The Key (16 page)

And the rectangle grew until it was revealed as a doorway. They stepped into a room with tall stone walls. Also, a flat-screen TV mounted on one of those walls. It was showing an old
Fairly OddParents
cartoon. But everyone was speaking French. Even Timmy.

Two kids stood within that room, eyes wary, poised to fight or flee.

One was a tall, painfully thin boy with brown hair and a sharp-featured, handsome face. He wore stylish glasses and had the collar of his shirt turned perfectly to frame his jawline.

The other boy was shorter, a bit stout, with full lips and a look of interested but sarcastic intelligence about him.

“We weren't really watching that,” Rodrigo said, pointing his male-model chin at the TV.

“Actually, we were,” Charlie said. “Because we only get the one channel down here. And no one thought to set the place up with books or games, so we're going slowly out of our minds and we would watch anything, anything at all.”

“Except
Jersey Shore
,” Rodrigo interjected. “I'll turn it off.”

“No!” Mack said, way too urgently. “No, no. It's … soothing.”

Obviously Stefan had let go of Mack. Stefan had a pretty good grasp of Mack's phobias by this point. He wasn't academically gifted, Stefan, but he had a certain intuitive grasp of other people's weaknesses. He got Mack. And so he knew that a well-lit underground room, especially one with a TV, was manageable for Mack. After all, no one ever got buried alive with a TV and Nicktoons playing.

Sylvie did the formal introductions. And she gave a brief explanation. “Long ago this was a secret place for people hiding from the king.”

“Which king?”

“All of them, really. All of them tried to kill their enemies.” Sylvie shrugged. “Kings. It's what they do. Later they hid from the emperors. And various invaders. Most recently cheese makers have used it to hide from health inspectors from Brussels. And now, we use it.”

“How did you know you had to hide?” Mack asked, feeling the panic sweat begin to cool.

“A creature that fires tiny arrows out of its fingers shot me once here.” Rodrigo pointed to his left bicep. “And would have shot me many more places except that I jumped out of a second-floor window.”

“I wonder if those are Bowands,” Mack said wearily. He hadn't seen them, just heard of them in one of Grimluk's grim perorations.
³²

“And I figured it out when an old fart dressed in green sicced a bunch of lederhosen-wearing dwarves on me,” Charlie said.

“Paddy ‘Nine Iron' Trout and the treasonous Tong Elves,” Jarrah said.

“What's that, a rock band?” Charlie asked.

“A Nafia assassin and … well, a bunch of treasonous Tong Elves.”

“Okay then, it's all perfectly clear,” Charlie said sarcastically. “Can we get out of here now? I doubt you've noticed, but it smells a bit down here. And the entertainment options are quite limited.”

“Things are a little dangerous out there,” Mack said. “So we need to be prepared. Let's take a minute and plan.”

“I've got it,” Charlie said. “You stay and plan; I am out of here.”

“Dude,” Mack said, and put his hand on the boy's arm.

Charlie's eyes narrowed dangerously. “Hey. Who died and made you king?”

“He's the leader of the group,” Jarrah said, looking every bit as dangerous as Charlie.

“Says who?” Charlie demanded.

“Says Grimluk,” Mack said.

“And the rest of us,” Jarrah said.

“And me,” Stefan said.

Then Charlie had an opportunity to take a close-up look at Stefan because Stefan stepped up to him and stood very close, which brought Charlie's nose to about the level of Stefan's muscle-bound chest and swollen biceps.

“Yes, well, all right then,” Charlie said briskly.

Mack sat down on the couch. He sighed. “We're trapped in this game where we're trying to get the Twelve together and Risky is chasing us. All she has to do to win is make sure we never get to twelve. And she already has Valin. So, I've been thinking about this—in between being stomped by giants—and I think we need to go on the offensive. We need to start hitting back now that we have the Key. Maybe the first thing to do is go right at them.”

“Go at them?” Dietmar asked in a shrill, disbelieving voice. “How do we do that?”

Mack shrugged. He hadn't figured that out yet.

“If I want a fight, I call someone out,” Stefan said.

“What does that mean, call someone out?” Rodrigo asked, intrigued, as if he liked the sound of it.

“It means I say, ‘You, me, after school,'” Stefan said.

Mack had received just such an invitation from Stefan. So had many others. Stefan had changed, but he had not changed completely.

“We issue a challenge? Why would we do that?” Dietmar asked.

“To throw them off balance,” Xiao said. “To force them out into the open. For all the power of my people, we have survived by remaining hidden. The dragons of China would never have survived if people had known about us.”

“Maybe that's the takeaway from old Billy Blisterthöng, eh?” Jarrah said, nodding. “He was all tough and bad so long as he was invisible to the world.”

Sylvie said, “People have seen the YouTubes of different things you have done, but I have read the comments and most people think they are fake. Many think they are some strange advertising, as if the display of your raw emotions and the suspension of normalcy is too threatening to accept. They prefer the comfort of self-deception. It is as if to believe this truth is to be cast into the abyss, the bottomless emptiness that is existence without—”

“Riiight,” Jarrah said, cutting her off with a sigh and rolling her eyes. “We gotta make people believe us. Gotta rub their faces in it.”

Mack nodded. “We need help. Which means we need people looking for the Skirrit and the Tong Elves and the Gudridan. We need people to be watching for Paddy Nine Iron. And Valin.”

“Call them out,” Charlie said, adopting the phrase. Then, in a sardonic tone, “What could possibly go wrong?”

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'?”

T
hey 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.

These did.

The centipede army backed slowly away, reversing down the tunnel.

Stefan looked at Mack, showed him the head, and said, “Can I keep this?”

“Sure,” Mack said. “As long as you carry it.”

Stefan stuck the head under his arm, much as a Frenchman might carry a baguette, and they marched, unhurried, toward the lit areas of the sewers and, hopefully, safety.

Rodrigo was next to Mack. “You know, I wondered what Stefan's purpose was. I think I understand perfectly now.” He walked a few more steps. “And I think I am just the smallest bit afraid of him.”

Mack shrugged. “He's much better to have on your side than against you.”

They emerged at last into the too-bright light of a beautiful Parisian day. After the dimness below, they blinked and shaded their eyes for a while.

“So, the Eiffel Tower is that way,” Dietmar said, pointing downriver. “Not so far. We can take a Métro or—”

“I think I've seen enough of underground Paris,” Charlie said. “I'm supposed to be here on a school tour. And I must say, this is the worst tour ever.”

“Let's walk along the river,” Sylvie suggested.

“Should we cross back to the other side?” Xiao wondered.

“Over the same bridge with those giant things?” Dietmar said. “That seems like a bad idea.”

So they walked along in lovely fall sunlight next to the Seine. It was almost possible to forget the deadly nature of their mission. There are some good things about being twelve years old: you recover quickly from events that might destroy the mind and break the will of an adult. Adults are fragile and easily frightened. Try saying the word
biopsy
to an adult. Or
tax audit
. See? It's easy to scare an adult.

But the effects of sunlight and the slow-moving river and the amazing beauty of the city around them restored their spirits more quickly than an adult could even imagine. The only off note was that some of the people they passed stared at Stefan's giant bug head, which was now gnashing more feebly, but still gnashing.

Mack pulled out his phone to check for messages. There were about a dozen, including various spams, something from his school, two Facebook friend requests, and something from the golem.