Out of Oz: The Final Volume in the Wicked Years (31 page)

“I just wanted to…” Rain put out her hand, palm down, indicating something to Muhlama, but Brrr had no patience. He roared at Rain and she backed up, not so much horrified as, perhaps, embarrassed for him.

“I never thought I’d see you do that,” said Muhlama as the girl retreated. “Roar, I mean. Didn’t quite seem in your makeup. She’s only a human cub, of course. But that was relatively convincing. Have you gone on the stage?”

He couldn’t chitchat. “Were you going to harm her?”

“Why would I want to do that? Of course not. I’ve been looking for her. For you al. The aerial reconnaissance team finaly located you after what, a year? I’ve been sent here to swim in the Field of Lost Dreams and drag you out by the scruff of your necks, if I needed to. You’ve been a long time making your way.”

“It’s quite a passage, this Sleeve of Ghastile.”

“You’re almost through. Two miles on there’s real grass. Let’s decamp there.”

“I have to see to the Clock.”

“Not much left of that, it looks like.”

They both soft-footed it over to the heap of split canvas and detritus. One wheel was spinning slowly like a roulette. Mr. Boss was pale, and Little Daffy was trying to fling her arms around him, but he was having none of it. “We’re over, we’re history,” he was saying. “Conscience dead, history buried.”

Rain sat down in the shadow of the wreck and draped one of the leather wings over her head, a tent of sorts. Ilianora stared at Brrr with fierce eyes as if something were al his fault. Wel, he was used to that, but not in a while, and not from her.

“How bad is it?” he asked the dwarf. Mr. Boss was blubbering. So the Lion looked for himself.

The wheels on the right side had buckled so that the left side, the most prominent of the stage areas, was exposed to view like a corpse. The Clock’s last revelation? Brrr felt prurient to peer at it, but peer he did. They al did.

The shutters were flung wide. The proscenium had split at the top and its segments overlapped like misaligned front teeth. The red velvet curtain, falen from its rings, draped off the front of the stage, a loling tongue.

In the mouth of the Clock, its main stage, lay some composite material, papier-mâché perhaps, made up to look like stones. On one side of the stage they resembled boulders having avalanched down a cliffside, but on the other side they seemed more carved, as if to imitate the rusticated facades of great stone buildings.

The place didn’t look much like the Emerald City, nor like Shiz. Nothing like Qhoyre.

No, this looked like a foreign city-state. Maybe someplace in Ix or Fliaan, if those places even existed. Brrr had his doubts.

Or an imagined place. As if such places existed, either.

Bits and pieces of puppets lay strewn about, spiled into an effectively ropey sort of red, almost like poppy juice. No figure resembled anyone even marginaly familiar. No stripe-stockinged witch crushed under a farmhouse. No corpse of baby Ozma bundled upside down into an open sewer. No costume, even, that anyone could identify—no Messiars or Menaciers from the military of Loyal Oz’s Home Guard, no cunning Munchkinlander folk getup for delighting tourists, no glamour gowns from palace bals. In their rictus, the puppets looked only like carved bits of wood and painted plasticine. The strings that held them in place lay snapped atop them. Dead, they convinced nothing about Death, except via the corolary that Life, perhaps, had always been made from scrap materials, and always would be.

“It’s an earthquake,” said Mr. Boss at last. He turned to Brrr. “You did this to it. You kiled it.”

“She caled out,” said the Lion. His use of the pronoun for his wife was the cruelest remark he had ever made, but he couldn’t help himself. “The girl comes before the Clock. As you should have known this last year, and some.”

“I told you we shouldn’t take her on!” The dwarf staggered about in a circle, beating his forehead with his fists. “The Clock saw the danger, and warned me against her!”

“I don’t cause earthquakes,” said Rain.

“Looks a heap of damaged goods to me,” said Muhlama.

Little Daffy found the Grimmerie a few feet away, lying where it had been pitched. Hidden in the shadow of the dragon’s ripped wing, as if the last act of the failing tiktokery had been to protect the magic book.

The Clock might be sprung at last, its mechanism despoiled after a century of charm, but the book remained closed to prying fingers.

“Let’s right the old lady, anyway, and see if we can cobble together a repair,” said Brrr. He wept a little, as if the dragon had been a companion too, and dissected one of its wings to remove a salowwood humerus. With his little knife the dwarf fashioned enough of a substitute axle to manage.

They dragged the dead Clock through the last few miles of the Sleeve of Ghastile. In a shadowy meadow where the brook widened out, they paused to breathe the air less thick with poppy dust.

Brrr noticed it was autumn again. More than a year had passed since they had taken Rain from Lady Glinda. The twisted bows of pretzel puzzle trees were raging with hornets doing their anxious final dance.

The leaves were faling, red and gold. They fel into the open mouth of the theater. When the sun began to set over the Great Kels and its light struck the stage, the earthquake event glowed as if it had been further plagued by a conflagration.

After a pick-me-up supper had been prepared and mostly ignored, and they were sitting around a smal fire of their own, the company of the Clock without, it seemed, the Clock to cohere them, Brrr asked of Muhlama, “On whose agency have you been trying to rope us in? You weren’t a team player when last we met, as I recal.”

“Stil not,” she said, yawning. “I’ve turned my back on my tribe, as you did on yours, Sir Brrr. But I never took up with humans. Yes, I’ve heard al about your later … accomplishments.” She had lost none of her power of condescension, he saw, almost affectionately. She continued. “I have no money on the matter of governments either way. I owe no loyalty to the grandees of the Emerald City or to the pipsqueaks of Munchkinland.” Little Daffy glowered at her in defense of her people, but Muhlama was impervious to a Munchkin glower.

“Someone sent you,” prompted Brrr.

“Someone asked me to come,” she agreed. “Someone said you might be in danger. I thought it might be amusing to watch. I had owed you something, after al.” She had. Brrr’s daliance with her had given her the alibi to leave the line of succession of the Spice Tiger camp. To escape the destiny of leadership her father, Uyodor H’aekeem, had required of her. Brrr saw that much more clearly now, since he too hadn’t been above using others as pawns for his own ambitions. “I was happy to help,” he said. “Way back then.”

“I made you happy to help,” she admitted. She flicked her tail in a way that reminded him of her seduction, the sordor of it, the ardor of it. But her tail was a commentary on Animal relations, not a come-on.

“You freed me from my own prison. These years later, the moment arrived for me to try to do the same for you.” She looked sideways at Ilianora, who appeared as if carved out of ivory, staring at the flames, and added drily, “If that’s your wife, perhaps I didn’t come soon enough.”

“Tel us what you know,” he said. “Has the invasion by Loyal Oz been successful? Has Haugaard’s Keep falen? Is the Emperor stil blathering on his throne? It’s been a year since we’ve lost touch with the news.”

She limned it in quickly. “The Munchkinlanders defended their positions for as long as they could, but eventualy they had to abandon the lake. Al but the eastern fort. For a while it’s looked as if Loyal Oz wil keep Restwater, requiring a retrocession of that edge of Munchkinland. Perhaps, folks said, to avoid further incursions, the Munchkinland Eminence would settle the matter, accepting the loss of the lake in exchange for political integrity of the rest of Munchkinland.”

“The EC only ever wanted water,” said the Lion.

“Not true. They also need the grain supplied by the breadbasket of Oz, in central Munchkinland,” Muhlama argued. “They need enough of a détente that commerce can begin again. There’s been a certain amount of unrest and deprivation in the Emerald City while Oz is engaged in this civil war.”

“So what’s the problem?” asked Brrr. “They sue for peace.”

“The Emperor,” said Muhlama, and yawned. “Shel Thropp. You remember him? I see you do. The younger brother of those sister witches, Elphaba and Nessarose. He has declared himself divine. He has promoted himself god.”

“Nice work if you can get it,” said Mr. Boss, his first comment in hours.

“The Munchkinlanders had enough of godliness after their years under the yoke of Nessarose,” replied the Ivory Tiger. “They’re commonsense when it comes to commerce, but they get their backs up when it comes to dogma. They won’t negotiate with a god. Who could? So just as it seemed a peace might be brokered, the Emperor had to go do a pious makeover and provoke the humble Munchkinlanders, who never ever shal be slaves. It’s not money. It’s some dim little ember of self-respect that won’t die out in the stout breasts of Munchkinlanders.”

“I’m not that stout,” said Little Daffy. “I’d say pleasingly plump.”

“The plumper, the pleasinglier,” said Mr. Boss, laying his head thereupon.

“Who is leading this Munchkinlander resistance to a brokered settlement?” asked Brrr. “When Nessarose was kiled by that house of Dorothy…”

“I remember that,” said Little Daffy. “I was there that day.”

Brrr continued. “… the first response upon liberation was to revoke the rights of the Eminences of Munchkinland and centralize control. No? I remember someone named Hipp, or Nipp, who named himself Prime Minister.”

“I didn’t read history, ancient or modern,” said Muhlama. “I’m a creature of the hils and shadows. As you ever knew. But the Eminenceship is not entirely dead. Titles never die, they just go somnolent.

Some crone or crony of the old Wizard of Oz has emerged to claim authority, if I have it right. Someone named Mombey. A kind of witch.”

“Hasn’t the Emperor caled in al magic utensils, hasn’t he forebade the casting of spels? I thought the time of witches was done,” said Brrr.

“It’s never done,” said the Tigress. “Besides, you’re forgetting the Emperor doesn’t have the rights to legislate about magic in Munchkinland. That’s part of what they’re fighting against.”

“I’m going to bed,” said Ilianora, and she crept into the shadows of the useless Clock, puling the ratty leather wing over her head like a blanket. “Come, Rain, settle with me. There’s no need to hear gossip about government. It’l only give you gas.”

“It’s my belief that Munchkinlanders wil launch a counterinvasion,” said Muhlama. “Won’t that be fun? Overrunning the EC with pudgy little ferret people? They have a dynamic military commander who has managed to hold on to Haugaard’s Keep, after al. A steeltrap farmgirl now goes by the name of General Jinjuria. She cals herself the Foil of Munchkinland.”

“A stage name for a commanding officer,” said the Lion. “It’s al stage stuff now, isn’t it?”

“Get me my wrap, I don’t need the second act,” she replied.

The dwarf and the Munchkinlander retired on the other side of the Clock. Rain and Tay crept in among the earthquake ruins, and no one stopped them. Muhlama and Brrr stayed awake, side by side, looking not at each other but at the horizon to the east, where creatures with names like Mombey and Jinjuria were providing some background static to the story of the Cats’ rendezvous.

22.

Under stars at first, then under a waterstain of vaporous cloud, high up. They didn’t talk anymore, not til morning.

U Ilianora gave the Tiger ample distance, and offered her no coffee.

“I’m no threat to you, Brrr. I’m joining no mission,” said Muhlama. “I’m bringing you out to your counterparts where they wait, and then going my own way. Ever was a rogue Tigress. But I confess to a little curiosity about that Matter of Dorothy. When I heard you were involved, I admit I was surprised. You didn’t seem to have it in you to get so deep into a mess like that.”

“Yes, wel, life, it does broaden you. It was just after I left you.”

“I left you,” she reminded him. “But let’s not monkey with nuance. Tel me about that creature. The things that are said about her! A holy fool, say some. A saint. A termagant. A pawn of someone’s larger campaign. She brought down the Wicked Witch of the West, for al her clumsiness—maybe
through
her clumsiness, for al I know. You were there. What happened?”

“I was nearby,” said the Lion. “I wasn’t present, no matter what the papers said. No one was there but Dorothy and the Witch. No one saw what happened. Lir and I were locked in the sculery, and I had managed to break through the door…”

“My hero,” she purred, meanly.

“But I didn’t get up to the parapet on time. The Witch was gone, and Dorothy descended, blasted and incoherent about what had happened. She was never coherent about very much, come to think of it.”

“Spoken like someone trying to distance himself from the inconvenience of a prior sympathy. But I never understood about the shoes. Magic shoes.
Shoes
, of al things? Why not magic braces? Or underwear?”

“I didn’t write the script. Don’t ask me.”

“The Witch’s reputation is ripe for a comeback,” said Muhlama. “At least in Munchkinland it is. That peculiar creature, Elphaba Thropp, had positioned herself in opposition to the stony faith that ran in her family. Her minister father, her totalitarian sister—and now her brother is god himself! Never underestimate the mood swings of the crowd. Dorothy’s gone from being thought a heroine to being tagged as an assassin, and Elphaba from Wicked Witch to martyred champion. At least in some circles.”

“The pendulum wil swing.”

“Ah, but is there such a thing as a pendulum anymore?” They looked at the colapsed Clock, which Mr. Boss continued to try to clean and organize as if by dint of polish and spit he could persuade it to revive. But it was the preparing of a corpse, no more than that. Everyone could see it.

“You haven’t said to whom we’re headed,” said Brrr. “Is it Lady Glinda? Is she released from house arrest?”

“I don’t folow the columns,” said Muhlama. “Anyway, I’m not talking.” She glanced over at Tay, the rice otter, who lay unrepentantly greenly in Rain’s arms. “You never know who is a squealer.” Brrr had to agree. “So enough is enough,” said Muhlama. “I’ve done my work, I need to get on.”