The Secrets of the Pied Piper 2: The Magician's Key - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

MATTHEW CODY is the author of Villainous, Powerless, Super, The Dead Gentleman, and Will in Scarlet. Originally from the Midwest, he now lives in New York City with his wife and young son. Besides novels, Matt has written for both DC Comics and Marvel, and is a regular moderator at the Thalia Book Club camp at Symphony Space. Find out more at matthewcody.com or @matthew_cody.

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Chapter One

The little cobbler’s shop at the corner had no customers. At least, warned Mrs. Amsel, not customers as such. In their few weeks of journeying together, Max had learned that when Mrs. Amsel said something like that, it was almost always cause for alarm. The diminutive housekeeper was prone to dangerous understatements.

So when Mrs. Amsel came stumbling backward out of the cobbler’s doorway, looking like she’d been standing downwind of a hurricane, Max wasn’t exactly surprised. The old woman’s flower-print cardigan sweater was matted with dust and bits of shoe leather, and her ever-present kerchief had been blown askew, so that her small pointed ears--a trademark of her peculiar lineage--peeked through hair that showed gray at the roots.

“Such rudeness!” exclaimed Mrs. Amsel in her thick -accent. She hastily rearranged the kerchief around her head, hiding those distinctive ears from view.

“Let me guess,” said Max. “He doesn’t know anything about elves and he’s never heard of any place called the Summer Isle and he wants us to leave him alone and never come back. Pretty much sum it up?”

Mrs. Amsel muttered something in German under her breath, something that would make the woman blush if Max had been able to translate it. “And there is something else in there, protecting him,” said the little woman. “I’m not sure—​a poltergeist, maybe. Can you believe it? Not a strong one, I don’t think. Just blows stuff around—but still, so very rude.”

“I’m going in,” said Max.

“What? No, meine Liebe,” said Mrs. Amsel. “Forget him. We’ll have better luck with the next one.”

“That’s what you said about the last three! I’m tired of everyone slamming the door in our faces and playing dumb. All we want to do is ask a few questions.”

“They are rude,” agreed Mrs. Amsel. “I always ask politely, but these provincial elflings have no manners.”

“So maybe we need a change of strategy,” said Max. She looked up at the closed door, the windows with the shades pulled low. Her mouth hardened to a straight line as she made up her mind. “Maybe we need someone who can be rude right back.”

“But be careful! He is already angry.”

“I’ve faced worse than him, believe me,” said Max, and it was true. For the most part, Max’s nearly thirteen years on this planet had been an uneventful stretch punctuated by fights with her younger brother and one impulsive morning when she’d decided to dye her hair bright pink. But in the last month, Max had traveled to a magic land, battled rat creatures and escaped a witch, walked over a troll bridge and bartered with ghosts. Now she was back on earth, but her brother was still trapped on the Summer Isle and her mother and father had mysteriously gone missing. All Max had was the little housekeeper for company. Like it or not, Max had packed a lot of experience into a very short amount of time. She felt confident she could handle a shoemaker and his magic wind.

The cobbler’s shop was a single-story chateau nestled at the corner of a winding side street in a village so tiny it didn’t appear on most maps. While the rest of the village could be called quaint, on this lone street the houses were either boarded up and abandoned or in such a state of disrepair that one had to wonder how anyone managed to live there at all. Weeds erupted through cracks in the brick sidewalk, desperate to reach the sunlight that failed to penetrate the seemingly endless shade. It was an odd place to find a shoe shop, but it was exactly the sort of place you’d expect to find a little hidden magic.

Mrs. Amsel had explained that those with magic blood lived in remote places because they eschewed technology, especially electronics. Electricity and magic were dual energies that did not mix well. Nothing could make a spell go awry like booting up a laptop. And Mrs. Amsel claimed that simply having elf blood in her veins was the whole reason she couldn’t get her microwave clock to stop blinking twelve.

On this evening, on this particular street, Max and Mrs. Amsel were the only souls in sight. This was good because, though she hadn’t said anything yet to the little house-keeper, Max was pretty sure they were being followed. It was mostly a sense she had, the feeling of being watched that had gotten stronger over the past several days. A few times she thought she’d glimpsed a tall figure standing in the shadow of a building or in the shade of an alleyway. She’d seen such a figure before, back in Hamelin where their whole adventure had begun. Max hoped that this time the shadows were just shadows, and that her instinct was wrong. But she feared it wasn’t.

All the more reason for urgency. Max wouldn’t let them be turned away again. A little sign hung on the door that was the French equivalent of out for lunch. The sign had been hanging there unchanged since early in the morning, and it was now nearing suppertime.

There was no doorbell chime to announce her entrance, which made sense because some elflings were superstitious and avoided things like cold iron and the chiming of bells, though they didn’t seem to bother Mrs. Amsel in the slightest. In fact, she often talked about how she missed listening to the church bells of Hamelin. Not Max. She missed the sounds of traffic and people speaking English back in her own home in New York. She missed such things terribly. What had been intended as a short visit, just a quick research trip to Germany so that Max’s father could work on his new book, had turned into something else entirely. Now her parents were missing and her brother was stranded in a land of magic, and Max didn’t know how to help any of them.

She was not leaving this shop without some answers.

The inside of the shop smelled of leather and polish, and it was filled with racks of shoes in various states of disrepair. An antique cash register sat on the countertop, and across from it a small man sat hunched over his cobbler’s work-station. He was as bald and knobby as an old potato, with two enormous pointy ears that twitched as he pried the soles off a pair of work boots.

The floor was covered with scraps of thread and flaps of leather that had been scattered everywhere, as if someone had left a window open in a storm.

The cobbler barked at Max in French without bothering to look up from his work.

“Excuse me,” said Max. “Do you speak English?”

“Hmm?” answered the cobbler. “American? Are you with the old woman? I told her I don’t have anything to say to you.”

Max felt a very slight ruffling breeze brush past her. Little more than a sigh, but enough that it made her second-guess her decision to come in. She’d seen enough magic in her life to know that she didn’t like it. A glance over her shoulder reassured her that Mrs. Amsel was waiting anxiously on the stoop.

“I just have a few questions,” said Max, turning back to the cobbler. “It won’t take any time at all.”

The cobbler slammed one of the work boots down on his table and hopped off his stool. The seat had added a few much-needed inches of height to the little...