The Key (The Magnificent 12 3)

“You should be afraid,” Connie said, and made an expressive hand gesture that was a pantomime of throat cutting. “You should be very afraid.”

Mack needed to get closer to use the Vargran spell. He wished that Connie would get out of the way because he figured she was just blinded by love, and he didn’t need to burn her up.

MacGuffin, on the other hand, had it coming.

Now out of the coffin-cell, out in the air with a blue sky overhead and a cool breeze on his face, Mack was recovering fast from his night of terror but now edging into full-blown beard panic.

But here’s the thing about Mack: he was scared of many things, but he wasn’t weak. He could hold it together. Usually.

Except for times when he couldn’t.

“Where are my friends?” Mack demanded, and took another bold step forward.

MacGuffin shot a conspiratorial look at Connie. The two of them seemed to share a private laugh.

“You don’t need to worry about your friends,” Connie said. “In a few minutes you won’t need to worry about anything at all. Ever again.”

Another step closer. Four feet from a bushy red beard!

Close enough. And now Mack decided it was too bad about Connie, but she was a bad, bad fairy. And if Mack died here, all of humanity was doomed.

“Fur th’ crime o’ invading mah secret hame ’n’ trying tae steal mah possessions, ah sentence ye tae death, Mack o’ th’ Magnifica!” MacGuffin cried, and pounded his stick on the ground.

“Oh yeah?” Mack snarled. “And I sentence you to fry like a hamburger.” With a supreme effort of courage he closed his eyes and leaped toward MacGuffin and his beard and cried, “E-ma edras!”

The light was like an explosion. Like someone had taken all the light of the sun, squeezed it into a balloon, then popped that balloon.

It was like a small nuclear fireball.

The heat instantly incinerated two skeletal guards.

It scorched the very walls and made the mortar bubble from between the seams of the stones.

MacGuffin and Connie wavered, like reflections in troubled water.

But not like they were burning up.

The light faded. The searing heat, which had spared Mack as the one who had cast the spell, dissipated.

And MacGuffin still sat calmly while Connie floated on gossamer wings.

“Um …,” Mack said. “Why … why aren’t you …”

“Dead?” MacGuffin asked, and burst out laughing. “Whit a stoatin’ gowk A’d be tae let ye wirk a Vargran spell oan me.”

Which in English was, “What am I, a moron?”

“Turn around, you foolish child,” Connie said.

Slowly Mack turned.

There at the far end of the courtyard was the throne, and MacGuffin upon it. The appearance—the illusion—of MacGuffin just a few feet away from Mack faded like the last scene of a movie.

“Tis nae enough tae huv th’ power, ye mist huv th’ cunning tae uise it.”

Or: “It’s not enough to have the power, you must have the cunning to use it.”

A half dozen skeletons of various species came at a rush.