The Key (The Magnificent 12 3)

“Still, how could you find exactly where I was?” Mack asked. A bit of suspicion wormed at his brain. Sylvie had been friends with Valin. She had met Nine Iron.

“I knew a Vargran phrase that led me to you.”

“Valin taught you Vargran?”

“No, not that. Valin is not a fool. As I told you, I have always known there was something odd about me. You see, from early on I had found a Vargran artifact.”

“Where? At the merry-go-round?”

She gave him a reproachful look. “Do not toy with me, Mack. No, I found it in the moat of the fort. There is a Vauban fort in Fouras. It is not so ancient, only a few centuries old. It was used under Napoléon’s rule. It has a moat, but the moat has long been dry, and children climb down there to play, or to hide from the petty tyranny of bourgeois parents.”

“Okay.”

“One day I was down there, alone, and I felt a strange presence. I looked up, and there appeared a spectral shape. A very ancient man with green-tinged fingernails and few teeth.”

“Grimluk?”

“Grimluk. He was weak and failing—”

“He always is.”

“And his time was short—”

“I’ve heard that before.”

“And when he spoke, it was in a riddle, gasping, incoherent and very hard to understand.”

“That’s Grimluk, all right,” Mack confirmed.

“He drew my attention to a piece of stone sticking up out of the muck of the moat. Then he faded from view. I went back the next day with a toy shovel—laughable, no? I had no true shovel, only a mockery of a shovel. But I dug, Mack. I dug like a mad thing, flinging clods of mud in every direction, in a frenzy, until, with dirt-crusted fingernails, I could claw away the last of the mud and see that to the stone was attached a golden shield.”

“Gold?”

“Gold does not tarnish, Mack. Not even after three thousand years. A scene was etched into that gold. It showed a terrible monster, unimaginable, huge, and surrounded by minions of a dozen horrible types. And facing them, twelve.... Just twelve.”

“The original Magnificent Twelve,” Mack said in an awestruck whisper.

“Yes. And along the edges of that depiction were strange words written in a strange alphabet. Each day I came back to that stone. I concealed it with branches so that only I could feast greedy eyes upon it. I tried to puzzle out the words, you see. For such a long time it did not work. Then, one day, I spoke the words flee-ma omias. All at once the moat began to fill with water. I was terrified, of course, and more so still when I saw that the rising water was filled with panicked fish, all thrashing as though to escape the water itself. You see, I had spoken the Vargran word for ‘run’ and the word for ‘fish.’”

“Run fish?”

“In the imperative, ‘or else’ tense. It was a macabre horror,” Sylvie said.

“Fish trying to run away?”

“Have you ever seen a thousand panicked fish?”

“Not really.”

“It is something you will never forget. I climbed the vines to escape the moat. I thought it was a hallucination. But the next day the town was abuzz with the miracle of fish appearing suddenly in the moat. Dead of course, since the water soon seeped away. The smell was very bad.”

“It would be.”

“It was weeks before I ventured into the moat again. But with those first words I was able to unravel the meaning of the remaining words. I learned perhaps two dozen Vargran words.”

“You learned enough to save my life,” Mack said.

“Also enough to know that Valin was tricking me. For, you see, he refused to teach me any Vargran himself. He only wished to neutralize me, to use me to find others, and thus destroy you and your mission.”