The Magnificent 12 (7 page)

Twelve

M
ack, too, was thinking, This isn't going to end well. But due to the unfortunate fact that he'd been transported four hundred years into the past, he was thinking it a long time before Camaro thought the same thing.

Also, his feet were cold.

They stumbled finally on a village. It was a primitive place, the village. The village was so primitive it didn't even have a name. At the edge of the village was a sign announcing, “Welcome to” and then just a blank space.

But it was a friendly village just the same. They offered Mack and his little troop a meal of cholera water and eels. Mack traded them the lentils for a pair of shearling-lined boots
33
sewn together with distressed-tendon string. He was glad of that, though Stefan was bitter over the lentils.

“We're looking for a guy who looks kind of like me,” Mack said to the village elder.

The village elder thought about that for a minute, looked around, nodded thoughtfully, and pointed at Mack.

“No, not me. He looks like me.”

The village elder once again nodded thoughtfully, then stroked his chin and pointed at Mack.

This happened six more times before Mack realized that this village was so small that it couldn't afford both a village elder and a village idiot and had therefore combined both jobs into one.
34

Xiao and Stefan went out to look around the village in the vain hope that there had to be a store or a restaurant or something other than nine mud-and-wattle huts surrounded by trees. Mack stayed with Boguslawa and the village elder/idiot.

“I am wanting to have nice house, many goats, and children,” Boguslawa said. “Must be paint and have two windows. Also deep poop hole in floor.”

“Look,” Mack snapped impatiently, “you and I are not engaged. For one thing, we're twelve years old.”

“Is old, yes, for engagement,” Boguslawa said. “But must be engaged before can be married.”

“Listen to me,” Mack grated. His feet were warming up, but all that did was allow him to pay attention to the other stuff that was bothering him. “I am not your boyfriend!”

Boguslawa's face fell. Tears filled her eyes. Her lower lip began to quiver. “You are not liking me?”

Mack rolled his eyes and threw up his hands. “That's not it, Boguslawa. Look, I do like you. I like you a lot. You're beautiful and . . . and, like, sweet and all. And really, if I wasn't busy saving the world, and also twelve, I would totally marry you. But where I come from? You can't get married until you're old.”

“You mean fourteen?” Boguslawa asked, aghast.

Mack thought he had hit upon a good way to put an end to all thoughts of marriage. “Even older,” he said. “I mean, hey, of course if I could, I would totally be your boyfriend but—”

Boguslawa squealed in misplaced delight and threw her arms around Mack.

“A
ha
!” Valin cried.

Because, yes, he had followed Mack through the woods and all the way to the nameless village and had snuck quietly
35
up and overheard the last of that conversation.

“Valin!” Mack cried. “It's not what it looks like!”

Valin pushed his way into the hut. Unfortunately the hut wasn't very well built and the whole thing sort of just fell over, so that now Mack and Boguslawa and the village elder/idiot were just sitting around a weak fire out in the open.

Mack saw, then, just how serious this was going to be. First, Paddy “Nine Iron” Trout was standing with his sword-cane in sword mode.

And second, there were some exceedingly large creatures with stabby razor-wire hands standing all around the village.

“I see you've noticed my Brembles,” Valin said. “Brembles! Seize him!”

Which was how Mack ended up stretched out in the sun later that day with ants stinging him to death.

See how that came full circle?

And now Mack gets stung to death.

Thirteen

F
rom a distance—they were “shopping” at the village's only store, Fleas, Dung, and Beyond—Xiao and Stefan saw Valin and Nine Iron and the Brembles take Mack away.

Stefan started to charge in recklessly, but Xiao put a restraining hand on his arm. (She wasn't attracted to humans, being a dragon, but Stefan did have impressive biceps.)

“No,” Xiao said. “This may be an opportunity.”

“What?” Stefan scowled at her suspiciously. “He's under my wing!”

“You will not prevail against the Brembles. I know this species. They are mentioned in some of my father's books. Once, long ago, they troubled China and were driven off only by deploying vast armies. If you attack, you will die. And Mack along with you.”

Stefan hesitated. The whole “fear” thing was foreign to him. But he understood the part about not being able to save Mack anyway. His job wasn't to act all brave, it was to actually keep Mack safe.

Boguslawa was also left behind by an angry, contemptuous Valin, who called her “a faithless strumpet.” Boguslawa spotted Xiao and Stefan and made her way toward them, weeping and wailing.

“Quickly, before that annoying girl gets here. We must find Sean Patrick. It is the only way to change the course of history and unite him with Boguslawa. I will fly!”

“What? You're going to leave me with that girl?” Stefan was fearless, absolutely fearless. And yet he wasn't sounding fearless.

“Just don't let anything happen to her. The fate of the world may rest on it!” Xiao cried. Then, hesitating, she added in a whisper, “Don't be brave. You must seem to be cowardly.”

“Why?”

“She admires courage. Do you want her to admire you?”

She slipped easily back into dragon form.

Boguslawa freaked out. Stefan had gotten used to seeing Xiao suddenly revealed as a Chinese dragon, but it was all new to Boguslawa. Stefan was about to tell her it was no big deal, but Xiao was right: Boguslawa seemed to have a thing for strong, fearless men. And Stefan knew what he looked like: he was a very good-looking guy. If you liked the tall, blond, icy blue eyes, chiseled features, rippling muscles type of guy.
36

It was time for some acting. But pretending to be afraid did not come naturally to Stefan since he'd never really been afraid. However: he'd been with Mack during at least a dozen phobia meltdowns.

“Oh!” Stefan cried. “Oh that's like scary! Ah. Ah. That creeps me out when she does that.”

“It was disturbing, but . . . ,” Boguslawa said.

“Uh. Uh uh uh uh!” cried Stefan, getting into it a little bit. “Gagagagagagaga!”

“She is gone away, so no more gagagagaga, yes?”

“I have dragon phobia,” Stefan said, having now exhausted his sound effects. “It's . . . kind of rare.”

Boguslawa rolled her eyes. “You are having big muscles not big heart like a lion.”

“Yeah,” Stefan said, feeling a bit of shame even though it was all an act. He sighed. “Let's keep riding, huh?”

And they did keep riding.

There was no way they could possibly realize that at that very moment Mack was being pinned down by Brembles.

And no way to know that Mack would panic and waste his
enlightened puissance
on disappearing some creepy beetles.

And no way to know that Valin was—at that very moment—guiding deadly red ants into a jar that he would forthwith dump on Mack's face.

Fourteen

W
hich brings us back to:

“Let me go!” Mack cried. He pulled at the chulks, but no, he wasn't pulling his way out of this one. The Brembles had him. Valin had him.

And the ants had him.

A second ant stung.

A third.

And now the stinging signal went out through all the ants.

Mack was about to die a most terrible death.

Really.

A fourth and fifth sting made Mack yell and thrash wildly. But now there was no more counting; the stings came fast and furious, a wave of them, pain upon pain, and already Mack felt himself swelling up, felt his airway constrict, felt his heart hammering way too fast, felt . . .

. . . felt death itself approaching, extending its bony claw to snuff the life from him.

“Hug! Ligean dó dul!”

Which obviously is Irish for, “Hey, let him go!”

Mack could barely see—that one ant was still right on his eyeball, and he was dying, after all—but across the field came Sean Patrick MacAvoy. He was armed with a sword and went charging straight at Valin.

Paddy “Nine Iron” Trout raised his cane-sword, preparing to stab Sean Patrick through the heart. Of course this was happening slowly, so unless Sean Patrick stopped to take a short nap, he wasn't in too much danger from the Nafia assassin.

But the Brembles were a different story entirely. All four of the massive, terrifying, evil (soon to be extinct) creatures drew themselves up, ready for a fight. This meant pulling their chulks from the ground, which in turn freed Mack, who was gasping for breath, swelling up, thinking seriously about vomiting, and starting to wonder why the whole world was spinning around and around and around.

The Brembles made an interesting sound. It went like this:
KIIIIIILLLLLL!

The funny thing is that Brembles don't know any actual words, so it's totally coincidental that their wordless, incoherent, oddly high-pitched shriek sounds like a drawn-out version of the word
kill
.

Then again, even though they don't know the word
kill
, that's obviously what they mean when they shriek that way and begin bounding like nightmare hyenas brandishing their chulks and the surrounding tangle of thorns and baring their six rows of teeth.
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Sean Patrick stopped running then because . . . well, because he was about to be killed, that's why. His face was pale as a ghost. Mack was pretty bleary but he thought he might be seeing knees actually knocking together.

“Noooooooo!” Valin cried. “Brembles! To me!”

The Brembles didn't seem to hear; they were about three big bounces away from hitting Sean Patrick like a freight train full of pain.

“Subze-ma Brembles!”

Valin had used Vargran meaning “Freeze, Brembles!” And sure enough, the Brembles stopped cold. Like statues. Frozen in midslaver.

“You can't kill him! He may still be my great-great-great-great-great-great—”

Mack detected a note of impatience from the Brembles despite the fact that they were frozen.

“—great-great-great-grandfather!”

Sean Patrick, to his credit, had recovered his composure, and you almost couldn't see the spot where he had peed his breeches. He had not dropped his sword, and now he advanced with a step that was somewhere about halfway between a swagger and a mince.

“Yeah,” he said, but in Irish. “Take that. You monsters! I'm not afraid of you!”

And then, though his vision was pretty sketchy, Mack was sure he saw Stefan and Xiao walking toward them. With them was Boguslawa.

Boguslawa broke into a run. Stefan started to go after her, but Xiao held him back.

Boguslawa ran to Sean Patrick.

“You are so brave!”

“
Go raibh maith agat
,” Sean Patrick said. “Thanks.”

“I am now loving you,” she said, and looked shyly at Sean Patrick.

“I thought you thought I was a weakling and a coward,” Sean Patrick said. “That's why I was going to break up with you. I couldn't spend my life with someone who thought I was a coward.”

“Of course, when you were weak, scaredy not-a-man, I was contempting you. I am daughter of great Taras Bulba! I am Cossack princess! But now you are not coward, but brave like angry buffalo! So now I am loving you.”

Meanwhile, while all this was going on, Mack was dying of ant venom. In fact he wasn't entirely sure he hadn't hallucinated the whole thing. It certainly was strange enough to be a hallucination. And how was it Sean Patrick could speak English now?

Xiao knelt beside him and spoke some Vargran words that he almost didn't hear because his ears were swollen shut from the stings.

And then he was fine.

This is the excellent thing about magic as opposed to medicine: it works much faster.

“So you'll marry Boguslawa?” Valin asked.

Sean Patrick shrugged. “If she'll have me. I thought she despised me. I can't marry someone who despises me.”

“I am not despising you, you are brave and handsome!” Boguslawa cried, and hugged him.

So it was happiness all over except for the fact that Sean Patrick, overcome with joy, started to say something. He started to say:

“This is wonderful. Now I can realize my dream of becoming a—”

And that's when Xiao tripped and plowed into him in such a way that she accidentally punched him in the jaw.

“So sorry!” Xiao said. “But, moving on, such a happy day!”

Valin, suddenly very formal, said, “Mack MacAvoy, this resolves the feud that has existed between our families for—”

“A feud I knew nothing about and had nothing to do with!” Mack pointed out. If by “pointed out” you mean “angrily asserted.”

“I hereby declare the blood feud over!” Valin said.

“Oh no you . . . ,” Paddy “Nine Iron” said, and reached for his mask.

And breathed.

And breathed.

And breathed.

“Don't!” And with that he raised his sword-cane, pointed it at Valin, and yelled, “Traitor!”

He plunged the sword into Valin's heart. In his imagination.

Put it this way: he intended to plunge the sword into Valin's heart. But between the moment when Paddy decided on that course of action and when he actually did the whole plunging thing, something like sixty seconds passed. During which time Valin had stepped out of the way, patted Paddy on the shoulder, and said, “You've been a good mentor to me. Let's not spoil it with a long good-bye.”

“We need to get back to our own time,” Mack said. The truth was he was feeling very cranky, very resentful, even peeved at Valin. He had a strong desire to punch the crazy kid in the stomach. But he had a job to do. There was a world to be saved, and the clock was ticking. So he swallowed hard, gritted his teeth, and said, “Are you with us, Valin?”

Valin did a sort of bow, a rather dramatic move really. Then he drew his sword and laid it at Mack's feet. “I am yours.”

While that was happening, Paddy made another try at stabbing Valin, and Stefan had to deflect the blade with a stick he had time to fetch.

“I know the way,” Valin said. “We shall all return to our present day. The breach has been healed! The wrong has been undone! My patrimony is assured! My family's shame is negated! I am free! Free as never before!”

Valin went on with more of that, but Mack kind of stopped listening. He was going to need a bit more time to get over the fact that Valin had very nearly killed him. But he needed Valin, and sometimes, when necessity demands it, you have to move past your petty grudges.

“Swell,” Mack said. As they headed off to the lake where they had first emerged in this time and place, Mack pulled Xiao aside. “What was it that Sean Patrick was about to say to Boguslawa?”

“That he has been taking classes from a man who hopes to pass his business on to Sean Patrick. A man who hopes Sean Patrick will be like the son he never had and carry the honored family name forward.”

“Are you about to tell me . . . ?”

Xiao nodded. “Yes. Sean Patrick has been apprentice to a clown.”

“Um . . .”

“He says if he studies hard and gets good enough, he will inherit the title of . . . Izmir the Clown.”

“Whatever you do—” Mack warned.

“Not a word to Valin,” Xiao swore. “Not a word.”

Paddy “Nine Iron” Trout was at a loss. He didn't want to live in the year 1634. There were medications and ointments in the twenty-first century that he would have a hard time finding here. On the other hand, he also didn't want to face the wrath of the Pale Queen when she learned he had let Valin join the Magnificent Twelve.

He thought it over quickly, but by the time he reached a conclusion the next morning, he was alone.