Dragon's Green by Scarlett Thomas

Author:Scarlett Thomas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Canongate Books

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.

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