Shadows of the Emerald City (34 page)

“
Huh? Oh yes. This is the End of Oz. The yellow Brick Road ends precisely where the Great Desert of Sand and Dunes begins. But since we’re in the middle of nowhere…”

“
Spare me, please,” Tin Man said. “Are we still going the right direction?”

“
Again,” Scarecrow said. “It depends on your perspective.”

Tin Man sighed wearily.

“
Explain please,” he said. “And
please
make sense.”

“
Well, according to folklore, there are many ways out of Oz. Too many, in fact, which is why Glinda made the realm invisible. Because at every spot people could get
out
, other people could get
in
.
Bad People
. The King of the Gnomes, for example.”

“
Your point being…”

“
My point is that once
out
of Oz, Any way we travel could theoretically take us away from Oz. Maybe to Kansas, maybe to Wonderland. Pretty much anywhere you want, nobody knows for sure.It was all very
hush-hush
stuff in the Emerald City, as we didn’t want the common folk to know how easy the defenses of Oz could be breached.”

“
So we could end up a million miles away from Kansas?” Tin Man said. “Terrific.”

“
Yes and No. As I said, once out of Oz, one could end up
anywhere
.”

Tin Man shook his head.

“
Don’t worry my friend,” Scarecrow said, trying to be reassuring. “We’ll end up in Kansas, you’ll see.”

“
But how do you know?” Tin Man said.

“
Because we wish it,” Scarecrow said. “And thinking makes it so.”

“
I can’t argue that logic,” Tin Man said.

“
You are a
wOz
man to listen and understand,” Scarecrow said, and burst into a shower of giggles.

I wonder how long he’s been mad,
Tin Man thought.
And I wonder why I never noticed until just now.

Tin Man stepped off the Yellow Brick Road. His feet sank to the ankles in snow and sand.

“
Great,” he said. “I’m gonna get bogged down, I know it.”

“
Step lively, Tin soldier!” Scarecrow chirped. “Knees high lad! That’ll keep you out of the sand.”

The desert was a gray and blond ocean washing as far as either of them could see. There was a chemical smell to the sand, like burnt metal, and the sound of silt and grit hitting the Tin Man’s rusted torso was like listening to water hitting an empty bucket. He felt it inside him, cold and alien, and after a while he closed a hand over the holes in his belly to try and keep some of it out. The wind whistled around them as well, and it was getting more difficult to see.

Tin Man put his head down and marched, high step, as Scarecrow had suggested, but the going was slow and dangerous, and several times they almost fell down the long dunes washing about them. The more he thought on it the more Tin Man began to think of the desert as a
real ocean
; an unstable surface that shifted moment to moment. He knew if he fell or got trapped in the dunes they might not be able to get out. And there was nobody left to save them.

Sand also got into his joints, making them creak and strain. His knee began locking up after a week in the sand, and he took to dragging it the way one might drag an artificial leg. The irony of that statement wasn’t lost on the Scarecrow. He howled like a coyote when Tin Man mentioned it.

The sun rose one morning but they couldn’t really see it, and there was a rolling thunder in the distance that Tin Man didn’t like.

“
We may want to find some shelter,” Scarecrow said. “From what I’ve read about desert storms they can be quite unpleasant. The sand might scour the rust off you, and then where would you be?”

“
In the bucket with you, maybe.” Tin Man said. He cupped a hand over his eyes and scanned the horizon but it was an exercise in futility. He couldn’t see more than a few hundred feet in front of him. The wind kicked up a blanket of sand in all directions, mixing it with silt and ash, scouring the Tin Man’s rusting frame, and affecting the topography of the great desert. With an eternal gray wall blocking the sun’s rays, the land was cold but arid; the lack of moisture was at least
something
the Tin Man could be thankful for.

They had no choice but to move on. With luck they might skirt the edge of the sandstorm, but they had no way of affecting that luck. They could only walk blind and hope.

Gradually the storm picked up and they became aware of a new noise; a gentle, crystal twinkling that carried like wind chimes to their ears. Tin Man actually stopped so he could listen better.

“
What is that?” he said. “Faeries?”

“
Hardly,” Scarecrow said. His head was half buried in sand. “Could be a hallucination brought on by madness. Doesn’t explain why
you’d
hear it too though, unless that’s all part of my delusion. On the other hand it could just be a wind chime.”

I hate when you talk like that,” Tin Man grumbled. “It’s confusing.”

“
Well, maybe there’s an old airship or something in the dunes out here. Maybe it
is
really a wind chime. We should check it out, because it there’s shelter to be had, we could use it to get away from that sandstorm.”

“
May as well,” Tin Man said. “We’re headed in that direction anyway.”

The sounds weren’t wind chimes. It didn’t take long for them to realize there couldn’t possibly be an airship out here. It would have been long buried in sand by now. But there was something ahead. Something Tin Man had never seen before.

There were tree-like forms in the gloom ahead of them, and as they neared it became obvious the sound was the wind and sand blowing off these objects. They were tall, black, and appeared to be made from strands of ash. there were more of them around, here and there, randomly scattered about with no discernable pattern. In a couple spots they appeared to overlap each other, grow together. in others they started together and grew apart. They tinkled and made grinding noises as the wind pushed them to and fro, and where their hollow trunks were exposed to the wind they whistled, the way you might whistle by blowing on an empty rum bottle.

“
What are they?” Tin Man said. He walked close to one so they could inspect it. “It doesn’t look like any tree I’ve ever seen.”

Me either,” Scarecrow said. “Is that even wood? It doesn’t look like anything but a long string of burnt charcoal coming out of the ground.”

“
It’s not wood,” Tin Man said. He reached out and pushed on the trunk. There was a sharp crack as it shattered under his touch and then fell to the ground with a tinkling of shattered crystal.

“
It’s glass,” he said, rubbing his fingers thoughtfully.

“
Oh of course,
” Scarecrow said. “If I had a hand I would slap my forehead with it. These aren’t trees, they’re
fulgarite!
”

“
Huh?” Tin Man said.

“
It’s glass alright!” Scarecrow said. “These are stalks of petrified lightning! The heat from the lightning turns the sand to glass and makes these wonderful sculptures!”

“
If you say so,” Tin Man said. “They look like burnt string covered in soap froth, if you ask me. Hardly wonderful at all.”

“
Well, each one is totally unique, depending on how the lightning strikes it. What I don’t get is these are formed in the ground when lightning strikes the
surface.
how can they be jutting out of the ground like this?”

“
Maybe they
used
to be underground,” Tin Man said. “Maybe the desert moved on and left them behind.”

“
You’re right of course,” Scarecrow said. “The amount of displacement around here is stupefying.”

Just then the wind gusted, and the petrified lightning erupted in crystalline song. Somewhere ahead of them in the dust, another monstrous crash roared over the wind.

“
How many of these things are out there?” Tin Man said.

“
Hard to say,” Scarecrow said. “But maybe we should move on huh? Wouldn’t do to get struck by lightning out here.”

They walked carefully between the tall stalks of petrified lightning. Tin Man hugged Scarecrow close to his body to keep the sand out of the bucket, but it did little to stop the bucket from filling. before long all that was visible of the straw man was his eyes, which bounced back and forth worriedly. The wind grew stronger until the chimes turned to shrieks, and the crashing became a constant scream over the wind. Tin Man stepped lively, avoided the crashing stalks of glass, and tried to keep the wind on his right side. It was the only possible way he could even tell which way he was going.

The storm rumbled and chain lightning arced through the sand. Not far off. Tin Man felt the angry roar of thunder as it passed by. Somewhere close,
new
stalks of petrified lightning were being made.

Tin Man turned the bucket to drain sand, but stopped when he noticed he was losing straw as well. instead he turned Scarecrow’s head so his mouth wasn’t buried.

“
It’s inside me
,” Scarecrow yelled. “It feels cold. I don’t like it”.

“
I know,” Tin Man said. “We’ll get you fixed up when we get out of this.”

“
Statistically speaking,” Scarecrow yelled, “we have an eighty-two percent chance of…”

He trailed off, as though he lost his train of thought.

“
You smell that?
” he shouted instead.

“
Are you kidding?
” Tin Man yelled.

“
Thought I smelled orange blossoms, for a moment there.
”

Tin Man shook the sand from his face. His joints were screaming with every movement. Sand worked its way into every crook in his body. He wouldn’t be walking much longer.

Another crash close by, followed by the hum of static in the air and and arc of burning white light not far off. The roar of thunder almost knocked Tin Man off his feet. He could feel the charge in the air. The constant abrasion of sand was causing him to gain a charge of his own; particles of sand and debris began sticking to him on the right side. There were shards of glass in the sand and it made a distinctive plinking noise when it hit him.

Scarecrow was screaming something. Tin Man couldn’t hear over the roaring wind.

The world was nothing but sand and glass. There was no sound but the roar of wind and the crash of lightning. Tin man couldn’t even see his feet anymore. There was too much debris in the wind.

Then lightning crashed into him, from the back, knocking him flying. The bucket flew from his hands, Scarecrow’s screaming face visible for an instant before the wind carried him away, and Tin Man rolled over and over, his metal flesh burning, his skin white hot, the sand melting and coating him like syrup, and he rolled in the sand collecting more of it, his limbs glowing in the after shock and a crack of thunder that made his head feel like it had been split with an axe, and then he was gone and that’s all there was to that.

And at some point he became aware that he wasn’t dead.

At some point he groaned, and tried to work his mouth bit felt like it had been fused shut. His hands were stuck too, but he forced them to move and whatever was holding them gave away cleanly, and there was a soft tinkle and crunching sound as he brought his hands up to his face. It was perfectly smooth in places; in others it felt pitted and coarse, and he realized that the lightning strike and made him hot enough to melt some of the sand and he was now a lumbering piece of petrified lightning.
Fulgarite
, as the Scarecrow called it.

And where had he gotten off to?

Tin Man sat up. He slapped at his face until the glass fragments gave way, then painfully opened his eyes.

It was a gray world. The sky was a gloomy blanket that blocked out the sun. There was sand around him, but this wasn’t the desert. He was sitting in a field, long dead, with endless rows of corn stalks shunted about a foot from the ground. Bone coloured and brittle, and they crumbled in Tin Man’s hand. He stood up and looked around.

It was the same in every direction. Corn stalks. Tin Man didn’t know where he was. was this place Kansas? it was possible; certainly the stories Dorothy had told them of the gray world she came from seemed to fit what he was seeing now. If this
was
Kansas, Dorothy had no business
ever
wanting to come back here. For anything.

“
Scarecrow!
” Tin Man yelled, putting both hands to his lips. His voice was gravel and dust, and it didn’t carry far.

He shouted again, and then started walking. The gray land could have been Oz, if not for the lack of snow. It was just as cold though, and the wind limped along the ground and dragged dirt and pieces of corn stalk with it. Nothing, after the desert wind they’d been through. Not even a nuisance. He leaned over and allowed the sand to escape from the holes in his belly. One was large enough to fit his hand in now. There were spots on his right arm and torso where the rust had actually been scoured away and the dull gleam of metal was visible in streaks. He right ear was completely missing, as was the handle on the whistle at the top of his head.

A short time later he saw a bucket upturned and half full of sand; it was just as rusty as Tin Man himself was and he was sure it was the bucket he’d been keeping Scarecrow in.