“Okay. All right. But I don’t understand, why did you bring me here if you don’t want to sell me back the button?”

The dragon’s pupils widened until they were almost a foot across, and it seemed to come awake and really notice him for the first time. Its head lifted off its tail. He was close enough that it had to go slightly cross-eyed to focus on him. Now that Quentin’s eyes had adjusted to the dark he could make out the big scales on the dragon’s back. They looked as thick as encyclopedias, and a few of them had things carved into them, sigils and pictograms that Quentin didn’t recognize.

“You will not speak again, human, except to thank me,” the dragon said. “You wish to be a hero, but you do not know what a hero is. You think a hero is one who wins. But a hero must be prepared to lose, Quentin. Are you? Are you prepared to lose everything?”

“I’ve already lost everything,” he said.

“Oh, no. You have so much more left to lose.”

The dragon was a lot scoldier than he expected. And disappointingly cryptic. Somehow in the back of his mind he’d vaguely thought that the dragon might want to be his friend, and they would fly around the world solving mysteries together. The chances of that happening now looked vanishingly small. He waited. Maybe the dragon would give him something they could use.

“The old gods are returning to take back what is theirs. I will play my part. Best you prepare to play yours.”

“That sounds like a good idea, but how exactly—”

“You will not speak. The button is useless to you. The Neitherlands are closed. But the first door is still open. It always has been.”

Quentin’s knees suddenly felt stiff from sitting cross-legged. He wanted to spit the salt water out of his mouth, but there was nothing but more salt water to spit into. The dragon whipped its tail out from under its chin, back into the darkness, slashing up a cloud of silt.

“You may thank me now.”

Wait, what? Quentin opened his mouth to speak—to thank the Dragon of the Grand Canal like a good boy, or to ask him what he meant, or tell him to fuck off for talking in riddles, he would never know, because he choked instead. He couldn’t breathe. The spell was gone, and he was gagging on filthy, freezing canal water. He was drowning.

He left his one remaining shoe stuck in the mud and kicked his way crazily up toward the surface.

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 15