The First Dragon(9)
“Well, now you know,” said Aristophanes. “And if you’re willing to help, I’m sure you’ll be well compensated.”
Argus folded his arms and considered them carefully for a moment. Then he pursed his lips. “A boon,” he said at last. “Your masters will owe me a boon, whatever I ask. That is my price.”
“Are we authorized to agree to those terms?” Uncas asked Quixote, obviously worried. “Scowler John never said anything about offering him an open ticket.”
“Well, it did work out the last time,” Quixote whispered back, “except for, you know, the betrayal and all that.”
“The Caretakers have always known my terms,” the Zen Detective remarked, winking at Uncas, as the shipbuilder gathered his tools together in anticipation of an agreement. “I get my fee, plus expenses. And if the expenses mean agreeing to pay whatever the mark asks for, then that’s the client’s problem, not mine.”
“I think I like your job,” Uncas said. “Not much seems t’ bother you. It’s a very Animal way t’ live.”
“We need him,” Quixote said simply. He turned to Argus. “I think your terms will be acceptable. We can go now, if you like.”
♦ ♦ ♦
“For a moment there,” the Zen Detective said to the shipbuilder as the foursome clambered into the car, “I thought you weren’t going to come with us.”
“For a moment there,” Argus said as he took the seat behind Quixote, “I wasn’t.”
“What changed your mind, if I might ask?” said Quixote.
Argus paused a moment, as if the question had violated some invisible boundary of etiquette, then realized that it was, in fact, an entirely appropriate question under the circumstances. “It was the ship,” he answered. “The Black Dragon. Any of the others would have been made by Utna—by Ordo Maas. But that one’s the exception—the only one he never touched.”
“How did you know that?” Uncas asked as he started the car.
“Because,” Argus answered over the roar of the engine, “I’m the one who built it, as payment for a promise made . . . long, long ago. I made the Black Dragon, at the request of Mordred, the Winter King.”
♦ ♦ ♦
It took a few hours for the excitement surrounding the Black Dragon to fade away, and soon things were humming away as usual at Tamerlane House, with one exception: Nathaniel Hawthorne had doubled the patrols along the islands and the guards at the bridge, just in case the appearance of the Dragonship was somehow a precursor to another attack.
“Remember,” he warned them, “discovering the Architect of the keep and rescuing our friends is not our sole concern. The Echthroi have other agents, and this ship spent a thousand years crossing from a Shadowed Archipelago. I simply want to be cautious—you never know who might also be lurking about.”
John knew without asking that Hawthorne was referring to Dr. Dee and his Cabal. Dee had enlisted the Zen Detective as a double agent to locate the Ruby Armor of T’ai Shan, which was said to give the wearer almost unlimited control over time and space. But not just anyone could wear the armor—it had to be an adept; someone like Rose. Someone the Histories referred to . . .
. . . as the Imago.
The problem was, Dee had just such a personage: a boy, a distant descendant of Rose, who had been rescued from the Archipelago and taken into the past, where he was then kidnapped by Dee’s agent, the traitor Daniel Defoe.
Defoe put the boy prince, called Coal, into a might-have-been, a possible future, for safekeeping. But he made one mistake: Defoe gave the boy a watch—an Anabasis Machine, the time-traveling device all the Caretakers carried. And, being an adept, the boy figured out how to use it on his own and spent a lifetime learning how the world worked. And finally, when Dee pulled him out of the future and gave him the Ruby Armor, the boy Coal, now grown, revealed he had been hiding in plain sight as one of Verne’s Messengers, calling himself Dr. Raven.
Then, in the crucial moment when the adept could have turned the tide against either the Caretakers or the Cabal, he instead gave himself a new name and disappeared. Moments later Dee, his house, and the entire Cabal also vanished. Ever since, the Caretakers had been on guard, waiting, watching for the attack they believed was inevitable.
“Understood,” John said to Hawthorne. “Keep me posted, and keep your silver sledgehammer at the ready.”
♦ ♦ ♦
As they waited for news from Uncas and Quixote, John, Jack, and a few of the Caretakers Emeriti accompanied Shakespeare back to the smaller island, to assist him with some minor adjustments he wanted to make to the Zanzibar Gate. As the poet-inventor worked, the Prime Caretaker examined the still impressive stone structure.