A Lion Among Men (23 page)

His offer to pay back to the banks any funds deemed to have been illegally skimmed off the released Animal accounts was met with “no comment.” The court wasn’t in a mood for bargaining. Brrr spent a few weeks in a holding pen, no worse a lodging than that old ministerial croft in which Professor Lenx and Mister Mikko were entering their dotage. One night the Lion was bundled into a special convicts’ train that traveled at midnight from Shiz to the capital. Within a mile or two of the Emperor’s Palace, Brrr knew, hunched Southstairs, the underground prison carved on the site of a megalithic tomb. He imagined the place as a massive mouth of Oz. It ground its stony gullet, waiting for Brrr’s carcass.

But there were a few steps to endure first, the joke of applying for an appeal in the Emerald City, the punishment of having to wait for a hearing until the meanest magistrate was free of social obligations. The usual foul skirmishes.

By dint of the judgment against him his assets were frozen pending appropriation. (Someone had to pay for his incarceration in Southstairs, and better the accused than the state.) He wasn’t a lamb thrown to the lions-he knew that-he was a Lion thrown to the lethal but dominant Lambs of the Unnamed God.

Then, if you could call it that, a stroke of luck at last. Someone serving as a Friend of the Court had recognized him in chambers; it was the Margreave of Tenmeadows, a Gillikinese noble named Avaric. For his own amusement if nothing else, Avaric worked in Secret Affairs, an arm of the Palace defense team. Before Brrr’s final appeal review could be canceled due to insufficient cause, and before he could be led off to prison, Avaric arranged a meeting between the criminal and the sentencing judge, a professional scold named Miss Eldersdotter. At the Court’s discretion the Margreave was allowed to attend.

“You are a Namory, as I understand it,” said Miss Eldersdotter. Her shiny jaw bristled with so many ugly hairs she could have knitted herself a chin wipe out of them.

“Sir Brrr, Low Plenipotentiary of Traum,” he replied.

“The first Animal so honored,” interjected Lord Avaric.

“All the more reason to set an example,” snapped Miss Eldersdotter. “You should be ashamed of yourself, Brrr.” Her refusal to use the honorific was nothing less than a taunt. He governed his temper.

“I am mightily ashamed of what has happened,” he said coolly.

“And well you might be.” Her eye was trained on documents. He expected if he kept replying she would keep answering his assertions so as to have the last word. I remain deeply ashamed, Your Honor. As it should be, Brrr. And as it is, Your Honor. I would expect it to be so, Brrr. And on. And on.

Then she looked up and said, “Not the Cowardly Lion of the incident out West? That little contretemps with the dainty Dorothy? You do get around.”

“The same, Your Honor, though I don’t include the sobriquet on my letterhead.”

Lord Avaric snorted. Even Miss Eldersdotter had to twitch a smile into submission.

“So you had doings with the Wicked Witch of the West and her witch-boy.”

“Doings would be putting a mighty fine gloss upon it. I accompanied Dorothy to the West and spent the evening in question mostly locked in a kitchen storeroom.”

“You know the lad called Liir. Her son, some say.”

“He won’t be a lad anymore if he is still alive. I knew him for a few weeks, and that was the end of it.”

“Have you an opinion as to whether he really was her son? Did he ever show signs of any particular talent at spells?”

“He showed little initiative in the time I knew him, and no promise of any sort.”

“Still,” she said noncommittally. “Still. And even so.”

“We may have an opportunity here,” said the Margreave.

“I begin to see what you are on about, Lord Avaric. Would you like to present your proposal to the Court? Since we are about to be off-record, Miss Saucerly, you may break for an early tea.”

Miss Saucerly fled. Miss Eldersdotter took off her magistrate’s wig to reveal a flattened little steel-blond hairdo, spare and dispirited. She fluffed her hair with Miss Saucerly’s pencil as Lord Avaric spoke.

Brrr looked out the window, his future in the hands of others. He listened, but not too closely at first, afraid to become hopeful about whatever Lord Avaric was proposing. Miss Eldersdotter asked a few questions and made a few notes. At one point she dispatched a pigeon to the Palace, requesting information from someone, and the pigeon returned twenty minutes later, the reply scribbled on the back of the same scroll.

Thus was the plot hatched to transpose Brrr’s punishment from incarceration in the highest security prison in Oz to a civic alternative: government service. By virtue of his experience with the Wicked Witch of the West and her putative son, Liir, Brrr would be engaged to do some research for the Courts and for Secret Affairs.

He would find out what happened to Liir after he was last seen some eight years ago, suspected of having holed up for sanctuary in this very mauntery of Saint Glinda in the Shale Shallows. He would poke around for this and that among the Witch’s effects. Interview a few witnesses.

To what end? Brrr insisted on following the point. Not because he would take it into account-just-because. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but he was a big Cat and had a higher tolerance for curiosity than some.

“Lord Avaric will explain. Case retired.” Miss Eldersdotter closed the file and rubbed her temples. “Before you take up your new assignment, Brrr, I wonder if you could illuminate me about that aspect of your career involving the assessment of antique prints. I inherited a set of moldy old things from my widowed aunt in Tenniken, and I suspect they are worth a pretty bundle.”

All kinds of possibilities emerged. He held his tongue until his thoughts settled in his mind. Then he said evenly, “I am afraid the market has changed so much since I was professionally involved, Your Honor, that I would no longer be qualified to offer a judgment.”

“Well,” she said, “so few of us are.” And she all but leaned back in her chair and kicked up her heels, laughing at her own little self-coronation.

Suppose Miss Eldersdotter’s widowed aunt had been the mother of Jemmsy the foot soldier. That would make the magistrate and Jemmsy first cousins. But if she were so related, Brrr didn’t want to know. Poetic justice could be just that ironic, but why allow it to trounce upon his frailest feelings?

Once the plea bargain had been struck and approved and signed in triplicate, and the copies filed and their receipts stamped in triplicate and themselves filed, he was free to leave his cell. In a brougham, Lord Avaric arrived to collect Brrr at the door of Saint Satalin’s Nook for Petty Criminals. The Margreave proposed luncheon at a respectable establishment, but Brrr said he had no appetite. This was only partly a lie, as he certainly had no appetite to be seen dining in public.

So Avaric took Brrr on a walk along the Ozma Embankment, where they couldn’t be overheard by pedestrians. Avaric had a little device called an air pistol that, when fired, made a sudden bang, and the nearby avian population involuntarily launched themselves into a frenzy. The swans on the canal hammered the water with their powerful wings, thwacking the lilies, splashing themselves airborne. No small winged spies remained near enough to overhear Avaric’s revelations.

“You’re right to ask about your obligations to the Court,” he confided to Brrr. “Secrecy is all very good, but an agent can best do his job if he knows the parameters.”

Brrr pulled the collar up around his ruff. He was furious, but he was free. The Ozma Embankment was in spring bloom. Butterflies, untroubled by the salute of the gun, pasted themselves on the limbs of miniature ornamental quoxwoods. Bees reprised their hymns to the goddess nectar. A street sweeper in leg irons sang, too, some pagan paean to Lurlina. The roses were a week from cresting. His eyes watered at the notion of how swiftly this could have been swept away. The beauty. The bastards.

“I don’t know why you took my part,” he said to Lord Avaric.

“Don’t be craven,” said the Margreave. “It wasn’t high sentiment, believe me. As I hear it told, you were once labeled a Witch’s familiar, back when she was public enemy number one. And-how talented you are, really-you’ve also been tarred as a collaborationist, taking the part of the Wizard against your own nativist Animal population. Both the left and the right have called you seditious. You’re despised by all. That’s a good profile in our line of work. If you’ve had some actual practice in betrayal, you’re better able to carry off the scheme again.”

Brrr did not reply. He had never considered himself either a defender of the Witch or a collaborationist with the Wizard; that had been an interpretation of the press and general public feeling. As if guessing his thoughts, Avaric continued, “Don’t mind me. A traitor can skew his moral compunctions around any new endeavor and make it seem the correct and even laudable course of action. That’s also part of the makeup of a spy: the ability to convince himself of the rightness of his aims.”

Brrr found the courage to say, “Sir, I am no spy.”

“Well, that’s just fine,” said Avaric, unflappable. “You’re just a Namory who has narrowly escaped imprisonment for treason. How lucky that you have such patriotic impulses. All ready to help the nation in a little fact-finding mission! And since you’re no traitor either, as I see you are about to claim, you’ll have no qualms in working on behalf of Secret Affairs.”

They had reached the place on the Ozma Embankment where one could turn around and look back along the Grand Canal to see the Throne Palace. It stood shining on its little blunted peninsula above the reflecting basin. The emeralds in its facade winked like reflections on a lake: at this hour, from this point, the palace looked as if it were built of the purest water.

This prospect was the subject of dozens of mettanite etchings and coldstone engravings. He knew it as he knew the back of his own paw. But seeing the view for real, in stone and jewel and waterway rather than in watercolor washed over ink on paper-well, it thrilled one to the bone, even as the power the Palace represented gave one a cramp.

“From what I hear tell,” Avaric was saying, “Old Elphaba, that crankina on a broom, once gave the Wizard of Oz a page from a book she called the Grimmerie. She was tempting him with it, using the book as a bargaining chip to arrange for the release of a political prisoner named Nor. The good Wizard refused to negotiate with a terrorist like her, but, frankly, he was tempted. He’d had knowledge of that magic book for some time, and he wanted it. The single page he managed to get from Elphaba that day was responsible for the knowledge of how to train dragons for use in military maneuvers.”

“Some book,” said Brrr cautiously.

“How much more the Wizard might have achieved had he gotten the whole book! But the Wizard abdicated-some say he was deposed, as he deposed the Ozma Regent before him-and notions of those magic gospels were forgotten for a while during the short, giddy reigns of Glinda the Good and the Scarecrow after her.”

“Yes,” said Brrr, unable to resist boasting about his connections. “I was once quite au fait with the Scarecrow, as it happens.”

“Indeed you were. Of course you were. Then you will remember how Shell, Elphaba’s brother, ascended to the throne in that smooth, unresisted way. The Scarecrow as good as a butler, the way he melted away without a murmur.”

“I was traveling at the time, but I learned of it later.”

“It was Shell’s ministers, combing the Treasury for negotiable commodities to fund his army, who came across the page on dragons.”

Avaric explained further. Since the writing on the reverse side of the page had seemed to be the second half of a spell, not otherwise identified, no one had paid it much mind at first. But then the Emperor had engaged a scholar of magic at Shiz-a Miss Greyling, spelled g-r-e-y, or maybe it is spelled g-r-a-y-something like that-to decipher what she could of the spell’s conclusion and to infer, if possible, the spell’s name and intention.

“That would take some talent,” Brrr ventured.

“She spent several years over it,” continued Avaric. “Eventually she made her report to the Emperor. As near as she could tell, the verso of the manuscript page was the second part of a spell to reveal hidden inscriptions. Codes, watermarks, the like. A universal spell for the deciphering of runes. Perhaps even the location of individuals in hiding; could it be? Either that or, perhaps, a recipe for oatmeal fritters. It was hard to be sure.

“‘What we need,’ our Emperor Shell replied, ‘is the rest of this text so we could use it to reveal the location of the Grimmerie to us. A circular ambition, but once we had the Grimmerie, what else we might be able to do!’”

“What does the Grimmerie look like?” asked Brrr. “Not that I was ever one for books or that sort of thing. My expertise was limited to flat pieces done on private presses.”

“Few could ever have seen it,” said Avaric. “So there’s no reliable description. By the size of the page that Shell has in his treasury, it is a big codex, a tome-a foot square, perhaps.” He looked narrowly at Brrr. “You were one of the few to go to the Witch’s castle while she was thought to have it in her possession. I mean, the others-dead or disappeared. The entire Tigelaar family, who held the castle called Kiamo Ko before the Witch took up residence, was captured and imprisoned. One of them, that child named Nor, escaped from Southstairs a few years ago-she might know the whereabouts of the Grimmerie.”

“Well, ask her.”

“You find her and ask her. Also, the boy named Liir, who some say is Elphaba’s son, had gone to Southstairs hunting for her. Perhaps he had seen the book, too, and was looking for his half sister to work with. But he also has gone into hiding. Oz is just riddled with hidey-holes, to judge by the number of useful folk that we can’t seem to locate. Can you imagine what a boon it would be, if the government could get its paws on the rest of the spell-to say nothing of the rest of that book?”

“Surely the Witch’s castle has been searched?” asked Brrr. He didn’t want to go back there again; he’d almost rather sign up for a season in prison. Those flying monkeys-it made his flesh creep to remember them.