans. A sacred place of great power. Millions labored for many years to build it. And many of those who built it died in the process. Their bones are now beneath our feet.”

Stefan carefully stepped aside.

“I meant all through the wall, not just right here beneath your feet,” Xiao explained. “When workers died, they were added to the wall.”

She looked at Stefan as if expecting a response, but he had turned away and was no longer listening.

“This way,” Xiao said, and pointed downhill.

“Yeah, let’s go that way,” Stefan said. “Because you know what? I think dragon girl is right. Risky? She’s not all that dead.”

Slowly Mack turned. The hair on the back of his head was standing up.

There, at the top of the closest mountain behind them, stood Princess Ereskigal.

She waved.

Waved like she and Mack were old friends.

“Hi, Mack!” she cried cheerfully. “Stay right there. I’m coming to kill you!”





Chapter Seventeen



DID WE MENTION IT WAS A LONG TIME AGO. . . .

In order to be named an official, full-fledged Nafia assassin, Paddy “Nine Iron” Trout had to do some traveling. His bosses gave him a choice.

“Bottomless pit in Greece or volcano in Italy?”

“Say what?”

“You gotta meet the boss: she makes the final decisions on major promotions like this.”

“What if she doesn’t like me?” Nine Iron asked.

“Well, then she’ll have you for lunch.”

Nine Iron didn’t think this sounded too bad. Until he considered that Have you for lunch could be taken two different ways.

“Volcano,” Nine Iron said.

So he was booked for a trip on the zeppelin Furzlassen. Zeppelins were giant airships. Basically you had a steel frame, and a giant skin stretched tight over that steel frame, and then the whole thing was filled with sacks of a lighter-than-air gas like helium, which was perfectly safe, or hydrogen, which could blow up if you so much as looked at it sideways.

Naturally the Furzlassen was filled with hydrogen.

The whole thing altogether was shaped like a cigar, one hundred feet in diameter and about eight hundred feet long. The bottom of the zeppelin had passenger and crew compartments like sleeper cars on a train. There was also a bar, a restaurant, and a smoking room. Which, given that the ship was being floated by giant sacks containing 3.7 million cubic feet of highly flammable gas, may not have been a great idea.

It was a fine trip. Nine Iron was booked into a windowless second-class room. Unimaginable luxury for a man who, as a child, had traveled seventh class.

But Nine Iron had gotten so he enjoyed a degree of luxury, so he moved up to a first-class cabin that became available right after the original passenger was tossed out of a window over Greenland.

No one’s saying Nine Iron tossed the poor fellow out, but Nine Iron did end up with the cabin. So draw your own conclusion.

It was a great trip and Nine Iron felt great, just great, as he stepped off the zeppelin in Rome, Italy.

Then he felt good taking a train to the seaside city of Naples.

And he felt okay taking the stagecoach to the small town of San Gudafella.

He felt slightly out of sorts riding a donkey up the side of Mount Vesuvius.

And by the time he reached the top, he was beginning to feel a bit nervous. Because first: he didn’t like heights all that much. And, second: he didn’t like being perched atop a rocky ridge above a vast sea of steaming hot magma.

His guide mutely pointed to a narrow pathway that led down toward the magma. Then the guide turned his donkey around and took off.

Nine Iron set off down the inside of the caldera—the bowl of the volcano. The volcano was in a sort of constant low-key eruption. The volcano that back in Roman times had totally erupted and wiped out the city of Pompeii, burying everyone in ash and flying rock and a bit of lava. That volcano.

Down he climbed. Down and down and hotter and hotter until he could feel the heat coming up through his shoes.

And that’s when Nine Iron saw his first monster. It looked like a giant bug wearing a striped suit and a fedora.