The Call (The Magnificent 12 1)

“We knew it was some great evil, Mum,” Jarrah said. She was trying to sound reassuring, but Mack could tell she was shaken up.

“The old ones say she was bound for all time in the underworld, in the vast World Below. Forever!” Karri said.

“Or three thousand years, whichever came first,” Mack said. “All of which is very informative, but what are we going to do about whatever is digging its way through to us?”

“I was hoping you knew,” Jarrah said.

“Me?” Mack laughed, but not in a funny way. “How would I know? I only remembered that one thing I heard from Grimluk. Like some kind of magic spell or whatever, but you heard the elves: it only works once every twenty-four hours.”

“It was Vargran, wasn’t it?” Jarrah asked. She pointed at the wall. “That is all written in Vargran.”

“We believe it’s some kind of sacred language,” Karri said. “A very ancient tongue…”

“Yeah. It’s magic or whatever,” Mack said. “So what can we use?”

“We can read it; we can’t really pronounce it!”

“Give me something, anything,” Mack snapped. His claustrophobia had been temporarily displaced by the fear of the princess-monster who somehow was digging through solid rock to get at him.

“I know the words for all the numbers,” Karri said frantically.

“Is there a math test, Mum?” Jarrah cried. “If not, maybe something else would be better than numbers.”

“I think I know how to say moon: (sniff) asha. And sky: urza. And sun: edras. And we have the verb to be: e, e-tet, e-til, e-ma. And…and…and…”

“Wait,” Mack said. “You can say sun?”

“Yes.”

“And you can say to be?”

“There are four tenses: present, past, future, and ‘or else.’”

“‘Or else?’”

“It implies an order that must be followed or else.”

“Hope my parents never learn it,” Mack said. His mind was going a mile a minute. Possibly faster. “Say it. Say, ‘Be sun. Or else.”

“E-ma edras?” Karri said.

“Yes. Like that,” Mack said thoughtfully.

The chewing sound was a jackhammer noise now. A crack appeared in the polished wall. Small rocks became dislodged.

“Whatever it is, it’s coming straight through the wall,” Jarrah said.

“I’ll try to protect you,” Stefan said to Mack.

“Thanks,” Mack said. “And I’ll try to protect you, Jarrah.”

Jarrah made a dismissive snort. “I don’t need protecting.” She grabbed a short steel shovel and swung it once, testing the weight. “Yeah, whoever this is, she gets it good and hard.” The polished wall was shaking like an off-balance washing machine now. The noise was incredible. The wall cracked like a windshield in a car accident, star patterns racing across the rock.

Suddenly a ten-foot-diameter section of the wall collapsed. They could see a tunnel. And standing in that tunnel was a redheaded girl with lovely green eyes and massive three-pronged hands. Each prong was a shard of diamond so big it would make every diamond ever mined look like a speck of dust.

“Well, hello again, Mack,” Risky said. “What a coincidence you being here.”

The diamond-tipped hands were slowly melting away to be replaced by Risky’s milky-white fingers dipped in blood-red polish.