The Song of the Quarkbeast: Last Dragonslayer: Book Two Read Online Free Page A

‘Happy now?’
    But Lady Mawgon was already thinking of other things. She took the ring, murmured something around it and handed it back to Dennis, who held it tightly in his fist.
    ‘I don’t like the feel of this,’ he said. ‘Something bad happened.’
    ‘I agree,’ replied Mawgon, taking out a small crystal bottle with a silver stopper. We had stepped back to allow them to work, and Perkins, now fully mystified by what was going on, had joined us.
    ‘They’ll try to animate the memory,’ I said.
    ‘Gold has a memory?’
    ‘Everything has a memory. Gold’s memory is quite tedious – got mined, got crushed, went to the smelters, got banged with a hammer – big yawn. No, we’re looking for a stronger memory that has been induced in the gold – the recollections of the person wearing it.’
    ‘You can transfer your memories to inanimate objects?’
    ‘Certainly. And the stronger you feel for something, the longer it will stick around. Some people think that objects like jewellery and paintings and vintage cars actually have a soul , but as far as we know they don’t – just the memories of the people who have been around them. The more something is loved, enjoyed and valued, the stronger the memory, and the more we can read into it.’
    ‘And the crystal bottle?’
    ‘Watch and learn.’
    Lady Mawgon placed a single drop on the ring that Full Price was holding, and in an instant the ring had morphed into a small dog that was sitting on the floor wagging its tail happily. It sparkled slightly, indicating that it was not real, and seemed to be made of solid gold.
    ‘Good boy,’ said Lady Mawgon, ‘find it.’
    The small memory-dog 3 gave a low bark, then scuttled off happily, sniffing the ground this way and that as it tried to remember where the ring might have gone. Lady Mawgon and Full Price followed the terrier away from the road, opened a gate to let it in and then chased the small dog across a field, much to the amusement of several cows. Mawgon and Full Price stopped occasionally as the memory-dog paused to think for a while or scratch its ear with a hind leg, then carried on as it chased off in another direction. It would often double back on itself as it tried to catch the memory-scent, all the while with Lady Mawgon’s index finger steadily pointed at it. Once, it thought its tail was the quarry and snapped at it, then realised and moved on.
    ‘I wonder what did happen to it?’ said Tiger as we followed the sorcerers and the dog across the field, over a stile and a smaller road, then into a small wood.
    ‘Happened to what?’
    ‘My luggage,’ replied Tiger, who wasn’t yet done on his missing luggage problem. ‘Luckily, it didn’t have anything in it. I don’t have any possessions. In fact, the luggage was my only possession. It was what I was found in.’
    Owning very little or even being found in a red suitcase with castors and a separate internal pocket for toiletries was not unusual when you consider Tiger’s foundling heritage. He had been abandoned on the steps of the Sisterhood of the Blessed Lady of the Lobster, the same as me, then sold into servitude with Kazam Mystical Arts until he was eighteen. I still had two years to run before I could apply for citizenship; Tiger had six. We didn’t complain because this was how things were. There were a lot of orphans owing to the hideously wasteful and annoyingly frequent Troll Wars, and hotels, fast-food joints and laundries needed the cheap labour that foundlings could provide. Of the twenty-three kingdoms, duchies, socialist collectives, public limited companies and ramshackle potentates that made up the Ununited Kingdoms, only three of them had outlawed the trade in foundlings. Unluckily for us, the Kingdom of Snodd was not one of them.
    ‘When we have some surplus crackle we’ll retrieve your luggage,’ I said, knowing how valuable any connection to parents was to a foundling. I had been left on the front seat of the