Aven rubbed her knuckles and looked at the others. “Sorry about that. I might have stopped myself from hitting him, but I didn’t think of it quickly enough.”
“Not a problem,” said Charles.
“If you’re finished with the fisticuffs,” John said, “can we please see this through?”
“Sorry,” said Aven.
“Ulysses wasn’t the only Greek hero mentioned in The Divine Comedy,” said John. “In what Dante described as the eighth circle of Hell, he and his guide, Virgil, met Jason, the leader of the Argonauts, who had commissioned the building of the ship the Argo—”
“Which Ordo Maas rebuilt into the Red Dragon!” Charles exclaimed. “Brilliant, John! Well done!”
“That’s another piece of the riddle, but it’s not the whole picture yet,” said John. “Let’s assume that every reference Dante makes here that involves Jason or Ulysses is literal when applied to Autunno. It says that when Dante entered the ends of the Earth—referring to Ulysses’ last voyage—it opened at his command with words that appeared in the Red Dragon’s breath.”
“Oh no,” groaned Jack, who had rejoined his friends but was also keeping a respectable distance from Aven. “Does that mean we can only solve the riddle if the Red Dragon is present?”
“I don’t think that’s it,” said John, peering more closely at the Geographica. “The handwriting is complicating the translation somewhat. But try this—what if Dante didn’t mean the actual Red Dragon, but was simply referring to a red dragon? Say, Samaranth, or one of his companions?”
“Same pickle, different barrel,” said Bert. “We don’t have a way to contact any of the dragons from our present position.”
“That’s a dumb riddle,” said Laura Glue.
“Not now, Laura,” Charles said. “This is very important.”
The girl stomped her foot. “I told you, my name is Laura Glue. And I said it’s a stupid riddle because everyone knows what dragon’s breath is.”
“They do?” Jack said, crouching to look the girl in the eye. “What is it?”
She shrugged. “It won’t do us any good anyway,” she said glumly. “There aren’t any volcanoes around here.”
John and Bert looked at each other in surprise.
“The Red Dragon’s breath,” said Charles. “Red, as in hot vapors?”
“It’s worth trying,” said John.
Aven called to several of the fauns to bring over some of the cord from the balloon rigging. They fashioned a makeshift harness for John, then lowered him gently over the side of the ship that seemed closest to the sulfur that was venting from below the Chamenos Liber.
Carefully, John held open the Geographica to the pages that depicted Autunno and Dante’s notations. The thick fumes made him cough, and his eyes watered, but sure enough—in seconds, something began to appear across the pages.
“Pull me up!” he yelled. “I have it! I have the answer!”
They hoisted John back to the deck, and he opened the Geographica.
“That’s why Jamie couldn’t just tell us the words,” he said excitedly. “I think it’s only possible to see the necessary words here, or wherever else there might be volcanic fumes.”
“Lucky us,” Charles said drolly. “What does it say?”
“It’s an Opening,” said Bert. “The third kind of spoken spell. Go ahead and read it, John—after all, you figured it out.”
John traced the near-transparent letters with his fingers, then began to recite the words:
By knowledge paid
For riddles wrought
I open thee
I open thee
By bones bound
By honor taken
I open thee
I open thee
For life eternal and liberty gain’d
To sleep and dream, as kings we reign’d
I open thee
I open thee
John closed his eyes, then opened one and looked around quizzically. “Ah, Bert? What happens now?”
Bert raised his eyebrows. “Don’t have a clue. I haven’t done this before either.”
For one minute, then two, the companions simply looked at one another, and at the water around the Indigo Dragon.
“All right,” Jack began.
“Wait,” said Charles. “Can you see that? Something’s turning the ship around.”
“That’s not the ship,” said Aven. “It’s the water.”
The sea within the Chamenos Liber was beginning to rotate. Slowly, but the motion was unmistakable now.
As they watched, the clockwise motion started to move faster, and then faster still.
“I think we’d better hold on to something,” suggested Bert. “I have a bad feeling about this.”
“Let’s get you into the cabin,” Jack said to Laura Glue.
“No!” said Aven. “If we capsize, it’ll be safer on top.”
“Good enough,” said Jack, who wrapped one arm around the girl and the other around a stout section of railing.
The sea was making a noise like breakers crashing on the shore, but it was constant, and growing louder with the speed of the rotating water, which was forming a gigantic whirlpool. It opened in the center of the islands, and then spread rapidly outward until it caught up the Indigo Dragon against the crest. The current pulled the little craft over the edge just as the sound crescendoed to a roar, and the sides of the whirlpool dropped away to darkness.
“Dear Christ,” said Charles. “It did mean ‘Fall.’”
And the Indigo Dragon fell.
PART FOUR
Into the Underneath
“Hello, boy,” she said.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Croatoan
The old man waited until he could no longer hear the clicking noises that indicated his captor’s presence, and was certain that the beast-children who served him were also gone, before speaking. “It’s all right,” he said into the darkness of the cave. “They’ve all gone now.”
A pearlescent glow began to emanate from the large mirror opposite the frame where he was tied, and images that extended far deeper than the mirror should have allowed began to swirl into clarity.
Whether it depicted fog, or flame, or simply chaos swimming beneath the silvered glass, he could not tell—but eventually a single image sharpened and came into focus.
The mirror showed the head and shoulders of a woman. She was neither young nor old, but seemed to be an ideal combination of youthful beauty and mature experience. She wore a loose-fitting tunic draped low across her collarbone, and a single silver necklace. Her dark hair was pulled up in the back and fastened with silver pins.
Her eyes were deep-set and weary, and showed her to be much older than her appearance indicated. She looked at the old man and smiled.
“Hello, boy,” she said. “How do you fare?”
“I’ve had better days,” the old man admitted, “but I’ve had worse, too, so I suppose it all evens out eventually. Time will tell.”
The woman hesitated. “So—there’s been no word?”
“None,” said the old man. “But I have hope.”
“Based on what?” she said sharply. “You sent a child to seek the help of your greatest enemy. Don’t you think that’s an act of desperation?”
He laughed and shook his head. “That’s not what I did at all. I sent my granddaughter, whom I trust fully, to seek the help of a Caretaker of the Imaginarium Geographica.
“That isn’t a desperate act. That’s a plan.”
The passengers of the Indigo Dragon didn’t fall so much as they descended; they were still dropping with great speed, but it didn’t feel as if the descent were unfettered, more as if the drop through the portal were being controlled.
Even so the impact was hard, and no one was conscious enough to hear the splintering of wood as their craft struck something much more massive, flinging them to and fro, and came to a stop.
It may have taken minutes or hours for the c
ompanions to awaken in the diffused light of the Underneath. But when they awoke, they might as well have imagined themselves to be near any common seashore in their own world. The shore was sixty or seventy feet below what they’d actually landed on: a great wall of wrecked, rotting, moldering ships. Hundreds of them, of every make and vintage, stretching away far into the distance; ships with names like the USS Cyclops and the HMS Rosalie and the Spray of Boston.
The companions all began to collect their wits, taking stock of the unusual scene they’d landed in. The sails (on the ships that had used them) had mostly rotted in the sea air, leaving a neglected field of masts pointing skyward, awaiting a harvesting that would never come. There were rafts and dinghies; pirate ships and tugboats; gondolas and even a Chinese junk. There were also other ships: great gray metal behemoths that were unrecognizable to them. And there were a number of aircraft as well, although many of these were also of an unfamiliar make.
Below the wall of ships was a narrow, sandy beach that was broken by shallow inlets ringed in a reddish stone. A short distance behind that was the tree line of a thick, old pine forest, and birdcalls could be heard coming from somewhere within.
A few hundred yards above them, where the Indigo Dragon must have fallen through the portal, was a vortex of water that receded upward as they watched. In seconds it dissipated into vapor and mist, as if it had never been there.
There was a yellowish light, but there was no sun.
And there was no sign of the Indigo Dragon.
John was quick to come fully awake and alert, and he did a brief head count. Charles and Jack were only a few feet away, on the foredeck of the large cargo ship they’d landed on, and Bert was wringing water out of his hat near the cabin. Aven was still unconscious but appeared uninjured and breathing, and she had her arms wrapped protectively around Laura Glue, who was nestled up against her chest, still clutching the Compass Rose.
None of them were aware of the eyes that watched them from inside the forest, nor did they notice that the birdcalls had changed.
Jack sat up, groaning. “I think I almost preferred life during wartime,” he said testily. “At least at the Somme, all I had to worry about was not getting shot.”
“Look here,” Charles exclaimed, pointing. “What in heaven’s name do you suppose those to be?”
The others looked to where he was gesturing and saw an extraordinary sight: massive white towers that stood on either horizon and stretched from beneath the surface of the water to beyond the clouds. The towers appeared to be some kind of stone but had an almost organic look to them. At such a tremendous distance, it was impossible to be sure. The sides of the columns were smooth and flowed upward with a graceful line that was practically sculpted.
John shaded his eyes with his hand and peered at the sky. “I can’t see where they end,” he said finally. “But there must be a ceiling to this place. We came through something, didn’t we?”
“It was Deep Magic,” said Bert, “Old Magic, that created that portal above. It was Old Magic that closed it again. For all we know, the sky above us here is the sea of the Archipelago.”
“Can any of you tell where the light is coming from?” Charles asked, turning around. “It’s almost as if we’re, well, inside a light-bulb.”
“I don’t know,” replied John, who had found the Imaginarium Geographica lying a few feet away against cargo boxes stenciled with the name ss timandra, and was busily dusting off the cover with his sleeve. “Maybe we’ve fallen into some sort of bowl-shaped world.”
“Hmm,” said Bert. “Now there’s an interesting thought.”
“That we’ve ended up in a bowl?” said John.
“May I?” Bert asked, indicating the Geographica.
John handed it over. “Be my guest.”
Jack went over to Aven and Laura Glue to make sure they were uninjured, then joined Charles near the promenade, where he was making an impromptu catalogue of the vessels that comprised the great wall.
“Amazing,” said Charles. “There must be hundreds, no, thousands of ships and aircraft here. Could all of these have come through the Chamenos Liber?”
“I doubt it,” said Jack. “For one thing, they’re spread out over an extremely wide area. I don’t think the portal we came through is mobile—it’s fixed in space.”
“Then these must have come through by other means,” Charles reasoned.
“Are there other means?” asked Jack. “We wanted to get here, and look at how much trouble we had.”
“These are all wrecked, abandoned,” stated John, coming up behind them. “I don’t think their arrival was planned or voluntary.”
“There are plenty of tales about the Devil’s Triangle in the western Atlantic,” said Charles. “Maybe the Underneath is what’s, ah, behind those accounts.”
“How they got here might be an interesting story,” said John, “but what worries me is that none of them went back in the other direction.”
At that moment, Bert came scurrying back to them, thumping the book in excitement.
“I think we’ve stumbled upon one of the greater mysteries of the Geographica,” he said. “There are some maps that have excellent descriptions of the lands they depict, but little if any cartographical or navigational information. That’s why we’ve had to make corrections and additions to the Geographica as the centuries passed—to try to make it more complete. And I think we already have maps of this place in the atlas!”
“And there’s a map of an island shaped like a bowl, with no sun?” asked Jack.
“The Cartographer said the Underneath was formed of circles within circles,” said John, “and that goes along with Dante’s descriptions, as well as the map of Autunno.”
“It’s worth a look,” said Charles.
John and Bert opened the Geographica on top of an orange crate and began to carefully page through it. Finally, Bert tapped a map with his knuckles. “Knew it. I just knew it,” he said under his breath. “They are here. Damn your eyes, Jules….”
Jack and Charles moved closer to see which maps Bert was referring to.
“The Underneath does have other names,” explained Bert, “and each of the lands within also has its own name and identity.”
“Like Paralon is an island within the Archipelago of Dreams,” said Charles.
“Precisely,” said Bert. “This place been called Skartaris by some, but most would know it as Pellucidar,” he continued, pointing at an expansive map that bore a strong resemblance to central Europe.
“From Edgar Rice Burroughs’s books?” Charles said contemptuously. “That’s terrible—don’t tell me he was a Caretaker.”
“Close, but no cigar,” replied Bert. “He has the imagination in spades but didn’t care one whit about learning the languages needed—or having much to do at all with the Archipelago, save as a source of story material. Jules spent considerable time with him—apparently—and made every effort to accommodate his eccentricities, but to no avail.”
“It’s for the best, believe me,” snorted Charles. “His prose is atrocious. Of course he couldn’t master other languages. He’s still working on English.”
“Now, Charles,” Jack admonished. “You have to admit, some of his publishers are very respectable. That American magazine that serialized his Ape Man stories, for example—they’re first class.”
“Granted,” said Charles. “But the idea that he might have become a Caretaker is appalling.”
Bert sighed. “What can one say? People do have their own ambitions, and most reasons for pursuing them aren’t benevolent. Some accepted for the wealth, as Edgar did, and some for the fame.”
“Did you do it for the wealth or the fame?” Jack asked Charles.
“I’m still trying to decide,” said Charles, grinning. “If we ever make it back to London, that is.”
Aven and Laura Glue had finally come fully awake and had chosen to leave the discussion of maps to the Caretakers. They had moved a short distan
ce away and were playing some sort of game. Neither one seemed particularly bothered by the happening that had brought them to this place, Jack noted aloud.
“Of course not,” said Bert. “They’ve both been here before—or somewhere like here, at least.”
“Why aren’t there more notes?” John asked as he thumbed through the previous few maps. “There ought to be more of—well, something written about this place.”
“No one makes new annotations if no one visits,” said Bert, “and since the last one here was probably Jamie, I’m not surprised by the lack of information.”
“Skartaris,” Jack mused, rubbing his chin. “That sounds very familiar, come to think of it….”
“It should,” said Bert. “That’s the name of the mountain that cast a shadow across the entrance to the center of the Earth in Jules’s book. Scartaris.”
“So it was based on the Underneath?” John exclaimed. “And he never told you this?”
Bert shrugged. “He is a writer, after all,” he said plaintively. “We do make things up on occasion, you know.”
John was about to make another remark when his brow furrowed, and he leaned closer to the page he’d just turned to. Suddenly he gasped and then swallowed hard.
“I say, John. Are you all right?” asked Jack.
The others looked down at the Caretaker Principia. All the blood had drained from his face, and he was trembling so violently that the atlas was shaking in his hands.
“John?” Jack asked, concerned. “What is it?”
Wordlessly John stood up, then slowly walked away from the tree line back to the clearing where they’d awakened. He stood there, staring at the Geographica, then dropped it to the ground and looked up into the sky.
Aven and Laura Glue had noticed the others’ concern and rejoined them from the fallen trees where they’d been sitting and playing their game.
“Is he all right?” Aven asked Jack in a low voice.
“I can’t say,” he answered. “He looks as if he’s seen a ghost.”
The Search for the Red Dragon Page 15
