Untitled (10 page)

    I took a last deep breath. I put my warpaint on. I took the axe off the wall. Ready as I was gonna get.

     "See you later," I said to the place I loved; and prayed, in that moment, that what I said was true.

    There were piggels in the rafters. They looked really sad. So did the walls and the candle and the bed. I took a look at myself in the Old Faithful Mirror. The mirror looked depressed, but it still told me the truth.

    I looked like Vengeance Incarnate.

    That was good enough for me.

    
Most of the creatures of Oz, magick though they may be, still
have skeletons clanketing under their skins. Their mechanics are not
so different. And the food chain waltzes on. When they die, their fesh
sloughs off. There is bloat. There is rot. There is withering down. And
you don't argue with the meat beetles, when they come; they've only
come to claim what's theirs
.

    
So the skull is still a symbol of meaning and power. Perhaps
more here than anywhere, because everyone here is so keenly at
tuned to symbol
.

    
In battle, I am the Skeleton Woman: my fesh white as bone, my
eyes black as death
.

    
It's not especially original, but it works like a bastard
.

It was eleven blocks to the Ambassador's manse, under cloud-encrusted skies that only heightened the emerald glow. At night, the streets remain almost painfully lit, which is why everyone still needs shades. I wore mine: black rhinestone catseyes that somehow just enhanced my spookiness. Folks steered clear, but I could feel the word spread.

    The Ambassador's gate was manned by a pair of Smidglings: runty quislings possessed of a chihuaha-like yap. Their oversized mouths sounded bigtime alarum while their undersized bodies scurried off to either side.

    "I'm not here to kill you guys," I called out to them. "Or anyone else. I'm just here to seek the Mistress Enchantra. I want to ask her

a favor."

    The din caved in, and a squeaky voice said, "Who shall I say is calling?"

    "Aurora," I answered. "As per her desire."

    The gate few open; I can only suspect that they yanked on the thing too hard, in their terror. The courtyard abruptly unveiled before me, with fountains disgorging and hedges bescuplted and two tiny Smidglings running hellbent for the door, slamming golfball-sized fsts against the sturdy wood (which hollered, in the moments before the door few open: too fast, yet again).

    In the time that took, I had crossed the courtyard, come within a dozen steps of the sleep-blinking face that peered out of the doorway. It was the Ambassador himself.

    He started to ask what the meaning of this was. Then he looked at my face and stopped. His butterball features went slack, and he backed off, voice puttering. Not a lot of spine in that boy. Even after he recognized me.

    "Hi," I said. "Tell yer gal we gotta talk." He stood as if glued there. "Like, right now. Okay?"

    He started to stammer a bit of um, well, I, when suddenly his mistress was there. You could see from her makeup that she'd been asleep, refexively ground out sleep-potatoes from the corners of her eyes. She looked almost as scary as me, but it wasn't on purpose.

     "This isn't a good time," she said.

    "I know," I said, stepping past her boyfriend. "Not at all. That's why I'm here."

    "Oh?"

    "I've got a little problem, and I need your help."

    She said Hmmmm and took a potent earth-mama stance. She didn't stay off-guard for very long; I had to give her that.

    So I told her what I knew; what the owl had told me. She listened, gave up nothing, but for the slight curl of her lip.

    The Ambassador, on the other hand, quavered: there's no other word to describe the helpless jellyroll waggle playing out beneath his bedclothes. While Enchantra listened, making a show of her dispassion, he was all but sculpting brown mountain ranges in the wide rump of his pajamas.

    The reek of secrets gave me pause. It smelled like the airlock of a Vegas casino: the rank fart-stench of desperation. I looked at them. They looked at me. Then they looked back at each other. She was annoyed, and he was terrifed, and I was curious as hell.

    "You seem upset," I said to Spang.

    He started to say something. She abruptly cut him off.

    "What do you want?" she asked me. So I told her.

    The Ambassador blacked out.

    It's hard to describe the pandemonium that ensued, only because I was so much a part of it. I knelt down to check on him. I was restrained by powerful pincer-like claws. I heard a whirr of voices, but I was already moving, coming up fast and stomping down hard. My handler squealed and let go as I whirled, axe in both hands, and confronted my assailant.

    The guard—for this was what it turned out to be—was a strange amalgam of walrus and weevil: it had enormous girth on the bottom end, but insectoid head and upper limbs. It was hopping on one fipper, with its mandibles a-waggling.

     I clonked it with the handle, sharply, once across the noggin. It went down with a lumpen thwunk, and only twitched a little.

    "Erk!" cried out Enchantra. At frst, I thought she was just surprised. Then I realized she was calling the guard by name. And I guess that surprised me some.

    "He'll be okay!" I blurted out. I guess I was a wee bit wound-up, too. "He'll just have a little lump or something. I'm sorry." It was time for another deep breath.

    Enchantra looked at me. Her violet eyes smoldered. There was rage in them—and lust, and cunning—but there was something else there that I didn't expect. It was fear, and I had a hunch that it ran deeper than Erk.

    Was she scared of me?

    "I'm afraid you'll have to leave," she said.

    "But I need your help."

    "It's out of the question."

    "Listen." I could feel my spirits starting to sink. "I realize it's a lot to ask…"

    "You have no idea," she said.

    "So tell me!"

    "It's beyond you. It's beyond…everything."

    I didn't know what to make of a statement like that; but a dark wind blew through me, the moment she said it. For the frst time, I caught a nasty whiff of enormity: bubble bursting to usher in some unexpected scope. Like my problems, and Gene's, were just two drops in a bucket so huge that I hadn't even known it existed.

    I guess I hadn't really put together how frightened the Ambassador really was. (I mean, the guy was scared of Pinkie! And I was locked in my own map.)

    But looking at her, with those words still resonating in the air, I felt my stomach start to plummet.

    And again, I started to wonder: oh Fonzie, what have you gotte
n
us into?

I had several other questions, as I showed myself the door, wandered back out through the courtyard to the gate. I wondered why she seemed more worried about her guard-thing than her husband. I was wondering, do bugs actually get lumps on their heads? It occured to me that I hadn't actually gauged her perceptions when her husband had collapsed, so maybe I wasn't being fair.

    I wondered these things, but they were like gnats around a bone. And the bone was: WHAT THE HELL DO I DO NOW?

    I had no answers. Just a total despair. I was a mopey skeleton with an axe three-quarters dragging. I had no backup plan. I had no allies I could get to…

    Scarecrow was waiting for me at the gate.

    "SCARECROW!" I screamed, dropping my guard and racing toward him. He started to make the shhhhh noise, but I was already there: pinning that fnger to his lip, squeezing him tight as tight could be. (He's so much fun to hug. And I was so happy to see him.)

    "Scarecrow!" I whispered, not being a total fool; and he nodded, kissed my cheek with his painted-on lips.

    "That's better," he said. "So come on. Let's get going."

    I took a step back, looked down. If I'd been thinking, I'd have noticed that he wasn't as tall as usual. That was because he was sitting on a rather splendid sawhorse. A sawhorse impatiently ficking its tail.

    "Oh, wow," I said, impressively. I'd heard about the Sawhorse; and, of course, read about him in the Oz books a trillion times. But I'd never actually met him before. He belonged, after all, to Ozma…

    And that was when the other shoe dropped. "Omigod," I said.

If you haven't actually read Baum's books, then you might not know that Sawhorse is fast. They talk about it in children's terms. But the fact is that you have no idea.

    I used to ride motorcycles, back in Earth. I liked to achieve high speeds. Horses are fun for other reasons, but they can't do a hundred per. There's nothing like g-force on solid ground.

    And I'm tellin' ya: Sawhorse is there.

    We were at Ozma's palace so fast that I blinked ffty times just to try and catch up. The light was so blinding that my shades almost hurt. I'd like to say that I was thinking, but there wasn't time to think. The questions caught up at my fftieth blink.

    And this is what they were:

    Why was Nick attacking the Hollow Man's castle? What did that have to do with Fonzie? Love him lots though I may have, and may to this day, I'd never thought of Alphonse Guttierez as a pivot upon which vastly-signifcant decisions were made. This was a man who couldn't even scramble eggs. He had great recipes, yes; but…

    And what about poor old Gene? I felt so incredibly guilty. It was like inviting a friend to a party where you knew a nuclear blast was going off. What had he done to deserve this pandemonium? Probably nothing. Probably just happened to be there…

    I thought about Ozma, but I thought while I was walking; and the splendour of the palace knocked some cars out of my train. This was a place I'd been working my way toward slowly, knowing it was the top of the list, feeling stupid about just barging in and saying, "Hi! I've been dying to meet you!"

    In Hollywood, it's one thing to round a corner and bump into a star. It's another thing to crash their party, no matter how many names you can drop with impunity. I always sorta felt that, if they wanted me to come by, they would just invite me, right? It had certainly always been that way in the past. (I met Nick in the woods. I met Scarecrow on the road. I met Keith Richards, just before he died, in the gutter a half-block from Musso and Frank's.)

    I guessed that this qualifed as an invitation. Especially given the escort that greeted us at the gate. It was made up of seventeen uni formed brass (I counted them), glimmering robotoid green. Tik-Tok was among them. So were sixteen others, similar in confguration. Including the one that was Mikio's pal.

    Tik-Tok himself walked us down the emerald carpet: short, squat, mustachioed, with his pith-helmet mounted like a surrogate toupee. Again, I was struck by how much he, like Scarecrow, looked just like those old John R. Neill drawings from the original books. How had they gotten him so right and gotten, say, Nick so wrong?

    It was a question I'd never really gotten a straight answer for; and now wasn't the time to ask.

    "May I say," Tik-Tok said, "that if I could feel fear, your appearance would frighten me immensely."

    "You're so sweet," I told him. "And so shiny, too!"

    "The princess had us polished and wound up, just this evening," the robot explained proudly.

     "Wow. I hope she didn't do it on my account!"

    "I think, in fact, that she did, Miss Aurora."

    I looked at Scarecrow for confrmation. He winked: a piece of magick that never failed to amaze me. "From what I can gather," he said, "this is the most signifcant, Oz-shattering event in ages."

    "No kidding?"

    Both Scarecrow and Tik-Tok said, "None."

    Head suitably aswim, I proceeded inside with my noble escorts.

     Beyond the front doors, it was even more stunning than I'd imagined. (In a city where even the storm drains are jewel-spackled, you gotta wonder how much farther up one can go. Well, now I know. And lemme tell ya…)

    It seemed as if the walls were literally woven out of emeralds: like some elegant spider of astonishing grace had devoured ten trillion ka-jillion gems, synthesized them into webbing and then spun them out as walls. Great walls, defning cathedral expanses, under ceilings that were easily twelve stories high. It was insane to attempt to calculate just how much genius had been involved; but standing there, overwhelmed by the glory in the details, it was impossible to disbelieve in the existence of God.

    And amidst all the fourish and fligree—the sculpted glass and ornate, near-Oriental tapestry—stood the great doors that led to the Throne Room itself. It was through those doors that we were headed. And though both Scarecrow and Tik-Tok had been through them a million times, I could see that their awe had not entirely diminished. They paused there, bid me enter without them, their sojourn in the entourage now come to its end.

    And it was there—in that chamber of even more surpassing beauty—that I met, not just Ozma, but Glinda as well.

The frst thing that struck me as was how incredibly young Ozma looked. I knew that age doesn't play out the same way here—an effect I'm very excited about, myself—but swear to God, she looked like she could still be in junior high. Her features, though slender, retained that near-cherubic roundness, that astounding pubescent ripe
ness that screams PLUCK ME FROM THE VINE!