The Shadow Dragons

by James A. Owen

  It was a Persian palace, both ancient and exotically new all at once. It was massive in an organic way, wings spreading out across the rise like the branches of an enormous tree. There was very little in their experience that it could be compared to, but John had heard stories of the fabled Winchester House in California, which had been built by an heiress to the Winchester rifle fortune to house the spirits of those who had been killed by the rifles. She built endless rooms, and stairways, and closets, and alcoves, and on and on and on. For decades the hammers never stopped. And for the first time, John was looking at a similar structure born of a similar obsession. He wondered with a mixture of curiosity and fear just what kind of spirits were meant to be housed in Tamerlane House.

  In answer to his unspoken question, a familiar figure, looking only slightly more presentable than his usual charmingly bedraggled self, appeared at the top of the steps. It was Bert.

  The three Caretakers rushed forward to shake hands and embrace their mentor, who appeared equally glad to see them. Rose hugged him tightly as he kissed the top of her head, and even Archimedes restrained himself to a polite greeting that was hardly sarcastic at all.

  “You’re a tall drink of water,” Bert said, shielding his eyes from the sun as he looked up at Quixote, who bowed in greeting. “How did you get pulled into joining this motley crew?”

  “He pretty much had to come,” explained Jack. “His room was about to fall into the Chamenos Liber.”

  “His room . . . ?” Bert said. He blinked a few times, then moved closer to the old knight. “Are you Don Quixote?”

  A deeper bow this time. “I am Don Quixote de la Mancha,” he said with a flourish, “and I am your humble servant.”

  “Does he have to do that every time he meets someone?” Jack asked John.

  “It certainly makes him memorable,” John replied. “Maybe you should try it with your next reading class.”

  “Har har har,” said Jack.

  “I know all about you,” Bert said to Quixote with a gleam in his eye, as his old familiar twinkle began to reappear. “Jules has told me many things—and while your presence is a surprise, it is not wholly unexpected.

  “Come,” he went on, gesturing for them to follow as he turned to enter the house. “There is much to talk about, now that you’ve finally arrived.”

  “We were expected?” exclaimed Jack.

  Bert grinned wryly. “Of course. Ransom told us what happened seven years ago, so we’ve been waiting. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have gotten past Grimalkin.”

  “The Cheshire?” said John. “He seemed pretty harmless to me.”

  “He may look like a simple Cheshire cat,” said Bert, looking around cautiously to see if Grimalkin was listening, “but in reality, he’s one of those Elder Gods that fellow Lovecraft has been writing about.”

  “You’re kidding, right?” said Charles. “It’s a joke.”

  “Laugh if you like,” Bert called over his shoulder, “but if I were you, I wouldn’t take off his collar. For any reason.”

  “As I was saying, we had an idea what had happened to you when Ransom reported in,” Bert said as he served the companions tea and Leprechaun crackers in an elaborate parlor, “so we hoped you’d make your way to the Nameless Isles, as Hank had suggested.”

  “I must admit, Bert,” said John, trying not to sound as if he were chiding the older man, “as the Caretaker Principia, I was a bit put out to find there were islands I was unaware of—indeed, islands I was not allowed to know of.”

  “I am sorry about that, John,” Bert replied. “Had it been up to me, I’d have said something to you much sooner. It’s been a matter of some debate, my position being that if you had been aware, you could have come here directly from Oxford, and not skipped over seven vital years.”

  “Debate with whom?”

  “The Prime Caretaker. But we will discuss that shortly.” Bert stood up. “For now, we should make some accommodations for Rose and the good sir knight.”

  “You rang?” Grimalkin said, appearing on the back of a couch.

  “Ah, Grimalkin,” said Bert. “Yes, please. If you would be so kind as to show the lady and her gentleman escort to their rooms?”

  “Certainly,” said Grimalkin, eyeing Archimedes. “Do I get the bird to play with?”

  “Define ’play,’” said Bert.

  “Oh, never mind,” said the cat as his body faded out to nothingness. “Come this way.”

  “He’ll take care of you,” said Bert. “Just follow his head.”

  “I could use a rest, I think,” Quixote said. “Thank you, master Caretaker.”

  As the two companions and the reluctant owl followed the bobbing cat’s head down a corridor, Bert turned back to the Caretakers. “Now we can talk as men do, about things of import and consequence.”

  “Will she be safe here, Bert?” asked John.

  “Safe as houses,” Bert replied, “or at least, as safe houses. She has nothing to fear here. Grimalkin will look after her, and no one may come here who wasn’t invited. That’s one of the reasons these islands have remained nameless, and why no map of them exists in the Geographica. This place is our own version of Haven, to withdraw to when we must, or when circumstances are most dire.”

  “Well, we’ve certainly got a map now,” Charles said, scratching at his side. “Does it keep moving even when we’ve arrived here?”

  “The Cartographer cornered you for the duty, eh, Charles?” said Bert with a grin. “It’s easier when you’re traveling with friends. My first trip here was solo, and I had to use a mirror.”

  Suddenly a flock of birds barreled down the hallway, each carrying silverware and china place settings. As in the Great Whatsit on Paralon, the servants of the house were large black birds, who were dressed nattily in vests and waistcoats.

  “Crows?” Jack asked as the last of the birds flew out of the hallway.

  “Ravens,” Bert corrected him. “A full unkindness.”

  “I’ll take an unkindness of ravens over a murder of crows any day,” said Charles.

  “Your jokes are still both literate and unfunny,” said Bert, hugging Charles around the shoulders. “It’s so good to see you again, lad!”

  Bert led the three friends through room after room, but other than the ravens, the house appeared empty.

  “Is there anyone here?” Jack asked, peering up at a stairwell that ended, inexplicably, at the high ceiling. “The place seems to be abandoned.”

  “The master of the house is indeed here in residence,” said Bert, “but he seldom chooses to appear. You may meet him after the Gatherum.”

  “The what?” asked John.

  “Better I simply show you than try to explain,” Bert said with deliberate mystery and a touch of glee. “Here—I want to show you the Pygmalion Gallery,” he continued, waving them down another long corridor. “In fact, I’ve wanted to bring you here for a very long time.”

  “What prevented you?” asked John.

  “Those evil stepsisters, Necessity and Planning,” Bert replied as they approached a set of tall polished doors. “One always gets too little attention, and the other too much—and they never seem to balance out.”

  The doors were covered with cherubs, and angels, and all manner of ornate and byzantine carvings. In the center, where the doors met, were three locks. Bert removed a large iron ring with two heavy skeleton keys from his pocket. He unlocked the first lock, then the next.

  “Three locks,” Charles said, “but only two keys?”

  “The third key is imaginary,” explained Bert. “It’s a safety feature.” He made the motions of choosing a key and inserting it into the third lock, and the companions were all surprised to hear a loud click.

  “It’s always the most difficult,” said Bert. “You have to turn it just so.”

  The gas lamps came up as they entered an anteroom. Beyond was a spacious gallery, with velvet-lined walls, lush oriental carpets, and high ceilings that irised to a ci
rcular skylight. The walls were covered with paintings—portraits, John noted, that were almost life-size and large enough to step through.

  “An astute observation, young John,” Bert said. “Do you recognize any of the portraits?”

  “Any of them?” said Charles excitedly. “I recognize them all!”

  In the center of the north wall was a full-figured portrait of Geoffrey Chaucer, and slightly smaller portraits of Sir Thomas Malory and Goethe hung to the right and left of it. On the south wall, directly across from Malory’s portrait, was an equally large painting of Miguel de Cervantes, flanked by portraits of Franz Schubert and Jonathan Swift. Next to Swift, the companions each noted with barely concealed surprise, was a portrait of Rudyard Kipling, appearing exactly as he had at the Flying Dragon.

  Kepler was there, as were William Shakespeare and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Jack was almost as good as Charles at identifying the portraits, but John was having a harder time of it.

  “I recognize Twain, and Dickens,” he said to Bert, “but I’m really at a loss for several of the others.”

  “Surely you know Daniel Defoe”—Bert indicated an exceptional portrait set in a rather ordinary frame— “and of course Alexandre Dumas père.

  “This is where the most important debates about the Archipelago of Dreams take place,” he went on somberly, his voice hushed as the four men walked deeper into the gallery proper. “Within this room is the greatest collection of knowledge and wisdom to be found in any world.”

  “I thought that was the Great Whatsit, on Paralon,” said Charles.

  “That is a great repository of learning, yes,” said Bert, “but you cannot have a discussion with a book, or debate with a parchment.”

  “And we’re supposed to fare better talking to paintings?” Jack said as he leaned close to examine a portrait of Washington Irving.

  “That may depend more on your own skills,” Bert replied mysteriously, “than on the conversational skills of any particular painting.

  “Gentlemen,” he announced with a flourish, “I’d like you to meet your predecessors, those who have gone before you in the most important job in creation: Behold the Caretakers Emeritis of the Imaginarium Geographica”

  “All of them?” John said in unvarnished awe.

  “Mostly, yes,” answered Bert. “The only ones we don’t actually have here are Wace, Bacon, and Dante. We do have a picture of Geoffrey of Monmouth, but when we told him what it was for he panicked and fled, and so the portrait remains unfinished and cannot be used to bring him through.”

  “Bring him through what?” Jack exclaimed.

  “Through to here—into Tamerlane House,” said Bert with a twinkle in his eye. “Watch and learn.”

  Bert removed his silver pocket watch and walked to the portrait of Hans Christian Andersen, where he inserted the watch into a small, semicircular indentation at the bottom of the frame. He pressed a button on the side of the watch, and a jet of eldritch light shot around the frame. Then, as the astonished companions looked on . . .

  . . . Andersen stepped out of the frame and into the gallery.

  “Very nice to be out,” he said, stretching his arms. “Not that I mind hanging around in here with the rest of the brethren, but in the picture, it’s impossible to scratch if you get an itch.”

  “I imagine it is,” Bert said as he inserted the watch into the next frame, and Cervantes joined them on the floor. “Don’t frown so, Nathaniel,” he called to the painting of Hawthorne. “I’m getting to you next.”

  As Bert continued the process of liberating the former Caretakers from their frames, Charles commented on the fact that several portraits were turned to the wall, and one even appeared to have been scorched in a fire.

  “You already know why,” Bert said in answer. “Those are portraits of Caretakers who either failed their duties badly, or betrayed them, or both.”

  “So, Houdini and Conan Doyle—,” Jack began.

  “No,” Bert replied quickly, cutting him off. “Their portraits are not here. And we don’t speak of them, not here in this house.”

  “If their portraits aren’t here,” said John, “then how is it possible that they exist past the dates of their death?”

  “And the burned one?” asked Charles.

  “If you get a moment, you might ask Percy Shelley about that one,” said Bert. He turned to Jack. “Better yet, you should do the asking.”

  “What?” Jack said, confused. “I—” He stopped with a lurch. “Oh, dear Lord above,” he whispered. The blood drained from his face as he pointed to one they’d overlooked. “Is that . . . ?”

  On the far end of the northern wall was a portrait of James Barrie.

  “As I told you, a lot has happened in seven years,” said Bert, “but now you’ll have a chance to catch up. Hello, Jamie.”

  “Greetings, Bert!” Barrie answered cheerfully. “Boys, it’s good to see you again!”

  “If you don’t mind,” a stately, bearded portrait sniffed, “I believe my seniority should dictate that I be released sooner rather than later.”

  “Very well, Leo,” Bert said with a frown, “although technically speaking, Chaucer has seniority here.”

  “Leonardo da Vinci?” Jack asked behind his hand. “Didn’t he steal a lot of things from Roger Bacon?”

  “Practically everything.” Bert sighed. “If Geoff Chaucer could have done it over again, he’d have picked Michelangelo. But we were still learning the process then, and Leo became a Caretaker instead, mostly because he was older. We’ve been going after younger apprentices ever since.”

  “We’re not going to let him out, are we?” Jack whispered.

  “If we don’t,” Bert replied, inserting his watch into the frame, “we’re all going to hear about it for years.”

  “Rude,” said da Vinci. “I can hear you, you know.”

  “The effort would have been wasted if you couldn’t,” said Bert.

  In short order, centuries’ worth of Caretakers had filled the gallery and were milling about, chatting, arguing, pouring drinks, and getting reacquainted with old discussions, which they were conducting in a variety of languages. John, Jack, and Charles were doing their best just to hold their own in the dialogues. It was hard enough just to keep their composure.

  Bert pulled John aside. “There’s one more, lad,” he said with a smile and a hint of melancholy. “I thought you’d like to summon him yourself.”

  They stepped over to the last portrait, and John felt his breath catch in his throat. He realized, as he stood there looking at it, that it was the most obvious thing in the world to expect—but he had never even considered the possibility that his mentor, Professor Stellan Sigurdsson, would be included among the throng of Caretakers who were defying space and time to come together at Tamerlane House.

  “May I use my own watch?”

  Bert nodded his assent. “You may indeed.”

  With trembling hands, John placed the watch into the frame and watched the light race around the edges. An instant later he could smell that familiar chocolate-tobacco mixture, as his old mentor and teacher stepped down from the frame.

  “Hello, my dear boy,” said Professor Sigurdsson. “I am very, very happy to see you again.”

  They shook hands, then embraced.

  “I’m . . . very happy to see you again too, Professor,” John said. “Perhaps this reunion will last longer than our previous one.”

  “I hope so, John. I truly do.”

  While the professor and his understudy became reacquainted, Jack and Charles steered Bert back into the anteroom. “Bert,” Jack said quietly, “I wonder if I might have a word with you about Kipling.”

  They had noticed only at the end, after Barrie had been liberated, that among the crowd of Caretakers were several famous personages who were not, in point of fact, official Caretakers.

  “I’d wondered when that would come up,” said Bert. “There are a few here in the gallery who were not official Caretake
rs, but who were loyal to the cause. The practice of naming three Caretakers at a time was a practice born of necessity, and so there are some from days past who were, ah, ‘spares,’ you might say.”

  “We’re spares?” Charles said, faintly mortified.

  “No, not at all,” Bert said, comforting him. “You are a Caretaker—but there are those among us who were able to contribute in other ways, but whose, shall we say, temperaments were not well suited to the task. Oscar Wilde, for example. Or Chesterton.”

  “G. K. Chesterton’s dead?” Jack exclaimed.

  “Sorry for the surprise,” said Bert mildly, “but if it helps, he’s pouring a brandy over there with Kepler.”

  “It’s one of those ‘apprentice’ Caretakers I want to speak to you about, Bert,” said Jack. “How well do you know Kipling?”

  Before his mentor could answer, Rudyard Kipling stepped around his chair and stuck his hand out in front of Jack. “The name’s Kipling, my boy. A pleasure to make your acquaintance.”

  “Er—um—ah,” Jack stammered as he shook the other fellow’s hand. “Likewise.”

  He waved John over from where he was chatting with the professor and introduced him and Charles in turn, each of whom, with some visible reluctance, shook Kipling’s hand.

  “Wonderful time for a Gatherum, wouldn’t you say, Bert?” Kipling said brightly, as he clapped John on the shoulder. “And it’s so nice to see the new blood here too, rather than just the usual roster of fuddy-duddies.”

  “Pardon me, sir,” said Jack politely, “but have we seen each other? Recently? In England?”

  “Mmm,” Kipling murmured, looking inquisitively at Jack. “I don’t believe so, unless you were at my funeral, which was the last time I was in England—in which case, I was definitely preoccupied.”

  “Sorry, I missed it,” said Jack.

  “No worries, old fellow,” Kipling said, smiling. He clapped Jack on the back, then Charles. “After all, that’s what we have Tamerlane House for, isn’t it?”

  John was about to ask something else when Kipling spied another acquaintance among the group and strode away.

  “I’m sorry,” said Bert. “What did you mean to ask, Jack?”