City of Fire (City Trilogy (Mass Market))

by Yep, Laurence

  Leech was trying his best to keep at Primo’s heels as they moved straight like an arrow toward the Kushan exhibit.

  At his side, Koko nudged him. “I don’t know why I bother with you.”

  Leech twisted the iron band on his arm the way he always did when he was bothered. The only decoration on the plain surface were two disks. It had been in the same basket in which he had been found at the orphanage. It was the only clue to his past, and the boy had clung to it no matter what, even though he had been teased about wearing such odd jewelry.

  “I don’t know either,” Leech admitted. His first eight years at the orphanage had been pure misery. He had been a target of every bully because he was small for his age and also smarter than the other children. The experience had left him like a beaten puppy, insecure and yet eager to please.

  Seeing how uneasy his friend was, Koko relented. “You and me, we’re a team now, aren’t we? You’re the only one I ever trusted with my big secret.”

  Leech grinned slightly at the memory. “You were so afraid that I’d be shocked. But you know what, buddy? I felt honored. I never had anyone trust me like that.”

  Koko slid his arm around Leech’s shoulders. “So, pals to the end?”

  “Of course,” Leech assured him. “Anyway, I thought you’d be the one in a rush to see the Kushan exhibit. They say it’s full of gold and jewels.”

  “Now you’re talking my lingo.” Koko laughed.

  The boys caught up with Primo just as he was handing their tickets to the guard at the entrance to the Kushan galleries.

  Leech had expected Primo to stop and examine the first room of the Kushan show, but Primo strode on as if late for an appointment. It was Koko who wanted to linger when he saw the glitter of gold and gems in a corner. “Whoa,” he said, his mouth making a little O of amazement.

  Leech caught hold of his friend and started to drag him along. “Come on.”

  Koko tried to dig in his heels. “We’re here to look, aren’t we?”

  “We’ll come back later,” Leech promised.

  Koko studied the glass covering the case. “I wonder how thick this glass is?”

  Leech knew that certain gleam in his friend’s eyes and leaned in close. “No, Koko,” he said in a fierce, low voice.

  “No, what?” Koko whispered back.

  “No to stealing anything here,” Leech explained in exasperation. “We’ve quit that,” he added, “at least for a while.”

  “Says you,” Koko said defiantly. “A guy’s got to stay in practice and they leave all this stuff just lying around.” He waved a hand airily at a jeweled crown. “Gold’s meant to be spent.”

  Leech nodded toward the man plowing a way through the crowd ahead of them. “Primo wouldn’t like it.” He nodded to the two museum guards. One, a beefy human, was dwarfed by his partner, a green troll whose too-small uniform bulged on his huge frame, and whose arms were so long they stretched out of his sleeves and brushed the floor. “And neither would they.”

  “You’re turning into a regular pill. You know that?” Koko complained as he jammed his hands into his pockets.

  They sped through room after room, trailing Primo as he searched for something. Finally, they came to the last and largest chamber. Over the doorway was a banner: “Kushan, the Crossroads of the World and of Magic.”

  Primo adroitly sidestepped around the huge golden statue of a majestic woman riding a lion, and the boys slipped around her as well. Despite the noise in the room, Leech thought he heard a chirping sound. “What’s that?”

  “Crickets,” Primo said. “It must be sound effects.” He scratched his head. “But I couldn’t say why.”

  “Goal!” a man cried. He was dressed in a funny costume with a gold-edged sash as he crawled across the floor with something in his cupped fingers. He didn’t seem to notice that he had knocked Primo to the side.

  A woman, in an antique outfit herself, scurried on her knees after him. “Excuse me.” She smiled politely up at Primo as they passed.

  The trio watched the man move on, crying “Goal!” in between chuckles. The woman stayed at his heels, apologizing to anyone he might have bumped.

  Leech stared at the spectacle surrounding them. Half the room seemed to be in costumes or at least fancy dress, and they were all scrambling about on their knees. “Are all openings like this?”

  “Just the fun ones,” Primo said, but he seemed just as puzzled as the boys.

  The rest of the crowd were spectators like themselves, trying to see the exhibits as they dodged around the crawling hunters.

  “Do you think someone lost their keys?” Leech wondered to Koko.

  But his friend was standing with his mouth open in ecstasy. The lighting made it seem as if there were dark circles around his eyes, but the eyes themselves shone as brightly as the gold and silver and gems sparkling at them from all sides. “Shut up. I’m in heaven,” he murmured.

  “Lady Tabiti at last,” Primo said. He marched determinedly toward a dais in the center of the room.

  “Come on,” Leech said, seizing Koko’s wrist. He towed his still stupefied friend behind him. “And quit drooling. Someone will slip and fall down.”

  Primo halted at the dais and, to Leech’s surprise, bowed his head with great reverence. And then again twice more.

  Curious, Leech sidled up next to him to see the mummy of a woman lying upon her back, completely encased in a suit made out of apple green plaques and sewn together with gold wire.

  “What’re you doing?” Leech asked Primo.

  Primo straightened, his face solemn. “Paying my respects to a beautiful lady.”

  The boy gazed at the face covered by the jade squares. “How can you tell?”

  “The… songs and tales all say that’s the way she was,” Primo said. “And she had a soul to match. When Lady Tabiti was young, her father gave asylum to a noble Kushan family. She and the daughter became best friends and swore to be loyal to one another. Later, when the family was exonerated and returned to the empire, her Kushan friend grew up and married the emperor. By then Lady Tabiti had become the leader of her people. When the Kushan empire was invaded, Lady Tabiti honored her childhood oath. She led her warriors to war and destroyed the invaders. She could have assumed the throne herself, but she chose to serve her friend instead.”

  Next to them, a pair of tourists seemed more interested in gawking at the Kushan warriors rather than the treasure they protected. For months the San Francisco newspapers and radio stations had been talking about the real-life “Amazons” as much as about the treasures they were going to guard.

  Leech had been expecting muscular giants, so he was disappointed to see that they were just women in funny costumes. Though one of them was tall, the others were of average height. Even some of the human museum guards looked more imposing than them.

  The Amazons stood straight as swords, ignoring the chaos all around them as they guarded the dais.

  “Have you ever killed anyone?” a fat tourist demanded.

  “Not today, sir,” the woman said politely in accented English.

  “Excuse me,” Primo said to the obnoxious man, “but you might want to show some respect.”

  “It’s quite all right, sir.” The Amazon flashed him a grateful smile. “You are all Kushan’s guests.”

  Primo nodded approvingly. “Spoken as graciously as she would have wanted.”

  “How do you kn—,” Leech started to ask him when the rumbling began. It sounded like a train was heading straight toward the room. As the floor began to vibrate, cups and other things crashed over in the display cases.

  “Earthquake!” someone shouted.

  Primo whirled around, searching for the boys. “Stand under a doorway.”

  The only trouble was that everyone else was rushing for the single exit, as well. The spectators were only one moment away from turning into a panicked mob, and Leech thought they were in more danger of being trampled by the crowd than being crushed in th
e earthquake.

  Primo tried to shield the boys from the stampeding spectators when the floor collapsed near them.

  Through the six-foot-wide opening, Leech could see the huge pipes in the museum’s basement. Out of it flew a creature straight out of a nightmare. A flapping wing brushed a tourist teetering on the edge. It hovered overhead as the flailing man fell through the gaping hole.

  Another winged horror followed it. And finally a third and fourth.

  Their gray, leathery bodies were about six feet long and as slender and supple as serpents. Each of their four legs ended in sharp talons ready to strike, and they flew with four wings, which beat in the same alternating pattern as dragonflies.

  Chairs crashed as people jumped to their feet in the roped-off section near the podium. A woman screamed as her husband pulled her away from the hole.

  Overhead, the monsters swung their heads back and forth, picking out their first victims.

  Scirye

  Lady Sudarshane rose, no longer the diplomat but the warrior she had once been. Her voice rose commandingly over the tumult. “Get the weapons from the cases!”

  She set her own example by picking up her chair and striding over to a display of halberds with their spiked, axe-like heads and sharp-pointed spears.

  Scirye stared open-mouthed at her mother. In her mind, her mother was a charming, fussy woman who was always telling her what to do, not someone who went about vandalizing museums. In her antique costume, this woman might have stepped out of a painting of an ancient Kushan battle.

  Lady Sudarshane swung the chair legs against the window. Dozens of cracks spread outward from the point of impact, but the bulletproof glass did not break and the magical wards held. An alarm bell began jangling loudly instead.

  Lady Sudarshane had to hit the glass with the chair three more times before she created a hole but the glass itself hung in fractured sections.

  By then, Prince Etre had joined her with his own chair and was helping her finish clearing the window of glass. “Quite an invigorating morning, isn’t it?”

  Scirye’s mother and the prince snatched spears from the exhibit, but Nishke and the other Pippalanta seized halberds. The rest of the consular staff was copying their Consul and attacked other display cases to get at anything that could be used as a weapon. A troll museum guard hadn’t bothered with a chair but was hammering one of his stone-like fists against another window while the other guards waited anxiously.

  They were the only ones moving. The city dignitaries and the spectators stood gaping just as Scirye was. The monsters were flying in ever widening circles, scanning the people below as if they were no more than a flock of sheep and the monsters were selecting their first victims.

  On her wrist, Scirye felt Kles stir. His fur and feathers were bristling as he spread his wings and shrilled his battle cry. Her hair flew every which way as Kles rose with a flap of his wings. He circled a few feet above her head, ready to defend her against monsters nine times his size.

  Scirye looked up at him admiringly, knowing that the griffin’s heart was bigger than anyone else’s in the room—including hers. And that made her love him all the more.

  She could not let Kles fight while she stood by like a sack of laundry. If she wanted to be a Pippal, she had to do more than read about them. She had to act like them, too.

  Scirye had always been a definite sort of girl. When she made up her mind to do something, she did it or she learned how. That was the reason she could speak several languages, could operate the teletype machine in the communications room, could make a soufflé and unstop an embassy sink—admittedly, she had plugged it up in the first place, but that was nit-picking.

  The terrified girl forced her numb legs to stumble toward her mother now, away from the frightened spectators. The stumble steadied into a walk and finally into a run.

  Lady Sudarshane had skipped the golden, jeweled ceremonial weapons to take a plain spear with a three-pronged blade. It was only when the light reflected off the steel that Scirye saw the patterns that swirled along its length. From her sister, she had learned that the patterns marked the steel creation of a master weapons-maker.

  Scirye’s eyes searched the case until she saw another one to match her mother’s. She was just reaching for it when her mother stopped her. “See our guests to safety,” her mother ordered.

  “I can fight, too,” Scirye said stubbornly. “Nishke’s been showing me.” The Pippalanta were expected to be as equally proficient with swords, spears, and bows as they were with modern guns.

  “We are their hosts,” her mother insisted firmly. “And by the rules of hospitality, a host must protect her guests.”

  “Mistress, we have a duty,” Kles reminded her as he kept an eye on the monsters overhead.

  “You must help them escape,” her mother instructed her.

  Tears stung Scirye’s eyes, but she knew her mother and the griffin were right.

  Pivoting, she ran back toward the dignitaries and spectators who huddled in the center of the room.

  “Go,” she said, waving her arms at the frightened man in front of her—she thought he might be the mayor. “Get out of here.”

  “Go, go, go,” Kles said, hovering long enough to beat his wings in the direction of the doorway.

  As the Pippalanta and museum guards rallied around her mother, Scirye and Kles gathered up the city dignitaries and the other spectators and herded them like sheep from the room.

  Mrs. Rudenko fell over a chair and might have been trampled by the people behind her, but Kles darted in, flapping his wings at the oncoming startled faces so that they swept around on either side of him and the woman.

  “Don’t panic,” Scirye shouted. She placed herself at the back of the group, fists ready.

  With a screech, a monstrous head darted downward and Scirye crouched. Her limbs were stiff with fright, but it was only a feint. The gray dragonfly, she thought angrily, was only playing with her.

  As she straightened to check on her charges, she saw an Asian-looking man using a chair to break into another case. Next to him were two boys. The larger boy was pear-shaped, with hips and legs too big for his slender torso. His black hair had a silvery sheen.

  The smaller boy had brown hair with a slender iron ring around each wrist.

  “You need to leave, sir,” she said to the man.

  He smiled grimly at her. “We’ll need something that will reach those monsters,” he explained as he began helping himself to the throwing stars. Scirye could see the sense of that, so perhaps he did know what he was doing. “But take the boys out of here.”

  “Right,” the bigger boy said with some relief. He was stocky, with most of his weight about his hips.

  The brown-haired boy, though, looked stubborn. “We’re not going to leave you, Primo. We know how to fight.”

  “This is no street punk, Leech,” Primo said gravely.

  “Well, what do you know about fighting dragons?” Leech demanded. He was fiddling nervously with the iron bracelets on one arm.

  “More than I want to,” Primo said, and nodded to the other boy. “Get him out of here, Koko.”

  “Come on,” Koko said, grabbed his friend’s arm. “We’ll just get in Primo’s way.”

  Leech pointed at Scirye. “So will she.”

  Scirye saw the contempt in his face and it angered her. He was just as bad as her schoolmates in other cities, but thanks to Kles, she didn’t put up with that. “I’ve been trained to fight,” she snapped— though she added truthfully to herself, At least, I’ve started. She took a certain satisfaction in shoving him toward the doorway. “You’ll just get in the way.”

  Leech opened his mouth in protest, “I—”

  “She’s right,” Primo said firmly.

  His mentor’s words hurt, but Leech allowed Koko to pull him toward the doorway. Scirye stayed at their heels while Kles flew protectively overhead.

  As they neared the doorway, Scirye saw a mousy woman standing t
here as if she were watching a movie.

  “Didn’t you hear me?” Scirye demanded, waving her arm angrily. “Leave!”

  Bayang

  Bayang had been as surprised as anyone when the floor had caved in, but she had not survived this long without learning to recover quickly from the unexpected—and to take advantage of it.

  The cave-in was just the sort of distraction she needed. The dust was still in the air as she began moving purposefully toward her prey.

  She paused when the first creature shot out of the hole. When the second and third appeared, she began to retreat toward the doorway where she stayed and watched, even as frightened tourists, dignitaries, and museum guards stumbled past her.

  As the menace wheeled in a wide circle high overhead, she noted with interest that Primo had taken his place to the side, where the Kushan and museum guards would not block him when he threw the priceless stars—and also where his misses would not hit them. So her suspicions had been right about him. He was a fighter, and probably a military man at that.

  And then she saw her prey coming straight toward her while his bodyguard was distracted.

  A quick strike and Bayang could make her escape in the confusion. And then she would find out who had sent the bodyguard to her prey in the first place, for the friends of her enemy were her enemies, too.

  Bayang tensed, getting ready to spring when a young Kushan female popped up in front of her. The sight of the hatchling in the antique costume caught Bayang off guard. In one hand, the girl held a spear twice as tall as she was.

  “Didn’t you hear me? Leave!” the bossy hatchling said, and waved her free hand as if shooing a pigeon from her windowsill.

  Bayang came from a proud race. She didn’t take kindly to being treated like a scruffy bird, but it was the curse of being too good at disguising herself. The hatchling took her for some mousy old woman who had frozen in fright.

  Bayang would have swatted this annoying hatchling away, but she did not want to tip off her quarry as he passed. If she was careful and alert, there would be another opportunity on the way out of the museum.