The Key (The Magnificent 12 3)

Mack pulled out the two pieces of the Key and laid them on the coffee table.

“We prepared a little and still ended up nearly getting killed by those giant things. We need more. We need each of us to know at least three spells in Vargran. We need some of those to be things we do on our own, and others to be things we can do together, in combinations.”

Xiao sat down beside him and gazed thoughtfully at the stone circles. “There are not a lot of words in this language. We should be able to learn a fair amount. But where do we start?”

Mack thought about that, as did the others. Then he smiled. “We want something very big and very public. Something undeniable, right? Okay, then simple question: What’s the Vargran word for ‘tower’?”

* * *

Twenty-two

* * *

They worked the night through, not that it was ever daylight down in the sewer tunnels.

/> But by morning they were a tighter group than they had been. They were prepared. They had a plan. Well, a plan of sorts.

But there’s an old saying among soldiers: no plan ever survives contact with the enemy.

Contact with the enemy came much sooner than they had expected.

As they were retracing their steps toward the lighted part of the tunnel, Mack again heard the scritchy-scratchy sound of rats. Stefan was walking right behind him, prepared for a friendly mouth clamp and possible head smack.

Mack felt a little better walking out of the sewers than he had walking in, for the same reason it’s better to be getting out of a casket than into one.

He had it under control, so long as they didn’t stay down there too long. And so long as there weren’t, oh, let’s say, rats.

Mack had picked up a pretty good flashlight in the underground hideaway, so he now aimed it at the rats, hoping to scare them off.

Only they were not rats. Not even big rats. They were, for lack of a better word, centipedes.

Big centipedes.

The flashlight beam highlighted a particular one that was just a little bit out in front of the others. Mack stared for what felt like a very long time but was probably no more than a second. In that second he saw a glistening, pulsating, yellow-white wormlike body, way too many legs, and a face dominated by dead-staring insect eyes and gnashing mouthparts, and really, that was all he needed to know to figure out his next statement. Which was:

“Ruuuuun!”

The others had seen what he’d seen and, not surprisingly, they agreed with his recommendation that they ruuuuun!

They ran. But so did the centipede things. And with that many legs, they were fast. They were especially fast running upside down on the ceiling. Something about six-foot-long insects running down the arched roof of an ancient sewer struck particular terror into Mack, and he wondered in some still-functioning part of his mind whether he had just developed a phobia about centipedes.

But no: phobias are irrational fears, and this fear was extremely rational because now one of the creatures was directly over Mack’s head. He could reach up and touch it. (He didn’t.)

But there was Stefan, right beside Mack. He pushed Mack forward, then leaped straight up, wrapped his arms around the giant bug, and yanked it down off the ceiling.

The centipede landed on its back, legs motoring madly in the air as it squirmed and tried to turn over. Stefan stomped once. Hard. His foot landed right where a centipede might have a neck if it had one (no, it didn’t), and two segments of the creature’s body popped apart. Thick, viscous yellow goo, like Play-Doh pushed through one of those squishy machines, came fast then slowed.

The centipede’s tail end thrashed. The mouthparts gnashed.

Stefan looked at the hundreds of bugs now coating every surface of the sewer tunnel and said, “Who’s next?”

The bug army had stopped to witness the one-sided combat. Now they seemed uncertain whether to rush Stefan or not. So Stefan helped them make up their minds. He squatted beside the squashed bug and twisted until its head came all the way off. Through all this, the mouthparts, driven by the simple bug nervous system, continued to gnash.

Stefan stood up, held the head with the gnashing mouthparts out like a weapon. And laughed.

The centipedes were creatures of the Pale Queen. And they lived beneath Paris (and a few other cities as well), so they’d seen some things down through the ages. But they had not seen an apparently crazy teenager brandishing the head of their squashed leader.

Regular centipedes are not known to have a reverse gear.