The Dragons of Winter (19 page)

“What it is, what it is?” the librarian called down from the ladder. “I cannot be bothering now. I am very busty.”

Uncas turned to Quixote. “Does she mean something else?”

“Probably,” the knight whispered, “but better not to ask. Just smile and nod.”

Aristophanes removed his hat and spoke in a respectful
manner. “Song-Sseu,” he said, hat in hand, “thank you for allowing us to enter your library. We have come to ask for your help.”

At the mention of her name, the librarian stiffened, but did not turn to look at them. A long moment passed, and then she answered. “I am not who you think me to be, strange, and am to work much, too much mind, to talk. To help.”

“You are the person we’re looking for, Song-Sseu, to find what we’re after,” Aristophanes said. “If you cannot help us, then there is no one else who can. We’re looking for the Ruby Armor of T’ai Shan.”

She turned her head slowly and fixed the detective with a thousand-yard stare that would have driven a lesser man, or perhaps a more prudent one, right out the door. But as it was, Aristophanes held his ground, and she descended the ladder.

“Wait here,” the librarian said, “and don’t think to be touch anything.”

She descended the ladder without actually tearing any seams, and removed herself to a room farther back. After some rattling around, followed by unintelligible cursing, she returned holding a ring of keys. “How would you know that even I know, the place of the armor?”

Aristophanes shrugged. “I didn’t know. But it’s apparent that you do. That’s Zen for you.”

“Hmm.” She folded her arms and pursed her lips. “What would you know of Zen, Westerner?”

Aristophanes stiffened at that, but he kept his demeanor and voice steady. “More than you would believe, Song-Sseu,” he replied. “Can you help us?”

“Help you, or help Caretakers?” she asked. “It not surprise,”
she added before he could react. “Who else send purple unicorn, talking rat, and crazy man to ask about T’ai Shan?”

“I’m a badger,” said Uncas.

“And I’m, uh,” said Quixote. “I have no defense.”

“Yes, they sent us,” said Aristophanes.

“You know the Archipelago, that it is gone,” she said. “Something happened to it. All Shadow now. So now they Caretakers of air.”

“We know,” said Quixote. “That’s why we need the armor—to fight the Shadows.”

She looked at the three of them for a few moments—at Aristophanes for longer and more critically than the others—before she finally assented. “Yes,” she said primly. “I help you. But it cost you much, I think.”

“I expected it would,” the detective said, rummaging around in his pockets. “Ah!” he exclaimed. “Here it is!”

It was a very old piece of parchment, covered in Arabic writing.

The librarian peered at it. “A Scheherazade story? Pfah! I have all already. All thousand and three.”

“This,” said Aristophanes, “is the one thousand and
fourth
tale.”

Her eyes grew wide as she realized he was quite serious, and the parchment, quite authentic.

Song-Sseu snatched it out of his hand and filed the parchment in a desk drawer, which she then locked with a key. Using a second key, she opened a different drawer and took out a sheaf of paper.

“You know these not work by themselves,” said Song-Sseu. “Need the Quill of Minos, or Letter-Blocks of—”

“I have an Infernal Device,” Aristophanes said, giving a sideways glance at Uncas and Quixote.

“Ah,” she said, as if that explained everything. “How many sheets you need?”

“Seven,” said the detective. “Seven should do.”

Song-Sseu’s brow furrowed in puzzlement. “Seven? But there are eight pieces . . . .”

“We already got the Ruby Opera Glasses,” Uncas offered, and Aristophanes’s complexion turned a full shade darker, “so we don’t need t’ look fer them.”

“You do know,” she said as she counted off seven sheets and handed them to the Zen Detective, “that knowing that places exist, and be able to locate those places, are two different thing. And there be places in the world that even Caretakers know not about.”

“Maybe they don’t,” Aristophanes said as he folded the papers and stuck them inside his coat, “but we do. We have the maps of Elijah McGee.”

The expression on her face, Aristophanes thought, was worth all the grief he’d had to take just to be able to witness that moment.

“You lie,” she finally said after closing her mouth and regaining her composure. “They were lost in fire, in London.”

“Not all of them,” Aristophanes said, “and not the important ones.”

She tried to look casually uninterested, and was failing miserably. “Do you have with you?” she asked. “Could I have to look at them?”

“Maybe next time,” Aristophanes said as he slowly guided Uncas and Quixote out of the shop. He bowed, then quickly closed the door before she could say anything further.

“Stupid, stupid, stupid,” he muttered as they retraced their
steps to the stairwell. “Never should have mentioned the maps!”

“Then, uh, why did you?” asked Uncas. “We already had what we wanted, didn’t we?”

Aristophanes glowered, then nodded. “I was showing off,” he said. “Wanted her to know I was in a loop she wasn’t in. And now maybe I’ve compromised us.”

“How so?” Quixote asked, looking a bit worried.

“Because,” the detective said as he pushed open the great green doors, “people who are willing to sell what they know always have a price. And we just gave her something very, very valuable. And you,” he growled at Uncas, “should not have told her we had the glasses, either. But what’s done is done, and it’s not to be helped, now.

“Come on,” he finished, jumping to the stairs. “We’ve just sped up our timetable.”

“We shouldn’t discuss the details of the pieces here,” Aristophanes said as they reached street level and Oxford Above, “and we sure as Hades shouldn’t look at the maps anywhere in the open. Does your instant-travel-projector have a slide for someplace more private?”

“We have just th’ place,” said Uncas. “Hop in. We’ll be there in two shakes of a fox’s tail.”

The three companions climbed into the Duesenberg, and Uncas pulled out the appropriate slide. Starting the motor, he wheeled the car around and, projector whirring, drove straight into—and through—a solid brick wall.

They were so intent on getting someplace more secure, where they could talk unmolested, that none of them had noticed the tall, hooded man at the end of the street, who had been observing
them since they entered Lower Oxford. No one else, not even the few ragged denizens who were coming and going through the door to the stairwell, took any more notice of him. He was simply another near-invisible lost soul, minding his own business. And so no one noticed at all when he took the watch out of his pocket, twirled the dials, and vanished.

“Have you ever noticed,” Uncas said conversationally, as the barmaid brought another round of drinks to their table, “that all th’ so-called ‘Soft Places’ seem t’ be centered around taverns and th’ like?”

Aristophanes snorted and took a long swallow of ale.

Quixote frowned. “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” he said. “There are plenty of Soft Places with no ale whatsoever.”

“Yeah?” Aristophanes replied, wiping his mouth on his sleeve. “Name
three
.”

“Hmm,” mused the knight. “There’s, ah, Midian. And, um . . .”

“I thought so,” said Uncas.

“Oh, just be quiet and drink your prune juice,” said Quixote.

The Inn of the Flying Dragon was one of the Caretakers’ favorite meeting places to discuss Archipelago business, and it had come as a huge relief to all of them that the loss of the Archipelago did not mean the loss of the Flying Dragon.

It was not the only Soft Place where they could drink away the night, but it was one of the few that consisted of a single edifice at a Crossroads. There were some, like Club Mephistopheles, that existed in London, for those who knew how to see them. Others, like Midian, were entire cities. Some, like Abaton, were both a city and a country, with indefinable borders.

Fortunately, according to Aristophanes, the Soft Places they would need to go to were a bit smaller in size.

“So,” Quixote said, having downed his second ale, “how are we going to find the pieces, anyroad?”

“With this,” Aristophanes said. He opened the box he’d taken from his office and removed a device that resembled a typewriter’s larger, more complicated, slightly preindustrial brother. “It’s called a Machine Cryptographique,” he explained as he set up the contraption on the table. “It was invented by a printer in Marseilles in 1836, and he claimed it could write as fast as a pen.”

The detective showed them how each letter had its own bar, which would rotate into place to type a letter. Uncas noticed that there were several bars that were engraved with numerals—as well as several more that bore marks he didn’t recognize.

“The inventor had more than commercial uses in mind,” Aristophanes was telling Quixote, “which is why he added the Hermetic markings to some of the bars. The problem was, he didn’t know enough about what he was getting into, and the device became possessed by a djinn.”

“By gin?” asked Uncas.

“A
djinn
,” the exasperated detective said. “An imp. Something that can grant wishes, tell your fortune, and make predictions.”

“That sounds like something th’ Caretakers would like, all right,” said Uncas.

“Actually, it was deemed too dangerous for the Caretakers,” said the detective. “The power to use it came with a condition—if you died while it was in your possession, yours became the next soul that powered it. The Frenchman—Verne—acquired it in 1882 and quickly realized the danger of keeping and using
it. So he sold it to someone less likely to die than even a Caretaker.”

He stroked the gears and wheels of the device and grinned. “I call it Darwin, after the last supposed owner who died while he had it,” Aristophanes said. “It’s been very reliable. Just don’t,” he added, “ask it any questions about the Garden of Eden. It gets very testy when you do that.”

“If you have this machine,” Quixote asked, “then what did we need to acquire the parchment from Song-Sseu for?”

“The original djinn is gone,” said Aristophanes, “and Darwin has no predictive powers of his own. So,” he continued, as he pulled out the seven sheets of parchment, “we needed some oracular parchment to do the job instead.”

“Hmm,” said Uncas. “Where d’you get oracular parchment?”

“From an oracular pig.”

“An oracular pig?” Uncas asked, shuddering. “D’you mean like the famous one, from the farm on Prydain?”

“The very same,” said Aristophanes. “Same pig, actually.”

“That’s a shame,” Uncas said, shaking his head. “Sacrificing an entire oracular pig just for some stupid parchment.”

“Oh, I don’t think they killed her,” the detective said quickly. “They just used her hindquarters. A pig that valuable, you can’t use all at once.”

“Ewww,” said Uncas.

“Well,” said Quixote, “I have seen those little carts with the wheels they can attach . . . .”

“Never mind about the pig!” Aristophanes snorted. “Let’s find out where we’re to go first.”

The Zen Detective threaded a sheet of parchment into the
machine, then slowly, deliberately, pecked out a question, which appeared in faint, reddish-gray letters.

Suddenly the machine took charge of its own operation, and more quickly than Aristophanes had typed, click-clacked out an answer one line below the question.

“There we go,” Aristophanes said, whipping the parchment out of the machine and stuffing it quickly into his pocket. “We’ll compare it with the maps in the morning.”

“In the morning?” asked Quixote. “Why not right now?”

“Because for one, I don’t think it’s safe to pull out the maps in sight of others, even here,” said Aristophanes. “And for another, I’m tuckered out and could use some sleep before we start off on this treasure hunt.”

“Why not just take a room here?” Uncas protested as the detective boxed up his machine and rose to leave. “The rooms are very nice.”

“They are,” he replied in a soft, low voice, so he couldn’t be overheard past their table. “It’s the other clientele that I’m wary of, like the fellow in the corner—no, don’t look, Uncas!—wearing the hood, who has been watching us since we got here.”