"Stop that!" Leo tried to grab the dwarf"s feet, but he couldn"t reach the top of the pedestal.
"Too short?" Brown Fur sympathized.
"You"re calling me short?" Leo looked around for something to throw, but there was nothing but pigeons, and he doubted he could catch one. "Give me my belt, you stupid "
"Now, now!" said Brown Fur. "We haven"t even introduced ourselves. I"m Akmon. And my brother over there "
" is the handsome one!" The red-furred dwarf lifted his espresso. Judging from his dilated eyes and his maniacal grin, he didn"t need any more caffeine. "Pa.s.salos! Singer of songs! Drinker of coffee! Stealer of shiny stuff!"
"Please!" shrieked his brother, Akmon. "I steal much better than you."
Pa.s.salos snorted. "Stealing naps, maybe!" He took out a knife Piper"s knife and started picking his teeth with it.
"Hey!" Jason yelled. "That"s my girlfriend"s knife!"
He lunged at Pa.s.salos, but the red-furred dwarf was too quick. He sprang from his chair, bounced off Jason"s head, did a flip and landed next to Leo, his hairy arms around Leo"s waist.
"Save me?" the dwarf pleaded.
"Get off!" Leo tried to shove him away, but Pa.s.salos did a backwards somersault and landed out of reach. Leo"s trousers promptly fell around his knees.
He stared at Pa.s.salos, who was now grinning and holding a small zigzaggy strip of metal. Somehow, the dwarf had stolen the zipper right off Leo"s trousers.
"Give stupid zipper!" Leo stuttered, trying to shake his fist and hoist up his trousers at the same time.
"Eh, not shiny enough." Pa.s.salos tossed it away.
Jason lunged with his sword. Pa.s.salos launched himself straight up and was suddenly sitting on the statue"s pedestal next to his brother.
"Tell me I don"t have moves," Pa.s.salos boasted.
"Okay," Akmon said. "You don"t have moves."
"Bah!" Pa.s.salos said. "Give me the tool belt. I want to see."
"No!" Akmon elbowed him away. "You got the knife and the shiny ball."
"Yes, the shiny ball is nice." Pa.s.salos took off his cowboy hat. Like a magician producing a rabbit, he pulled out the Archimedes sphere and began tinkering with the ancient bronze dials.
"Stop!" Leo yelled. "That"s a delicate machine."
Jason came to his side and glared up at the dwarfs. "Who are you two, anyway?"
"The Kerkopes!" Akmon narrowed his eyes at Jason. "I bet you"re a son of Jupiter, eh? I can always tell."
"Just like Black Bottom," Pa.s.salos agreed.
"Black Bottom?" Leo resisted the urge to jump at the dwarfs" feet again. He was sure Pa.s.salos was going to ruin the Archimedes sphere any second now.
"Yes, you know." Akmon grinned. "Hercules. We called him Black Bottom because he used to go around without clothes. He got so tanned that his backside, well "
"At least he had a sense of humour!" Pa.s.salos said. "He was going to kill us when we stole from him, but he let us go because he liked our jokes. Not like you two. Grumpy, grumpy!"
"Hey, I"ve got a sense of humour," Leo snarled. "Give me back our stuff, and I"ll tell you a joke with a good punch line."
"Nice try!" Akmon pulled a ratchet wrench from the tool belt and spun it like a noisemaker. "Oh, very nice! I"m definitely keeping this! Thanks, Blue Bottom!"
Blue Bottom?
Leo glanced down. His trousers had slipped around his ankles again, revealing his blue boxer shorts. "That"s it!" he shouted. "My stuff. Now. Or I"ll show you how funny a flaming dwarf is."
His hands caught fire.
"Now we"re talking." Jason thrust his sword into the sky. Dark clouds began to gather over the piazza. Thunder boomed.
"Oh, scary!" Akmon shrieked.
"Yes," Pa.s.salos agreed. "If only we had a secret lair to hide in."
"Alas, this statue isn"t the doorway to a secret lair," Akmon said. "It has a different purpose."
Leo"s gut twisted. The fires died in his hands, and he realized something was very wrong. He yelled, "Trap!" and dived out of the fountain. Unfortunately, Jason was too busy summoning his storm.
Leo rolled on his back as five golden cords shot from the Neptune statue"s fingers. One barely missed Leo"s feet. The rest homed in on Jason, wrapping him like a rodeo calf and yanking him upside down.
A bolt of lightning blasted the tines of Neptune"s trident, sending arcs of electricity up and down the statue, but the Kerkopes had already disappeared.
"Bravo!" Akmon applauded from a nearby cafe table. "You make a wonderful pinata, son of Jupiter!"
"Yes!" Pa.s.salos agreed. "Hercules hung us upside down once, you know. Oh, revenge is sweet!"
Leo summoned a fireball. He lobbed it at Pa.s.salos, who was trying to juggle two pigeons and the Archimedes sphere.
"Eek!" The dwarf jumped free of the explosion, dropping the sphere and letting the pigeons fly.
"Time to leave!" Akmon decided.
He tipped his bowler and sprang away, jumping from table to table. Pa.s.salos glanced at the Archimedes sphere, which had rolled between Leo"s feet.
Leo summoned another fireball. "Try me," he snarled.
"Bye!" Pa.s.salos did a backflip and ran after his brother.
Leo scooped up the Archimedes sphere and ran over to Jason, who was still hanging upside down, thoroughly hog-tied except for his sword arm. He was trying to cut the cords with his gold blade but having no luck.
"Hold on," Leo said. "If I can find a release switch "
"Just go!" Jason growled. "I"ll follow you when I get out of this."
"But "
"Don"t lose them!"
The last thing Leo wanted was some alone time with the monkey dwarfs, but the Kerkopes were already disappearing around the far corner of the piazza. Leo left Jason hanging and ran after them.
XII.
LEO.
THE DWARFS DIDN"T TRY VERY HARD TO LOSE HIM, which made Leo suspicious. They stayed just at the edge of his vision, scampering over red-tiled rooftops, knocking over window boxes, whooping and hollering and leaving a trail of screws and nails from Leo"s tool belt almost as if they wanted Leo to follow.
He jogged after them, cursing every time his trousers fell down. He turned a corner and saw two ancient stone towers jutting into the sky, side by side, much taller than anything else in the neighbourhood maybe mediaeval watch-towers? They leaned in different directions like gearshifts on a race car.
The Kerkopes scaled the tower on the right. When they reached the top, they climbed around the back and disappeared.
Had they gone inside? Leo could see some tiny windows at the top, covered with metal grates, but he doubted those would stop the dwarfs. He watched for a minute, but the Kerkopes didn"t reappear. Which meant Leo had to get up there and look for them.
"Great," he muttered. No flying friend to carry him up. The ship was too far away to call for help. He could rig the Archimedes sphere into some sort of flying device, maybe, but only if he had his tool belt which he didn"t. He scanned the neighbourhood, trying to think. Half a block down, a set of double gla.s.s doors opened and an old lady hobbled out, carrying plastic shopping bags.
A grocery store? Hmm ...
Leo patted his pockets. To his amazement, he still had some euro notes from his time in Rome. Those stupid dwarfs had taken everything except his money.
He ran for the store as fast as his zipperless trousers allowed.
Leo scoured the aisles, looking for things he could use. He didn"t know the Italian for h.e.l.lo, where are your dangerous chemicals, please? But that was probably just as well. He didn"t want to end up in an Italian jail.
Fortunately, he didn"t need to read labels. He could tell just from picking up a toothpaste tube whether it contained pota.s.sium nitrate. He found charcoal. He found sugar and baking soda. The store sold matches and bug spray and aluminium foil. Pretty much everything he needed, plus a laundry cord he could use as a belt. He added some Italian junk food to the basket, just to sort of disguise his more suspicious purchases, then dumped his stuff at the till. A wide-eyed checkout lady asked him some questions he didn"t understand, but he managed to pay, get a bag and race out.
He ducked into the nearest doorway where he could keep an eye on the towers. He started to work, summoning fire to dry out materials and do a little cooking that otherwise would have taken days to complete.
Every once in a while he sneaked a look at the tower, but there was no sign of the dwarfs. Leo could only hope they were still up there. Making his a.r.s.enal took just a few minutes he was that good but it felt like hours.
Jason didn"t show. Maybe he was still tangled at the Neptune fountain or scouring the streets looking for Leo. No one else from the ship came to help. Probably it was taking them a long time to get all those pink rubber bands out of Coach Hedge"s hair.
That meant Leo had only himself, his bag of junk food and a few highly improvised weapons made from sugar and toothpaste. Oh, and the Archimedes sphere. That was kind of important. He hoped he hadn"t ruined it by filling it with chemical powder.
He ran to the tower and found the entrance. He started up the winding stairs inside, only to be stopped at a ticket booth by some caretaker who yelled at him in Italian.
"Seriously?" Leo asked. "Look, man, you"ve got dwarfs in your belfry. I"m the exterminator." He held up his can of bug spray. "See? Exterminator Molto Buono. Squirt, squirt. Ahhh!" He pantomimed a dwarf melting in terror, which for some reason the Italian didn"t seem to understand.
The guy just held out his palm for money.
"Dang, man," Leo grumbled, "I just spent all my cash on homemade explosives and whatnot." He dug around in his grocery bag. "Don"t suppose you"d accept ... uh ... whatever these are?"
Leo held up a yellow-and-red bag of junk food called Fonzies. He a.s.sumed they were some kind of potato chips. To his surprise, the caretaker shrugged and took the bag. "Avanti!"
Leo kept climbing, but he made a mental note to stock up on Fonzies. Apparently they were better than cash in Italy.
The stairs went on and on and on. The whole tower seemed to be nothing but an excuse to build a staircase.
He stopped on a landing and slumped against a narrow barred window, trying to catch his breath. He was sweating like crazy, and his heart thumped against his ribs. Stupid Kerkopes. Leo figured that as soon as he reached the top they would jump away before he could use his weapons, but he had to try.
He kept climbing.
Finally, his legs feeling like overcooked noodles, he reached the top.
The room was about the size of a broom closet, with barred windows on all four walls. Shoved in the corners were sacks of treasure, shiny goodies spilling all over the floor. Leo spotted Piper"s knife, an old leather-bound book, a few interesting-looking mechanical devices and enough gold to give Hazel"s horse a stomachache.
At first, he thought the dwarfs had left. Then he looked up. Akmon and Pa.s.salos were hanging upside down from the rafters by their chimp feet, playing antigravity poker. When they saw Leo, they threw their cards like confetti and broke out in applause.
"I told you he"d do it!" Akmon shrieked in delight.
Pa.s.salos shrugged and took off one of his gold watches and handed it to his brother. "You win. I didn"t think he was that dumb."
They both dropped to the floor. Akmon was wearing Leo"s tool belt he was so close that Leo had to resist the urge to lunge for it.
Pa.s.salos straightened his cowboy hat and kicked open the grate on the nearest window. "What should we make him climb next, brother? The dome of San Luca?"
Leo wanted to throttle the dwarfs, but he forced a smile. "Oh, that sounds fun! But, before you guys go, you forgot something shiny."
"Impossible!" Akmon scowled. "We were very thorough."
"You sure?" Leo held up his grocery bag.
The dwarfs inched closer. As Leo had hoped, their curiosity was so strong that they couldn"t resist.
"Look." Leo brought out his first weapon a lump of dried chemicals wrapped in aluminium foil and lit it with his hand.
He knew enough to turn away when it popped, but the dwarfs were staring right at it. Toothpaste, sugar and bug spray weren"t as good as Apollo"s music, but they made a pretty decent flash-bang.
The Kerkopes wailed, clawing at their eyes. They stumbled towards the window, but Leo set off his homemade firecrackers snapping them around the dwarfs" bare feet to keep them off balance. Then, for good measure, Leo turned the dial on his Archimedes sphere, which unleashed a plume of foul white fog that filled the room.
Leo wasn"t bothered by smoke. Being immune to fire, he"d stood in smoky bonfires, endured dragon breath and cleaned out blazing forges plenty of times. While the dwarfs were hacking and wheezing, he grabbed his tool belt from Akmon, calmly summoned some bungee cords and tied up the dwarfs.
"My eyes!" Akmon coughed. "My tool belt!"