The First Dragon (Chronicles of the Imaginarium Geographica, The) (11 page)

“Namers like yourself,” Charles noted drolly. “Just saying.”

“I speak to be understood, not out of vanity,” said Samaranth, “and they believe they will have little need of me, even though there is still a tremendous amount of work to be done. There will always be some need for Makers—but Naming is far more valuable, because to Name something is to give it meaning. Simply being created is not enough.”

“Everything has been made?” Edmund said, gesturing out the window. “Even there?”

He was looking to the west, toward the Archipelago—or at least, where the Archipelago should have been. But there was nothing except darkness there. And not the storm-cloud darkness of the Frontier, but the darkness that Rose had seen only once before, when she and her friends sailed past the waterfall at the Edge of the World and into the darkness beyond, to find her father.

Samaranth looked at him in surprise. “That is the Un-Made World,” he said as if his visitors should have known already, “and it remains Un-Named, until the Word chooses a time and a place to make it and Name it. There is nothing there except darkness, and stone, and . . .”

“And the keep,” said Edmund. “The Eternal Tower. Isn’t that right?”

For the first time since they’d arrived, Samaranth actually looked frightened. “Are you Nephilim?” he asked, his voice steady,
but the fear still evident in his expression. “Have you come to Un-Name me?”

“No, we aren’t Nephilim, and we haven’t come to Un-Name anyone,” Rose quickly assured him. “Why would you ask that?”

“Because,” Samaranth replied, “only a few among the Host, the eldest of us, even know the tower exists. We have traveled to it. We know how to use it. And of us all, I alone deduced how important it is to this world and the Un-Made World both. They were not always severed. And someday, they may be made whole again. This is the secret we have kept for eons. The secret worth . . . killing for. So, I must ask you again—have you come to Un-Name me?”

An elderly man . . . led the procession . . .

“They did what?”
John exclaimed, incredulous. “You helped them to do
what
?”

“Calm down, John,” Jack said soothingly, “and I’ll explain everything.”

“Calm
down
?!?” John sputtered, almost too furious to speak. “You’ve just betrayed everything we believe in!”

Jack scowled. “No, I haven’t,” he said as calmly as he could manage. “We just believed that—”

“We?” John exclaimed. “You mean there were . . .” He stopped, thinking, then spun around, pointing an accusing finger at Shakespeare.

“I’m surprised at you, Will,” John said. “They could not have done this without your help. You should have come to me.”

“That’s the rub of it,” Shakespeare said, moving around the table to stand in solidarity with Jack. “We don’t think you made the right call. The gate was the only viable option we had.”

“You’ve betrayed your oath as a Caretaker, Jack,” John said, shaking. “And you’ve betrayed me.”

“Well, as regards the former,” Jack said, his voice becoming steadier as he grew bolder about confronting his friend, “I disagree.
I swore an oath to protect a book that is lost somewhere in Deep Time, and an Archipelago that has disappeared to heaven knows where from a world that is dominated by shadows. So there really wasn’t much to betray except my own best judgment, which I used. And as to the latter,” he continued, “if that’s really how you feel, oh Prime Caretaker, why don’t you fire me?”

It was spoken in the heat of the argument, but Jack’s statement nonetheless shocked the older Caretakers. Verne and Bert stepped in to try to calm tempers on both sides.

“Focus on what moves us forward, not what moves us backward, John,” Verne said, laying a hand on the younger man’s shoulder.

“Don’t patronize me, Jules,” John said, rebuffing Verne’s calming words and comforting hand. “Besides, wasn’t it your man Burton who taught us that time moves in two directions? They’ve gone back in time, and we couldn’t even check in on them if we wanted to! We’ll have no way of even knowing if they get into trouble!”

“We actually may have a way,” said Verne. “It’s something I’d been working on with Burton ages ago that I think will come in useful now.”

John glared at Jack a few seconds longer, then tipped his head at Verne. “All right. Show me.”

Verne ushered the Caretakers into a large, circular room in the northernmost wing of Tamerlane House. There was an immense round table in the center. It was made of some kind of stone, more ancient than marble. It was crisscrossed with various alchemical symbols, and a hexagonal shape, inset into the middle, was polished to an almost mirrorlike finish.

“This is the table that Arthur used to conduct séances,” Verne said, gesturing at Conan Doyle. “What he didn’t understand at the time, and what Ehrich spent a lot of time and energy trying to debunk,” he added, winking at Houdini, “is that Arthur wasn’t making contact with the spirit world, but with the past.

“This table,” he continued as the other Caretakers took their seats around the circle, “is one of the few artifacts that survived the destruction of Atlantis. It is possible, if that is where our friends have gone, that we will be able to observe them, and possibly even send messages as well.”

“Send messages?” John said, still fuming from Jack’s announcement. “If there was the possibility that this would work, then they never should have risked using the gate.”

“We don’t know that it
will
work,” said Verne. “In fact, it never even occurred to me as a possibility until last night. You see, Arthur always assumed he was communicating with a spirit in real time. What he was actually doing was communicating with the past, with someone who, from their own point of view, was still living. Burton is the one who figured it out.”

“Actually,” Conan Doyle admitted with a touch of embarrassment, “that’s part of the reason Burton was able to so easily recruit me into the ICS. He had already been told a lot about me by his own right-hand man, who had been speaking to me for years via the table.”

“Burton’s right-hand man?” John said, frowning. “What does he have to do with all this? I don’t understand.”

“It is attuned to the craftsman who made it,” said Verne. “Arthur knew him as Pheneas, a man of Arab descent who supposedly died thousands of years ago. In fact, the maker of this
table was considerably older than that. He was known at points in his life as Theopolous, and earlier still as Enkidu. But Burton, who knew him best, simply called him the End of Time, and when he introduced us, I knew I had found the first, and perhaps the best, of my Messengers. As you know, he died at the hands of an Echthros in London, but he may be able to serve us still.”

“What must we do, Jules?” Jack asked. “How does it work?”

“He always seemed to appear in answer to my questions,” Conan Doyle replied. “He seemed never to age, but sometimes he couldn’t recall earlier discussions. I think it’s because I was going further and further back along his timeline. It functions in a manner similar to the trumps—intuition plays a part.”

“As does belief,” Houdini interjected. “You believed, and I didn’t, Arthur. That’s why you saw him.”

“Believing is seeing,” said Shakespeare. “We should give it a go.”

“All right,” John said, still reluctant, and more than a bit put out that he hadn’t been told about the table earlier. “How do we do this?”

“Join hands,” said Conan Doyle. “There are just enough of us here to make it work. Seven seems to have been the best number for making it operate. More, and there were too many competing thoughts; less, and there wasn’t enough concentration to keep a clear focus.”

Jack took Shakespeare’s left hand and Houdini’s right. Conan Doyle sat between Houdini and John, with Bert to John’s left, and Verne completing the circle.

“What question should we ask?” said John.

“The simplest one, I suppose,” said Conan Doyle. “Where is the
Indigo Dragon
?”

Together, the men gripped one another’s hands and focused their will and thought on the question and the table.

Nothing happened.

“If Charles were here,” Jack said after a few minutes had passed, “he would be asking if we needed to invoke some sort of incantation or magic spell.”

“Abarakadabara,” said Houdini. Still nothing.

“Is it plugged in?” asked Bert.

“Maybe it needed a Dragon, like the Zanzibar Gate did,” Shakespeare began to say, and in that instant an unearthly glow began to emanate from the center of the hexagon.

“Ah,” said John. “Well done, Will.”

“Thanks, but I haven’t the slightest idea what just happened,” said Shakespeare.

“You focused your thoughts on a living Dragon,” said Verne. “Life flows to life. We simply asked the wrong question.”

“Quiet, all of you,” John said as the light rose from the table in a column that began to alter and shift, forming a three-dimensional, almost holographic image. “Something is beginning to appear.”

♦  ♦  ♦

On the downward slope of a gigantic sand dune, the air shimmered and hummed, and suddenly the Zanzibar Gate came into view, becoming more and more solid as the seconds passed.

Almost instantly, the
Indigo Dragon
slid through and onto the sand, coming to rest with a slight lean about twenty feet down the dune.

“Meh!” said Elly Mae.

“Mah!” said Coraline.

“Is it over?” asked Fred. “That went pretty quickly.”

“Just like walking through the doors of the keep,” said Madoc. “That Shaksberd is quite the talented fellow. If I’d have recruited him instead of Burton—”

“Don’t,” Uncas said sternly, “even
joke
about that.”

Quixote had already removed his helmet and breastplate. In the heat, the armor would be almost unbearable. He wiped his brow and looked to the horizon. “There,” he said, pointing. “I think we’ve found the city.”

Indeed, off in the distance the companions could see the magnificent outlines of the City of Jade, but the view was obscured by something so much more massive that at first, what it was failed to register with any of them. It was Madoc who understood it before the rest of them.

“The giants,” he breathed, shading his eyes to look as high into the sky as he could manage. “The Corinthian Giants have formed a living wall between us and the city.”

It was true—the great giants of legend, who had once saved the Caretakers from an aspect of Mordred called the King of Crickets, were standing shoulder to shoulder from the western edge of the desert that met the ocean, to so far to the east that they faded from view in the distance.

All along the perimeter formed by the giants’ feet were encampments of people. Thousands upon thousands of tents, and caravans, and wagons, and what might have been a million people of every creed and color. Every culture of the young world seemed to be represented, and none of the encampments seemed to be temporary. Flocks of sheep and woolly cattle were corralled at spots along the line, as well as flocks of fowl, and animals of labor of every stripe: camel-like creatures with great humps, small
horses covered in fur, and great catlike creatures that were large enough to be ridden by three men.

“It looks as if generations of people have lived here, waiting for something,” said Quixote.

“Or being kept from something,” said Kipling.

“Or waiting for something t’ happen,” said Uncas. “Turn around.”

In the other direction, to the north of the Zanzibar Gate, was a sight equally as stunning—not because it was as overwhelming as the sight of the massive giants and enormous encampments at their feet, but because each of them intuitively knew what they were looking at.

Not half a mile behind the gate was a gigantic ship. It was perpendicular to their position, so they had no way of judging just how broad it might be, because it was so long they could barely see the ends.

Kipling let out a low whistle. “That has to be . . .”

“Several miles long, end to end,” said Madoc. “I can’t see how wide, though.”

“I’ll take a look,” Laura Glue said, unfurling her Valkyrie’s wings and leaping into the air.