The Key (The Magnificent 12 3)
“You’ve used up your enlightened puissance for a while,” Connie said. “And by the time you are strong enough to cast another Vargran spell … well …”
And that is how we come to the point where Mack was bound in the basket of a trebuchet.
“Cheerio the nou, ye scunner,” MacGuffin said, and he swung the sword.
The blade parted the frayed rope.
Gravity worked the way it usually does, and the big basket of rocks dropped like a big basket of rocks.
“Aaaahhh!” Mack screamed.
It was like being shot from a cannon.
Mack flew like … okay, like a cannonball.
The flight lasted only seconds. Then he hit the wall of Urquhart Castle. His bones were all broken. His skull popped open like a dropped melon. He was dead before the gelatinous mass of his pulverized body could ooze down to—
Okay, that’s not what happened. It’s what would have happened. Except that Stefan had made good on his promise to round up a crowd.
He had done it by spotting a pair of tour buses that were parked just off the road at Urquhart Castle, waiting to visit said castle and watch the sun rise and light up Loch Ness.
Stefan banged on the doors and then each of the windows of the buses, hammering them with his fists and yelling, “The Loch Ness monster is running around loose! Grab your cameras!”
For a while the sleepy tourists just stared at him. Then, one man—a man with two cameras slung around his neck—broke and ran for the door.
“This way!” Stefan shouted, and the man, bless his gullible heart, followed.
Well, that was all it took. Because there was no way the rest of the tourists were going to sit idly by while that one guy got all the good pictures.
In a flash both buses were gushing forth the usual bus-tourist folk: people in Bermuda shorts who had no business wearing shorts; old couples with matching plaid outfits; sullen goth teenagers who couldn’t believe they were stuck touring with their grandparents OMG; guys with unfortunate facial hair; women in giant bonnets; the kind of old dudes who like to repeat stupid jokes until you laugh just to make them stop; cheek pinchers; sour-faced crones; tiny Asian people who take pictures of everything, even the bus tires; vegans wearing hemp T-shirts—the entire cross section of subspecies Touristus fotograficus.15
All of them raced after Stefan, who led them away from the actual lake and toward a hill that neither they (nor Stefan himself) could see.
The crowd faltered then.
They slowed.
They began to think they were being made fools of. Then Jarrah, Xiao, and Dietmar rose from behind a stone wall.
The three of them joined hands. They focused on what united them: affection and concern for Mack, a Determination16 to Stop the Pale Queen, and Regret17 at not getting some Magnum bars for themselves.
Hands linked, with Jarrah in the middle.
Hands linked, they climbed atop the stone wall. And for the first time in 3,000 years, a group spell was spoken in the Vargran language.
“Oscur exelmo oo-ma!”
The three Magnifica waited. Tense. Scared.
And then, the goth tourist kid said, “Whoa.”
She was a girl. Not quite a teen. Maybe … well, exactly … twelve years old.
“There’s a castle there. On top of a mountain.”
She was with her grandparents. Not the wrinkled-up type of grandparents—these
were the active, fit, nutrition-beverage-drinking kind of grandparents.