The Key (The Magnificent 12 3)

If he lay down on the hard stone floor, his feet would touch the door and his head would touch the far wall. And he would be able to press his hands against both side walls.

He was being buried alive.

“Aaaahhhh!” he screeched when he saw the cell. “No, no, no, no! Nooooo! Nooooo!”

The skeletal guards didn’t have an answer: they had no tongues or lips, or voice boxes or lungs. Pretty much all of the things you need to speak were missing.

“Noooo! I can’t … you can’t....”

Oh, but they could. And they did. They threw Mack into the cell, pushing his head down with claw-like hands so that he would fit through the short door.

Mack turned and ran at them. He gibbered madly in Vargran, but casting two earlier spells had pretty well wiped out his enlightened puissance for now. So he might as well have been speaking Portuguese.12

The iron door slammed in his face.

The oil lamp guttered, and for a frozen moment of terror, Mack thought it might go out, and if there’s anything worse than being buried alive, it’s being buried alive in the dark.

“No! No, you have to let me out! Nooooo!”

One is tempted to look away. Because to keep looking at Mack is to watch him completely fall apart. It’s to see our hero whimpering, crying, sobbing, begging for his mother.

You see, a phobia isn’t just a fear, like maybe you’re afraid you’ll fail a test. A phobia is much, much deeper. A phobia taps into the bottommost layers of your brain, down where the brain is just the sediment of evolution and where blunt animal terror lies, far away from your reason and your logic and your calm, soothing voices.

So the Mack we would see in that terrible cell is not the Mack who stood up to Stefan back when Stefan was the most feared bully at Richard Gere Middle School. (Go, Fighting Pupfish!) Nor would it be the Mack who threw down with Risky in the Australian Outback and killed her once. It’s not the Mack who faced dragons and fought Skirrit and treasonous Tong Elves and insane Norse gods and Paddy “Nine Iron” Trout.

It’s possible to be very brave some of the time. And pants-wetting scared another time. That’s the reality of it. The same person can run away in blind terror one moment, then turn suddenly and face certain death with unearthly determination.

Humans are strange that way.

The thing about Mack’s fear was that it was so intense that if you’d told him he was just hours away from being catapulted to certain death, he wouldn’t have been even 1 percent more terrified. He had already turned the fear meter up to eleven.

* * *

Eight

* * *

Jarrah, Dietmar, Xiao, and Stefan were ushered unceremoniously through the door of MacGuffin’s castle. The door slammed behind them.

Stefan was back in the enchantment zone and could no longer see the stones and tufts of grass around him, or the castle door closed behind him, or the walls looming above him.

“We have to get him out of there,” Stefan said.

“Can’t even call me mum for a few good words of Vargran,” Jarrah said. “MacGuffin took our phones. What can we do?”

“I …,” Dietmar began. Then he shrugged. “I don’t know what to do.”

Mack would have been secretly pleased to hear that, if he’d been there.

One by one they looked at Xiao. Jarrah said what they were all thinking. “You could fly us over the walls.”

Xiao looked down, deep in thought for so long it seemed as if she might have fallen asleep. “I cannot,” she said finally in a very sad whisper, and with a slow shake of her head. “There is a treaty. No eastern dragon may appear in the west. To violate the treaty is to risk a war.”

“So risk it,” Stefan snapped.

Xiao’s eyes flashed. “You don’t understand: it’s not only a risk to dragon folk; if the western dragons were to rise again, entire cities would burn!”

“I don’t care,” Stefan snarled. He stabbed a finger in the general direction of the door he couldn’t see. “He’s under my wing. I protect him, and I don’t care what gets in my way. He’s under my wing!” He raged back and forth, demanding someone show him a rock so he could bang the door down with it.