“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.
“Behold the floor of rhymeless rock, where time
Lies sleeping in a cave, a seamless deep
And dreamless sleep, unpatterned dark
Within, without. Time is a reddened dragon.
The claws refuse to clench, though they are made,
Are always made in readiness to strike
The rock, and spark the flint. Then to ignite
The mouth of time that, burning hot
And cold in turn, consumes our tattered days…”
“You have it down cold.”
“And it goes on
; “…then the burst
Of whitened sulfur spark. The fuse is lit.
The dragon’s furnace starts to roar and ride
And time, being dreamt within, begins outside.”
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.”
“You too,” said Liir. “You were brought through primary school to the services, and the Time Dragon dreamed you there at the head of this horrible stable. But you don’t know what he’s going to dream you to do next. Maybe it’s scamper and leave those dragons to their fate.”
“I said already. The family.”
They came to a newsstand shuttered up for the night. ELPHABA LIVES was scratched in char on the boards. The family! Hah. “They think they own her,” Liir said, suddenly disgusted. “The Witch would be foaming at the mouth. She was a flaming recluse and a crank.” Even the handwriting had an intimate, proprietary look to it somehow.
“What do you care?”
Liir changed the subject. “Maybe it’s your job to kill the dragons. Maybe that’s why you’re there. Maybe that’s why our paths crossed again today.”
“Are you insane? I couldn’t do that.”
“You could kill me, or at least you told me that you would. And I’m the least little lick of flame in your past. If it wasn’t Qhoyre, if that hadn’t worked, your superiors would have set up some other straw threat. I was being used no less than you are now. But I left, Trism. I did. You could, too.”
“I told you. The parents,” he said. “I’m trapped.”
“How would it work?” said Liir. “Quick and permanent? Burn the stables down? Slice their heads off?”
Eleven-thirty bell. Time to start back for the barracks.
“Poison?”
“Didn’t you hear me?” said Trism. “They’ll kill my next of kin.”
“Not if you didn’t do it,” said Liir. “I’ll do it. I’ll leave a note saying I did so, and that I kidnapped you as a hostage. You’ll be exonerated. They can’t kill my next of kin—I don’t have any.”
He didn’t add: Anyway, by some rumors, Shell is my next of kin, our holy Emperor. Let them go after the First Spear, if they must.
6
“TELL ME,” said Liir as they stood outside the sentry gate, screwing up their courage, “how do you mesmerize a dragon?”
“It’s not mesmerism, quite. I focus and I—hum—”
Liir raised an eyebrow. “Sweet nothings?”
“Nothing sweet.”
“Come on.”
Trism balked, but Liir pushed. They were both avoiding the risky moment of trying to get into the base. “Oh, all right,” snapped Trism. “Truth is, my family’s not all that exalted, despite the fancy ‘bon’ in my surname. Gentlemen farmers in Gillikin a couple of generations ago, but the gentlemanly part couldn’t be afforded during the drought, and they farmed to eat after a while. I won a few hog-calling contests, which brought more shame than glory to the family, and then I did some sheepdog trials, too. I guess I have a knack. Proved there was dirt under the fingernails; it made my folks crazy. They were trying to breed up.
“Goes something like this,” he said. “But I’m not telling you the whole whack: I’ve picked up the benefits of need-to-know. So this is the general stuff. I get up close to a dragon, which is hard work by itself. They’re skittish and inbred, given the stocks we have to work with. Takes time. You have to be totally still and selfless as possible, become like a rag doll in their pen, till they relax. When they do, their breathing changes; it slows. I come in close and mount them. No, you can’t ride a dragon, I mean I just climb up the pinions of their wings and settle my chest on their long strong neck, and straddle them. I crook my knees around the forward phalange of their wing. I circle the neck with my arms, the way I’d choke a man if I had to, only gently of course. This makes their ears fill with blood and stand up. It’s arousal, basically. They’re suggestible but also hugely intelligent, and I hum into their ears. Usually the left one, don’t know why; it tends to cock backward a little more, I think.”
“It is sweet nothings!”
“Shut up. I hum, line by line, the shape of the task at hand. If I hum a dragon to sleep, he sleeps—and I could jump up and down on his sensitive wings without waking him. If I hum him to fly, to hide, to hunt, to act alone, to be a team, to unlatch his dangerous claws, to cut, to scrape, to preserve, to return…”
“But you didn’t hum four dragons to bully a boy-broomist out of the air and confiscate his broom…”
“No. And that’s the worrying thing. I didn’t. How would I know he’d be there? How could I?”
“Well,” said Liir, “we’re not a moment too soon, are we. But listen: why don’t you just hum the dragons into docility? Or make them fly themselves into dead and deadening Kellswater?” Burning letters of thatch drowning in Waterslip.
“I don’t think I could. I’ve always guessed that dragons are, essentially, antagonists. They take to attack more easily than to, say, flying in military formation.”
“You could try.”
“Not now. Not tonight.” Trism cast a sideways glance at Liir. “I wouldn’t trust myself to be able to concentrate so intently. One lapse of focus and I’m the midnight snack.”
“No, don’t try tonight,” agreed Liir hurriedly.
Trism threw his military cloak around Liir’s shoulders to finish what camouflage they could manage. “On we go, then, and see what happens.”
THE SENTRY WAS yawning and ready for his relief to arrive. He was nodding over a pamphlet that looked suspiciously like “The Pieties of the Apostle,” the tract printed at Apple Press Farm. Anyway, its arguments must have proven leaden and soporific; he waved Liir and Trism through the guardhouse without a second glance.
At this hour, the yard was largely deserted. Without opposition Liir and Trism circled about to the basilica with the stables beneath.
Since the dragons needed to be stabled, and yet their claws kept honed for precise military use, the stalls wanted constant cleaning. Dragon fewmets tended to corrode dragon claws. But some months before, Trism explained, sloppy stablehands had left behind a bucket of cleansing solvent helpful in disinfecting the floors of their stone stalls. A dragon had lapped up a quart and died in its sleep an hour later.
Several kegs of the germicide, already tapped and ready for dispersal, stood in the cleaning shed. Trism had keys.
Liir didn’t want to look at the dragons. The coma he’d been in had blunted the memory of their attack, and that was fine with him. Still, out of his peripheral vision he allowed himself to take in the golden blur, the furnace heat, the sharp ammonia pong of breath and semen-sweet skin, the sound of deep-throated dragon purring.
But the first dragon turned its nose up at the bucket of risk.
“Not thirsty?” whispered Liir, when hearing Trism’s report.
“Dragons are smart,” said Trism. “That’s why they’re so trainable. They learn fast and they remember. This dragon may have seen the other die, or smelled his death and associated it with the smell of the cleanser. Maybe if we disguise it somehow.”
The first bell after midnight. They had to work fast in order to have time to get away.
“If they won’t drink, maybe they’ll eat,” said Trism at last.
“Come on, the provisions cellar is down this way.”
Into a chilly storeroom they tumbled. Bricks of ice laid out on slate stones kept the meat cold. At least it was bundled in old newsfolds and tied with string, so they didn’t have to look at it closely. The parcels were sloppy, more mounded than squared off, about the size of saddlebags.
“Stop, don’t retch,” said Trism roughly. “The dragons will smell your stink and be put off their supper. Don’t think of this as human flesh. It’s the delivery of a necessary medicine, that’s all. And may the Unnamed God have mercy on these poor quartered souls, and on ours.”
“And the dragons’,” added Liir, but now he wanted to see them, wanted to remember that attack, their canny strength. He needed to block out the thought of what they were carrying, armload by armload, up the stairs, but when he could no longer do that—peppery tears an inch thick in his eyes, all of an instant—he steadied himself:
You poor corpse, you thought you had died in vain, selected for slaughter by Chyde. You didn’t. You’re bringing down the House of Shell. In the most ungodly way, you’re doing good. Bless you.
They doused the parcels with the poisonous decoction. As if they were tossing lighted coals into pools of flammable fluid, Liir and Trism dashed up and down the central corridor of the dragon stables, and along the several transepts, and lobbed the midnight snacks over the stout stone-ribbed doors. Those dragons who dozed woke up and ripped the packets open with their teeth. They ate so vigorously that small glistening gobbets of flesh spun in the air.
Only when the last one was done did Liir allow himself to climb up on a bench and look down into a stall.
The dragon faintly gave off its own coppery light. It was working at its meal without hesitation, snuffling with greed. The forearms twisted with a terrifying capacity for grace. The claws retracted, clicked, leaned against one another in efficient opposition, and gleamed a horny blue-silver. Then the creature turned and looked at Liir. Slobber fell from the back of its jaw as it slowed its eating. The intelligent eye—he could only see one—was gold and black, and its iris, shaped more like a peapod than a marble, rotated from a horizontal to a vertical slit, and widened.
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