The Shadow Dragons - James A. Owen [3]
“How can you be lost?” his friend Jack asked with a barely concealed grin. “You’re the Principal Caretaker of the Imaginarium Geographica. You’re probably the foremost authority on maps in the entire world. How is it you’ve managed to get us lost not two hours’ walk from Oxford?”
“I wasn’t paying attention,” John said irritably. “I was enjoying the conversation and the company. After all, this is the first time in almost twenty years that the three of us have been able to come together as friends out in the open. I like secret societies as much as the next man, but actually having Charles participate as a formal member of the Inklings is going to be delightful.”
“Agreed,” said Jack, clapping Charles on the back. “The ability to share things with Hugo has been a blessing, but I’ve been itching to discuss your work at length with Arthur Greeves and Owen Barfield.”
“It was fortuitous that Greeves sent you a copy of my new book,” Charles agreed, “at the same time that you sent your own to the Oxford University Press. It was just the sort of coincidental happening that’s interesting enough to sound truthful.”
“That’s because it is true,” Jack insisted, “and all the more significant for it. Although we’re going to have to work on our timing for these private walkabouts—I had to bow out of a walking tour with Barfield and Cecil Harwood to come out today.”
“And I suppose you never get lost?” John said, raising a skeptical eyebrow.
Jack made a dismissive motion with his hands. “Never,” he said primly. “We always bring a map, and I am, after all, the best map reader. Honestly, it’s a mystery to me why I wasn’t made the Caretaker Principia in your place.”
John laughed. “I’ll gladly give you the job right now,” he said, pretending to remove his pack as Jack whistled and looked the other way, pretending to ignore him, “unless we can find someone better qualified, like a badger or a faun.”
“I think you’re both looney,” said Charles, “and it’s starting to rain.”
They all looked up at the overcast sky, and as one, had the same thought. It had been raining on the night they first met in London—the night their lives were irrevocably changed.
It had been nearly two decades since the three men were brought together at the scene of a terrible crime. John’s mentor, a professor of ancient literature named Stellan Sigurdsson, had been killed by a man called the Winter King, who was searching for the book known as the Imaginarium Geographica. John was being trained to become the next Caretaker of the great book, and Jack and Charles, as much through circumstance as by design, became Caretakers as well. With the help of another Caretaker called Bert, who became their trusted mentor, they managed to keep the Winter King from using the book to conquer the Archipelago of Dreams, the great chain of islands for which the atlas was the only guide—but at great cost. Friends and allies were lost, hard lessons were learned; and even then, their nemesis returned again and again like a persistent nightmare at the edge of the waking world.
At the end of their first conflict, a great Dragon called Samaranth had dropped the Winter King over the edge of an endless waterfall. But nine years after that adventure, the three companions returned to the Archipelago to search for the great Dragonships that had vanished—along with all the children— only to discover that his Shadow had survived and was as deadly as the real Winter King himself.
Five years after that, they found themselves drawn into yet another crisis, when rogue Caretakers who had allied themselves with the Winter King tricked their friend Hugo Dyson into going through a door to the past—where he changed history itself.
Only by traveling through the events of two millennia and discovering the identity of the Cartographer of Lost Places, who created the Geographica, were they at last able to set things right. But what they discovered was disturbing: The Cartographer, who was once Merlin, was in large part responsible