The Trap (12 page)

“This is an ancient place,” Xiao said. “I feel long memories touching this place. Strangeness. Danger. Evil. But faith and hope, too.”

“It has a certain Uluruness about it,” Jarrah admitted.

“There are stairs climbing up. A walkway. Do we go?” Xiao asked.

Nine Iron stood between them and the start of the ascending path. Tourists from the bus were unlimbering their cameras, stretching, looking around anxiously for a restroom.

“I don't see any Lepercons,” Mack said. “And if we run—or even walk quickly—we can get around Nine Iron.”

Stefan, however, was not interested in getting around Nine Iron. He strode with manly purpose straight toward the ancient man in green.

“You and me, old man,” Stefan said.

Nine Iron grinned wickedly with his unhealthy horse teeth and his pale, bloodless lips. He slowly drew his cane-sword.

Stefan waited. “First thing I'm going to do is shove that cane right up your—”

And that's when someone stepped out from behind Nine Iron.

He couldn't be more than twelve. He was a smallish kid. He had skin the color of caramel, big dark eyes, long black hair with lots of body, tied in a thick ponytail.

He was dressed in loose-fitting, even billowy white trousers. His shirt was a close-fitting embroidered jacket of a strange pinkish, salmonish color.

Around his waist was a green satin sash. Two jeweled scabbards were stuck into that sash. And in his hand was a staff maybe five feet long.

This rather incredible-looking boy twirled the staff in one hand with practiced ease.

Nine Iron said, “May I present my apprentice.”

“Valin,” the boy said. And he bowed from the waist, just a slight inclination, and an arrogant one at that. He smirked at Mack, ignoring Stefan.

“Step off, kid,” Stefan warned.

Valin laughed delightedly. “I am well-versed in all manner of combat, mayhem, brawling, and assassination.”

“Good for you,” Stefan said. He reached to shove the boy aside.

That's when the stick whirled in Valin's hand and knocked Stefan's hand aside, spun, smacked Stefan in the side of the head, and ended by jabbing at Stefan's stomach.

Stefan landed flat on his behind, but he was up in the blink of an eye.

“Little weird dude, stay out of my way,” Stefan warned. “Or I might kill you by accident.”

“That would be a very . . . ,” Nine Iron began.
Wheeze. Wheeze.
“. . . bad idea. You see, my apprentice here is one of you.”

“It's true,” Valin said. “I, too, have the
enlightened puissance
. But unlike you hopeless fools, I serve the Pale Queen.”

W
hat?” Mack said.

“You can't be on her side!” Jarrah cried.

“That is cheating!” Dietmar cried.

Valin shrugged. “If you kill me, you will never assemble the full Magnificent Twelve. And if you don't kill me, then I will kill you.”

“Wait a minute,” Mack said. “You're twelve and you're already evil? That's impossible!”

“Really?” Valin asked smugly. “Think about it.”

So Mack did think about it. And when he thought back over the many twelve-year-olds he knew or had known, he was a lot less sure that none of them were evil. Still, actually working for the Pale Queen and being an apprentice to a Nafia assassin seemed a little much. He said so.

Mack was stalling. First because it seemed crazy, even by the new and lower standards of crazy he had come to accept. He wanted some explanation.

But he was also stalling because Stefan was edging away unnoticed by the arrogant and flamboyantly attired stranger. It was absolutely impossible that Stefan would be fleeing, which could only mean that Stefan was up to something.

“Did you have, like, a bad childhood or something?” Mack pressed.

Valin made a phony sad face and said, “It's been a hard life for me. Boo-hoo.”

“Maybe we could get you some counseling.”

Valin's smirk evaporated. “You know nothing, fool. You don't know who I am. Or where I come from. Or why it is that I must destroy you.”

“I've got some free time,” Mack said. “You could tell me all about it.”

“I think not,” the boy said. “I will only say that when I have destroyed you, my family will be avenged for an ancient injustice done to us by your family.”

“I don't think my mom and dad ever—” Mack began.

“He's stalling,” Nine Iron broke in. “Take him, my young apprentice!”

Mack figured he only needed another few seconds. He figured this because, as always, he noticed things. And the thing he had noticed was that the tour bus's engine had just roared to life. And he had a pretty good idea who was sitting behind the wheel.

“Stalling? Me? I just have an interest in history,” Mack said. It was a statement that would have caused his history teacher at Richard Gere Middle School (Go, Fighting Pupfish!) to laugh and laugh and then start weeping.

There came the grinding of gears, and the bus came wallowing up over the lawn.

Nine Iron spun toward the bus with his usual catlike speed—if the cat you're talking about is a dead one. But Valin was much quicker. He grabbed his ancient master and threw him to the ground.

The bus swept over them both.

Stefan hit the brakes, and the bus stopped with both Nine Iron and Valin beneath it.

“Go go go!” Mack yelled.

He, Dietmar, Jarrah, and Xiao raced for the path up onto the Externsteine. Stefan brought up the rear.

It took a while for Valin to extricate Nine Iron from under the bus. He had to crawl back under to retrieve his master's cane-sword. Then he had to wait for Nine Iron to gasp, wheeze, cough, pant, gargle a little phlegm, and take a good spit. And by then the Magnificent Four were pushing past slow-moving tourists and racing up stone steps and across rickety, rusted steel arches, from stone to stone, toward the pinnacle.

They reached the top, gasping for breath and calling out apologies to the middle-aged folks they'd shoved past. Valin was far below, rushing to catch them but still a few minutes away.

“Okay, now what?” Mack gasped.

“Yes, now what?” Dietmar echoed.

“Hey! I thought you knew!”

Dietmar looked very serious. “I have been here many times, it is true. After all, this place is on our family crest. But—”

“Your what now?”

“Our family crest. The coat of arms of the Detmold branch of the von Augestein dynasty. The symbol of our family. It shows the helmet of Helmut der Zusammenhanglos—Helmut the Incoherent—the greatest of the von Augesteins in the fourteenth century, renowned for his inability to make anything clear. Below Helmut's helmet are three black lions above the Externsteine. And of course our family motto, which was written by Helmut and is therefore completely incoherent.”

“The incoherent thing seems to have been passed on,” Jarrah said. “Didn't understand a word of that. And by the way: ticktock! That crazy kid is coming!”

Xiao seemed mildly irritated by Jarrah. “You should not show disrespect for Dietmar's ancestors.”

Mack said, “Why is the motto incoherent?”

Dietmar shrugged. “It is written in a strange alphabet, symbols that mean nothing.”

Jarrah's curiosity beat out her skepticism. “Can you draw them here? The symbols, I mean.”

“I have nothing to draw with.”

Jarrah stuck her finger in her mouth and used the spit to draw on a flat altar.

“Ah,” Dietmar said with obvious distaste. “Of course I know the symbols. The family crest is on all our dinner plates; I have often puzzled over it.”

He drew.

Valin raced.

Stefan blocked his path at one end of a short but scary bridge.

“It's Vargran!” Jarrah said, watching as Dietmar finished. “And it says . . .” Jarrah frowned, concentrating. “It says, ‘Open the stairway to heaven.' I think. Of course, if you were speaking Vargran, you'd say, ‘
Sec-et eb etchi n(ch) alinea
.'”

Mack flinched. He looked around. He breathed a sigh of relief. “I was halfway expecting something crazy to happen.”

Dietmar was obviously deeply impressed by what Jarrah had told him. “I cannot believe that after many centuries we know that our family motto is
Sec-et eb etchi n(ch) alinea
.”

Mack flinched again. And this time he was right to flinch because suddenly the ground began to shake.

“Earthquake!” Mack cried.

“We have no earthquakes in Germany!” Dietmar protested.

“You do now,” Jarrah said. “Welcome to the Magnificent Twelve!”

“Hey, all you people, get off these rocks!” Mack yelled to the middle-aged tourists.

Dietmar yelled it in German. Roughly, “
Getten zee offen den rocks!
” At least that's how it sounded to Mack.

People were running, pelting back down the stairs and across the connecting bridges. People will do that in an earthquake: they will run and they will totally pelt. And as luck would have it, Valin was unprepared for the pelting. He was swept away by the frightened hordes.

The Externsteine was shaking. The rock pillars were swaying back and forth like tween girls at a Ke$ha concert. The gloomy little lake was rippled and splashing.

Unfortunately Mack didn't have the option of running. He just mostly had to stand there atop the pillar, hands out for balance, like a surfer trying to ride a really big wave.

Stefan made his way to his side and said a thoughtful, deeply impressed “Huh.”

The smallest of the pillars suddenly upended with a great noise of ripping roots and flying dirt. It rolled end over end, like a slow baton, and snugged up against the next pillar.

These two pillars then crunched and ripped and tore and pushed themselves right up against Mack's pillar.

They formed now a sort of crude three-step staircase. A staircase you might climb if you had extremely long legs.

With a surge of dark green water, a new pillar began to rise from the lake. It pushed its way straight up, spilling water and mud and algae all down its side.

It rose higher, all the way up to where Mack and the others were standing.

“Come on!” Mack yelled.

He leaped onto the rising pillar. He landed hard, stumbled, took two way-too-big steps to try and steady himself, and almost launched off the edge.

But Stefan's hand grabbed him and yanked him back.

Still another pillar was growing now, even as the one they were on was still rising. The latest pillar was surging from the lake, catching up to them.

“It's a stairway!” Mack gasped.

They leaped, all together, onto the next pillar as it surged past them, impossibly big, and all covered with amazing carvings—lions, unicorns, weird things that none of them recognized, symbols, and figures of giant bearded dudes and women with severe braided hair.

Up they went. Mack leaned out to see if any more steps were coming, but this seemed like it.

“Look!” Xiao cried.

The pillar, the final stair, pushed up toward a door that hung all by itself in the air. A large door that led, as far as Mack could tell, to nothing at all.

T
he door frame was a pointed arch of stone, all of it entwined with stone snakes and shields and spears and other not-very-welcoming things.

The door itself was made of trees. Not wood. Saying “wood” implies nice little two-by-fours or maybe a sheet of plywood. This door was built of logs as big as redwoods. They still had the bark on. And they were bound together with fat bands of iron bristling with barbed spikes.

The pillar came to a stop. It was still wet and a bit slimy with lake water. Mack and the others were probably five hundred feet in the air. High as a skyscraper. High enough not to hear the cameras clicking away below or the cries of amazement. But not so high that they couldn't see a lot of stunned, antlike tourists gaping. The inevitable phones and cameras were aimed up at them.

And there were Nine Iron and Valin. They were too far away for Mack to be sure of their expressions, but neither seemed to be raging or threatening. They seemed disturbingly calm.

“There's a sign on the door,” Jarrah said.

Dietmar peered at it. “It says, ‘Beware of Wolf.' In German and I think in Swedish and Danish, too.”

“‘Beware of wolf'?” Mack echoed. “There's a wolf?”

There was definitely a door knocker. It was a massive iron ball on a hinge. There was zero chance any of them could lift it.

“Should we knock?” Xiao asked.

“Like anyone would hear?” Jarrah said.

“Do we even want it to open?” Xiao wondered aloud.

Mack sighed. “Grimluk said we had to discover secret places. Get help from ancient ones. He sent us here, right?”

He knocked on the door. It made a very small sound.

“I think I know what is behind this door,” Xiao said.

“I as well,” Dietmar said.

Stefan kicked the door. Three times. As hard as he could without breaking his foot. That didn't make much noise, either, but it got a response.

A howl.

No, that doesn't quite express it. More like: HOW-OOOOOOOO-OOOWWLL!

Like that.

Mack, Jarrah, Xiao, and Dietmar jumped. If you added up all the jumps together, you'd have an Olympic record. Stefan did not jump. But he did say, “Huh.”

The door opened with a sudden jerk. The motion of the door almost sucked them in.

Standing there holding the knob and scowling was a giant. He was probably fourteen feet tall. He had massive, bunched, oiled, tanned muscles. He had a blond beard almost down to his waist. His eyes were blue and crazy-intense.

In his free hand he held a short leash attached to a very big collar that went around the neck of a wolf the size of a medium-large elephant.

But the wolf was much scarier than an elephant.

The wolf was gray, aside from its black nose and black eyes and very white teeth. It, too, had crazy-intense eyes.

It made a sound approximately like “Grrrr-grr.” Very low and deep in its throat.

All of this was alarming to Mack.

But despite the fact that Mack knew he should be focusing on the wolf's slavering jaws—jaws that could without the slightest doubt not just blow your house down, little pig, little pig, but chew it and swallow it no matter how many hairs you had on your chinny-chin-chin—Mack found his gaze drawn irresistibly to two very odd details.

First, the giant bearded guy was wearing sweat pants and a Led Zeppelin T-shirt. The pants were pale blue with a yellow stripe down the side. The T-shirt was stretched so tight over the massive upper body that it was like a grown man wearing a baby T. The giant's stomach was bare, revealing at least half of a six-pack.

The second thing, even more astounding, was that around the giant's neck hung what was unquestionably the biggest electric guitar in the world.

“What do you want?” the giant roared.

They stared, not quite knowing how to answer. Because none of them had a lot of experience dealing with giant wolf-wrangling guitar players.

Finally Mack said, “Um . . .”

“Well?”

“We're, um, we're the Magnificent Twelve. Or four of them, anyway.”

The giant blinked his crazed blue eyes. He got a sort of crafty look and smirked a bit privately. Then, with patently false surprise, he said, “Wow. Is it that late? I thought it was still the twentieth century.”

“No,” Mack said. “We're, um, it's, um, you know, the twenty-first.”

The giant nodded. “Well, come on in, then.”

Mack and the others hesitated.

He thought he intercepted a sly look between wolf and giant.

The giant broke into a grin. “Don't worry about old Fenrir here. He won't eat you. Just give him a little scratch behind the ears.”

Fenrir made what might be a wolf smile. Or not.

Mack stepped across the threshold. He swallowed hard, bit his lip, scrunched his eyes, and gingerly patted the wolf's ruff.

“Come on, I want you to hear this,” the giant said. “And give me your honest opinion. Don't be scared: I don't do the whole Mjolnir thing anymore.”

They followed the giant and the wolf through the door, which slammed shut behind them.

The room was not at all what they would have expected based on the door. It was big—it would have to be. The walls were massive tree trunks with white plaster between them. There were ancient tapestries that showed ancient battle scenes in faded, muddy colors. But it looked as if many more tapestries had once hung on these walls. And Mack could clearly see an empty place that had once boasted a chandelier.

And the room had some more modern elements. For one thing, IKEA furniture.

It was normal IKEA furniture, but about a dozen tables had been shoved together to form one wide but low table, at which this massive creature could not possibly sit and eat.

Nevertheless there was food on the table: half a dozen two-liter bottles of some unknown soda and several ripped-apart packs of cookies. There was also a vase being used as an ashtray.

At one end of the chamber stood a low stage, and on that stage were massive amps. Inhumanly big. Metallica sized.

“What's a Mjolnir?” Mack whispered.

Dietmar had gone even paler than his normal pale. “Mjolnir? You don't know Mjolnir? It's the hammer of Thor.”