“The wall! Look at it!”
Mack turned away from the advancing guards. The decorated wall wasn’t just pretty tile. Jarrah was right: nine brightly colored dragons cavorted down the hundred-foot length of it.
“Huh,” Stefan said, but he wasn’t appreciating the wall. He was noticing that some small shadows were creeping up behind the guards, even as the guards were edging closer.
“Back off, you quivering jelly bags of mucus!” one of the Tong Elves said. “They’re ours!”
It’s possible the guards understood them. But it’s more likely they were just startled to see that they were surrounded.
By elves in lederhosen.
That would startle most people.
“What?” Mack yelled into the phone. “Who is it? I’m kind of busy!”
“Hi, Mack! It’s me, your golem!”
“What?” Mack shrieked.
“I’m looking for the English paper. Do you know where you might have put it? It’s already late, and our teacher—”
“What? What?”
“The English paper—”
“I’m kind of busy right now!” Mack screamed. “It’s in my laptop. The folder marked ‘Useless Stuff.’”
“Thanks! Bye-bye, real Mack.”
The flashlights all swung around to highlight the new threat. Probably seventeen or eighteen—Mack wasn’t really concerned with counting—Tong Elves, each armed with a chubby billy club, formed a menacing semicircle.
“The walking human slime are ours,” the elf leader snarled. “So step aside in the name of the Pale Queen, you sock puppets stuffed with pig filth!”
One of the guards evidently understood this well enough. He translated for his comrades. Suddenly the guards—who had been pretty determined to catch Mack and his friends—found a whole different motivation.
The guards wore green uniforms with white belts that went around their waists and over their right shoulders. They had brass buttons and red epaulets, and the only weapons they had were their flashlights. Mack was pretty sure he was going to witness an elf-on-guard massacre.
But then one of the guards shouted an order. Moving as one, the guards holstered their flashlights, laid their hats carefully aside on the cobblestones, and adopted martial arts stances.
“Kee-yah!”
The guards leaped!
The Tong Elves rushed!
It was kung fu fists versus Tong Elf clubs.
“Cool. They should totally make a game of this,” Stefan said. Then, “Owww. My chest kind of hurts.”
“The nine dragons in Beijing,” Jarrah shouted, to be heard over the sounds of kicks and grunts and kung fu punches. “It wasn’t the hotel. It was this wall!”
“Yeah,” Mack agreed. “But when this fight’s over, we won’t be either place.”
Jarrah stared with amazing concentration, totally ignoring the fight that raged behind her.
“The Magnificent Twelve,” she said.
“Not yet we’re not,” Mack said.
“In Vargran. ‘The Magnificent Twelve’ in Vargran! I remember seeing this at Uluru. It was one of the keys to deciphering the whole alphabet.” And then, she said it. Aloud. In Vargran.
“Eb Magga Ull-tway.”
And then! Nothing!
“That didn’t work,” Jarrah said, sounding a bit surprised. “You try it, Mack.”
So Mack said, “Eb Magga Ull-tway!”
The wall, all one hundred by ten feet of it, tilted back and then slid straight down into the ground with a slight grinding noise.
A wide, dark staircase led into the earth.
“Oh, fine, it works for you.” Jarrah pouted. “Go or no go?”
Mack hesitated. If he kept going and didn’t get Stefan to a doctor immediately, Stefan might bleed to death.
Stefan had become a friend. That realization came as a shock to Mack. In the space of just a few days, really, Stefan had gone from bully to protector. Mack had realized that part, the bodyguard thing. But until this moment he hadn’t really noticed that he actually liked Stefan.
Stefan had been hurt protecting Mack. That had to count for a lot.
But the fate of the world might rest on this decision. And the single word trap was definitely bouncing around inside his head like a Ping-Pong ball with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder.
Sure, Ping-Pong balls can have ADHD. Absolutely.
But this wasn’t the time for Mack to contemplate the problems of Ping-Pong balls. This was decision time.
Stefan was a friend. But he was a friend who would want Mack to save the world.
Mack tightened his supporting grip around Stefan. And he stepped across the threshold into an unimagined realm.
Chapter Ten
ABOUT NINETY YEARS AGO, MORE OR LESS . . .
After landing in America, Paddy Soon-to-be-Nine-Iron Trout had gone to the Toomany Society for some guidance and had learned that his best career option was crime.
The Toomany Society lady sent him to an address north of Wall Street, where all the best criminal organizations had offices. It was a place they called Five Points Hall.
Five Points Hall was a large, cavernous space built around a huge enclosed courtyard. In that courtyard were various booths, each with pamphlets and literature set out. Paddy walked wonderingly past the Wounded Chickens Gang booth with its promises of drinking, carousing, street fighting, and extortion; past the Black Hand booth, which focused more on exotic foods redolent of garlic and which offered a career in crime regardless of how fat you got; and the Kosher Nostra, where he stopped and spoke with their recruiter.
He learned that the Kosher Nostra engaged in every manner of crime except for the mixing of dairy products with beef.
“But afterward, we feel bad,” the Kosher Nostra recruiter said with a shrug.
“After you mix beef and dairy?”
“After we do crimes. These other schmendricks”—he gestured toward the Wounded Chickens and the Black Hand—“they do whatever, then they have a cannelloni or drink a bottle of whiskey. But us, we feel guilty.” He held out a plate of pastry. “Would you like a rugelach? Apricot. They’re to die for.”
Paddy decided this wasn’t quite the right criminal organization for him. Then he spotted the smallest of the booths. It was hardly a booth, in fact, just a card table manned by a sullen, furious-faced man in a too-large striped suit. The man was playing solitaire with a dirty, bent-up deck of cards. On the table was a half-finished bowl of something Paddy recognized: oatmeal.
“Aren’t you going to finish that?” Paddy asked boldly.
The furious-faced man looked up at him. Furiously. A sneer distorted his face, which was further distorted by what had to be a knife scar running from the corner of his left eye to his right jaw.
“No,” the man spat angrily. “It lacks any real appeal. Altogether a bland, unimaginative dish.”
“Try toasting some pecans,” Paddy said. “Toasted pecans, and instead of milk maybe a dollop of crème fraîche. Clover honey would sweeten it nicely.”
The man squinted at Paddy. “You’re not married, are you?”
“No.”
“Have a girlfriend?”
“No.”
“Good. Crime is a great life. But it’s not for a family man. It’s a lonely life, kid. A life of violence and money and flashy clothes and money and then some more violence.”
“I tried to kill my own twin brother.”
“Nice.” The furious-faced man nodded thoughtfully. “Just the kind of ruthless, amoral, psychopathic young fellow we’re looking for.” He put down his deck of cards and reached inside his jacket. He whipped out a business card.
The card had the single word Scarnose. And an address.
“You’re Scarnose?” Paddy asked.
The man looked a bit sheepish. “I wanted Scarface. But it was taken.” He looked Paddy up and down. “So, you want a life of crime. Do you have any objection to serving the murderous Mother of All Monsters,
who is plotting her distant return, at which time she will enslave the entire human race?”
“Meh,” Paddy said.
“Go to the address on the card.”
“I’ll do that,” Paddy said. “Say, what’s the name of this gang?”
Scarnose grinned (insofar as he was capable of grinning) and said, “You’ve just signed up with the Nafia, kid.”
The Nafia had a very rigid system of promotion. Young Paddy started out as an “eel.” An eel spent his days running errands and occasionally attending classes in criminal culture and technique.
(Incidentally, criminal-culture-and-technique school was quite strict. Fail one test, and you were put on horse-poop pickup detail. Fail a second test, and the teacher would hurl you out of a second-floor window. Fail a third test, and the teacher could remove one of your eyeballs and make you eat it. This was not exactly Montessori.)
Paddy enjoyed the life of an eel. But one day an older kid shoved him out of the way, and Paddy beat the boy severely with a fruitcake (a fresh fruitcake fortunately, or it would have been murder).
At which point Paddy was promoted to “miscreant.”
Miscreants still had to run errands and attend the occasional class, but they were also given real duties, mostly as lookouts.
Once while acting as a lookout, Paddy was approached by a suspicious police officer. Paddy shoved the police officer. At which point the cop delivered a beat-down with his billy club.
Naturally Paddy was promoted from miscreant to “malefactor.”
A malefactor did not run errands or attend classes but acted as a sort of freelance criminal, responsible for shoplifting, purse-cutting, and the snatching of men’s pocket watches. (Ninety years ago, remember? They weren’t stealing iPods.)
Paddy proved to be quite good at his work. He was a malefactor until the age of sixteen, when he was promoted to “thug.”
It was a proud moment because Paddy was the youngest person ever to be so honored.
Being a Nafia thug was a pretty good gig for Paddy. For the first time he was responsible for others. He employed one malefactor and three miscreants.
Oh, they were carefree days for Paddy. Some of the best days of his life.
Each morning he would get up in the afternoon, enjoy a bowl of oatmeal and several shots of whiskey, and then make the rounds of small shops and kiosks, extorting “protection” money.
Paddy had a certain charm that even his victims appreciated. One of them, Luigi MacMackenzie, testified in court that Paddy had never once threatened to kill him if he didn’t pay up. Instead, he always phrased his threats politely.
“Which would you prefer, Mr. MacMackenzie? That I beat you with a brick until you can’t talk without drooling? Or would you prefer to pay up?”
It was these small courtesies that his victims always appreciated.
Unfortunately Paddy was not as good at managing his subordinates. In fact, the reluctant conclusion of the Nafia bosses was that Paddy would never be a people person.
So his career took an unexpected turn. Rather than being promoted along the path from thug to marauder to pillager—a path that might eventually have led to a comfortable life as a crime boss—Paddy was guided onto a lonelier path.
This path led from thug to backstabber to assassin.
No one really liked assassins. One of their chief jobs was to take out fellow Nafia members who were too soft, or squealed to the cops, or asked too many questions, or looked funny.
Paddy acted like he didn’t care. “Hey, I never wanted a nice suburban home in New Jersey with a blond wife and two difficult kids. I don’t even like onion rings.”
No one knew what that last remark meant, but who was going to question him? Paddy had become a dangerous guy.
It was about this time that an event occurred that altered the course of Paddy’s life: the local boss of the Black Hand invited him to join him at his country club for a round of golf.
This gentleman was known as Six Toes Ricotta.
Their golf game changed Paddy’s life forever.
Chapter Eleven
Down into the dark they stumbled, tripping on steep steps. Stefan sagged in Mack’s and Jarrah’s arms and barely motored his feet forward.
Mack glanced back and saw the nine-dragon wall sliding back up with barely a sound. An astonished guard gaped down at him, shook his head like it was all a dream, and chopped at an elf.
Then, total darkness.
The air smelled of mold and dust and rotten eggs.
Mack shifted his grip on Stefan. He held up his phone, trying to see with the dim light. It didn’t really work; the space was too big. Which was bad, because right then Mack started thinking about his very least favorite story: “The Cask of Amontillado,” in which a guy gets walled up in a basement.
Mack whimpered.
Then, a voice!
“Is that the new iPhone, or the earlier model?”
A girl’s voice. And she seemed to actually expect an answer.
“I . . . I’m not sure,” Mack admitted.
A match flared. Mack had an impression of a heart-shaped face and almond eyes and black hair.
The match burned. It lit a torch. The torch was then carried to the wall, where another torch lit and then, like dominoes falling, the flame went flying from torch to torch off into the distance.
“Xiao Long,” the girl said. “You may call me Xiao.”
She was dressed in a tight-fitting, full-length, gold-embroidered turquoise silk dress.
“I’m Mack,” Mack said. “This is Jarrah. And Stefan. Who needs a doctor.”
“I can see that.”
“How can we get out of here and find a hospital?”
Xiao looked at him for what felt like a very long time. Then she said, “Ah.” As though she just got something. As though she didn’t like what she had just realized.
“Come with me,” Xiao said. “I will take you to my parents.”
“Is one of them a doctor?”
Xiao had already turned away to lead them. She hesitated. “They are both . . . well, they will be helpful. Or fatal.”
Mack was pretty sure he hadn’t heard that last word quite right. Because obviously, why would she be saying her parents could be fatal?
They walked down a long hallway. It was quite wide, as wide as the nine-dragon wall had been. It headed downhill at a steep angle. At the end of the hallway were three enormous elevators. They didn’t have doors; they were just platforms suspended on cables as thick as Stefan’s bicep.
There were no buttons to push. Once they were all aboard the platform, it dropped. Slowly at first. Then faster, faster, so fast that the shaft walls were a blur of stone and rock.
The elevator slowed, stopped, and Xiao led the way off the platform. Now they faced a set of massive steel doors decorated with what had to be real gold filigree. You could drive a moving van through those doors. And you could make a million wedding rings out of the swirling gold framing.
As Xiao approached, the doors swung silently inward onto bright light and lush color and a smell of flowers.
Mack, Stefan, and Jarrah reached the threshold and froze. They were standing at the top of a long descending ramp that extended for what had to be two football fields in length.
It led down to a cavern so vast that at first Mack could not believe it was underground. It was impossibly big. Big like the Grand Canyon. Big. Really big. In fact, you could have sawed a giant line around the Forbidden City and dropped the whole thing crashing down into this cavern and have room left over for a couple of major malls.
Mack, his jaw open, counted nine massive palaces, each done up in red and azure and gold and green. Each palace had acres and acres of grass lawn and cute, well-trimmed trees. A river meandered through it all, like a sparkling liquid road. Light-colored bricks bordered the river and occasionally spread out to form tree-shaded plazas.
There were no other roads or pathways. No cars. No bikes. No people, as far as M
ack could tell.
The sky—the roof of this ridiculously large cave—was painted blue, and decorated with what had to be millions of paintings of people and animals and mountains and dragons. Like the Sistine Chapel but so big the entire Sistine Chapel ceiling would have been one drawing.
From the very center of the blue ceiling hung a steel pot so huge that blue whales could have floated around inside. But the pot-in-the-sky did not contain water; it contained light. It shone through artful cutouts and reflected onto the ceiling. An artificial sun.
“Welcome to Long Xiang,” Xiao said.
Stefan opened his eyes and struggled to focus. “Huh,” he said, and slumped again.
“Crikey,” Jarrah said.
“Whoa,” Mack said.
Xiao stood aside so they could see better. Just then something that looked an awful lot like a very big snake began to emerge from one of the nine palaces. It was hard to judge size from this distance, but it looked about as big around as a redwood tree and as long as four or five city buses end to end.
It was brilliant yellow with scales that flashed in the light of the artificial sun.
It was not a snake. For one thing, it was far too big to be a snake. Plus it had four stubby lizard legs. Each leg ended in five claws.
Its head was almost horselike. But it had two horns that twisted back from its brow, horns that must have been as long as flagpoles. It had a mouth at once fierce and laughing, as if the creature found many things amusing, and then ate those amusing things.
It slithered and squirmed from the palace.
Then, without wings or jet engines or rockets, it slithered right up into the sky.
“That’s like . . . that’s like a . . . ,” Jarrah said. But she was baffled as to just what the creature might be.
“A giant flying snake?” Mack offered.
“Not a snake!” Xiao said a little angrily, like the idea was disgusting. “That is my father.”
“Your father?” Jarrah said with a disbelieving laugh.
“But he’s a—whatever,” Mack said. “And you’re . . .” Mack felt a warning prickling on the back of his neck. Mack was good at noticing things. He’d been distracted by the unreal sights before him. But still he’d heard a slight shushing, slithering sound coming from Xiao’s direction. And he’d noticed that her name, Xiao Long, had the same word—Long—as the name of this place, Long Xiang.