The Dragon’s Apprentice

by James A. Owen

  “But here you are at last, my dear young lad,” Twain said gently, taking Morgan’s hands in his own, “and here you’ll stay. The watch finally brought you home.”

  Jack found it a bit disconcerting to hear Twain refer to the more elderly-appearing Morgan as young, but not as disconcerting as he would have when he himself was younger. Still, neither the gesture nor Twain’s soothing words seemed to help—Morgan was still frantic.

  “That’s just it!” he said as he loosed Twain’s hands and rummaged around in his pocket. “The watch still doesn’t work!”

  This, at last, seemed to get Poe’s attention, and he leaned farther over the table. “That isn’t possible,” he said softly. “The cavorite in the watches never loses its energy. They will function indefinitely.”

  “To keep time, yes,” Morgan shot back, clearly incensed by the fact that no one was really paying attention to his protestations, “but not to traverse time. It took me out, then stopped functioning as it’s supposed to.” He pulled out a rumpled parchment from his pocket and flattened it out on the table. “This is the only reason I’m here now.”

  It was a map. Slightly charred around the edges, and shot through with a few holes, but a map nonetheless.

  The drawing on the parchment was almost holographic in nature and gave the impression of being a palimpsest, as if several drawings had been created, then erased, leaving a faint impression of what had been drawn before under what was now there.

  The locus for Tamerlane House and the Nameless Isles was clearly visible in the center, and other markings indicated the placement within the Archipelago of Dreams, but there were additional lines that were almost mathematical in nature, and calculations that involved symbols, pictograms, and runes, all wedded to the location of the islands. It was at once simple and complex, and unlike any map any of the Caretakers had ever seen—the images drawn upon it almost … moved.

  “Is that one of the trumps?” asked John. “It looks too large.”

  “It is too large,” countered Jack. “It’s one of Merlin’s spares, isn’t it, Bert? One of the extra sheets he pulled out of the Geographica.”

  Bert moved around the table and peered more closely at the sheet, then at Morgan’s harried expression, before turning to the others and nodding. “It is. I didn’t know Hank had it, but I’m glad he did.”

  “He needed a new map, because the old one, the one that catalogued all the zero points, is gone.”

  “What map?” asked John.

  “The keep,” said Bert. “The Keep of Time was how we mapped zero points.”

  “Take this,” Hank said to Twain, pressing the parchment into his hand. “Take what I’ve done and learn from it. You can still find a way. I know you can, Samuel.”

  “We will, we will,” Twain assured him as he leaned him back in a soft chair. “You’ve done a marvelous job for us, Hank. We’re very grateful.”

  Morgan didn’t respond, but instead closed his eyes and took a deep breath. A moment later his watch fell out of his hand and to the floor.

  “Ah, me,” Twain said heavily. “Good-bye, my noble friend. Sail well into that good night.”

  The others stared at one another in disbelief. Hank Morgan was dead.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Strange Devices

  Morgan’s body was put into his room to lie in state until the Caretakers could get a better grasp on the escalating crisis. In just one day a Caretaker and a Messenger had died, and another Messenger lay on the edge of death. They returned to the meeting hall, frustrated, saddened, and subdued—most of them, anyway.

  “I’m thinking we chose a terrible time to ally ourselves with this lot,” Burton said to his two colleagues. “The Caretakers are dropping like flies.”

  With a sudden explosion of energy that none of them had expected, Mark Twain burst out of his chair and struck Burton full in the jaw with a brutal right cross. Burton flew backward and fell flat on his back, cracking his head against a cabinet.

  “What the hell …?” Burton sputtered as Doyle and Houdini helped him to his feet. “I should kill you for that!” he spat at Twain as he glowered, held back only by Doyle’s good sense and strong arms.

  “Better men have tried,” Twain answered as he straightened his cuffs and sat down, “and anyway, I’m already dead, so you’d be trying to harvest when the cows already ate the cabbage. You can be angry at me if you like, but we will have respect in this house, especially for our own fallen.”

  Burton didn’t reply, but relaxed his stance and shrugged off Doyle’s grasp. “It’s a strange business,” he murmured gruffly, “when dead men such as we must mourn another dead man.”

  “Does he have to stay that way?” Jack asked with a burst of excited insight. “This is Tamerlane House! Can’t you bring him back with one of the portraits?” He started for the stairs to the upper rooms. “Where’s Basil? We need to fetch him, quickly!”

  Several of the other Caretakers reached out to Jack to stop him, offering gestures of comfort for the words they knew he was about to hear.

  “It’s not possible, young Jack,” Chaucer said as they moved him back to the table and his seat. “Not for one such as Henry Morgan. I’m sorry.”

  “How about you?” Jack said to Verne. “And you?” he said to Burton. “Can you make him a tulpa?”

  “It doesn’t work that way,” Burton said dismissively. “For one, it’s the same problem—it wouldn’t work for Morgan. And anyway, our methods take longer—at least a year would be necessary.”

  Bert took his protégé by the arms and looked into his eyes. “Jack,” he said, “the reason that we cannot create a portrait for Hank Morgan is because he is a Fiction.”

  Jack blinked and narrowed his eyes. “You mean, as in Samuel’s book? But all of us have fictionalized things we have seen and people we’ve met.”

  “I don’t mean to say he is a fictional character,” Bert said with emphasis, “but that he is unique—what we refer to as Fictions. Unique works in creation.”

  Verne stepped in to elaborate. “You know that there are analogues of us all in other times, other worlds, other dimensions. You’ve even met some of them.”

  “Like Chaz,” Jack said.

  “Precisely,” said Verne, “but Hank was not like that. He was unique in all the worlds. There was one of him, and one only. There have been others like him, but very, very few.”

  “Herman Melville,” said Chaucer. “Prime Caretaker material, just prime. A brilliant creator, with marvelous insights.”

  “We considered him before Jules,” said Dickens. “No offense, Jules.”

  “None taken,” said Verne.

  “He would have been a Caretaker,” Dickens continued, “but there were … ah, complications. And we moved on.”

  “Complications?” asked John.

  “Crazy as a bedbug,” said Hawthorne.

  “Nathaniel!” Dickens exclaimed. “Bad form.”

  Hawthorne sighed. “His creative genius was coupled with madness,” he explained to the others. “We could never be certain which of the traits would become dominant, and we couldn’t take the risk that the insanity would prevail.”

  “We still wanted him,” Twain interjected, glancing sternly at Hawthorne, “if only to have him as an apprentice to our group. That was when we discovered he was, in fact, a Fiction. Unique.”

  “We tried to get him ourselves, for the Society,” said Burton, “but we noted the Caretakers’ apparent disinterest and withdrew. If we had only known …”

  “It would have done you little good, Richard,” Twain said in as stern a voice as they had ever heard. “He would not have become a tulpa, and as we discovered, painting a portrait does not work on Fictions. It drove Basil nearly insane, mixing and remixing the resins to try to fix what he saw as his own mistake. But it had nothing to do with the resins, or the quality of the painting. It was because Melville could not be duplicated. And Hank Morgan was unique in exactly the same way.”


  “Despite Morgan’s rashness in testing the theory,” said Poe, “Rose’s suggestion still has merit. There may be a point in time where something may be fixed. And as he demonstrated, zero points may still be created—and mapped.”

  “We can’t stop the fall of the keep,” said John. “That risks sacrificing our victory over the Winter King.”

  “I wasn’t even thinking that far back,” said Rose. “What if we just went back far enough to avoid the discontinuity?”

  “To keep Tamerlane House from being separated from the Archipelago?” asked Chaucer.

  “No,” Rose said. “I was thinking that we’d start by saving Charles and Mr. Morgan.”

  “You’re a sweet girl,” said Bert. “Your heart is in the right place. But before we could even try, we’d have to find a way to do it. And we already discovered that the watches will not work.”

  “Let’s try the repository then,” Verne said, rising, “before anyone else tries something rash.”

  The repository was by far the largest room the companions had seen within Tamerlane House, with the sole exception of the Trophy Hall that Poe kept in the basement. It contained, among other things, a stuffed tyrannosaurus rex, a giant American penny, and both halves of the Titanic—from which, Poe had claimed, they had gotten all the dinnerware used at Tamerlane House. John kept meaning to turn one of the plates over to check for the maker’s insignia, but always forgot until after the tables had been cleared.

  All the various time travel devices used by Verne and Bert were stored in the repository, Poe explained, including the ones that had never quite worked as they were meant to. There was one that resembled a blue police box from London—“Stolen by a doctor with delusions of grandeur,” said Poe—one that was simply a large, transparent sphere—“Created by a scientist with green skin and too much ego,” said Verne—and one that was rather ordinary by comparison.

  “This one looks like an automobile,” John said admiringly, “with wings.”

  “The doors open that way for a reason,” Verne explained, “we just never figured out what it was. The inventor of this particular model tried integrating his designs into a car, an airplane, and even a steam engine train. He was running a crackpot laboratory in the Arizona desert, and he never realized that it was not his inventions themselves, but his proximity to some sort of temporal fluctuation in the local topography, that allowed them to work.”

  “What happened to him?” asked Jack.

  “He’d get the machines up to one hundred and six miles per hour,” said Bert, “and then he’d run out of fuel and promptly get arrested by whatever constabulary had been chasing him. The sad part was that Jules figured out if he’d just gone two miles an hour faster, he’d likely have been successful in his attempt.”

  “And this one?” asked John. “It looks like a treadmill.”

  “The Cosmic Treadmill, if you please,” sniffed da Vinci. “It may have never operated as I planned it to, but the theory behind it is sound.”

  “Only if you can find someone who is capable of running one hundred eight miles per hour,” said Bert.

  “It’s hardly my fault that human potential has not yet risen to match my invention,” da Vinci replied. “At any rate, I’m not going to stand around here just to be insulted. I’m going back to my portrait.”

  He stormed off in a huff, and Bert flipped open a book to make a note. “Insult the treadmill, da Vinci leaves the room,” he murmured, clicking his tongue as he finished and snapped the book shut. “Good to remember. He’s going to drive me up a wall someday.”

  John and Jack moved away from the mobile devices toward one far more elaborate. It resembled a theater balcony, with a low banister across the front and a wide, red velvet seat in the center. In front of the seat was an instrument panel filled with switches and dials, and behind was a large metallic disk.

  “This is the one you traveled in, isn’t it, Bert?” John asked, circling the machine with unabashed admiration. “It looks brilliant.”

  Bert folded his hands behind his back and blushed. “Well, yes. Thank you, John. It’s the only machine here created entirely from my own design.”

  “After all the grief you fellows gave Arthur and me,” Houdini complained, “it’s a bit insulting to find you sharing Archipelago secrets in your books.”

  “Technically speaking, the machine and my accounting of the journey were not of the Archipelago,” said Bert. “The trip was done entirely in London.”

  “Also, it wasn’t so much that you broke the rules,” Verne chided, “but that you were so noisy about doing so.”

  “The man has a point,” Burton agreed, glaring at Houdini and Doyle. “Now will you please be quiet?”

  “You have a lot of machines here,” said John. “Will any of them work better than the watches do?”

  “That’s a difficult question to answer,” said Bert.

  “Here’s the main problem we have encountered,” said Verne. “While it’s true that we have discovered many ways to travel through time, each way works only once for each traveler. Once, and never again.”

  “The main reason we turned almost entirely to the watches—the Anabasis Machines,” said Bert, “is because they could be used over and over again. What they didn’t have is range—to be able to go more than a millennium required either a Lanterna Magica, which was limited in use too, or one of these devices.”

  Chewing on his lip, John turned to Bert as another piece fell into place. “So your first journey out, when you traveled eight hundred thousand years in the future …,” he began.

  Bert took a deep breath, then nodded. The sorrow was undisguised, and it occurred to John that perhaps the old man wanted them to realize the depth of his feeling on the matter.

  “Once, and never again,” Bert said, echoing Verne. “I took one of our earliest devices, a contraption designed by Leonardo da Vinci and assembled by Nemo, Bacon, and the animals, and a few minutes into the trip, I made a terrible miscalculation. I tried to correct it, but the knob broke off in my hand. By the time I was able to replace it, I had traveled more than eight thousand centuries.”

  “With such an accident,” said Verne, “there was no way to track or follow him. He was utterly on his own.”

  “As you found out, I discovered I could be happy there,” said Bert, “but I also thought I could leave again and return at will—that the accident was only that. Not that I couldn’t go back.”

  “So when you returned here …,” Jack began.

  “We didn’t know,” Bert said with painful bluntness. “We were monkeys playing with … well, with a time machine. I believed that I could easily move back and forth as I liked, and so when Aven was only a few years old, I offered to take her on a short trip to the Archipelago, to visit, only to discover I’d abandoned her mother in the far future. I can only imagine,” he said tearfully, “how lonely she must have gotten.”

  “Well, from a certain point of view,” offered John, “she hardly knows you’ve left. That is one of the advantages to traveling in time, isn’t it? That you can go back almost to the moment that you left, with no one the wiser?

  “After all,” he added conclusively, “isn’t that what you did with us when you returned us to the Inn of the Flying Dragon shortly after we’d left?”

  “Not quite,” said Verne. “Always moving forward, remember? You still aged the days you were in the future—you didn’t shed those years when you came back.”

  Jack nodded in understanding. True, Bert and Aven could possibly return to almost the same point they’d left, if a means for returning could be finely tuned enough to do so. But they would be the age they were now—an elderly Herbert George Wells instead of a young adventurer, and a pirate queen named Aven, a mature, fully grown woman, rather than a child bubbling with laughter on her father’s lap as they vanished into time.

  Like Morgan, they could go back, but they would not be the same two people who had left. It was possible that Weena, Aven’s mo
ther, would not miss them at all, but it would become immediately apparent to all three of them that something had been lost—three lifetimes together, never to be recaptured.

  “Why do you think he gave up being a full-time Caretaker?” Verne murmured. “Stellan was killed, true, but Bert had become semiretired already—although he never took it to the extent that Jamie did in refusing to be involved at all.”

  “So all those occasions, all these years,” John said, “all the moments when you were unavailable to us as a mentor …”

  Bert choked back a sob and gave one short, sharp nod of his head.

  Verne put a steadying hand on his friend’s shoulder. “Yes,” he said gently. “He was here, in the repository, trying device after device in hopes he might finally be able to return to Weena.”

  “The most ironic thing about mourning her?” Bert said as he wiped a sleeve across his eyes. “She won’t even be born for more centuries than I can count.”

  “Can you leave her a message somehow?” John asked. “Like Hugo did when he went back to Arthur’s time, with the message he wrote in the Booke of Dayes?”

  Bert shook his head. “I was there, remember, lad? In that much time, cultures fade and vanish. To be sure, it’s not geologic time, or even Deep Time—but eight thousand centuries is too long to expect anything familiar to persist. No Caretakers, no Archipelago to speak of—at least in the form we know it today, or whatever day this is. The libraries were gone, the buildings, the—” He stopped and stared curiously into space.

  “No, wait,” he continued after a moment. “There was one artifact that did survive, although I seldom spoke to her myself. She was a frosty one.”

  “The Sphinx!” Fred exclaimed. “That’s who you mean, isn’t it? My father and Quixote told me about her.”

  “Yes,” said Bert, “but other than her, I saw almost nothing—nothing— in the future that had survived from our time, or any other. Nothing that she would be able to recognize, at any rate.”