Page 80 of Son of a Witch (The Wicked Years 2)

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.”

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