Josh Moonford and the Lost City of Cantia by James Essinger

Author:James Essinger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Young Adult thriller;set in Canterbury UK;coming-of-age;teenage love;underground city below Canterbury;heroic young twins;magical technology;Latin-speaking
Publisher: The Conrad Press
Published: 2019-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

46

Sam hurried up to me. ‘What does that mean, Taberna Lusoria?’ he whispered to me.

‘“Toy-shop”,’ I said, quietly, before I could think of pretending it meant something else, so the twins wouldn’t want to go in.

Needless to say, the twins instantly headed for the toy-shop. So, despite all being so hungry, we followed them.

Well, inside the toyshop it was kind of weird because it was a combination of Roman decor and very strange toys. The decor itself did look very Roman. There were white marble tiles, each maybe about a foot square, on the floor. I had no idea where the Cantians would have got marble from. I even wondered if maybe they had some in the old days which had been shipped from Rome before they’d gone down into the underground world and they’d brought the marble with them.

There were about a dozen Cantian children inside the shop, which was rectangular and maybe about twenty yards long and maybe ten yards wide. There were loads of display cabinets with toys underneath the glass. What you had to do, I noticed, was go to one of the three Cantian women assistants who were behind the counter and point to what you wanted if you wanted to buy anything.

Well, we weren’t going to buy anything, obviously, because we hadn’t any money, but it was quite interesting to see the kind of things they had there. There were lots of small Cantian cogwheel cube computers, each one about six inches square. On the other side of the shop I noticed there were dozens of models of ants, the ants all being about six inches long. I went and looked at the ants under the glass, expecting them to start moving, but they weren’t moving ants. They were very good models though, I had no idea what they were made of. They looked pretty spooky.

Under another display cabinet on the left hand side of the shop, the glass was lifted up, and an assistant was showing a girl and a boy, each aged maybe about fourteen or fifteen, small, red hearts. They looked like the kind of hearts you get on Valentine cards. The little hearts were maybe about two inches wide. I had no idea what they were made of. I also wondered what they were supposed to do, but the assistant saw me looking at them and for some reason she closed the glass cabinet quite abruptly. I didn’t know why. I noticed that Declan had seen the hearts too and he seemed interested in them and went over and glanced at them where they were now under the glass.

The boy was holding a heart in his hand and he took it to the counter and paid some money for it, not very much I think; he gave about three copper coins for it. By now Declan was looking at us all and nodding towards us, (of course it would have been far too dangerous to have said anything in English in that little shop) and we all knew that he wanted us to leave.

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