A LION COULD move in circles that others could not. Once he established himself as a professional arbiter, Sir Brrr began to demand—and get—the more useful sort of testimonials. Letters from the proper officials that permitted his passage across the Oz-Munchkinland border at the checkpoint called Munchkin Mousehole. A good thing, too. Much safer than the off-road scurry that black-market enterprise favored. Still, the fear of highway robbery remained strong, since the wheels of the rented phaeton had bronze rims that rang out an alarm—the progress of money over here!—as they struck the yellow brick paving.
Brrr’s valet doubled as a chauffeur. He carried a cosh and a pistol and looked like a bandit himself, which was perhaps useful. His nose ran constantly and he seemed to enjoy his toddy at all hours of the day and evening, which Brrr overlooked since everything else seemed in order. He was called Flyswatter.
The need for Brrr to approach his old chum the Scarecrow in the Emerald City had never arisen. A good thing, too, as the Scarecrow had stepped down or been stepped over. Indeed, Flyswatter—speaking for the demimonde—insisted that the Scarecrow had disappeared. The power in the EC now devolved upon the improbable person of Shell Thropp, who had boasted publicly of his estrangement from his famous and powerful sisters, Nessarose and Elphaba. And then he had ordained himself Emperor.
On what authority? He’d had a conversion. The Unnamed God had chosen him to lead Oz. The Unnamed God had selected in Shell a servant and a steward of this great people, this deserving nation, this heap of goodness, this blessed verdant pasture ringed by stinging deserts…well, the rhetoric was almost as bountiful as the moral surcease with which Oz credited itself.
Brrr took little notice, except to be glad he hadn’t needed to approach the Palace of the Emperor of Oz. Instead, he involved himself in more traditional credits of the double-entry bookkeeping sort.
The banks didn’t like seeing their deposits dwindle, but those in the know were always muttering about the cost of an impending military strike. Who could say when deposits might be impounded by the Throne for the purpose of funding the army? If the banks could charge 30 percent for every withdrawal by an Animal and then use magical accounting to disappear their earnings as thoroughly as Ozma herself had been disappeared, they were in some ways ahead.
Any in-house scruples were easily suppressed. A certain Loyalist strain had never accepted that Shiz banks should be holding Animal funds in the first place. Tainted!
So the banks prospered in the short term, and hid their gains; the Animals received some capital after a long period of penury; and Brrr thrived. His own account accumulated like—well, like magic. He paid off old debts involving Ampleton Quarters, and he invested shrewdly in the less gaudy of Hiiri Furkenstael’s gilded engravings. Not for trade, but for his own pleasure.
The Lion ran into Piarsody Scallop one afternoon at the Fine Engraving Exchange this side of Ticknor Circus. She had not aged well, growing purple in the face and kitted out in an unsuitably girlish gown, all white ruches and pink furbelows. Her boot was undone because she suffered from elephant ankle. The malady forced one shoulder lower to the floor than the other, but Miss Scallop bolted upright with surprise to see him. She came stumping across the sawdusty floor with both hands flung in the air as if she were about to hurl a watermelon. He cut her.
He lived it up, he put on weight, becoming almost portly as befitted a gentleman in middle age. He ate well. It showed.
He called it gravitas, but it was mostly gravy. He was swimming in gravy.
Until the gravy boat spilled him.
It happened so slowly this time, so genteelly, that he didn’t even see it coming. He paid little attention to conversations in the club about the need of an Animal workforce to shore up the Gillikinese manufacturing sector. No significant improvement noted in that area yet, worried the captains of industry. But Sir Brrr—he used the title now—didn’t feel implicated. For one thing, he wasn’t a laborer himself, as was patently clear. For the second, though he had initially proposed to the Shiz banks that a loosening of monetary policy would result in a rise of Animal workers hunting for jobs, the bankers seemed to be exercising due patience. The banks were still culling huge fees from the withdrawals. “What do they have to complain about?” he muttered to his valet, expecting no answer. Flyswatter gave him none.
Whatever else was barked and bellowed, Loyal Oz saw no return to the Animal Adverse laws. In fact, those hoary old containment strategies were retired in ceremonies dripping with public symbolism. COME HOME TO OZ read the full-page government advertisements.
“Ha,” said Brrr to Flyswatter. “Come home to Oz. That’ll be the day.”
“What day would that be, sir?”
Brrr explained. The Animals who had emigrated to Munchkinland or to the outback of the Vinkus remained cautious about emerging from their obscurity. Hardly better integrated into the Free State of Munchkinland, where the Wizard’s Animal Adverse laws had landed a weaker blow, many Animals nonetheless lived in relative tranquility. “Exiled for a generation now, some of them, they go largely unmolested about the rural reaches of the Hardings and the Fallows. They keep to themselves. They’ve found their safe haven and they’ll stick to it. Smart of them, too, don’t you think?”
“I wouldn’t know, sir.”
Brrr thought it over. Few Animals tried to reinvent themselves in Shiz or the Emerald City as he had done. Abroad—in Fliaan, in Ix—it was another matter, but the sands that surrounded Oz made it likely that anyone who managed to survive an oversand trek to a foreign country stayed there.
Oz—Loyal and not—remained, in all its own breadth and vitality and distance, isolated from anything like a comity of nations. The vessel had yet to be built that could sail the desert sands on sledge runners, though inventors and madmen had imagined such a thing for generations.
“Troops amassing on the Munchkinland border, they say,” he murmured to Flyswatter once. The valet was giving him a whisker trim. “That long-anticipated strike against Munchkinland’s life support?”
“What life support would that be, sir?”
“The lake called Restwater. Huge thing. Don’t you read the papers?”
“I keep to myself, sir.”
Brrr turned to the financials. It looked as if Shell, the human Emperor of Oz, had run his treasury bankrupt by building up the military for the possible invasion.
“That’s enough for now, Flyswatter.” Brrr decided to get to the bank. He’d seen that the Emperor’s chancellor had ordered an audit of the banks, hoping to find pennies of taxable profit.
The bank manager was too busy to see him. He came home and watched the matter unfold in the papers, listened to the gossip in the clubs.
Hold on, cried the auditors. What’s this? Shiz deposits draining into the breakaway state of Munchkinland?
Possibly funding the military of that upstart nation?
And in a time of social unrest, what with the labor shortage, the drought still upon them, the tax base eroding as incomes fell?
Fie, cried the chancellor, and the bankers shrugged, and the fie! rolled off their shoulders. It lay like a judgment upon the shoulders of Brrrr.
Or perhaps Flyswatter turned him in. In any event, the constabulary showed up one morning and the valet had bolted, so Brrr answered the door himself. He was wearing a regrettably adorable robe, beige satin woven with stripes of darker beige, and pink piping, very cuddly, very oh-what-a-night—and his mane went every which way. Bumblebee advocates of the new journalism—on-the-spot flash-lit photogravures—were waiting behind the shoulder of the constable to ambush the Lion.
“Aiding and abetting the enemy,” said the constable, as if pronouncing a sartorial crime. “Is that a Rampini knockoff?”
“It’s an original,” said Brrr, letting it drop to the floor. The nakedness of Animals always made humans profoundly uncomfortable. It was the best he could do as a protest, given such short notice. “Am I allowed to dress myself?”
“We’re gentlemen here. Make it snappy, though.” CLAP HIM IN CHAINS said the caption that evening, and IF SIR BRRR LIKES STRIPES SO MUCH, WE CAN SHOW HER SOME STRIPES IN A PRISON GARMENT.
Clap some more as he is led to prison, was the point, and we go free for the virtue of our fingering him.
“I am only a delivery service,” Brrr declared to the court registrar. “You want the bankers, not me.”
The registrar raised her eyebrow. Brrr knew she was saying: Bankers are always pure. Bankers are purer than priests. Something about money insulates them in virtue.
“I charge you with fraud, to start with,” said the first magistrate he saw in Shiz, known as the doorbell magistrate for his job of cobbling together the initial court definition of an indictment. “You’re a villain.”
“I charge you with exaggeration,” shot back the Lion. “I’m a fall guy.”
The accusation of fraud was entered into the register—fraud perpetrated not against the victims, for some reason (who regards victims?), but against the banks themselves. Fraud in the service of treason. (Had he been turned in by one of his pool-hall cronies?) The complaints were written in such convoluted language that Brrr couldn’t follow them. Nonetheless, his gizzard seemed cooked, but good.
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.
“The place was turned inside out,” said Avaric. “Or so I understood. Nothing left there but an old family retainer and the monkeys. No, the guess is that someone took the Grimmerie from Kiamo Ko. But who—and why—is a mystery—and where it is now is an ever bigger mystery.”
“To whom does it actually belong?” asked Brrr. “I mean, if Liir actually is the Witch’s son, I suppose it is his book, really.”
“It belongs to the government,” said Avaric. “I hope I haven’t misplaced my trust in you, Brrr.”
“Not at all. I was merely making conversation. Wondering if perhaps Liir had found it after all, somehow.”
“I don’t think he has,” said Avaric. “Because the betting parlors have it nine to one that when or if the Grimmerie falls into Liir’s hands, he would find a way to use it against the Emperor.”
“Is our national security policy governed by the odds in betting parlors?”
“You’re funny,” said the Margreave in a voice that betrayed little evidence of amusement. “Liir led a sort of protest of sorts against the Emperor seven or eight years ago. He commandeered a huge armada of Birds and they flew over the Emerald City. He had the Witch’s broom and her cape. If he gets his hands on her book, too, there’s no telling which corner the trouble will start in. The fact that things have been so quiet this past decade suggests he is looking for it as hard as we are.”
“Maybe he isn’t,” said Brrr. “Maybe he’s melted away like his so-called mother. He’s done his conscientious objection—”
Avaric started.
“I mean his rabble-rousing,” continued Brrr. “And if the rabble refuses to rouse itself further, why bother? Maybe he’s retired to the country to take up croquet.”
“He’s certainly gone to ground,” agreed the Margreave. “But it isn’t Liir we want, specifically. It’s the Grimmerie. Keep your eyes on the matter at hand. My advice is to start with Madame Morrible. She was, apparently, engaged by the Wizard to keep Elphaba under some sort of surveillance. She died two decades ago, but her effects are archived in the college of Shiz University, where she was headmistress. Crage Hall, it’s called. Start there.”
When they were about to take their leave of each other, Brrr asked, “How will you have me report?”
“I trust you,” said Avaric. He pulled his cloak about his shoulders. Despite the spring efflorescence, a cold wind had sprung up, smelling of old ice. “You are the Cowardly Lion, dear fellow. You will fulfill your commitment to the Throne or find your pardon revoked. One can always trust a coward to behave in a certain manner; they are predictable as rust. That’s why you’re so useful.”
“You are too kind,” said Brrr.
Avaric laughed. “You can’t even do obsequy with any conviction. The perfect spy. Here’s hoping for your sake, and for ours, you can carry it off.”
Freed to wander about again, though without his glad clothes. Brrr was reduced to seconds bought off the rack at the Poor Fair Boutique in the Burntpork district. A Lion snatching for a Rampini knockoff and fighting over it with a toothless gentleman who wanted it, he said, to make purses out of. Brrr won the tussle but lost his dignity. Well, as if he had any left to lose.
Supplied with a sheaf of writs and a small purse for expenses, Brrr headed back to Shiz. It was eerie to be middle-aged, tramping about the quadrangles as a functionary of Secret Affairs, where once as a dandy he had sprung along the graveled walks in an opera cape and a daringly rose-scented cologne. Everything now looked as seedy as he felt. He didn’t know if this was the aging process—the retreat from insouciance—or if the university was falling on hard times.
He’d met the archivist, Miss Greyling, a stoic in sensible shoes, and he decided that she was nuts. She couldn’t work the latch on the casement window, or remember with which hand to shake Brrr’s paw—nor whether touching the felted pad of an Animal was gauche or daring or illicit or morally profound. How could she deduce what the half-a-spell was saying? It would be a half-magic not worth the coin, he guessed. Her credentials, in addition, seemed dubious. But she was devoted, and flustery, and her cheeks grew pink if he let his language get coarse, which he did now and then, to remind her that he was, after all, an Animal.
“Oh, sir,” she’d say, “muffins at Lurlinemas, I shall scream!”
He was amused, and also chagrined. So it comes to this. I say naughty things to aging spinsters, to get a rise out of them. What a wolf I am. What a loser.
She found him the name of Yackle, though, and in time, with worryingly few other leads scrawled in his notepad, Brrr made to leave that hothouse atmosphere.
A glass cat had been sitting, grooming itself at the porter’s lodge. Perhaps unused to seeing a Lion in the streets of Shiz, the cat had gone all devotional and even romantic, purring up a storm in its aging larynx. So this is what it’s like to have a pet, thought Brrr, and while he didn’t encourage the creature, he didn’t kick it away, either. It had been too long a time since anyone, creature or human or Animal, had purred in his presence.
Why did the cat cross the Yellow Brick Road? To reach the Lion waiting on the other side.
Brrr had accepted the companionship. It was a novelty. He named it Shadowpuppet for its bright transparency, for its tendency to skulk in the shadows as if to keep from being overheated by the sun.
Going overland again—into the part of Oz most likely to see military activity—was no picnic. Until the first sign of battle, though, he preferred imminent danger to the froufrou of cottage guest rooms for hire. The lavender sachets, the geranium-mint teas, the caged songbirds embellishing the air with the pretty sound of their distress. Spinsters can decorate their own hearthsides with handiwork and camouflage, but to the Lion it seemed another sort of prison.
However, he was striking out in a new direction, and that had some merit. He had always relished the look of a virgin horizon. He headed due south, bypassing the EC, southwest toward the place where the dead lake called Kellswater most nearly approached the great reservoir of Restwater. The provinces of the Vinkus and Gillikin met here, and the Free State of Munchkinland to the east nudged up against them both. It was, quite possibly, the hottest spot on the map just now, due to the need for fresh water.
The various biddies from their porches agreed: Just north of the oakhair forest he would find the Cloister of Saint Glinda in the Shale Shallows. He nodded and kept on. With luck the old bitch, Yackle, would still be clinging to life. If she’d survived to this unholy age, she’d be a pushover. He wasn’t worried about it.
He would pursue any lead he could to learn from Liir, or from any source, the whereabouts of the fatal book of magic known as the Grimmerie. Even daring to dart about a landscape gone noisy with the movement of infantry divisions. Where, in a slightly horrifying night, he had come across Sister Doctor and Sister Apothecaire tending the wounded, and persuaded them to let him and Shadowpuppet accompany them back to the mauntery.
HE SAT IN the darkening room. Early evening was always the hardest to negotiate. He tried to concentrate on the immediate. The wind had died down a little; the oakhair forest moaned less strenuously. A moon was rising; it would be ducking in and out of clouds tonight. The world first in shadows and secrets, then in naked prominence.
Nothing in his own life was worth remembering, really. Every turn had promised reward, and delivered something less. So in truth, searching out the twists of someone else’s life—be it Madame Morrible’s, or the wretched Liir’s, or even old Yackle’s—was a downright comfort. A welcome distraction. It was diverting to consider lives that had been as hobbled as his own troubled existence.
From a witch’s familiar to a collaborationist of the Wizard to this: a civil servant yoked to the information agencies. Abhorred by the right and the left alike, as Avaric had said. In some ways, rounded upon by everyone, Brrr had nothing left to be, to become, but himself.
How limited, even sour a prospect, though.
One may, oh, cook poorly, or be socially graceless, or invest unwisely, or fail to achieve the best of personal hygiene. But one doesn’t want to live wrong—from breath to breath, from start to finish, to get it wrong, so wrong, so fully wrong, that one has never had the glimmer of an idea that it might be better. Or does one? Maybe if you’re going to get it that wrong, it’s better to get it all wrong. The proverbial stupid ant crawling on the hat brim of the prophet, eager only for the shade behind the prophet’s left ear, and ignorant of the civilization-altering sermon it is witnessing.