Dedication

For Katherine, Jake and Julia

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Before Chapter One

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Twenty-Six

Twenty-Seven

Twenty-Eight

Twenty-Nine

Thirty

Thirty-One

Thirty-Two

Thirty-Three

Other Magificent 12 Books by Michael Grant

Copyright

About the Publisher

rimluk – looking as grim as ever – said the following while appearing as an indistinct image in a shiny chrome object in a bathroom in Sydney, Australia:

“I cannot guide you much further, Mack of the Magnifica. You must learn the secrets of this world. Find the ancient ones… the great forgotten forces. Some will help you. Some… not so much. But above all: Learn the ways of Vargran! Assemble the Twelve!! Time is shooooort!!!”

Grimluk usually didn’t use that many exclamation points. Nor did he typically draw a word out that way by adding unnecessary vowels. He tended to be grim rather than excited. So Mack paid close attention. This involved leaning nearer to the shiny chrome object in question, which if you’ve ever been in a public restroom, you’ll know is not considered appropriate behaviour.

“How short?” Mack asked.

“Short. Very shooooort.”

“But I mean, like, days? Weeks?”

“Thirty-six days from today is the end of the three thousand years of the Pale Queen’s sentence of banishment. The spell that binds her – already weakened – will end. And she will be free.”

“Say what? You’re telling me I have thirty-six days to find all the Magnificent Twelve? It’s just two of us so far! We’re just the Magnificent Two!”

“Thirty-six days to assemble the Twelve and destroy the Pale Queen!”

“You didn’t think to mention this earlier?”

“I didn’t have my calendar handy.” Then Grimluk’s wrinkled, haggard, drawn, worn, not-exactly-cute-little-Justin-Bieber face frowned. He rolled his white eyes up as though trying to remember. “Wait,” he said. “It’s thirty-five, not thirty-six. I always get seven minus four wrong.”

“I’ve already lost a day?” Mack shrilled.

“Go to the nine dragons of Daidu,” Grimluk whispered.

To which Mack replied, “The what?”

“Don’t make me repeat myself,” Grimluk snapped. “This apparition thing isn’t easy. Each time I do it, I lose power. I weaken… I…”

And then he faded out. And Mack was left to stare at the chrome pipe with the same frustrated expression he got when the cable went out.

A man standing two urinals down shot him a worried look. “You all right, kid?”

“Yes, sir. Sometimes I talk to toilets. It… Well, they seem to like it.”

“Is that so?” The man thought about it for a minute. Then he said, “Hello, toilet.”

Mack was giving up on Grimluk and turning away when the ancient apparition came back into view. But now his voice was a whisper. An urgent, sketchy whisper: “… dragons may help… the Egge Rocks…”

“Daidu, nine dragons, egg rocks?” Mack repeated. “Egg Rocks? Is that a band?”

“Egge Rocks!” Grimluk whispered. “Teutoberg Forest. There… the eyes show!”

“Daidu, nine dragons, a band called Egg Rocks, toityberg… and an ice show?”

“Eyes!”

“Ice?”

Grimluk shook his head slowly, rolled his eyes up, and gasped, “Close enough…”

In a faint whisper, so quiet that Mack had to lean close – which looked extremely not-normal – Grimluk said, “Beware of…”

Mack listened intently and stared at the chrome for a while longer. He tried flushing a couple of times, banging on the handle on the theory that sometimes it helped to bang on things when they didn’t work.

But Grimluk was gone.

Again.

Which was very inconvenient because Mack had the impression that the last word Grimluk had said was “trap”. And that’s the kind of word you want to hear clearly enunciated.

“Grimluk has got to get himself a phone.”

It was irritating. Frustrating. Because Mack had quite a few questions.

He would have to answer those questions the hard way.

He clicked on his iPhone. Opened the browser. Opened the Google search window. And typed in Daidu.

or David MacAvoy – who all his friends called Mack – the flight to China went much better than the flight to Australia had.

The flight to Australia had ended when a beautiful shape-shifting evil princess named Ereskigal – who all her friends (she had no friends) called Risky – turned into a monster and yanked Mack out of a jet at thirty thousand feet and dropped him into the ocean.

On this flight, the one from Sydney to Shanghai, they’d had some turbulence, the first-class bathroom ran out of hand towels, and the meal they served was fish. But none of that was quite as awful as a five-mile fall through thin, freezing air into the shark-infested Pacific. Then they had transferred in Shanghai for a flight to Beijing.

Mack was accompanied by Jarrah Major, the second member of the Magnificent Twelve. And by his former bully and current bodyguard, Stefan Marr.

Stefan could pass for an adult because although he was in the same grade as twelve-year-old Mack, he was fifteen and had the muscular development of one of those guys who sell exercise equipment on cable TV.

In case anyone asked, they were telling people that Stefan was the “big brother” of Mack and Jarrah. How a dangerously handsome, muscle-bound blond thug had become the brother of a very average-sized, average-looking kid like Mack, let alone the brother of Jarrah, who had the skin tone of her Indigenous Australian mother, was anyone’s guess.

But people seldom questioned Stefan.

Certainly not more than once.

Anyway, the flight to China was relatively normal, although Mack spent the entire time gripping the arm-rest and whimpering. He had no fear of flying but he had a morbid fear of oceans and of sharks, and there’s a lot of ocean between Australia and China.

At one point Stefan smacked Mack on the head to get Mack to whimper more quietly. Mack didn’t really resent this much because if Stefan hadn’t done it, the rest of the passengers seated nearby would have. There’s just something about a sweating, trembling, teeth-gritting, seat-gripping, weeping, I-don’t-want-to-die-whining kid that gets on people’s nerves.

But now Mack, Jarrah, and Stefan were off the plane and at the Beijing airport waiting for their luggage to come down the conveyor belt. They were surrounded by passengers who’d been on the plane from Australia with them. Everyone was bleary and tired and leaning on luggage carts and checking their watches and trying to get more bars on their cell phones.

And standing well apart from Mack.

Mack was thumbing through the Chinese currency he’d gotten from an ATM upon landing.

“I don’t understand this money. I’m going to end up paying someone a hundred dollars for a soda,” Mack muttered.

And that’s when Stefan poked him. “Dude,” Stefan said. “Over there.”

A very old man, dressed almost entirely in green, was coming towards them. He was still a hundred yards away and did not move briskly. So Mack had plenty of time to say, “Paddy ‘Nine Iron’ Trout? Here?”

“Paddy Wacky,” Stefan growled. He smiled then and interlaced his fingers in order to crack his knuckles and stretch his arm muscles. Stefan knew that before you engaged in the strenuous activity of beating someone up, it’s best to stretch. It saves you getting cramps in your biceps.

“You know that old git?” Jarrah asked.

“He’s a Nafia hit man,” Mack said.

“What? Mafia, like Tony Soprano?”

“Not Mafia. Nafia,” Mack said.

“Ah,” Jarrah said, as though that clarified the situation for her. (It didn’t.)

Mack looked for his bag. There were plenty of bags going by slowly on the carousel, but none were his. Annoying, because if the bag were there, he’d have time to pick it up, place it on the luggage cart along with Jarrah’s backpack and Stefan’s bag, and leave at a leisurely pace.

Paddy “Nine Iron” Trout? Not a fast-moving guy.

But Mack knew about the sword in Nine Iron’s walking stick. So although Nine Iron was probably almost a hundred years old and therefore slow, slow, sloooow, you didn’t necessarily want to hang around and wait for him. If you stood still long enough, he would absolutely stab you.

“You want me to go beat him up?” Stefan asked, with the kind of hopeful expression you might see on the face of an eager puppy who thinks you have Pup-Peroni.

“Not unless he starts something,” Mack said. “How would you explain it to the cops? You can’t just beat up a hundred-year-old guy.”

Nine Iron made his way to the far side of the carousel. He stood there like any other person waiting for a bag. Except that as he stood there, he stared with sunken, bleary, borderline-crazy eyes at Mack.

Mack almost felt he should wave.

Apparently Nine Iron spotted the bag he was waiting for. It had a jaunty plaid pattern. Nine Iron leaned over and struggled to grab it. Except no, no, he wasn’t really trying to grab it. He was…

Mack heard the sound of a zipper.

Nine Iron smiled, revealing teeth like those of an unhealthy horse. He laughed, a creaky sound filled with malice.

“I warned you not to—” he said, but then held up a finger, indicating he needed a moment. He reached inside his green blazer and pulled out a clear plastic tube and mouthpiece.

Nine Iron sucked oxygen once, twice, three times.

“—defy me!” Nine Iron finished.

The plaid bag came around the carousel. Unzipped.

It popped open! The top was pushed back by a tiny, scabby hand that appeared to be missing a couple of fingers.

As Mack saw the contents of the suitcase, he squealed. So did Jarrah. So, actually, did Stefan. Not squeals of delight. More like squeals of “Eeew!”

“Ah-ha-ha!” Nine Iron cackled. “Arise, my Lepercons! Arise and—”

He paused to take several more deep breaths from his oxygen tank while everyone – Mack, Jarrah, Stefan, and the Lepercons – waited.

“—kill! Kill for the Pale Queen!”

The suitcase was full of what were definitely living things, but not like any living things Mack had ever seen before. They were about the size of fat house cats. They were more or less human shaped, but with legs too long for their bodies. They didn’t wear clothing, but their torsos were discreetly covered by black-on-white spotted fur.

They looked a little like dalmatian puppies. Except not cute. The Lepercons didn’t make you want to say “Aaaw”; they made you want to say “Aaah!” Largely because they had leprous, disfigured faces that reminded Mack of wadded-up gym socks with downturned doll mouths.

They appeared to have started life with the usual number of fingers and toes and noses, but the bare flesh visible beyond the fur was all eaten at, chewed up, and missing things that ought to be there.

“Did he say leprechauns?” Jarrah asked.

“Lepercons, you stupid—” Nine Iron squinted. He growled. “Who are you, anyway?”

“Jarrah Major,” she answered. “Pleased to… Well, maybe not.”

There looked to be about a dozen of the Lepercons packed into the suitcase like sardines. Diseased, unhealthy sardines.

They unpacked themselves very quickly.

And Nine Iron laughed again as he unzipped a second plaid suitcase.

Lepercons leaped from both suitcases.

They leaped, and paused there for a moment on the carousel to unzip an outer pocket on each suitcase. From which they extracted bundles of sharp implements like knitting needles, handed them around, and then, armed, they launched themselves at Mack, Jarrah and Stefan.

ack did the smart thing, the thing anyone would do when attacked by a dozen knitting-needle-wielding, diseased minipeople who looked like dalmatian puppies with mismatched fingers and deformed legs.

He yelled, “Yaa-ah-aaah!” And ran.

The Lepercons were quick. At least, the ones who still had both feet were. Some were chasing him on stumps. Or on one stump and one regular foot. Or on one whole leg and a partial leg.

These were slower.

Mack felt a needle jab the back of his left calf. It didn’t penetrate his jeans, but it hurt and he yelled, “Hey, cut it out!”

Because normally that works.

A second jab caught him in the right butt cheek.

Mack spotted a small woman hauling a large wheeled suitcase. He snatched the bag, yelled, “Sorry!” then executed a running pivot and flung the suitcase at the charging Lepercons.

Three of them went down like bowling pins and let out howls of outrage.

“Agara! Agara! Agara!” Which is probably the traditional Lepercon howl of outrage.

But the others leaped clear of the bag and were all over Mack in a heartbeat.

Knitting needles jabbed at jeans and T-shirt without much effect, but one caught him in the palm of his left hand, and that drew blood.

A particularly persistent Lepercon climbed on to Mack’s shoulders from behind. He felt the tip of the needle enter his ear. He jerked away, but the needle jabbed, jabbed, jabbed again.

“Hey! That hurts!”

Mack reached around, grabbed a handful of spotted fur, and yanked the creature up over his head. He held him by one leg and swung the little monster like a club, beating at the others.

Thumpf!

Mack nailed one of the Lepercons pretty well, but then the leg he was holding came off – just detached. He stared stupidly at it. There was no blood, no hanging arteries or gore.

In fact, the detached end of the leg looked like a piece of well-aged blue cheese. Possibly Stilton.

Although it may have been Gorgonzola.

Mack wanted to throw up. It wasn’t a good thing to see. Or smell. And if it was blue cheese… No. No, it couldn’t be! He hated blue cheese. Worse yet: he had a deep and awful terror of blue cheese.

“Jasnafar’s been legged!” one of the Lepercons screeched.

“Avenge Jasnafar!”

“Agara! Agara!” the now one-legged Jasnafar cried. He hopped on his remaining leg, oozing gooey blue cheeselike product from his stump, and stabbed busily at Mack’s foot.

“Get off me, get off me!” Mack cried. “Noooo, nooooo! Get it off me! Nooooo, it’s Roquefort!”

Jarrah and Stefan were both busy with their own Lepercon problems. Mack caught a flash of Jarrah tossing a Lepercon so hard it went spinning across the floor and smacked into a Chinese boy, who kicked it away with a reflexive soccer kick.

Stefan had one of the Lepercons in his teeth. He chomped down hard and spat out a Lepercon hand. Stefan also had a knitting needle either stuck into his head or his hair – hopefully his hair – and was too busy to run to Mack’s rescue.

“You fools!” Nine Iron cried. “Go for the boy! The boy!”

The old man had to sit down after that and inhale more oxygen from the tube. He sat on the carousel and was swept slowly away, wedged in between a large black garment bag and a grey duffel bag.

Mack punched one of the Lepercons. Right in the face.

Pumpf!

Blue cheese product shot from the creature’s nose, mouth and ears.

Mack felt a sharp pain. The knitting needle just sat there, sticking out of his neck. “Hey!” he yelled.

He snatched the needle out and stared at the single drop of his own blood.

Now Mack was mad as well as terrified. “OK, that’s enough!”

In one fluid movement he jammed the needle into the nearest Lepercon. It went easily all the way through. Goo squeezed out around the puncture.

Mack kicked, punched and generally flailed away like a panicky kid in the midst of a phobia meltdown – although it was all very Mortal Kombat in his head. But flailing didn’t help much, and now more of the Lepercons were heeding Nine Iron’s fading, wheezing shouts and leaving Jarrah and Stefan in order to come after Mack. They were all over him. The sheer weight of them made him stagger.

But worse was the morbid terror of the goo oozing from the Lepercons’ many wounds.

Mack suffered from twenty-one known phobias – unreasonable fears. We don’t have time to list them all, but they ran the gamut from fear of puppets to a fear of fear itself, which is called phobophobia.

The thing with phobias is that they aren’t reasonable fears, such as a fear of clowns or brussels sprouts or reality shows. Phobias are at a whole different level. The phobia panic builds and builds until pretty soon a person just loses it altogether.

And that’s what was happening to Mack. The grossness of the blue cheese goo – the unbelievable disgustingness of it, the football player’s armpit smell of it – was working on the scared little monkey brain buried deep down inside Mack’s otherwise pretty cool human brain.

Of course the phobia thing wouldn’t be a problem if he were dead. In minutes, if not seconds, one of the needles would hit an artery or an eyeball or go in through Mack’s ear. He realised then that this wasn’t just a fight: it was life and death.

There were words Mack could use, Vargran words, that could freeze time and let him escape. But it was hard to think of them when a dozen evil midgets were jabbing you with needles and when a sick fear was dumping all sorts of panic chemicals into your system.

Then it came to him! He knew the Vargran command. It was ret click-ur.

Not that hard to say, except that just as he was forming the words, a needle jabbed him in the gum. It wasn’t that hard a hit; it just scraped his gum. It didn’t knock out a tooth or anything, but the Lepercon wasn’t backing away. He had hold of Mack’s shirt with one hand and had hauled himself up on to Mack’s chest, and with his free hand he was trying to shove the knitting needle right down Mack’s throat.

Mack bit down hard on the needle. He held it tight with his going-to-need-braces-in-a-few-years teeth.

He tried to pull the Lepercon away, but the thing was swarming him. At least six of the things were on his body, hauling at him, grabbing handfuls of shirt and hair, using belt, nose and ears as climbing grips.

And smelling like a hobo’s sneakers.

The needle scraped against Mack’s teeth. If he opened his mouth to say the spell, he would die.

“Esk-ma belast!”

But it wasn’t Mack who said this; it was Jarrah.

She was a mess, hair all askew, and somewhat covered in Lepercon goo. She looked scared, wild and furious.

Stefan stomped a heel on to one of the Lepercons, which popped like a noxious water balloon. He yanked the needle out of his hair, laughed happily – this was Stefan’s idea of a party – and ran (finally!) to help Mack.

But Mack didn’t need as much help any more. The Lepercon on his shoulder fell heavily to the ground. The one on his chest – the one trying to jab a knitting needle down his throat – was changing. The small, wrinkled ShamWow face was becoming smoother, bigger, fuller. The wrinkles were filling in. Plumping.

Mack felt the weight of the creature grow. He felt his shirt stretch further and further until the Lepercon lost his grip and slid, moaning (“Agara… agara…”), to the floor.

Mack glanced wildly around. All the Lepercons were growing. Larger. Heavier. They were no longer the size of fat cats; they were the size of moderately full garbage bags. And still growing.

They were not moving much.

The needles looked tiny now in their bratwurst-sized fingers.

Mack spat the needle out of his mouth and said, “Whoa.”

“Huh,” Stefan remarked. He seemed disappointed.

Jarrah, looking shell-shocked, came to them. The Lepercons were now the size of cows. Stunned bystanders stared in awe and horror. Some took pictures with their cell phones. YouTube would be getting some very odd uploads. Thumbs flew across touch screens: Twitter was getting the news out.

Other folks stolidly wheeled their luggage past as though the problem of rapidly enlarging, leprous, cheese-stuffed monsters was just another obstacle to be overcome by the weary travelling public.

“What did you do?” Mack asked Jarrah, panting.

“It was all I could think of. I don’t know that much Vargran,” Jarrah said. “I was trying to say ‘follow’. I was going to lead them away.”

“They would have killed you,” Mack said.

“Eh,” Jarrah said. “They might have tried.”

Mack intercepted an admiring look from Stefan. Jarrah was his kind of girl.

“I think what I actually said must have been ‘grow’, not ‘follow’, ‘Grow monster’.”

“‘Grow monster’?”

Jarrah looked sheepish. “Yeah, that could have gone badly, eh?”

The Lepercons were still getting bigger. In fact, they were crowding the baggage area. Lepercons weren’t built to be the size of parade balloons, so they were as helpless as slugs. Big, giant slugs.

“Agara!” the one-legged Lepercon slurred.

“Yeah? Agara you, you big fat scab!” Jarrah snapped.

Mack spotted his bag on the carousel. He snagged it and wedged it on to the luggage cart along with Jarrah’s and Stefan’s luggage.

Nine Iron was just coming around on the carousel, still wedged between a garment bag and a duffel.

“You wait right there!” Nine Iron raged. “I’m coming for—”

He paused. Fumbled for his plastic mouthpiece. Breathed. Breathed.

Breathed.

Breathed.

“—you!”

Mack was breathing as hard as Nine Iron. The fear of death was gone, but he was now surrounded by what had to be a thousand pounds of warm blue cheese or a blue cheeselike product.

Nine Iron was struggling to get up off the carousel, but he was sitting kind of far down, with his legs over the side, so he had to use his walking stick to get himself up. Unfortunately, since Nine Iron was moving, the floor was also moving, and he couldn’t get the stick… Well, you get the picture.

“Do you have any idea what Lepercons cost?” Nine Iron cried.

“Leave me alone, you crazy old man!” Mack yelled.

“I’ll follow you to—”

He breathed. Breathed.

And then the carousel ran Nine Iron straight into the engorging, growing, swelling, bloated butt cheek of a massive Lepercon.

So Mack didn’t hear where exactly Nine Iron was going to follow him. He just heard a sort of angry “Mmmphh mmmph!”

“Let’s get out of here,” Jarrah said. “Place smells.”

“Blueturophobia,” Mack said. “It’s a fear of blue cheese.”

“Are you going to have one of your crazy fits?” Stefan asked.

“Not if you knock me out, throw me in a taxi, and don’t wake me up until I’m standing in a shower,” Mack said.

Five seconds later Mack was draped over the luggage. Stefan wheeled him – blissfully unconscious – towards the exit.

ow we’ll explain all the stuff we didn’t explain earlier. It’s called “exposition”. Toss that word into the middle of your next English class. Your teacher will be like, “Wow, someone is actually paying attention!” That will be kind of sad, really.

David “Mack” MacAvoy was a normal-looking kid living a normal life in the almost normal city of Sedona, Arizona. He had no idea that he would be called upon to save the world from a terrible evil.

A terrible evil no one had actually heard of.

Everyone expects the world to eventually be destroyed by some combination of global warming, a giant asteroid strike, the sun going supernova, the planet falling off its axis, a wandering black hole, the explosion of the giant magma-filled zit below Yellowstone – Oh, you hadn’t heard about that? Well, it’s best not to think about it – or a rapidly spreading disease that turns people into flesh-eating zombies.

Asteroids, exploding sun, global warming, black hole, magma pimple, and zombie apocalypse – those are all happening for sure. Those are the things we know about.

But in the twenty-first century absolutely no one was worrying about the imminent release of the Pale Queen from the World Beneath, where she’d been imprisoned for three thousand years.

It’s always the thing you’re not worrying about that gets you. You’d think Mack would have realised that before most. After all, Mack suffered from a whole long list of phobias.

He had arachnophobia, fear of spiders. Dentophobia, fear of dentists. Pyrophobia, fear of fire (which was ironic considering he’d used a Vargran spell to turn into a sort of minisun while fighting Ereskigal at one point).

He had pupaphobia, fear of puppets; trypanophobia, fear of getting shots; thalassophobia, fear of oceans – which led fairly naturally to selachophobia, fear of sharks.

And as mentioned earlier, phobophobia, which is the fear of developing more fears.

The mother of all fears for Mack was claustrophobia, fear of small, enclosed spaces. Of being buried alive. Not that anyone would exactly enjoy that, but Mack could freak out just thinking about it.

But despite his close relationship with fear, Mack hadn’t known there was a Pale Queen about to be released from the World Beneath.

(By the way, if you know all this because you read the first book? You can skip this chapter and go to the next one. My feelings won’t be hurt.)

Mack’s part in that three-thousand-year-old story began when he was about to get the snot – excuse me, mucus – beaten out of him by Stefan Marr, King of All Bullies at Richard Gere Middle School. (Go, Fighting Pupfish!)

Just as the beating was scheduled to start, Grimluk appeared. Ghostlike. Special effects time. Booga booga.

Grimluk’s appearance froze time for a few seconds while he began to lay out the bad news for Mack. In effect, “Dude, you are one of a select group called the Magnificent Twelve. You need to drop out of school, assemble the rest of the Magnifica from the four corners of the Earth, learn this magic language called Vargran, and take down the Pale Queen when she emerges from her underground lair.”

Those weren’t Grimluk’s exact words. For one thing, Grimluk would never say “dude”.

Unfortunately Grimluk wasn’t able to sit down and have a nice long chat and explain everything since he could only appear briefly – usually in the reflective chrome surface of a bathroom fixture. So Mack had to operate on very limited information.

The golem that Mack discovered living in Mack’s room didn’t fill in too many details, either.

A golem, as you may know, is a sort of robot made of clay. The golem maker writes down an instruction and puts it in the golem’s mouth. Then the golem comes alive and does whatever the instruction says.

In the case of the golem in Mack’s bedroom, the message said, “Be Mack.” So the golem had done its best to look and sound like Mack. He might not be good enough to fool a really close observer, someone who really knew Mack well, but he fooled Mack’s parents.

Still, even with a golem, Mack didn’t go rushing off to save the world, not right away, because although Mack was open-minded about the whole ancient, smelly, Grimluk-manifestations thing, he wasn’t stupid. He needed more information before doing something reckless.

The “more information” came in the form of Paddy “Nine Iron” Trout trying to assassinate Mack by pushing a basketload of highly poisonous snakes into Mack’s house. And later, that same Nine Iron tried to run Mack through with a sword while Mack was taking a… um… utilising the wall-mounted facilities in the boys’ bathroom.

Having escaped the snakes and the sword, Mack was set upon by two Skirrit, who invaded the school and tried to kill him. Skirrit are one of the evil races that obey the Pale Queen. Think really large grass-hoppers walking erect. Grasshoppers or maybe praying mantises, possibly cicadas. Anyway, insectlike and as tall as a short man.

Clearly Richard Gere Middle School needed some new signage. They had a sign forbidding drugs, cigarettes, guns and alcohol. They had another sign forbidding bikes, skateboards, rollerblades and scooters. And a third sign forbade iPods, iPhones and anything else “i.” They even had a sign proclaiming the school a nuclear-free zone and a peanut-free zone.

Which was good in case terrorists ever came up with a nuclear peanut.

But there was no sign forbidding Nafia assassins or evil insectoid species in service to the Mother of All Monsters.

Being almost killed by snakes and then chased into a limousine by the Skirrit definitely helped convince Mack to save the world. Plus, in the limousine was an elegant young woman named Rose Everlast, who worked for a very respectable accounting firm. Rose handed Mack and Stefan passports under fake names, and a credit card tied to a million-dollar account.

So, that’s where we are. Everything explained.

Except for Princess Ereskigal, known in Greek mythology as Persephone and in Norse mythology as Hel. Not a real popular person, whatever name she used.

Fortunately Mack had used some words of Vargran and turned Risky into burned toast. She was gone. Dead. Vapour. No longer a worry. A ghost. History.

Are you buying that? No?

You’re wise to be suspicious. Because Princess Ereskigal is very, very hard to kill.

ABOUT A HUNDRED YEARS AGO, GIVE OR TAKE…

ou might think that Patrick Trout, the feared Nafia assassin – who would come to be called Paddy and, still later, Nine Iron – would be a product of a bad upbringing.

But no. He was just a rotten kid.

Patrick Joseph Trout was born eighteen seconds after his identical twin, Liam Sean Trout. The birth took place in the back of an oat wagon on the dirt road between the small village of Loathbog and the town of Trollbog.

Within seconds of his birth, Paddy was trying to bite through his twin brother’s umbilical cord. Of course Paddy had no teeth – any more than any newborn would – so all he could do was attempt to gum his brother to death, gnawing and crying in a thin newborn wail.

Gnaw gnaw gnaw, waaaah! Gnaw gnaw gnaw, waaaah!

He was a very bad baby.

Both Loathbog and Trollbog were in County Grind. County Grind was known for its beautiful vistas of shockingly green fields, bright pink pigs and pale amber whisky.

The reason the Trout family was on its way to Trollbog was to sell their load of oats. No one grew better oats than the Trouts, and Mother Trout was justly renowned for her many oat recipes: oats, oats with salt, oat cereal, oat bread, charred oats, grilled oats, fricasseed oats, barbecued oats, oat kabob, smoked oats, oat fondue, oat pie, oat loaf, oat terrine, Grimos (like Cheerios but not), oats stuffed with peat, oats à la turf, oats with three types of lichen, oats sous vide (she was an early pioneer in the technique), oats with pig feet, oats with pig snout, oats with a reduction of feet and snouts, oat-stuffed pig intestine, oat-stuffed pig stomach, oat-stuffed pig-organ-no-one-knows-the-name-of, oats with whisky, and of course, oatmeal.

Patrick and Liam were expected to grow up and take over the oat farm. Indeed, they were raised to care about little else. Once Patrick mentioned that some people enjoyed wheat, and his father promptly smacked him with a loaf of oat bread.

Not stale oat bread, because that’ll kill you.

By the time he was nine, Patrick could identify all major types of oat blight: oat weevils, oat rust, oat worm, oat mold, false oat mold, and oat-eating falcons.

See, he was trying to be good. Trying not to be just evil. Really, he was.

But as hard as Patrick worked at the science of oats, Liam, as the firstborn, got all the attention from their father. This was because County Grind had a primogeniture law, which meant that the firstborn would inherit everything. The second son was a sort of spare part. A sort of unpaid employee. Only if Liam died would the farm go to Patrick.

But Liam was even healthier than Patrick. So no such luck.

Unless…

But murder was frowned on in Loathbog, especially murder of a brother. The punishment was to be drawn and quartered by four powerful horses. Now, since no one could afford horses in Loathbog, they used pigs. And since pigs weren’t really strong enough to pull a person apart, it wasn’t exactly a death sentence. But it was humiliating, and you could easily dislocate a shoulder.

Cars had just been invented, so there was some thought given to using cars for the drawing and quartering. But seriously, if you can’t afford a horse, you sure can’t afford a car. I mean, please. Cars in Loathbog? No. It was still pig-drawn wagons in Loathbog. After all, County Grind wasn’t exactly County Snoot.

County Snoot: everyone hated those guys.

One day when Patrick was about twelve, his father had a little talk with him. He sat him down on a bale of oats and said, “Um… wait, it will come to me…Patrick! Yes, I knew I’d remember your name.”

“My friends call me Paddy,” he answered tersely.

“You have friends? Ah-ha-ha-ha, that’s a good one.” Mr Trout slapped his knee. Patrick’s knee. “Sure an’ ye have the gift o’ blarney, that ye do, that ye do, laddie buck.”

I could kill you with a pitchfork, old man is what Patrick did not say, but what he thought.

“Well, I’ll get right to it, um…”

“Paddy.”

“Whatever. As you know, your brother, Liam, is to inherit the farm when your sainted mother ’n’ me shuffle off this mortal coil. Now, normally you could stay on and work for Liam.”

Patrick produced a sort of low growl mixed with a serpentine hiss.

“But Liam doesn’t much like the notion of you hanging around and trying to kill him.”

“Me?” Paddy said innocently. “Try to kill him? Me? That’s crazy! I’m innocent! Oh, the pain of false accusation!” Then he leaned in close to his father and snarled, “So who told you?”

“The point is, son, we can’t have you trying to murder your brother all the time. We’re sending you to America.”

“America?”

“For the last nine years your mother has saved all her prize money from the County Grind Fair oat-cooking competitions, and we’ve now got the money to send you abroad.”

“Wait. She’s been saving up to get rid of me since I was three years old?”

“No, no, no, laddie. That’s just the first time she won any prize money. Lord love ye, we’ve been trying to get the cost of the ticket set aside since you were four months old and reached for your first meat cleaver. And especially since our farmhand Tommy O’Doul disappeared. By the way, you don’t happen to know where Tommy is, do you, laddie?”

“I categorically deny all accusations, and I refuse to answer any questions on the grounds that it may incriminate me,” Paddy said.

“Ah, you’ll do just fine in America.”

Which is how Patrick “Paddy” Trout came to leave Loathbog and County Grind and took ship for the land of opportunity.

ack in Beijing, Stefan and Jarrah took a cab to the brand-new Nine Dragons Hotel.

It was a stunning hotel. Beautiful. Expensive. Swank. All those things. Mack woke up in the elevator, moaning and whining about blue cheese, so as soon as they got to their room, Stefan dragged him to the bathroom, turned the shower on, and tossed him in.

Mack showered using several cleaning agents: hand soap, bath soap, tangerine body wash and shampoo. Then he started it all over again. And finally he felt clean of the awful blue-cheesy-guts stuff.

He emerged scrubbed and pink, swathed in a plush bathrobe, and far less likely to whine.

Jarrah had snagged a candy bar from the minifridge and was standing beside Stefan, who was looking out one of the floor-to-ceiling windows.

“You know, you boys didn’t mention there was a crazy old loon trying to kill you,” Jarrah accused.

“I didn’t think he’d come after us,” Mack said. He flopped back on to the bed, which was amazingly soft. There were two beds in this room, and another bed in the adjoining room. “I thought Grimluk might have said something about a trap. It wasn’t clear. I thought I was imagining it. But I guess that was the trap.”

“The possibility of a trap is something you definitely want to mention,” Jarrah said. “Still and all, here we are, right as rain. No worries.”

Jarrah was a cheerful, optimistic sort of girl. Mack wished he could be like that. The cheerful, optimistic part, not the girl part.

Stefan was looking at the room service menu. “I can’t read this.”

Jarrah took the menu from him, flipped from the Chinese-language pages to the English-language pages, and handed it back.

“Huh,” Stefan said.

“That was weird, wasn’t it?” Jarrah said thoughtfully. “I mean, so I say these Vargran words, and stuff happens. I mean, that’s weird, right?”

Mack lifted his head. “Some people might think so. Like, sane people. They would think so.”

THIS BOOK IS ABOUT MACK, NOT ABOUT ME. I’M JUST HIS GOLEM. SO YOU DON’T HAVE TO READ THIS PART. UNLESS YOU WANT TO. DO YOU WANT TO? ARE YOU HOLDING THE BOOK SIDEWAYS SO YOU CAN READ IT? ARE PEOPLE STARING AT YOU BECAUSE YOU’RE READING A BOOK SIDEWAYS? DO YOU FEEL KIND OF SILLY? I FEEL SILLY A LOT. LIKE THE OTHER DAY WHEN IT RAINED AND MY FEET GOT WET AND STARTED DISSOLVING. I WAS RUNNING LATE, SO NO TIME TO STOP AND RE-MUD MYSELF. BY THE TIME I GOT CLASS, I WAS WALKING ON MY KNEES. I FELT SILLY. ALSO SHORT. THEN KIDS STARTED SCREAMING.

Jarrah took a thoughtful bite of her candy bar. “I mean, what’s weird is that I’d spoken Vargran before. While I was with my mom and she was working on the Uluru cave wall. We’d puzzle words out. But nothing ever happened before. Not like that. Not something supernatural.”

Stefan said, “It’s all Chinese food. Except the club sandwich.” He tossed the menu aside and turned on the TV.

“I think there’s some kind of match-up between the person and the things they can do with Vargran,” Mack said. “I don’t know. I tried Google, Bing, Wolfram|Alpha, all the search engines. There isn’t much about Vargran.”

“You think they’ll eventually shrink back? The Lepercons, I mean?”

Mack nodded at the TV, which was showing a news report. It was an exterior shot of the airport. There were police cars and ambulances with lights flashing.

A small army of workers pushed wheelbarrows full of goo that looked a bit like soft blue cheese. Firefighters had hooked up a hose and were spraying down some very disgruntled-looking people and their luggage.

The broadcast was in Mandarin – one of the two main Chinese languages – so no one understood the commentary. But Mack guessed it was something like, “Holy fajita, the airport baggage claim is full of giant creatures oozing stinky cheese. What the heck is going on?”

“This Vargran stuff is cool,” Stefan said. “I could buy a Snickers, right? And Jarrah, you could do your magico mumbo jabumbo and make it, like, huge.”

“And then we’d be smothered in creamy nougat,” Mack pointed out.

“Nah. Just eat your way out,” Stefan said. He made a face like he thought maybe Mack was being an idiot.

“I don’t know what we’re supposed to do,” Mack said. He got up and went to stand between Stefan and Jarrah at the window. They were on the twenty-first floor, high up. It was dusk; lights were just coming on all over the city.

“We have thirty-five days,” Mack said. “We have to find ten more kids. The exactly right ten more kids. We can’t just go to the nearest middle school. Then we have to, like… Well, I don’t exactly know. Grimluk said we had to find these ancient, unknown forces. And mostly, we had to learn Vargran.”

“Well, my mom is working on deciphering more of that,” Jarrah said. “Why did Grimluk send us here to China?”

“All Grimluk told me was, go to the nine dragons of Daidu. If I hadn’t Googled it, I wouldn’t even have known Daidu was the ancient name for Beijing. There was only one hotel named the Nine Dragons Hotel. So. Here we are.”

“We’re here to find the next one of our group, right?” Jarrah said. “So, it’s what, like, a billion people in China? No worries, we just start asking around.”

“Let’s go out and get some food,” Stefan said.

“We only have thirty-five days!” Mack cried.

“We still have to eat,” Jarrah said. “And we’re here, right? Let’s go out, see what’s what. Maybe the third member of the Magnificent Twelve is at the local McDonald’s.”

“It’s getting dark,” Mack said, but it was a weak objection because Stefan and Jarrah were already on their way.

The hotel was situated on a broad avenue. Traffic wasn’t heavy but it was dangerous. There were more bikes than buses, more buses than taxis, more taxis than private cars. But none of them seemed overly concerned with traffic lights.

The Magnificent Two plus Stefan had a map, given to them at the hotel. Marked on it was the night market, the Donghuamen.

Seriously. That’s the actual name.

The woman at the hotel had told them it was the place to go for food. They could see the bright glow of it from blocks away.

“It’s right next to the Forbidden City,” Mack said, turning the map in his hands.

“Forbidden,” Stefan said with a smirk. “Yeah, well, it’s not forbidden to me.”

Jarrah laughed. “Got that right, mate.”

(Author’s note: I forgot to mention that Mack had changed out of his bathrobe. So if you were picturing him still in a robe, no: regular clothes.)

Mack read the brief description on the map. “The Forbidden City is open to anyone nowadays. It’s this gigantic palace complex. Bunch of palaces and museums and stuff, with nine thousand nine hundred ninety-nine rooms. Back in the old days no man could enter. Instant death. Unless you were a eunuch.”

“What’s a eunuch?” Stefan asked.

Mack told him, and as a result Stefan headed into the Donghuamen Night Market walking a little strangely.

The market was about four dozen blazingly bright stalls topped by cheery red-striped awnings. The attendants all wore red caps and red aprons and screeched insistently at the passing crowd. It was very clean and well-organised, and smelled of fresh fish.

The food choices were rather unusual. First, most of the food was on sticks. Like shish kebab. Or corn dogs. Except that these were no corn dogs.

There were fried silkworm cocoons on a stick.

Fried grasshoppers on a stick.

Fried beetles on a stick.

Seriously, none of these are made up.

Fried sea horse on a stick.

Fried starfish on a stick.

Fried scorpion on a stick.

And fried snake wrapped around a stick.

The philosophy at Donghuamen seemed to be: Is it really gross? OK then, put it on a stick!

The crowd was predominantly Chinese, and mostly they weren’t eating the various stick-based foods. They were eating little buns stuffed with meat and vegetables, or pointing at pieces of fish and having it fried up in blistering-hot woks. Or chewing brightly coloured glazed fruit.

It was the American, British and Australian tourists eating the OMG-on-a-stick food.

“Huh. Those are, like, bugs,” Stefan said. “Bugs on a stick.”

“You’re not scared to try them, are you?” Mack taunted.

Stefan narrowed his eyes, shot a dirty look at Mack, but then noticed Jarrah smiling expectantly at him.

“I will if you will,” Jarrah said. She had a dazzling smile. At least Stefan looked dazzled by it.

“Yeah?”

Mack rolled his eyes. “You guys really don’t have to.”

“Starfish?” Jarrah suggested.

“Why, you scared to eat a fried snake?”

“Oh, I’ll eat a fried snake, mate,” Jarrah shot back. “The question is, are you man enough to eat a fried silkworm cocoon?”

It was a strange sort of courting ritual, Mack decided. Two crazy people sizing each other up.

“Scorpion,” Stefan said.

Jarrah high-fived him. “You’re on.”

They bought two orders of scorpion on a stick. Each stick had three small scorpions.

Stefan said, “OK, at the same—”

Jarrah didn’t wait. She chewed one of the scorpions, and Stefan had to rush to keep up.

“The two of you are mental,” Mack said as Jarrah and Stefan laughed and crunched away with scorpion tails sticking out of their mouths.

“Oh, come on, don’t be a wimp, Mack,” Jarrah teased. “At least try a fried grasshopper. They don’t look so bad.”

Mack made a face and looked dubiously at the plastic tray loaded with fried grasshoppers. “Yeah, I don’t think so. They look a little bit too much like those…”

The words died in his mouth. What the grasshoppers looked like were Skirrit.

One of which, wearing a tan trench coat and a narrow-brimmed fedora that didn’t exactly hide his giant bug head, had just stepped up beside Mack.

kirrrrrriiiiiittt!” Mack yelled.

He jerked away from the food, away from the Skirrit in the trench coat. But another was right behind him and wrapped its insect stick arms around him. The first pulled a bladed weapon like a short, curved sword from beneath its coat and pointed it at Mack’s chest.

A ripple went through the crowd of tourists as more and more realised that a couple of very big grasshoppers – grasshoppers not unlike the ones some of them were eating – were kidnapping a kid.

People ran. The vendors and cooks working the food stands ran. It took about four seconds for everyone to go from normal to complete panic, and then it was screaming and running and knocking over hot woks, and awning poles broken and ice bins spilled all over the sidewalk, and everywhere food: food flying and food dropping and food slithering because it was still alive.

A giant glass aquarium full of octopi shattered, and hundreds of confused octopi attached their suckers to legs and sandalled feet and bicycle tyres.

That last part was actually kind of funny. If you ever get the chance, attach an octopus to a bicycle tyre and ride around. You’ll see.

Then the first flames appeared as hot wok met spilled oil.

“Back off, bugs!” Stefan roared.

He threw himself, fists pummelling, at the Skirrit that held Mack tight.

“He’s got a…” Mack had wanted to yell, He’s got a knife; but it wasn’t exactly a knife and Mack didn’t know quite what it was, so he ended up just yelling, “He’s got a” followed by an ellipsis.

But Stefan had seen the blade. With sheer, brute force he lifted the Skirrit and Mack together in one armload, spun around, and slammed the first Skirrit straight into the outthrust blade of the second.

“Ayahgaaah!” the stabbed Skirrit cried.

His grip on Mack loosened. And loosened still more when Jarrah snatched up one of the confused octopi and hurled it into the Skirrit’s face.

“Thanks,” Mack gasped.

But thanks were premature. There was still one Skirrit left.

He advanced on Mack with his nameless blade out and ready. “You die,” the Skirrit said. With blinding speed he switched the blade from one hand to the other and lunged. The blade hit – shunk! – a plastic tray held up as a shield by Stefan.

The blade went right through the plastic tray but stuck. Stefan twisted the tray, trying to yank the blade from the bug’s hand.

And… yeah, that didn’t work.

Instead the Skirrit pulled the blade free, took a step back to steady himself, stepped on the ice that had been spilled, did a comic little cartoon wobble, and landed on his face, hard.

Stefan was on him fast. He stomped on the bug’s blade and with his other foot crushed the exoskeletal arm.

“Ayahgaaaaaahh!” the Skirrit cried.

Apparently that is the Skirrit cry of pain.

Stefan picked up the blade, smiled, and began to admire the weapon. Jarrah looked on, admiring both Stefan and the blade.

There came the sound of sirens approaching. At least one of the food stands was burning. Its red-and-white-striped awning sent flames shooting high into the night sky.

The crowd had backed away to a distance and were each and every one fumbling with cell phones to take pictures and video.

“I don’t want to be a YouTube sensation twice in one day,” Mack said. “Let’s get out of here.”

They turned their backs on the chaotic, burning, but still somehow cheerful market, and plunged through the crowds that were now rushing to see what all the yelling was about.

They practically stumbled into a mass of people on bicycles.

Short people on bicycles.

So short, especially in their stumpy legs, that they’d each strapped wooden blocks to their feet so they could reach the pedals.

Mack was just noticing this odd fact when he was smacked on the side of the head by a club shaped a bit like a bowling pin.

Tong Elves, he thought dreamily as his legs turned to jelly and he circled the drain of consciousness.

That’s right: circled the drain of consciousness. You have a problem with that?

Mack barely avoided being completely flushed out of consciousness. He sank to his knees, and Jarrah hauled him back up.

The mob of Tong Elves on bikes shot past, braked, turned clumsily back, and came in a rush for a second pass.

“You got a magic spell for this?” Stefan asked.

“I miss Toaster Strudel,” Mack said.

Stefan and Jarrah correctly interpreted this remark as evidence that the blow to Mack’s head might have scattered his wits a bit.

“Run!” Stefan said to Jarrah.

“Got that right!” Jarrah agreed.

They each grabbed one of Mack’s arms and took off, half guiding, half dragging Mack, who was explaining why strawberry Toaster Strudel was the best, but sometimes he liked the apple.

“I had a s’mores flavour Toaster Strudel once but…” Mack announced before losing his train of thought.

The Tong Elves were just a few feet away. But they were awkward on their bikes. Stefan led Mack and Jarrah straight across their path, rushed into traffic, and dodged across the street through buses and taxis.

The Tong Elves veered to follow.

Wham! A bus reduced their number by two. The unlucky pair went flying through the air and landed in front of a taxi, which hit them again – wham! – and flipped them bike-over-heels into a light pole.

“I like foosball,” Mack said. “But I’m not good at it.”

“This way! We can’t outrun them on foot!” Stefan yelled, and he and Jarrah dragged Mack bouncing and scuffling down the sidewalk and into a rack of parked bicycles. The bikes were locked, but Stefan still had the Skirrit blade.

Thwack! Thwack! Thwack!

And there were three unlocked bikes.

“Can you ride a bike?” Jarrah asked Mack.

Mack drew himself up with offended dignity and said, “I could be a Jonas brother.”

“I think that’s a no,” Jarrah said.

Stefan lifted Mack up and settled him on the handle-bars of a bike. With fluid strength Stefan swung a leg over, mounted the bike, held a drifting, ranting Mack in place with one hand, grabbed the handlebar with the other, and stomped on the pedal.

Down the street, past the now partly flame-engulfed market they rode, with a mob of Tong Elves on bikes behind them.

But then, just ahead, a pedicab.

Small digression: a pedicab is defined on wordia.com as “noun, a pedal-operated tricycle, available for hire, with an attached seat for one or two passengers.”

This particular pedicab had a wiry guy pedalling. And on the back it had a sort of cabin, bright turquoise with a red fringe and gold tassels.

The pedicab was speeding right towards Mack and Stefan. As fast as the guy could pedal.

And leaning out of the side of the cabin, with the naked blade of his cane-sword pointed forward like a knight with a jousting lance, was Paddy “Nine Iron” Trout.

ABOUT NINETY YEARS AGO, GIVE OR TAKE…

o long, son!” Paddy’s parents shouted as they waved to him from the quay. “We’ll…” They paused and looked at each other, each hoping the other would say, “We’ll miss you.”

But in the end neither could quite pull it off. So they just repeated, “So long!”

Paddy shipped out for America aboard HMS DiCaprio, a luxury transatlantic ship. At least it was luxury if you were in first class. But the DiCaprio had seven different classes of accommodation.

In first class you lived like a king. A giant stateroom, a butler, a maid, two bathrooms, crystal chandeliers, gold doorknobs, lovely soft feather beds. The toilet paper was linen, and the linens were silk. In the bathroom there were three knobs: hot, cold and soup. The food served was so fresh you could actually meet the chickens who laid your eggs and the pigs who would become your bacon.

But none of that mattered because Paddy was not in first class.

In second class you were still doing pretty well, with a nice little stateroom. There was no soup nozzle in the room, and the toilet paper was just paper, but it was soft (two-ply). And second-class passengers were served pleasant and healthy meals in the cheerful second-class dining room. You didn’t get to actually chat with your pig or lamb or chicken or cow, but you could wave to them.

But Paddy was not in second class.

Third class was a little more rough-and-ready. You had to make your own bed, for one thing. And meals were all self-serve at the oat ’n’ swine buffet.

SO, MAYBE I SHOULD EXPLAIN BECAUSE YOU MAY NOT KNOW VERY MUCH ABOUT GOLEMS. FIRST OF ALL, IT’S GOLEM, LIKE GO AND THEN LEM. NOT GOLLUM. I AM NOT GOLLUM. I DON’T WANTS IT, PRECIOUS. A GOLLUM IS 90 PER CENT HOBBIT AND 10 PER CENT EVIL. A GOLEM IS 90 PER CENT MUD, AND ANOTHER 7 PER CENT TWIGS, PINECONES, DEAD BEETLES, AND LINT. THE LAST 3 PER CENT IS FAITHFULNESS. WE ARE VERY FAITHFUL. I WILL ALWAYS FAITHFULLY TRY TO TAKE MACK’S PLACE WHILE HE’S AWAY. EVEN THOUGH IT MEANS I HAVE DETENTION BECAUSE OF THE WHOLE DISSOLVED-FEET SITUATION AND THE SCREAMING AND ALL.

Nope, not third class, either.

Fourth class was where most impoverished immigrants travelled. They cooked their own meals over open fires in massively overcrowded holds down in the sweaty bowels of the ship, where they dreamed of spotting the Statue of Liberty.

Paddy was not in fourth class.

Fifth-class passengers weren’t even given a place to spread out a blanket. Mostly they climbed into laundry bags and hung those bags from hooks. Thus they rocked back and forth all night, banging up against the steel bulkheads with each passing wave. They were kept awake by the mystery of how they could hang up a bag they were actually in. Their meals were served at the same time as the livestock kept for the first-class passengers’ dinners. In fact, it was the same food.

Fifth class didn’t dream of spotting the Statue of Liberty because if they ever appeared on the open deck, they’d get a beat-down from beefy ship’s stewards. The only time they were allowed on deck was for gladiatorial games in which they were pitted against each other in pepper mill battles while first-class passengers bet on the outcome.

Fifth class? Tough place. Unpleasant place.

But Paddy was not in fifth class. He’d have loved to be fifth class.

Sixth class meant you slept in the fifth-class bathrooms, or heads as they say on boats. You could sit on one of the toilets until someone needed to use it. This wasn’t a great way to spend ten days, which was how long it took the HMS DiCaprio to get across the ocean to New York.

But Paddy wasn’t in sixth class.

Paddy was in seventh class. And seventh class was a very bad class aboard the DiCaprio. Seventh-class passengers were allowed aboard the ship, but once aboard they were hunted by the packs of wild dogs that lived down in the bilges.

The wild dogs were the offspring of escaped pets. You see, sometimes first-class passengers travelled with poodles or Chihuahuas or Pekingese. Over the years some of these animals had escaped their kennels and had bred and multiplied in the bowels of the great ship.

Imagine, if you will, poodles bred with Chihuahuas and then hardened and made savage by the dog pack life in the dank, dark holds far, far from light.

Nobody would want to go up against that kind of horror.

The bilges of a ship are the lowest level. Down below the engines. Not even the basement of the ship, more like if the ship had a basement but someone dug out a pit below that.

Anyway, the bilges were where all the water that seeped into the ship collected. Rainwater, sea spray, mop water, overflowing toilet water, spilled coffee water, seasickness results, you name it. It was about up to Paddy’s thighs. It smelled like a toilet.

For food, the seventh-class passengers had to trap and kill one of the many alligators that slithered through the dank, cold, oily, poo-smelling water.

So basically it was bad. Very bad. As bad as it gets.

But Paddy was a tough kid. On his first night in the bilges he earned the respect of the wild dog pack by biting the pack’s leader on the ear and gnawing away for so long that forever after that dog was known as Rex “One Ear” Plantagenet.

On his second night Paddy killed and ate an alligator.

By the time he left the DiCaprio – seventh-class passengers didn’t walk down the gangplank; they were tossed into the water and left to swim ashore – he not only had a belly full of tasty alligator sushi, he had a nice pair of homemade alligator boots and a matching alligator vest.

Which was frankly disturbing to the first New Yorkers who saw him, what with Paddy having had no facilities for drying or even properly cleaning alligator skin. So his alligator boots had bits of alligator intestine trailing behind.

On the plus side, no one asked him for spare change.

Paddy went straight from the dock to the headquarters of the Toomany Society, which was housed in Toomany Hall. The Toomany Society offered help to newly arrived immigrants.

“What do you do for a living?” the woman at the desk asked.

“I used to grow oats.”

“That’ll be really useful here in New York. We have so many vast fields of oats.”

“Are you being sarcastic?” Paddy asked.

“Actually, no. I mean, this isn’t New York like it might be in the future, say, the far-off twenty-first century. This is New York in the early twentieth century. And believe it or not, we still have farms here. A hardworking oater can eke out a miserable existence working sixteen backbreaking hours a day, seven days a week in harsh conditions. You’ll marry a dance hall girl, spawn ill-mannered brats, grow old before your time, and die of some miserable disease, possibly consumption. But hey, it’s a living.”

“What are my other choices?” Paddy asked.

The woman shrugged. “You’re not fit for anything but oat farming or banking – and you don’t have the wardrobe for banking. And then, there’s always crime.”

“Tell me about this ‘crime’ of which you speak.”

“Well, hmm… I suppose you’d join a criminal gang, extort money from shopkeepers, rob banks, dress in flashy clothes, and mostly sit around all day drinking with other criminals in between acts of mayhem.”

Paddy pointed a jaunty finger at her and said, “Bingo.”

y favourite colour used to be purple!” Mack cried out as Stefan and Jarrah pedalled frantically.

The Tong Elves were just behind them.

Nine Iron Trout was just ahead, ready to impale them.

Clearly the Pale Queen’s minions weren’t waiting around for the thirty-five days to be up. They were looking for a quick kill.

Or in Nine Iron’s case, a slow kill.

Panicky vendors were trying desperately to save squids and snakes-on-a-stick from the threatening flames. All the commotion was lit by cheery neon lights shining off candy-striped awnings.

Stefan had powerful legs. But the weight of a not-exactly-steady Mack flailing all over the handlebars slowed him down a bit.

Mack didn’t snap entirely back to reality until he saw Nine Iron’s cane-sword within about eight feet of skewering him like a fried scorpion.

“Hey!” he yelled.

Stefan tried to veer right to pass the safe side of the pedicab, but quick-peddling Tong Elves cut him off.

“Left! Closer!” Mack shouted.

Maybe Stefan obeyed or maybe he just wobbled, but either way Mack’s left hand came just close enough to a tray of mixed skewers.

He snatched them up, transferred them to his right hand, and with Nine Iron’s deadly sword just two feet from his heart, flung the skewers like darts.

The sudden movement sent Stefan even further left, crashing through a grease fire and slip-sliding through a couple of dozen frantic lobsters who were no doubt hoping to reach the ocean. (Sorry: no.)

The sword missed by millimeters.

The skewers did not. In a flash of neon, Mack saw that a skewer of fried sea horses had stuck in Nine Iron’s gaunt cheek. And a skewer of fried silkworm cocoons had stuck in Nine Iron’s green bowler hat.

They flashed past the pedicab and gained speed. Jarrah was alongside, pedalling hard.

“Why am I riding on the handlebars?” Mack cried.

“Look out! Here they come!” Jarrah cried, jerking her chin back towards the Tong Elves. With a glance, Mack could see that the pedicab driver had spun his vehicle sharply, making a teetering two-wheel turn, and now raced after the fleeing bikes.

Ahead was a tall, red-lacquered double door studded with brass bolts as big as a baby’s head. Two uniformed guards were just closing a massive filigreed gate behind a departing cleaning crew.

Mack, Stefan and Jarrah shot through the gap, pursued by Chinese shouts of outrage. Which aren’t that different from American shouts of outrage because outrage is a universal language.

The guards slammed the gates closed behind them, locking out Nine Iron and the elves on bikes.

Unfortunately now the guards were yelling at Mack, Stefan and Jarrah, and blowing police whistles, so while things looked better than they had, they still didn’t look good.

“We have to hide!” Jarrah said.

They were in a vast square. Buildings all around formed the edges of a cobblestoned courtyard. The walls on all sides were reddish, although in the dim light it was hard to see very clearly.

Mack was trying to picture the map of the Forbidden City in his mind. He’d glanced at the map but he hadn’t exactly memorised the place. After all, it’s a huge complex full of numerous palaces – some big, some small, all fabulously decorated with dragons and filigree and Chinese characters.

And still, even now, Mack was thinking just a little bit about Toaster Strudel.

“Which way?” Stefan asked.

They were easily outpacing the guards, who were on foot. But Mack had no illusion that these were the only guards. In a few minutes the place would be swarming with guards and cops and, for all he knew, the entire Chinese army.

Things had loosened up a bit at the Forbidden City, but not so much that they’d let two Yanks and an Aussie ride bikes around the place at night.

“Just keep riding!” Mack yelled.

They were pedalling up a long ramp that led to one of the central palaces.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.