Two figures jumped out of the van. I recognized them immediately as the werewolf Phelan and the Malandanti called Nach. The two men snatched up the unconscious were-cat and threw him into the vehicle, pausing only long enough for the Malandanti to kick Hexe in the face as he struggled to his feet. The vision inside the scrying egg ended as Hexe staggered back toward the gallery.
I touched his bruised face. “Are you okay?”
“I’m banged up, but nothing’s broken,” he replied, giving my hand a gentle squeeze. “But if we don’t move fast, Marz is going to turn Lukas into a fur coat. And we’re going to need an army to get past his croggies.”
No sooner had Hexe said those words than I heard Mr. Manto’s prophecy inside my head, echoing as if the oracle were speaking to me from the bottom of a well.
“‘Rise shall a fire-born army forged of woman to the bestiarii free.’ ”
“Huh?” Vanessa, Adrian, and Hexe exchanged confused looks.
“It’s some thing I jus tremembered,” I explained. “Something Mr. Manto told me.”
“Aloysius read your fortune?” Hexe asked in surprise.
“Yes. At the time I didn’t understand. But now I think I do.” I turned and looked into the main gallery. The art patrons were watching us apprehensively, muttering among themselves, unsure if what was going on was part of the opening or not. “The statues—are they still enchanted?”
“Yes.” He nodded. “All they need is for you to command them.”
“We have our army, then.”
Thrusting my thumb and index finger into my mouth, I whistled as hard as I could. The chatter filling the gallery fell silent. Stepping forward, I threw out my chest and bellowed in my best
Full Metal Jacket
imitation.
“Atten-shun!”
The art critic from the
Village Voice
uttered a piercing scream as the Thinker stood up. This was followed by an alarmed yelp from the
New York Press
critic as the Lovers belonging to
The Kiss
unwrapped themselves from their embrace, and Ariadne abandoned her feline couch.
Everyone else started to scream as the Dying Gaul got to his feet, brandishing his sword and shield, and the Cyber-Panther, arching his metal-clad back, turned his head in my direction.
“Fall in!”
As the statues descended from their pedestals, the gallery visitors shrieked and began falling over one another in a desperate attempt to get out of the way. Hexe hurried forward, motioning for the panicked art fanciers to stay calm.
“There’s nothing to fear! These things mean you no harm!”
The Dying Gaul stepped forward and stood before me, bringing his sword to his chest in the time-honored salute of the gladiator. At that moment I could not have been prouder of him if he were my own son.
“
March!
” I yelled.
My army of animated statues moved forward, like ducklings following their mother, with the Dying Gaul leading the way. As the Cyber-Panther stalked past, Bartho reached out to stroke the figure’s steel hide, only to have the metal beast flash his glowing eyes at him and make a screeching noise that sounded like a band saw cutting through sheet metal. I saw Gretchen pressed up against the wall, looking as if she were about to piss her panties. I wanted to feel bad about that, but really didn’t have the time to bother.
“What the
hell
do you think you’re doing?” Derrick shouted as he pushed his way through the group of frightened gallery patrons.
“My friend’s in danger, Derrick,” I explained as I led my handiwork toward the exit, “I have to save him.”
“But what about the show?” he implored, grabbing my arm.
“I don’t have time to think about that now,” I said, shaking myself free.
“Well, you’d better think about it,” Derrick snarled, dropping all pretense of affability. “Because if you take those . . .
things
out of my gallery, I’ll see to it that you’ll never get another show in this city again!”
Derrick was literally trembling with rage, the veins on his forehead throbbing in time with his pulse. The last person I had seen that furious had been Hexe’s uncle. I glanced over my shoulder at my sculptures, waiting patiently for my next order, and then back at Derrick. I shook my head and shrugged.
“Then that’s how it’s going to be,” I said, my voice steadfast. “I’m not going to let my friend die just to save my career.”
As I started to move again, Derrick jumped in front of me, arms spread wide, in a desperate attempt to block my path. “No! I won’t let you do this!”
“Get out of my way, Derrick.”
“But I’ve already sold two of those pieces!”
Hexe sighed as he raised his right hand. “You heard the lady, mister.”
Derrick froze in midplea, his arms sticking straight out like those of a scarecrow. I motioned to Lover Number One, who clanked forward and dragged the petrified gallery owner out of the way, placing him alongside my equally frozen ex-boyfriend.
“You’ve killed him!” Gretchen wailed as she scurried forward to check on her boss.
“He’s perfectly fine,” Hexe assured her. “He’ll come out of it in a few minutes.”
“What about us?” Vanessa asked, gesturing to herself and Adrian. “Is there anything we can do to help?”
“No,” Hexe said. “I’m afraid not. If I were you, I’d get out of here before the PTU show up and arrest you as accomplices to illicit magic after the fact.”
“He’s right, Nessie,” Adrian said, grabbing his fiancée’s hand.
“Call us when it’s over!” Vanessa shouted over her shoulder as Adrian dragged her down the stairs and out the door. “Let me know you’re okay!”
“We will,” I promised. I turned back to look at my homemade army, and saw that half of the gallery attendees were trailing after us at a safe distance. Perhaps they thought all of this was some kind of elaborate experimental theater being performed for their benefit.
However, once we reached the street, the chorus of screams that greeted us as pedestrians found themselves confronted by a group of animated metal sculptures, erased whatever misconceptions the remaining gallery patrons might have had about being part of living theater. Some turned and fled, while others simply stood and stared at the chaos unfolding around them.
Everywhere I looked, people were calling 911 on their cell phones. There was the sound of squealing brakes as a taxi driver, startled by the sight of the Cyber-Panther leaping atop the roof of a nearby parked car, ran up onto the sidewalk, smashing the front window of yet another art gallery. I heard the sound of sirens in the distance headed our way.
“There’s no way we can get to Golgotham in time if we stay on the streets,” Hexe said matter-of-factly. “The cops are already on their way, and the Paranormal Threat Unit won’t be far behind. We have to go underground.”
“Take the subway?” I rolled my eyes at the thought. “The transit cops are gonna
love
us.”
“No,” Hexe said, shaking his head. “Not the subway.” He pointed to the manhole cover in the middle of the street.
“Why not?” I shrugged. “Looks like that’s where my career’s headed, anyway.” I turned and gestured to the Thinker. The sculpture walked over and, without hesitation, lifted the manhole cover as easily as I would a paper plate.
As I climbed down the ladder into the hidden underbelly of the city, I looked up to see Hexe, still topside, frantically texting on his BlackBerry.
“This isn’t the time to update your Facebook status!”
“I’m putting out the call for reinforcements before I lose my signal,” he explained.
“Hurry up—the cops are gonna be here any moment!”
Hexe pocketed his BlackBerry and clambered down the utility ladder to join me. I pointed at the Thinker, who climbed back up and dragged the cast-iron cover back into place.
“You know, I think I could get used to this five-star-general gig,” I said drily.
Hexe spoke a few words in Kymeran, and a ball of milky blue witchfire spontaneously combusted in the palm of his right hand, illuminating our immediate surroundings. He then tossed it up in the air, where it hovered over his head like St. Elmo’s fire. The flickering light made the faces of the sculptures gathered about us look truly alive.
“Do we even know where we’re headed?” I asked.
“I heard one of the bastards mention Ghastly’s. It’s this hole-in-the-wall on Duivel Street.”
The adrenaline was starting to ebb, and my heart sank as I realized that we were still miles away from Golgotham, and on the wrong side of town, to boot. “It’s going to take hours to get there—assuming we can get there at all,” I said mournfully.
“Don’t give up hope,” Hexe said, squeezing my hand. “I know a shortcut.”
Chapter 20
“Why aren’t we in the sewer?”I asked,looking around at the coils of fiber-optic cable, telephone lines, and public utility pipe work that surrounded us on all sides. “Not that I’m complaining, mind you.”
“The sewer system for the city is hundreds of feet belowground, past the subways,” Hexe explained. “The first thirty feet is mostly Con Ed, telephone lines, steam pipes . . . that kind of stuff. We have to move fast. NYPD might be hesitant about following us under the streets, but the PTU won’t have any such reservations since they have Kymerans and other paranormals working for them.” He took out his scrying egg and held it between his thumb and forefinger, just above his head. A dim, purplish light sparked within its depths, like a lamp seen through a heavy fog. “This way,” he said, ducking down a narrow off-branch from the central tunnel, the witchlight bobbing over his head like a luminous toy balloon.
I hesitated for a moment. I do not like cramped, closed-in spaces that are dark and might electrocute me, blow up, or contain rats—
especially
that last part. I glanced nervously over my shoulder at my self-made army, their LED eyes burning in the gloom like small lamps. I took a deep breath and hurried after Hexe, heartened by the sound of my creations clanking after me.
That’ll scare off the rats
, I tried to reassure myself.
“So what’s this shortcut of yours?” I asked, trying to push from my head the image of hundreds of filthy, disgusting rodents watching me with their beady little eyes.
“The Sub-Rosa Subway.”
“I’ve never heard of it.”
“That’s the whole point. Back in the 1870s, there was this inventor Alfred Beach, who designed a pneumatic subway system. ...”
“You mean like those tubes you use at the drive-up teller?”
“Exactly! Except in this case he planned on moving people back and forth, not bank deposits. Beach wanted to build a demonstration model, only a block long, running under Broadway from Warren Street to Murray Street, to show the public how a full-scale model would work. But when Tammany Hall turned down his permit, he decided to go ahead and build it in secret, anyway, using dwarf laborers from Golgotham. No one knew he was tunneling a hundred feet under the busiest street in the entire city until Beach Pneumatic Transit opened for business in 1870.
“However, he created a lot of enemies at City Hall with that stunt, and they made sure his subway went out of business. Eventually the line was sealed off and forgotten, at least by human society. The dwarvish community, on the other hand, saw the benefit in having a means of commuting underground, as most of them worked as sandhogs, digging water tunnels for the city hundreds of feet below street level. Once the project was abandoned, they moved in and took it over for themselves.”
“You mean there has been a secret dwarf-only subway running under this city for more than a hundred years? Are there even enough dwarves to make it worthwhile? I mean, I don’t remember seeing a single one the whole time I’ve been in Golgotham.”
“Are you kidding?” Hexe laughed. “Subterranean Manhattan is absolutely
riddled
with dwarf-warrens! They’re probably the largest minority community in the triboroughs! Just because you don’t see them topside doesn’t mean they’re not around. They’re like rabbits or badgers. The Sub-Rosa strings the various warrens together and allows them to commute to and from work, just like the Long Island Rail Road.”
“So how do we get on this secret subway?”
“We have to find a dwarf warren, first,” he explained. “I’m using the scrying egg as a form of radar. It should lead us to the nearest one.” He glanced over his shoulder at me, a quizzical look on his face. “So . . . when did Mr. Manto tell your fortune?”
“It was a while back—before your birthday party.”
“Why didn’t you mention it before now?”
“Well, to be honest, I thought it was just a bunch of gibberish,” I admitted. “He’s a sweet old dude and everything, but he was tripping his face off at the time. And by the next day, I’d pretty much forgotten what he told me. But when you said we’d need an army to save Lukas—it all came rushing back. ‘The fire-born army forged of woman’—the fire is my welding equipment, right? And I made these guys out of metal. That’s pretty obvious, or at least
now
it is.
“Before I built
The Dying Gaul
, I did a lot of research on the Roman Empire, especially the gladiatorial games. That’s where ‘and the
bestiarii
free’ comes in.
Bestiarii
is Latin for ‘beast fighters.’ They were a special type of gladiator who fought only wild animals. But it also referred to slaves who were thrown to the beasts. I’d forgotten all that, as well. But
now
I understand. Lukas is the beast fighter I’m supposed to set free. It’s funny, but it’s as if Mr. Manto’s words had been hiding inside my head, waiting for the right time to come out.”
“Did he say anything else?”
“Yeah, but I can’t really remember what. Except that the word ‘blood’ was involved.”
“
That’s
encouraging,” Hexe grunted.
“I don’t think it has anything to do with Lukas and Boss Marz, though, or I would be able to remember it,” I replied. “I guess I’ll just have to wait until the time is right, and then I’ll understand what it means.”