The Outsorcerer's Apprentice Read Online Free Page A

feeling he wasn’t entirely welcome. “I was just—”
    “Go down the office,” the foreman said firmly, “they’ll give you your blue form and your receipt, and then you can get paid. All right?”
    “Yes, right.” For some reason, the look on the foreman’sface made Turquine nervous, in a way dragons never did. Not live ones, anyway. “Thank you.”
    “ ’S all right,” the foreman said, still looking straight at him. “Mind how you go.”
    He went to the office, where a very old man in a brown coat and a curious flat-topped cap gave him his blue form and his receipt, smiled and put up the “Position Closed” sign before he could say anything. He looked round, but the only other living creature in the office was a very tall, thin young man, leaning against the wall, eating a sausage. He didn’t look as though he was in any position to answer difficult questions, though he nodded politely as Turquine walked past him into the cold night air.
    The drill was, you took the blue form and the receipt to the other office, right round the other side of the building, where you got your money; but the other office closed at dusk and didn’t open until three hours after daybreak. Turquine glanced down at the blue form, and was pleasantly surprised; 907 lbs @ 15d./cwt = 6s. 2d. Six shillings and twopence. A warm smile spread over Turquine’s face, like spilled oil on water. Six bob. Hey.
    He went back to the inn and asked for a beer. “The good stuff,” he specified.
    The innkeeper looked at him. “You sure?”
    Turquine nodded. “I can afford it.”
    The good stuff was still pretty bad, but it was unimaginably better than the other stuff. Turquine sat by the fire, nursing his beer, staring into the flames. He was trying to remember what it had been like, before the wizard came. He found it remarkably difficult. How old would he have been? Hard to say. Nine, twelve, something like that; he was pretty sure he’d been in the dragon-slaying business for four years, and he’d won his spurs when he was eighteen. Of course, those four years had felt like for ever.
    Yes, but it was so much better now, wasn’t it? He unfolded the blue form and looked at it, just to make sure the numbers were still there. Six shillings and twopence. The family estate, to which his father and now his brother had devoted their lives, brought in a gross income of one pound two shillings and fourpence (in a good year, when the harvest didn’t fail and the chickens didn’t get fowl pest), and that put their family in the top third of the nobility; new shoes once a year, fresh cabbage leaves for the outhouse and half a bottle of malmsey wine at Candlemas. Before the wizard came, any transaction involving six shillings and twopence was big news, the sort of thing they’d be talking about in the inn and the smithy from lambing through to blackberry-time. Now, though; now, a no-account younger son like Bedevere (a nice enough chap in his way, but scarcely the sharpest bodkin in the quiver) could earn himself three pounds nine shillings in a single month, and for doing what? Pest control. Forty-one pounds a year for being basically a glorified rat-catcher.
    And what was good for the younger sons of the nobility, of course, was good for the kingdom; all that extra money in circulation, leading inevitably to prosperity for all. True, there wasn’t much sign of it to the casual observer. The villages were still poverty-stricken, mostly because of the depredations of the dragons, but no more so than before; about the same, in fact. Turquine thought about that. If the wizard hadn’t come along when he did, they’d presumably still have had the plague of dragons (where
did
they come from? Good question), but without the vital cash boost to the economy that the wizard provided. Without the wizard, in fact, they’d be in all sorts of trouble, though of course it was no use trying to tell that to the average peasant-in-the-stocks. That was the