Tad Williams - The Secrets of Ordinary Farm

For a long moment the bearded man grew silent, as if seeing that night again before his eyes. “It was not the great wolf, though, but only a dog,” he said at last. “But, gods, what a dog! A monster thing that rushed out after Gideon and Caesar and would have pulled them both down and killed them. But Simos was faster. You should have seen him, child! Do you think I am strong? Walkwell seized that dog with one hand around its neck and threw it so far away that it did not rise after it had fallen.

“And then Kingaree appeared, tall and dark of face as Loki the mischief-maker himself. He scarcely looked down at the dog’s body as he passed, but stared only at Gideon and Caesar. I did not speak English well then-I had only been speaking your tongue for a year-but I understood what he said next: ‘ You have something of mine.’ ”

“What was he talking about?” Lucinda asked.

Ragnar was squinting against the sun. A rolling, silvery something appeared for a moment at the center of Elliot’s Lagoon. He shook his head. “He meant Caesar.”

“What?”

The big man shrugged. “I do not know the history of this land well, but I know there was a time not long ago here in America when they still had thralls-what you call ‘slaves.’ Caesar was a slave who had escaped. Kingaree was the man who was trying to bring him back.”

“Oh, no! What happened? Why did Gideon bring someone so terrible back to the farm?”

“He didn’t-not by choice, anyway. Gideon had made one of his devil’s bargains with Caesar to help him escape his pursuers, but somehow the Fault Line stayed open longer than usual and Kingaree followed them back. At first Kingaree would not believe what had happened, but at last he came to see the truth.”

“Then what?”

“Gideon promised Kingaree that if he behaved himself he could live on the farm too and be safe… but that was making a devil’s bargain with the devil himself. Jackson Kingaree stayed only until he had learned what he could. Then, on the night of the laboratory fire, he slipped away. We have not seen him since-at least not until you met him in the street. Me, I hoped we would never see him again.”

Thinking how close she had been to this Kingaree made Lucinda feel queasy. “Why is everyone so scared of him?”

Ragnar shook his head-firmly this time. “You do not need to hear any more stories. All you need to know is to keep away from this man if you ever see him again. Tell Simos or me as fast as you can. Or Gideon.”

Lucinda’s heart fell further. “Tell Gideon? Sure, if we ever find him. If this Kingaree guy hasn’t killed him or something… ”

Ragnar clicked his tongue and flapped the reins. Culpepper began to pull the wagon back onto the road, leaving Elliot and his broad silver pond behind. “Do not underestimate Gideon Goldring, child,” the bearded man said. “You know how stubborn he is. Well, Gideon is also stronger and more determined than you can guess.”

As Colin Needle walked toward the library he watched the male dragon Alamu flying in long, lazy circles a few hundred feet above the house as if enjoying the sight of Colin’s mother’s sprawling gardens. A little afternoon sun peeked through the heavy clouds, glinting off the creature’s coppery scales and shining through the gray membranes of his wings-the only brightness Colin had seen in hours. A storm was moving in on the valley, a swell of thunderheads crouched above the farthest hills like an angry genie. Alamu glided low, then swung high into the air again.

Electric fences are all well and good, Colin thought, but what if Ed Stillman and his men are camped out there on Springs Road taking pictures with a telephoto lens right now? It’s going to be hard for him to miss an actual dragon flying around. His stomach flopped in queasy discontent: just one more thing to worry about.

The billionaire Stillman had double-crossed him last summer, but what was worse was that Colin had fallen for the man’s lies-in fact, he had been as gullible as one of the Jenkins kids. That still didn’t sit well. Now Ed Stillman was just one more, apparently permanent problem. Somebody was going to have to solve these problems and save Ordinary Farm. Gideon Goldring was gone, maybe dead; Colin’s mother was busy picking up the slack of Gideon’s absence; and Walkwell and Ragnar and the Jenkins children were no use at all. Only Colin Needle could solve the farm’s problems and make everything work again.

The sad thing, though-the truly infuriating thing-was that only Colin himself seemed to understand that.

In the library Colin sat among the papers and books piled on his table and felt something like despair. Almost every weekday for two months he had been sitting here, keeping an eye out for another Magic Necklace Drop (as he sarcastically thought of it) and had filled the time studying everything he could find about the science of the Fault Line (because none of his plans for the farm would work if he couldn’t use the Fault Line.) And what did he have to show for all that work? Piles of physics books he could barely read, let alone understand, because they were full of crazy terms like ergodicity and Poincare Recurrence Theorem and Loschmidt’s Paradox, terms that Colin couldn’t make much sense out of even when he found them in ordinary science books. Still, he had worked his way through all of them, making plenty of notes at first, but as it became clearer and clearer that the science was far beyond him he had mostly given up. Despite what he’d said to Tyler Jenkins, Colin knew he was never going to make a Continuascope on his own; he had only threatened it to make his enemy worry.

As for finding Grace, he didn’t think he was going to have any luck with that either. She had disappeared so completely on that night twenty years ago that almost everyone on the farm assumed she’d somehow wound up in the Fault Line. But if she had, why should her golden locket turn up here in the library, a thousand yards away from the silo and the strange phenomenon hidden beneath it? Gideon only had Tyler Jenkins’ word that it had actually come from the library, but the old man had still stuck Colin in the library, lonely as a lighthouse keeper, waiting for some other memento of Grace’s to show up, all on Tyler Jenkins’ dubious say-so…

A new and startling thought came to Colin then, an idea so astonishing that for a moment he forgot to breathe. The Jenkins brat had already been in the Fault Line once and traveled to the Ice Age-by accident, he had claimed-then walked back out again no worse for wear, the cave girl Ooola trailing after him like a lovesick puppy. But what if that hadn’t been an accident? What if Tyler had found a Continuascope of his own-perhaps some early prototype of Octavio Tinker’s? If so, then he might have found the locket somewhere in the Fault Line and just pretended to find it here in the library, to keep everyone fooled about where it had really come from…

But if Tyler Jenkins had his own Continuascope, why was he always asking questions about the whereabouts of the old one? That didn’t make sense. Colin knew that if he had a Continuascope, he’d be in the Fault Line every time he had the chance.

So much was happening, and it was so hard to make sense of it all. The Jenkins kids were back on the farm. Gideon had disappeared. Kingaree had returned. Could all those things happening at the same time really be coincidence?

Thunder rumbled over the distant hills. Colin Needle decided he was tired of secrets. It was time to talk to the one person who almost certainly knew more than she had told him so far… about everything.

His mother stood in front of the elaborate old Victorian washstand and the pretty, black-haired woman in the mirror looked back at her, expression thoughtful and pale face somber. She was so beautiful! Looking at her now, Colin couldn’t believe he had been about to tell Lucinda Jenkins that he suspected her of knowing more than she was saying about Gideon’s disappearance. Yes, his mother might have a temper, but he felt certain she would never do anything to harm the man who had saved her life…!