Here, There Be Dragons

the tasks that lie before you. Now you must overcome the fear that is preventing you from embracing your destiny.”
“The fear that I am too weak?” asked John.
“No,” said the professor. “The fear that you are too strong.”
John was taken aback. “Too strong? How can I be too strong? I’ve failed at every task I’ve been given.”
“Because of your fear,” said the professor. “Not because you were incapable. Our weaknesses are always evident, both to ourselves and to others. But our strengths are hidden until we choose to reveal them—and that is when we are truly tested. When all that we have within is exposed, and we may no longer blame our inadequacies for our failure, but must instead depend upon our strengths to succeed…that is when the measure of a man is taken, my boy.
“Believe in yourself. Believe that you were not meant to spend your life in dusty libraries, nor in the battlefields of war, but in doing something greater.
“Believe in yourself, John, and that you have it within you to lead an extraordinary life.
“Just believe, my boy. My dear boy. Believe.”
The wind rattled the windows of the study, the first indication that the weather was shifting.
“I think a storm is coming in,” said the professor. “I’ve said what needed saying, and I think it’s time for you to go.”
As if punctuating his words, a tapping sound had begun down the street outside. The professor rose and clapped his student on the shoulders.
“You’ll do fine, my boy,” he said as he opened the door, “and remember, whatever happens—I have been, and always shall be, very proud of you.”
With that, John stepped out of the study and closed the door.
Once more he found himself standing in the Keep of Time.
“Is something wrong?” asked Aven.
“What do you mean?”
“You just stepped inside,” said Charles. “Just this moment. The door closed, then opened again. You weren’t gone for but a second or two.”
“Impossible,” said John. “I’ve been talking with Professor Sigurdsson for the past half hour.”
“The doorways,” said Jack. “They manipulate one’s perceptions of time. To John, it was half an hour. To us, out here in the keep, it was no time at all.”
“What did he say to you, John?” Bert pressed.
John tilted his head, then smiled. “He said we have a job to do.”
As he spoke, the familiar rumbling sound started again, and as the companions watched, the floor shifted beneath their feet, and the ceiling expanded, as if the keep were taking in a breath.
“I think the tower just grew,” said Charles.
“That makes sense,” said Bert. “This is nearly the last room—if all of the other doorways led to points in the past, then it stands to reason that the Cartographer’s room, there near the top, is constantly moving into the future, and the one above is in the future.”
The door they had determined to be the Cartographer’s was the only one in the entire keep that had a keyhole. Jack squatted down on his haunches and peered through.
“Spare me your furtiveness,” said a clipped, slightly irritated voice from behind the door. “It’s very rude to peep through keyholes—either knock down the door or go away.”
Jack stood upright. “Do you have a key?”
“I have a thousand keys,” said Bert, “but none that would fit this lock.”
Charles reached out a hand and pushed. The door didn’t budge. “Solid,” he said. “Not like any of the others. Maybe we’re meant to try to knock it down?”
“Perhaps we could pick the lock,” Artus said, as he reached out to examine the mechanism. At his touch there was a sharp click, and the door opened with a slight creaking.
“Hmm,” said Artus. “Didn’t expect that to happen.”
He pushed it open the rest of the way, and together, the companions entered the room at the top of the stairs.

“If you’re here about the annotations, you’re early.”

Chapter Fifteen

The Cartographer of Lost Places

The room was expansive, but not overly so. The walls—what could be seen of them—were stone, but every available surface was covered with maps. Old ones, new ones, maps topographical, cultural, political, and agricultural. There were maps of the moon, as well as Antarctica, and even maps that were obviously of the Earth, but of a kind that seemed to have coalesced the continents into a single landmass.

There was a scattering of bookshelves, all laden with volumes of what they presumed were more maps. And save for the two pieces immediately in front of them, no other furniture. The rest of the room was filled with globes, surveying equipment, and rolls upon rolls of parchment, all of which served the purpose and namesake of the man they had come to find.

There, in the center of the room, sketching at a carved wooden desk, was the Cartographer of Lost Places. He was sitting on the edge of a high-backed chair with the emblem of a Sun King carved into the top, intensely focused on the task at hand. He would draw a few quick lines with a large quill, before dipping it into an inkwell on the desk while considering what to do next. He would then make a few more lines, and repeat the entire process.

The Cartographer, for all the legendary dross of rumor and mystique that surrounded him, was rather unremarkable in appearance. He was shortish and stocky, and he wore spectacles that were perched on a bulbous nose. His hair, which was dark save for two streaks of white that grew above his temples, was swept back and flowed to his shoulders.

He wore the scarlet robes that a knight who might have served during the Crusades, or possibly the Inquisition, would have worn. His belt was Roman or Greek, bound tightly over a skirt fashioned from strips of studded leather; and underneath all the rest, he was wrapped in strips of cloth that covered his legs and feet and extended to his wrists.

“Yes?” he said, finally taking notice of his visitors. “If you’re here about the annotations, you’re early. It’s the wrong damned Friday.”