The First Dragon(2)

Here, there be Dragons was meant to reassure the Caretakers and all those living in the lands depicted on the maps that there would always be someone watching over them; someone older, wiser, and stronger than any forces who might seek to destroy the world of the Archipelago of Dreams. Since the creation of the Archipelago, when it was separated from the world called the Summer Country, there had always been a Dragon—at least one—standing watch.

That was before the coming of the Winter King, who sought to rule the Archipelago, and the Caretakers of prophecy from the Last Book, three young scholars from Oxford, who defeated him and saved both worlds. But the price was high—before the Winter King was defeated, the Keep of Time, which connected the two worlds, was set on fire and gradually destroyed, severing the connection.

Time in the Archipelago was severed from the Caretakers’ base at Tamerlane House in the Nameless Isles, as well as the rest of the world, and in the process, had begun to speed up. Thousands of years passed in the Archipelago, and it was eventually taken over completely by the Caretakers’ great enemy: the eternal Shadows known as Echthroi, and their servants, the Lloigor.

The Nameless Isles were spared the same fate only because of a temporal and interdimensional bridge built by William Shakespeare that connected Tamerlane House to the Kilns, Jack’s home in Oxford.

With the destruction of the keep, the Caretakers also lost the ability to travel in time—something that their adversaries, led by the renegade Caretaker Dr. John Dee, seemed to have a greater facility for. Only the Grail Child, Rose Dyson, and the new Cartographer, Edmund McGee, working together to create chronal maps that could open into any point in time, could give the Caretakers any hope of repairing the damage that had been done and restoring what once was in the Archipelago.

Somehow, the Keep of Time had to be rebuilt. And the only way to do that was to find the Architect—and no one in history seemed to know his identity, or when the keep had been built to begin with.

Rose and Edmund, along with the tulpa Caretaker Charles, his mentor Bert, the clockwork owl from Alexandria named Archimedes, and the once leader of the Imperial Cartological Society, Sir Richard Burton, were dispatched into Deep Time to try to find the Architect—and the mission was a disaster.

Burton was trapped in the far future, after narrowly defeating an Echthros-possessed alternate version of their friend Jack; Archimedes was nearly destroyed; and Rose’s sword, Caliburn, was irreparably broken. Only the intervention of a mysterious, near-omnipotent old man in a white, timeless space called Platonia saved the other companions. Bert was returned to Tamerlane, just in time to die and become a portrait in Basil Hallward’s gallery; and Rose, Charles, and Edmund were sent more deeply into the past, to a city that might have been Atlantis.

Since Bert’s reappearance and the discovery of an engraving of the city that Edmund had left inside a Sphinx for the Caretakers to find, nearly two months had passed, with no sign of the companions, and no further word of where, or when, they were.

Shakespeare, who had a gift for constructing chronal devices, had fashioned a pyramid he called the Zanzibar Gate out of the fallen stones of the keep, in order to use it to go after the missing companions. Unfortunately, it had to be powered by the presence of a living Dragon—and there were no Dragons left. Even the great old Dragon Samaranth had vanished when the Archipelago was lost—so the Caretakers couldn’t even seek him out for advice, much less ask him to go through the gate. That left everything at a standstill for weeks—and when Rose, Edmund, and Charles failed to reappear, John, Jack, Laura Glue, Houdini, and some of the others at Tamerlane House began searching for other options. But even the fabled Repository of Tamerlane House had given them nothing.

“It seems there are times when only a Dragon will do,” Houdini said, slamming shut another ancient tome. “There simply isn’t any substitute.”

“Do you need a hand with those?” Jack asked, rising from his chair as Laura Glue again descended a ladder carrying a precariously arranged assortment of boxes.

“It’s all right,” Laura Glue said as she carefully balanced the stack on the table. “I got this.”

“Actually,” Jack said, “the proper way to say that would be ‘I’ve got this.’ The way you say it makes you sound . . .”

“Uneducated? Like a wildling, maybe?” Laura Glue replied.

Jack frowned. “I was going to say, it makes you sound less intelligent than you actually are.”

Laura Glue frowned back. “ ’Ceptin’,” she said, deliberately using Lost Boy slang, “you knows I be intelligent as all that, and I knows I be intelligent as all that, so what be the problem, neh?”