The Power (The Magnificent 12 4)

“Ah. And if she . . .”

“Yes, my love, she’ll probably eat you. In fact, there’s a pretty good chance that even if everything goes perfectly, she’ll eat you.”

This was news to Gil, who was not happy. “Shouldn’t you have warned me about this?”

Risky made a pouty face and stabbed an angry finger at the murals that lined the walls. Each of them showed the Pale Queen in one fabulous outfit or another eating various legendary and historical figures: Adam, Eve, Zoroaster, Dagan, Astarte, Noah, and various pharaohs. “It’s like you didn’t even pay attention to your own artwork!”

“I didn’t think it was literal. I thought it was more metaphorical. I thought eating people symbolized, I don’t know, the state of a corrupt society.”

“No, she eats people.”

“Some family you have,” Gil snapped.

“Oh, do not go there,” Risky said, waving a scolding finger in his face. “Do not dis my family.”

“Let’s not squabble,” Gil said. He tried out his most winning smile, but the truth was, he was feeling a little sick to his stomach. What if it was his own blood in the blood gutter? Would that be irony?31 He had a lot of plans for the future, and none of them involved being chewed on by a malevolent, demonic goddess.

“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

Valin’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.