Seven Sorcerers Read Online Free PDF Page B

indragon tongues of smouldering amber and fierce yellow. Around them the hillside was bathed in molten light.
    ‘A lot of things here are what people make of them,’ said Jonas. ‘Take number 27 for starters.’ He nodded his head back up the hill the way they had come, so she turned to see.
    Looking somehow closer to them than it should, number 27 towered against the flaming sky, huge and grim, its eyeless windows watchful. Nin could see shadows coming off it like steam.
    ‘On the Widdern side there’s nothing in there,’ Jonas laughed. ‘Just a lot of empty, burnt-out rooms. This side, it’s a place you don’t want to go!’
    The flames grew dim and went out, leaving a pale blue sky full of gentle sunlight. At last, Nin got her first real view of the Drift.
    All the houses were gone. The hill swept before her, its coat of grass strangely vivid and speckled with buttercups that shone like gold. Away in the distance, she could see the lazy curve of the river, but it was not the one she knew. Its banks were no longer edged with parks or neatly kept houses. Instead it had a fringe of dark and ragged woodland that turned to open meadow further upstream. Here and there, white trees stood out amongst the green like the bone-dead casualties of some weird attack by lightning. And beyond the wood, rising above the shadowed trees, was that bank of cloud, sitting on the horizon like a white cliff against the sky.
    ‘The Raw,’ said Jonas before she could ask. ‘It’s like akind of fog. You get patches of it all over the Drift, but it doesn’t go away.’
    ‘Fog always goes away,’ said Nin, puzzled.
    ‘I only said it was
like
fog.’ There was an edge to his voice, as if the mist made him nervous. ‘Sometimes the patches kind of … explode outwards. Or sometimes a whole new patch just appears somewhere else. But wherever it is, once it’s there it never goes away again.’
    Nin was only half listening. She had just spotted a concrete hump that looked seriously out of place.
    ‘That kind of looks like the underpass to the park.’
    ‘That’s because it
is
the underpass to the park,’ said Jonas. ‘It’s a partial gateway. You can get to the Widdern through it from the Drift, but not back again. From the Widdern, it only goes where it’s supposed to go, under the road.’
    ‘Huh,’ Nin snorted. ‘I don’t s’pose it’s any friendlier in the Drift than it is in the Widdern.’
    Out of the corner of her eye she saw Jonas smother a grin. She turned to look at him, but he just stretched and shook himself.
    ‘It’s morning,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Bad things don’t like the light. They give up when the sun rises.’
    ‘And that’ll include Skerridge, will it?’ said Nin fiercely.
    ‘Probably.’ Jonas grinned. ‘Bet he’s right ticked off about you!’

    Skerridge was steaming. It was coming out of his earsand nose in thin streams, and every time he opened his mouth to curse he let out a cloud of scalding vapour. He stamped back up the hill, dragging the sack behind him and peering at the dawn light growing on the horizon.
    Somehow Right Madam had given him the slip. He couldn’t believe it had happened. He, Skerridge, Chief Bogeyman and Champion Kid-Catcher, given the slip by some nasty girl-brat. He stopped to scream with rage, sending billows of hot mist spurting into the early-morning air. Then he threw the sack on the ground and pounced on it, shredding it with his bone-yellow claws. When it was a rag he chucked it aside and stared again at the horizon.
    Dawn. BMs hated the dawn. They loathed the sun. Despised its nasty, sizzling glare that gave them no place to lurk.
    Skerridge bellowed again. The steam hissed above him in a cloud, faintly golden in the growing light.
    Thing was, he had a reputation to keep up. Other BMs might lose kids, but not Skerridge. Never Skerridge. Even the half-eaten one didn’t count as a loss. Exactly. His mind made up, Skerridge stood his ground.
    The rising sun