The Stone War

by Madeleine E. Robins

  “Anyone hurt from our side?”

  “Bobby’s caught under a door, looks like they dropped it on him. He’s gonna be killed if someone doesn’t get him out of there fast. Tom Severin was bleeding, but he was fighting, too. I couldn’t tell how badly he was hurt. And someone was lying down, but still moving. I think it was one of ours.”

  “Well, that makes it easier than attacking in cold blood, doesn’t it?” Barbara murmured to him. She hefted the stick she was carrying, five feet long and almost two inches thick.

  “It does,” Tietjen said simply. “Go.”

  Then everything was a blur, things happening too fast for him to take in. They ran up the street and turned the corner, all of them screaming. The monsters, startled from their attack, turned to meet Tietjen’s people. Allis, the archer, stood at the corner long enough to take one of the monsters out with an arrow before she followed the rest of them. Tietjen found himself parrying a piece of telescoping metal—an old-fashioned car antenna—with the club Ketch had made him, before he swiped at his attacker with the machete he carried in his other hand.

  A spray of blood: the man wasn’t dead, but hurt badly enough to fall back, grasping with his one hand at the cut across his face. Before Tietjen could step in and finish him, another of Allis’s arrows cut him down. Tietjen barely had time to realize what was happening before another one, a stocky woman with stringy hair and madwoman’s eyes, came running at him. In each of her three hands she held a knife, and she swung her arms in circles, like a cartoon buzz saw. Tietjen raised his club to parry at least one or two of the blows, but did not need to: in her rush across the avenue the woman tripped and fell, caught by two of her own knives.

  He looked around. Someone had got Bobby Fratelone out from under the door that had pinned him, and he was methodically shooting at the enemy, his rifle steadied on his wounded arm. He watched as two women squared off against each other, golf club against chain; the tall, Asian woman with four eyes was one of Maia’s friends; she wore a blue shirt with OURS painted on the back in case of confusion—Barbara’s idea. Her opponent was an elderly woman with lizard’s skin and eyes; spit collected in the corners of her mouth, so that with each shake of her head she released a spray of saliva. The lizard-woman took a hit in one shoulder and kept coming. Then Tietjen got distracted by his own trouble. There were more of them rounding the corner at Forty-eighth, running northward to take up the fight. Outnumbered, Tietjen thought again. They were going to lose.

  He kept fighting, slashing with the machete, parrying with the club. The club was heavy; he wasn’t used to using muscles this way. He parried, left arm raised above his head to fend off one blow, but was too slow to avoid it completely. The baseball bat his enemy carried grazed the side of Tietjen’s head and he fell back, dizzy, with his ears ringing.

  For a moment that was all there was, the roaring in his ears and the pain, the hopeless sense that they were going to lose. Crap. My fault. When he could focus again he saw that everyone, human and monster alike, had stopped fighting to listen. At first he thought the sound was the sea-sounding roar of people, the noise he had heard months ago on his way back into New York. Then he realized that what he heard was a roaring, a real sound of animals coming closer, maddened by the smell of blood and the sweat of battle.

  The first lion turned the corner onto Park Avenue and stopped, looking from side to side, raising its head to smell the air. Its twin followed a moment later, trotting lightly. Both stopped when they saw the human battlefield and roared again.

  “Jesus Christ, Patience and Fortitude,” Barbara breathed, nearby.

  They were made of stone. Pink marble, and taller, standing up, than he was. Of course he had never seen them standing. They had been carved in 1911, Tietjen remembered; they had flanked the main branch of the Public Library for over a hundred years. Patience and Fortitude.

  One lion looked back over its shoulder and growled, rolling its head with a “come on” gesture. Three other lions, two of iron, one of stone, padded up behind. Then another behind them, of chipped and weathered brownstone, and behind it in the distance more lions loping toward them, pacing, waiting. Stone, iron, one of glass. It was so impossible Tietjen only believed it because everyone seemed to be seeing the same thing he was. They stared and gaped just as he had. Then the woman with the snake eyes called out, sweetly, “Here, kitty, kitty.”

  The lions turned toward her.

  “Here, pussies. Father sent you, didn’t he? Come and get ’em, kitties.” She waved an arm to include all of Tietjen’s people. “Come and get ’em.”

  Delicately, one of the great lions advanced, walking sinuously up the street. Tietjen could see the muscles ripple under the impossibly fluid granite covering. The woman kept up her crooning, but no one else seemed able to move, even when the cat began to run, eating up the space between it and the woman with a few long strides. Not until the lion was almost upon her did the snake-eyed woman realize that she was its prey. The lion brought her down with a swipe of one paw, smashing her into the pavement. Then it stood, raised its head, and roared again.

  Everyone began to run. There was no order; monster and human scattered toward the grilled plazas on either side of Park Avenue. The other cats ran forward to join in the hunt. Tietjen ran, fell, rolled, stood and ran again and darted into a nest of crumpled steel and aluminum grating. He watched a brownstone lion knock down one of the monsters, then stand on his chest, batting his head back and forth between its paws playfully. Looking up, he saw Barbara lying in the street, pinned by the dead weight of a monster woman. Tietjen watched, horrified, as one of the library lions walked leisurely over, raised its head to catch Barbara’s scent—then walked past her.

  Without thinking he ran from cover to help her up, then stopped as the lion saw him. Tietjen froze again, as it paced toward him. Standing before him, the lion was immense. He looked up at its perfectly curling stone mane, felt its hot, impossible breath on him, and knew he was about to die. Then the lion knelt before him.

  When it lay on its belly the thing’s eyes were on a level with Tietjen’s own. It looked at him calmly, the stone eyes speaking to something in him. An ironwork lion came up beside him, knelt too, and watched Tietjen silently. Then another. What the hell is this? A word came into his mind: trust. Was he to trust them, or they him?

  Finally he reached out a hand to stroke the mane of the great lion. It was cool and gritty to the touch, but moved as silkily as any fur he had ever felt. Tietjen raised his head to meet the great cat’s gaze. Trust.

  “They’re with us,” he said clearly. In the morning silence his voice carried and echoed against the buildings.

  The monsters began to run, dodging around cars and the median park strip that ran down the center of the avenue, trying to get past and away from the cats. The lions did not follow at once; not until their prey were half a block away did one, then the next, then the entire pride launch after them, covering the distance in powerful strides.

  “Jesus, they’re playing with them,” someone said, awed.

  Tietjen nodded, bent to help Barbara up.

  They only took a few minutes to patch up the wounded, assess the damage. Two dead, one badly wounded. Almost everyone had bruises, cuts. Bobby Fratelone’s left arm was broken, Barbara said, but Bobby refused any more help than a sling to brace it with. “I can still shoot,” he said. “You need me.” Tietjen did not argue. Their timetable was shot to hell, and Ketch and her group might be in position by now. If they hadn’t been ambushed too.

  “John,” Barbara said, low.

  He looked up. One of the library lions stood at the end of the street watching him with an air of expectation. A roar came, and another and another, not from the lion waiting there, but from all around them, hundreds of rough, terrifying calls of triumph. Every ornamental lion’s-head, sunk in stone, decorating a newel post, lying broken in the street, sounding the cry all at once. The noise built to a final, thunderous crash, then stopped. In the e
mpty silence Tietjen looked around him to gather his force together.

  “Something is on our side,” he said quietly. It is the city itself rising up to help us, he thought, but he did not tell them that. It was enough to know that whatever it was, it was on their side. “Let’s go,” he said aloud. He started south down the avenue. When he reached the lion it turned south and walked along flanking him on the right.

  According to the plan, his group was supposed to enter from Forty-second Street, but their escort would not have it. The lion resolutely guided Tietjen toward Vanderbilt Avenue, on the west side of the terminal. There, crouched by the door and guarded by the rest of the lions, were Ketch and her group: all of them, unhurt. Tietjen waved a hand in silent greeting; she rolled her eyes at the lions as if to ask What? How?

  He shook his head, mouthed, You okay?

  She nodded, made a thumbs-up, but looked sideways at the lions again.

  Tietjen made a hand sign of reassurance, then nodded toward the doors of the terminal: Ready? She nodded: Do it. Allan Hochman, behind her, nodded. Barbara, Bobby, and the others nodded one by one in final agreement.

  The door moved easily in his hand. They went through the vestibule, then through the door to the balcony.

  Inside the terminal, Tietjen blinked, trying to accustom his eyes to the shadows after sunlight. Gable was in one of those shadows. Downstairs on the main concourse the marble was banded with strips of bright sunlight that filtered in through the gated windows. The pile of rubble and dust that was the east end of the concourse was lit with a narrow blaze of sunlight from a hole in the ceiling of the terminal—Mack had told them that the Met Life building above the terminal was a gutted shell that channeled the sunlight into the terminal like an airshaft. Two of the stories-high cast-iron grates from the arched windows on the terminal’s south side had fallen, and plants were growing in the spaces, like a parody of a formal garden—or a parody of the gardens at the Store. There was some sunlight from the south and west windows, the dazzle of light on the rubble, and torches everywhere. Like something out of an old Dracula film, Tietjen thought. The light made the creamy marble of the terminal glow warmly.

  To Tietjen’s left the old commuter bar had been cordoned off with velvet ropes, and heavy red velvet drapes were hung from ropes and rods. The effect was like a lush Bedouin’s tent from an old movie. Gable clearly liked things theatrical.

  He had stood inside the inner doorway only a few seconds, taking it all in. Then something came swooping down at him from the center of the terminal. It was so far from human that Tietjen thought for a moment that it was a bird or something—not one of Gable’s monsters. But as it came it shrieked “Bastard! Bastard!” in a torn, painful baritone.

  “Jesus—” Someone behind pulled Tietjen down in time to avoid the harpy’s talons. He had been mesmerized by that voice, and the human eyes that had locked with his as the harpy swooped at him.

  “Don’t look at its eyes,” the man said over his shoulder. It was Allan Hochman crouched behind him.

  “Thanks,” Tietjen said.

  “A pleasure. Where do you want us,” Allan asked. “Up? Down?”

  Tietjen shook his head. “Some up, some down. Some of us have to go in there.” He jerked his head toward the tented bar. “That’s where Gable is.” No one asked him how he knew; no one asked questions like that anymore.

  “What about that thing?” someone asked, pointing at the harpy, which hovered over the tent, eyeing them. Tietjen did not have an answer until he looked across the concourse and saw something diving in through the hole in the ceiling. Maia’s shadow swept across the floor, breaking the bands of light and darkness as it passed through them. The harpy swept down to meet her, talons extended. Maia had something in one hand that glittered, a knife, maybe. She looked like something out of Blake—fierce and unforgivingly righteous.

  “Good luck, Mai—” he breathed. He couldn’t stay to watch; Maia was buying them time. “Let’s go.”

  Then a swarm of Gable’s people poured out of the tent and they were fighting hand to hand. There was no time to think or make plans or even to worry—everything was reactive, it was all about saving his own life, helping the people around him if he could. When he realized that the one he was fighting was one of the monsters he’d watched torture a woman, weeks ago near Mt. Sinai, Tietjen shrank back for a moment. Then the hook-handed monster moved in on him and Tietjen brought the club up and smashed across his jaw. The monster struck out. Tietjen dodged, not far enough, and his left arm went numb from the force of the monster’s blow. With his right he slashed up with the machete and its tip caught just behind the enemy’s chin. When the monster jerked backward Tietjen thought he would lose the machete; the creamy stone floor was slippery with blood. Then the monster crumpled. Tietjen loosed his machete and went on.

  There was fighting on the floor of the main concourse; Tietjen thought he saw Ketch turning and weaving, faking out her opponent. Tietjen looked away and kept moving. From the noise of fighting behind him and shadows dancing on the floor he knew that Maia was still in the air, still battling with the harpy. He pushed into the tent.

  Again the darkness, broken in wavering pinpoints by candles. The tent was broken up by carpets and curtains hung up to create little rooms, and there was the smell of dust and corruption everywhere, permeating the curtains. No one stopped him. When he looked around one hanging carpet he saw two women, almost naked, curled together like kittens, sleeping. One had no mouth, just blank flesh below her nose. The other had no hands or feet, just—not fins, but webbed bird’s feet. As she slept she whimpered. The other woman woke and stroked her hair softly. When she saw Tietjen she did not react.

  In the next cubicle he found bodies, five or six. The skin had been neatly flayed off in strips which hung drying on a rack nearby. On a table a set of kitchen knives, immaculately clean and shining, waited. In a handsome brass tripod plumes of incense burned, mingling smells of decaying flesh and sandalwood. Tietjen gagged.

  “Jesus,” he muttered.

  “You don’t like it?”

  Tietjen turned, startled sick. He had not heard anything behind him, and here was—with a shock he realized it was Gable. He towered a good foot over Tietjen, pale, almost emaciated, in a billowing red silk shirt that opened in the front to display his ribs. Lank, dark hair hung almost to his shoulders. Eyeless sockets glowed red as his shirt, and he was smiling, a narrow crescent below his narrow, patrician nose. His teeth, Tietjen noted in one of those weird dispassionate observations, were very bad: uneven and badly stained.

  “No,” Tietjen answered. “We don’t like what you do.”

  Gable shook his head. “But it’s not your city anymore, John. The old days are gone. We have the power now.” Gable stood in the doorway, talking as if he had all the time in the world. He spoke past Tietjen, his blind eyes focused on the pile of bodies. “It’s our city, to do with what we like. You pathetic bastards kept us down for long enough, but now it’s ours. The Maker gave it to us.”

  “No one gave it to you,” Tietjen said. “You have no right. We would have left you alone if you’d let us be—”

  The grin on Gable’s face widened. “You don’t get it, do you, stupid bastard. We don’t want to let you alone. We want to kill all of you sad pathetic little bastards. We want to make you hurt. We look the way the city looks now, and the city looks like us. The Maker gave it to us.”

  “Maker?” Tietjen looked past Gable, watching for sign of one of his people, or of the monsters. Nothing.

  “The One who made the city new. Our Father who took us when we were sad pathetic bastards like you and made us new. Powerful—”

  “Twisted and ugly, you monster. That’s not power; it’s your own sickness hanging out all over you.” Tietjen hefted the machete in his right hand. The feeling had come back in the left, but it hurt like hell, and he couldn’t count on that arm to save his life. Where the hell is everyone else? He took a small step to his left, toward t
he table with the knives.

  Gable moved also. “I’m going to kill you,” he said matter-of-factly. “Then I’ll kill your women. Or maybe I’ll let the young one live, John-bastard, so she can remember you each time I take another piece of skin—”

  He struck out with a staff Tietjen had thought was another tent pole. Tietjen dropped to avoid the blow, and his bad arm stung as he hit the floor. He rolled and reached up, grabbing the staff at the bottom and overbalancing Gable. The monster fell hard, flailing, almost on top of Tietjen. The two rolled over and over. It was like a schoolyard fight: the sort of punching, kicking, wild striking out of eight-year-olds. There was nothing planned or heroic about it. Finally Gable grabbed one of the hanging rugs and pulled it down, tangling Tietjen in it. By the time he was free, Gable was gone.

  Tietjen followed the monster’s retreat, winding through the curtained tent, looking for some sign of his own people, following the fluttering edge of a rug disturbed by Gable’s flight, a table knocked down, curtains torn aside. Then he saw light, outside of the tent. Gable was out on the terminal balcony again. When Tietjen emerged, Gable was standing near the marble railing, watching the fighting on the concourse. The vaulted ceilings echoed hoarse cries and the clang and clatter of metal against metal. There was fighting on the balcony, on the stairs, on the concourse; everywhere.

  “They’ll die,” the monster said. “All of them.” He smiled cruelly. “This whole fucking city is mine, John-bastard.”

  Something broke inside Tietjen.

  Rage rose up in a flood that filled him with red light, and he ran headlong at Gable, machete raised to cut him down. Still smiling, the eyeless man jumped up onto the railing, balancing there. The railing was a foot wide and gracefully rounded; a backbreaking drop to the concourse floor. Gable danced back and forth mockingly, beckoning Tietjen to join him. Tietjen followed, staying on the balcony, looking up at Gable, moving the machete in his hand in a crossing motion from left to right, trying to anticipate which way the monster would jump.