The Dragon’s Apprentice

by James A. Owen

  The passageway was neither steep nor narrow, and the torches they carried provided more than enough light for the companions to clearly see the steps above and below. The descent to the Watchmaker’s cavern did not take long—less than twenty minutes passed from the time they entered until they reached a place that was well-lit enough for them to extinguish their torches.

  The enormous room looked to John as if someone had filtered a cave from one of Jacob Grimm’s stories through a London clockmaker’s shop, and then sprinkled in some Greek myths for good measure.

  There were mirrors of all shapes and sizes spread throughout the space, mingled with crystal formations and stalagmites. Each one reflected not just the observers, but also some additional form—some were human; some, like the giant mantis Verne had mentioned, were not. They appeared as ghost images laid over the real reflection.

  John found himself in front of a tall mirror that showed a rough-looking woman, dressed in skins and carrying a Bronze Age hammer. For a moment John thought she was real enough to touch, and he reached out with his hand.

  “I wouldn’t if I were you,” Bert murmured, grabbing his hand, “unless you fancy living out your years in a form very different than you’d imagined.”

  Verne moved around the others and walked to the Watchmaker, who had been too absorbed in his work to notice he had company.

  Predictably, he was sitting at a broad workbench amidst a scattering of tools, wires, cogs, and other sundry items that had no apparent purpose. Some of the objects were made of gleaming metal, while others were obviously stone. At the moment he seemed to be trying to coax a miniature sun into a porcelain clock.

  The Watchmaker himself was shorter than the companions, but not noticeably older. He had a prominent nose that curved up and into his brow, and small, close-set eyes. His hair was black and slicked back over his head out of the way of his face, so as not to obscure his vision as he worked.

  He was dressed simply in a tunic and breeches, and he wore a thick leather apron covered with pockets that were all laden with tools. On the companions’ approach, he stood and greeted each of them, shaking their hands and repeating John’s and Jack’s names.

  “I’ve met so many people over the centuries, you see,” he said in explanation, “that I find repeating the names helps me to recall them. Of course, the fact that you are Caretakers who bear examples of my handiwork will help to narrow it down a bit,” he added, winking conspiratorially.

  On his prompting, both John and Jack pulled out their watches for him to examine. “Nice, very nice,” the Watchmaker proclaimed on seeing Jack’s, which was all silver, with a silver basrelief dragon on the cover. “Egyptian. Or maybe Chinese. I forget. I can never keep track of these young cultures and the things they do—but I know when they’ve done something worth incorporating into my own work.”

  He moved on to John’s watch. “Ah, the classic,” he murmured approvingly. “Silver case, silver chain, glazed ceramic disk with the Red Dragon on it.” He turned the case over and noted the engraving: CAVEO PRINCIPIA.

  The Watchmaker looked up at John appraisingly. “You’re the Principal Caretaker, then?” He looked at Verne. “Well, Frenchman? Is he worthy?”

  Verne nodded. “Eminently so.”

  “Good enough,” said the Watchmaker as he handed the watch back to John. “Not that my opinion should matter, overmuch. You have a harder row to hoe than I.”

  “For a Watchmaker, you don’t seem to have many actual, uh, watches hanging around,” Jack said to their host. “No offense.”

  “Why would I want to surround myself with watches?” said the old man matter-of-factly. “I spend a great deal of time making them, but they aren’t an all-encompassing obsession.”

  “How many have you made?” asked John.

  “Several hundred for the Caretakers, of course,” the Watchmaker replied, “and perhaps fewer for others.”

  “You make watches for people other than Caretakers?” John replied before Verne could caution him not to ask. “Isn’t that dangerous?”

  The Watchmaker fixed John with a gaze that was so intense it was almost a physical blow, and his smile belied the gravity of his words. “I am not the judge of all the Earth,” he said, unblinking, “nor do I wish to be.”

  “These are very interesting mirrors,” Jack said, trying to steer the conversation in a less tense direction. He was peering at an oblong one that reflected some sort of multi-tentacled creature. “They don’t actually reflect very well.”

  “They reflect well enough for me,” said the Watchmaker, “as they should, since they are my mirrors. What good would my mirrors do to me if they reflected someone else better than I?”

  “I guess you have a point,” Jack admitted. “Is that a winged centaur?” He pointed to a large rectangular mirror above a worktable.

  “It is,” replied the Watchmaker, “when that’s what I want to be.”

  John threw a surreptitious glance at Jack, who widened his eyes in response. Whatever this Watchmaker was, he was not a kind of creature they had met before. It was no wonder he was friends with Samaranth—they were similar in both mystery and temperament.

  “You all have watches,” said the Watchmaker, “so I expect you have come for some other reason.”

  “We’ve come,” Verne began, “because they don’t seem to be working properly. In fact, one of the Messengers has died because he could not return to us in, ah, time.”

  “Not working?” the Watchmaker exclaimed. “Improbable. Let me take a look.”

  Verne handed over his watch, and the Maker looked at it for barely a moment before he handed it back. “The watch is fine,” he proclaimed. “Something else must be broken.”

  “History,” said Bert. “History has come undone.”

  “History?” the Watchmaker repeated. “History is a self-defining term. By necessity, it is an accounting of the past—and that past is not real, not solid. At least, not as much as we’d like to believe.

  “The present is real. The future is malleable. And the past is both, because although all stories are true, some of them never happened.

  “Events and accountings may become undisputed components of history not merely because of the truth they hold, but because of their perpetuity: The stories we believe are the stories we know.”

  “He talks just like Merlin used to,” Jack said to John. “I never thought I’d miss it so.”

  “Merlin?” the Watchmaker asked. “I know that name, don’t I?”

  “The Cartographer of Lost Places,” said Verne.

  “Oh, yes,” said the Watchmaker. “I remember him now. The young stallion with fire in his belly.”

  “Young?” Jack exclaimed. “Merlin is one of the oldest people I ever met.”

  “Youth is a relative term,” the Watchmaker replied. “I prefer to think of it as a state of mind.”

  “I know a lot of youthful students who might argue that point,” said Jack.

  “I’ve no doubt you do,” the Watchmaker replied. “That’s what gives my point of view credibility. Everyone argues against it at first, but eventually they all come around. So,” he said to Verne, “how is young Merlin?”

  “Gone,” Verne said simply. “Freed from Solitude, just before the Keep of Time fell.”

  “Ah,” the Watchmaker said, leaning back in his chair. “I suspected that might be why you’ve come. Sit, and tell me what’s been occurring.”

  As quickly as they were able, the four Caretakers related all the events that had happened, including the mystery of the discontinuity.

  “It’s not a mystery,” the Watchmaker said when they had finished. “Without the Keep of Time, there is nothing to connect Chronos and Kairos, and Kairos itself is loosed.

  “Chronos time is merely a record of the passage of objects through physical space,” he explained, “but Kairos time is what gives those events meaning. This is why your watches cannot find any zero points. The meaning has been lost. The connection
is gone.”

  “Is that why there were doors in the keep?” asked Jack. “To connect to zero points in time?”

  “The doors merely acted as focal points for the energies within the keep,” the Watchmaker said. “Once attuned to a specific time, they would continue to work, as you noted with the false tower the Barbarian—Burton—built for the Shadow King.”

  “And the door that Hugo Dyson stepped through in Oxford,” added John. “That makes sense to me.”

  The Watchmaker nodded approvingly. “The Barbarian’s design was faulty to begin with—the doors opened to the same energies, and had you not dispatched it, it would have no doubt eventually fallen on its own accord. But it was in his original premise that he made his most grievous error. The doors were not the aspect of the keep that made it function—that was something integral to the keep itself. Something about the construction design, and the stones used, and perhaps even the runes carved into the stones. The doors focused the energies to allow passage, but the Keep of Time served a larger function: It anchored Chronos and Kairos. And now that the anchor has been lost, time is flowing freely in the Archipelago, and there is no way to harness it again.”

  “How can we repair it?” John asked. “We’ve gone back in time before and managed to not do so badly. We believe we can do so again—we just don’t know where to start, or how to get there without the watches.”

  “So, you need the watches to fix time, but you cannot use the watches until you already have.”

  “A paradox?” asked Jack.

  “A pickle,” said the Watchmaker.

  “I wish we were able to consult Samaranth on this,” John said miserably. “I think he’d have an idea or three as to what to do.”

  “I spoke with him before the fall of the keep,” the Watchmaker said. “He anticipated that this might happen—but he is also reluctant to participate in the matter.”

  “You’ve spoken to Samaranth?” John exclaimed. “Did he say anything else?”

  “All that he would volunteer was to say that as he has already given you the means to solve this problem, he is not obligated to do anything further. A Son of Adam put these events into motion, and only a Son of Adam should put them right.”

  “He isn’t going to help us, then,” said John.

  The only response the Watchmaker gave was a steady, almost sorrowful gaze, and silence.

  Jack’s shoulders slumped. “What are we to do now?”

  “Find a way to create zero points,” the Watchmaker said. “Find a way to give meaning to Chronos again. And then you will be able to use the watches.”

  “We have traveled through time without the watches before,” said John, “when we used a trump from the future, remember?”

  “Except that didn’t really work out so well the last time,” said Bert. “Needed a bit of a push to get through. And you lost seven years of Chronos time. We can’t risk another loss like Hank—not when the trumps aren’t working properly anyway.”

  “We never discovered who your mysterious benefactor was either,” said Verne. “The old man in the white room.”

  “People have a way of becoming their own benefactors,” said the Watchmaker. “That may be the case here.”

  “Not the future,” Jack said, thinking about the trumps. “That won’t help. We need to go into the past.”

  “The Histories?” asked John. “Can we use those?”

  “They’re just books,” said Bert, thinking. “No spatial or temporal properties to them.”

  “But,” said Jack, snapping his fingers, “we do have something with those properties. Remember the map that Hank brought with him? He said it was what brought him to Tamerlane House. He used a map to go through space and time. And he made it using one of the spare pages from the Geographica.”

  “I’d almost forgotten!” Bert exclaimed. “I have the rest of those extra pages, back at Tamerlane House.”

  “If we can use those to create zero points,” said Jack, “then we’ll have something to attune the watches to. We can create a sort of chronal Geographica.”

  “A sort of Archipelago of Lost Years,” the Watchmaker said as a thoughtful expression flashed across his face. “It could be done in such a way. Yes, exactly so. In fact, one of your own tried such a thing many years ago. He even came to be called by a name that reflected this: the Chronographer of Lost Times.”

  “He went renegade,” Verne said with a careful look at Bert. “We haven’t seen him since, and have no idea how to find him.”

  “Ah, that’s right,” the Watchmaker said. “I did hear about that. There’s no way to contact him, then?”

  Verne shook his head. “Not that we know of.”

  The Watchmaker spread his hands and tipped his head. “It seems simple then,” he said. “You need to find another Cartographer. Another Cartographer of Lost Places. You have apprentice Caretakers,” he added, gesturing at John and Jack. “Surely there were also apprentice Cartographers?”

  Bert sighed heavily and traded resigned glances with Verne. “There were, in fact, a number of individuals who trained with Merlin, but replacing him isn’t going to be anywhere near that easy,” he said wearily. “To do what the Cartographer did, to attain his skill and intuition, would take generations. Centuries, perhaps. And no one I know who studied with him possesses either. Not to the degree we would need.”

  Verne pursed his lips and nodded tersely at John and Jack in answer to their unspoken question. There had been one apprentice and one only who might have taken the Cartographer’s place: Hank Morgan. But he had been drawn away by his escapades through time with Verne. Ironically, his experiences with time travel would have made him an even more ideal choice to do what the Watchmaker said was necessary. And now, just when they discovered he might be the one man they needed most, it was too late.

  “Remember what Samaranth said,” the Watchmaker reminded them. “You have the tools you need to fix this. All you need to do is believe that you can, and then do it.” He turned back to his workbench. The audience with the Caretakers was over.

  “Thank you for all you’ve told us,” Verne said, bowing. “Hopefully, much good will come of it.”

  “All good things happen in time,” the Watchmaker said. “Trust in that wisdom, as I have.”

  “A chronal Geographica?” John murmured to Jack. “Do you really think we can create one?”

  “Someone already has,” the Watchmaker cautioned without pausing in his work or glancing up. “The watches still work, so time is flowing. Someone’s found a way to begin mapping time, and unless you discover who is doing so and why, your race may already be lost.”

  It occurred to John that the Watchmaker’s last remark may have referred to the human race, and not the ensuing conflict to somehow fix the flow of time in the Archipelago, but by the time he had the presence of mind to ask, the old Maker was already engrossed in his work, and Verne was closing the door, a finger to his lips.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Black Dragon

  The march back to Tamerlane House was largely silent, as each of the Caretakers pondered what they had learned from the Watchmaker. The visit had birthed almost as many questions as it answered, but still, it seemed there was no way out of their dilemma. If there was no way to traverse time, then there would be no way to fix it. And worse, it seemed that far from reuniting the two worlds, they had lost the Archipelago of Dreams completely.

  “We move into the future one second at a time,” John murmured to no one in particular. “It seems it would be an easy enough thing to move a few days into the past.”

  “I know what you wished to ask him, John,” said Verne as they began their crossing to the central island. “It would not have aided you to know.”

  “Sometimes information is a comfort,” John countered. “I’d like to have known if it was possible.”

  “To make Charles’s death into a zero point?” Verne answered. “I don’t know that he could answer that. Or would.”
>
  “It would have been a start,” said John glumly. “ Can you tell me,” he went on, suddenly switching direction, “why Charles chose not to have Basil finish his portrait?”

  Bert inhaled deeply. “He didn’t want to have the limitations that the others did,” he said consolingly. “After what happened to Stellan, Charles saw that as more of a living death than a chance to carry on as a Caretaker. I disagreed with him, but it was his own choice.”

  “I only wish,” John said to Verne, “that he had chosen your path. That you had been able to be with him before his death and create a tulpa. I keep feeling that if he were only with us, he’d know exactly what must be done—and it would be a plan too outrageous for any of the rest of us to think of.”

  Jack quickened his pace and put his arm around his friend, whispering words of comfort to him as they walked.

  Bert started to approach them both to say something, but Verne held him back, shaking his head sternly. “Not yet,” he said softly. “We can’t say yet. Later, when it’s sure, we’ll tell them. But not now.”

  Bert stared at his mentor, struggling to form a response, but finally nodded in agreement and turned away.

  “We have to return to the Archipelago,” John declared firmly. “That’s the only way to discover what’s caused all this.”

  The report of the meeting with the Watchmaker had not gone over well at Tamerlane House. The Caretakers split into factions, all arguing over what they thought should be done, and why everyone else’s plans were impossible. Fred, Laura Glue, and Rose did their best to mediate, while it was all Burton and his colleagues could do not to make things worse by venturing any opinion at all. Only John’s pronouncement ended the arguments. The room went silent so they could hear what he had to say.

  “We have to recreate a map of the zero points in Chronos time,” he said calmly, “but time travel here is impossible at the moment. So we must go to the source of the problem. This all began when the keep fell. We caused that to happen. Samaranth said we have the means to repair what is broken, and I don’t think that can be done here, in this world.