Page 73 of Out of Oz (The Wicked Years 4)

The Lion slewed about. He let out a roar more iconic than anything else, and he powered his haunches to

cover the ground between Rain and the interloper. The dwarf fell back as leathern straps snapped. Probably half-rotted from a year in Quadling Country. The cart inched as if to see for itself, and a curvet of sandhill gave under the rim of the forward wheel. The Clock went plunging down the slope after the Lion; after Rain.

Into this bowl of poppies, the last gasp of their color and prominence, Brrr pounded to the rescue, endangering the Clock. It was a false alarm—or false enough. The stalking creature was a Tiger with Spice Leopard markings. He knew her by the affectionate disregard that rose in her eyes as she turned at the sound of his approach; he knew her for his first love, Muhlama H’aekeem.

2I.

You always were rash. I wasn’t going to snack on her,” said Muhlama. She neither flinched nor flushed at seeing him again. As if he hadn’t been chased from her tribe by her chieftain father bent on vengeance—oh, all those years ago, twenty was it? As if Brrr had merely stepped out for an evening constitutional.

She was a matron Ivory Tiger now. Not given over to fat as some might have done, but sleek still. Markings about her cheeks had gone a silver that verged on purple. “I never took you for a pack Lion,” she added as Little Daffy and Mr. Boss, like stout grasshoppers, came hopping down the hill toward the Clock, which lay on its side, the dragon snout collapsed into its own poppy cushions, laid to rest.

“Get back, Rain,” growled Brrr. “Go to Ilianora. She’s having a fit up there.”

“I just wanted to…” Rain put out her hand, palm down, indicating something to Muhlama, but Brrr had no patience. He roared at Rain and she backed up, not so much horrified as, perhaps, embarrassed for him.

“I never thought I’d see you do that,” said Muhlama as the girl retreated. “Roar, I mean. Didn’t quite seem in your makeup. She’s only a human cub, of course. But that was relatively convincing. Have you gone on the stage?”

He couldn’t chitchat. “Were you going to harm her?”

“Why would I want to do that? Of course not. I’ve been looking for her. For you all. The aerial reconnaissance team finally located you after what, a year? I’ve been sent here to swim in the Field of Lost Dreams and drag you out by the scruff of your necks, if I needed to. You’ve been a long time making your way.”

“It’s quite a passage, this Sleeve of Ghastille.”

“You’re almost through. Two miles on there’s real grass. Let’s decamp there.”

“I have to see to the Clock.”

“Not much left of that, it looks like.”

They both soft-footed it over to the heap of split canvas and detritus. One wheel was spinning slowly like a roulette. Mr. Boss was pale, and Little Daffy was trying to fling her arms around him, but he was having none of it. “We’re over, we’re history,” he was saying. “Conscience dead, history buried.”

Rain sat down in the shadow of the wreck and draped one of the leather wings over her head, a tent of sorts. Ilianora stared at Brrr with fierce eyes as if something were all his fault. Well, he was used to that, but not in a while, and not from her.

“How bad is it?” he asked the dwarf. Mr. Boss was blubbering. So the Lion looked for himself.

The wheels on the right side had buckled so that the left side, the most prominent of the stage areas, was exposed to view like a corpse. The Clock’s last revelation? Brrr felt prurient to peer at it, but peer he did. They all did.

The shutters were flung wide. The proscenium had split at the top and its segments overlapped like misaligned front teeth. The red velvet curtain, fallen from its rings, draped off the front of the stage, a lolling tongue.

In the mouth of the Clock, its main stage, lay some composite material, papier-mâché perhaps, made up to look like stones. On one side of the stage they resembled boulders having avalanched down a cliffside, but on the other side they seemed more carved, as if to imitate the rusticated facades of great stone buildings.

The place didn’t look much like the Emerald City, nor like Shiz. Nothing like Qhoyre.

No, this looked like a foreign city-state. Maybe someplace in Ix or Fliaan, if those places even existed. Brrr had his doubts.

Or an imagined place. As if such places existed, either.

Bits and pieces of puppets lay strewn about, spilled into an effectively ropey sort of red, almost like poppy juice. No figure resembled anyone even marginally familiar. No stripe-stockinged witch crushed under a farmhouse. No corpse of baby Ozma bundled upside down into an open sewer. No costume, even, that anyone could identify—no Messiars or Menaciers from the military of Loyal Oz’s Home Guard, no cunning Munchkinlander folk getup for delighting tourists, no glamour gowns from palace balls. In their rictus, the puppets looked only like carved bits of wood and painted plasticine. The strings that held them in place lay snapped atop them. Dead, they convinced nothing about Death, except via the corollary that Life, perhaps, had always been made from scrap materials, and always would be.

“It’s an earthquake,” said Mr. Boss at last. He turned to Brrr. “You did this to it. You killed it.”

“She called out,” said the Lion. His use of the pronoun for his wife was the cruelest remark he had ever made, but he couldn’t help himself. “The girl comes before the Clock. As you should have known this last year, and some.”

“I told you we shouldn’t take her on!” The dwarf staggered about in a circle, beating his forehead with his fists. “The Clock saw the danger, and warned me against her!”

“I don’t cause earthquakes,” said Rain.

“Looks a heap of damaged goods to me,” said Muhlama.

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