Quickly the Caretakers took a head count of themselves and their allies and realized that one of them was missing.
“Argus,” Jack said, his heart sinking. “The shipbuilder is missing. And I think I know what Dee is going to try to do.”
Waving for the others to follow, Jack grabbed up Hawthorne’s sledgehammer and bolted out the door. John, Irving, Dumas, Verne, and Jason’s son Hugh followed him, taking whatever weapons they could grab along the way.
♦ ♦ ♦
Inside the south boathouse the Caretakers found Dr. Dee and the missing Argus—but minutes too late. The shipbuilder had already completed the work Dee had forced him to do.
Where there had once been a gaping, splintered hole in the prow of the Black Dragon, there was now the massive, regally maned head of a cat that aspired to be a lion. It was Grimalkin, the Cheshire cat of Tamerlane House, an angel become Echthros, and it was now part of a living ship. That gave it will, and power—and it was still in the thrall of John Dee.
Argus was half sitting, half standing on the dock alongside the ship. Even from a distance the Caretakers could tell he had been beaten, and badly. His shirt was torn, and bruises were visible on his shoulder and chest. Worse, there was a bandage over his left eye that was oozing with blood.
“Dee,” Jack muttered. “I’ve had about enough of him.”
Yelling and brandishing their weapons, the Caretakers charged into the boathouse, but Dee was prepared for them. He pressed a contact on the wall, and a sudden explosion threw all of them to the ground.
Splinters of wood flew everywhere, and the billowing smoke obscured their view of the ship—but when it started to clear, they saw there was a gaping hole in the wall of the boathouse. The ship was gone, and Dee and Argus were gone with it.
“I think this must have been part of his plan all along,” said John. “We lost the only Dragon we had when Madoc left, and with him, any possibility of crossing the Frontier into the Archipelago. But if Dee has a living ship, bonded with a creature that was once an angel . . .” His words trailed off into a stunned silence.
“It can cross over,” Jack said, “and I say we let it. Remember what is happening in the Archipelago? Or what used to be the Archipelago, anyway. It’s all Echthroi. All Shadow. I say let them go and good riddance.”
♦ ♦ ♦
Once the extra material that Shakespeare had added was stripped off the Zanzibar Gate, the stone was easy enough for Madoc to pull apart. As he began to construct the base of the keep, Rose used Caliburn to cut branches into planks to use as support beams, while the rest of their friends busied themselves mixing mud to use for mortar.
“So,” Fred observed as he dropped more straw into the pit where Quixote, Laura Glue, and Edmund were stomping it into the mud with their feet, “if the stones that Will used to make the Zanzibar Gate came from the original keep, but now we’re back here helping t’ build the original keep, then where did the original stones come from the first time? Isn’t that one of those . . . conundrum things Scowler Jules is always going on about?”
“A pair of ducks,” Uncas said as he dumped his own armload of straw in, taking great care not to get wet. “That’s what Mr. Telemachus said it was called.”
“A paradox, you mean,” said Edmund, “and no, I don’t think so. Rose and I have learned that time only seems to move in two directions—but it really just moves forward, along with the events you perceive. So this is still the original keep, because we’re building it for the first time. It’s never been built before.”
“But it’ll still be there when we get back to our own time, because it’s been rebuilt, right?”
“Yes.”
“So,” Fred repeated, “if the keep never fell in our timeline, then where did Will get the stone to make the Zanzibar Gate?”
Edmund frowned, and bit his lip. “Uh, hmm,” he said. “I see your point. I’ll tell you what. If it works, we’ll never bring it up again. And if it doesn’t, we’ll have plenty of time to debate it. Agreed?”
“Gotcha,” said Fred. “You don’t know the answer either, do you?”
“Not the faintest clue,” said Edmund.
♦ ♦ ♦
“Oh, dear Lord in heaven,” Shakespeare said, grabbing Hawthorne by the arm. “Look, Nathaniel!”
The small island where the Zanzibar Gate had been built was empty. The rickety bridge was still there, as was the path that had led to the gate. But the gate itself had vanished. It was simply gone.
Hawthorne waved over several of the other Caretakers and pointed to the now empty island, and they quickly realized that something terrible had happened.