Gregory Maguire_Wicked Years_02 (31 page)

Liir was near to spitting. “I have seen merciless, Trism. As it happens. I was attacked by your little trained pets.”

It was Trism’s turn to start, and with the advantage, Liir tried to pull away. He half managed, but they ended up in a tumble on the pavement, fighting. They rolled in puddles and a plod of horse dung, and Trism ended up on top, his knees on Liir’s chest.

“I’m going to kill you. I saw you standing there on the playground, and I thought: there
is
an Unnamed God, and it has delivered you to me to kill. Your cruel actions have sentenced me to a life more wretched than anything you have known. Once the military strategists saw what the dragons could do, nothing for it but that they should be used again. Trained more precisely. My life is
chained
to the job of perfecting the killing capacity of those creatures.” He was as close to wailing as yelling, and Liir saw now what he hadn’t noticed so far: Trism bon Cavalish was a shattered person.

“Kill me then,” Liir said. “It’ll make you feel a whole lot better, I can just tell. And maybe me, too, the way things are going. But hear me out first. It was the Emperor’s word that started this whole thing. He required Cherrystone to invent an incident. Maybe he wanted a reason to launch a dragony attack all along, I don’t know. I was doing the bidding of my company commander.”

“And that’s all I’m doing, and between us there’s hundreds and hundreds dead, and more hundreds living in terror, and even more hundreds ready to kill us back, if they could only find a way.”

Liir let Trism sob. Well, he didn’t have much choice. Trism’s nose dripped on Liir’s face, but Liir couldn’t lift his arms to wipe it off. “We’re more or less in the same boat, you know,” Liir said in as even a voice as the sentiment allowed, when Trism had regained some composure. “We’ve both done some serious damage.”

Trism took a huge breath, nodded, and then removed his knees from Liir’s chest. Liir sat up and, as discreetly as he could, shook the snot off his forehead.

5

T
HEY WALKED ACROSS
the Law Courts Bridge and disappeared into the alleys and courtyards of the Lower Quarter. The place teemed with charlatans, addicts, and runaways; it stunk of sizzling night sausage and sewage, and rang with the laughter of the mad. We belong nowhere else, thought Liir; better get accustomed to it.

They could talk, though, without fear of being overheard; and in not looking at each other they could say more.

Trism bon Cavalish was the chief dragon master. He wasn’t governor of the dragon stables, but he trained the creatures with a sure hand and a regulating eye. He had the longest tenure on the staff. His work required him to follow the exploits of the dragons and fine-tune their training.

He knew that a pack of dragons from the west had returned with a broom and a cape, though he didn’t know where this bounty had come from. Liir, of all places! Trism knew about the scrapings of the missionary maunts, among, it turned out, several dozen others.

“Scrapings,” said Liir with a shudder. Candle had mentioned such a thing. “I hardly know what it means…”

The claws are sharp as razors, oppositional pinchers like a human thumb and forefinger, Trism explained. A human can build a miniature ship in an empty jeroboam, and a dragon can remove a face with as few as nine incisions.

Trism was curt. “Don’t ask me for the rationale. I know one thing: the dragons only go after the young. They’re trained that way.” He squared his shoulders. “
I
trained them that way. The theory is that when the young are brought down in their prime, it is more—alarming—useful—than if some old codger or crone is bumped off.”

Why hadn’t the dragons scraped Liir’s face? He was young enough. Maybe they thought the broom and cape were all the trove they needed. Or maybe they saw something in Liir that stopped them.

“But maunts!” Liir said. “Young women devoting their lives to the service of the Unnamed God? It doesn’t figure.”

Trism explained that the old maunteries, with their traditions of independence, didn’t suit the leadership style of the Emperor. The Apostle of the Unnamed God—

“What’s all this about the Apostle?”

“That’s what the Emperor calls himself. The humblest of the humble has been exalted by the Unnamed God. So the Apostle feels obliged to exercise the authority granted him.” It seemed that some of the maunteries about Oz were led by older women raised in an archaic scholastic tradition. Some superiors were becoming dangerously out of touch with the needs of the common folk, and fell to asking bothersome questions about the spiritual authority of the Emperor. Such foment could only erode the confidence of the nation.

“Is that it?” asked Liir. “Is this a moment of foment?”

“I’m not privy to the thinking. Information’s meted out on a need-to-know basis. But I’ve heard the western tribes were close to uniting by treaty, to defend against City interests in their land. The dragon attacks could confound the tribes, cause them to mistrust one another, if they didn’t know who was behind the attacks.

“The faces of those young missionaries you mention,” Trism concluded, working to maintain his composure. “They’ve been cured and stored. They’re going to be taken out at the next Holy Affairs Day and exhibited. A point is going to be made.”

There was worse still. The dragons—there were several dozen of them—were fed on the corpses of freshly killed humans. That bloody diet helped stoke the dragons with the strength needed to fly the hundreds of miles to the west. The cadavers were imported directly from a killing chamber in Southstairs, where a fresh supply was always available, thanks to the culling campaigns of the Under-mayor.

“Chyde,” intoned Liir. “The guy with the rings.”

Trism was nonplussed. “Is Shell the spy, or is it you?”

“I get around. Find the company I deserve. Go on.”

“Well, with all that folderdoodle, human corpses freshly bled and rendered into cutlets, do you wonder I am a wreck? The dragons weren’t my idea, but I was elevated to the position, and now they’re under my supervision.”

“Whose idea were they? Shell’s not that clever.”

Trism cast Liir a dark look. “Who can believe anyone anymore? But I met Shell again—as Emperor I mean, of course—a while ago. I had a private audience, not long after his Elevation to the Imperialcy.”

Liir folded his arms and leaned against a parapet. They’d walked on, climbing out of the Lower Quarter as the streets climbed. The lights of the alleys of the Burntpork district burned below the escarpment. “Do tell.”

“He was humility personified, Liir. Make that face if you like. You distrust everything. He’s a little thicker about the waist, very quick of wit and…almost tender, I guess. His Awakening has given him a largesse and a zeal. He talked about it. Why shouldn’t he lead? ‘Choosing the lowliest among us,’ he said, indicating himself. ‘A fornicator and a sot.’ He seemed pretty shocked. ‘What am I but a shell—waiting to be filled with the spirit of the Unnamed God?’”

“What form did his Awakening take, I wonder? I thought people who heard voices were generally considered lunatics.”

“Who knows. He grew up in the thick of it, though, didn’t he? He’d had those two powerful sisters; next to them he must always have felt like shredded cabbage.”

“Are we talking about the same Shell? Come on!”

“Come on yourself. Suppose everyone in your family was thought to be wicked. Even were called
Wicked,
almost as a title—”

But they were, thought Liir; it was my family, too, or as good as.

“—what would you have done in Shell’s place—as…alleviation? Compensation? Damage control? Shoot, he may have believed the next flying house or flying bucket of water was meant for him. You’d sign on with a Higher Authority if you were he, wouldn’t you?”

“Shell was about the last one I’d have fingered for a low self-image. Surprise, surprise. Now he works out his inferiority at the helm of the nation…”

“He sees it as destiny. He showed me a page torn out of a book of magic. The Scarecrow found it in the Wizardic apartments after the abdication. It was in an indecipherable script, but it had been laboriously translated. I suppose by the Wizard. ‘On the Administration of Dragons’ it said.”

Liir felt creepy. He knew that the Wizard had wanted Elphaba’s Grimmerie. She had sworn it would never happen. This sounded like a bit of it. How had it gotten here?

“He convinced me it was the right thing to do,” continued Trism. “I believed him, mostly because he believes himself. He’s not lying; he’s not the sham that the Wizard was, or misguided like Glinda the Glamorous, establishing libraries wherever she planted her jeweled scepter. Neither was he the ineffectual front man of a cabal of bankers, like the Scarecrow. He’s the genuine article.”

“The genuine article of what?” It was Liir’s turn to scorn. “He convinced you to take part in something so heinous?”

“He asked me. What could I say? It was like the Unnamed God came down—”

“Isn’t the Unnamed God actually unnamed so that you can’t confuse it with someone named Shell Thropp?”

“I’m just telling you, since you asked. We’ve all heard that the bankers in Shiz have been withdrawing investments from the Free State of Munchkinland. Lord Chuffrey was the chief architect of that strategy. Sanctions against the Munchkins. They’re not small enough already, bring them to their little knees. The exercise of dragon power was billed as a necessary lead-up to an annexation of Restwater in western Munchkinland. Well, the Emerald City needs the water, you know.”

“All that bores me. You still knew what you were training dragons to do.”

“I did,” said Trism. “The dragons were the Second Spear.”

If the Seventh Spear could immolate Bengda, what might the Second Spear be capable of? And the Emperor, the First Spear? “Can’t you ask for a reassignment?”

“Dragonmaster bon Cavalish? Reassigned? Don’t be absurd. They couldn’t replace me. I’m too valuable. My assistants are assigned to the stables on a quick rotation so they can’t learn too much. There’s no replacement trained to take my place. Not yet anyway, it’s all too new. In the development and testing stages.”

“You could just leave. Scamper, as you put it. The way I did.”

“That would make me feel better for about an hour. It would do no good beyond that. The dragons would still be there. Someone else would figure out how to hum them through their assignments. I’m talented, but I’m not a freak; I’m not indispensable. Besides, I have a family. They’d be fatally mortified if I disappeared in disgrace—and singled out for reprisals, like as not.”

“A family.” Liir whispered the word as if it meant
gelignite
. He felt cold, as if he was offended that his potential murderer no longer thought him worth the effort to kill. Falling from a great height again, and no warning. A
family
.

“What’s
that
look for? I mean parents. Citizens of some standing. From good lines. Also a lunk of an older brother, simple in the head. Not such a good iteration of the bloodlines.”

And Liir didn’t crash-land but was rescued by that answer.

They were walking, circling, in the mist. It was a clammy night to be out on the street, but neither of them wanted to stop in another establishment. The mist thickened to a fog, and bells rang out. Ten-thirty. Someone emptied a chamber pot out an upper window, and the soldiers ducked together into a doorway just in time to escape being wasted. It put Liir in mind of the time they met, huddled in an archway, sheltered from a hailstorm.

For the first time since Quadling Country, Liir felt the appetite for a perguenay cigarette.

They kept on. Dragons. Where had they come from, these creatures of myth and mystery? Had a cluster of eggs been uncovered in some landslide in the Scalps, or in a mud-pocket in the badlands of Quadling Country? Trism wasn’t certain.

Liir didn’t have to ask about the more basic
why
. Not if the Emperor’s aim was to make rural people cower. If a dragon was really a flying lizard, the original lizard of Oz was the Time Dragon. The foundation myth of the nation. In a subterranean cavern, deeper even than Southstairs, sealed over by earthquakes and landslides, the Time Dragon slept. He was dreaming the history of the whole world, instant by instant.

Trism was thinking along the same road. “I can tell you the inspiration,” he said, and—a little pompously—recited the words of the anonymous Oziad bard.

“You have it down cold.”

“And it goes on

Liir was awed. “You’ve had some schooling before the service.”

“We had to memorize great quaffs of
The Oziad
in primary lessons at St. Prowd’s,” said Trism. “I was a day student on a bursary. Got top honors though.”

“Well, it’s awfully, uh, grand,” said Liir. “The Time Dragon dreams up when we’re born, when we’re to die, and whether for lunch we’ll get the roast pfenix stuffed with creamed oysters at the head table at St.
Prowd’s,
or the day-old ploughman’s, the roadsweeper’s budget lunch?”

“If the unlettered farmers of Munchkinland and the factory workers of Gillikin believe that their fate is being determined by how the Time Dragon dreams them up, they don’t need to bother to take responsibility for their actions or for changing their class and station in life.”