The First Dragon (Chronicles of the Imaginarium Geographica, The) (28 page)

♦  ♦  ♦

It took considerably less time for them to arrive at the only other island that couldn’t be removed by Samaranth, because it was the very island that marked the edge of the original Archipelago.

“Terminus,” Madoc said as he leaned heavily against the railing. “I never expected to see it again.”

“Father, are you all right?” Rose asked.

“I am . . . remembering,” Madoc answered slowly. “The last time I went over the side of this waterfall, it wasn’t in a ship.”

“Wait!” Charles exclaimed. “What about the different gates, below,” he said as the ship flew down the face of the waterfall. “Aren’t there dangers abounding here?”

“I don’t think we’ll find any,” said Jack. “It’s been twenty years since you restored the keep, so we’ve had a little time to look around. As far as we could tell, when the Echthroi occupied the whole of the region, they completely absorbed or destroyed all the gates. It’s all free passage to the end now.”

“That’s sort of a good-news, bad-news scenario,” said Charles. “It’s the first thing that the Echthroi have ever done that I was actually happy to hear about.”

It was dark by the time the ship reached the bottom of the waterfall and began sailing over open ocean again.

“When we came this way before, there were thousands of lights above,” Rose said wonderingly, “and the Professor said they were Dragons. I wonder where they’ve gone?”

“I thought you had, ah, released all the Dragons with the sword,” said Edmund, “and that there weren’t any left.”

“Those were all who descended from angel to Dragon at Samaranth’s urging, when the City of Jade fell,” said Madoc, “but they were not all the Dragons there are, nor were they the first Dragons of creation.”

“Where have they gone?” asked Rose. “What’s happened to all of them?”

Madoc shrugged. “I can’t say for certain. Samaranth taught me that this plane borders heaven itself, and so that may be where they have returned to. Why, I have no idea.”

“It was the Echthroi,” said Fred. “The entire Archipelago was lost to shadow. I don’t think any Dragon would stick around to watch over a world that we screwed up that badly.”

“Maybe when we put everything right,” said Rose, “the Dragons will return again.” She looked up into the darkness and sighed. “Maybe.”

♦  ♦  ♦

“It shouldn’t be too long now,” Madoc said as he and Rose consulted the
Imaginarium Geographica.
“We’re almost there, at the End of the World.”

“There was a time not long ago,” said Uncas, “that we believed Terminus and th’ waterfalls was the End of the World, but then we found out it went beyond that. And now, we’re finding out that the boundary is even farther away. I’m starting to think there’s no end to anything!”

“There was also a time,” Jack said wryly, “when you would have taken my shadow for the chance to have that book, Madoc. And done many other terrible things besides.”

“Jack!” Rose exclaimed. “I can’t believe you said that!”

“It’s all right,” Madoc said, shushing her. “It’s better that I know these things, if he feels they are worth saying.”

“This will be difficult to hear,” Jack said. “You are not the man now that you were then.”

Madoc considered Jack’s words, then slowly nodded his head. “True,” he said at last, “I am not. I have been several men since that time, and a Dragon besides. But I think I am better than I was. I hope I am. And if that is true, I should be able to bear an accounting of my own darker choices.”

“Fair enough,” Jack said, turning to the others. “During our first
great conflict with, ah, the Winter King, we discovered something that chilled us all to the core. We were focused on safeguarding the
Imaginarium Geographica
and by extension the Archipelago, but Mordred knew how connected this world was to our own. And he knew that as devoted as we had become to seeing through what we had promised Bert and Professor Sigurdsson we would do, we might abandon our responsibilities as Caretakers if something we cared for more was threatened.”

“Something?” Rose asked, looking at her father.

“Someone,” Madoc replied, meeting his daughter’s gaze.

“Several someones, actually,” said Jack. “Mordred had dispatched several Shadow-Born to the Summer Country, to seek out and . . . murder our loved ones. Charles’s wife. My mother, and best friend. And John’s young wife, Edith, as well as his eldest child, then newly born.”

Uncas glared at Madoc with barely contained fury. “That in’t right,” he said, his voice low and trembling. “Goin’ after younglings . . . That in’t right.”

Strangely enough, it was the badger’s anger that affected Madoc most of all. Everyone else—every human—he faced squarely, fully accepting that his past sins were choices for which he would continue to pay. But he struggled to meet the badger’s eyes.

“Charles never knew,” Jack continued, “and I was still young and brash enough not to understand the gravity of the situation. But John knew, and understood. And he realized that if we abandoned our duties here to try to race back to save our loved ones, then both worlds might be lost. So the decision was made to soldier on and try to find a way to defeat the Winter King. It was the only way we could save them.”

He paused, and put a hand to his forehead. “I . . . I found out later, through James Barrie, and some of Verne’s Mystorians, that the Shadow-Born came closer than we realized to killing our families. In fact, two of them were right outside Edith’s door—close enough to hear her singing lullabies to young John, the baby, in his crib.

“It was in that moment that Charles and Tummeler figured out how to use Perseus’s shield to close Pandora’s Box and reseal all the Shadow-Born within it. At once, all the—the Shadow-Born vanished, including the assassins that had been dispatched to the Summer Country.”

“I never heard that story,” Uncas said, eyes shining with pride. “Your grandfather was a credit to badgers everywhere,” he said, clapping Fred on the back. “A credit, I tell you.”

“The reason I wanted to share that story,” Jack continued as he leaned against the railing, “is so that you understand that all our choices are cumulative—and we must always keep the bigger picture in mind. Sometimes . . . sometimes the stakes that are more personal can distract us from the goals that are more necessary to achieve. And that’s—that’s when you must be resolute. . . .”

The Caretaker’s voice trailed off as he rubbed his temple. “I—I think I need to sit down.”

Before any of the companions could assist him, Jack’s eyes rolled back in his head and he pitched forward, already unconscious.

Standing atop the rocks before them . . . was a Cherubim . . .

“It’s happened several times,”
Jack admitted as Laura Glue dabbed at his forehead with a damp cloth. “Mostly just headaches, but they’ve been increasing in frequency and intensity over the last few years. And in the last several months, I’ve started having blackouts.”

“And no one at Tamerlane House noticed?” asked Rose.

Jack shook his head and propped himself up to a sitting position. “I’m good at hiding the headaches,” he admitted. “That’s what a lifetime of British reserve will do for you. And only Dumas ever saw me black out, but I managed to explain it away. I didn’t want any of them thinking something was amiss.”

“You’re already dead,” Charles said bluntly. “You’re technically a portrait, Jack, and I’m a thought-form given flesh. People like us don’t
get
headaches or have blackouts. It simply doesn’t happen.”

“If he’s stable for the moment,” said Edmund, “we can discuss it later. I think we’ve arrived.”

♦  ♦  ♦

The wall at the End of the World stood above a shallow beach, which was barely wide enough to pull a boat onto, but the wall
itself rose so high that not even the keen-eyed Archie could fly high enough to see the top of it.

“Is it even possible to get over or through?” Jack asked. “Can it be done, Madoc?”

“I could not have done it then,” said Madoc. “That is indisputable, because heaven knows I tried. I walked the length of the wall in both directions until my strength gave out, and the only way to restore it was to return here, to the center. The compulsion was unbearable, but crossing was impossible. And thus is hell on earth attained. But now, yes—it may be possible.”

“Because you’re a Dragon?” asked Fred.

“A Dragon
can
cross,” said Madoc. “A true Dragon, at any rate. I have been one in the past, and the Zanzibar Gate proved that I carry with me some of the aspect of a Dragon still. But this is different.”

“How is it different?” asked Charles. “It’s just a wall, isn’t it?”

“On this side, yes,” said Madoc. “But behind it is the true Unknown Region. It is the source of the Dragons, and all the magic that is in the Archipelago. It is the true beginning of the world, and whatever lands we may find might very well be within sight of the shores of heaven itself.”

“So how do we get over it?” asked Charles.

“We don’t go over,” said Madoc. “We go
through
.”

Two great doors, hundreds of feet high, with sculpted angels on either side, suddenly materialized out of the mist and gloom as if they had been there all along—which, the companions realized, they probably had been.

“It’s like with the Zanzibar Gate,” said Laura Glue. “Your presence alone activates whatever is needed.”

“Such is the power of a Dragon,” Madoc murmured. “If only I had known then . . .”

He took the reins to the goats from Fred and urged them onward with a gentle shake, and quickly, they crossed the wall into the Unknown Region.

♦  ♦  ♦

“It’s an old children’s poem, I think,” Madoc said as they surveyed the landscape past the Great Wall. “Something about an impossible desert, or something like that . . .”

“I can tell,” Archie said, dropping from his perch atop the airship’s balloon, “that you have sorely neglected your studies while I’ve been away.”

“Is that what you call it?” Madoc replied with a grin. “ ‘Away’?”

The clockwork bird ignored him and instead began to recite a poem. To his delight, Laura Glue joined in, chanting the verses along with him.

Cross the uncrossable desert, tally-yee, tally-yay.

Climb the unclimbable mountain, tally-yee, tally-yay.

Swim the impassable sea, tally-yee, tally-yay.

Find the house that angels made,

On the isle of bone.

Pay the price that angels paid,

On the isle, alone.

Choose the Name that shows your face,

Drink your tea and take your place.

At Hades’s gate or heaven’s shore.

There to live, forevermore.

Tally-yee, tally-yay.

“There, Caretakers,” Madoc said, winking at Rose. “Find that bit of wisdom in your little
Geographica
.”

“It isn’t
in
the
Imaginarium Geographica
,” said Fred. “That’s what the Little Whatsits are for. Page two hundred ninety-six.” He looked up at Archimedes. “I see what you mean about his education.”

Madoc laughed. “Point taken, little fellow.”

“So what does it all mean?” asked Charles.

“It’s our map,” said Jack. “All the wisdom in the world can be found in fairy tales and nursery rhymes. And, it seems,” he added, scratching Fred behind his neck, “in the Little Whatsits.”

“I see the end of the desert already,” Laura Glue said, shading her eyes, “and beyond that, the mountain.”

“Surely Samaranth passed this way years and years ago,” said Charles.

“Perhaps,” Rose said. “But remember what Enoch told us—time has been flowing differently here. It changes with one’s own perception.”

“And,” said Madoc, “we aren’t carrying the history of an entire world on our shoulders. It’s going to go much more quickly for us.”

♦  ♦  ♦

As Madoc predicted, the passage over the mountain and then across the sea went quickly; in a short while, the airship passed over the last of the bridge, where it was tossed about by the storm clouds that circled the island.