The Shadow Dragons - James A. Owen [46]
“Are you the welcoming committee?” Charles asked as he jumped to the dock and looped the mooring ties to a pylon. “If so, I’m pleased to meet you.”
“I am what I am,” the cat said, “and if that pleases you, so be it.”
“What does that mean?” asked Jack.
“It means,” the cat replied, tipping its head toward Rose, “that I am like her. Here, and not here, all at once.”
“A riddle?” said John.
“An enigma,” said Rose.
“A conundrum,” said the cat, which tilted its head, then began to disappear.
“My word,” said Charles. “The cat! It’s vanishing!”
“No,” said the cat, which by now was nothing more than a head, floating in the air. “I’m simply going to a place you aren’t looking.”
“That makes perfect sense,” said Rose.
“It’s very confusing,” said Jack.
“Thank you very much,” said the broad smile that was once a whole cat. “You may call me Grimalkin. Welcome to Tamerlane House.”
PART THREE
The League of Poets
The walls were covered with paintings... large enough to step through.
CHAPTER NINE
The House of Tamerlane
The Magician and the Detective pulled the door out of the ship’s hold and dragged it across the field to where the construction was taking place. There were carpenters and bricklayers and all manner of roustabouts scattered across the worksite who were carrying materials and banging on things and generally trying to look busy. But everything always stopped when they delivered a door.
Just so, the Magician thought. The rabble should stop and take notice when I’m onstage. It might not be a formal performance as such, but he and the Detective were performing the job that could only be trusted to the betters of these rabble.
“Are you two idiots going to take all day dragging that door over here?” said a brusque voice.
At the top of the rise, holding the project blueprints, stood a solid man whose eyes glittered with purpose and whose scarred cheeks testified to his will. Richard Burton was not one to suffer fools or layabouts—not for long, anyway.
“Bring it up here,” Burton instructed them, pointing to a frame that had been erected on a patch of clover. “Carefully, now. The Chancellor will not be pleased if we lose another one. Nor will I.”
A few months earlier they had been bringing another door up the rise when some of the workers dropped a wheelbarrow load of bricks from the scaffolding high above. The bricks had struck the door with enough force to shatter it, and splinters were all that was left. Burton had examined them with an Infinite Loupe—a modified set of eyeglasses that could be used to see through time— and proclaimed it to have been linked to the ninth century.
“And to Persia, unless I miss my guess,” Burton had said. “That could have been useful—but it isn’t a time or place that is wholly unknown to me, so we’ll let it go, for now.”
Of course, Burton’s idea of “letting it go” meant beheading the workers who had spilled the bricks, but since it was also useful in motivating the rest of the workers to be more careful, he didn’t see it as a complete waste of effort and resources.
The Detective and the Magician stood the door in place and fitted it to the frame, then stepped back.
Burton wiped his hands on his leather apron and stepped up to the door. Cautiously he reached for the handle and slowly pulled the door open, careful not to step over the threshold.
A bright light emanated from within, giving Burton’s harsh features a demonic cast. Baroque-period music could be heard from somewhere deep in whatever place the door had opened to. “Excellent,” he said as he closed the door. “The Chancellor will be very pleased. A few more, and we’ll be able to give the order to move forward. A few more doors . . .
“. . . and we’ll be able to conquer all of creation.”
The central island of the Nameless Isles was practically barren of vegetation, save for a number of massive stumps of petrified wood, and the black obsidian crystals that were scattered among the dunes.
At the end of the dock, a path formed of obsidian pieces wound its way up the slope