The Shadow Dragons - James A. Owen [89]
Defoe let out a bark of a laugh and was elbowed in the ribs by Hawthorne. The professor responded only with a smile that was more melancholy than admonishing.
“That’s more true than you realize, John,” he said, clapping his protégé on the shoulder.
“Have we missed something?” Jack asked. Charles shrugged and looked at Twain, who merely observed the three companions and puffed on his cigar.
“Rules of time may be broken,” said Professor Sigurdsson. “Rules of space may be broken. But not together, and not at the same, ah, time, so to speak. Bent, sometimes, in the rarest of circumstances. But not broken.”
“There are limitations,” Bert explained. “It’s one of the reasons that this place has been kept such a secret. Yes, using Verne’s technology it is possible to do as we have done, and summon personages from the past to dine, and discuss, and determine the fate of the world. But the price they pay is that this is all there is—none of them may pass beyond the threshold of Tamerlane House and live.”
John sank back in despair. “Then we’re handicapped before we start.”
“Seven days,” came a voice from the upper floor, ghostlike and ethereal. “One may pass outside this door, but unless he crosses back before the end of seven days, he will vanish back into the ether.”
“Is that true?” said John, looking at Bert, then the professor.
“I’d trust in Poe,” said Bert. “It is his house, after all, and much of what Jules learned was based on his writings. If he says seven days, then you can plan on it.”
“You can’t do it, Professor,” John said, already anticipating his mentor’s decision. “We’ll find some way to communicate your instructions, to transfer the information they need to navigate to them without sending you in person. There must be some other way.”
“It’s a bit odd, isn’t it?” said Charles. “We have the ability to travel around in time, and into alternate dimensions. We can summon people from the dead. And we’re at an impasse to save the world because no one thought to install a telephone system in the Archipelago.”
“Actually, we tried,” Bert replied. “Nemo was keen to do it, but we could never get all the lands to agree to hook it up. And when you add to that the peculiar weather patterns, the temporal shifts, and mermaids who had a tendency to chew up any cables strung underwater, the result was the lostest of lost causes. The badgers have set up a rudimentary version, but it’s not much more advanced than a telegraph, I’m afraid.”
“There is no other way, John,” the professor said. “Other than Bert, I’m the only one who has ever traveled that far west—at least, the only one willing to act as a guide.”
They all knew from the professor’s hangdog expression that he was thinking of his old friend Uruk Ko, the Goblin King.
The Goblins were among the most ancient and noble races in the Archipelago, and Uruk Ko and Stellan Sigurdsson had shared a love of adventure and discovery that had culminated in an unprecedented journey. But when the first war with the Winter King took place, Uruk Ko chose to side with Mordred. And after they were defeated, he closed the borders of the Goblin lands to all outsiders.
“We can persuade the Goblin King to do it, somehow,” John pleaded. “It’s worth trying, and better than you going to a certain death.”
The professor laughed heartily at this. “My boy, I have already suffered a certain death, as you put it. Anything from here on out is just gravy.”
“But you’re alive again! It’s such an opportunity!” John cried. “We can’t just waste it!”
The professor took his young study—who was now nearing the age he had been when he died—firmly by the arms and looked into his eyes.
“John,” Professor Sigurdsson said gently, “the reason we were given the chance to come here, now, to this extraordinary place, was to discuss the gravest of crises at the most crucial time in history. Only we Caretakers, gathered here in this way, have the means to decide