The Power (The Magnificent 12 4)

Something about the curly brown hair seemed familiar to Mack. He felt as if he’d seen it somewhere before.

Like . . . in the mirror.

“And that is your great-great-great-etc.-grandfather,” Valin said poisonously. “Sean Patrick O’Flanagan MacAvoy!”

Taras Bulba spotted the young Irish boy and smiled. He waved him over and gave an affectionate rub to his hair. This had the useful side effect of cleaning some of the leg-o’-lamb grease from Bulba’s hands.

“What’s he doing here?” Mack asked.

“They’re engaged,” Valin said. “Your great-great-great-etc.-grandfather is engaged to marry my great-great-great-etc.-grandmother. But in two days he’s going to dump her. She will be so humiliated that she runs away and joins a group of traveling troubadours, jugglers, and actors. This will infuriate Taras Bulba, who will disown Boguslawa. She will end up marrying not Sean Patrick, whose own descendants will be famous warriors and distillers, but a mere performer. And thus will sixteen generations of my family be raised not as descendants of the famous Taras Bulba, Cossack royalty, but rather as the descendants of a random Cossack girl and . . . Izmir. Izmir the Clown.”

“Wait,” Mack said. “That’s the reason you’re trying to kill me and doom the entire human race to subjugation by the Pale Queen? Because some ancestor of mine dumped some ancestor of yours?”

“You make it sound trivial,” Valin said. “Sixteen generations of humiliation all caused by your family! But I should be Cossack royalty! I could have been a prince!”

MEANWHILE, MUCH, MUCH FURTHER BACK IN TIME

The grand opening of the Babylon temple of the Pale Queen was finally at hand. It was a gala day. Which was fine because a gal a day was about all Gil Gamesh could handle, especially when the gal in question was, shall we say, difficult.

“Did you check everything?” Risky demanded. She strode nervously up and down the main aisle of the temple, wringing her hands. “How about the blood gutter? Did you check the slope of the blood gutter? It’s really important: too steep and the blood flows by so fast we can’t really enjoy it.”

“Yes, yes, for like the tenth time, Risky, I checked the blood gutter. I tested it out. It worked great.”

She spun on her heel, which made her red hair flare out and caused his heart to skip a beat as it always did. “Did you test it with blood or water? Because the viscosity is totally different.”

Risky had figured this out centuries before Isaac Newton even started thinking about it. She was evil, but she was not dumb.

Gil listened patiently to this odd fantasy of Risky’s—he thought she often pretended to know things that were patently untrue. Just the other day she had talked about going around the world. Like you could go around a square dinner plate perched on the rear end of Marduk’s donkey. I mean, as if.

But even as Gil tried to be patient, Risky’s haranguing tone was grinding his last nerve. It had not been easy getting this temple built. Even simple things like measuring a slab of stone could be very difficult—the invention of the tape measure was still thousands of years in the future. They would measure in “feet,” but each foot was slightly different, and after a man’s foot had been cut off, it would shrivel up and the toes would curl, so that a “foot” measured with a fresh foot would be different from one measured with a more stale foot.

And with the invention of basic math still far in the future as well, no one could add beyond ten. The temple ended up having to be ten tens of ten feet. Of course in modern times we’d know this was a thousand feet, but back in those days, that would have meant a thousand people hobbling along on just one foot. Or five hundred people crawling without both feet, but that’s getting into multiplication and division, and believe me, Gil and the Babylonians were not up for that yet.

Hardest of all was the massive statue of the Pale Queen that would dominate the altar. And that was Gil’s special, personal responsibility.

Gil had assembled the finest sculptors from all over Babylon and the nearby kingdoms of Ur of the Chaldees, Um of the Chaldees, Mill Valley, and Hork-Bajir. But since the Pale Queen would not sit for them, they had to operate on Risky’s description of her. Risky was not good with descriptions and offered only that her mother was a controlling witch who never let Risky have any fun. As a result, the statue, which stood two hundred hands high (don’t even ask), looked a bit like Pikachu (who also would not be invented for thousands of years) but with white hair and a gown made of the tears of children. But Gil thought he’d managed the whole thing pretty well. Probably. And anyway, the Pale Queen would surely be understanding.

Right? he asked himself nervously. Right?

Risky had not seen the final product. It was covered with a cloth—a very big cloth—and awaited the unveiling before the Pale Queen herself.

Now the great day was at last at hand. A thousand sacrificial animals had been stocked in the fenced enclosure outside. Pigs, cows, sheep, unicorns,30 baboons, auks, rocs, hipsters, hippos, and ducks all waited to be ritually slaughtered for the glory of the Pale Queen.

If that seems harsh, bear in mind that it had taken all of Gil’s influence to keep humans out of it, and the truth was, even then, there were a few unfortunates who’d wandered too close and been reclassified as “goats” in order to round out the numbers.

Gil gave Risky a hug. “Don’t worry, sweetheart, your mother will love it.”

“I hope so. Because if she doesn’t, she’ll eat you,” Risky said, giving him a little

peck on the cheek.

“Say what now?” Gil asked.

“And did you finish the story you’ll be reading to her?”

“The epic?” Gil sighed. “I only hope it lives up to its name. I’m afraid there are some plot holes.”

“Try to clean those up. Mother is a stickler for plots that make sense.”