by Tad Williams
“That question again?” He smiled, but only barely. “It is the past to you, child. To me this is the future, although I would never have dreamed it to be so.”
“But how does it work?” asked Tyler. “How did Gideon find you?”
Ragnar shrugged. “He was not looking for me. He was hunting for worms-dragons, you would say-to bring back. He got me instead. As to how it all works, it is magic, whatever Gideon calls it, so I can tell you nothing about it.” He gestured to the bags of feed stacked on the cart. “Now, are you going to help me?”
Lucinda took a bucket and filled it with the damp mash that the sea goats liked. She threw handfuls over the fence and watched them scramble out of their shallow tub of water after it, sliding over the wet floor of their pen, hissing and bobbing their heads. She would miss feeding them and the other animals when they went home. It was hard to believe their time at the farm was almost over.
“But… what was it like?” she asked Ragnar at last.
“I do not know what you mean.”
“When you first came here. Were you scared?”
Now he did laugh, but it wasn’t much happier than the smile. “What I left behind-that was my death, and that was fearful. Coming here I faced nothing worse than an unfamiliar place and a new tongue to learn. Of course, I did not understand that I had left my own time behind as well.”
“You didn’t know?”
“Of course not, child. Not at first.” He heaved a broken cage up onto the cart. “What was I to think? It was strange enough that I had escaped the doom that was upon me. When I came to this place, I saw only a farm at first.”
“Oh, tell me about it.” Lucinda went back for another bucket of mash. “I really want to hear.”
“How did Gideon find his way around?” Tyler asked. “Was it really that Continuascope thing? How did it work?”
“That craft is beyond me-and anyway, the device is gone.” He shook his head. “Sometimes it seems that everything good in this place has been lost.”
“What do you mean?” Lucinda asked. “This place is amazing!”
Ragnar lifted several of the heavy sacks off and dropped them to the ground with a dusty thump. “The friends I’ve met here tell me we Norsemen are a gloomy lot. Still, I cannot help thinking this house and perhaps all the magic of this place is cursed. Certainly it has seemed so since the night Gideon’s wife disappeared.”
“Disappeared?” Lucinda thought of the room so full of pictures of the dark-haired woman that it had seemed like a religious shrine. “I thought she died.”
“Nothing so simple.” He frowned. “She was swallowed by the Fault Line.”
For a moment Lucinda couldn’t speak-she felt cold all over. “Swallowed?”
“That is what I call it. I do not speak Gideon’s tongue of science. She went in and she did not come out. It was the most ill-fated night of all.”
“Where?” Tyler demanded. “Where was she when it happened?”
Ragnar gave him a strange look. “I do not know. Some where in the Fault Line. It is the family’s gift-but it is also a curse, I sometimes think.” He looked up suddenly, his face stricken. “I am sorry! Gods, I am a fool.”
“Why are you sorry?” Lucinda asked.
“Because I have called your family cursed.”
Lucinda had to think about it for a moment before she understood. “Oh, right. I keep forgetting that we’re related to Gideon.”
“Not to Gideon, in truth,” Ragnar said. “To his wife. And through her to Octavio himself.”
Now Tyler was the puzzled one. “What does that mean?”
“You are of the Tinker clan. Grace was a Tinker-Octavio’s granddaughter. Gideon and Grace never had children. You are not related by blood to Gideon, but to Octavio.”
“So is that why we’re here?” said Tyler, slowly. “Me and Lucinda? Because we’re old Octavio’s blood relations?”
Ragnar heaved up another bunch of feed sacks. “I do not know why you are here, boy. Gideon has many thoughts he does not share with me. Still, I am glad you two came. It has brought some new life to this place-life that was needed.” He looked almost wistful.
Lucinda felt as though she was suddenly seeing things clearly that she had only glimpsed before through a fog. “So Gideon married into the family.”
“Yes. It was against Octavio’s wishes, at least at first.” Ragnar said. “Gideon came to work with the old man and help him build his device, but he also fell in love with Octavio’s granddaughter, who he had seen grow from a child to a woman. There was much anger, at least at first, when the two of them married.”
“Octavio was angry?”
“So I am told, but he came to accept it at last. And for some years things were good. Then came the bad night when Grace vanished into the Fault Line and was lost. That same night, Octavio Tinker’s heart failed and he died.”
“Oh my God!” Lucinda said. “That’s so terrible! How did it all happen?”
Ragnar shook his head. “I was not there. It is not my story to tell. Already I have talked and talked-talked too much. We have work to do. Besides, what more do you need to know? The whole sad story is in these words-Gideon lost his wife and his thane on the same night.”
“His thane? What’s that mean?” Tyler asked.
“Ah, it is not a word of your time, but mine. The one who held his oath-his lord, you might say.”
“This is America,” Tyler told him. “We don’t have lords.”
Ragnar’s half smile returned. “Words change-men do not. In all ways Octavio was Gideon’s lord. But it was the loss of Grace that crippled him. He searched years for her, until the Continuascope was lost too.” He looked around, then lowered his head a little between his big shoulders and said quietly, “He was already a little mad, I think, when the Continuascope was lost in the laboratory fire and he could not even search for her anymore.” He shook his head.
“So she just disappeared into the Fault Line,” Tyler said slowly. Lucinda could not help noticing the strange expression on her brother’s face-he was lost in thought, staring at nothing, as if he was on the last level of some game and completely absorbed. Why was he zoning out when they were finally getting some answers?
“Why did Gideon bring you and the others here?” she asked.
The big man snorted. “You would rather talk than work, I see. He brought us because he needed workers to keep the farm going… workers who will keep the secrets.”
Tyler abruptly stood up. “I have to go back to the house!” He turned and headed off at a trot.
“What about your chores, boy?” Ragnar called.
“I’ll be back, honest!”
Lucinda stared after him, wondering what was going on. She had a sinking feeling that she was going to wind up doing his share of the work as well as her own.
A hot, sweaty hour or so later Ragnar finally sent her back to the house to get lunch while he went to talk to Mr. Walkwell about some fencing.
Lucinda was rinsing the worst of the dust off her face and hands at the faucet outside the Sick Barn when she felt the hairs at the back of her neck begin to rise. She even looked around to see if someone was standing behind her, but no one was in sight: she was alone with the concrete bulk of the huge barn. Then the weird, powerful sense of someone else’s feelings flooded into her again, bringing a sense of loss as sudden and shocking as being doused with a bucket of cold water.
Lost… lost… lost…!
Her first impulse was to run away-but how could she run away from thoughts in her own head?
Lucinda lifted her hands to her cheeks and found they were wet. The force of the misery-whoever’s misery it was-had brought her to tears.
Go away, ghost, she thought desperately. Leave me alone!
But it would not go away, and she spun in helpless circles, holding her head. It was only then, as though she had turned toward the sun with eyes closed and felt its heat, that she realized she could tell where the painful, unhappy
thoughts were coming from.
The Sick Barn.
Lucinda looked around but there was still no one in sight. She walked slowly to the front of the great concrete tube. The overwhelming sense of someone else’s misery was growing a little less, but it still battered her mind like a strong wind.
The door to the Sick Barn was open, propped with a stone so it wouldn’t latch shut. Lucinda poked her head in, heart beating fast and prepared for almost anything, but there was little to see. In fact, except for the huge bulk of Meseret sprawled in sleep, tethered to the floor with massive bands of canvas, and some movement in some of the smaller pens and cages, the place seemed empty. But who had left the door propped? And whose terrible, mournful thoughts had invaded her mind? Was it the ghost in the library mirror? Or something worse-some horror conjured up out of its natural time and place by Gideon’s Fault Line?
And then Meseret’s great, red-gold eye flicked open, as if a gypsy fortune-teller had lifted the cloth cover off a crystal ball. The long, narrow reptilian pupil widened a little and several ideas thundered in her brain at the same time.
NOT EGG THIEF. WHAT WANT HERE? SAD SAD SO SAD!
Lucinda didn’t hear individual words, but instead felt the meanings with the suddenness that a splash of paint would shout “Red!” As the alien ideas cascaded over her, a sudden, clear understanding came with them: the voice she had been hearing in her head, the mournful thoughts that she had mistaken for ghosts, had come from Meseret.
The dragon was in her head.
Lucinda’s first impulse was to turn and run, but the misery that she could feel as clearly as heat or cold held her. The immense reptile let out a floor-rumbling groan and tried to stand, but the heavy canvas restraining straps, each one as wide as a bedsheet, kept her belly against the floor and her winged forelegs pinned against her sides.
“Oh, you poor thing…,” Lucinda said, then trailed off in sudden fear as the dragon stopped struggling and turned her terrifying eye on Lucinda. “I’m… I’m sorry you’re tied up,” she said, her voice little more than a squeak. “I’m so sorry your egg… your baby… died.”
Now, as if her idea had leaped between them in the same way the dragon’s thoughts had jumped to Lucinda, the dragon shuddered and shook her massive head from side to side as if to shake it free of something. Lucinda guessed from the slowness of the great beast’s movements that Meseret was drugged.
NO DEAD! Drugged or not, Meseret could still make the inside of Lucinda’s head rattle like it was thunderstruck. NO DEAD! TAKEN!
It took Lucinda a moment to make sense of the thoughts.
“Taken? You mean… by Alamu?” It hadn’t occurred to her until that moment that it might not be very smart to argue with a giant winged monster forty feet long-especially one that was clearly angry and upset. But instead of the burst of anger she feared-or even a scorching belch of fire, which could reach her even where she was standing, she abruptly realized-what came to her was only a squall of misery, like cold wind and dark clouds.
NOT LITTLE WORM. NOT HIM! LOST. TAKEN. EVERYTHING GONE.
And then there were images with the ideas, pictures in her head that Lucinda could not make sense of-a setting sun, a tangle of bones, a cliff wall of sheer red stone looming above drifts of sand.
NO QUICKENING. NO BABY.
Lucinda saw an image of something that was neither a dragon baby nor a human infant-more of a shining point of light, like a welcoming door opened into darkness.
GONE.
It was too much, the power of the dragon’s thoughts, the strangeness of them. It felt like having a stranger pull on her arm and shout in her face in a foreign language, shrieking for help. Lucinda took a few stumbling steps backward. Something creaked behind her and she saw Haneb standing in the doorway, pulling his protective hood back on as he returned from somewhere outside, his scarred face wide-eyed with surprise to find Lucinda standing beside the dragon’s pen.
A moment later she was rocked off her feet by Meseret’s bellow of anger and pain, her ears popping with the pressure.
EGG THIEF! The thoughts crashed through Lucinda’s head like an avalanche, almost knocking her down again even as she struggled to rise. HIM. THIS ONE. EGG THIEF!
Haneb hurried toward her, head down as though he crossed a battlefield beneath a hail of bullets. He grabbed her arm and pulled her to her feet, then yanked her toward the door.
“What you doing?” he shouted, his voice muffled by the hood, his eyes frantic behind the faceplate. He grabbed her arm and began pulling her. “No suit! Dangerous! Come away! Come away now!”
He can’t hear what she said, Lucinda thought. He can’t hear her thoughts like I can.
“It’s you,” she said wonderingly as they reached the door. Behind her the dragon groaned. “She’s calling you a thief. She says you took it.”
“What?” Haneb still had his hood on, but his startled look was easy to see even through the protective mask. “What you saying?”
“Meseret. The dragon. She says you stole her egg.”
For a moment his eyes widened even farther, as though they might leap right out of his skull. Then Haneb turned on his heels and ran away from her across the farmyard.
Chapter 24
Squirrel Meets World
T yler wasn’t sure he understood everything she was saying-his sister was pretty worked up.
“So, hang on-the dragon talked to you?”
“Not talked, not exactly. But it totally communicated with me, Tyler. I’m not kidding! I could get most of what it meant. It kept saying- she kept saying-that Haneb stole her egg! And when I said it out loud Haneb got this super-guilty look and ran away!”
“But why would he steal an egg? It’s not like they don’t feed people around here.”
“Tyler! I’m serious! This is the craziest thing yet!”
“I am being serious-and it may not be the craziest thing happening around here… although talking dragons is pretty hard to beat.”
For a moment Tyler thought she was going to go into her old hurt-feelings act, but instead she finally noticed the papers spread all over his bed. “What are you doing? And why did you just take off and disappear like that?”
“Oh yeah. Well, see… ” He was about to launch into an explanation of everything he’d been thinking, but something about her face made him say instead, “You know, that’s really amazingly weird, what happened with the dragon, Luce. Do you think you can do it again?”
She seemed surprised to be asked. “I don’t know. Maybe. She was really upset and I think she’s on some kind of drugs-tranquilized.” She shook her head. “I still don’t understand why Haneb would steal an egg from her.”
“Maybe she got that wrong.”
Lucinda frowned. “She seemed pretty certain. But he wouldn’t do that, would he? He’s so nice.”
Tyler shrugged. “Who knows? We’re leaving in a couple of days and we’re not going to figure everything out by then.” He saw her expression. “Yes, even I admit it. We’re not going to solve all the riddles-not this time. These people are crazy and this place is totally nuts-it’s like someone crashed a bunch of amusement park rides together. Whee! It’s the Haunted Monster Time-Travel Train!”
Lucinda laughed. “Okay, now I’m asking again. What’s all the paper, and why did you take off and leave me to do all the work?”
“Sorry about that. I was just trying to find out more about the Continuascope. Because I have an idea.”
“Another idea? How are we going to get almost killed this time?”
Now Tyler laughed. “Hey, you’re the one who keeps messing with the dragons, not me.”
“Just tell me your idea.”
“Okay, but first I want to hide all this stuff. I already took notes on the parts I want to look up at the library, so I don’t need to take it with me.”
“Notes? Library?” Lucinda pretended to look around the room. “Where did my little brother go? Someone stole my little brother!”
“Very funny. But I’m not kidding, we have to hide it. Gideon’ll freak out if he knows we found all this stuff and didn’t tell him. Besides, you know the Wicked Witch is going to be going through these rooms after we’re gone.”
Lucinda shivered. “I don’t know. Maybe we should hide it somewhere else on the farm-like the reptile barn or something?”
“When? And it might be hard to get to it when we come back next time.”
“ If we come back.” Lucinda actually sounded like she wanted to, despite all the frightening, crazy things that had happened. Tyler was impressed. “How about our bathroom?” she asked. “Is there anywhere to hide it in there?”
They trooped in and began investigating. After a bit, Tyler stood on the toilet seat and began pushing at the boards of the ceiling until he found one that was loose. “I think I can get this off,” he said as he began to wiggle it back and forth.
Lucinda hardly seemed to hear him. She was staring at Tyler’s hairbrush on the counter of the sink like she was hypnotized.
When he had the board off, he held out his hand. “Get me the stuff, would you? I just want to see if it fits up here okay.” But his sister didn’t respond. “Lucinda?”
“Oh, Tyler!” She sounded really upset. “I think I know how that horrible squirrel kept finding you.”
“What do you mean?”
“Mrs. Needle. She made me get some hairs from your hairbrush. I just remembered.” She shook her head. “It seems kind of like a dream, but I’m sure it’s real.”
“What are you talking about? Hair?”
She told him a strange, disjointed story about drinking tea and watching sleight-of-hand tricks in Mrs. Needle’s room. “I can’t remember when it happened. But that’s like voodoo, isn’t it? They take your hair and make a doll or something? Oh, Tyler, I’m so sorry! She tricked me!”
For about half a moment he remembered that nasty, hissing, yellow-eyed creature chasing after him and was really angry with her. That was Lucinda’s big problem-she wanted to pretend like things were okay even when they weren’t. Oh, no, Mrs. Needle was a perfectly nice lady! Then Tyler looked at his sister again and really saw the misery on her face, her red, brimming eyes.
