The Key (18 page)

“My half brother,” Sylvie hissed.

It was indeed Valin. He was smirking at them, nodding appreciatively, and when they stopped to stare up at him, he did an ironic slow clap.

“Very nice, Mack,” Valin said.

“Valin! Join us,” Mack said.

Jarrah and Rodrigo dragged the soggy Stefan up beside Mack.

“He's just one guy,” Jarrah said.

“He's one guy we can't hurt,” Mack said through gritted teeth. “Don't forget: we need him.”

“I don't think I would have thought of walking on water,” Valin called down. “That is very clever.”

“Valin, you have to join us,” Mack insisted, despite the ridiculousness of pleading up at him while standing on a river.

“Join you?” Valin spat. “Join the scion of a family that did terrible injustice to my ancestors? Never!”

“I don't even know what you're talking about,” Mack pleaded.

“If I were you, Sylvie,” Valin said, “I would join with me, instead. You're being a fool. You can never defeat the Pale Queen. Don't you know that even now, as her time approaches, her power grows? Don't you know that her power flows through me? Fools! You have Vargran, yes, but so do I. And I have the power of Her Majesty as well!”

“I will not join you, Valin,” Sylvie said stoutly. “And if you serve her, it will mean that someday you must kill me.”

That actually brought evidence of a twinge of conscience to Valin's face. He drew back just a little. But then he seemed to shake it off. “That is your choice, Sylvie
cherie
. And it will be your doom.”

Then he began to chant Vargran words. He raised his hands high, and the sky, the pure blue sky, began to fill with boiling dark clouds.

From those swirling, malevolent clouds a lightning bolt stabbed through the sudden eerie darkness. It struck the cathedral.

Mack looked instinctively at the beautiful old stonework, expecting to see damage.

Rows of gargoyles stared down with hideous malevolence. (Medieval church builders loved them some gargoyles.)

Then, the gargoyle that had taken the main blast of the lightning bolt … blinked.

If you read about the gargoyles of Notre-Dame, you may come across a story that they were mostly used to direct rainwater. This is nonsense, of course. Okay, not total nonsense because they were used to keep the rain that rushes down off the roof from draining down the side of the church and messing up the nice stonework.

But that doesn't explain why they look like demons. There are dozens of other ways to design a rainspout. They could have been just pipes. Or Hello Kitties. But no, they were carved to look like demons—bits of hungry lion and screeching eagle and sinister wolf and dragon.

Gargoyles were there to send a message to people—people who, in the Middle Ages, mostly couldn't read. The message was that the end of the world was nigh and they'd better show up for service on Sunday. Or else.

These particular gargoyles were very old, eroded stone figures, so they'd lost some of their fearsomeness. Unless of course you woke them up with a magic spell and a bolt of lightning, because then, well, then they got very real, very fast, and in very lifelike detail.

“That thing just eyeballed me,” Stefan said.

“Yep,” Mack agreed.

“Fly, my gargoyles, fly!” Valin cackled madly, arms upraised. “Destroy them. Destroy them all!”

Needless to say, he added a crazy laugh that went, “Ahhh-ha-ha-ha-haaaahhhh!”

The lightning-struck gargoyle grew detailed. Long years had worn away the scales, and roughened the edges of its wings, and dulled the sharpness of its talons. Now those emerged from the stone. They became whole and complete and terrifying.

This was no longer a stone sculpture to frighten children. It was a living, steam-breathing emissary of hell.

The gargoyle then emitted a cry. How to describe it? A cry full of furious frustration, sudden unexpected liberation, and a realization that all its centuries of imprisonment as a stone object, all its forced immobility and helplessness, were at an end.

The gargoyle opened its leathery wings, fixed its mad eyes on Mack, and swooped down from its roofline perch.

Others then moved. Others then stared with fixed hatred on the small band of kids standing (rather improbably) in the middle of the Seine.

Dozens?

No, more than dozens. Hundreds!

Some had only half a body—they had been sculpted that way. Some leered lasciviously while others glared furiously. Some had wings; some moved sinuously like snakes through the air. They seemed almost to swim down out of a sky boiling gray and black and riven by bolts of lightning.

“We don't want to go that way anyhow,” Mack yelled. “Back! Back!”

They turned and ran across the water. Now the current was their friend. Each step was like a step and a half. It was strangely like ice-skating somehow, but dragging Stefan through the water was slowing them down.

The first gargoyle raked Mack's hair with its talons. Blood dribbled down his face and he made a sort of frightened whinnying sound, like a horse that's just seen a rattlesnake.

They passed beneath the first small bridge, a temporary—very temporary—respite, then out the other side for a renewed onslaught.

But at the same time his mind was working furiously. He had Vargran. They all did. But the
enlightened puissance
was an easily exhausted resource: like the patience of a boy who finds himself in a Claire's store, or a girl who finds herself in a discussion of belching, or a reader forced to wade through an overly long simile.

The point is, the
enlightened puissance
is like a battery that runs down and then needs to be recharged. So Mack had to take that into account. He'd already used up a whole lot of
e.p
. walking on water. And they would need all their combined strength to pull off the dramatic stunt they were planning.

On the other hand, it was important not to die.

Beneath the next bridge and out, and beneath and out, and this time the gargoyles encircled them, swooping to cut them off so that they had to push and flail and bat at monsters to get out the other side.

“We must use the Vargran!” Rodrigo cried seconds before a gargoyle struck him in the back and knocked him forward. Rodrigo hit the water, but instead of landing on it as though it was solid, he plunged in, bellyflop-style. He bobbed up after a second, but in order to walk on the water, he needed first to be able to walk.

Sylvie, Charlie, and Xiao grabbed Rodrigo's arms and hauled him up, up until he could get one foot above the surface. Then he was able to stand. But pulling this off had made the knot of four kids a focus for the gargoyles. They swarmed in a fast-moving spiral, all gray talons and beaks, horns and wings.

“Stefan!” Mack yelled. “Swim for the bridge on your own. Dietmar and Jarrah with me!”

He led them in a body slam against the spinning gargoyles. But that so didn't work. Dietmar was knocked down into the water, just like Rodrigo had been. A gargoyle had talons in Jarrah's hair and was dragging her, pulling her away.

Blam!

Something hit the leonine creature that had Jarrah by the hair.

Blam! Blam!

Mack turned in amazement and saw that the current had carried them closer to the big bridge than he had realized. The bridge where the cops were waiting. It was police marksmen shooting at the gargoyles.

The bullets would only have chipped the stone of a regular gargoyle. But these were living creatures now, however bizarre and unnatural. The bullets struck home and brought forth cries of pain and outrage. Black blood boiled up through skin the color of cement.

“Run! Run!” Mack cried, and windmilled his arm to show the way. “We have to get past the bridge!”

The gargoyles had hesitated and allowed just enough time for the group to haul Dietmar onto dry water, where they were running flat-out now. Valin's voice still reached them, far-off but shrill and determined.

“Attack!” he cried. “Attack!”

The hesitant gargoyles had no choice but to obey.

Here is the scene so that you have it clear in your mind:

Seven kids running on gray-blue water as if it was some sort of soggy playing field.

One boy in the water, swimming with powerful strokes even as his friends caught up to him.

The famous Pont Neuf, a series of stone arches, beautifully proportioned, stark and white and built to look a bit like the wall of an old castle. And atop that bridge an array of flashing lights, blue uniforms, body armor, and pointed guns.

Police boats, a mismatched collection, some like simple cabin cruisers of the sort you'd see in any marina, others black-hulled and blunt-snouted like converted barges. And a few very small, fast boats with men in scuba suits.

Gargoyles, a dark cloud of them, diving on the racing Magnifica.

“
Tirez!
” the
inspecteur
cried, and a volley of shots rang out. Then the firing went on, ragged but continuous. The noise was unbelievable, but the effect was welcome. Gargoyles died in the air, turned to stone again, and plunged into the Seine like a rain of boulders.

Mack and the rest ran beneath the Pont Neuf, out the other side, past the straggling police boats that were now rushing to join the battle of flic vs. gargoyle.

The battered, bruised, wet, and terrified group clambered aboard a passing barge that was hauling a load of sand.

The owner-captain yelled and protested until Sylvie explained in weary French that these eight had escaped from the terror upstream, and that they were also running from
les flics
.

This engaged the man's sympathies and he hid them in his small, homey cabin until they were alongside the Eiffel Tower.

“Okay,” Mack said, exhausted. “Now we tell the world. And we make the world listen.”

“I
t's today,” Camaro Angianelli said, punching the golem in the shoulder. It was an affectionate punch. It would have affectionately given a huge affectionate bruise to anyone else, but Camaro had long since realized that the golem was pretty much impervious to bruising.

“Yes, it is today,” the golem replied. In fact it was always today. It was never yesterday or tomorrow, it was always today. The golem had noticed this.

“Will you be there?” Camaro asked.

This felt like it might be a bit of a trick question. The golem had never been anywhere but “here,” just as it was always “today.”

“Where?” the golem asked cautiously. They were in the hallway, standing next to the golem's locker. The locker contained his schoolbooks, several twigs, a plastic trash can full of moist mud—just in case he did end up taking a shower—and a sketch he had drawn of Grimluk and taped to the inside of the door. The sketch wasn't very good—it was recognizably Grimluk, but it lacked perspective.

“What is that?” Camaro demanded, noticing the portrait for the first time. “Is that your grandpa?”

“That is Grimluk, my creator,” Mack said.

Camaro frowned. “God? God's looking like he needs dental work. No offense. Anyway, you'll be there, right? You said you would.”

Well, there she had him. He must have said he would. Now he just had to remember what he'd said he would do. And where. Asking why would probably be greedy.

“Yes. I will be …” At this he hesitated. Because he had never been anywhere other than “here” and indeed didn't see how it was possible to be “there.”

“The usual place,” Camaro said helpfully.

“Ah.”

“Me and Tony Pooch. All you have to do is watch my back.”

“You have a flat back.”

“Are you insulting my back?”

“No. I like watching your back. I see it whenever you walk away.”

Camaro narrowed her eyes, suspicious that this was an obscure insult. “Just be there,” she said, and showed him her back as she walked away.

The golem checked his phone. Still nothing from Mack. It was worrying him, and worry was a very new emotion for him. He didn't know how much of it to do at a single stretch. Was it good to worry constantly? Or should he pick a time or place and worry really hard, then stop?

One of the things that worried him was that he had, in addition to his own phone, brought Risky's phone with him to school. It was in his pocket. He had intended to either leave it home or smash it with the dining room table, but he had found he couldn't quite bring himself to do either.

And now it was in his pocket. Waiting to ring.

“I don't know how to worry,” he said to the portrait of Grimluk. “You didn't teach me that.”

WWMD? What would Mack do?

Slowly he drew out both phones. The one that came from Risky. The one that led to Mack.