The Call (11 page)

“A
hhhhh!” Mack cried, knowing even as he made that whinnying sound that he was confirming his unsuitability as a hero.

Stefan said, “If I can't box kangaroos, I'll pound me some elves,” and struck a defensive combat pose in full G.I. Joe mode.

Three of the elves were on him in a heartbeat. Down went Stefan, flat on his back.

Two more grabbed Mack. Their thin, delicate
fingers weren't terribly strong, so he squirmed and broke one elf's grip. But then he caught a glimpse of short clubs that looked, improbably, like bowling pins.

He had a chance to see one up close when it smashed against his nose.

“Owww!” Mack yelled. His eyes were full of tears. He knew blood was gushing from his nose. He wanted to run, but when last he checked he was on a mesa that ended in sheer thousand-foot cliffs.

Mack punched and missed, punched and missed again.

Another blow from an elfin club hit him behind the knee. The knee collapsed, and he stumbled to his left. That was lucky: he staggered out of the way of a vicious blow that just caught his ear.

The pain was intense, but the same blow hitting his head would have knocked him out.

Mack saw a dimly lit Jarrah lash out with a well-aimed kick that caught her elf assailant right where it should have really hurt.

“Ha! You know nothing of elf anatomy, you stupid, reeking sack of human secretions!”

The battle was going very badly. All four of them were either on their backs or on their knees within a few seconds. The elves weren't very strong, but there were a lot of them. Six to one. The odds were bad.

In a startlingly short time it was over. Mack was facedown with his hands and feet tied with a loop tying his bound hands to his bound feet. This bent him into a U.

A crying, angry, terrified U.

Stefan, Jarrah, and Karri were likewise hog-tied.

Meanwhile, the sun was dropping below the horizon. Soon it would be completely dark.

The elves—it was going to take Mack some time to accept that he was actually using that word—formed a little circle around them. They were as elaborately polite to each other as they had been abusive to Mack and his friends.

“What shall we do with them, brothers, friends, boon companions?” one of the elves asked.

“My own suggestion, made with utmost humility in the company of so many intelligent and experienced elves, is that we kill them.”

“Would you suggest throat slitting? Or do you favor
a simple stab to the heart, wise and good friend?”

“I mention—only in the expectation of correction from my betters—that strangulation can be a solution,” another elf chimed in.

The leader, if that's what he was, said, “I blame myself for perhaps not making this clear, dear brothers, but our contract with the princess requires that we make an effort if possible to deliver them alive.”

“Ah, so she wishes to kill them herself?”

“No doubt, good friend. As usual, you have gone straight to the heart of the matter.”

This seemed to have been a witticism, and the elves tittered politely, clapping the speaker on the back in congratulations.

Mack wasn't thrilled at the prospect of seeing Risky again. But it seemed preferable to being strangled, stabbed, or slit.

The time had come, he decided, to attempt Grimluk's magic spell once again. So he said, “
Ret click-ur!
”

That stopped the elves cold. But not because the spell worked. It didn't.

“Dare you to use the Vargran tongue against us?”
the head elf shrieked. “You worm! You pestilent malignancy! Do you imagine that you have the
enlightened puissance
? A foul, reeking toad like you?”

“Well…it worked once,” Mack said lamely.

“Ignorant, rock-headed, jelly-jointed, brittle-limbed sputum! If you truly had the
enlightened puissance
, you would know that no spell may be reused for a period of at least one full day!”

“Oh,” Mack said, crestfallen. “I didn't know that.”

“Huh,” Stefan said.

“I heard Grimluk use another spell, but I can't remember…,” Mack said to Stefan.

The name Grimluk drew a torrent of abuse from all the elves at once. They knew the name. And they were not fans.

“Brothers,” the lead elf said finally, signaling an end to the heaping of insults and catcalls, “we must decide. My own small wisdom whispers to me that we must honor the princess's request and defer the killing of these mucus-smeared cretins.”

There was general agreement on that, much to Mack's relief. But what they said next changed his outlook entirely.

“So, let us lower them down into the pit and seal up the hole after them.”

“Wait. What?” Mack said.

“Thus will the princess find them imprisoned, entombed, but still alive.”

“No. That's a terrible idea!” Mack said.

The elves grabbed Jarrah, who was squirming and trying to kick and not accomplishing much of anything. They dragged her to the hole. One of them fired up the generator that ran the winch. They dumped her into the basket. Then they did the same with Karri.

The engine strained and whirred as the two of them slid down the shaft.

Mack counted the seconds, which stretched into minutes. How far down were they?

He couldn't. They couldn't. No way.

Someone was going to rescue them because that's the way it always worked in movies. Someone would rescue him before he was buried alive,
buried alive
.

“Help!” he cried. “Heeeeelp!”

An elf smacked him on the head with his bowling-pin club. Mack's vision swam, a swirl of sunset colors tinged with the extra vibrancy of sheer panic.

He thrashed and screamed for help, head spinning, until a second blow turned out the lights.

A REALLY, REALLY LONG TIME AGO…

G
rimluk and the others reached the Pale Queen. And they battled her with all their powers united.

The battle raged for a day and a night.

Each of the Magnifica had his or her own areas of greatest strength. Each had mastered one of the Twelve Pairs of Potentiality. Grimluk's greatest strength was
in the Birds and Animals pair. He had summoned hundreds of creatures to the battle. And many brave hawks, lions, stags, bats, wild boars, and snakes had died.

But Grimluk also had lesser abilities in Darkness and Light, and even in Calm and Storm—though that was Miladew's area of true genius.

When it was done, the Magnificent Twelve were the Magnificent Eight. Four of them had died fighting.

But the Pale Queen, at last worn down and defeated, lay pulsating, helpless, bound by spells and ropes and chains and heaped all around with the driest tinder and trusted men with torches.

The battle had been long and bloody and horrible beyond belief. It had aged Grimluk. He was no longer a young man with clear skin and firm muscles. There were lines in his face, aches in his body, a physical weakness that sometimes made breathing itself seem like labor. Worse still was the shadow that would forever darken his soul.

The castle walls had been shattered. Great chunks of wall lay scattered across the landscape. Bodies lay
everywhere—on the walls, and crushed beneath remnants of the walls.

The bodies were mostly human, but there were also dead Skirrit and Tong Elves, Bowands, a scattering of Near Deads, even a pair of giant Gudridan—all of them monsters or allies of the Pale Queen.

And the destruction went beyond the castle. The entire forest had been knocked flat or burned down. Villages were gone for a hundred miles in every direction. No deer or skunk or bird or snake had survived.

Grimluk found the body of his friend the pikeman, Wick. He dug a grave for the man himself and piled stones to mark the place.

Bruise and Miladew found him standing there. Bruise had managed to upgrade his wardrobe. The one good thing that could be said for so much death was that there were now plenty of clothes to go around, although most were bloody.

“Grimluk,” Miladew said gently, touching his arm. “It is time.”

“The battle is over,” Grimluk said. “The Pale Queen lies in chains. We won.”

“The battle is over, but not the war,” Bruise said.
“Drupe has called for all the wise men and witches to assemble. They will decide the fate of the Pale Queen. And we, with the last of our failing powers, must carry out the sentence.”

“Surely the sentence is death,” Grimluk said.

Miladew shook her head. “Nay, Grimluk. Four of the twelve are dead. To try and kill her now with what is left, with just eight, would kill us all.”

Grimluk hated the Pale Queen, but this news definitely gave him pause.

Drupe stood waiting for Grimluk back at the castle. “So long as Princess Ereskigal is free, the Pale Queen cannot be killed. For at the death of the Pale One, her terrible power is inherited by her vile daughter,” said the witch.

“Well, that's messed up,” Grimluk said. Or words to that effect.

“She will be exiled to the World Beneath,” Drupe said. “She will see no sunlight, no green plant or blue sky. She will live in the kingdom of monsters, the land of the cursed dead. Forever.”

They headed back to the castle. It was wrecked, walls mostly torn down, roofs collapsed. The narrow
streets were filled with bodies. In Grimluk's grim life he had never imagined he could witness anything so grim.

He wanted nothing now but to get away from here and find his family. He would take any job now, anything that would get him away from this place of horror. Anything so long as he could be back with Gelidberry and the baby he would name Victory (he couldn't quite remember whether it had been a boy or a girl).

And that's what he told Drupe when they were in the now ceiling-free and three-walled meeting chamber.

“Alas, Grimluk,” Drupe said, and she laid her hand on his shoulder. “Your family is no more.”

Grimluk stared at her, trying to make sense of what she was saying.

“Gelidberry and the child were in the village of Suther when it was overrun by a troop of Gudridan.”

Gudridan were known for their giant size. And for their diet, which consisted almost entirely of human flesh.

“No,” Grimluk gasped.

He sat down very suddenly on the cold stone floor.
He sighed deeply, and it was as if at that moment the last of his spirit left him forever. With all that he had endured, all that he had witnessed, all the pain, this pain was greater still.

Drupe squatted down beside him—a move made easier by the fact that she had managed to turn her ostrich leg into a deer's leg, which was an improvement.

“You can find a new wife. You can have a new child. You will be forever honored as the leader of the Magnificent Twelve.”

Grimluk barely heard her. He just shook his head.

“The job of honored hero is yours if you wish. It pays well, and you'll be given a small farmhouse.”

“I…I can't…” Grimluk began to cry, and because the concept of “macho” would not be invented for many centuries, he cried without shame.

“Those of the remaining Magnifica who so choose will scour the world searching for Princess Ereskigal,” Drupe said. “So long as she lives, we cannot destroy the Pale Queen.”

“I will go. The others will go with me.”

“You have not very much time. As each of you ages, your powers will fade. All too soon you will be
too weak to defeat the princess. And remember that the princess is not easily killed. She must die twelve deaths before she will truly be dead.”

Grimluk said, “I feel like we just invented this new number twelve, and now we're using it for everything.”

“Progress,” Drupe said doubtfully.

“And if we fail?” Grimluk asked.

“Then there may be another future for you,” Drupe said cautiously. “It would be a long, very long, but terribly lonely life.”

“What could I ever be but lonely?” Grimluk whispered.

“In the secret places of the earth, in the ancient habitations of the Most Ancient Ones, death comes but slowly.”

“I don't understand,” Grimluk said.

“You would find such a place. And there you would live alone, cut off. You would be a sentinel. A lone watcher. You would live and wait and watch.”

“Watch for what?”

“For the possibility that the Pale Queen may rise again.”

M
ack woke too early. It was the high whine of the winch that penetrated his conscious mind.

He opened his eyes and saw…nothing.

“Wha…?” he said.

He was aware that he was still tied up. And aware that he was facedown. On something hard. That was moving.

In a downward direction.

In the dark.

“No,” he whispered.

“Be cool, now,” Stefan said. His voice was from somewhere very close. Mack could feel something that might be Stefan's elbow jammed against his ear.

The truth hit him all at once. They were in the shaft. And dropping.

“Aaaahhhhh,” Mack moaned.

“Dude. Relax.”

“Aaaaaahhhhhh aaaaahhhhhh aaaaaahhhhh!”

See, the thing with phobias is that they aren't just regular everyday fears. They aren't even slightly more intense versions of regular fears. Phobias are like wild beasts that crouch, waiting inside your brain until something wakes them up. And once they are awake, they go crazy. Imagine a gorilla losing its mind inside a cage, beating on the bars until its paws are bloody, trying to bite through the metal until its teeth crack, slamming itself in sheer panic against walls that will break its bones.

That's a full-blown, out-of-control phobia.

And of all Mack's phobias, none was more like a crazed, penned-up gorilla than claustrophobia.

In school Mack had been required to read Edgar Allan Poe's “The Cask of Amontillado.” It was the story of a man walled up and left to die. Not a happy story for anyone, but for Mack it had been agony.

And now, he was to be walled up, buried alive. So he screamed and screamed as the bucket descended. Screamed at blank, invisible stone pressing in all around him.

He was wet with sweat and hoarse by the time the lift reached the bottom of the shaft. Karri and Jarrah had already managed to free themselves from their ropes using some of the objects lying around: a pickax, the sharp edge of an open can of sardines, and a rock shaped like a wedge of cheese. Cheddar. Not that that matters.

A small flashlight waved eerily in the dark and came to focus on Mack. He felt hands busily untying the knots of his ropes. His hands and feet fell free.

He had stopped screaming but only because now the screams themselves had become frightening to him.

“So, definitely claustrophobic,” Karri said with the unmistakable Aussie dryness of tone that Mack
might have appreciated had he not been on the verge of vomiting.

Jarrah peered up the shaft. “No, I can't see any stars. They've blocked it.”

“And the winch control is dead,” Karri said calmly. “But I should be able to find some lights.”

Mack saw the flashlight jerk here and there and finally settle on a bank of switches. A second later there was a click, the sound of a generator
put-put-put
ting to life, and then glaring bright light.

Mack was still shaking from the effects of his panicky meltdown. The fear was far from gone. But at least now he had a distraction to occupy some part of his brain.

The four of them were at one end of a cave so large it was impossible to see the far end, even though a row of lights had been strung from the arched roof. It was as long as a football field and almost as wide, although it was in no way regular or rectangular.

And sadly there were no bright exit signs.

One wall of the cave was lit with its own set of spotlights. It was too far away for Mack to see details, but he could see that something, lots of somethings,
had been chiseled or drawn onto the rock face.

“That's what we came here to see,” Jarrah said. “Can you handle it?”

Mack stood up. His legs buckled, but Stefan grabbed one arm and Jarrah caught the other and kept him from falling. On wobbly pins, stomach clenched, heart pounding but no longer quite as if it intended to beat a hole in his ribs, he walked the few dozen steps to the rock face.

The wall went thirty feet up. It was the same reddish rock that all of Uluru seemed to be made of, but this surface was polished to a near-mirror shine.

This polished area went forty feet to his left as well. And all of that square footage, a space that would equal thousands of pages of a book, was covered in what could only be writing. The letters were strange, nothing recognizable, although here and there one of the shapes would look a little like a T or a stylized Z.

The wall was scarred in places by deep fissures. In other places the rock had simply collapsed, fallen down to make a pile of pebbles and fragments.

“What is it?” Mack asked.

“We're not totally sure. But my mum thinks it's
the last ten thousand years of history,” Jarrah said in a voice full of awe.

Mack looked at her, skeptical. “How could that be?”

Jarrah pointed to a series of marks that ran like the lines of a ruler across the bottom of the wall. “We think each one is a year. At the far end there's a vertical set of marks. We think those are days. And do you see these smaller markings, these curlicues? That's how I knew where you would be. We think they are sort of the equivalent of GPS numbers. Each indicates a place relative to here. Distance and angle from Uluru.”

“That's crazy. I can see how maybe someone could do all this to show things in the past, but there's no way to predict what happens in the future.”

“Yeah, well, that makes sense, mate,” Jarrah said cheerfully. “Except for the fact that all these markings, this whole chamber, are more than ten thousand years old.”

“What?”

“Mack, when this was written, all of it was in the
future
.” She led him to the last chiseled inscription. It barely peeked out from the edge of a massive rock
collapse, the last visible thing on the wall.

Jarrah pointed. “That right there? That's yesterday. And the curlicues? Those show distance and angle from here to the place where you fell from the sky.”

“Me?”

“See that?” She pointed to an angle line with three small marks. “That's the number twelve in base four.”

“Who counts in base four?”

Jarrah tilted her head and smiled mysteriously. “Someone with four fingers instead of ten, I'd guess.”

“No one has…,” Mack said, then fell silent as a chill went all through him.

“Yeah. You get now why we wanted you to see this?”

“And what are the rays coming out of it?”

“Ah. That took a while to figure out. But then we found this.” She led the way back along the wall, back into the past. They had to climb over a jumble of rocks. “See that? Same symbol. Three thousand years ago. Someone like you was here. See how the distance and angle are zero? Someone like you, Mack, one of a group of people, the Magnificent Twelve, came here, was in this place right where you're standing.”

Then, with hushed reverence, Jarrah pointed to a symbol that, judging from the marks, had just appeared a few months earlier. “See that? That's a gum tree, a eucalyptus. A
jarrah
, you might say. And it is linked with you, Mack. And with the symbol for the Magnificent Twelve.”

She shook her head as if she still couldn't quite believe it. “Weird, eh? To find your fate was chiseled ten thousand years ago.”

Mack could only stare. It shook his entire worldview. Although in fairness his worldview had already been rather badly shaken. His worldview was a cube of raspberry Jell-O in the middle of an earthquake.

His gaze was drawn to a sort of wheel chiseled at the top of the wall. Almost like a clock, but instead of numbers there were pairs of symbols.

“What is that?”

“Ah. That,” Jarrah said. “We don't quite know. I mean, we understand the symbols. They're pairs. Light and dark, speed and slowness, health and disease, and so on. We think they may be—”

“Sh!” It was Karri. “I hear something!”

There came a sound like nothing Mack had ever
heard before. It came from deep within the rock. Like something grinding its way through the limestone. Like a monster chewing rock.

“It's a pity this wall ends here,” Jarrah said. “Or we might know what's happening.”

“Why does it end there?”

“One of two reasons,” Jarrah said. “Either it's just that the rock face shattered at this point…”

“Or?”

Jarrah shrugged. “Or, maybe history is coming to a sudden end.”