Drachenerwachen Chapters 36-38: the Hostage
In the meantime,
I’m still getting on with my reading challenge.
I’ve started reading the next book on my list, but I’m trying to get up
to date with blogging about Drachenerwachen. So…
Still at Black
West, we jump to a scene with the villains, the thin-lipped man with ash-blond
hair and the dainty man called Sherpa Sarvas, who are worrying about why the
effect of Kurmo’s imprinting hasn’t yet summoned him to Frau Tossilo. Sarvas offers his companion a
raspberry-flavoured sweet, explaining that the taste of raspberries comforts
him because it brings back memories of childhood – so yes, we were right, the
sweet-wrapper was a sign of Black West’s presence!
The thin-lipped
man
retorts that he’s not interested in childhood, he’s interested in
progress! They have been waiting twenty
hours now, and their security cameras show no sign of a dragon. This implies that their research hasn’t been
very detailed, if they don’t yet know that dragons don’t show up on film, which
gives Kurmo a chance of getting in before anyone spots him.
(The narrator
lets us in on the secret that Kurmo is already close, though of course neither
Black West nor Frau Tossilo knows this yet.)
In the meantime,
Sarvas goes to question Frau Tossilo, who recognises him as a man she had seen
at the hotel in Mexico discussing the cost and danger of obtaining ‘the egg’. Like the young man who brought her in
earlier, Sarvas begins with a show of politeness, asking her whether she’s
having a pleasant stay, and is met with a sarcastic, ‘Oh, absolutely – I feel
quite at home!’
Sarvas tries to
find out more about Kurmo, asking Frau Tossilo what she feeds him on. Tossilo tries to throw him off balance by
replying, ‘Burtelsur’ (although she admits to herself that she still hasn’t
been able to work out what ‘burtelsur’ means), and that Rüttgen’s burtelsur is
the best brand.
Sarvas,
unimpressed, points out that Rüttgen is a company that makes shoe insoles, and
that he knows that baby dragons eat nettles, and has Frau Tossilo been feeding
him on those? Tossilo continues to try
to stall for time by claiming that she doesn’t feed Kurmo and he finds his own
food. At this point, the thin-lipped man
comes to join in interrogating her, and after a quick glance up at the hole in
the roof that had been deliberately left for the dragon to fly in, he joins her
inside the glass prison.
Meanwhile, we
cut back to Kurmo. He had landed in the
mountains at dawn, in a safely secluded spot, and has been resting while Johann
and Janka go to search for water, as they had brought sandwiches but nothing to
drink. But now, as Janka comes back to
greet him (while Johann is still off foraging), Kurmo senses that Frau Tossilo
is in urgent danger and that he needs to fly right now.
Janka, worried
that he is being too hasty, tries to stop him by grabbing hold of his tail, but
he is too frantic with worry about Frau Tossilo even to pay attention to Janka’s
safety, and she just has to scramble up his tail until she can climb into the
luggage-compartment in his back. She
tries to persuade him to land and at least wait until Johann comes back, so as
not to leave her brother wondering what has become of them, but Kurmo insists
that he mustn’t wait a second longer.
Meanwhile, Frau
Tossilo is still trying to find out what Black West is after, and at last gets
an answer, of sorts. Progress, the
thin-lipped man explains. He wants
progress and security. And then he
becomes quite poetic, for a ruthless, heartless Mad Scientist, explaining that ‘Dragons are creatures that could give everything. Everything! Dark and light. Downfall and new beginnings. That which has been, and that which will
be. And every shade in between.’
Frau Tossilo
thinks how much Kurmo has given her.
Even though he’s too big to fit in her flat, eats too much, moults scales
and constantly breaks things, having a dragon in her life makes her feel she
could want nothing more. She feels as
reassured as if Kurmo were right by her – you can tell he’s going to turn up at
any moment, can’t you?
Not
surprisingly, the thin-lipped man’s interests are far more mundane. What he wants from Kurmo, he finally explains,
is electricity. Frau Tossilo
sarcastically retorts that there are these things called plugs that you stick
into wall-sockets.
The thin-lipped
man points out that mains electricity isn’t something that just happens: energy
resources are running out. He has a
point – one which Frau Tossilo has apparently never considered, and she
reflects that this man seems to suffer from even greater anxiety about the
future than she does herself. But of
course, the search for a renewable energy source doesn’t excuse kidnapping a
sentient being, chaining him up and inserting electrodes into his brain to
convert emotional energy into electricity.
Frau Tossilo
insists that Black West’s trying to convert a dragon’s love into electricity
cannot work, because Kurmo doesn’t love the thin-lipped man but her. The thin-lipped man airily dismisses this on
the grounds that Kurmo’s bond with Frau Tossilo is just the result of
imprinting and he could just as easily have imprinted on anyone (probably true,
but his life and his character and emotions would have been very different if
he had imprinted on someone who mistreated and exploited him), and that it’s
nothing to do with love (emphatically not true).
At this point,
Kurmo flies in and tries to break down the walls of Frau Tossilo’s prison by
swinging his tail at the unbreakable glass or clawing it, to no avail. I want to shout at him, ‘No, use your fire!’ Okay, there’s a risk that the molten glass
could injure Frau Tossilo, but Kurmo is generally quite effective at melting
only small areas. It reminds me of times
playing Dungeons & Dragons when I’ve repeatedly tried and failed to hit an
orc with my mace or my flail, even when I know full well that my crossbow is my
best weapon, just because using a ranged weapon against an opponent who’s
standing next to me sounds stupid.
The thin-lipped
man tries to summon his colleagues to capture Kurmo, but as they don’t turn up,
he resorts to producing, of all unexpected things, a sword, and pressing the tip
of it against Frau Tossilo’s back. He
revels in his power, taunting Kurmo by ordering him to sit, and then to lift
his front paws and beg, and, finally, to put himself in chains.
Janka, squished
inside Kurmo’s luggage-compartment, finally manages to peer out and see what is
going on. Eventually, she manages to
reach out to Kurmo through their telepathic bond and talk some sense into him,
making him realise that he can’t rescue Frau Tossilo by imprisoning
himself. And finally, Kurmo thinks of
breathing fire on the glass prison.
It doesn’t have
any effect, however. And now a group of
Black West employees rush in, armed with some kind of ‘sticks’ which they point
at Kurmo. He has to flee at once with
Janka. Well, after all this build-up, it
would have been too much to hope that the rescue would be easy, after all. Besides, there’s an important member of the
team missing.
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