The Dragons of Winter

by James A. Owen

CHAPTER SIX

  The Anachronic Man

  It was definitely not the world they came from, or at least, it was obvious that it was a different time. The air smelled different, and there was a startling sort of energy that vibrated through the gloomy twilight.

  As soon as they were through, the portal closed, becoming a map once more, and where there had been the images of all those they had left behind at the Nameless Isles, there was now only more of that penetrating darkness that surrounded them.

  “We were right,” Rose said in both delight and relief as she turned to Charles and embraced him. “We did it!”

  “Well done, both of you!” Charles said, returning Rose’s hug and clapping Edmund on the back. “I daresay you’re getting better at these jaunts all the time.”

  “Quiet, all of you!” Burton snapped. He was looking at Bert, who had already walked several paces away from the others. “Something’s wrong.”

  The other companions moved to stand with Bert, so they could have a better look at where and when they’d actually come to. Charles and Burton removed two electronic flashlights from Charles’s duffel, so they could illuminate the area and get their bearings.

  The portal had opened onto a small plaza, which was paved with some form of concrete. It was seamless, and nearly smooth, and it spread outward in geometric patterns from where they stood on Shakespeare’s platform all the way to the buildings that formed yet more geometric patterns in the distance. Beyond those, they could see the shapes of great, dark pyramids, which rose above the rest of the city like silent guardians.

  Charles whistled. “Impressive,” he said, looking at Bert. “You never mentioned the city in your book.”

  Bert looked back at the taller man, his brow furrowed with worry. “That’s because there wasn’t one—not one like this, at any rate. There was no London, no Oxford. No cities of any kind. None of this should be here, Charles.”

  “I read it too,” Rose said, pointing up at the sky, “and I don’t remember any mention of those, either.”

  Higher in the sky, above the spires of the city and obscured by the clouds, were the faint outlines of massive structures that arced across the sky from horizon to horizon. The companions all gasped in shock at the immensity of what they now realized were all-too-familiar shapes.

  They were chains.

  Unimaginably massive, each link was larger than the tallest building before them, and there were at least seven chains that they could see crisscrossing in the atmosphere.

  “No,” Bert breathed when he could find his voice again. “Those were definitely not here.”

  “Who could have built such incredible chains?” said Edmund, clearly overwhelmed with the concept. “And raised them so high into the air?”

  “I’d be more concerned with why,” Burton said as Charles nodded in agreement. “Chains are made to keep something out, or . . .”

  “To keep something in,” Charles finished.

  “I think,” Bert said, his voice trembling, “that we are in trouble. This is not my future,” he continued, the trepidation and fear rising in his voice as he spoke. “Not the future I came to before.”

  Charles checked the date on his watch. “No,” he said, trying to sound reassuring even as he fought his own rising panic at Bert’s words. “It’s the correct time. Ransom and Will calculated it from the point you left the first time, plus almost four years, so that we would arrive almost exactly after you and Aven left. This should be exactly the right place, exactly the right time.”

  Bert looked at Charles, then opened his own Anabasis device. “Eight hundred thousand years?”

  “And a pinch more,” said Charles. “It should be the year 802,704 AD, and a few months.”

  “Something has changed,” Bert said, the anguish in his voice tearing at their hearts. “Something happened, and the future changed . . . and Weena is not here.”

  “Wouldn’t the Histories of the future give us some clue?” asked Rose. “Surely there would be some sort of pattern to them that can be traced, to see if we miscalculated.”

  “Not over eight hundred thousand years,” said Burton. “Not over that long a time. Too many things may have changed for the same lives he remembers to have been lived. He’s right—she’s gone. She’s not here, and she never was.”

  Bert turned to the Barbarian and swung his fist, connecting hard with the other man’s chin.

  Burton staggered backward and rubbed his jaw. “I’m getting very tired of being struck by Caretakers.”

  “You aren’t that stupid, Richard,” a glowering Bert said, almost breathless with anger. “You understand better than most how this all is supposed to work. If something’s gone wrong, it can still be fixed. If reality has been changed, then it can be changed back.”

  “If it’s a reality that no longer exists in this time, Bert,” Charles said gently, “then why do you believe it can still be put right?”

  “Because,” Bert said, opening his hand to show them what he kept in his inner pocket, “I still have Weena’s petals.”

  Charles whistled, then reached out and gently stroked the fragile wisps of color in Bert’s hand. “The flower she gave you before you left,” he said admiringly. “You’ve kept them all this time?”

  “I have,” Bert said as he replaced the petals inside the jacket pocket, “to remember. And now I keep them to believe,” he added, jabbing a finger at Burton. “She existed. She exists. And somehow, I will find my way back to her.”

  “Fair enough,” Charles said, realizing that his largest role in this expedition might be that of peacemaker. “So let’s start by finding out what’s happened to the world in the last eight thousand centuries.”

  The companions walked slowly along the paved pathways, being cautious about their surroundings. At Rose’s behest, Archie took flight to better scan the area, but on Bert’s advice never flew higher than twenty or thirty feet. Something about the great chains in the atmosphere made him wary of intruding into the airspace of this world any more than absolutely necessary.

  “Is this anything like the Winterland?” Burton asked Charles. “That alternate reality we, ah, accidentally caused with the Dyson incident?”

  “I wasn’t there,” Charles said, looking a bit crestfallen. “I’m sorry. Whatever aspects of Chaz I may have don’t include his memories of that time—so I have no idea if this is a similar situation or not.”

  Bert was paying less attention to the men conversing than he was to Rose and Edmund, who were trying to work out something that seemed troubling to them both.

  “It’s Ariadne’s Thread,” Rose explained when Bert inquired as to what was the matter. “I can’t manage to connect it to Edmund’s map. If it won’t connect, we can’t establish a zero point here, and the Caretakers will have no idea of when we really are. And,” she added, “we might have a really difficult time getting home.”

  Ariadne’s Thread was the magical cord given to Rose by the Morgaine—the three near-eternal goddesses also called the Fates. The thread was what allowed Rose to connect the maps of time made by Edmund to other zero points.

  “It’s always worked before,” said Edmund, “ever since that first time, in London. There’s no place in real time we haven’t been able to connect to.”

  Bert smacked a fist into his other hand. “By the cat’s pajamas,” he exclaimed. “I knew it! This is a might-have-been, not the real reality. Otherwise, Edmund would be able to connect Rose’s thread to his map. It won’t connect because this is only an imaginary land. Which means,” he added with a note of hopefulness that matched the expression on his face, “we can go back and try it again. And this time, I know we’ll succeed.”

  Hastened by their shared desire to leave the dismal Night Land and return as quickly as possible to Tamerlane House and the Kilns, the companions made their way back to the plaza much more quickly than they’d anticipated. And so it was still only twilight when they finally reached the platform.

  Edmund o
pened his Chronographica, where all his maps were stored, and retrieved the one that would take them back to Tamerlane House in 1946. Together he and Rose concentrated on the map, but nothing happened.

  “That’s odd,” said Edmund.

  “Worse than odd,” Rose said. “Ariadne’s Thread isn’t connected to this one either—and it’s a confirmed zero point.”

  They tried several other maps, but to no avail. None of them were working, or connected by Ariadne’s Thread.

  “Oh dear,” Bert said weakly. “I think that we are in trouble.”

  “The usual kind?” Charles said.

  “No,” Bert replied. “The special kind. With nuts and caramel sauce. And a cherry. A great big, red, flaming cherry on top of a huge, delicious pile of nut-and-caramel-coated, special-delivery, once-in-a-lifetime trouble. That kind.”

  “It’s this might-have-been business, isn’t it?” Charles asked, rattled by the realization of what was happening. “That’s the problem.”

  “Going from a place that exists to a place that doesn’t exist is easy,” Bert lamented, nodding. “But going from a place that doesn’t exist to a place that does . . . not so much.”

  Rose gasped. Edmund scowled. And Burton uttered a string of curse words that had not been spoken aloud by a human more than twice since the fall of Babylon, just as a large stone came flying through the air, striking him viciously in the face.

  The companions spun about to look in the direction from which the rock had come, expecting to see some fearsome enemy, or a clutch of Morlocks. That wasn’t what they saw.

  To one side of the plaza, a hunched, shabby-looking man was muttering to himself and cradling a rock in his hands as if preparing for another throw.

  Shouting, Burton and Charles rushed forward and grabbed the man’s arms, throwing him down and pinning him to the pavement.

  Burton, who was bleeding profusely from the wound along his left cheekbone, removed the second rock from the wailing man’s hand, and was not gentle about it. There was a snapping sound as the man’s wrist broke, which only caused him to howl all the louder.

  “Stop that infernal screeching!” Burton bellowed, “or I’ll really give you something to howl about!”

  “Oh,” Bert said. He’d suddenly gone pale, as all the blood drained out of his face.

  Rose recognized the expression on her teacher’s face. “What is it?” she asked as she looked from Bert to the strange man and back again. “Do you know him? Is he one of Weena’s people? One of the Eloi?”

  Bert shook his head. “Not one of the Eloi, no,” he said, his voice trembling with emotion. “One of us.”

  Charles blanched as he and Burton lifted the man roughly to his feet. “What? He’s a Caretaker?”

  “Not a Caretaker,” Bert answered. “A Messenger, and the only time traveler to become so completely lost that no trace could be found to even hint as to where he went. Jules called him the Anachronic Man—the man lost in time.”

  At the mention of Verne’s name the man took a breath to start howling again, but a stern look from Burton silenced him, and he simply swallowed hard, then looked at Bert with wide, frightened eyes. “Far Traveler?” he said meekly. “Is that you? Have you come to rescue me at last?”

  “Rescue?” Burton said in surprise. “Who is this, Bert?”

  Bert sighed heavily before answering. “Rose, gentle sentients,” he said with a tight grin, “I’d like you to meet Arthur Gordon Pym.”

  “Had to do it,” Pym said once he’d calmed down and gathered his wits. Rose and Charles were using bandages from the kit Bert always carried to bind up his broken wrist as he spoke. “No telling whose side you were on,” Pym went on. “Can’t leave one’s enemies just strolling about.”

  “But,” said Edmund, “we aren’t your enemies at all. We didn’t come to rescue you, but you’ve just attacked your friends.”

  “The irony is delicious to me,” said Pym.

  “He’s an idiot,” said Burton, who was gingerly touching his own bandaged face as the others tended to the injured Messenger. “We didn’t have any idea you’d be here.”

  “Oh,” said Pym. “Did you come here for the others, then?”

  That stopped everyone in their tracks.

  “What others?” Charles asked carefully, fully aware that the Messenger might still be speaking stuff and nonsense. “Other Caretakers?”

  Pym seemed about to answer when his eyes widened in shock as Archie circled low enough to join in the conversation.

  “If he’s a friend, I fear to see our enemies in this place,” the mechanical bird said, “but I suppose there’s no accounting for taste.”

  “It . . . it isn’t real!” an astonished Pym stammered.

  “No, he’s real, all right,” Burton said wryly. “Nothing imaginary could be so irritating.”

  “What do you think, Archie?” Edmund called to the bird circling overhead. “Are you real, or aren’t you?”

  “All of you sound smarter,” the bird replied, sneering at Burton’s feigned respect, “when you aren’t trying to sound like philosophers.”

  “So speaketh the adding machine,” said Burton. “I can barely hear you over the sound of your gears.”

  “That’s why I keep a small oilcan in my pack,” Edmund said, glancing at the dark clouds. “In foul weather, Archimedes tends to, um, squeak.”

  “I do not!” Archie squawked in indignation. “I emit nothing but the sounds of my proper functioning. To squeak would be uncouth.”

  “You squeak,” Rose said, nodding and holding up her hands in resignation. “Sorry. Edmund is right.”

  Suddenly, without warning, Pym’s right arm shot up in a curving arc, launching a large, jagged rock high into the air . . .

  . . . where it struck the hovering Archimedes with a terrible, grinding crunch.

  “Spies,” Pym said, panting. “His spies are everywhere.”

  Edmund and Rose cried out and rushed to where the damaged bird had fallen. Edmund reached Archie first, and he cradled the bird in his arms.

  “Are you insane?” Charles exclaimed, shaking the hapless Pym by the shoulders. “No wonder Verne stopped looking for you! You’re worse than Magwich!”

  The stone had struck the bird with such force that it tore a gash in Archie’s torso from just above his right leg to his neck. Only luck or the bird’s quick reflexes had allowed him to tip his chin back at the last instant and avoid having his head torn off his neck.

  As it was, the damage was bad enough. Gears and wires were spilling out of his chest and onto the ground, where a tearful Rose was attempting frantically to gather them up and stuff them back in.

  “Oh, my Archie!” Rose cried. “You’ve killed him!”

  “He’s a clockwork, Rose,” Bert explained gently. “He can be repaired back at Tamerlane. We have Roger Bacon’s books, and Shakespeare has become quite adept at working with delicate machinery. We’ll fix him, I promise.”

  Pym seemed to have already forgotten the entire incident and had gone back to muttering to himself. Charles and Burton joined the others and circled around Edmund and the damaged bird.

  Edmund seemed almost numb with shock. He knew, intellectually, that his recently acquired companion was a mechanical bird—but it was a different thing to have that point clarified in such a violent manner.

  “Well,” said Charles, “Messenger or not, when we get back to Tamerlane House, there’s going to be an—” He stopped and looked around, groaning. “Drat! Where’s Pym gotten off to?”

  “I couldn’t say, since I didn’t see him go,” Burton said, his voice low but steady. “I did, however, see the new arrival, who is watching us now.”

  He tipped his head to the north, and the others turned to see a man calmly watching them from about twenty paces off.

  The man was pale—no, more than that, Rose realized. He was an albino. His skin was almost entirely free of pigmentation. He wore something that resembled sunglasses over his eyes, and was
dressed simply, in a tunic and breeches made of the same unbleached fabric.

  On his forehead was a strange marker, or perhaps a tattoo: a circle, surrounded by four diamonds.

  “I don’t recognize the symbol,” Burton murmured to Charles. “Do you?”

  “Not at all,” Charles concurred, “but it’s been such a long time, who knows what is meaningful, and in what ways? We might have to resort to using sign language, just to be understood.”

  “Greetings,” the strange man said in perfect, unaccented English, “and salutations. May I be of assistance?”

  Bert gave a gasp and dashed forward, almost grasping at the strange man. The old Caretaker seemed to have difficulty finding the right words to say, and it also appeared to the others that this was more than an overture to a stranger—this was recognition of . . .

  . . . a friend?

  “Is it you?” Bert said, his voice faint in his breathlessness. “Nebogipfel?”

  “He was my sire,” the pale man replied. “You may call me Vanamonde.”

  “Nebogipfel?” Charles asked. “You know this man’s father, Bert?”

  “Dr. Moses Nebogipfel,” Bert said, relieved to have another touch point of familiarity in that dark place. “He is a Welsh inventor, who had developed some remarkable theories about time travel.”

  He strode over to Vanamonde and extended his hand. After a moment’s hesitation, the pale man shook it, bowing slightly.

  “I knew your father well, Vanamonde,” said Bert. “How is he?”

  “He died many years ago,” Vanamonde replied with no obvious emotion, and enough finality that Bert knew not to ask further. “Your mek,” he said, gesturing at Archie. “It has been damaged. We have the means to repair it, if you like.”

  “That’s very kind of you,” Rose said, before the others could answer. “Yes. Help him, please.”

  A look passed between Charles and Burton that expressed the same thought—caution was necessary, but there was no reason not to agree.

  “Here,” Vanamonde said, turning toward the towers of the city. “Follow me, if you please.”

  The companions fell into step behind the mysterious man as he began to walk. In a few minutes, it was obvious that their destination was the largest, tallest, darkest tower on the skyline.