The Key (12 page)

There were many things that Vargran might cure, but boys being just a few steps behind girls was too basic a fact of life for mere magic to alter.

“I have always known that I was strange,” Sylvie said as the jet rose steeply away from Inverness and arced out over the sea. “As a little girl I did not play with dolls. I did not play at all, except in my imagination. In my imagination I saw myself as a warrior, and a companion to other warriors. Strange, no? Because most little girls see themselves as princesses.”

“Strange maybe,” Mack allowed. “But Xiao is a dragon, so the bar is pretty high on ‘strange' in this group. Dietmar was a little like you: he kind of knew something was coming, if you know what I mean.”

He wanted to bite his tongue. Why would he draw her attention to Dietmar?

“How did you just happen to be in Scotland?”

“I did not ‘just happen,'” Sylvie said. “It is more complicated than that. It began for me in the summer. Fouras is a village with beaches. Tourists come to swim and lie in the sun, yes?”

“
Oui
,” he said, feeling self-conscious.
Oui
was pretty much the limit of his French.

“My parents have a small merry-go-round near the beach. There are restaurants and
crêperies
and souvenirs, and there is the merry-go-round. Only it is not so merry, I think. I find it melancholy. Children climb on looking for joy and find only a meaningless circular pursuit that cannot relieve the existential pain of existence, the fundamental ennui that must afflict any thinking person.”

Mack had no idea what she had just said, beyond “merry-go-round,” but he loved the way she said it.

“There was a boy there, one day. He was strangely dressed, flamboyant, you might say. I was collecting tickets, and he said to me, ‘What is that brass ring that you taunt the children with?'

“You see,” Sylvie explained, “a brass ring dangles from a rope. It is yanked here and there by my mother, or by me when I am helping. A child who rides the wooden ponies must grab the ring to get a free ride.”

“Okay,” Mack said, mentally filing away the fact that this must be where the phrase
grab the brass ring
came from.

“This boy said to me, ‘Why should the children strain for the bauble merely to repeat a meaningless experience that only serves to make them aware of the void that lies before them depriving life itself of any meaning?”

“So this boy was French, too?” Mack asked.

“No, he was from India. He had an accent, dark skin, and, as I said, dressed in unusual style.”

Mack got a tingling on the back of his neck. “Wait a sec. It wasn't Valin, was it?”

“Yes, Mack, it was,” Sylvie said, not surprised that he had guessed.

“But didn't you say he was your brother?” Mack said, and then, without waiting for Sylvie's response, added, “And doesn't he work for Paddy ‘Nine Iron' Trout?”

Sylvie shrugged expressively. “He learns from the man in green, but does he serve him? Valin serves himself alone, I think.”

“As long as he is working against us, he's working for the Pale Queen,” Mack said sharply.

“You see the world in simple black and white? It must be us and them? Good and evil?”

“In this case, yeah,” Mack said. “The Pale Queen is evil.”

“How do you know this? Because the ancient Grimluk has told you?”

Mack moved back a few inches. “Okay, yes. But I've also met Risky. That girl is evil.”

“You feel it here?” Sylvie lay her hand over his heart.

He nodded because he couldn't speak.

Sylvie returned that wordless gesture. “Yes. And so I felt when Valin introduced me to
l'homme en vert
, the man in green. Paddy ‘Nine Iron' Trout.”

“Yeah, he gives off a kind of evil vibe.”

“A vibe. Yes,” Sylvie said, not quite agreeing. “It was Valin who told me that I was one of the Magnificent Twelve. He told me that the strangeness of my life was because of this curse.”

“Curse?” The word surprised Mack.

“Of course it is a curse. How could it be a blessing, Mack? To have power is to have responsibility. I would have to devote my life to maintaining the empty shell of existence.”

“Um … well, I kind of guess I don't think existence is meaningless,” Mack said.

That caused one of Sylvie's eyebrows to rise in amused skepticism, but she didn't respond directly. “Valin told me all. He revealed what I had never known: that we shared a father. But Valin was obsessed with his mother's side of his family, indifferent to the father we shared. He told me that a terrible wrong had been done to his family by your people.”

“Did he tell you what his beef was? Because as far as I know, my family is pretty boring.”

“It was a long time ago,” Sylvie said.

“Even a long time ago my family was boring.”

“He did not explain this … as you said, beef. Instead he told me of himself and of the man in green. He told me too much, perhaps. Because as he explained, it seemed to me that I must not join him. But rather that I should fight against him.”

“Wouldn't that be meaningless, too?”

“I must defend
la liberté
, liberty, no? I am French, after all.”

That seemed obvious to her, and Mack was frankly so confused by Sylvie he felt it best just to keep quiet.

“Valin, he foolishly trusted me with the names of two others who he would attempt to recruit to his side.”

“You beat him to those two?”

For the first time, Sylvie smiled. “Valin is very old-fashioned. He does not know email, texting, Facebook, Twitter, or Google Plus. Before he could even begin to reach the two, I had found them online. They figured out ways to come to Paris. And I went in search of you, to unite us all together.”

“How did you find me?”

“You leave a trail of YouTubes behind you, Mack.”

Mack thought back on the first shaky YouTube video that showed him and Stefan running from Skirrit at Richard Gere Middle School;
²⁵
the YouTube video of him being dragged out the door of a jet by a monstrous version of Risky; the one about the swollen, bloated blue-cheese-filled Lepercons; the one some shaky tourist had filmed of the Great Wall of China.... Yes, he hadn't exactly concealed his tracks. It didn't seem as if the authorities had caught on yet. There were millions of hits on Mack's various inadvertent (and terrifying) videos, but the consensus of opinion was that it was all a massive game being perpetrated as part of an advertising campaign for a movie.

“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.”

“He must really not be very happy with you, and I guess you don't like him much,” Mack said, probing for any lingering loyalty she might have for her half brother.

But her eyes blazed with sudden fury. “Why do you think I traveled to Scotland with my grandparents and not my mother and father?”

“I—”

“Valin!” She spit the word out like it was a bad olive pit. “He sought to control me by placing a Vargran spell on my parents.”

“What spell?”

“My parents are no longer merely the owners of the merry-go-round,” she said. “My father is one of the wooden horses. My mother is a wooden swan.”

Mack felt as if his heart had stopped. And he had been suspicious of her.

“They go round and round now, in a meaningless dance to music they cannot hear, twirling through the void.”

At which point, with a shuddering thud, the jet touched down at Charles de Gaulle Airport, outside Paris.

M
ack, Jarrah, Dietmar, Xiao, Sylvie, and Stefan took the train from the airport into the city. Needless to say, none of them had ever been to Paris before, except for Sylvie.

It's quite a city.

You start with the river that runs through it: the Seine. It's a moderately large river, much more than a stream, but not quite the Mississippi, either. It doesn't hurry, but it doesn't meander. It sort of chugs along.

There are lots of bridges, most fairly modest but some with golden lion statues and whatnot. There are lots of boats—barges and tugboats and especially the
bateaux mouches
, which are amazingly long and narrow and usually glass-bubbled with tourists staring out at the city.

In the middle of the river is a pair of islands, one of which is home to the Gothic cathedral of Notre-Dame—a very Hunchback of Notre-Dame kind of place.

There's the Arc de Triomphe, which is a sort of massive stone arch marooned in the middle of a crazy traffic circle with about nine different roads coming in.

But the most identifiable sight in Paris is the Eiffel Tower. When the Eiffel Tower was first built (coincidentally by a guy named Eiffel, what are the odds?) everyone was all like, “Man, that sucks.” Or in French, “
Mais, que cela sucks, n'est-ce pas?
”

The problem was that the Eiffel Tower looked like it was made out of an Erector set, which was what kids played with before the invention of Legos, which was what kids played with before the invention of iPad games.