Changeling Page 16

  “Okay, okay.” The voice was resigned. “Hold on and I’ll buzz you in.”

  Later, Fleet and I got to be friends, but when I first met her, I didn’t like her. If Changeling looked too much like me, Fleet looked too different. She was tall and slender, with polished cinnamon skin and black hair in a thousand little braids down her back like the statue of an Egyptian princess.

  Usually I don’t care that I’m kind of ordinary. Folk are supposed to be incredibly beautiful, unless they’re incredibly ugly. But Fleet was only a mortal, like me. Plus, she kept shooting sideways glances at Changeling, like she couldn’t believe she was real. And she totally refused to take us to the Dragon of Wall Street.

  “Are you nuts? The Dragon’s dangerous. When he chews you up, there’s not enough left to spit out. My advice? Go home and forget about it.”

  I could feel myself getting red and hot. “Go home? Forget about it? I wish. The whole reason I’m here at all is that I can’t go home until I’ve completed my quest for the Dragon’s Scales.”

  “The Dragon’s Scales?” Fleet shrieked so loud that Changeling flinched. “You’re planning to steal the Dragon’s Scales? You haven’t got a chance!”

  I got hotter. “Why not? I’ve already scored the Magical Magnifying Mirror of the Mermaid Queen and a pair of tickets to Peter Pan. And believe me, the Producer of Broadway is plenty dangerous to deal with.”

  Fleet wasn’t impressed. “Maybe you should quit while you’re ahead. New York’s a big city. There are plenty of other places to live.”

  I wasn’t so sure. What were my choices? The Financial Maze? No way. Broadway? No green things or sunshine. Battery Park? Where would I sleep? In Castle Clinton, with the ghosts? Chinatown was very cool, but not exactly homey. I could just imagine living in the Metropolitan Museum—if the Curator let me—and there were places in New York I hadn’t even seen yet: the Upper West Side, Midtown, the Village, Chelsea. But I was willing to bet that none of them had nixies or corn spirits or Astris or the Water Rat. I didn’t think I could bear it if I couldn’t see Astris again. And what about the Pooka, stuck in the Museum being good until I got back? What about Changeling?

  “No,” I said. “Central Park is home, and I’m not ready to leave it yet. Besides, I’ve got promises riding on this.”

  “You shouldn’t promise what you can’t deliver,” Fleet said. “You don’t see me promising to take you to the Dragon, do you?”

  “Are you telling me you don’t know how to find the Dragon?”

  Fleet looked insulted. “Of course I know how to find him. Blindfolded. It’s just that I know better.”

  We were sitting in the living room of Fleet’s apartment. Although it was smaller than my bedroom, it had a lot more furniture crammed into it: a round table with four chairs, a white sofa with a little table next to it, an easy chair, and a big bookcase stuffed with books. Drawings of giants and dragons and griffins and dwarves were thumbtacked all over the walls. Every flat surface was a jumble of papers and pencils and cups with mold growing in the bottom. Fleet was hunched up in the easy chair, fiddling nervously with her braids.

  “Why are you so scared?” I asked. “It’s not like he’ll eat you or something. Aren’t you under his protection?”

  “I’m under his protection, all right.” Fleet’s pretty mouth drooped. “Way under. You are looking at one of the Dragon’s Executive Assistants-in-Training.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The Dragon’s very busy. He needs someone to keep Folk from interrupting him and to make coffee and appointments and things like that. He always has at least three maidens on hand, working in shifts. When one of them retires, one of us gets promoted.”

  I wondered what happened to retired Executive Assistants, and decided I didn’t really want to know. “And you’re not looking forward to the promotion?”

  Fleet laughed. “You could put it that way. It’s all finance and systems and keeping everything neat and organized—in other words, totally not me. I’m an artist, really.”

  “You are obviously not an organized person,” Changeling said from the corner. “Your books are out of order.”

  I hadn’t even known she was listening. As soon as we got upstairs, she had gone to sit cross-legged in front of the bookcase. Apparently, she’d counted enough books to calm herself.

  “I like them that way,” Fleet wailed. “See? It’s hopeless. Sooner or later, I’ll do something really dumb and the Dragon will eat me and that will be that.” Her velvety brown eyes filled with tears. She blotted them with her sleeve before they could spill over. “I’m miserable, but I’m not miserable enough to want to be eaten.”

  I knew exactly what she meant. Suddenly it didn’t matter so much how beautiful she was.

  “I understand,” I said, and when Fleet looked doubtful, “No, really, I do. The Folk don’t care whether we’re happy or not. They only care if we follow their stupid rules. And if we don’t, whammo! We’re Folk food, and we don’t even know why. It’s not fair.”

  “You said it, sister.” Fleet smiled at me, beautiful as a fairy-tale princess.

  Princess. Hero. I had an idea.

  “Hey, Fleet,” I said slowly. “How about if in exchange for you leading us to the Dragon, we rescue you from him?”

  “Say what?”

  “We rescue you. You know, like the old stories about knights and damsels in distress? What do you say? Is it a deal?”

  “And how are you going to do that?” Fleet asked sarcastically. “You got a dragon-killing sword in that satchel of yours?”

  “No,” I said. “It’s not that kind of quest. Besides, you can’t just go around killing Geniuses.”

  “What have you got in mind, then?”

  “I’ll come up with something. I’ve done it before. Besides, I have the Magical Magnifying Mirror of the Mermaid Queen and Changeling knows how to work it.”

  Fleet gave an unhappy laugh. “Which leaves us with what? A kid with a trick makeup mirror and a fairy double against a Genius of unimaginable size and power guarded by one of the best security systems in New York Between. Even a country girl like you can do the math on that one.”

  “We’ve got this far, haven’t we? What are the odds against that?”

  I hadn’t meant it as a real question, but Changeling answered it anyway. “There is insufficient data to calculate the odds. But it is safe to say that they would be very, very high.”

  Fleet shrugged. “Very funny. Okay, Folklorist from Central Park. What do you know about dragons?”

  The real answer was, “Not enough.” But I was getting used to working with what I had. “They’ve all got a vulnerable spot,” I said. “If we could find out what the Dragon of Wall Street’s is, it would give us something to bargain with.”

  “Oh, I can tell you that,” Fleet said gloomily. “The Dragon of Wall Street is blind. Not that it slows him down any.”

  Too easy. I shook my head. “That can’t be it, then. There’s got to be something else, something he’s hiding. I’m sure Changeling and I can figure it out, if we can see him.” I put my hand on Fleet’s arm. “Please, Fleet, take us to the Dragon. It’ll turn out fine, you’ll see.”

  Fleet got up and paced between the window and the back wall a couple of times, dodging cast-off shoes and piles of papers. She looked at Changeling quietly rearranging her books in alphabetical order, and she looked at me.

  “Okay,” she said. “It’s a deal. I’ll take you to see the Dragon. But you guys have got to get me out of here. Wall Street is no place for an artist.”

  CHAPTER 20

  DRAGONS DON’T FOLLOW THE RULES. THEY MAKE THEM.

  Neef’s Rules for Changelings

  Once Fleet had made up her mind about the Dragon, she relaxed enough to offer us something to eat. Her version of Satchel was called Microwave, and it gave us rice and chicken in a strange, glowing, orange-pinky sauce Fleet called “sweet and sour.” When we asked for macaroni and cheese, Microwave produc
ed a bowl of lumpy stuff that looked like yellow paste poured over bits of rubber. Changeling was ecstatic.

  As we ate, we talked. Fleet was all for striking while the iron was hot. I was all for waiting until morning, in case the Dragon might be asleep or out at the theatre or something.

  Fleet found this very funny. “This isn’t Madison Avenue,” she said. “The Dragon works 24/7. And if you’re worried about negotiating the Maze in the dark, don’t be. I’ve been doing this since I was six.”

  So Fleet changed into what she called “business drag,” a dark gray skirt and jacket, a pale gray blouse, and black shoes with very high heels. With her braids pulled back into a tight ponytail and little gold coins in her ears, she was still beautiful, but kind of scary, like an elf. Changeling wouldn’t look at her.

  On our way down, the elevator stopped and a boy and a dwarf got on. They were both wearing dark suits and carried the Wall Street magic bags Fleet called briefcases. The dwarf had a gray beard that would have trailed on the floor if he hadn’t braided it and looped the tail through his belt. I knew right away that the boy was another mortal Assistant-in-Training. His jacket was too short in the sleeves and he was flushed, like his tie was choking him.

  I smiled at the boy. He looked a little startled, but smiled back shyly.

  The dwarf scowled. “Elevator etiquette!” it barked. Both Fleet and the boy jumped guiltily and stared fixedly at the elevator door. It would have been funny except that the boy’s mouth was trembling like he was trying not to cry, and the dwarf was glaring at me like I was the one upsetting everybody. It was a real relief when the elevator got to the bottom and the boy and his fairy godfather disappeared into the night.

  If Maiden Lane was spooky in the daytime, it was even spookier after dark, all black and silver with inky shadows. Fleet’s high heels tapped sharply against the pavement, waking echoes from the high walls. It sounded like someone was following us, but whenever I turned around to look, the street was empty. In fact, we saw almost no one between Maiden Lane and Wall Street except the occasional dwarf.

  “I thought you said the Financial Maze never closed down,” I said to Fleet.

  “It doesn’t. Everybody’s inside, working. The streets are only busy twice a day, when the night Folk and the day Folk change shifts. You don’t want to get caught in Rush Hour if you can help it.”

  Right.

  Wall Street turned out to be just that: a street running next to a wall that stretched as far as I could see in each direction and disappeared into the sky above. By this time, I’d realized that some places in New York looked bigger than they really were. I mean, I know how big Manhattan Island is, and believe me, if Broadway and Central Park Central and the Treasury were actually as big as they looked, there would be no room for Chinatown and Madison Avenue and the Village and everything else. Looking at the Treasury wall, though, it was easy to believe it covered the whole island.

  You can tell a lot about a Genius, I think, by how hard it is to get to see it. The Green Lady and the Curator, for instance, like to keep an eye on what’s up in their territories. They don’t hide in special buildings or rooms, or try to impress you with how important and powerful they are, on the theory that you’ll figure it out yourself once you start talking with them. The Mermaid Queen and the Producer, on the other hand, obviously want you all softened up and humble before you even set eyes on them. The Dragon of Wall Street takes things even further. He wants you to feel like an ant. A tired, jumpy ant.

  The massive door was made of some slick grayish metal with black bands, and it was huge. Fleet pushed on a corner, and a smaller door swung open, just big enough for us to enter single file. I wondered how the giants got in.

  Fleet led us across an echoing stone hall to a slightly beat-up wooden counter with a sign over it that read SECURITY DESK.

  “ID, please,” said the guard. A kind of dragon, I thought, taking in the eagle claws, the leathery wings, and the long, snaky body. A wyvern, maybe. As it examined the white talisman Fleet extracted from her briefcase, I thought I saw a faint sheen of gold sliding along the surface of its eyes.

  The wyvern waved us through an archway into a lofty corridor. Except where we were standing, it was totally dark. Fleet picked a torch out of a convenient torch stand and tapped off into the darkness with Changeling and me pattering after like benighted travelers following a particularly determined will-o’-the-wisp.

  I’m not afraid of the dark. The dark in Central Park is wide and clean and full of the music of fairy voices. When I was little, I would play hide-and-seek with the Shakespeare fairies at night, even when there wasn’t a moon. The dark in the Treasury, however, was close and stale smelling and haunted by hisses and clanks. Fleet’s torch sparked gleams of gold from the gray stone walls or licked bright tapestries or paintings into brief, unnerving life. At intervals were doors barred and banded with iron. One of them opened as we passed, releasing a blast of cold air and the mushroom-pale, blunt-nosed head of a giant worm.

  I froze, and it irised its round, needle-toothed mouth at us. Changeling gave a squeak—or maybe that was me—and we dashed after Fleet’s torch.

  Twice more Fleet pulled out her talisman to be examined, once by a (non-holographic) griffin, and once by a huge, slobbery three-headed Cerberus guarding a narrow staircase. We had to go down them single file, with Fleet leading and me bringing up the rear.

  At first, I worried about meeting someone horrible climbing up or something worse slithering down behind us. Then Changeling started to hum unhappily, and I started worrying about how to deal with a fairy fit on a steep staircase. I was beginning to worry about my legs snapping off at the knees, when we finally stumbled out of the staircase into a long, dark tunnel.

  “My legs hurt,” Changeling said, her voice flat and dead.

  “Nearly there,” Fleet said. “See the light?”

  I did—a flickering, reddish glow that looked a long way away. It turned out to be another torch rack, set beside yet another massive door. This door was round, made of iron, and had a big wheel in the middle that I thought would take at least three giants to turn.

  Fleet parked her torch in the rack and turned to me. The light gilded her coppery cheeks and cast her eyes in shadow. “You sure you want to go through with this? It’s not too late to turn back.”

  Oh, yes it was. “Lead on,” I said.

  Fleet took hold of the wheel with both hands, spun it to the right, braced herself, and pulled. To my surprise, the massive door whispered smoothly open. Light blazed through it, dazzling my dark-blinded eyes. “Go on,” Fleet said in my ear. “I’m right behind you.”

  Changeling had her hands over her face, so I took hold of her sleeve and, squinting, stepped through the door.

  I’ve accomplished my share of impossible tasks in New York Between, but I can’t possibly describe what it was like to see the Dragon of Wall Street for the first time.

  “Gigantic” doesn’t come close to conveying how big he is. “Humongous” doesn’t cut it. There’s a legend in New York that the Dragon of Wall Street exists in many different worlds simultaneously. I had never understood how that was possible until then. He was bigger than the Statue of Liberty. He was bigger than the Metropolitan Museum. He lay against the far wall of the Treasury like a knobby mountain, miles and miles away across a floor that glittered like frozen fire.

  “We’re standing on the Dragon’s bed,” Fleet told me. “It’s gold, of course, tons of it. The stuff on the bottom is very, very old. Legend has it that it’s the original hoard he brought with him from the Old Country.”

  Right. Dragons sleep on gold. And rubies and emeralds and sapphires and diamonds. Even the walkway was made of what looked like silver plates—if the Dragon bothered with anything so ordinary. Probably they were platinum or white gold or elf silver or something even more rare and precious.

  Fleet eyed me anxiously. “You’re awfully quiet. You don’t feel gold-sick or anything, do you?”


  “I’m fine. I’m just wondering what we’re standing on.”

  “Old scales,” Fleet said. “The Dragon sheds quarterly.”

  I wiggled my toes. The scales were smooth under my feet, and a little warm.

  Changeling hunkered down at the edge of the walkway, plucked a large emerald out of the glittering jumble, examined it, and laid it down. Then she picked up some gold coins and arranged them around the emerald.

  Fleet gasped. “Sweet Industrials!” she swore. “We’re in trouble now!” She clicked over to Changeling and begged her to leave the hoard alone, in a voice she was obviously trying to keep low and calm. Changeling added two more coins and a small sapphire to her pattern.

  Six identical giants materialized around us. They were dressed in blue, and each one carried a club bristling with spikes.

  “No playing with the gold,” the first one said, his voice like wheels over a loose manhole.

  “No looking at the gold,” the second added.

  “It’s best not even to think about it,” the third recommended.

  The fourth held out his broad, hairy hand, palm up. “Could I see a little identification here?”

  Fleet fumbled in her briefcase. “It’s cool,” she told Giant Four, her voice shaking a little. “I’m an Executive Assistant-in-Training.” She pulled out her talisman. “I’ve got clearance.”

  While the giants were examining the talisman, I swept Changeling’s design back into the hoard. She protested, and I explained that dragons really hate it when other people touch their stuff. She glared at me. “Like your dad and his computer, remember?”

  “The jewels are pretty. I think the Dragon should learn to share.”

  “Who’s going to teach him? Never mind, that wasn’t a real question. For what it’s worth, Changeling, I think you’re right. But you still can’t touch anything.”

  Giant Five handed the talisman back to Fleet, and Giant Six said, “ID seems to be in order. But we gotta search the visitors.”