The Trap (The Magnificent 12 #2)(32)

“Actually, there are people in that hut there.” Xiao pointed. Mack saw a couple of men dressed in leather breeches and loose-fitting shirts.

“I don’t see anyone,” Stefan said.

Just then a man came pushing past carrying a rough-hewn cage filled with rats.

“I hate rats,” Mack said.

“Me, too,” Stefan agreed. “But I don’t see any rats.”

“In that guy’s cage,” Mack said.

“What guy?”

Mack stopped walking. “Xiao? Jarrah? You saw the guy with the box of rats, right?”

Both said they had. Stefan had not.

Nor did Stefan see the woman leading a cow.

Nor did he see the two men laboring to lift bundles of firewood into a wagon. Or the young girl carrying a baby. Or the fat old bald guy riding backward on a horse.

In a few more seconds of increasingly perplexed and then panicky conversation, it became clear that Stefan was seeing something entirely different from what they were seeing.

Stefan saw a completely empty, but neat and well-preserved, assemblage of old buildings—a village with a large windmill.

The rest of them saw a scattering of lean-tos and barely standing shacks and a population of young, very dirty, rag-bedecked people with few teeth and no sense of style or standards of personal grooming.

The young girl carrying the baby was joined by a young man—in fact he might be no older than twelve or so—leading a pair of cows.

“You don’t see that?” Mack pressed.

“No. No, I don’t see cows or a baby or some dude,” Stefan maintained.

“He does not possess the enlightened puissance,” a voice said in German-accented English.

Mack spun around and there, emerging from the fog, was a boy. He had on jeans and a denim jacket. He might have looked tough, except that he didn’t. He was painfully thin, tallish, with fine blond hair down to his shoulders. He had a soft mouth and big brown eyes. Mack thought he looked about ten years old.

“I am Dietmar,” the boy said.

“Good for you,” Stefan snapped. “Now what was that you called me?”

“You do not see what they see,” Dietmar said in a low, reverential voice. “For they possess the enlightened puissance. They are of the Magnifica.”

“And what is it you see?” Mack demanded, only slightly less hostile than Stefan. The rats had unsettled him. That plus the feeling that maybe he was hallucinating.

“I see what you see,” Dietmar said. “I see Gelidberry and her husband fleeing their village as the Pale Queen approaches.”

Mack froze.

The boy made his quick, short-duration smile. “You know his name, surely? That young man who flees?”

Mack watched the couple with the baby and the two cows walking quickly away.

“Grimluk,” Mack whispered.





Chapter Twenty-three



Okay, what is this, some kind of trick?” Jarrah demanded. The notion made her angry.

Dietmar shook his head. “This is a very old site. Long before the Freilichtmuseum was built, or the medieval village, there was an earlier village in this place. Long, long ago.”

“Three thousand years,” Mack said.

“Yes,” Dietmar agreed. “This is a place of power. Very few can even feel it, and only one with the enlightened puissance can see through the mist of time.”

The fog was clearing now. Warmth returned as the sun peeked through. Now they all saw the restored village as others saw it, as an outdoor museum. Gone were the phantasms of an earlier age.

“If you saw it, then you must be one of us,” Xiao said to Dietmar.

“One of the Magnificent Twelve?” Dietmar nodded. “Yes. I am Dietmar Augestein.”

He extended a hand, and Jarrah shook it. Then she made a wry face. “Might want to put a little more gristle in that handshake there, mate.”

Dietmar didn’t seem to know what to make of that.

For his part, Mack wasn’t quite sure what to make of this boy, or of this encounter. He had been strangely moved by the vision—hallucination, whatever it was—of Grimluk as a youth. Had Grimluk caused the apparition? Was this Grimluk reaching out to say, “See, I was young once, too, and scared”?

“Did someone tell you to meet us?” Mack asked.

Dietmar blushed. It was very visible because his skin was extremely pale and the blush crept up his neck like a rising tide.

“Not a person. In my family’s schloss there are ancient rooms, down under the ground.”

“Schloss?”

“It’s like a castle.” He shrugged. “Perhaps you don’t believe me.”

“You’d be amazed what we’ll believe,” Mack said.

“This castle is not so old, but before this castle was another, and another before that, you see? Each one built atop the last. Just like this village. But if you know the way, you can find the ancient rooms. I love this, to look at ancient things.”

“Is this a long story?” Mack interrupted.

“Yes.”

“I don’t mean to be rude,” Mack said. “But it seems like everywhere we go, someone shows up and tries to kill us. So just tell me the quick version.”

“I am the great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great—”