The Dragons of Winter Read online

  To the animals, dead was dead, and while they tolerated the portraits, none of them—especially the badgers—could quite accept the tulpas. It was something about their smell, Fred once said to Jack—there was none. Tulpas gave off no odor at all. And to an animal, who determines friend or enemy, truth or lies, based on smell—that made the whole idea completely suspect.

  Still, he was sworn to serve the Caretakers, as were his father and grandfather before him, and of them all, Charles had the strongest bond to the badgers. So Fred was cheerfully stoic. Mostly.

  “You could do as John is doing,” Jack continued, “and base a great work on stories of the Archipelago.”

  “I learned my lesson about that ages ago,” Byron grumbled. “They set fire to me, remember? And that was just on general principles. I’d hate to see what the others would do to me if I broke one of the cardinal rules of the Archipelago.”

  “Others have done it before me,” said John. “Most of them, actually. And as long as the stories or characters are disguised or altered, and no secrets of the Archipelago are revealed, it isn’t really a problem.”

  “Technically speaking,” said Charles, “you aren’t revealing any secrets about the Archipelago, because there’s nothing left to keep any secrets about.”

  “Believing is seeing,” Fred murmured in a low voice. “Believing is seeing, Scowler . . . Charles.” He twitched his whiskers as if he were about to say something more, then turned abruptly and scurried out of the room, closing the door behind him.

  “Ah, me,” Charles said, sighing. “I’ve put my foot in it again, haven’t I?”

  “No argument there,” said Jack.

  “You’d think finding his father was really alive, and not lost with the rest of the Archipelago, would have cheered him somewhat,” said Barrie, “but he can’t push past the loss of everything else, I fear.”

  “It was his world,” said John. “And it’s gone. You can’t fault the little fellow for feeling as he does.”

  Charles sighed heavily. “No,” he said. “No, we can’t. But I wish it were at least easier for him to accept that I’m, well, me. Myself.”

  “Remember, Charles,” said Barrie. “All good things happen . . .

  “. . . in time.”

  There was a knock at the door. Percy Shelley opened it and stepped into the room. He scowled at Byron, then regained his composure and faced the other Caretakers. “Gentlemen,” he said, gesturing back down the hall. “Summon the others to the meeting room, if you please. The war council will begin within the hour.”

  Charles led his companions to the inner courtyard of the house, where Sir Richard Burton and the Valkyrie called Laura Glue were instructing Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain, and Rose Dyson in the ancient art of the samurai sword.

  Each held a katana about three feet long and was in a stance of readiness. The girls faced each other, while Burton faced both of the other men. He barked a command, and all of them erupted in a flurry of shouts and clashing metal.

  “I never caught the knack of it,” Charles said over the din. “I’d land a good blow with one of the wooden practice swords, then pause to apologize to my opponent and allow him to regain his footing. It’s an honorable discipline, but it really doesn’t mesh well with gentlemanly chivalry.”

  The girls were evenly matched, and fought to a draw—but after handily disarming Hawthorne, Burton found himself driven to his knees by Twain, who finally relented when he realized they had an audience.

  The combatants turned to face their visitors, and John was struck by how Rose seemed to have changed since his last visit. There, in battle gear, with newly colored blue hair and holding a sword, she seemed to have grown older overnight, and for a moment he felt a wistfulness for the child she had been when they first met. But then again, he reminded himself, she had never truly been a child—something for which he felt honest regret.

  “Uncle John! Uncle Jack! Uncle Charles!” Rose exclaimed as she tossed away her sword and jumped across the lawn to hug and kiss the three companions. “I didn’t know you were here!”

  Laura Glue also went to greet the Caretakers, but only after retrieving Rose’s sword. “I told you,” she said, glaring at the other girl as she hugged Jack, “never drop your sword. It must be a part of you.”

  “Something Samuel here has learned too well,” Burton said as he dusted off his trousers and rose to his feet. He glowered at Twain as they greeted the others.

  “He may look older than the rest of you,” Burton said to John, “but he’s really full of—”

  “Spirit,” Twain said, winking at John. “I’m full of so much spirit it just spills out of me.”

  “Percy asked us to fetch you,” said Charles. “It’s almost time for the council.”

  “All right,” Burton said, handing his katana to Hawthorne. “We’ll just pick up the lesson another time. Maybe next time you can fight Laura Glue, Caretaker.”

  “Thank you, no,” said Hawthorne. “She’s better than you are.”

  John pulled Twain aside as the others gathered their weapons together. “Where is Bert?” he asked, concerned. “He’s usually first to greet us, and we were expecting to have seen him well before now.”

  A look of concern mixed with worry crossed the older Caretaker’s features as he gestured at the three of them. “Come with me,” he said, turning down one of the corridors. “There’s something you need to see.”

  As the others went to the room where the war council was to be held, Twain led John, Jack, Charles, and Rose to a large screening room. It was darkened, save for the light coming from the projector in the center of the room.

  “Is that . . . ?” John asked, staring at the projection in astonishment.

  “Yes,” Twain answered. “That’s the film you brought back from the Archipelago.”

  The reel had been created by Bert’s daughter, Aven, and left in the ruined palace on Paralon for the Caretakers to find—but neither they nor she had expected it would be two thousand years of Archipelago time before that would happen. Two millennia, during which Aven had lain in a deathless sleep. Most of those centuries were spent in a rarely interrupted hibernation inside a bed of crystal; but before that, she had ensured that there would be a way for her friends to find out what had happened, as well as a means to try to make things right, via the film Bert was now watching.

  They’d been able to speak to the projected image when they found it, but now it was simply a recorded memory of the friend who never lost hope that they would come—and who paid the ultimate price to do so.

  “It’s a rare day that goes by,” Twain said, his voice low, “that he hasn’t watched it through at least once. More commonly, he watches it several times at a sitting. Then he goes back to his work as if he hadn’t a trouble in the world.”

  Bert’s daughter had been a reluctant queen of the Silver Throne of Paralon. She much preferred her life as a dashing buccaneer and captain of the Indigo Dragon, and after her marriage to King Artus, did her level best to maintain that life, even as she kept an eye to her responsibilities on Paralon. But then Artus was killed in the conflict with the Shadow King, and suddenly the entire Archipelago was looking toward Aven to lead. And lead she did, right up to the moment the Keep of Time fell—and then for two thousand years after.

  The companions were at a loss as to what they could say to console the old Caretaker. Of all that they had lost in their many conflicts, John thought, it was their mentor who had paid the dearest price. And it was a loss that could not be mended.

  Bert finally noticed the group at the door and quickly reached out to shut off the projector. The image of Aven vanished abruptly from the screen, and the room darkened to twilight. “Ah, I’m sorry,” he said, wiping at the tears on his face. “I didn’t realize you were there. Just, ah . . .”

  “We know,” John said gently. “It’s all right, Bert.”

  “How far can I go?” Rose asked abruptly. She was looking at Bert as she spoke. �
�With Edmund’s help, how far in time can I travel?”

  The others looked confused, but Twain realized what she was asking, if not entirely why.

  “It would be my wager,” Twain said, puffing on his cigar, “that young Rose here, with assistance from our new Cartographer, could go anywhere—anywhen—she chose. Isn’t that correct, Bert?”

  “Yes,” Bert replied, looking back at Rose. “At least, that is our hope. That’s what we’ve been working toward, after all,” he continued, “finding a way to go far enough back to rebuild the Keep of Time. That will be your mission, and the reason I’ve called the war council. It’s time. And you’re ready, I think.”

  “That may be the primary mission, but it doesn’t have to be the only one,” Rose said. “Before we can attempt to go back into Deep Time, we’ll have to go forward into the future anyway, right?”

  “Farther than almost anyone has ever been,” Twain agreed, nodding as he ushered the others out of the room, “to one of the only zero points we have recorded that distantly in the future. About eight thousand centuries, wasn’t it, Bert?”

  The old man didn’t answer, but his bottom lip quivered, and his eyes started to well with tears. “Rose,” he began, “I’ve never asked you to—”

  She stepped closer to him, taking his hands in hers, and shook her head. “You don’t need to ask,” she said, smiling. “Of course we’re going to try—as I said, we have to go there anyway.”

  “You’ve lost me,” said Charles, scratching his head. “Where are you going?”

  “Weena,” Rose answered. “We’re going to go find Weena.”

  CHAPTER Two

  The Bungled Burglary

  As the companions made their way through the labyrinth of rooms and hallways that comprised the upper floors of Tamerlane House, Bert chatted happily with Jack and Charles, as if nothing significant had just taken place. But John knew that Rose’s suggestion was incredibly significant—and that she must have been thinking about it for a very long time.

  It was an open secret among the Caretakers that Bert himself was the very time traveler he had written about in The Time Machine, and that the woman he met there, called Weena, bore him their daughter, Aven. But what was not discussed so openly was the fact that after Bert returned to visit the Summer Country in his own time, to show his daughter the world he had come from, he had never found a way to get back to the future. Weena had been lost to him—and not even Poe himself had conceived of a way to go back to the far future. But Rose and Edmund, together, could do just that.

  “Can she really do it?” John whispered to Twain, out of earshot of the others. “Do you really believe it’s possible?”

  “Bert thinks she is ready,” Twain answered. “And I believe our war council will concur. Rose is, for all her unique experiences, still a youth. And she’s made her share of youthful mistakes. But she has learned from them, John. And she would not have said what she did to Bert if there were a doubt in her head that she and Edmund could do this.”

  He was hooded, but his face was clearly visible . . .

  As he spoke, they rounded a corner to the Cartographer’s Lair that had been set up by young Edmund McGee. There were maps and diagrams scattered around the main room, which was decorated in accordance with Edmund’s late-eighteenth-century upbringing, but the space was dominated by a large construct that stood in the center of the room. The Cartographer was standing amid the tangle of rods and wires, making some sort of adjustment to the mechanism, when he looked up and saw his visitors.

  “It’s a tesseract,” he said, answering the question that was on all their minds. “Diagramming the different trips through time and space that Rose and I have been experimenting with on paper was becoming too tedious, so I thought I’d try to build a working model of it all instead.”

  “Impressive,” said Jack. “How’s it coming?”

  “It’s been a struggle, I’ll admit,” Edmund said as he stepped gingerly out of the tesseract, “but a few of the new apprentice Caretakers—especially the young woman, Madeleine—have been very helpful.”

  He shook hands with each of the Caretakers in turn. “I take it you’ve come because of the burglary?”

  “Burglary?” John said, surprised. “I hadn’t been told anything about a burglary. We were summoned to a council of war.”

  “It’s all part and parcel of the same thing,” Edmund said as they stepped out of his lair and back into the corridor. “A number of things at Tamerlane House have come up missing—and my great-grandfather’s maps were almost among them.”

  He pointed at the door as he closed it behind them. The handles were tied together with string, and the locks had been pried out entirely.

  “Nothing else was touched,” he explained, “but the maps were scattered around on the floor. If Archimedes hadn’t been rooting around in the rafters where he could hear the intruder, they might have gotten them, too.”

  “Hmm,” said John. “That’s quite unthinkable, to invade Tamerlane House! Those maps must be more important to someone than we realized.”

  “They are important to me,” said Edmund, “and they have some historical significance, I suppose, since they were drawn by my great-grandfather. But I don’t know what use they’d be to anyone else—not so as to make them worth stealing.”

  “I agree,” said John. “If anything, I would have thought it was all your own more recent maps that were most valuable.”

  “That’s true,” Twain said. “They probably are more valuable—but only to those who can use them. And as far as we know, there are only two groups on Earth who have the ability to travel in time.”

  John sighed heavily and nodded in agreement. When the Keep of Time fell completely, the connection between Chronos time, which was real, day-to-day clock time, and Kairos time, which was pure, almost imaginary time, was completely severed. This had several effects on both the Archipelago and the Caretakers. In the Archipelago, time fell out of sync with the Summer Country, and it began to speed up until thousands of years had passed, destroying anything familiar that was left there. It was only because of Aven’s sacrifice, and her willingness to stay behind, that the Caretakers learned that somehow, the great Dragon Samaranth had taken the rest of the Archipelago someplace beyond the world itself. Someplace where it could be safe, until the Caretakers figured out how to restore the proper flow of time.

  Unfortunately, the fall of the keep had also handicapped the Caretakers, rendering their Anabasis Machines, their time-traveling watches, almost useless. The doors of the keep had created focal points, called zero points by the Caretakers, that allowed them to align and utilize their watches. But when the keep was lost, so were all the reference points—and one of their own, a Messenger named Hank Morgan, paid the ultimate price to learn the truth.

  It was only with the discovery of the McGee family, and particularly young Edmund, that the Caretakers found that time could be mapped; new zero points could be created. And with the help of Rose, Edmund could reestablish the Caretakers’ ability to traverse time at will. But according to Edmund, none of those maps, which he kept in a book he called the Imaginarium Chronographica, had been touched. Only the maps made by his great-grandfather, Elijah McGee, had been disturbed, and those only depicted a handful of places in the Summer Country.

  “I guess we’ll find out soon enough,” Twain said as he threw open the doors to the great hall where the war council was to take place. “It’s time.”

  In the year since the fall of the Archipelago, the last vestiges of World War II had drawn to a close—but the War of the Caretakers had barely begun. It was a passive war, fought in small skirmishes on the outskirts of history, but that fact made it no less a war, nor its effects any less potent.

  It was a war of ideas, and the battlefields were the smoke-filled taverns, and libraries, and stages, where stories were whispered with an urgency that gave them the ring of truth. Stories that were believed more and more as time passed. And that belief
was what allowed the darkness in the shadowed corners to creep closer and closer, crowding out the light.

  For many years the Caretakers had believed their greatest enemy was the one called the Winter King, and more than once they fought and defeated aspects of him. But his rise to prominence had been fostered by a coalition of rogue Caretakers who formed the original Imperial Cartological Society, which had even darker goals than establishing the Winter King. Many members of the Society, including Richard Burton, Harry Houdini, and Arthur Conan Doyle, realized that a greater evil had permeated their group, and so they left, defecting back to the Caretakers. But that evil, which had formerly operated in secret, was now becoming bolder and bolder. And in the last year, the Caretakers were finally able to give it a name: Echthroi—the primordial Shadows. The original Darkness. And through the Lloigor, corrupted agents recruited by the Echthroi, they had taken over the Archipelago—and now threatened the Summer Country.

  A war of stories was still a war—even if the only ones who knew it was being fought were a group of storytellers, gathered together in the house of Edgar Allan Poe.

  The Caretakers took their customary seats around the great table. At the head sat Geoffrey Chaucer, who, as an Elder Caretaker, often presided over their meetings. The other Elders, including Edmund Spenser and Leonardo da Vinci, took their seats to his left and right, with the younger Caretakers seated at the far end. The other guests of the house who were not Caretakers, such as Edmund McGee, Laura Glue, Rose, and the clockwork owl Archimedes, took up positions along the walls where they could watch and, when invited, participate.