Bert clapped John on the shoulder, then took Jack by the hand. “I wish Charles were here,” he said. “Otherwise, it’s just how I had hoped it would happen.”
“How you hoped what would happen?” asked John.
Almost as if answering his question, Bert’s watch began to ring with a strange chiming—a noise John had never heard it make before.
Bert’s eyes grew wide, and he looked up at the other Caretakers, several of whom had moved closer to him. “Oh dear,” he stammered. “I’ve forgotten. I needed one more sitting with Basil . . . .”
His eyelids fluttered, and he grew pale. Twain and Dickens moved around the table and gently helped the Far Traveler sit back down into his chair, where he immediately slumped into the cushions.
“What is it?” John whispered to Verne. “What’s happening to him, Jules?”
“Not him,” Verne replied quietly. “Well, not just him, I should say.” He checked his own watch and nodded as if in confirmation. “That’s it, then,” he said to the others. “H. G. Wells has died.”
The house at 13 Hanover Terrace, in Regent’s Park in London, had no runes carved in its doors, nor along its hallways, or in the room where the aged author took his last breath. But even though those attending to the body could not see those who had come to pay their respects, he was not without friends.
“It was a good death,” said Baum.
Franklin nodded. “Agreed.”
“Do you think he’ll join us?” Lewis Carroll asked. “I mean, join us as, you know, a spirit?”
“No, I think not,” said Macdonald, looking around the room. “I think he did the things he needed to do, and that was enough.”
“He also knows,” Franklin added, “that he has a brother elsewhere to continue the work. So there’s no need for him to stay the way that . . .”
He couldn’t quite bring himself to finish the sentence, nor did he need to. And for a brief moment, the thirteen ghosts gathered around the bedside of H. G. Wells felt a twinge of regret, and the slightest envy.
Then, murmuring words of blessing and personal prayer, the members of the Mystorians took their leave of London.
In the portrait gallery of Tamerlane House, the Caretakers Emeriti gathered closely around the new portrait that had just been hung at a place of honor in the center of the west wall, among the portraits of the greatest and most distinguished members of their group.
“That really should have been my spot, you know,” grumbled da Vinci, “instead of over in the corner, next to George Gordon.”
“Oh, shut up, Leo,” said Irving. “Someone had to be next to him.”
“I resent that,” said Byron.
“Hush, all of you,” said Twain. “He’s waking up.”
It was a slow rise back to consciousness. The light around him came up gradually, but when his vision finally cleared, Bert could see the gathered Caretakers all beaming up at him.
“Let me,” Verne said, placing his watch into the frame just out of Bert’s field of vision. “Here,” he said, extending his hand as the frame blazed with light. “Come join us, Far Traveler.”
Bert stepped out from the portrait on the wall and into the midst of his colleagues, who burst into spontaneous applause.
“Basil finished,” Bert said, a bit dazed by all the attention. “He finished my portrait.”
He wheeled around to Verne. “What if I’d changed my mind and decided I wanted to be a tulpa instead?” he said. “I thought there’d be more time to choose.”
“Bert, my old friend, my old sparring partner,” Verne said, clapping a large hand on the smaller man’s shoulder. “You chose long ago, and we both know it. This was the path you preferred. And so we’d had it prepared for some time.”
“Humph,” Bert snorted indignantly. “You could have prepared a tulpa, too, if you’d wanted.”
Twain puffed on a cigar and blew a plume of smoke into the air. “Certainly we could have,” he said, “but then if you’d chosen not to take it, someone would have had to spend a lot of time dispersing it. They don’t just go away on their own—not right away, that is. And it wouldn’t have done to have another you wandering around where just anyone’s will could step in and mess with his—your—head.”
“Ah,” Bert said. “So you figured it out. The Cabal did steal the wisp of a shadow of—”
“We’ll deal with that later,” Verne said quickly, glancing at Jack.
“It also means,” Bert said with a heavy sigh, “that I’m restricted to Tamerlane House. Forever.”
“Forever may be just long enough,” Dickens said with a wink at Twain, “and I think staying at Tamerlane House will be your preference from now on. Turn around.”
“What the blazes are you talking about, Charles?” Said Bert. “I’m not—”
“Bert,” John said, grasping his mentor by the shoulders. “Trust us. Just turn around.”
Still complaining under his breath, the Far Traveler did as he was told—and what he saw left him without words or breath.
There, hanging next to his own portrait, was a full-size portrait of a woman. She was lithe, and simply dressed, and had the innocent beauty of one who had only known trust and love in her world.
Bert reached a trembling hand out to touch the portrait, but he stopped an inch short of it, as if it were a gossamer dream that might disappear if it were disturbed. “Jules,” he whispered softly. “How . . . ? How did you . . . ?”
“Using young Asimov’s psychohistory, the Mystorians had calculated a high probability of the might-have-been future you and the others traveled to,” Verne replied, “and with each passing day, the percentage grew higher. So I took a risk and took your machine into your future. Into her future. I knew that someday you would try to return, if you found the means to do so. But my messengers found more and more future timelines were changing. And I didn’t want to risk that this future would change, and take with it any hope of finding Weena again.
“Because you’d been there, you had already made it a zero point, so I knew I could get there. I was a little more concerned about having the same trouble you did in getting back.”
Something clicked together. “Your missing year,” Bert said. “The year we thought you’d been lost, right after John, Jack, and Charles became the Caretakers.”
“Yes,” Verne answered, nodding, “and just as I founded the Mystorians. I didn’t want to risk making an anomaly out of myself—being a tulpa, I had no clue what that might do to the timestream—so I pulled back and returned a year after I’d started. But I accomplished what I went there to do.”
“I explained to her why you hadn’t been able to return, and I got her permission to take this.” He pulled a small cube out of his pocket. “I took along one of my optical devices and took a remarkable image of her that I could bring back.”
Bert reached out again but still didn’t dare touch the picture. “So . . . this is a photo, then?”
“Not at all,” Verne said, smiling broadly. “A portrait. One of Basil’s best.”
“There was a concern,” said Twain, “that you wouldn’t be able to bring her back, the way you had Aven. But only the one machine had ever gone that far into the future, and having used it once, you had no way of going back—until young Rose and Edmund came to us.”
“But Jules could go, using my machine,” Bert said. He spun and looked at Verne, then the other Caretakers, all of whom were beaming. “You were all in on this?”
“Some of us knew,” said Dickens, “but you know Jules—he likes to keep his own counsel. This is the first time we’ve invited a non-Caretaker to have their portrait done, and so this was hung only a few moments before yours was.”
“So she’s never come out of the portrait?”
Twain stepped forward and gave Bert a push. “No,” he said with a grin, “we figured that’d be your job, young fellow. So,” he added, “what are you waiting for? Bring her out!”
He paused. “Will it—will she s
till be . . . my Weena?”
For the first time, Poe spoke. “She will. She chose this, freely, and as with your own portrait, she lives because her aiua is the same. Only the form is different.”
“As you are still our Bert, she’ll be your Weena,” said Twain. “Do it, son.”
Trembling, Bert removed his watch from his pocket and placed it into the indentation at the base of the frame. The light from the portrait washed over him as tears streamed down his face.
Almost hesitantly, a hand reached out from the portrait. Bert took it, and gently pulled her forward into the room, before losing his composure and embracing her amid the cheers and claps of his colleagues.
“Hello, my sweet Weena,” he said into her hair as they embraced. “Welcome home.”
Somewhen, far in a future that may yet come to pass, the Barbarian who had become a Dragon prepared to tell his stories, as he had once done long ago, in another life, another time.
It had taken nearly a year of hard labor to create a new amphitheater where the stories were told, to re-create a stage and carve rows of terraced seating out of the earth and stone that formed this small, natural canyon.
Above, the Dragonships watched, silent sentries and testaments to a long-vanished past—a past from which the storyteller had come, and to which he could never return. Not without a price that was too costly to pay, and risking all the good work that had brought him here, to this place, and this time.
Sometimes, at night, he could feel the waves of time shimmering off the stones of the amphitheater, and in those moments, he felt regret—but as always it passed quickly, for he knew that being in this place was his destiny. It was his great work.
“All the best stories are written in books,” he said, smiling at the children clustering around him, “as they once were, and as they will be again.”
The grown-ups who came to listen sat to either side of him, as the smaller children clambered on top of them, eager, waiting to hear the story he would tell them tonight.
“It has been one thousand nights, and I have told you one thousand stories,” the storyteller said, “and tonight will be the one thousand and first.
“How?” the children asked. “How does it begin, Sir Richard?”
“It begins,” he said, “as all the best stories do. Once upon a time . . .”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The Ancient of Days
“Praise the Lord and bless Basil’s sainted head,” said Bert as he took a seat alongside John in the banquet hall. “He was prepared, or I ought to say, Jules was. They had a portrait waiting to be finished in the event of my eventual demise. I was rather hoping it would be later in coming—but their second surprise more than made up for it.”
Weena sat alongside Bert and was being patiently cheerful as she tried to take in everything her husband was explaining to her. It would be a very long process, but in the meantime, Bert was happy—and still among the Caretakers. And to John and Jack, that was all that mattered.
Bert had told most of his story when he reappeared at Tamerlane House, and the rest after he died and then reemerged from his portrait. And while the Caretakers were happy to know that Charles, Rose, and Edmund were safe, the rest of what he’d had to say about the city of Dys, and Lord Winter, and the Last Redoubt created more questions than answers.
Almost as much attention was being paid to the newest resident of Tamerlane House: the Zen Detective, who took a seat next to Uncas, and who, to everyone’s surprise, was not only fully recovered from his wound, but was noticeably lighter skinned than when he’d arrived.
There, in the near distance, was the City of Jade.
“That’s not all that’s changed,” Aristophanes said. He reached across the table and offered Verne his hand—which the Prime Caretaker took and shook, once, then again.
“Uh, isn’t he supposed to be poisonous to the touch?” asked Quixote. “No offense, Steve.”
“None taken,” the detective replied, “and no longer.”
“That was the deal we made,” said Verne, nodding at another guest who was just joining them at the table—the Messenger Beatrice.
“His horn is still quite deadly,” Verne said, “but the Lady Beatrice is just as adept at removing toxins as she is at creating them.”
While everyone commented on Bert’s account of the future, no one was quite bold enough to address the matter of Lord Winter, which was just fine with Jack. He was less concerned about the ancient future and the possibilities that a shadow-version of himself might become a tyrant and a servant of the Echthroi, than he was about the still-missing boy prince, who Blake confirmed had been Dr. Raven all along.
“Raven—or Telemachus, I guess—is, in fact, the boy Coal,” he told the Caretakers. “When I discovered it for certain, I was not in a position to leave Dee’s House, and the Cabal were watching me too closely to send a message out. But there is no doubt—he is the missing prince.”
“But Dr. Raven was looking for the boy too, wasn’t he?” asked Jack. “How is it he kept his true identity so well hidden?”
“He’s a true adept, like Rose,” said Blake, “maybe even better than she is.”
“But why couldn’t we find him?”
“He was in a might-have-been in the future,” said Verne. “That’s the only place where Defoe could have hidden him where we’d have little hope of ever finding him.”
“Why?” asked John. “You find things lost in time all of the, ah, time.”
“In the past, yes,” said Verne, “but the future is a different matter. The past already exists, and thus can be treated as archaeology. What we want is there, it just needs to be looked for patiently enough. But the future is all possibility, and must be treated as psychohistory. And even Isaac’s best techniques can do little to find one lost child amid a myriad of possible futures.”
“It was Crowley who figured out that the Sphinx could travel not just in time and space, but also between real time and might-have-beens,” said Blake. “That’s how we knew that it could be used to give a lifeline to Bert and the others when we realized they’d gotten lost in their own might-have-been.”
“But shouldn’t they have gone to the same time, uh, place, that Bert had?” Jack asked. “Isn’t it a zero point?”
“That may be my fault,” said Shakespeare. “We think, but can’t be certain, that the cavorite platform is what threw them askew. I’m working on it.”
“Wait a moment,” John said, thinking about everything they’d discussed. “Blake, you said that Defoe couldn’t go retrieve Coal because they didn’t have the Sphinx—because we had it here. Why couldn’t we use it to go after him ourselves once you knew how to track him?”
“Because of how the Sphinx works,” Poe said from his alcove above. “The payment she has always required has been a human life—a price Defoe and the Cabal would willingly pay, which we would not.”
“But a life wasn’t required for Bert and Rose and the others to use in the future,” said John.
“Because Rose had the only other thing Azer would accept,” said Verne. “The ability for Azer to choose her own redemption, and the promise of being a full Dragon again. Despite the sum of those efforts as they stand, I still believe it was all worth the risks we’ve taken.”
“Worth the . . . ,” John began, astonishment choking his words. “But Jules, we lost the armor! To a possible enemy who can now do almost anything!”
“Yes, but you heard the boy,” Verne replied. “He’s still deciding what to do, and how he’ll choose. For all we know, he’s already on our side, and working against the Cabal from within.”
John blinked a few times, then looked over at Jack, who was sitting with an inscrutable expression on his face. Wordlessly, John rose from his chair and walked to the head of the table, where he delivered a devastating right cross directly to Jules Verne’s jaw.
The Prime Caretaker went sprawling across the floor as blood splattered across his shirt and coat. He ro
lled over, his eyes flashing with anger, preparing to lash out over the unfair blow . . . .
And then he realized that not a one of the Caretakers Emeriti had risen to his defense. John stood next to his chair, panting with anger and effort, and Jack sat where he was, with a slightly stunned look. But all the other Caretakers had remained in their seats, and only a few even dared to meet his eyes.
“Well,” Verne said heavily as he pulled himself to his feet and straightened his waistcoat, “I see that your opinion of me is in the majority, young John.”
“No more secrets, Jules,” John said, his voice firm and steady. “The warning about the Echthroi that was given to Rose last year, when she was told to seek out the Dragon’s apprentice, the whole key to the restoration of the Archipelago—it’s all there in that one simple phrase. No more secrets. And keeping secrets seems to have been all that you’ve done, since even before we met.
“Even nearly losing our friends to that might-have-been,” John continued. “You even planned for that, didn’t you?”
“Now, John,” Twain started to say, “how could he possibly—”
“If he didn’t know,” said John, “then why did he have Quixote and Uncas steal the Sphinx a year ago, when we were in eighteenth-century London?”
“I know he hasn’t always planned for the big picture,” Bert said, trying to steer the discussion into more pleasant waters, “or else he’d have made other plans for Richard Burton instead of letting him defect to the ICS.”
“It’s too bad you didn’t think of that earlier in your career as Prime Caretaker,” John said to Verne. “Burton would have made an excellent candidate for a new Mystorian.”
Jack chuckled at this, as did one or two of the Caretakers Emeriti—but Verne didn’t even smile, or acknowledge the comment except to keep a level gaze at John. At first John thought Verne simply misunderstood what he’d suggested—and then he realized, Verne did understand. Far too clearly.
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