Page 139 of Out of Oz (The Wicked Years 4)

Next to the pumpkin head stood a squat little copper beast on casters. A perfectly round copper cranium perched atop its round body

. After scraping with their fingernails, they could make out the words SMITH AND TINKER’S MECHANICAL MAN on a plate corroded with green blisters. Under that an additional plate had been added, in engraver’s boilerplate: PROP OF M MORRIBLE, CRAGE HALL.

He’d been messed with quite a bit. Snippers or loppers of some sort had opened his upper chest. Inside lay the dusty fragments of oraculum vials as well as coils and batteries disfigured with mouse droppings. When Rain stood back to get a look at the whole of him, for he was short and overshadowed by the others, she almost blushed. Part of the abdominal plate had come away, and a five-inch screw to which a couple of nuts were attached hung down obscenely between what you might call his legs.

“Look, we can do a Butter and Eggs lesson,” she said. Before she remembered that Tip had not been in the class, she’d cupped the rusty ribbed metal piece in her hand and tilted it forward.

“Clever girl,” said Tip as Rain’s action wore through a weak bit of the sheathing, and the screw came off in her palm.

“Don’t break the merchandise,” called the Bear mildly, but he was only responding to the creak of old metal. At his desk behind his stacks of junk he was now shuffling through ancient newsfolds and reading aloud predictions of long dead weather.

Rain’s manipulation had unstuck some narrow compartment in the tiktok creature’s undercarriage. A rusty drawer with thin black metal edges shot forward and fell on the floor. “We should leave before I bring down the house,” said Rain. “I’m a right danger.”

Tip knelt and fingered the dark recess. “Something’s wedged in here,” he said.

He worried out a narrow packet of black cloth. “Treasure,” said Rain, realizing that she knew the word but not, in fact, what might qualify as treasure in anyone else’s mind other than hers. She thought of that tiny perfect inch-high horse on its single curlicue leg, carved in miniature into a stone at the Chancel of the Ladyfish. The horse like a question mark. Why hadn’t she taken that as something to collect?

“Now what’ve we here,” murmured Tip, unfolding the cloth.

Not too much—nothing like treasure according to Rain. A small rusted dirk with black stains streaked upon the blade. A set of skeleton keys. Some scraps of pink thread that might once have been rose petals? And a bit of vellum, about five inches square, folded into eight or twelve sections.

It was too dark to look at it right here. Besides, they both felt responsible. They brought it to the counter and told the Bear what had happened.

“Well, let’s see what you’ve got there,” he said, putting aside the bits and bobs, and with his shaking paws he tenderly unfolded the parchment. “Looks to me like an old map,” he said. “Sadly, not a treasure map, as children would like. Let’s have a peep.” He adjusted his spectacles. “Hmmm. Seems to be a standard issue map out of some department of government ordinances. Maybe about the time of Ozma Glamouranda? To judge by the typography? But let me find my magnifying lens.” After a search he located the instrument on top of a pile of about forty children’s novels, a matched set that made a column halfway to the ceiling beams. “Now. We shall see what we shall see.”

“What if we bring the light closer?” asked Tip.

“My gentle friend, you are the very light of intelligence yourself. Bring the lamp. On a day this gloomy we need all the light we can find.”

A second look at the map showed it clearly to be Oz before the secession of Munchkinland. The EC wasn’t even called the Emerald City yet. It was an obscure hamlet assigned the name of Nubbly Meadows. However, the general outlines of the counties of Oz seemed more or less correct. Gillikin and Munchkinland sported the greatest number of towns marked out, and the Quadling Country was represented by a single graphic smear simulating a coarse picture of marshland. The Vinkus was called “Winkie Country” and in ink someone had scrawled below, “Utter wildness, don’t bother.” On the left-hand margin, beyond the ring of deserts indicated by a profusion of mechanically applied dots, that same hand had written “water?” and a printer’s hand-stamp of a whorled shell appeared like a messy thumbprint.

“That’s nice,” said Tip, pointing to the picture.

“You always liked my shell,” said Rain, remembering now that he had been cradling it the night she had discovered him in her wardrobe.

Near Center Munch, in Munchkinland, Rain thought at first she spied another shell, one standing on its tip. Or maybe not. Anyway, some kind of squiggly funnel, appended by hand in quick slashes of brownish ink, with an exclamation point beside it. The punctuation mark was underlined thrice.

“This is an admirable little map,” concluded the Bear. He ran his paw over the Great Gillikin Forest. “I hail from up this way, long ago. Look, does that tiny line read ‘Here there be Bears’? I feel positively anointed with a personal history. Somewhere in that thicket of identical trees I imagine Ursaless, the Queen of the Northern Bears, holding court, as it was back in my day. No,” he said, “I’m afraid you may not buy this thing. It has put me in mind of my past, and that happens all too seldom. If you come back tomorrow I won’t remember you were here today, and if you find this map on top of a chest of drawers I’ll probably sell it to you. Happily. But tonight I’m going to look at this and dream of my home, and better days long gone.”

The rain was still pelting down, but the drops were less forceful, less like hail. “We should go,” said Rain. They made their good-byes to the Bear, who already seemed to have forgotten them a little. As they went up the steps Tip took her hand for a moment.

“Why do you like shells?” she asked, the first thing that came to her mind in the panic of being touched on purpose.

“I like anything that is home to a secret life,” he said. “I always liked nests, and eggs, and the discarded skins of snakes, and shells, and chrysalises.”

“We should have bought you that flying carpet,” she said. “Full of flies.”

The joke wasn’t any funnier the second time than the first, and Tip let her hand go. They walked back to St. Prowd’s in silence to find that the girls had not been hijacked for ransom, Tip was not in line for a prison sentence or a dismissal, and Madame Chortlebush had departed already for her family home, to comfort her grieving parents.

If Miss Ironish noticed that Rain had been out alone with a boy, she chose to muscle her disapproval down. More likely, thought Rain, she doesn’t really care what happens to any child whose parents don’t bother to show up during Visitation Day.

But then, come to think of it, Tip himself had shown up on Visitation Day. A fairly acceptable substitution, under the circumstances.

I6.

Rain thought, it’s almost as if Tip and I got too close, that day in the storm, in the shop of the absentminded Bear. But he grabbed my hand, not I his. Now he seems … aloof. Unmoored. Like one of those floating islands that had occasionally drifted by on Restwater and, catching in some eddy invisible from shore, gently spun in place for a couple of months. Out of reach. Tip was in perfect sight, all aspects of him, just … just further out.

For a mean moment she thought that he might be taking up with Scarly in the kitchens, a nearer and maybe more approachable friend. But that kind of thinking was solid St. Prowd’s girl attitude. Why shouldn’t he chum around with Scarly if he liked her, and she was right there, shuttling between Miss Ironish and Cook? Why should it bother Rain?

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