The Shadow Dragons - James A. Owen [97]
“I thought speed was our first priority.”
He shook his head. “Our first priority is success. Speed will be a luxury to indulge in after.”
They had expected to find all manner of detritus along the bottom of the waterfall, but there was nothing to be seen. It was as if they’d crossed over into a pristine world where no human or creature had set foot.
“Apparently, people have taken the warnings seriously,” said Quixote.
“That’s why we put it on the maps,” said the professor.
After promising not to fly out of sight of the Scarlet Dragon, Archimedes lit out to do a little exploring. He was gone only a few minutes when he returned, jabbering excitedly.
“A ship!” he squawked. “I’ve found another ship! Well, most of one, anyway.”
“How do you find ‘most of’ a ship?” asked Rose.
“Part of it is there, and part of it is not,” Archie replied. “You’ve obviously been spending too much time with those idiots at Oxford.”
Archimedes was correct—not a mile away from the falls, on a due west heading, was a ship. It had been badly wrecked and lay in the shallows, with various pieces scattered in the waters nearby.
It was elegantly simple in its design, and several times larger than the Scarlet Dragon. On one side, the painted letters peeling from the effects of weather and age, was the name of the vessel: the Aurora.
“My old ship!” the Professor exclaimed. “I’d always wondered what happened to her!”
“You left her here?” Quixote asked.
“No,” replied the Professor. “We took her back to Paralon, but that was many years ago. Apparently someone tried to duplicate our voyage to the End of the World. But when we went, it was through the Southern Isles, not here.”
“There is an End of the World in the south as well?” Quixote said in surprise. “How can that be?”
“It’s a curious cartological principle,” the professor replied. “If you are standing on the top of the real world at the North Pole, every step you take in any direction will be south. Similarly, the world ends in the same way no matter which path you take to reach it.”
“How did you get it down here, Professor?” asked Rose. “Was it an airship too?”
“The first of them, I believe,” the professor said proudly. “It was a creation of my old friend, Uruk Ko, the Goblin King. Of all the races in the Archipelago, theirs was the most technologically advanced. They had been testing airships for decades before Ko and I decided we wanted to undertake this journey.”
“The ship,” Rose said. “There’s no dragon on the prow.”
“Oh, it wasn’t a Dragonship,” the professor said. “Those were not to be used on a foolhardy exploration such as ours. It was built solely for the journey we took—and it came back in one piece. It was the first time Bert and I had the opportunity to really become friends, and it is one of my fondest memories.”
“But aren’t all the ships similarly equipped with balloons and sails?” Quixote asked. “I understood that to be a recent development.”
“After the old Indigo Dragon was rebuilt as an airship, Prince Stephen initiated the program to convert them all,” said the professor. “He was the only one brave enough to propose doing it to all the Dragonships themselves.”
“I wonder why they were here?” said Rose. “That’s very sad, to have come all this way down the waterfall only to wreck so short a distance away.”
“It weren’t a wreck,” a faint voice said from somewhere ahead of them. “It were a dread sea-beastie, and the crew never even saw it coming.”
The voice had come not from the Aurora, but from the wreckage just below the surface.
Resting amid some coral and sea plants was an oval-shaped frame with the portrait of a well-to-do pirate under a piece of heavy, curved glass. It was halfway hidden by some of the undersea flora and seemed to have gone down with the Aurora, judging by the amount of silt that had accumulated around it.
“I am Captain Charles Johnson,” the portrait said, looking up through the water. “Who is it that you be?