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The Power
Mack grew and grew. It was a painless process, but a potentially embarrassing one since Mack’s clothing was human-sized. He was concerned he might have a sort of Incredible Hulk clothing issue, but, fortunately for all concerned, his clothing grew along with him.
There was quite a view from a hundred feet up. Mack saw farm fields, and a small city, and the bigger city of Amritsar off to the south.
He also saw a small private jet coming in for a landing and flying directly toward him right around eye level. The pilot was staring with disbelieving eyes, too transfixed by the bizarreness of two gigantic twelve-year-olds to steer away.
Mack dodged aside, ducking low, which was very good luck because at that very moment Valin swung his scimitar horizontally as if he meant to cut off Mack’s head.20
The scimitar passed harmlessly over Mack’s head but sliced the tail right off the private plane.
This was bad. The reason planes have a tail is that it allows them to turn. Also it keeps them from either pitching straight down to the ground or straight up in the air and actually falling over backward and then heading straight for the ground.
That’s what happened.
“Hey!” Mack yelled. “The plane!”
But Valin was already preparing for a second scimitar swing.
Mack made a desperate snatch for the plane. It was very strange, like trying to grab a badminton shuttlecock in midair. He learned something surprising: like the feathers of a badminton shuttlecock, actual airplane wings aren’t all that strong if you grab them with a giant fist.
He also learned: jet engines are really hot.
“Ahhh!” he yelled.
The three passengers on the jet also yelled, “Ahhh!” but with an Indian accent.
Mack swung with the direction of the jet, trying desperately not to crush it as it went from two hundred miles an hour to zero miles an hour in a single second.
The scimitar swung!
Too late to duck!
“(Ch)on-ma Mack i poindrafol!” was shouted with a German accent.
Dietmar!
In a millisecond a huge shield appeared in the air between Mack and the flashing scimitar.
CLANNNNNNNNG!
The blade bit into the shield but not through. Instantly Mack slid his forearm into the straps of the shield, even as he carefully held the jet with his other hand. He knelt, laid the jet on the ground—upside down, but hey, it was better than crashing.
Valin was breathing hard—swinging a scimitar the size of a sequoia isn’t easy, especially if you’re not a practiced swordsman.
Mack, for his part, stuck his now-giant fingers into his giant mouth and winced at the pain from the jet exhaust.
“What is your problem?” Mack yelled at Valin, mumbling because of the fingers in his mouth.
“There is bad blood between our two families!” Valin cried.
Paddy “Nine Iron” Trout wheezed, “Yes, an ancient blood feud of …”
He reached for his oxygen bottle, but Mack was not in the mood to wait politely.
“Whatever it was, I apologize, all right?” Mack said.
“Ah, so you admit that your great-great-great …” This went on for a while, so for brevity’s sake let’s just cut to: “… great-grandfather dishonored my family and destroyed my ancestry!”
“What the … Look, I don’t even—”
“My ancestors swore to Guru Hargobind himself that they would never rest until the insult was—”
“Guru Hargobind?”
“Aha! So you do know! And so, you die!”
Valin stabbed at Mack and missed, but dodging had put Mack off balance. He would not be able to avoid the next sweep of that terrible sword.
Suddenly a new creature appeared on the scene. It was as big as Mack and as big as Valin. But this giant was Stefan—magicked into existence by the combined Vargran efforts of three of the Magnifica below.
“Give me that,” Stefan growled to Mack, and yanked the shield from his arm.
Valin raised the scimitar high as if to strike at Stefan, but Stefan wasn’t having it. Not even a little. He raised the shield over his head and charged straight at Valin like an enraged bull, yelling, “Gaaaahhhhh!”
Valin swallowed hard, clapped a protective hand over Paddy “Nine Iron,” still peeking out of his pocket, and ran away, waving the scimitar ineffectually over his shoulder. “This is not over! I will force you to face your guilt!”
Huge Mack and huge Stefan stared at each other.
“Should I go after him?” Stefan asked.
“No. We’ve already destroyed the airport. We could end up crushing cars and houses.”
“Huh,” Stefan said, and he was not happy about it. Most likely because he had always been a great admirer of Godzilla and would have relished crushing some houses with Mack.
But Mack had a better idea. He looked down at tiny Xiao and said, “That treaty that says you can’t be your dragon self in the lands of Western dragons …”
Xiao nodded, grinned, and said, “This is no longer the West.”
In seconds she had left behind her human form and taken on her own, true form as a wingless turquoise Chinese dragon. She slithered into the air—a remarkable thing to see—and, flying low to the ground to avoid being spotted by Valin, went after him and the Nafia assassin.
EVEN LONGER AGO THAN EVER BEFORE
The Pale Queen had been feared and worshipped since human beings first learned to walk erect. In fact, the Pale Queen had helped that process along. Anytime she saw an early human—whether it was a Homo erectus, a Homo habilis, or even a Homo neanderthalensis—who was leaning too far forward or knuckle-walking, she would say, “Hey! Stand up straight!” And if they didn’t, she’d kill them with an energy bolt or by dropping rocks on their heads.
She was like a very strict teacher.
After many, many years of this, there weren’t all that many early humans knuckle-walking anymore. Standing fully upright turned out to make a lot of sense in terms of survival.
The Pale Queen needed early humans to walk upright because that would free their hands to do the important work of writing about the Pale Queen, building temples for the Pale Queen, and sacrificing sheep and maidens to the Pale Queen. It took her quite a while to get humans to that point, and her efforts earned her a lot of respect in the primitive ancient cities of Ur of the Chaldees, Nineveh of the Assyrians, Sumer of the Akkadians, and Indianapolis of the Pacers.
But when Babylon came along, the Babylonians chilled the Pale Queen. The Babylonians thought they were all that, and they saw the Pale Queen as being last year’s model when it came to godding. So there was no temple to the Pale Queen, and no cult of shaved-headed priests, and no sheep or maidens being sacrificed.
Which was totally unacceptable to the Pale Queen.
But you know how kids are supposed to help around the house? How they are supposed to have a list of chores and just do them without being nagged ten times? Well, same thing in the Pale Queen’s house. Her daughter expected to have everything handed to her: goddess robes, flying sandals, chariots drawn by unicorns, parties with her friends (she had no friends), and she didn’t want to have to do any of the work.
“Listen to me, young lady, I’m giving you a chore to do. You will make the Babylonians worship me. I want a main temple and two smaller—”
“Why are you picking on me?” Risky demanded.
“I’m not picking on you. I’m telling you what I want you to do.”
Heavy sigh. “Okay, what? Gah!”
“I want a main temple and two smaller ones. The main one has to be bigger than Astarte’s. I want a cult. I want sacrifices. And I want some kind of invocation.”
“What’s an invocation? Am I supposed to know that?”
The Pale Queen gritted her thirty-six teeth because Risky was grinding her last nerve. “An invocation is like when someone says, ‘Praise Astarte!’ or ‘Zeus, that hurt!’ or, ‘Where the Baal are my keys?’ That kind of thing.”
So Risky rolled her eyes and promised to do it next millennium. But the Pale Queen wasn’t having it and insisted her daughter get out right now, young lady, and get started.
So verily did Risky go forth into the land of Babylon. Babylon was watered by two rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates. In those very early days Babylon was still a bit scruffy. Some of the best buildings were made of stone, but a lot were just mud smeared over sticks.
Risky was walking through the ox-poop-strewn streets, threading her way past lepers and refusing offers of souvenirs from the many shopkeepers.
And then she saw him.
Yes, him.
He was the strongest, handsomest, most armored-up guy she had ever seen in her life.
To be honest, Risky hadn’t dated much during the first thousand years of her existence. What human males she had even seen had been in the process of being eaten by her mother. Or occasionally by Risky herself. And it’s hard to get a good impression of a guy who is crying and begging for his life, only to be gobbled up.
This, however, was different.
He was tall. His hair was lustrous black. His armor glittered silver and gold in the sunlight. He had almost all of his teeth and he did not smell like a goat, which was pretty rare in Babylon. The concept of hotness had not yet been invented, but if it had been, Risky would have said he was hot.
Risky stopped in the middle of the street and stared. She did not know how to play it cool. Like hotness, cool had also not yet been invented, so people just pretty much acted however they felt and expressed their emotions openly.
These were very primitive times.
“Why are you staring at me?” the young man asked.
“Because your hands are as gold rings set with beryl,” Risky said. “Your belly is as bright ivory overlaid with sapphires. Your legs are as pillars of marble set upon sockets of fine gold. Your countenance is as Lebanon, excellent as the cedars, and your mouth is most suh-weet.”
Somehow the sight of this boy was making Risky go weak in the knees but strong in the similes. She knew she was babbling. She knew it was crazy, but it was how she felt. She felt smitten. She felt gobsmacked. She felt … love.
“I like your hair,” the boy said. “You have the hair of a goddess.”
“I am a goddess,” Risky pointed out. “See?” To demonstrate, she transformed into a huge beast made up of the useful parts of a lion, a bear, a ram, and a bull. But she kept the hair through the whole thing.
The boy turned and ran, but Risky bounded on her powerful kangaroo legs (yeah, kangaroo, too) and smacked him down on his back. She landed atop him and once again became her usual amazingly attractive self.
“What’s your name, human boy?”
“G-G-G-G-Gil.”
“G-G-G-G-Gil?”
He swallowed hard and said, “Gil. Gil Gamesh.”
“Epic,” she said approvingly. She jumped up effortlessly and pulled him to his feet. “I need to build a temple for the Pale Queen.”
“The Pale Queen?” Gil echoed. He frowned. “But isn’t she evil?”
“Oh, she’s evil all right,” Risky said with airy dismissal.
“I heard she demanded a human sacrifice of a thousand Amalekites.”
Risky spread her hands and smiled. “They were out of goats.”
“Will she demand human sacrifices here in Babylon?”
“That depends. How fast do you think we can get a temple built?”
Oh, the days that followed were magical for Risky. She and Gil chose an architect for the temple. Then they picked out draperies and looked at paint samples and interviewed potential priests. There were so many details: whether to have pews or just make everyone stand, whether they would have music—possibly bleating horns—which knives to use to cut the throats of sacrifices, whether the blood would be caught in copper bowls or silver bowls. (Both were hard to keep polished, but this “bronze” everyone was talking about struck them both as too newfangled.)
Gil took one job for himself, keeping it coyly secret from Risky: finding a sculptor for the great statue of the Pale Queen that would dominate the altar.
The more they worked together, the more they liked each other. They held hands. They gazed into each other’s eyes. Gil even wrote her poetry.
Your neck is like a gazelle’s,
You’re good at magic and spells,
Your skin is fair,
I like your hair,
When I look at you my heart swells.
No one said it was great poetry. Gil was just starting out as a writer and poet. He was actually much better at sword fighting than writing. But he was also very organized and had a way of getting things done that sometimes surprised Risky. When it was time to form the bricks for the temple’s foundation, Risky suggested sending a conquering army to enslave the Canaanites and use their blood to mix with the mortar.
Gil came up with a totally different approach: he simply hired some professional bricklayers and used water to mix with the mortar.
“You’re so efficient,” Risky gushed.
The girl was smitten.
And so was Gil.
Their love burned hot for a while. But that which burns hottest often burns out quickest. Like a match that flares in the darkness only to be extinguished by the smallest breeze.
And when love dies …
“Did you see where he went? Would you be able to find it again?” Mack asked her as she shifted back to human shape.
“Easily. He and Paddy went into the Golden Temple.”
“The what now?”
At this point they were outside the airport, completely surrounded by khaki-uniformed men wearing khaki turbans and carrying nightsticks. These were Amritsar police. There was also a swiftly growing number of men in camouflage uniforms, some in turbans, some in berets, all armed with rifles. These were Indian military.
Beyond the ring of threatening police and military forces were regular folks with cell phones taking pictures. And somehow paparazzi were there clicking away from behind superlong lenses.
None of this worried Mack very much. First of all, he was done worrying about YouTube. It was just a given that they would be starring in yet another viral video.
And the armed men weren’t a great concern because, frankly, at this point the Magnificent Seven had more than enough Vargran to deal with mere humans. Indeed, Sylvie, Jarrah, and Charlie had combined to freeze the armed men in place, which was why Mack was not handcuffed and on his way to jail.
This meant that all the beards on all those armed men were also frozen in place. This definitely made them less terrifying. After all, a beard at rest will stay at rest, while a beard in motion may run right into you at some point.21
Dietmar had his phone out and was googling the “Golden Temple.” Actually he pronounced it “golten,” with a t. It irritated Mack, as most things about Dietmar did.
“It is a temple belonging to the Sikh religion,” Dietmar reported.
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