The Dragons of Winter Page 19

  “Just the one,” replied Winter. “Otherwise, he was an excellent student himself. He just had his own ideas of how to go about things. It never went well when his affairs were guided by someone else’s intentions.”

  “As your intentions guide the choices of your Dragons, Jack?”

  “They’re Dragons in name only, you know,” Winter said, indicating the masked servants who stood at posts around the great room. “It was my way of establishing a hierarchy among the Lloigor. But none are really Dragons. There have been none here for millennia who even knew what becoming a true Dragon meant, and then,” he said, turning, “you came.”

  “The Echthroi are mighty,” Charles said, “and obviously dominate this world, even if there are places left that still defy your rule. So what need have you of Dragons?”

  Winter inhaled sharply, and the breath rattled in his throat. “Because,” he answered, “only a Dragon can leave this world and travel to another.”

  All at once Charles understood. A real Dragon, who had accepted his calling, as Madoc once had, could cross even the great wall that existed at the far edge of the Archipelago.

  “Then the chains in the sky . . . ,” he said.

  “My fetters,” Winter answered, “imposed by Shadow.”

  Charles started, surprised. “Your own masters imprisoned you here? Why?”

  “Because of that,” Winter said, gesturing to the pyramid in the distance. “Because I do not control the whole of this Earth, I am not permitted to leave. But with a Dragon as my apprentice, who could also take me as her apprentice, there will be no boundaries to stop me.”

  “I hate to tell you, old fellow,” said Charles, “but I’m not . . .” He stopped, suddenly realizing what Winter had actually said: her apprentice. “You mean . . .”

  “Rose,” Winter said, nodding. “When Madoc became the Black Dragon, he entrusted her with his heart. That is how the mantle of responsibility is passed. She is now the Dragon’s apprentice. And all she need do is choose it, and she will become a Dragon in more than name.”

  “And the reason you asked to speak with me first . . .”

  “We are old friends, are we not?” said Winter. “Together we could convince her. The others need not be involved. Just you and I. Just like old times.”

  He turned and placed a hand on Charles’s shoulder. “I know you,” Winter said, his voice dropping to a whisper. “I know you chafed, as John and I received the recognition and the glory. But what I’m offering you now can be far greater than that, Charles. Greater than you are able to imagine.”

  “Yes,” Charles replied. “But at what cost?”

  “I paid the cost myself, long ago,” said Winter. “All your friends died, long ago. Their work turned to dust, long ago. All you have to do now is say yes.”

  “If I agree to help you,” Charles said slowly, “will you let the others go?”

  “I’m sorry, but that just isn’t possible,” Winter said, an almost gentle tone in his voice. “They cannot remain as they are. But join me, help me convince Rose to take the mantle of Dragon, and I as her apprentice, and we will all be together forever, living lives of perfect order as servants of the Echthroi.”

  Charles couldn’t contain his reaction, and he recoiled in horror. “You want us all to become Lloigor? Are you insane?”

  “I understand,” Winter said soothingly. “But you have no idea how free will has burdened you all. You may argue, but eventually you must agree.”

  Charles shook his head. “That isn’t a reality I have the right to choose for my friends. And I refuse to choose it for myself.”

  “There is no other reality,” Lord Winter hissed, irritated that the Caretaker was not ceding his point. “There has been no other reality for eight thousand centuries. There has been no opposition to my dominance of this world for a longer time than all of human history before it, many times over. Open your eyes, Charles, and see the world as it truly is.”

  Almost absentmindedly, Charles put his hand into his pocket and removed what he found there, cradling them gently in his hand.

  Weena’s petals.

  “My eyes are open,” said Charles, “and what I see is that you have nothing to give me that I do not already have. I decline your offer. I will not join you, nor will I help you convince Rose to do so. And that is your reality.”

  Lord Winter stared at Charles, trembling, then with a gesture had him escorted from the room.

  “He wants us to choose to become Lloigor?” Bert exclaimed. “He is insane.”

  “It’s greater than that,” Charles said after he’d related the gist of the conversation with Lord Winter to his friends. “He wants our Dragon to make him her apprentice.”

  Rose went pale and touched the circlet that hung on the chain around her neck—the Dragon’s heart her father had given her. “My apprentice?” she said in disbelief. “But that would mean . . .”

  “Yes,” Charles said. “When your father gave you his heart, he marked you as his apprentice. You were meant to become the next Dragon, Rose, if you chose to be—and if in turn you made Lord Winter your apprentice, then he could learn to become a Dragon too. And that’s what he wants.”

  “I’m a little unclear on the power structure,” said Burton. “He’s practically the absolute ruler of the entire planet, and he has the soul of an Echthros. So what would he have to gain by becoming a Dragon?”

  “The one ability that has only ever been invoked by one Dragon I know of,” said Bert. “The choice that is all-encompassing, and for which an impossible price must be paid. But still the only thing a Dragon can do that an Echthros or Lloigor cannot.”

  “What?” asked Rose.

  “Heaven,” Bert said grimly. “He wants to become a Dragon so that he can storm the gates of heaven itself.”

  Before any of them could remark on Bert’s words, there was a tapping at the door, which opened. They all expected it to be the ever-polite Vanamonde, but it wasn’t Lord Winter’s chief Dragon—it was Arthur Pym.

  “Oh, my stars and garters!” Bert exclaimed. “Am I ever so glad to see you, Arthur!”

  “Quickly, quickly!” Arthur exclaimed, eyes darting back and forth in fear. “Distracted the guards, and there’s no one in the corridors! To escape, it must be now!”

  Hastily the companions gathered up their belongings, including the broken sword Caliburn, and the books they’d come back to retrieve in the first place.

  “That’s everything,” said Burton. “Let’s go!”

  “What about Archie?” Edmund said. “We can’t just leave him here!”

  “Lad,” Bert said, as gently as he could manage. “That isn’t the Archimedes we know. Not any longer.”

  The young Cartographer backed away and shook his head. “I don’t believe that. They may have been able to change around some of his parts, but what made him our Archie is still in there somewhere. I know it.”

  Bert looked at Rose, then at Charles, who shrugged.

  “I’m here now because my soul, my aiua, my . . . whatever it is that makes me me, didn’t need my old body to go on,” he said. “So I found a new one. So who am I to tell Edmund that Archie’s soul isn’t still there, somewhere, buried under all those cogs and wheels and wires?”

  “I can carry him,” Edmund said, ending the discussion. “We won’t leave him behind. Maybe Shakespeare can fix him.”

  “I’ve got him,” Burton said, putting the compliant clockwork into his own bag. “We aren’t leaving anyone behind. Not today.”

  At the gates, Pym’s anxiousness eased visibly, and swiftly they made their way back through the canyon of ships and toward the entrance of the Last Redoubt.

  “What is it?” Burton asked Charles, keeping his voice low so the others couldn’t overhear them. “You’re chewing on something, I can sense it.”

  Charles nodded. “It’s Pym, the Messenger. Before, he wouldn’t go anywhere near the doors to Dys. Was absolutely terrified just at the prospect of it. But sud
denly, to rescue us . . .”

  Burton tipped his head in agreement. “I see where you’re going. Somehow he overcame his fear, made his way deep into a city he’d never been in before, snuck into the tower where Lord Winter lives, located us, and is now leading us to . . . safety?”

  “Wherever this leads,” Charles whispered, “be prepared for it to go terribly wrong.”

  “I hope you’re wrong,” Burton said, glancing ahead at where Pym was animatedly chatting with Bert and Charles.

  I hope so too, Charles said silently to himself, but I’m not.

  As they moved along the paved pathways, Rose, Bert, and Edmund were scanning through the Little Whatsit and the Imaginarium Geographica for clues to the riddle of the Sphinx.

  “What I don’t understand,” Rose said, “is why Lachesis called it the last Dragon’s riddle. What would the Sphinx have to do with my father?”

  “Technically you’re the last Dragon,” said Edmund, “in waiting, as it were.”

  “You’re letting your own notions guide you, rather than the riddle itself,” said Bert. “Obviously, the Sphinx was a Dragon once. So she has to be who the Morgaine was referring to.”

  “I think that’s what Lord Winter brought the Dragonships here to do,” said Edmund. “He was trying to find a Dragon to make him its apprentice.”

  “And one was here, in the only place he couldn’t get to,” said Rose. “No wonder he wanted to get into the pyramid.”

  “If the Dragon’s heart is what he needs,” said Edmund, “why didn’t he simply take it? Rose even tried to kill him and couldn’t, so he obviously could have overpowered all of us anytime he chose to.”

  “It’s a matter of free will,” said Bert. “It’s an office that must be conferred, then accepted—not taken by force. She had to choose it—that’s why he needed Charles’s help to persuade her.”

  “I never would have—,” Charles began.

  “I never doubted, Uncle Charles,” Rose said, hugging him. “You’d never let me fall.”

  “Here,” Edmund said, pointing to a map in the Geographica. “This looks like the Sphinx, doesn’t it?”

  The map was one that Bert had seen before—and he knew the drawing well. It depicted a chariot being drawn by two Dragons, one scarlet, the other the greenish-gold of the Sphinx.

  “Oh my stars and garters!” Bert exclaimed. “I think I know what her name is. Rose,” he said, eyes wide, “I want you to look up the Little Whatsit’s entry on Samaranth.”

  “You think the Sphinx is Samaranth?” asked Charles, who was listening in with one ear.

  “No,” Bert replied, “I think the Sphinx is Samaranth’s wife.”

  The companions crossed the plazas inside the wall and entered the passageway to the chamber of the Sphinx.

  “I’m guessing that Jules left something inside for us,” said Charles. “Maybe something we can use to reestablish a connection to another zero point.”

  “They wouldn’t even know what had happened,” Burton said, looking up at the sleeping Sphinx, “so how could they know what we needed to come home?”

  “The Sphinx knows—,” Pym started to say before Burton finally lost his temper and clocked the Messenger upside his head. “We know that, you cretin! That’s why we have to solve the riddle!”

  Pym, in a rare moment of assertion, actually shoved Burton and spun away, pressing his back to a wall. He took a deep breath. “No,” he wheezed, “not ‘knows.’ Nose. The Sphinx nose. Look at the nose.”

  They all looked at the Sphinx. The nose, and places along the wings, were more worn than in other spots, allowing the underlying material it was made of to show through. “It needs a little plaster,” said Charles. “Why is that significant?”

  “Because,” Bert said as the realization suddenly dawned on him, “underneath the centuries of paint, and soot, and dust, the Sphinx’s nose—in fact, the entire Sphinx—is made of cavorite. Including the structure—and the arch.”

  Rose suddenly beamed. “They knew a machine would never survive all those centuries,” she said brightly, “but something made entirely of cavorite would.”

  “Here,” Edmund said, indicating an entry in the Little Whatsit. “There’s not much about Samaranth or his wife, just that they pulled a chariot for the legendary Jason, of the Argonauts. It also says that she was punished for betraying the Archipelago,” he finished, “but that’s about all.”

  “Her name is here in the Geographica,” Bert said, handing the atlas to Rose. “It can’t hurt to try.”

  “It will work,” Rose answered. “Somehow, I know it.” She looked up at the Sphinx and laid a hand on the cool stone. “Azer,” she whispered, hardly daring to breathe. “You’re Azer.”

  For a long moment, the Sphinx did not answer. Then, slowly, she opened her eyes.

  “Greetings, Moonchild,” Azer said in a voice that sounded of silk and ancient gardens in a long-ago place. “What do you desire?”

  Before Rose could answer, there was a terrible noise outside—the sounds of combat, and screaming, and suffering.

  “Oh no,” Charles exclaimed. “What’s happened now?”

  The companions rushed out of the chamber and into the amphitheater—which was in flames. The Unforgotten were running away from the center of the chaos: a dozen masked servants of Lord Winter, who was standing at the top of the steps, where the dark geometric shapes of the Echthroi hovered in the air above him.

  He was holding one of the old Caretakers’ books in his hand. One of their future histories—a book that would have turned to dust long ago, were it not for the Lloigor’s eldritch magicks running through it.

  “This was once a prophecy,” Lord Winter said, “that warned of what might happen if the Echthroi were to finally conquer this world in full. And now I’m going to turn prophecy . . .

  “. . . into history.”

  The companions’ minds raced to try to figure out what could be done. There were too many Lloigor to fight, and the Unforgotten were already scattered.

  “I think,” Bert said, mostly to buy them more time, “that you are not completely in the thrall of the Echthroi. I think you are not wholly Lloigor.”

  “Really,” Lord Winter said with an amused smile. “Do tell.”

  “All this power,” Bert said, gesturing widely with his arms, “and such absolute domination for so many centuries, and somehow you never managed to overcome the Unforgotten until we arrived?”

  “Oh, on occasion I captured and killed or converted a few,” Winter said. “Those who strayed too far, or for too long, from their haven. I still have the skull of The Golden Compass 519 on my wall. But,” he went on, “until you came, I didn’t have this.”

  He was holding Bert’s watch. A terrified Arthur Pym stepped out from behind one of the servants. He looked overcome with sorrow—but he was standing behind Winter, not the Caretakers.

  Charles and Burton glowered, but Rose and Edmund held them back as Bert continued to talk.

  “Speaking of Pym,” he said, gesturing at the terrified Messenger, “he’s been here, what? A decade? And he aided us. He’s been running freely around this world of yours, and yet you never managed to stop him, either. And it’s not because you couldn’t—I think it’s because you wouldn’t.”

  “He betrayed us, Caretaker,” Burton said coldly. “It was his choice.”

  “No,” said Pym. “It wasn’t.”

  Trembling, he held out his arm and pulled back his sleeve. There, tattooed on his forearm, was the mark of Lord Winter—a circle, surrounded by four diamonds.

  “Not useful enough to be a Dragon, I’m afraid,” said Lord Winter, “but useful enough, when the time came.”

  “What did he promise you?” Charles asked.

  “Freedom,” said Pym. “I get to go home.”

  “And I always keep my promises,” said Winter. He lowered his glasses, and dark bolts of ebony fire leaped from his eyes and in a trice had consumed the hapless man.

  “
Arthur!” Bert screamed. “Oh, dear me, Arthur!” He dropped to his knees, scrabbling after the drifting wisps of flame-singed cloth that were all that remained of the Anachronic Man.

  “I kept him around far longer than I should have, anyway,” Winter said dispassionately. “He had begun to bore me.”

  As one, Burton and Charles both stepped protectively in front of Rose and Edmund, who scowled and moved forward to stand shoulder to shoulder with them. Charles also kept a steadying hand on Bert, who was trembling with anger.

  “Don’t worry, I have no intention of destroying any of you,” Winter said blithely. “You’re all very interesting, and you will make excellent Lloigor.”

  “We’ll find out how we failed, and we’ll make things right,” Bert said. His voice was trembling, but his face was a mask of defiance. “We’ll find a way to defeat you, Lord Winter.”

  “Mmm, all formal now, are we, old friend?” Lord Winter said with a trace of sarcasm. “You should just call me Jack.”

  He shook his head. “You aren’t Jack. I’m not sure who you are, but you’re not him.”

  “I thought you wanted to become a Dragon,” said Charles, “to get past your masters’ chains.”

  “Pym told me about the Sphinx,” said Winter, “and that she may, in fact, be a time travel device. And if that’s true, I can use her to go back and correct my own mistakes—and I can make sure that this place,” he added, gesturing at the pyramid, “will never be built, and all the books destroyed.”

  “What if I accept your offer?” Rose said suddenly. “What if I become a Lloigor and make you my apprentice Dragon?”

  “Rose, no!” Charles cried. “Don’t!”

  “Hmm,” said Winter. “That’s an interesting proposition. I might even consider sparing your friends, just for old times’ sake.”

  As the others cried out in protest, the Winter Dragons parted and allowed Rose to approach Lord Winter.

  “Just take my hand,” Winter said, “and kneel.”

  Instead of taking Lord Winter’s outstretched hand, Rose picked a shard of flint off the ground and jabbed it into her thumb, drawing blood. She stepped to one side and spun around, too quickly for Lord Winter to respond. Rose locked her arm around Winter’s neck and warned the servants to back away. Then, she reached up and swiftly marked the Lloigor’s forehead with blood.