The Fire Chronicle by John Stephens Read Free Book Online Page A

head!” Michael finished. “I know that quote! I was just talking about it today! Unbelievable.” He clapped his hands together, smiling from ear to ear. Not only did he and his father both admire and esteem dwarves, they’d also each separately singled out the same quote. If that wasn’t a sign of, well, something, then Michael didn’t know what was. “Do you remember how he felt about elves? I imagine he thought they were pretty ridiculous—”
    Dr. Pym coughed. “Perhaps we could stay on subject. Hugo, if you could continue?”
    “Fine, fine. So in his second year, I told Richard about the Books of Beginning.” Hugo Algernon looked at Dr. Pym. “How much do they know about the Books?”
    “I’m sure they would be interested in anything you have to say.”
    “Here’s what you need to remember: the Books of Beginning are three incredibly old and powerful books of magic. If you believe the stories, they could literally remake the world. Most reports start with the Books in the Egyptian city of Rhakotis, guarded by a gaggle of what had to have been the most mossy-brained magicians of all time—granted, that’s just my opinion, though I’m no doubt correct. Everything’s fine till one day—this is about twenty-five hundred years ago—Alexander the Great shows up, burns the city to the ground, and the Books vanish.
    “So, your dad hears all this and gets a bee in his bonnet.Why have the Books never been located? How amazing would it be if he found the Books? On and on. I told him to forget it. People had been looking for the Books for thousands of years, real magicians and wizards, and no one had ever found diddlysquat.
    “Anyway, Richard took his degree, left, got married, decided the world wasn’t crowded enough, and had you sardines—I mean, children. Next thing I know, Pym here’s taken him up. Read some article your dad wrote. Thought he’d made this big discovery.” Again mimicking the wizard, he spoke into a pretend telephone, “ ‘Oh, cheerio, Hugo, I’ve found the most promising young man, tut-tut, I’m such a great galumphing booby.’ He was my student first, you—”
    “Just finish the story, Hugo.”
    The man scowled but went on. “So time passes, and one day, I’m in Buenos Aires. There was this old wizard who’d lived down there. Mad as a hatter, but an excellent archivist and a collector of rare manuscripts. He’d died, and I was going through his library. House was a wreck. Held together by dust and mouse droppings. Anyway, I’m there working when the library floor gives way. Almost broke my neck. But when I could finally look around, I saw I’d fallen into a kind of vault. Stacks of old books and documents. I spent a year going through and cataloging everything, and then … I find a letter. It was in an extinct Portuguese dialect. Thing was murder to translate. But I had a feeling about it. A man writing to his wife. Apparently, he was on some kind of eighteenth-century business trip. Buying pigs or llamas or something. And he writes how he’d gotten into town late and allthe inns had been full and he’d had to share a room with a sick man. His roommate was feverish. All night, he raved how he and a few others had taken a magic book out of Egypt long ago and had hidden it away. He kept saying, ‘I must make the map.… I must draw the map.’ ”
    “And then what happened?” the wizard asked.
    Hugo Algernon shrugged. “Nothing. The rest of the letter was about a pig he’d bought and how plump it was and blah, blah, blah.”
    “And where did this encounter take place?”
    “In Malpesa.”
    “Ah.”
    “What’s Malpesa?” Michael asked.
    “Malpesa,” the wizard replied, “is a city at the southern tip of South America, on the coast of Tierra del Fuego, the Land of Fire. It was first an Indian village, then became a colonial trading post, a stopover for ships going from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Then, when the magic world pulled away, Malpesa went with