Free The Outsorcerer's Apprentice by Tom Holt Page A

segment of pink tongue. In spite of its size it looked very, very real, and as sad as road kill. No, he thought, I’m definitely not having fun. In fact, why don’t I just go back where I came from and get a real life?
    This is real
, said a little voice in his head.
And it’s not right
.
    Where did that come from, he wondered. No idea. No way in hell could the existence of real dragons be considered his
fault
; and if there are real dragons in or near a populated area, someone’s got to deal with them, because otherwise they’d slaughter everything that moved. A predator this size, capable of flying and breathing fire, must use up an inconceivably high level of energy, which means it’d need to be feeding all the damn time. Obviously you’d have to control the creatures–control? Wipe them off the face of the Earth. Damn it, if the nice man in the iron knitting hadn’t happened to be passing, I’d be toast—
    A cart, twelve men, muslin and a lot of ice. Maybe that was what was wrong.
    Not my problem
, he assured himself. Yes, this is real; but it’s not my fault, I’m a
tourist
, I came here under the misapprehension that it’d be a bit of fun, and now I’m going to go away and never come back—
    Well
, said the little voice.
Go on, then
.
    He allowed himself a little groan. Oh, all right, he admitted to himself, maybe it is my fault, just a teeny-weeny bit; not anything
I’ve
done, of course, it’s one of those transfer-of-undertakings things, like when you buy up a company and that makes you responsible for all its outstanding debts. I did choose to be the prince, didn’t I?
    For some reason, when his mind referred that one back to committee, he was rewarded with a fleeting mental picture of her, the annoying girl with all the difficult questions. No way, he protested, no way in hell. True, she was pretty–was she? Actually, he wasn’t sure. All the girls here were pretty, just as all the men were handsome; like under-thirties in a daytime soap (because you don’t progress far enough in the dramatic profession to be cast in one unless you meet a certain standard of physical appearance); accordingly, after the first week, a sort of snow-blindness had set in and he no longer registered beauty, except on the rare occasions when it wasn’t there. So it wasn’t that, he reassured himself, and if it’s not that, for someone as shallow and superficial as me, what else could it possibly be—?
    Suddenly, the earth shook. He staggered. It felt like standing up on a fast-moving train while drunk.
    Earthquakes, for crying out loud. Somehow (probably thanks to all those trips he’d taken on fast-moving trains while drunk) he managed to keep his feet; then, when it was all over and the ground had stopped moving, he put his foot in a rabbit hole and fell flat on his face.
    He discovered that he was eye to glassy, dusty eye with the dead dragon. He jumped up, swore, and ran back to the palace without looking round.

T he slight tremor that so distressed prince Florizel was no bother at all to Yglaine as she made her way through the forest. Yglaine was an Elf, and Elves have a sort of special relationship with the ground; which is why they can walk over snowdrifts without sinking in, and why wellington boots aren’t available in Elf foot sizes.
    It made her frown, though. If the earth was shaking, it meant that the goblins, or the dwarves, or both of them were back to work in the mines. That was very bad. There was no need for it, they only did it to make
money
for their greedy, brutish leaders, and it was terribly bad for the trees and the environment and wildlife and stuff. She’d often wondered why they couldn’t all get normal, sensible jobs, doing the sort of things Elves did for a living–abstract contemporary pottery, for instance, or sitting on committees, or writing amusingly snide reviews of each other’s latest volume of collected essays.
    She made an effort and shooed all such unpleasant thoughts