The Indigo King

by James A. Owen

  THE CHRONICLES OF THE IMAGINARIUM EOGRAPHICA

  THE INDIGO KING

  Written and illustrated by

  James A. Owen

  For Sophie

  SIMON & SCHUSTER BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS

  An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events,

  real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names,

  characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s

  imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or

  persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2008 by James A. Owen

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or

  in part in any form.

  SIMON & SCHUSTER BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS is a

  trademark of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Book design by Christopher Grassi and James A. Owen

  The text for this book is set in Adobe Jenson Pro.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Owen, James A.

  The indigo king / written and illustrated by James A. Owen.

  p. cm.—(The Chronicles of the Imaginarium Geographica ; bk. 3)

  Summary: When, in 1931, there is a breach between this world and the Archipelago of Dreams,

  John and Jack, two of the Caretakers of the Imaginarium Geographica, must race through history using a time travel device left by Jules Verne, and discover the identity of the Cartographer.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4169-5107-0 (hardcover)

  ISBN-10: 1-4169-5107-5 (hardcover)

  eISBN-13: 978-1-4169-9918-8

  [1. Time travel—Fiction. 2. Fantasy.] I. Title.

  PZ7.O97124Ind 2008

  [Fic]—dc22

  2008004966

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Part One: The Mythopoeia

  Chapter One: The Booke of Dayes

  Chapter Two: The Door in the Wood

  Chapter Three: The Royal Animal Rescue Squad

  Chapter Four: The Unhistory

  Part Two: Fractured Albion

  Chapter Five: Tatterdemalion

  Chapter Six: The Serendipity Box

  Chapter Seven: Noble’s Isle

  Chapter Eight: The Infernal Device

  Part Three: After the Age of Fable

  Chapter Nine: The Storyteller

  Chapter Ten: The Shipwreck

  Chapter Eleven: The Grail

  Chapter Twelve: Imaginary Geographies

  Part Four: The Iron Crown

  Chapter Thirteen: Betrayal

  Chapter Fourteen: The Sword of Aeneas

  Chapter Fifteen: The Stripling Warrior

  Chapter Sixteen: The Crucible

  Part Five: The Isle of Glass

  Chapter Seventeen: Animal Logic

  Chapter Eighteen: The Sacrifice

  Chapter Nineteen: The Enchantresses

  Chapter Twenty: The Good Knight

  Part Six: The Silver Throne

  Chapter Twenty-one: The Fallen

  Chapter Twenty-two: Exiled

  Chapter Twenty-three: Restoration

  Chapter Twenty-four: The Bird and Baby

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  List of Illustrations

  …he looked down at his watch, checking his progress …

  The door was sitting slightly askew within the arch.

  …hanging from every available surface were badgers …

  The thing that followed them resembled a motorcar …

  “Whatever it is you’ve come about, Chaz, I want no part of it…”

  On it sat a skull, a scroll, and a small box of a unique design.

  “Please, come inside,” said Reynard.

  There …sat an unusual if not extraordinary device.

  The attention …was focused on the young man in the center …

  “The ship ran aground …crashing violently against the rocks …”

  “You know about the trials, do you not?”

  Every surface was covered with maps …

  “Please!” Madoc cried to her, imploring. “I’m sorry! …”…

  There …was a black sword in a scabbard, covered in the dust …

  “I came from high in the mountains, where it is still winter …”

  One by one …six opponents fell before Mordred…

  The bird flew off, and …returned with the projector …

  In answer, Arthur began to raise the black sword, Caliburn …

  Circe held up the golden bowl. “Choose,” she said.

  …the knight …stood at the entrance of the temple …

  The older dragons …almost looked as if they were grinning …

  In the distance …the passenger …could make out the island …

  …the door …was still standing slightly ajar.

  “Gentle Caretakers,” Burton said cheerfully…

  Acknowledgments

  The Indigo King was the book that I most looked forward to writing, the book I dreaded writing, the book that was the hardest to write, and my favorite book so far. And it would not be the book that it is without the hard work and dedication of my editors.

  David Gale is exceptionally patient and knows how to persuade rather than push a writer. He gave me support when I needed it, and room when I needed that. Navah Wolfe, whom I got to know as an online friend prior to her employment at Simon & Schuster, is an excellent editorial assistant for David and is as first-class as they come where this author is concerned. She is smart, and caring, and she kept me on my game. Dorothy Gribbin remains an editorial rock in my world. I’ve often rethought certain passages just because I knew she’d question them. And it’s always been for the better. And Valerie Shea is a rock star. I sometimes feel like she’s been more exacting with details than I am, and that fact both impresses and humbles me.

  My legal team added a new name, Erik Hyman, who is both deft and witty, and as reliable as his Loeb & Loeb compatriot Craig Emanuel. Both have been invaluable supporters of my work, as have my managers at the Gotham Group: Julie, Ellen, and Lindsay. Ben Smith at ICM remains the agent’s agent, and I am grateful to them all.

  My senior apprentice, Mary McCray, stepped to the forefront of the work on this book by turning all of my thumbnail sketches into full-size layouts. Lon Saline, apprentice emeritus, added his skilled touch to several pages, and Jeremy Owen kept all of the trains running on time at the Coppervale Studio while also doing a smashing coloring job on the cover.

  Joe Pruett of Desperado Publishing helped me to jump-start a few projects that have languished for far too long and in the process gave us another vehicle for promoting the novels.

  Justin Chanda, publisher of Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, opened a door into our mutual future—and I am lucky to have him on my side. Also on that front, my publicists Kate Smyth and Paul Crichton have done a stunningly good job of promoting me and my work, organizing my tours, troubleshooting, and in general just taking good care of this author. And my art directors, Lizzy Bromley, Chlöe Foglia, and Laurent Linn, continue to make the books look better than I’d dreamed.

  Joe LeFavi brought me together with Jason Lust, Lisa Henson, and Brian Henson, all of whom have become my friends and among the biggest supporters of my ambitions.

  Stephenson Crossley deserved to be acknowledged in the first two books, as none of them would
exist if he hadn’t fed, housed, and encouraged me while I was trying to sell the first book—but his girlfriend, Karen, said if I didn’t wait until at least the third book, he’d be impossible to live with.

  And not least among my influences, I want to thank Jimmy Swihart, my first business partner, who has recently come back into my life and brought with him some great memories.

  The greatest of my influences, however, is my wife, Cindy. Without her, I would not have lived the life I have, had the family we’re raising, and created the work that I love. And I am forever thankful for her love and support.

  Prologue

  In the centuries that would pass, the spacious stone room known as Solitude would fill with an accumulation of culture; not by design, but because those who would eventually come to seek the occupant’s skills would feel the obligation to bring something, anything, as gifts, or perhaps tribute. But that was in a time yet to come. In the present moment, it was empty save for the items he’d brought with him: a torn robe, an empty scabbard, a quill and half-filled bottle of ink, and as many rolls of parchment as he could carry.

  When he entered, the door had swung shut behind him. He knew without touching it that it had locked, and also, with less assurance, that it would probably not be opened again for many years.

  He had once had a name—several names, in fact—all of which were irrelevant now. In his youth he had aspired to be a great man, and had been afforded many opportunities to fulfill that destiny; but far too late, he learned that it was perhaps better to be a good man, who nevertheless aspires to do great things. The distinction had never mattered to him much before.

  Solitude had not been created for him, but he took possession of it with the reluctant ease of an heir who receives an unexpected and unwanted inheritance. He laid the robe in one corner, and the scabbard in another, then sat cross-legged in the center of Solitude to examine the rolls of parchment.

  Some of them contained drawings and notations; a few, directions that may or may not have been accurate, to places that may or may not have existed. They were maps, more or less, and at one time it had been his driven purpose to create them. But that was before, when his sight was clearer and his motives more pure. Somehow, somewhen, he had lost his way—and in the process, ended up on a path that had brought him here, to Solitude.

  Still, he could not help but wonder: Was it the first step on that path, or the last, that had proven to be his undoing? He looked down at the maps. The oldest had been made by his hand more than a millennium before; but the newest of them had been begun, then abandoned, a century ago. He examined it more closely and saw that the delicate lines were obscured by blood—the same that marked the cloak and scabbard as symbols of his shame.

  Some things cannot be undone. But someone who is lost might still return to the proper path, if they only have something to show them the way.

  Taking the quill in hand, he dipped the point into the bottle. Whether the place he drew existed then didn’t matter—it would, eventually. All that mattered now was that he was, at long last, finding his purpose again. Would that he had done so a day earlier. Just one day.

  As he began to draw, tears streamed from his eyes, dropping to the parchment, where they mingled freely with the ink and blood in equal measure. The man in Solitude was a mapmaker once more.

  PART ONE

  The Mythopoeia

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Booke of Dayes

  Hurrying along one of the tree-lined paths at Magdalen College in Oxford, John glanced up at the cloud-clotted sky and decided that he rather liked the English weather. Constant clouds made for soft light; soft light that cast no shadows. And John liked to avoid shadows as much as possible.

  As he passed through the elaborate gate that marked the entrance to Addison’s Walk, he looked down at his watch, checking his progress, then looked again. The watch had stopped, and not for the first time. It had been a gift from his youngest child, his only daughter, and while her love in the gift was evident, the selection had been made from a child’s point of view and was therefore more aesthetic than practical. The case was burnished gold (although it was most certainly gold-colored tin), the face was painted with spring flowers, and on the back was the embossed image of a frog wearing a bonnet.

  John had absentmindedly pulled it out of his pocket during one of the frequent gatherings of his friends at Magdalen, much to their amusement. Barfield in particular loved to approach him now at inopportune moments just to ask the time—and hopefully embarrass John in the process.

  John sighed and tucked the watch back in his pocket, then pulled his collar tighter and hurried on. He was probably already late for the dinner he’d been invited to at the college, and although he had always been punctual (mostly), events of recent years had made him much more aware of the consequences tardiness can bring.

  Five years earlier, after a sudden and unexpected journey to the Archipelago of Dreams, he’d found himself a half hour late for an evening with visiting friends that had been planned by his wife. Even had he not taken an oath of secrecy regarding the Archipelago, he would scarcely have been able to explain that he was late because he’d been saving Peter Pan’s granddaughter and thousands of other children from the Pied Piper, and had only just returned via a magic wardrobe in Sir James Barrie’s house, and so had still needed to drive home from London.

  His wife, however, still made the occasional remark about his having been late for the party. So John had since resolved to be as punctual as possible in every circumstance. And tonight he was certain that Jack would not want to be on his own for long, even if the third member of their dinner meeting was their good and trusted friend, Hugo Dyson.

  Hugo had become part of a loose association of like-minded fellows, centered around Jack and John, who gathered together to read, discuss, and debate literature, Romanticism, and the nature of the universe, among other things. The group had evolved from an informal club at Oxford that John had called the Coalbiters, which was mostly concerned with the history and mythology of the Northern lands. One of the members of the current gathering referred to them jokingly as the “not-so-secret secret society,” but where John and Jack were concerned, the name was more ironic than funny. They frequently held other meetings attended only by themselves and their friend Charles, as often as he could justify the trip from London to Oxford, in which they discussed matters that their colleagues would find impossible to believe. For rather than discussing the meaning of metaphor in ancient texts of fable and fairy tale, what was discussed in this actually secret secret society were the fables and fairy tales themselves … which were real. And existed in another world just beyond reach of our own. A world called the Archipelago of Dreams.

  John, Jack, and Charles had been recruited to be Caretakers of the Imaginarium Geographica, the great atlas of the Archipelago. Accepting the job brought with it many other responsibilities, including the welfare of the Archipelago itself and the peoples within it. The history of the atlas and its Caretakers amounted to a secret history of the world, and sometimes each of them felt the full weight of that burden; for events in the Archipelago are often mirrored in the natural world, and what happens in one can affect the other.

  In the fourteen years since they first became Caretakers, all three men had become distinguished as both scholars and writers in and around Oxford, as had been the tradition with other Caretakers across the ages. There were probably many other creative men and women in other parts of the world who might have had the aptitude for it, but the pattern had been set centuries earlier by Roger Bacon, who was himself an Oxford scholar and one of the great compilers of the Histories of the Archipelago.

  The very nature of the Geographica and the accompanying Histories meant that discussing them or the Archipelago with anyone in the natural world was verboten. At various points in history, certain Caretakers-in-training had disagreed with this doctrine and had been removed from their positions. Some, like Harry Houdini and Arthur C
onan Doyle, were nearly eaten by the dragons that guarded the Frontier, the barrier between the world and the Archipelago, before giving up the job. Others, like the adventurer Sir Richard Burton, were cast aside in a less dramatic fashion but had become more dangerous in the years that followed.

  In fact, Burton had nearly cost them their victory in their second conflict with the Winter King—with his shadow, to be more precise—and had ended up escaping with one of the great Dragon-ships. He had not been seen since. But John suspected he was out there somewhere, watching and waiting.

  Burton himself may have been the best argument for Caretaker secrecy. The knowledge of the Archipelago bore with it the potential for great destruction, but Burton was blind to the danger, believing that knowledge was neither good nor evil—only the uses to which it was put could be. It was the trait that made him a great explorer, and an unsuitable Caretaker.

  Because of the oath of secrecy, there was no one on Earth with whom the three Caretakers could discuss the Archipelago, save for their mentor Bert, who was in actuality H. G. Wells, and on occasion, James Barrie. But Barrie, called Jamie by the others, was the rare exception to Burton’s example: He was a Caretaker who gave up the job willingly. And as such, John had realized early on that the occasional visit to reminisce was fine—but Jamie wanted no part of anything of substance that dealt with the Archipelago.

  What made keeping the secret difficult was that John, Jack, and Charles had found a level of comfortable intellectualism within their academic and writing careers. A pleasant camaraderie had developed among their peers at the colleges, and it became more and more tempting to share the secret knowledge that was theirs as Caretakers. John had even suspected that Jack may have already said something to his closest friend, his brother Warnie—but he could hardly fault him for that. Warnie could be trusted, and he had actually seen the girl Laura Glue, when she’d crashed into his and Jack’s garden, wings askew, five years earlier, asking about the Caretakers.