The Dragons of Winter Page 8

  “Heh.” Charles chuckled and gestured at Rose. “‘Child Rowland to the dark tower came,’” he said jovially. “She is our Child Rowland.”

  “Child?” asked Edmund.

  “Childe, with an e,” said Charles. “It means an untested knight.”

  “Hmm,” said Bert. “Are you quoting Browning?”

  “Shakespeare,” said Charles. “King Lear.”

  “Oh dear,” said Bert. “You couldn’t have quoted from one of the happy ones, could you?”

  “Hey,” Charles said, shrugging. “At least it’s not Macbeth.”

  As they walked toward the dark tower, Bert was unable to contain himself and continued to pepper Vanamonde with questions, which the albino answered patiently.

  “The city is called Dys,” he said without taking his eyes from the path. “It has always been called Dys, since the earliest days of the master’s reign.”

  “And how long is that?” asked Bert.

  “Since the beginning of time.”

  “You mean since the beginning of Dys,” Burton corrected.

  “What,” Vanamonde asked without turning around, “is the difference?”

  Occasionally, the companions would pass other people, some nearby, some in the distance. All were dressed similarly to Nebogipfel’s son, but only a few bore the same markings on their forehead.

  Charles asked if the markings had some sort of meaning, and Vanamonde bowed his head. “They do,” he said. “They signify that one is a Dragon.”

  The pale man did not see the others’ reactions to this remark. They were intrigued, to say the least. And more than a little surprised.

  “You know, Vanamonde,” Burton suggested, “some might say that it takes more than a tattoo to signify that one is a Dragon. What do you think of that?”

  Vanamonde’s eyes flashed briefly to Burton’s forehead, but he kept walking and chose not to answer.

  “What of the others?” Bert pressed, intent on finding out something about what had befallen Weena’s people, the Eloi. “If they are not, ah, Dragons, what is it they’re called?”

  At this, Vanamonde merely shrugged, as if the question was of no importance. Before Bert could ask him anything further, they reached the base of the tower.

  Vanamonde pressed a panel on the wall and a door irised open, revealing a staircase. Motioning for the others to follow, Vanamonde started walking up the stairs.

  After climbing for what seemed an eternity in the deep, windowless stairwell, Vanamonde led the companions to a landing where there was a door with a traditional handle and lock.

  “Here,” he said, opening the door and gesturing inside. “You may wait here as our guests while I see to the repairs on your mek and inform my master of your arrival. He will want to meet you. Of that I’m certain.”

  The companions filed into the room, which was simply furnished, but expansive, and more comfortable than anything they had seen on the outside.

  Rose and Edmund gently handed Archimedes over to Vanamonde, who cradled the mechanical owl in his arms and, with no further comment, turned to leave.

  “Vanamonde, wait!” Bert implored. “You said that you are a Dragon, is that right?”

  Vanamonde did not speak, but answered with a single nod.

  “All right,” said Bert, “then tell us this. Is everyone here a Dragon? Everyone on Earth? You never answered me when I asked you earlier.”

  A light of realization went on in Vanamonde’s eyes. “No,” he said. “Dragon is an office of high regard. Only a few are Dragons here.”

  “Then the rest,” Bert pressed. “The other people. Are they Eloi, or Morlocks?”

  Their host furrowed his brow, as if trying to comprehend the question. “Eloi and Morlocks . . . ,” he said slowly. “These are not ranks, like Dragon?”

  “No, you idiot,” said Burton. “We aren’t asking what people do, we’re asking what they are. The others here—people like us.”

  “Ah,” Vanamonde said as he stepped back onto the landing outside the door and grasped the handle. “But there are no others like you. All are like me.”

  “Eloi?” asked Bert. “Or Morlock?”

  “No Eloi,” Vanamonde said, “no Morlocks. Only us,” he finished as the door closed. “Only Lloigor.”

  The Cheshire cat began to slowly appear a piece at a time . . .

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Messenger

  “So,” said Byron. “Did it work?”

  “Of course it worked, you biscuit,” Twain snorted. “The minute they stepped through, they vanished, just as they have with every other trip. I’d say the mission is off to a rousing start.”

  Dickens moved closer to the platform and tapped the cavorite with his shoe. “I wonder, Jules . . . wouldn’t they be able to return almost the instant they left? I mean, wouldn’t they have the capability to do that?”

  “Could, but shouldn’t,” Shakespeare said quickly. “That would involve reworking the markings on the maps, because the time differential would change.”

  “That’s why it’s actually safer to allow them to explore in real time,” Verne said. “It keeps the maps synchronized between the two times—the time they left and the time they arrived both move forward in Chronos time, so that nothing needs to be redrawn. Otherwise, a whole new set of calculations would have to be made. Rose might be able to do it, but it’s going to be far easier for them to simply reverse the procedure when they’ve done all that they need to do.”

  “So an hour here is an hour there, and vice versa,” Jack said, rubbing his chin. “Exquisite.”

  “How long are they expected to be gone, then?” asked John.

  “They need to spend at least one full day there, in order to bank a chronal reserve of time for the trip into the past,” Verne explained, “which gives them plenty of time to make their way to London.”

  John nodded in understanding. The site formerly known as London in the future time was the region where Weena would most likely be found.

  “We allotted up to one day there, and one day back,” Verne continued. “If all goes well, they should be coming back on Thursday, midday.”

  “Will they be bringing Weena with them?”

  Verne paused and looked at John and Jack. “If at all possible, I’m sure that they will,” he said, not entirely convincingly. “Chronal altruism aside, that is, after all, the reason that Bert went to begin with.”

  “An hour here is an hour there, and vice versa,” Twain murmured, echoing Jack’s earlier words. “And a day there is a day here. And a week there . . .” He let the words trail off as he looked up at the other Caretakers, who all understood what he was getting at. Bert’s last clock had started—and every tick that did not see his return was another tick closer to the possibility that he might not return at all.

  With that sobering thought heavy on their minds, the Caretakers and their friends left the platform and went back into Tamerlane House.

  “Do we need to return to your office first,” Don Quixote asked the Zen Detective, “or do you have what you need to find the Ruby Armor in that box you placed in the boot of the car?”

  “I may have been exaggerating just slightly,” Aristophanes admitted as the Duesenberg sped away from the Kilns. Uncas was driving erratically, as usual, which hadn’t unnerved the detective the first time, but was a little more troubling now that he’d agreed to an extended trip. “What I really meant is that I know how to find the people who know how to find the armor.”

  “That in’t what you told us,” Uncas said without taking his eyes off the road, “or the Scowlers.”

  “I find it difficult to condemn a man for the same moral failings I myself have grappled with time and again,” said Quixote, “and besides, the truth of things now will be borne out upon the success of our quest later.”

  “That’s a very pragmatic attitude,” Aristophanes said admiringly. “You’d have made an excellent philosopher, Don Quixote.”

  “I couldn’t
have afforded it,” Quixote said. “That’s one profession that pays even less than being a questing knight. And then there are the occasional missteps—one irritated audience, one awkward philosophical comment, and then someone starts talking about hemlock, and that’s about the point you wish you’d listened to your mother and just become a fisherman.”

  “Does he always take compliments that poorly?” Aristophanes asked the badger.

  “You have no idea,” said Uncas. “I am surprised, though, that no one kept better track o’ this armor, if it’s as important as all that.”

  “The pieces could not be kept in the Archipelago, and neither were they safe in the Summer Country,” said the detective, “and so the only way they could be kept completely safe was to hide them in the Soft Places—the places that aren’t there.”

  “And no one kept a ledger?” Uncas said. “Impractical.”

  “Whose job is it to keep track of the places that aren’t there?” Aristophanes asked. “Yours?” He pointed at the badger next to him. “Or his?” he said, hooking his thumb over his shoulder at Quixote. “The Caretakers cared only about the real places of consequence—those in the Archipelago of Dreams. But the rest were just overlooked, or,” he added with a touch of rancor, “exiled.

  “Only someone like Elijah McGee had the skill to set down maps of the unknown places, and only his children had the presence of mind to preserve them. That the Caretakers have them now for us to use is—”

  “Zen?” offered Quixote.

  Aristophanes started to scowl, then lowered his head and smiled before turning to look at the knight in the backseat. “I was going to say ‘luck,’ but Zen will have to do. That’s how we’re going to find the places we need to find. With a little Zen, and a little luck. And hopefully, the world won’t end before we’ve done it.”

  “Someone’s world is always ending,” said Quixote.

  “And I care less about that,” said Aristophanes, “than I care about making sure the world that does end isn’t mine.”

  Quixote sat back and sighed. “You’d have made a terrible knight.”

  “I know,” Aristophanes replied, turning to face the front again. “That’s why I became a philosopher.”

  “Our first destination should be no trouble to get to,” said Aristophanes. “But we’ll need to arrange passage to all the rest.”

  “Not necessary,” the badger replied. “Not when we’ve got old Betsy here.” He patted the dashboard.

  “No, you don’t understand,” said the detective, irritated. “I’m talking about places that are thousands of miles away, so we’ve got to—”

  “No problem,” Uncas said, “as long as you know precisely where you want to go. Pick anyplace in th’ world, an ol’ Betsy can take us there.”

  Aristophanes blinked. “How about Madagascar?”

  Quixote opened up a large compartment in the dashboard, which was filled with rows and rows of photographic slides, all ordered alphabetically. “Ah!” the knight finally exclaimed. “Here it is. I had it in Mauritania’s slot. Took a minute to find.”

  He removed the slide and inserted it into a device on the dash that resembled a radio but had an external motor and some sort of arrangement of lenses.

  “It’s Scowler Jules’s latest innovation,” Uncas said proudly. “It projects an image through a special lamp on the bumper, like . . . so,” he said, switching on the device. Immediately a large projection of the image on the slide appeared on the wall of fog in front of them, and Uncas gunned the engine.

  “It works best with brick walls,” said the badger, “but fog works pretty well too.”

  Before the detective could vocalize his astonishment, the Duesenberg had barreled through the projection, bouncing jarringly from the country road in England and onto a nicely paved cobblestone road in a hilly area that was clear of fog. Palm trees lined the streets, and the smell of seawater was strong in the air.

  “I’m impressed,” said the detective.

  “So,” Uncas said. “Where to first?”

  “I’m almost afraid to say,” said Aristophanes, “but you’re going to need to turn around.”

  As the rest of the Caretakers converged in the portrait gallery to discuss the recent events, Jules Verne quietly pulled John down the adjacent hallway and closed the door behind them. “I need to take you with me to consult some of our allies in the war,” Verne said, his voice quiet until they were a safe distance away from other ears, “and I don’t want anyone else to know we’re going—not yet.”

  “Isn’t that a bit chancy?” John asked, glancing around. “We ought to—”

  “Poe knows,” Verne said, interrupting, “and Kipling. And for now, that must be sufficient.”

  He chuckled to himself, then looked at John. “You’ll never believe that the pun wasn’t intentional, but I told Poe we’re going to see the Raven. Dr. Raven, to be precise.”

  “The Messenger?”

  Verne nodded. “The only one among them who is still wholly mobile, and therefore wholly useful,” he explained, “and that in itself brings some degree of risk, because he is also the most unknown.”

  “How so?”

  “He’s the only one we didn’t actively recruit,” said Verne. “Bert and I were taking a breakfast meeting in Prague in the late eighteenth century, and we observed that we were being observed ourselves. We took no notice of him, but quickly made our departure so as not to attract more attention—but then he turned up again at a café in Amsterdam.”

  “You have refined tastes,” John said. “Perhaps he was simply running in similar epicurean circles.”

  “Ahh, that explanation may have sufficed,” offered Verne, “if our lunch in Amsterdam had not been a century later.”

  John stopped in his tracks, blinking in amazement. “He was a time traveler?”

  Verne nodded. “All the Messengers are, of course—but he was doing it before he became a Messenger, and,” he added, with just a hint of menace in his voice, “he already had an Anabasis Machine.”

  John removed his watch from his pocket and examined it carefully. His was identical to the one Verne himself carried: a silver case, emblazoned with a red dragon. “How is that possible? I thought only the Caretakers possessed the watches.”

  “The Watchmaker gives them to us to use,” said Verne, “but we may not be the only ones he has made them for. I’ve never been able to wheedle a straight answer out of him regarding that particular question. But in any regard, Dr. Raven, as he introduced himself, has never been anything but faithful to our goals. We asked him to join us, and he has made himself available at each point where he’s been needed. As far as I know, he keeps rooms in Tamerlane, but as to the rest of his life, he is still a mystery.”

  “He sounds more like a secret,” John said as he pocketed his watch.

  “Secrets and mysteries, mysteries and secrets,” a voice purred from somewhere above their heads. “Answer one and win, answer the other and lose. But who can tell which one is which? And which of you shall choose?”

  John glanced above his left shoulder and smiled. “Hello, Grimalkin.”

  The Cheshire cat began to slowly appear a piece at a time as the men made turn after turn down the seemingly endless corridors. He had once been Jacob Grimm’s familiar, but he seemed to have bonded himself to John. He was, however, still a cat, and he came and went as he chose.

  “So,” Grimalkin said as his hindquarters appeared, “you’re going to see the Raven, are you?”

  “We are,” said John.

  “Mmmmrrrr,” the cat growled. “We do not like him. He has no place.”

  “What do you mean?” John asked, puzzled. “Jules said he has a room here.”

  “Not room, place,” the cat spat back, clearly irritated. “The Raven has no place. He is here, but not here. It’s very confusing, and it vexes us.”

  “What the Cheshire is trying to explain,” said Verne, “is that Dr. Raven is unique among the Messengers, and even a
mong the Caretakers, in that he has no trumps.”

  Again John stopped and looked at the older man. “He doesn’t travel by trump? So how does he get to where you need him to be?”

  Verne shrugged. “We aren’t really sure. He just . . . goes to wherever he is needed. We tried to press him about it once, and he vanished for six months. When he returned, he acted as if nothing had happened, so we never addressed it again.”

  “No place,” the cat repeated as it started to vanish again. “We will be watching, Caretakers.”

  “Can we really trust him then, Jules?” John said as Verne indicated a rather plain green door at the end of the last hallway. “He sounds more like someone we should be worried about than entrusting with our future.”

  “The best assessment we were able to make is that he is a fiction, like Herman Melville, or Hank Morgan,” said Verne. “Or possibly an anomaly, like Bert himself. But he has never acted against us, and in this war, we may be less able to choose our friends than we are our enemies.”

  He rapped sharply on the door, which swung open immediately. The room was small, obviously an antechamber to a larger warren of living spaces, but it was utilized fully. There were desks and shelves filled with antiquities and relics of the distant past—and, John observed, some from possible futures. Toward the right side, sitting in a tall, straight-backed chair, was a slender, slightly hawkish man who immediately rose to greet them.

  “You assess correctly, Caveo Principia,” Dr. Raven said, noting John’s interest in the items of the collection that were not antiques. “We once kept most of these items at the Cartographer’s room in Solitude, but for obvious reasons, they had to be relocated.”

  John gave a slightly formal nod and handshake to the other, still chewing over what Verne had been telling him in the hallways. “I recognize a few things,” he said, moving over to a shelf filled with record albums. “Merlin was very fond of his Marx Brothers collection.”