“Send messages?” John said, still fuming from Jack’s announcement. “If there was the possibility that this would work, then they never should have risked using the gate.”
“We don’t know that it will work,” said Verne. “In fact, it never even occurred to me as a possibility until last night. You see, Arthur always assumed he was communicating with a spirit in real time. What he was actually doing was communicating with the past, with someone who, from their own point of view, was still living. Burton is the one who figured it out.”
“Actually,” Conan Doyle admitted with a touch of embarrassment, “that’s part of the reason Burton was able to so easily recruit me into the ICS. He had already been told a lot about me by his own right-hand man, who had been speaking to me for years via the table.”
“Burton’s right-hand man?” John said, frowning. “What does he have to do with all this? I don’t understand.”
“It is attuned to the craftsman who made it,” said Verne. “Arthur knew him as Pheneas, a man of Arab descent who supposedly died thousands of years ago. In fact, the maker of this table was considerably older than that. He was known at points in his life as Theopolous, and earlier still as Enkidu. But Burton, who knew him best, simply called him the End of Time, and when he introduced us, I knew I had found the first, and perhaps the best, of my Messengers. As you know, he died at the hands of an Echthros in London, but he may be able to serve us still.”
“What must we do, Jules?” Jack asked. “How does it work?”
“He always seemed to appear in answer to my questions,” Conan Doyle replied. “He seemed never to age, but sometimes he couldn’t recall earlier discussions. I think it’s because I was going further and further back along his timeline. It functions in a manner similar to the trumps—intuition plays a part.”
“As does belief,” Houdini interjected. “You believed, and I didn’t, Arthur. That’s why you saw him.”
“Believing is seeing,” said Shakespeare. “We should give it a go.”
“All right,” John said, still reluctant, and more than a bit put out that he hadn’t been told about the table earlier. “How do we do this?”
“Join hands,” said Conan Doyle. “There are just enough of us here to make it work. Seven seems to have been the best number for making it operate. More, and there were too many competing thoughts; less, and there wasn’t enough concentration to keep a clear focus.”
Jack took Shakespeare’s left hand and Houdini’s right. Conan Doyle sat between Houdini and John, with Bert to John’s left, and Verne completing the circle.
“What question should we ask?” said John.
“The simplest one, I suppose,” said Conan Doyle. “Where is the Indigo Dragon?”
Together, the men gripped one another’s hands and focused their will and thought on the question and the table.
Nothing happened.
“If Charles were here,” Jack said after a few minutes had passed, “he would be asking if we needed to invoke some sort of incantation or magic spell.”
“Abarakadabara,” said Houdini. Still nothing.
“Is it plugged in?” asked Bert.
“Maybe it needed a Dragon, like the Zanzibar Gate did,” Shakespeare began to say, and in that instant an unearthly glow began to emanate from the center of the hexagon.
“Ah,” said John. “Well done, Will.”
“Thanks, but I haven’t the slightest idea what just happened,” said Shakespeare.
“You focused your thoughts on a living Dragon,” said Verne. “Life flows to life. We simply asked the wrong question.”
“Quiet, all of you,” John said as the light rose from the table in a column that began to alter and shift, forming a three-dimensional, almost holographic image. “Something is beginning to appear.”
♦ ♦ ♦
On the downward slope of a gigantic sand dune, the air shimmered and hummed, and suddenly the Zanzibar Gate came into view, becoming more and more solid as the seconds passed.
Almost instantly, the Indigo Dragon slid through and onto the sand, coming to rest with a slight lean about twenty feet down the dune.
“Meh!” said Elly Mae.
“Mah!” said Coraline.
“Is it over?” asked Fred. “That went pretty quickly.”
“Just like walking through the doors of the keep,” said Madoc. “That Shaksberd is quite the talented fellow. If I’d have recruited him instead of Burton—”
“Don’t,” Uncas said sternly, “even joke about that.”