Rose picked up Caliburn and strode over to Bangs, but he offered no resistance. Instead he dropped to his knees and bowed his head.
“Please,” he said, his voice raspy from sorrow and centuries of pain, “release me.”
“I don’t want to kill you,” Rose began, but he cut her short.
“Already dead,” he said, “oh so long ago. The man I was is sitting with the angels at the end of all things, but cannot go on until you release the aiua from this body that was created. And only an Imago or an Archimago can release their own.”
Rose closed her eyes in sudden understanding and nodded her head.
“Thank you,” the tulpa said. She nodded again, and the sword Caliburn rose, and then fell, and the tulpa dissolved into smoke.
“Now,” a voice whispered into her ear from across the eternities, “you are truly the Imago.”
Chapter TWENTY-FOUR
The Reign of the Summer King
It took some time for the companions to recover from their ordeal past the wall at the End of the World, and the events on Terminus, but eventually they all healed, and soon preparations were made for the restoration of the Archipelago of Dreams.
The Caretakers Emeriti insisted on a ceremony, with a lot of pomp and circumstance, and speeches, and of course, a massive feast. But when all the ceremony was done, in the end all that was left to do was for the last Dragon, Madoc, to open the Amethyst Box with the Master Key.
It was as simple as it seemed. He inserted the key, and the lid of the box exploded with light, and color, and sound, and life. The torrent from the box filled the sky overhead in an ever-expanding curtain of strange and wonderful geometries.
“Does that look familiar to you?” Edmund asked.
“Yes,” said Rose. “It’s the tapestry the Archons were weaving in the sky, with light and color and all those impossible gestures they made.”
“It seemed like the place I should be.”
“This is better,” Charles said to them both. “You get to design everything about the Archipelago that the angels intended to create when they were planning it in the City of Jade—only there’s no impending flood to hurry things along.”
♦ ♦ ♦
Edmund and the badgers were put in charge of island placement, using Tummeler’s editions of the Imaginarium Geographica as a guide.
“I have to say, this is the most unusual cartographical job I’ve ever undertaken,” said Edmund. “I’ve used many maps to find lost islands, but this is the first time I’ve ever used an atlas to tell me where the island should be returned to.”
“That’s kind of how things work around here,” said Fred.
“Here!” Uncas exclaimed excitedly. “I found what we was lookin’ for, Rose!”
He turned the atlas around and pointed at a map of a very large, very green, and very undistinguished island.
“This would work just dandy,” Uncas continued. “It has mountains, but not too many, beaches and harbors, nice trees, and a huge, honking cave that we can use t’ build a new Great Whatsit.”
“If it’s so undistinguished, then why did Tummeler include it in the facsimile Geographicas?” asked Charles.
Uncas shrugged. “We had to fill out a printing signature,” he said matter-of-factly, “and it was either a map of this boring ol’ place, or another muffin recipe. And we had four in there already.”
Charles slapped his forehead. “I should have known,” he said, rolling his eyes.
“It looks perfect, Uncas,” Edmund said. “Absolutely perfect.”
“What is it you’re doing, Rose?” Charles asked.
“I’m going to summon the Corinthian Giants,” she answered. “We’re going to use this island to create a place that we should have never lost, and give it a name that makes certain we always remember.
“We’re going to build New Paralon.”
♦ ♦ ♦
The new Cartographer of Lost Places declined to keep the rooms he had been given in Tamerlane House in favor of something that felt more fitting for his calling. Once he had moved all his maps, charts, and equipment to his new workplace, Rose and Madoc took the Indigo Dragon, newly restored by the shipbuilder Argus, out to go visit him and give it their blessing.
“It seemed like the place I should be,” said Edmund. “Once the Caretakers explained to me fully who the Cartographer of Lost Places really was, and how significant he was to everything that happened in the Archipelago, I thought that there would be no better place for me to work than here, in his old quarters.”
Rose looked around the room and realized that it was smaller than the space he had used at Tamerlane, but somehow, this was more fitting. The second-to-the-last room at the top of the Keep of Time had housed a Cartographer for a very, very long time—and it seemed fitting that it did so again.