The Indigo King - James A. Owen [122]
The meeting proceeded as he had expected it to; each proposal was met with open enthusiasm and fully proffered support. It would be, he realized, the easiest conquest he’d ever planned, and the most successful, because it would be his last. When this was done, there would be no players on the board but himself.
The rallying offensives of the past year had made his allies arrogant, especially the American president. He was the weakest of them physically, but he commanded the same sort of loyalty as others he had known in the distant past. And he was heading for the same great fall.
If they had not been so concerned with the plans for the war itself, and so enthralled by any credible promise of an added advantage over their enemies, they might have noticed the gentle whirring sounds that the chancellor emitted as he spoke, or the slightly mechanical nature of his movements. But they had not, and so when they left the room, no one looked back at their strange new ally, for if they had, they might have noticed that his shadow had a will of its own and moved of its own accord.
Of course, none among them would have known that it was the shadow that provided the motive power to the Clockwork Man that had been created by talking animals and a man called Nemo, and in another world had been known as the Red King. And if any of them had suspected, they did not care. All that mattered was that he had brought them the weapon that would see them to victory, when the time was right.
It was ironic, he thought. To have sought the weapon once called the Lance of Longinus for so many years, only to discover that it had been in the possession of the Green Knight. Most if not all of their long line, especially the first, would not have entertained the thought of giving it up to one such as he, even if they had been unaware of his plans for it. But the last, Magwich, had been his own servant, and he gave it up for the asking. It had taken time, but the world was once again in flux, and he would have the chance to prove his worth.
And time, the chancellor thought to himself as he cradled the Spear of Destiny in his hands once more, was what it was all about. Time, and how to use it. Because once that question was answered …
… he would rule the world.
Author’s Note
In many ways, the chance to tell the story I created in The Indigo King is the reason the Chronicles of the Imaginarium Geographica exist. The heart of it is a very real event that took place on an evening in September 1931, when J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and Hugo Dyson took a stroll on the grounds around Magdalen College, and discussed the story behind Christianity in the context of its meaning as a mythology rather than a religion.
Lewis had been if not a complete atheist, then something very close to it for most of his life, and although he had finally decided that there was “a” god, he could not wrap his head around the literal truth of the Christian mythology espoused by his friends.
Until that one night.
They walked, and talked, and as Lewis later wrote to his friend Arthur Greeves, “I have just passed on from believing in God to definitely believing in Christ—in Christianity. I will try to explain this another time. My long night talk with Dyson and Tolkien had a good deal to do with it.”
Considering how influential Lewis became as an advocate of Christianity, the chance to imagine possible events for my fictional Jack to experience, that might thematically fold into the real events of his life, was too good to resist.
I had a great starting point for the book with the most-asked question about the other books: Who is the Cartographer? I knew I wanted to tell his complete story, and I’d been careful about dropping hints in the other books. I also wanted to bring my history of the Archipelago into sharper focus, tying it as I have to Odysseus and the Trojan War.
We’d already established connections to Arthurian lore with the lineage of the Silver Throne—but I wanted to go back as far