The Power (The Magnificent 12 4)

“Yeah, whatever. Where did they go?”

The woman pointed a heavily bejeweled hand toward the hills. “Up Schnebly Hill.” She shivered then, and met Camaro’s gaze. “Where else would a demon goddess and a golem go?”

Camaro pointedly ignored the reference to a golem. No one should know that, but Mrs. Lafrontiere was a clairvoyant after all. She looked up at the hill. It was quite red in the slanting rays of the sun. Many believed it was a place of special power, of mysticism, a nexus of supernatural manifestation.

It scared Camaro a bit. But worse yet, there was no way to walk that far. So sadly, reluctantly, she turned back toward town. In the end, she knew, the golem would return as the Destroyer.

“This isn’t going to end well,” Camaro said.

Twelve

Mack, too, was thinking, This isn’t going to end well. But due to the unfortunate fact that he’d been transported four hundred years into the past, he was thinking it a long time before Camaro thought the same thing.

Also, his feet were cold.

They stumbled finally on a village.

It was a primitive place, the village. The village was so primitive it didn’t even have a name. At the edge of the village was a sign announcing, “Welcome to” and then just a blank space.

But it was a friendly village just the same. They offered Mack and his little troop a meal of cholera water and eels. Mack traded them the lentils for a pair of shearling-lined boots33 sewn together with distressed-tendon string. He was glad of that, though Stefan was bitter over the lentils.

“We’re looking for a guy who looks kind of like me,” Mack said to the village elder.

The village elder thought about that for a minute, looked around, nodded thoughtfully, and pointed at Mack.

“No, not me. He looks like me.”

The village elder once again nodded thoughtfully, then stroked his chin and pointed at Mack.

This happened six more times before Mack realized that this village was so small that it couldn’t afford both a village elder and a village idiot and had therefore combined both jobs into one.34

Xiao and Stefan went out to look around the village in the vain hope that there had to be a store or a restaurant or something other than nine mud-and-wattle huts surrounded by trees. Mack stayed with Boguslawa and the village elder/idiot.

“I am wanting to have nice house, many goats, and children,” Boguslawa said. “Must be paint and have two windows. Also deep poop hole in floor.”

“Look,” Mack snapped impatiently, “you and I are not engaged. For one thing, we’re twelve years old.”

“Is old, yes, for engagement,” Boguslawa said. “But must be engaged before can be married.”

“Listen to me,” Mack grated. His feet were warming up, but all that did was allow him to pay attention to the other stuff that was bothering him. “I am not your boyfriend!”

Boguslawa’s face fell. Tears filled her eyes. Her lower lip began to quiver. “You are not liking me?”

Mack rolled his eyes and threw up his hands. “That’s not it, Boguslawa. Look, I do like you. I like you a lot. You’re beautiful and . . . and, like, sweet and all. And really, if I wasn’t busy saving the world, and also twelve, I would totally marry you. But where I come from? You can’t get married until you’re old.”

“You mean fourteen?” Boguslawa asked, aghast.

Mack thought he had hit upon a good way to put an end to all thoughts of marriage. “Even older,” he said. “I mean, hey, of course if I could, I would totally be your boyfriend but—”

Boguslawa squealed in misplaced delight and threw her arms around Mack.

“Aha!” Valin cried.

Because, yes, he had followed Mack through the woods and all the way to the nameless village and had snuck quietly35 up and overheard the last of that conversation.

“Valin!” Mack cried. “It’s not what it looks like!”

Valin pushed his way into the hut. Unfortunately the hut wasn’t very well built and the whole thing sort of just fell over, so that now Mack and Boguslawa and the village elder/idiot were just sitting around a weak fire out in the open.