The Shadow Dragons

by James A. Owen

  “A gentleman never fires a pistol unless it’s to defend a lady’s honor or to quiet a herd of braying jackasses,” he said. “Luckily, since Lady Shelley and Miss Dyson are among us, I got to do both at once.

  “We like to pretend that we’re civilized and organized,” Twain continued, “but when we’re taken by surprise, we suddenly fall apart like clay soldiers. We have the Caretaker Principia with us, and the Grail Child. The Prophecy will be fulfilled—as long as we don’t derail it ourselves.”

  John stood up to better take advantage of the momentary lull. “Samuel’s right. We need to organize, and I think the most important concern isn’t that the book is gone, but that it was taken at all.”

  “I concur,” said Chaucer. “We still have an enemy in our midst.”

  “Well,” Grimalkin said as he appeared in the center of the table, “you’ll have plenty of help discovering who he is. There’s an entire armada pulling into the harbor.”

  John flew to the window. “Well, this is a fine how-do-you-do,” he said to the other Caretakers. “It seems the Dragonships have come to the Nameless Isles.”

  “Which ones?” asked Twain.

  John pursed his lips. “All of them.”

  It took the rest of the day to receive the new arrivals, which was still extremely expedient, considering Tamerlane House had never had so many guests at once.

  The flight from Paralon had happened quickly, and so the only provisions the refugees had were what they had had onboard the ships. Bert, Twain, Defoe, Hawthorne, and John took charge of assigning quarters to the newcomers, and the other Caretakers began converting the conservatory into a war room. A meeting of the king and queen, the ship captains, and the Caretakers would have to be held as soon as possible.

  Charles, on the other hand, had a plan of his own—which Jack was only too eager to share in. At present, there were at least three conversations Jack had managed to avoid on the trip to the Nameless Isles, and if he could delay them longer still, all the better.

  “You heard about the book?” Charles asked as he, Jack, and Fred walked to the Pygmalion Gallery.

  “Yes,” said Jack. “We keep ending up one step behind! I wonder if Kipling had something to do with it?”

  “I was thinking the same thing.”

  “What would be helpful is if we knew where Kipling went,” said Jack. “I can’t get past the feeling that if we’d said something when we got here, we might be a lot further along.” He opened the doors to the gallery, and the three of them walked in.

  “I wonder if they’ll keep his picture here now that his portrait is just a landscape?” asked Charles.

  “I think we ought to just burn it,” Jack said irritably. “He won’t be returning to Tamerlane House now that we know what he is, so there’s no further use for the painting.”

  “Maybe there is,” said Charles, running his hand across his head. “I have a strange idea, but I believe it will work.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Jack.

  “We’re going to try taking this battle to the Chancellor’s doorstep,” Charles called back as he took the stairs two and three at a bound. “Fred, find Bert and bring him upstairs to the atelier. Jack, find Ransom, and bring him up as well. We need to talk to Basil Hallward.”

  “It is possible,” Ransom mused after Charles had explained what he proposed to do. “Difficult, perhaps. But not impossible. What do you think, Basil?”

  Hallward shrugged and chewed on the end of a brush. “It was a different painting,” he said. “When I created Kipling’s portrait, it was different.”

  “So he had to have already been liberated from the real portrait beforehand,” said Charles, “and when Bert thought he was bringing him out, he was really just stepping through the Trump. It’s quite ingenious.”

  “Remind me to be impressed later,” said Jack. “My question is, can you duplicate the painting as a Trump for us?”

  “I don’t see why not,” said Hallward. “The only real criteria is that it has to be a real place, somewhere, and I have to know exactly what it looks like. And this place must exist, or else he couldn’t have gone through.”

  “And if he can,” said Bert, “what then?”

  “If we have a Trump,” said Charles, “Fred and I can go through and discover where their base of operations is. At present, they don’t know where we are, and we don’t know where they are. I’d like to shift the balance in our favor.”

  Bert considered this a moment, then nodded. “Just one thing,” he said sternly, “no adventuring. Reconnaissance only. Learn what you can and come back. But don’t take any risks.”

  “Fair enough,” said Charles.

  Together the group of men and the badger went into the Pygmalion Gallery, where Hallward set up a makeshift easel in front of Kipling’s picture.

  Ransom gave Hallward one of the blank Trumps, and slowly, carefully, the artist duplicated the scene depicted on Kipling’s portrait. “That should do it,” said Hallward. “It’s already dry, if you’d like to give it a whirl.”

  Charles held the Trump up in front of him and concentrated on the picture. Slowly it began to expand, and in moments it was large enough to step through.

  “Are you sure you don’t want any of the rest of us to go with you?” Bert asked.

  “You can’t spare the resources,” said Charles. “And besides, Fred and I are basically reprising another successful espionage partnership. His grandfather and I made quite the team.”

  Fred beamed. “That you did,” he said proudly. “May our venture be as successful.”

  “Very well,” said Ransom. “I’ll keep the card open here on this end. If you have any trouble, come running. But remember, Charles . . .” He let the sentence trail off.

  Charles nodded. “I understand. If the portal is discovered, you’ll have to close it.”

  “We’ve opened it this time,” Ransom said, “but I don’t know if we can do it again. Time is of the essence, Charles.”

  The two men shook hands, Ransom shook Fred’s paw, and Charles thanked Bert and Hallward for their help. And then he and his apprentice stepped through the portal in search of the Town That Didn’t Exist.

  In his own explorations, Charles had once come across a place in Germany where a narrow alley between a distillery and a seed merchant actually led to an entire district outside space and time.

  The entire community seemed sickly and poorly maintained, with faded whitewash on the houses and holes in the cobblestone streets. The seasons themselves were confused in that place, and the trees were barren even in springtime.

  He had always planned on exploring it at greater length, but others in the area had stumbled on it and ransacked the hidden village. Not long after, a series of grisly murders occurred in all the nearby German towns, and people whispered that it was the vengeance of the dark spirits who dwelled within.

  It was only then, at the moment he was passing through the Trump, that he recalled that the townsfolk who claimed to have seen the spirits described them as men with oversized bird skulls for heads.

  He tried to contain the shiver that rolled up his spine, and only just managed to disguise it as stretching before Fred noticed.

  “Are you worried?” asked Fred.

  “Not in the slightest,” said Charles.

  “Good,” said Fred. “So am I.”

  There was a signpost pointing to Abaton that stood just before a half-crumbled gate. The gatekeeper was a blind man, dressed in a loincloth. Every inch of his body was covered in tattoos—some pictorial, but most were words and random markings.

  He perked up as he heard them approach. “What business have ye in Abaton?”

  Charles sighed. It was not good espionage to declare your intentions. “Our own, if it’s all the same to you.”

  “It’s my job to ask, no need to be twisty about it. Sign your names, and enter.”

  “Sign?” said Charles.

  “With the stylus,” said the man. “O
n my skin. I am the keeper of the gate, and all who enter and leave must sign.”

  “Certainly,” said Fred. He took the steel-pointed tool from the man’s hand and quickly scribbled two names, which flared with silver fire. As they watched, the writing turned blue, as if it were changing ink.

  “Thank you,” said the tattooed man, and promptly went to sleep.

  “Just a word of advice,” Charles began.

  “Oh, the names?” said Fred. “Don’t worry—I didn’t use ours. That might get us into trouble.”

  “Very perceptive!” Charles said, surprised. “Whose names did you write?”

  “Harry Houdini and Arthur Conan Doyle,” said Fred.

  “This is already a great partnership,” Charles said as they entered the town.

  It was a pastiche of a town that seemed to have been assembled from a dozen cultures. There were gabled roofs topped with elaborate weather vanes sitting side by side with Turkish domes. The overarching theme was vaguely eastern European, but that might have been an impression generated by the age of some of the structures. The very air was ancient here. And although it was dressed up in familiar garb, that was just the wool covering the wolf underneath.

  “There are stories,” Charles whispered, “of a German village called Germelshausen, which fell under an evil spell cast by a witch. I’ve also heard of a similar tale from Scotland, about the Brig o’ Doon, in Bobby Burns country, where Tam O’ Shanter raced to safety across a stone bridge to escape from a village full of witches.”

  Fred swallowed hard. “An awful lot of references t’ witches, Scowler Charles,” the little badger said. “I hope this village in’t like those villages.”

  “You and I both,” said Charles, hitching up his belt. “Nothing to do but follow the path and see where it takes us.”

  As it was, their path led them right past a bakery, which was filled to overflowing with cakes, and pastries, and puddings, and on and on and on. It was a culinary wonderland in the middle of a virtual medieval village.

  “Grandfather would be sorry he missed this,” Fred said, reaching for a muffin from a cart near the door.

  “Don’t,” warned Charles, grabbing Fred’s paw. “I don’t think it’s wise to eat anything here. I’ve read far too many stories about travelers being trapped in places just because they ate a morsel of food—and if it’s all the same to you, I’d rather be able to get home!”

  “No problem, boss,” said Fred.

  “This also smacks of a witch’s gambit,” said Charles. “The minute you set foot in the gingerbread cottage, you suddenly find you’re in an oven being roasted for dinner.”

  “Good call,” Fred said, pointing up.

  In the sky above them, silhouetted against the apricot sky, was a gaggle of witches—but Charles commented that they were wholly unlike any witches he had ever seen.

  “How many have you seen?” asked Fred.

  “Practically none,” said Charles, “but I’ve read a lot about them, and these don’t fit any of the descriptions.”

  The witches were not on brooms—they were riding bicycles. Each one was sitting upright with ramrod-straight posture and was wearing a dour gray dress, topped off with a black shawl and a pillbox hat.

  The bicycles were as average as any he’d seen, except for the fact that they flew. Each one had reflectors on the front (for safety, he assumed) and a small wicker basket behind the seat. They bobbed and wove exactly like a flock of birds, each following in formation behind the others.

  Charles and Fred ducked down an alleyway to stay out of sight, splashing through some puddles and tripping into a laundry line as they ran.

  The witches were gradually moving southeast to northwest. They had nearly moved away from Charles and Fred altogether when one of the last witches in the gaggle pulled away from the group and stopped, hovering in the air above them.

  She squinted her eyes and turned her head from side to side, then lifted her head up to the air and sniffed, then sniffed again.

  A smile spread across her face, and she looked down directly at Charles and Fred’s hiding place.

  “Oh, no,” said Charles. “She can smell us.”

  “You mean me,” Fred groaned. “Wet badger fur is a curse—a curse, I tell you!”

  “This way!” Charles yelled. “We’ll try to lose her in the alleys and switchbacks.”

  No sooner were the words out of his mouth than he ran headfirst into a solid brick wall. Fred plowed into him a second later, and they both ended up sprawled in a heap.

  Charles had led them into what was a blind alley. There were a few open doors on the adjacent walls, but the wall at the end was too high to scale.

  “That’s an unexpected turn of events,” said Charles. “I don’t think we can outrun her now!”

  “We’ll get you, my lovely boy,” the witch cackled, “and make a fine pie of your dog!”

  “I’m not a dog!” Fred shouted. “I’m a badger!”

  The witch swooped down with terrifying speed and swung something at Charles as she passed.

  He threw himself aside just in time, but she caught his sleeve. He rolled over as the witch spun about for another pass, and he realized that the elbow of his jacket was in tatters.

  Rather than brandishing a wand, the witch was wielding a long, razor-edged fork.

  “Oh, come on,” Charles groaned. “A fork? What kind of a witch are you?”

  “The kind who eats lovely little children like yourself!” she screeched as Charles again threw himself aside, protectively shielding Fred.

  “Children!” Charles huffed, jumping to his feet. “I’m no child! I’m an editor! With tenure!”

  The witch just laughed in response—a sound that was like grinding metal gears. She made another lightning pass that reduced Charles’s jacket to a ragged mess.

  “Curse it,” Charles exclaimed. “There wasn’t supposed to be any fighting. We’re the espionage division, for heaven’s sake!”

  The witch continued to laugh as she came around again, but this time she wasn’t targeting Charles. She was aiming at Fred.

  Charles threw himself in front of her just before she ran down the little mammal, and the bicycle bounced violently off of his back. It knocked the wind out of him and only irritated the witch.

  “Fred! Run!” Charles shouted. “I’ll buy you some time and keep her attention on me!”

  “I’m not leaving my partner!” Fred yelled back. Then he turned and dashed inside one of the houses.

  “I didn’t really expect him to go,” Charles said under his breath. “That was just something you’re supposed to say.”

  The witch stopped laughing as she realized that she’d just lost track of one of her quarry. She rode the bicycle more slowly now, and a dark rage settled over her face.

  “I can catch you anytime I want,” she said with menace as she brandished the fork, which was tipped with crimson.

  My blood, Charles realized. This was not going at all well, and it promised to get worse.

  “I enjoy the game,” the witch said, “but now it’s time to finish it.”

  She dropped down to a height just level with Charles’s head and hovered in front of him.

  “You aren’t going to escape,” she said, grinning wickedly, “and neither will your dog.”

  “He’s a badger, actually,” said Charles.

  “Did you really think you could defeat me? Was that your plan?”

  “Not precisely, no,” Fred responded as he appeared in a nearby doorway. “The plan was to get you to come closer and hold still.”

  Before she could react, Fred threw a handful of a thick, cream-colored substance at her. It struck her in the face and stuck like glue.

  The witch shrieked in fury and wheeled the bicycle about. She let go of the handlebars to clutch at her face with her hands, and the bicycle spun crazily around, finally flipping end over end, completely out of control.

  The bicycle crashed into a wall and plummeted to th
e ground. The witch fell off it just before it struck, and she rolled several times before she finally came to a stop against a barrel. She didn’t move.

  “Betcha no dog can do that,” Fred said, wiping his paws and smirking. “Stupid witch.”

  “What was that?” Charles asked, flabbergasted.

  “You said I couldn’t eat anything, but you didn’t say I couldn’t use the food as a weapon,” said Fred. “There were no muffins in there anyway. So I used the next best thing. Tapioca pudding.”

  “Fred,” said Charles, “I’m completely impressed!”

  “It’s not as good as a poke in the eye with a sharp stick,” said the little badger, “but it’ll do in a pinch.”

  Charles and Fred had finished binding and gagging the witch, whom they hid behind a bushel of potatoes in the cellar of one of the houses. She only narrowly avoided being put into an oven.

  “I still say we should have flipped the coin for three out of five,” Fred grumbled. “She wouldn’t have given us that much of a chance.”

  “That’s what separates her from us,” Charles said in admonishment. “We try not to eat anyone else.”

  “Oh, I wasn’t going to eat her,” said Fred. “But she would have made a nifty chunk of charcoal.”

  “At least she provided us with transportation and a disguise,” Charles said as he pulled the shawl over his shoulders. “What do you think?”

  “You make a pretty good witch,” said Fred.

  “Thanks a lot,” said Charles. “If anyone asks, you’re a dog.”

  “That’s very insulting,” said Fred.

  “Hey,” said Charles. “If I have to go in disguise, then so do you.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “How do you think this thing works?” Charles asked, examining the bicycle.

  “It’s not mechanical like the principles,” Fred said, crouching to examine the gears. “I think it’s purely magical.”

  “Oh, excellent,” said Charles. “No risk there,” he added with obvious sarcasm.

  “Unless you’ve got a better idea, this is our best means of seeing the entire area at once,” said Fred. “Time is of the essence, remember?”