The Bronze King Read Online Free PDF

up.”
    â€œJagiello!” I said. “It moved Jagiello!”
    He nodded. “Yah. He’s the key. This park was made to hold down a local manifestation of the weakness and Jagiello was put here to seal that place. Him, and the little castle there, and what you call Cleopatra’s Needle.”
    Cleopatra’s Needle is a stone obelisk from Egypt, which stands on a little hill across the path northward from Jagiello’s hill, half hidden by cherry trees.
    â€œBut some of those are modern things,” I said. “Don’t you need really ancient monuments, like Stonehenge?”
    â€œNot Stonehenge,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s a little out of whack, always was. Avebury, yah. There are plenty of newer things, too. Even when you don’t know exactly why anymore, there are still people around with a good instinct for where a marker or a guardian is needed, and they put it there and say it looks pretty.
    â€œTrouble here is, they took the weather instruments off the castle roof, which was a mistake; and the hieroglyphs that give the needle its power are almost worn off by erosion. With two down, it wasn’t so hard for the kraken to shove the third out of the way. So those three that stood guard here are disarmed or lost.
    â€œWhich doesn’t have to mean something terrible, provided we can find Jagiello and get him back in position in the next few days. I can go around and fiddle up the power of some other markers you got around here, and with them he can hold the line all right. Only we got to find him.”
    This stranger was going to want something from me after all. I felt disappointed, as though I’d let somebody put something over on me. Maybe he was just a nut, a fancy nut with a great imagination and a violin.
    Except he knew my Granny Gran. So I couldn’t just duck out on him. On the other hand, I was not really delighted by the idea of being loaded with more stuff to do . I mean, with a working mother and me the only child, I already had my hands full a lot of the time.
    â€œWhat have I got to do with any of that?” I said.
    â€œYou’re mixed up in it somehow,” he said, shoving the hair off his forehead and blowing more smoke. “Or what do the Princes want with you? They belong to the kraken.”
    â€œYou mean they’re—magical? Devils or something?” I squeaked.
    â€œNo, just creeps, like you call them. They were down in the subway, looking for what they could take off the poor bums who sometimes crawl down there to sleep when it’s cold. And they’ve done worse than just stealing; you don’t need to know. The kraken was naturally drawn to them, and it took them on. There are always people dumb enough to agree to that kind of thing.”
    The Princes! It was way too late to get cautious, I realized. With the Princes after me, I was in this anyway, like it or not. I said, “I don’t know what they were looking for, but if you hadn’t come along and—and—” And what? I didn’t know what to say.
    He didn’t smile, exactly, but the corners of his mouth twitched. “You liked that? Pretty good, eh?”
    â€œHow did you do it?”
    â€œI just played good music,” he said. He was sort of twinkling at me, but still, well, serious. It was weird, in a warm sort of way. His light gray eyes looked right at me the whole time we talked, right into my eyes, which was actually uncomfortable for me. I knew his stare was friendly, wasn’t a stare at all really. It was just his way of looking at a person. But I had to keep looking away.
    He said, “What are you called?”
    Which surprised me—you’d think a magician would know your name. “Tina,” I said.
    He shook his head. “No,” he said.
    â€œNo what?” I said. “Tina, that’s my name—for Valentine. Mr., ah—?”
    He said something that sounded like