‘Yes,’ lied Effie. ‘I have a plan. Sort of.’
The carriage looped around a section of forest and then approached the steep downhill lane again.
‘Are you ready now, miss?’ asked the driver.
‘Yes,’ said Effie.
Down, down, down they went. Crescentia squeezed her hand and thanked her again. ‘Good luck,’ she said, as Effie got out of the carriage and walked towards the drawbridge, where an elderly maid greeted her and took her into the castle. The drawbridge was raised behind her and the carriage drove away.
The maid took Effie down a stone passageway and through a thick wooden door. Then Effie was left alone at the top of a steep, wide staircase with thick red carpet. At the head of the staircase were two stone plinths with statues of the dragon with his wings spread. All the way down there were portraits of other dragons, each one ornately captioned in a language that seemed oddly familiar. Effie gulped and continued down into the main part of the underground castle, her way lit by candles.
At the bottom of the stairs she found a massive wooden door that had been left ajar. From inside came a flickering, warm light and the smell of freshly cut flowers. Effie breathed deeply and went in. The room was quite small but had a very high ceiling. There was a vast candelabra full of white candles, all dancing slowly together. There was a roaring fire in the huge fireplace. The carpet was a deeper red than the one from the staircase, with swirling gold patterns in its thick wool pile.
There were paintings and tapestries on the walls, some depicting great fights between dragons and young men with swords. These differed from the normal style of such paintings, in that in most of them the dragon seemed to be winning. They also had what looked like the same caption as the portraits.
Spyrys – Pryder – Wythrés.
There were fresh roses in a great vase on the coffee table and bowls of fruit and chocolates and candied peel everywhere. Through another wooden door Effie could see a luxurious dining room with a table set for two. She gulped.
Where was the dragon?
20
‘I suppose I am going to have to kill you,’ said Leonard Levar.
‘It would appear to be the only reliable way to make sure you don’t get your hands on my books.’
He didn’t switch the light back on. Instead, he lit several candles around the cold, dark cave. Although it is, of course, extremely uneconomical to use magic to achieve such a task in the Realworld, Levar wanted to impress on these puny boys just how magical – and dangerous – he was, and so he lit each one with just a snap of his thin fingers.
All of which was very costly for someone who had so recently done what he had done. But no matter. The rewards he would get from . . .
‘Um . . .’ said Maximilian. ‘They aren’t really your books.’
‘I paid for them. Even for the five hundredth book that I do not have.’
Maximilian gulped. The five hundredth book must have been Dragon’s Green. Oh well; at least Effie had that one. Now all that remained was to get these 499 books back to her as well. But that was probably going to be difficult, now that they had been captured by this . . . this . . . What was he? In candlelight, he looked more like a creature than a man: small, shrivelled, with slightly pointed ears and an air of something that had been pickled for a very long time. He was supposed to be over three hundred and fifty years old, Maximilian remembered, which would probably explain it.
‘Effie didn’t want to sell those books to you,’ said Wolf.
Maximilian tried to scan Leonard Levar with his spectacles. He wondered what a man like him would have in terms of M-currency and—
‘How dare you!’ said Levar, spinning around. ‘You are not just impudent, but stupid as well. You boldly try to scan one as powerful as me, without even trying to cloak what you are doing? And of course you find out nothing, because I have cloaked myself. And then you also give away the fact that you carry a great and valuable boon. Well, let me have them.’
Maximilian’s heart jolted.
‘WELL?’ said Levar. ‘Give them to me.’
‘Give what to you?’
‘Oh, you silly boy. You’re not going to live much longer, but you might try to dignify your end by acting a little less backward.’
Levar took out a pen and a notebook and started writing something down. From the outside, it may have looked as if he were just a forgetful old man writing a shopping list or jotting down an aide-mémoire. But the more he wrote, the more sick Maximilian started to feel. It began in his stomach, but soon progressed to his head until all the organs in his body were swimming in nausea. Of course, being such a high-level scholar meant that Levar carried with him several quite powerful weapons. One of these was the Pen of Prescription with which he was writing now.
‘Uh . . .’ said Maximilian. ‘Are you doing that? Please stop.’
‘You’ve gone completely white,’ said Wolf. He turned to Levar. ‘Hey, stop it!’
‘Silence,’ said Levar. ‘The spectacles, please.’
He walked over to Maximilian, who now felt so sick and unstable he was grasping around for something to hold on to. As the cave only contained shallow crates of books, there was nothing apart from the cold, stony walls. Levar took the spectacles without any trouble at all, and Maximilian fell back against the wall and slumped to the ground as if he had been punched.
‘Give those back,’ said Wolf. ‘They’re not yours.’
‘Oh, but they are, pathetic boy, they are.’ Levar put the spectacles on. ‘Hmm. Not bad,’ he said. ‘The Spectacles of Knowledge. Where did the boy get these, I wonder? They are ancient. Beautifully made, of course. Crafted on the Western Plains perhaps even before the Great Split. One of only four pairs of this precise sort in the known universe.’ He held them up to the light as if he were about to polish them. Their antique silver frames glinted in the faint candlelight.
And then he bent them with both hands until they were about to snap in two.
‘No!’ cried Maximilian. Even though he still felt sick, he managed to haul himself up. He ran – well, stumbled – towards Levar. ‘Please don’t break them. Please . . .’ he said.
‘If you beg me, then I won’t break them,’ said Levar. ‘Call me sir.’
‘Please, sir,’ said Maximilian. ‘Please— ’
‘Don’t,’ Wolf said to Maximilian. Wolf knew something about how bullying worked. Not that he did it himself, well not very often, but he had hung around with enough ‘troubled’ boys – and indeed the crueller of the so-called ‘gifted’ ones as well – to know that there was absolutely no point ever doing what bullies want. And then, of course, there was his uncle, who often set Wolf impossible tasks just as an excuse to beat him when he failed.
‘But . . .’ said Maximilian.
‘Too late,’ said Levar, and snapped the spectacles in two.
‘No!’ wailed Maximilian. He threw himself to his knees. ‘Please put them back together,’ he said. ‘Please, sir . . .’
‘You disgusting coward,’ said Wolf.
‘Isn’t he?’ said Levar.
‘No. I’m talking to you, you repugnant reptile.’ Before Wolf had a chance to think about what he was doing, he had rugby tackled Levar to the ground. The pen went flying, and the pad fell out of his hands as well. For an eleven-year-old boy Wolf was extremely strong, with muscles like a well-trained fifteen-year-old.
Levar had not expected to be attacked. After all, what child in their right mind attacks an adult with such formidable magical powers? Still, all he had to do to bring this pathetic beast under control was reach for his . . . his . . . Drat. His pen had rolled away. Never mind, if he could just get hold of . . .
But the boy was stronger than Levar had thought. He had Levar’s arms pinned down.
‘Get the pen,’ said Wolf to Maximilian. ‘Write something.’
Wolf kept holding Levar down by his arms. In rugby, you make the tackle and then get on with the game. You are penalised for continuing t
o tackle someone who doesn’t have the ball. Wolf was very used to bringing people down in rugby, but had no idea how to restrain or hurt people in real life. When his uncle beat him he just took it, although he wasn’t sure why, especially now he probably had the strength to overpower him. So what should he do to Levar? Some voice was saying to him, ‘Bash his head in. Beat it against the floor until blood comes out of his ears.’ But Wolf knew he couldn’t do this. He didn’t want to go to prison. He didn’t want to spend the rest of his life as a murderer. ‘Bash his head in,’ came the voice again. Wolf realised the voice wasn’t in his head. It was Maximilian.
‘Go on, Wolf,’ said Maximilian again. ‘Bash his head in!’
‘I can’t,’ he said back. ‘It’s wrong. It’s . . .’
‘It’s not wrong when . . . Oh, never mind. Hold him and I’ll . . .’
Maximilian had picked up the pad and the pen. How would you use a magical prescription pad? Maximilian thought you would probably just write down whatever you wanted to happen to your foe, but how did you specify who exactly was your foe? He didn’t want something bad to happen to himself or Wolf. Where were the instructions? If only he still had his beloved spectacles. In fact . . . Mend the spectacles, he wrote. Give them to me.
Were his priorities right? Perhaps not. The spectacles did in fact mend themselves – spinning in the air with little fizzes and pops and the odd pink spark – and then return to him. But when he put them on, the world didn’t change at all. It was as if their magic was gone.
‘What have you done to them?’ he shouted at Levar.
‘Stupid boy,’ Levar said. ‘You’ve used up all your currency doing that, so you can’t even use the spectacles any more, or cast any spells on me.’ He looked at Wolf. ‘I can feel that this boy has some magic in him, but he has no weapon. So . . .’
Levar closed his eyes, and Wolf found himself releasing his grip on Levar’s arms. Then Wolf was floating in the air. He hovered for a few seconds, then hit the ground with a thud. It was like Saturday night with his uncle in slow motion.
‘I do believe,’ said Levar, ‘that I have won this silly little battle.’
He stood up and looked down on Maximilian and Wolf.
‘Why are you dabbling in things you do not understand?’ he asked them. ‘My business is of no concern to you or your pretty girlfriend. I bought some books, quite fairly, and now you have come to steal them. I wonder what the police would say about that? Or your parents? Or maybe they’ll never find you, because . . .’
What could he do to them? Leonard Levar didn’t want to use up too much more of his already very low M-currency, although he’d be able to exchange the spectacles for quite a lot of lifeforce at one of the Edgelands markets. Tying the boys up magically would cost too much, but there was no way he could do it with just his physical strength. Of course, throwing Wolf across the room had been easy. He had just used a simple deflector spell that turned the boy’s own strength against him. And Maximilian’s nausea was created entirely by a tiny misdirection of his stomach juices. That was the thing with magic. Sometimes the tiniest interventions could lead to the most spectacular effects.
So. Drowning. Levar really liked the idea of drowning. For example, if he had a nice big tub and a hosepipe and if he could tie these two up and put them in the tub and then put the hose-pipe on . . . He imagined them fretting away, screaming perhaps, praying to be rescued, while the tub filled up and up and up. But to do all that in the Realworld, with M-currency? It would cost thousands. Hundreds of thousands, more likely.
What else was there? Spiders. Everyone knew that all young boys were afraid of spiders. And what did spiders cost? Nothing at all, if you happened to own an antiquarian bookshop next door to an exotic pet shop, and if there happened to be a secret door from one shop to the other, left over from the days when armies were based here during one of the old wars. So. You didn’t always need magic at all. You simply needed keys. Two keys, to be precise. One to lock the boys into the empty cave with the grille (which was far too small for them to escape through), and one to open the door to the pet shop. Oh, and just a tiny little bit of magic to put the boys to sleep for a while, so they didn’t try to escape before he came back with a book trolley to move them.
When they woke up, they would find themselves alone in the darker, smaller, empty cave, perhaps feeling relieved to still be alive. Levar would leave them some candles and matches. That would be nice. They wouldn’t believe their luck when they found they had light as well. Alone in a bright cave. They may even start to feel cosy and comfortable and entertain hopes of being rescued. But then at some point they would notice the large Chilean six-eyed tarantulas that Levar was just about to go and get. That would keep them busy while he went to sell the spectacles. Then he could come back with a bit more power and, if necessary, finish them off. Then his precious books would be safe.
21
Effie heard a door creak from somewhere beyond the dining room. Then came the click-click of a creature’s claws striking the tiled floor of the dining hall, which turned into more of a soft padding sound as the stone gave way to thick carpet.
The dragon entered the drawing room with a deep, satisfied sigh. He was just as majestic and beautiful as Effie remembered, his hard muscles glistening under his shiny grey skin. He sighed again, perhaps with enjoyment of the ambience of the room, or the tinkling piano music that was now coming from the dining room.
But then he noticed Effie, and started. He looked at her rather the way you might look at a pepperoni pizza when you were sure you had ordered a margherita. He blinked and looked again, taking her in, up and down and up and down, until he took a step back and frowned. The piano music continued as if this were the most elegant restaurant, rather than an appointment with death.
‘Why have they sent you?’ he asked, a little sadly. His voice was as smooth and dark as the finest melted chocolate. It was both comforting and terrifying at the same time. It was comforting because if this creature was your friend, you would be protected from anything else for miles. No human or beast from the forest could harm you. For this one night, you would be safer than you’d ever been. But terrifying because of course after this night, he meant to eat you.
‘They didn’t send me. I took Crescentia’s place.’
‘Why do they want me dead?’ he said, with a touch of melancholy.
‘Sorry?’
‘You won’t win. Gin and tonic? Martini? Aperol?’ The dragon sat down slowly on a large sofa upholstered in a heavy gold fabric with a pattern of apples and pheasants on it. ‘Maid!’ he called. The elderly woman entered. ‘A gin and tonic and a . . .?’
‘Nothing for me, thanks.’
‘Champagne?’
‘I’m not old enough to drink.’
‘Have it your own way.’
The maid brought in a glass tumbler full of ice cubes, clear liquid, mint leaves and slices of lime. The dragon took this in his hand and sipped from it. He looked almost refined, sitting there on his expensive sofa, drinking his perfectly prepared cocktail. If it hadn’t been for his size, his shiny grey scaly skin, his wings, his tail and the fact that he breathed fire, he could have been a very handsome man.
‘I wondered why they put you in the catalogue with the others,’ said the dragon. ‘I even wondered about choosing you, to see what would happen. But Crescentia, Crescentia . . . How delicious she would have been. Ah . . .’ The dragon made a kissing sound with his lips, the way great gourmets do when they know they have just been served something really nice.
‘Crescentia. It could have been such a beautiful evening, you know. The village put on a game of cricket for me this afternoon, and the women brought baskets of flowers and buckets of mead – not that I drink the revolting stuff, I give it all to the staff. Still, it’s a rather delightful touch. They want to make me happy. Of course they do, since I appear to emit gold. But then someone sends you.’
The dragon looked down at his drink, sipped from it,
stirred it with the little green swizzle-stick. He sipped again. ‘Why?’ he said, quietly.
Effie didn’t know what to say.
‘WHY?’ he suddenly roared, flames coming out of his mouth.
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said Effie, quite afraid.
‘You have the ring,’ said the dragon. ‘But no weapon. Where is your sword?’
‘I don’t have a sword,’ said Effie.
‘Then . . .?’ The dragon sighed. ‘How will we fight?’
‘Fight? Why would we . . .?’
‘Don’t tell me you don’t find me just a bit fascinating,’ said the dragon. ‘Of course you do. You may think you’re sitting there all innocently, but perhaps you have forgotten that you are wearing the Ring of the True Hero. Everyone knows a true hero cannot resist a dragon. It’s in your blood. The princesses are naturally a little nervous, poor things, although I must say I think they have a fine time once they get here. But you? I bet you couldn’t wait. Did you kill her to take her place? Did you fight Crescentia for me?’
‘Of course not. I don’t understand . . .’
‘Playing stupid is not going to help your cause,’ said the dragon. ‘What, did you think we were going to settle down to a nice dinner, with me believing that you were the princess I ordered, wearing her clothes, acting like her, even smelling like her? How many courses was I to have before you stabbed me in the back? A true hero can’t keep away from the dragon she – or more usually he – is destined to kill. But the dragon in question does have an inkling of his own destiny as well. Do you think you can smell us, but we can’t smell you? Do you not think that I yearn for your blood just as you yearn for mine?’
‘Well . . .’
‘You will be checked for weapons, then we will dine as if you were the princess. You will spend the night with me as arranged, as my guest. In the morning, we will fight. I had a modest battle arena constructed in my grounds in case this situation ever arose. How about that? Will you dine with me first?’