Samaranth looked at him in surprise. “That is the Un-Made World,” he said as if his visitors should have known already, “and it remains Un-Named, until the Word chooses a time and a place to make it and Name it. There is nothing there except darkness, and stone, and . . .”
“And the keep,” said Edmund. “The Eternal Tower. Isn’t that right?”
For the first time since they’d arrived, Samaranth actually looked frightened. “Are you Nephilim?” he asked, his voice steady, but the fear still evident in his expression. “Have you come to Un-Name me?”
“No, we aren’t Nephilim, and we haven’t come to Un-Name anyone,” Rose quickly assured him. “Why would you ask that?”
“Because,” Samaranth replied, “only a few among the Host, the eldest of us, even know the tower exists. We have traveled to it. We know how to use it. And of us all, I alone deduced how important it is to this world and the Un-Made World both. They were not always severed. And someday, they may be made whole again. This is the secret we have kept for eons. The secret worth . . . killing for. So, I must ask you again—have you come to Un-Name me?”
An elderly man . . . led the procession . . .
Chapter EIGHT
The Steward
“They did what?” John exclaimed, incredulous. “You helped them to do what?”
“Calm down, John,” Jack said soothingly, “and I’ll explain everything.”
“Calm down?!?” John sputtered, almost too furious to speak. “You’ve just betrayed everything we believe in!”
Jack scowled. “No, I haven’t,” he said as calmly as he could manage. “We just believed that—”
“We?” John exclaimed. “You mean there were . . .” He stopped, thinking, then spun around, pointing an accusing finger at Shakespeare.
“I’m surprised at you, Will,” John said. “They could not have done this without your help. You should have come to me.”
“That’s the rub of it,” Shakespeare said, moving around the table to stand in solidarity with Jack. “We don’t think you made the right call. The gate was the only viable option we had.”
“You’ve betrayed your oath as a Caretaker, Jack,” John said, shaking. “And you’ve betrayed me.”
“Well, as regards the former,” Jack said, his voice becoming steadier as he grew bolder about confronting his friend, “I disagree. I swore an oath to protect a book that is lost somewhere in Deep Time, and an Archipelago that has disappeared to heaven knows where from a world that is dominated by shadows. So there really wasn’t much to betray except my own best judgment, which I used. And as to the latter,” he continued, “if that’s really how you feel, oh Prime Caretaker, why don’t you fire me?”
It was spoken in the heat of the argument, but Jack’s statement nonetheless shocked the older Caretakers. Verne and Bert stepped in to try to calm tempers on both sides.
“Focus on what moves us forward, not what moves us backward, John,” Verne said, laying a hand on the younger man’s shoulder.
“Don’t patronize me, Jules,” John said, rebuffing Verne’s calming words and comforting hand. “Besides, wasn’t it your man Burton who taught us that time moves in two directions? They’ve gone back in time, and we couldn’t even check in on them if we wanted to! We’ll have no way of even knowing if they get into trouble!”
“We actually may have a way,” said Verne. “It’s something I’d been working on with Burton ages ago that I think will come in useful now.”
John glared at Jack a few seconds longer, then tipped his head at Verne. “All right. Show me.”
Verne ushered the Caretakers into a large, circular room in the northernmost wing of Tamerlane House. There was an immense round table in the center. It was made of some kind of stone, more ancient than marble. It was crisscrossed with various alchemical symbols, and a hexagonal shape, inset into the middle, was polished to an almost mirrorlike finish.
“This is the table that Arthur used to conduct séances,” Verne said, gesturing at Conan Doyle. “What he didn’t understand at the time, and what Ehrich spent a lot of time and energy trying to debunk,” he added, winking at Houdini, “is that Arthur wasn’t making contact with the spirit world, but with the past.
“This table,” he continued as the other Caretakers took their seats around the circle, “is one of the few artifacts that survived the destruction of Atlantis. It is possible, if that is where our friends have gone, that we will be able to observe them, and possibly even send messages as well.”