Endymion Spring

doesn't concern you.'

He reached into the pocket of his jeans and pulled out the dog's bandanna, which he started threading round his fingers like a boxer taping his knuckles. 'You're just jealous,' he muttered, giving his sister a sideways glance.

'Oh yeah?  Jealous of what?'

'Of the book I found.'

'You mean the one you lost,' she reminded him. 'Or have you forgotten that too?'

'Of course I haven't.'

She knew she had the upper hand. 'The book probably realized its mistake,' she taunted him, 'and went back into hiding until someone else could find it.'

'What's that supposed to mean?'

'It means you're too dumb to solve this mystery on your own,' she said.

'That's what you think.'

'Yep, and I'm smarter than you..'

'Well, you're not as clever as you think you are,' he said angrily, rising from his log. 'You're just a silly girl in a silly raincoat, who thinks Mum and Dad will stick together so long as you go on wearing it. But they won't, you'll see!  They'll get divorced and then we'll have to live on different sides of the ocean. Then you'll be happy, won't you, because you'll never have to see me again!  Anyway, Endymion Spring chose me, and not you, so get over it.'

He knew he was hitting her everywhere it hurt, but he was not prepared for her reaction. Duck looked about to sneeze, but her face crumpled instead into tears. Immediately, he reached out to hold her, but she shook off his clumsy attempt at an apology and covered her face with her hands. She rocked back and forth, sobbing.

He hadn't seen her cry like this — at least, not since the Big Argument. His words had opened a deep and dangerous wound.

The man had been watching them with a subdued look of tenderness on his face, as though he knew the pain and suffering the book could cause. Yet at the mention of Endymion Spring he stood up and approached them. The name seemed to fit like a key in a lock and released him from his inactivity.

He still did not speak, but sat down between them and reached into one of his voluminous pockets. He brought out a battered book — the volume he had been reading outside the bookshop. It wasn't blank, as Duck had led Blake to believe, but full of densely printed words:  old-fashioned words with barbed black letters and small illustrations of angels and skeletons and devils — not to mention men working on presses like the one Jolyon had shown them yesterday. Some of the pages were torn and others were covered in nasty brown blotches. The book was falling apart.

Duck stopped crying and looked up.

At last the homeless man turned to a series of blank white pages he had inserted near the back of the volume preceding them:  the finest tissue paper, veined with silver lines.

Blake gasped. 'How did you get this?' he asked, realizing at once that he was looking at part of Endymion Spring.

In answer, the man pointed to one of the blank pages, where Blake could see something forming. It was as if someone had breathed on a mirror and drawn a message on the foggy glass. Lines appeared — at first very faint, but then darker as more and more of the image was revealed. They were like pin scratches on skin before they well with blood. The boy's eyes widened in astonishment.

'What does it say?' squeaked Duck. 'Tell me!'

'Can't you see it?' he said, surprised.

'No. I could see the printed bits, but not this,' she said, sitting on the edge of her log. 'It's like it's the blank book I told you about.'

She sounded upset and more than a little bit jealous still, but her curiosity was getting the better of her.

Blake wasn't sure how to describe the apparition.   It was an ancient tree with an odd beast dwelling in its leaves. He could see it quite clearly and reached forward to touch it. The creature seemed to sense his presence and flicked its head nervously from side to side before darting away from his enquiring finger.

And then, perhaps at his touch, the animal shivered and disappeared. The tree was no more than a memory on the page, a wintry outline, becoming fainter and fainter, until it had faded away completely.

Blake held his breath. 'What was that?' he asked eventually, thinking it had looked like the dragon he had seen in the tree last night.

'What was what?' cried Duck.

'A dragon, I think,' he said less certainly, 'in a tree. Something happened. I don't understand. It didn't answer my question at all.'

Duck didn't know what the image meant either, but promised to find out something later in the library. Blake might be able to read from enchanted books, she remarked, but at least she could learn things from real ones.

Blake, however, wasn't listening. He had looked up at the homeless man. 'How did you — how did the book — do that?' he asked, but the man was miles away, staring at the book, as if he could see something else.

Blake glanced at the page. It was blank.

'Who are you? he asked again. 'What is your name?'

The man seemed to emerge from a daydream. He shrugged off a memory and flipped to the front of the book, where he underlined a partially obscured word with a grimy fingernail.

Blake frowned. The syllables lodged like fish bones at the back of his throat. How was he supposed to pronounce it?

'It says his name is—' he started.

'I can read this, dummy,' said Duck irritably, cutting him off.

She pushed his head out of the way and studied the man's name for a moment. Then she looked up and smiled.

'I'm pleased to meet you, Psalmanazar.'

?

Blake's face wrinkled in consternation. Psalmanazar?  What kind of name was that?  It reminded him of an angel or a djinn. 'Are you a wizard or something?' he asked finally.

Psalmanazar smiled, but shook his head.

'Then how did you know to contact me?' asked Blake, before Duck could interrupt.

Psalmanazar flipped to the end of the book, where several words were waiting for Blake, in ink as faint as ash. Even this message didn't make much sense. He mouthed the words to himself, unable to fathom their meaning.

'Come on,' Duck badgered him. 'What does it say?'

He read the lines aloud:

'The Silence will end — the Sun approaches.

Mark my Word — the Shadow encroaches.

'That's weird,' he added. 'The sun appeared in the other riddle, too. It's like an instruction or a warning of some kind.'

'And the shadow,' said Duck, ominously. 'Don't forget that.'

With a shiver, Blake remembered Jolyon's stark warning about a Person in Shadow — someone who would stop at nothing to find the Last Book.

He was about to say something when he noticed the following page had been neatly excised from Psalmamazar's book, possibly so that the man could construct the paper dragon.

On a whim, he asked, 'Did this message appear the other day, when we saw you outside the bookshop?'

The man looked pleased and nodded.

So that was it!  Somehow, the paper — Endymion Spring 's paper — must have told him to look up from the book. But why?

Blake reread the riddle. The suggestion that the Person in Shadow — perhaps the person Jolyon had warned the about — had been lurking outside the bookshop unnerved him and he looked around suspiciously. Only a few leaves shook on the branches of the surrounding trees.