Century #4: Dragon of Seas Read Online Free PDF

tell you how I’ve been over the last few months?”
    “No.”
    “Aren’t you happy to hear from an old friend?”
    “Not exactly.”
    “Heh, heh, heh! Heremit! You surprise me. You think I called just to say hello? That wouldn’t be my style, don’t you think? My style is elegant. Sober. High-class. Oh, I’m sorry you can’t see me on your monitors … but as you know, things have changed and I haven’t had the chance to equip my new office with all thoseelectronic contraptions you like so much. So you’ll have to make do with hearing my voice.”
    “What do you want?”
    “I have good news for you. Heh, heh, heh!”
    Silence.
    “First: I had Olympia’s gym burnt down. But I don’t think you’re interested in that. Let’s just say I did it mostly to … reestablish my priorities. Second: I’m about to do the same thing to your boy’s house.”
    “Stop.”
    “Stop?” Egon Nose protests, his big nose trembling. “I can’t stop! Not after what they did to me. Besides, you certainly can’t stop me.”
    “I’m the one who had you released, Egon.”
    “Heh, heh, heh! Of course, Heremit. You got me out of prison and I’m grateful to you. But may I remind you that you also got me in there, thanks to your orders: get my hands on a top and follow a boy from Grove Court … who, coincidentally, just left town.”
    “When?”
    “Half an hour ago.”
    Silence.
    “You still there, Heremit?”
    “Do what you want, Nose. New York is no longer my concern.”
    With this, the conversation ends. Heremit Devil has other things on his mind. Things that are unfolding. And things that don’t add up.
    Harvey left town. To meet with the others in Shanghai, nodoubt. But where? There’s only one thing Heremit hasn’t yet learned: the Chinese boy’s identity.
    The man paces his office on the second-to-top floor of his tall building and stares at the city spread out on the other side of the picture windows, trying to decide what to do. Then he picks up the phone again.
    “Mademoiselle Cybel,” he says in a low voice, hanging up a second later.
    Various objects are lined up on his desk.
    “The Ring of Fire,” he says, going down the list as he strokes the object also called Prometheus’s Mirror. It’s a fragment of an ancient mirror set in a frame that can’t be more than a hundred years old.
Possible
, Heremit thinks. Its original frame might have broken. And the more recent one must have been designed to fit into the statue of Prometheus at New York’s Rockefeller Center.
    “The Star of Stone,” Heremit continues. An ancient, primordial rock. A rock that’s hollow, like a vase.
    “And then Paris …,” Heremit murmurs. The object from Paris is an old wooden ship.
    Why a wooden ship?
he’s been wondering for weeks now.
And how are these three objects connected?
    Next to the ship are six ancient wooden tops. Heremit runs his fingertip along their delicate engravings: dog, tower, whirlpool, eye … those are the ones that were in Professor Van Der Berger’s possession; rainbow, which was in the antiques dealer Vladimir Askenazy’s possession; skull, which has been in Heremit’s family’s possession.
    “A hundred years,” Heremit Devil says aloud. “These objectsare useful only once every hundred years. The mirror, the stone, the ship and, finally …”
    The underground level of his skyscraper.
    Zoe told Heremit that last time, in the early 1900s, the objects weren’t found. Therefore, game over. The universe turned, the stars moved. And they had to wait another hundred years.
    “But today,” Heremit Devil murmurs, “the objects should all be here.”
    The elevator opens with a whoosh.
    “Is something the matter, my dear? Is something the matter?” the mammoth Mademoiselle Cybel asks, gliding across the room in her flashy white-and-blue-flowered dress and butterfly-shaped glasses. Without waiting for a reply, she goes over to one of the two chairs in Heremit’s office and sits down