The Key (The Magnificent 12 3)

Cost: 0.00 GBP.23

It was still two days before the Magnifica managed to leave Scotland.

They drove away toward the nearest airport—in Inverness—destroying quite a number of mailboxes, lampposts, fences, and, of course, side mirrors en route.

The road they drove on was already lined with signs and billboards hastily altered to take advantage of the new situation. Everywhere they looked, “Search for the Loch Ness Monster!” had already been changed to “See the Loch Ness Duck!”

The traffic heading toward the loch was practically gridlocked.

The tourism business—which had sputtered along on one ruined castle and an elusive mythical beast—now exploded with the addition of a castle only some people could see, and a massive duck everyone could actually feed.

They never heard from Frank again. And the only thing the All-Mother had to say was a loud, furious quack.

It was a short flight to Paris. Just long enough for Mack to get Sylvie’s story. (Cost of six one-way tickets to Paris: 3,023.28 GBP.24)

She told it in excellent English and with a French accent Mack found charming. For a while he hoped that his paying attention to Sylvie would inspire some jealousy in Xiao. But it didn’t. And why he should want her to be jealous he couldn’t possibly have explained. Any number of things had changed for Mack lately—he had a golem, his former bully was now his bodyguard, he was bearing enormous responsibilities, and he could apparently turn dinosaur sea serpents into giant ducks—but at the same time some much more mundane changes were taking place.

He was beginning to see the world differently. He was seeing people differently.

He was even seeing himself differently, and it was all a bit disturbing. Given that he had plenty of craziness going on, the personal changes were mostly unwelcome.

But there was no escaping the fact that he had gone from not caring about girls as anything other than a sort of subspecies of kids at school to paying slightly more attention to them and wishing they would pay slightly more attention to him.

In this he was behind the girls, who had long since begun to notice boys and had already formed some pretty definite opinions about them in general and Mack in particular.

There were many things that Vargran might cure, but boys being just a few steps behind girls was too basic a fact of life for mere magic to alter.

“I have always known that I was strange,” Sylvie said as the jet rose steeply away from Inverness and arced out over the sea. “As a little girl I did not play with dolls. I did not play at all, except in my imagination. In my imagination I saw myself as a warrior, and a companion to other warriors. Strange, no? Because most little girls see themselves as princesses.”

“Strange maybe,” Mack allowed. “But Xiao is a dragon, so the bar is pretty high on ‘strange’ in this group. Dietmar was a little like you: he kind of knew something was coming, if you know what I mean.”

He wanted to bite his tongue. Why would he draw her attention to Dietmar?

“How did you just happen to be in Scotland?”

“I did not ‘just happen,’” Sylvie said. “It is more complicated than that. It began for me in the summer. Fouras is a village with beaches. Tourists come to swim and lie in the sun, yes?”

“Oui,” he said, feeling self-conscious. Oui was pretty much the limit of his French.

“My parents have a small merry-go-round near the beach. There are restaurants and crêperies and souvenirs, and there is the merry-go-round. Only it is not so merry, I think. I find it melancholy. Children climb on looking for joy and find only a meaningless circular pursuit that cannot relieve the existential pain of existence, the fundamental ennui that must afflict any thinking person.”

Mack had no idea what she had just said, beyond “merry-go-round,” but he loved the way she said it.

“There was a boy there, one day. He was strangely dressed, flamboyant, you might say. I was collecting tickets, and he said to me, ‘What is that brass ring that you taunt the children with?’

“You see,” Sylvie explained, “a brass ring dangles from a rope. It is yanked here and there by my mother, or by me when I am helping. A child who rides the wooden ponies must grab the ring to get a free ride.”

“Okay,” Mack said, mentally filing away the fact that this must be where the phrase grab the brass ring came from.

“This boy said to me, ‘Why should the children strain for the bauble merely to repeat a meaningless experience that only serves to make them aware of the void that lies before them depriving life itself of any meaning?”

“So this boy was French, too?” Mack asked.

“No, he was from India. He had an accent, dark skin, and, as I said, dressed in unusual style.”

Mack got a tingling on the back of his neck. “Wait a sec. It wasn’t Valin, was it?”

“Yes, Mack, it was,” Sylvie said, not surprised that he had guessed.