The First Dragon (Chronicles of the Imaginarium Geographica, The)

by Owen, James A.

  “That’s the rub of it,” Shakespeare said, moving around the table to stand in solidarity with Jack. “We don’t think you made the right call. The gate was the only viable option we had.”

  “You’ve betrayed your oath as a Caretaker, Jack,” John said, shaking. “And you’ve betrayed me.”

  “Well, as regards the former,” Jack said, his voice becoming steadier as he grew bolder about confronting his friend, “I disagree. I swore an oath to protect a book that is lost somewhere in Deep Time, and an Archipelago that has disappeared to heaven knows where from a world that is dominated by shadows. So there really wasn’t much to betray except my own best judgment, which I used. And as to the latter,” he continued, “if that’s really how you feel, oh Prime Caretaker, why don’t you fire me?”

  It was spoken in the heat of the argument, but Jack’s statement nonetheless shocked the older Caretakers. Verne and Bert stepped in to try to calm tempers on both sides.

  “Focus on what moves us forward, not what moves us backward, John,” Verne said, laying a hand on the younger man’s shoulder.

  “Don’t patronize me, Jules,” John said, rebuffing Verne’s calming words and comforting hand. “Besides, wasn’t it your man Burton who taught us that time moves in two directions? They’ve gone back in time, and we couldn’t even check in on them if we wanted to! We’ll have no way of even knowing if they get into trouble!”

  “We actually may have a way,” said Verne. “It’s something I’d been working on with Burton ages ago that I think will come in useful now.”

  John glared at Jack a few seconds longer, then tipped his head at Verne. “All right. Show me.”

  Verne ushered the Caretakers into a large, circular room in the northernmost wing of Tamerlane House. There was an immense round table in the center. It was made of some kind of stone, more ancient than marble. It was crisscrossed with various alchemical symbols, and a hexagonal shape, inset into the middle, was polished to an almost mirrorlike finish.

  “This is the table that Arthur used to conduct séances,” Verne said, gesturing at Conan Doyle. “What he didn’t understand at the time, and what Ehrich spent a lot of time and energy trying to debunk,” he added, winking at Houdini, “is that Arthur wasn’t making contact with the spirit world, but with the past.

  “This table,” he continued as the other Caretakers took their seats around the circle, “is one of the few artifacts that survived the destruction of Atlantis. It is possible, if that is where our friends have gone, that we will be able to observe them, and possibly even send messages as well.”

  “Send messages?” John said, still fuming from Jack’s announcement. “If there was the possibility that this would work, then they never should have risked using the gate.”

  “We don’t know that it will work,” said Verne. “In fact, it never even occurred to me as a possibility until last night. You see, Arthur always assumed he was communicating with a spirit in real time. What he was actually doing was communicating with the past, with someone who, from their own point of view, was still living. Burton is the one who figured it out.”

  “Actually,” Conan Doyle admitted with a touch of embarrassment, “that’s part of the reason Burton was able to so easily recruit me into the ICS. He had already been told a lot about me by his own right-hand man, who had been speaking to me for years via the table.”

  “Burton’s right-hand man?” John said, frowning. “What does he have to do with all this? I don’t understand.”

  “It is attuned to the craftsman who made it,” said Verne. “Arthur knew him as Pheneas, a man of Arab descent who supposedly died thousands of years ago. In fact, the maker of this table was considerably older than that. He was known at points in his life as Theopolous, and earlier still as Enkidu. But Burton, who knew him best, simply called him the End of Time, and when he introduced us, I knew I had found the first, and perhaps the best, of my Messengers. As you know, he died at the hands of an Echthros in London, but he may be able to serve us still.”

  “What must we do, Jules?” Jack asked. “How does it work?”

  “He always seemed to appear in answer to my questions,” Conan Doyle replied. “He seemed never to age, but sometimes he couldn’t recall earlier discussions. I think it’s because I was going further and further back along his timeline. It functions in a manner similar to the trumps—intuition plays a part.”

  “As does belief,” Houdini interjected. “You believed, and I didn’t, Arthur. That’s why you saw him.”

  “Believing is seeing,” said Shakespeare. “We should give it a go.”

  “All right,” John said, still reluctant, and more than a bit put out that he hadn’t been told about the table earlier. “How do we do this?”

  “Join hands,” said Conan Doyle. “There are just enough of us here to make it work. Seven seems to have been the best number for making it operate. More, and there were too many competing thoughts; less, and there wasn’t enough concentration to keep a clear focus.”

  Jack took Shakespeare’s left hand and Houdini’s right. Conan Doyle sat between Houdini and John, with Bert to John’s left, and Verne completing the circle.

  “What question should we ask?” said John.

  “The simplest one, I suppose,” said Conan Doyle. “Where is the Indigo Dragon?”

  Together, the men gripped one another’s hands and focused their will and thought on the question and the table.

  Nothing happened.

  “If Charles were here,” Jack said after a few minutes had passed, “he would be asking if we needed to invoke some sort of incantation or magic spell.”

  “Abarakadabara,” said Houdini. Still nothing.

  “Is it plugged in?” asked Bert.

  “Maybe it needed a Dragon, like the Zanzibar Gate did,” Shakespeare began to say, and in that instant an unearthly glow began to emanate from the center of the hexagon.

  “Ah,” said John. “Well done, Will.”

  “Thanks, but I haven’t the slightest idea what just happened,” said Shakespeare.

  “You focused your thoughts on a living Dragon,” said Verne. “Life flows to life. We simply asked the wrong question.”

  “Quiet, all of you,” John said as the light rose from the table in a column that began to alter and shift, forming a three-dimensional, almost holographic image. “Something is beginning to appear.”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  On the downward slope of a gigantic sand dune, the air shimmered and hummed, and suddenly the Zanzibar Gate came into view, becoming more and more solid as the seconds passed.

  Almost instantly, the Indigo Dragon slid through and onto the sand, coming to rest with a slight lean about twenty feet down the dune.

  “Meh!” said Elly Mae.

  “Mah!” said Coraline.

  “Is it over?” asked Fred. “That went pretty quickly.”

  “Just like walking through the doors of the keep,” said Madoc. “That Shaksberd is quite the talented fellow. If I’d have recruited him instead of Burton—”

  “Don’t,” Uncas said sternly, “even joke about that.”

  Quixote had already removed his helmet and breastplate. In the heat, the armor would be almost unbearable. He wiped his brow and looked to the horizon. “There,” he said, pointing. “I think we’ve found the city.”

  Indeed, off in the distance the companions could see the magnificent outlines of the City of Jade, but the view was obscured by something so much more massive that at first, what it was failed to register with any of them. It was Madoc who understood it before the rest of them.

  “The giants,” he breathed, shading his eyes to look as high into the sky as he could manage. “The Corinthian Giants have formed a living wall between us and the city.”

  It was true—the great giants of legend, who had once saved the Caretakers from an aspect of Mordred called the King of Crickets, were standing shoulder to shoulder from the western edge of the desert that met the ocean, to so fa
r to the east that they faded from view in the distance.

  All along the perimeter formed by the giants’ feet were encampments of people. Thousands upon thousands of tents, and caravans, and wagons, and what might have been a million people of every creed and color. Every culture of the young world seemed to be represented, and none of the encampments seemed to be temporary. Flocks of sheep and woolly cattle were corralled at spots along the line, as well as flocks of fowl, and animals of labor of every stripe: camel-like creatures with great humps, small horses covered in fur, and great catlike creatures that were large enough to be ridden by three men.

  “It looks as if generations of people have lived here, waiting for something,” said Quixote.

  “Or being kept from something,” said Kipling.

  “Or waiting for something t’ happen,” said Uncas. “Turn around.”

  In the other direction, to the north of the Zanzibar Gate, was a sight equally as stunning—not because it was as overwhelming as the sight of the massive giants and enormous encampments at their feet, but because each of them intuitively knew what they were looking at.

  Not half a mile behind the gate was a gigantic ship. It was perpendicular to their position, so they had no way of judging just how broad it might be, because it was so long they could barely see the ends.

  Kipling let out a low whistle. “That has to be . . .”

  “Several miles long, end to end,” said Madoc. “I can’t see how wide, though.”

  “I’ll take a look,” Laura Glue said, unfurling her Valkyrie’s wings and leaping into the air.

  “Laura Glue, no!” Kipling yelled, just a moment too late. She rose sharply into the air before she understood her mistake and dropped back down to the Indigo Dragon.

  “Uh-oh,” said Fred. “I think we’re about to have some company.”

  A group of people had indeed seen Laura Glue’s brief, ill-advised flight and were making their way over to the Zanzibar Gate to investigate—but not from the encampments. The procession was coming from the huge boat.

  An elderly man, dressed in desert garb, with a long gray beard streaked through with white, led the procession of women, children, and, the companions were surprised to see, a large contingent of animals.

  He raised a hand in greeting as he peered curiously at Laura Glue and Madoc in turn, taking particular care to look over their wings. In response, and perhaps as a bit of a challenge, Madoc flexed his shoulders and opened his wings to their full, impressive glory.

  Kipling stepped forward, expecting to address the old man, but Fred and Uncas beat him to it, throwing themselves to the sand at the man’s feet. “We greet you, oh Ancient of Days,” they said in unison. “Now and forever, we serve thee, Ordo Maas.”

  The old man chuckled and helped them both to their feet. “That’s all well and good,” he said, a cheerful expression on his face that bespoke earnest affection for everyone in their group, “but there’s no point getting sand in your clothes, now, is there?”

  “Ordo Maas?” Madoc said, dumbfounded. “You are Ordo Maas?”

  The old man nodded. “The Children of the Earth—the animals—named me thus back in the days when all of them spoke as these two fine badgers do,” he said, scratching at Uncas’s head, which the badger would have hated anyone else doing, but which he seemed to love in the moment. “In my old kingdom, back in the Empty Quarter, I was known as Utnapishtim. But here, among the people of this great exodus, I am simply known as Deucalion.”

  “Deucalion, the son of Prometheus,” said Madoc, “who built a great ark and saved all the creatures of the earth from a deluge that covered the world.”

  “You’re mostly right,” Deucalion said. “My father was Prometheus, and I have built a ship. But it hasn’t rained here in decades. Water is growing scarce. And my reputation is more that of a fool than a king or savior of animals.”

  “Just wait,” said Fred. “I think things are about to change.”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  “Why were we brought here?” Kipling wondered aloud as they followed the shipbuilder back to his tents in the shade of the great boat. “I thought we’d end up closer to the city itself.”

  “Remember what Will told us,” Laura Glue reminded them. “Intuition plays a part in how the gate is guided. If we were brought to this place, it’s in part because this is where we needed to be.”

  “Perhaps the giants have something to do with it,” said Madoc.

  “You may be right in that,” said Deucalion. “The Corinthian Giants have prevented anyone from reaching the city who did not specifically have the Mandate of Heaven. It has been thus for generations.”

  “ ‘Generations’ is certainly the word for it,” Quixote said, straining backward to look up at the huge ship.

  “This wasn’t built overnight,” Madoc said with real admiration in his voice. “How long have you been working on this vessel, old one?”

  “From the time I was warned about the cataclysm to come, and my wife and I fled my kingdom to come here, it has been one hundred and forty years,” Deucalion said as he gestured for his sons and their wives to serve water to his guests—first to the goats, then to the badgers, and then to the rest. “We began our family with the birth of my eldest son in the same year we began constructing the ship, a decade after our flight into the desert. And now we are nearly finished, just as my youngest son, Hap, is reaching manhood.

  “But enough of family histories,” he said, turning to Uncas. “What is it that brings you to my tent?”

  “Some friends of ours have gone missing,” Uncas said, “and we’ve come looking for them.”

  “How come I can never explain our goals that simply?” Kipling whispered to Quixote.

  “Poetic license,” the knight whispered back. “It’s a privilege, not a right.”

  “I see,” said Deucalion. “And I take it from what you said earlier about expecting to find yourselves in the city that you hope to find them there?”

  “We do,” said Uncas.

  “You may be right, but without the Mandate of Heaven, you’ll never know,” Deucalion said. “Nothing living can get past the Corinthian Giants.”

  In one fluid, graceful motion, Kipling rose to his feet. “I think that’s my cue. I’m going to go have a look around,” he said jovially. “I’ll see if I can’t get the lay of the land, so we can make a game plan for finding our friends.”

  The shipbuilder started. “You want to go into the city?”

  Kipling bowed. “That is where, it seems, all the action is. And I am a man of action.”

  “We could all try to—,” Quixote began before Kipling cut him off with a gesture.

  “Alone would be best,” he said. “Just reconnaissance, I promise. I’ll be back as soon as I can manage.”

  “Is that wise?” Laura Glue asked.

  “I’m head of the Espionage Squad, remember?” Kipling said, feigning hurt feelings. “I’m just going to go have a look around. And besides,” he added, glancing from Madoc’s wings to Laura Glue’s, “I’ll attract a lot less attention than the rest of you will.”

  Deucalion sighed heavily. “Man of action you may be, but it is impossible. As I have told you, unless you have been given passage into the city by an emissary, the giants will permit no one living to cross the boundary.”

  “It shouldn’t be a problem, then,” Kipling said with a wink as he exited the tent, “since I actually died some time ago.”

  Deucalion looked at Fred and Uncas for an explanation, but the Caretaker merely shrugged, and the knight’s squire stifled a chuckle.

  “It’s kind of hard to explain,” said Laura Glue, “but trust me, he’s alive enough to do what he must.”

  This time it was the shipbuilder’s turn to smile. “As are we all, my child. God willing, as are we all.”

  Part Three

  The Summit

  . . . Kipling . . . started the long trek to the distant city.

  Chapter NINE

&nb
sp; Messages

  The Echthros watched, and waited.

  It was in the house because of the Binding it wore, and so, when it was called upon, it was forced to serve the master who had fashioned it. But in between those summonings, it was still a creature of will, doing as it pleased. And it pleased the Echthros to be here, watching these little things play at the machinations of the world as if they were gods. No—as if they were the only gods; as if they were all the little gods there were.

  It had played a part in the choices they made, partly in service to the Binding, and partly because it found the events taking place to be interesting. Once, in service to the Binding, it had even killed someone who had spent thousands of years doing little more than helping others.

  And once, very recently, it had spilled one of its master’s secrets, perhaps the most important one. The Echthros claimed to have done so because of a covenant it had made oh so long ago—a covenant made almost at the same time it had been bound, when it was not yet an Echthros, but a free creature, who walked unafraid through the streets of the City of Jade.

  The covenant did not compel servitude as the Binding did. Maybe that was why the Echthros chose to honor the request and offer help to the Caretakers’ friends.

  Or maybe it was simply another aspect of its service to Shadow. It didn’t know. But soon, it might find out.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Samaranth’s question hung in the air for a long moment before any of the companions chose to answer. Rose opened her mouth to speak.

  “We are not here to Un-Name you,” she said again, slowly and carefully. After all, Samaranth might have seemed afraid in that moment—but he was still an angel. There was no way to know what that might mean in terms of the power he could wield if he felt threatened . . .

  . . . or felt the need for retribution.

  “We have come a . . . very long way, to ask for your help,” said Edmund. “We have no desire to interfere with you, or your summit, or anything to do with the city. We simply want to ask you a question.”