Out of Oz: The Final Volume in the Wicked Years (33 page)

In the sloping light of evening Lir couldn’t tel if he was noting a condition of facial structure or an expression. Or was it a lack of expression? The girl’s eyes seemed cloaked. She had Candle’s high cheekbones and hazelnut jaw, but she was urchin-thin and dusty as a rebel. She held a translucent porcelain something tucked into an elbow. A shel, he saw. Far the largest shel he’d ever laid eyes on.

“You’re nice but that’s nicer,” he said, pointing at it. “May I see it?”

“
You’re
taking liberties before you have a license,” observed the dwarf, but the Munchkinlander dame cuffed him good and proper. Then the smal square couple folowed Nor into the keep. Even Brrr started to pad away, but the girl whimpered, so the Lion sat down halfway. He set to grooming himself with a desultory air.

“It’s awfuly pretty,” Lir said of the shel. His heart was beating as if he were in a court of law—a court of recriminations and, maybe, pardons. “Can you hear anything in it?” He inched forward on his knees, only a scosh.

The girl put the thing up to her ear and listened. Then she turned away to ramble after her companions through the shattered archway of the porch and into the open-roofed ruin of the building. The verdant creature—perhaps an otter?—scampered after her. Candle’s face had falen but her weeping remained silent, at least for now.

“I think that went pretty wel,” said the Lion.

“Is the child al right?” asked Lir. His eyes folowed her as she crossed a patch of gloaming light, the sort that gilds every feature at the last minute. She looked normal as a copper farthing. Not a sign of green in her skin, not at this hour, not in this sunset attention. “Is she al right, do you think?”

“Begging pardon, it’s been a long day. It’s been a long year,” said Brrr, “and believe me, I’m no expert. But I’d say she’s right as rain.”
2.

Lir caught Candle’s hand as they hurried up the sandy steps to their sanctuary. “She’l need to adjust,” he said. “We have to give her time.”

“We’ve given her al those years. I have no more moments to spare.”

Their daughter had gone ahead wispily, surlily perhaps. Lir tried to see this hideout anew, as if through Rain’s eyes, realizing that he had no notion of what she’d ever seen before. Stowed away in Lady Glinda’s entourage as she’d been. And who knows what else she’d witnessed on the road.

The place where he and Candle had washed up—how improbable it seemed. Perched high over the pass that led from the Sleeve of Ghastile toward central Oz. A nameless hil, so far as they knew—in silier moods Lir sometimes referred to it as Mountain Objection. Travelers watching their footing below would have no reason to lift their eyes; in any case, the spot was camouflaged by overgrowth.

The place may have been established as a guard keep or a pilgrim’s destination. But when Lir and Candle had found it—they were hunting for a cave in which to hunker down, out of sight—it’d been abandoned for decades. Longer, maybe. For some community of cliff dwelers time out of mind, this outpost had been home. Home, or maybe an inn for passersby, for the underground warren was supplied with smal cels and the remains of bedsteads and mattresses.

The ruin aboveground, through which Lir and Candle now walked, looked designed for some public function. At this stage in its colapse, the wal facing southwest was gone. The pavers of the great formal floor lay open to the sky. Al that was left of the outside wal were the stumps of a line of columns. Like a lower jaw ful of bad teeth. Ivory, grey, eroded. The opposite wal, hugging the hil that rose behind it, featured columns leading to the ribs of a missing roof and a dais of some sort.

In the few unionist chapels Lir had ever bothered to visit, the lectern had always stood at the far end of a rectangle, opposite the vestibule and porch. Here totemic sculptures and a sort of throne were inset against the hil wal, in the long side of the box, rather than tucked into the far apse. The carvings between the intact columns faced the broken columns and the sky and valey beyond, as if visitors on giant birds might swoop in for an audience.

Now he and Candle caught up with Rain. She’d paused at the altarpiece or whatever it was, and there she stood, tracing her hands over the surface.

At first Lir was puzzled. After an initial glance at the graven images, years ago, he’d ignored them except as hooks for bleeding a wild lamb or muttock, ledges for drying berries and onions. But Rain had set her pink shel in a niche, just so. The supports of the ledge were carved like shels too. He’d never noticed.

The shelf capped a panel of carved marble. Like a blind person, Rain was feeling the sculpture with a curiosity and openness she hadn’t shown to her mother or father.

A type of fish-woman, perhaps a lake mermaid of some sort. Her lower half tapered into a scaley tale and fins. From each of her hips flared a pair of spinnerets. Her arms and breasts were naked. Her face, set in profile against a dial or plate of some sort, gave the effect of a head on a coin. Lir didn’t know who she was—maybe some fishy variant of Lurline, maybe the invention of a bored unionist monk with a chisel and an appetite for breasts. But the creature looked in equal measure both beneficent and ferocious.

Rain’s hands touching the stern blank eye, the weatherworn stone breasts, the imbrications of those stony scales—his daughter made Lir see that the carving had character. He hadn’t noticed.

Stil so much to see, so much to take in, and he was thirty or there-abouts—halfway through his life, assuming the Emperor’s assassins didn’t find him out at last and cut his life short.

Candle couldn’t hold back any longer. She wrenched away from Lir and moved forward to kneel beside Rain. He could see the similar shapes of their skuls, but the girl’s shoulders were tight, as if wound onto her spinal column like a wing nut, whereas Candle had tended toward a sexy fulness of form the past few years.

“I like this one,” said Candle in her soft, bruised voice. Her hand reached out to touch a star-shaped protrusion humping along with others in a welter of runes. For al Lir knew, this row of roughs was only the pattern-block of an anonymous instructor of ancient carving. He didn’t care. He had an aversion to magic, implied or actual.

“Me too,” said Rain, “but this better.” She chose from a protected cubby a smal freestanding stone Lir had never noticed. He neared to look over her shoulder. About the size of a breviary, the display side was polished smooth as milk pudding. In it was carved something impossibly smal and delicate. Lir couldn’t imagine the human hand that might manage such particularity, nor the instrument that such a hand might use. A relief of a vaguely animal-shaped creature. A sort of snouted feather, a legless head of a pony erect on a curved spine or tail. An inch high, no more. “What is it?” asked Rain.

“I don’t know,” said Candle.

“Pure fancy, I suspect,” said Lir, trying out the pedagogical function of fatherliness. “Nothing living can stand upright without at least two legs.”

“A tree can. What’s this?” The girl pointed to another shape carved into the lintel, a protrusion too peculiar for Lir to compare to anything else.

“An accident of the artist’s adze? Or maybe it was once something remarkable, but wind and rain took away its character over time. So now it’s just a mystery.”

“Wind and rain?”

“They blow from the west, clear cross the hal, or from the south. Sometimes—once a year—a storm with tiny teeth of salty sand, which rub at these carvings.”

“I never knowed of storms that could change off the face of a creature.” Rain looked surprised at the idea of the ravage of the world. “How many storms was it?”

“Hundreds of years of storms,” Candle answered her. “More years than I could count. We’ve only been here a handful of years, and the damage was done when we arrived. Nothing’s changed since we got here, but the sand comes and settles. I brush it off with feathers when the great wind subsides.”

Rain made her fingers like feathers, brushing, brushing. “What is this place?”

“It’s your home,” said Candle, and extended her hand to touch Rain’s hand—to cover it as Rain had covered the star shape.

This was a venture too bold. “I got no
home
,” said Rain, and puled away and walked into the dark doorway that led to the stairs and the catacomb apartments in which Candle and Lir had hid, and lived, through the time it had taken seven rainstorms to deposit seven skins of sand upon the evaporating stone.

3.

Just before they’d met Muhlama yesterday, Ilianora had cried out to the Lion that Rain had no fear. Rain had heard this, and she knew it was wrong. She had plenty of fear, al right. For instance, she didn’t trust these two new people in their hiltop hideaway. The man was possessed by something aggravated, something with the intensity of hornets. He tried to disguise it, but she could see. The woman was no calmer, even though she looked like a Quadling, and Rain’s exposure to Quadlings in Ovvels had led her to consider them kindly and placid. Up til now.

I’l have no part of this, she thought, though she knew she had little choice.

She found Brrr downstairs, pacing in and out of stone doorways, checking out the lodgings. “Time was I might have expected the sheets turned down and a chocolate bourbonette placed upon the pilow,” he said. “But since there are no sheets or pilows, I suppose hoping for a chocolate bourbonette is a waste of energy. Rain, where should we sleep?”

“Far away from here.”

“Tiss toss, somebody’s cross. What’s gotten under your skin?”

“En’t nothing under my skin but my underskin.” She threw herself down on the floor, purposefuly hard so she could bang her coccyx and try out a cuss. Tay twisted its head at her, confused.

Brrr had learned enough not to take the bait. He said nothing.

“How long are we here? When are we going?”

“I don’t know. I don’t yet realy understand where we’ve arrived. Shal we go help with food, and see what we can learn?”

“I can’t learn anything.”

Brrr decided to consider morbid self-loathing something of an advance in the consolidation of Rain’s character. “Wel, if you’re enjoying a little hissy-mood, why don’t you come along and find more to disapprove of upstairs?”

“You can leave me here to die.” She stretched out on her back and put an arm over her head. She made an unconvincing corpse, though Brrr knew that with enough practice—sixty, seventy years on—she’d get it right.

“Wel, I’m going to sleep here. I think this room is kind of cozy. I like how a little natural light comes in through that slit. I bet you can see stars on a cloudless night, inching by.” She didn’t look. “But while there’s work to be done for supper, it’s cowardly to shirk down here. So now I’m going above. You can do as you like.”

“I
know
that.”

He had to suppress a smile. A vexed Rain was slightly more coherent: there was more of her on display. He knew she’d folow eventualy.

Back outside, in a summer kitchen beyond the nave of the sacred fishy lady, Lir and Candle were scrubbing some turnips. A rusty kettle hanging on a hook bubbled, a rich onion broth. Ilianora—Brrr couldn’t yet think of her as Nor, which was how Lir addressed her—was mashing carrots with a pestle. Little Daffy and Mr. Boss were colecting from the compartments of the Clock anything that might be of use.

Scissors, forks, banged-up pewter plates. Dried herbs. Candle’s eyes went wide and delighted at the sight of oregano and pumperfleck.

Brrr was no better at dicing cubes of salted grite than he was at the preparation of radish roses. His arthritic paws were devoid of opposable anythings. Settling to take some of the evening wind onto his jowls, he closed his eyes to listen to the murmur of human malcontent. It was comfortingly so like his own.

When Rain cried out, because splashed by moiling soup—so she’d emerged, no surprise there—Brrr opened his eyes. They focused to pick out a statue of an iron goose framed in a colapsing archway of unpruned peony hedge.

The bush was past its prime. Like the rest of us, he guessed. Then the statue kinked a leg and spoke.

“None of my business, of course, but have you paid
any
attention to the question of whether or not your dinner guests are being folowed?” He appeared to be addressing the peonies, since one could not tel on whom his glazed eye was fixing.

“We’l get to that,” said Lir to the Goose. “We’l talk after we eat. If you’re so concerned, launch yourself and take a loop around once or twice. Settle your mind about it.”

“Couldn’t be bothered to exercise myself. The moment your incarceration arrives, I take to wing with a song in my breast and the old heave-ho.”

“Ever the optimist,” Candle said to the newcomers, shrugging. “This is Iskinaary. Lir’s familiar.”

“Not as familiar as al that,” protested the Goose.

“I never knew a Bird to shelter with humans,” said Brrr.

“I never knew a Lion to mind his own business,” snapped the Goose.

“Don’t let the Goose vex you,” said Lir. “We haven’t had company for so long, he’s forgotten how to be cordial.”

“
You’ve
forgotten how to be suspicious,” complained the Goose. “These vagabonds come creaking like the Walking Dust of St. Satalin’s Graveyard and you don’t worry it’s the opening salvo of an ambush attempt?”

“Muhlama has promised to stalk the perimeter tonight before she slinks away in the morning,” soothed Lir. “No need to ginger up the atmosphere, Iskinaary. This feast has been postponed for too long. You were there when the little girl was born. You can manage to be glad she’s back. No?”

“This is al my fault. I saw the Clock from the air, we sent Muhlama to investigate since she was passing through. I’m sorry I opened my mouth. But the girl is trouble, Lir, and dragging trouble in her wake.

Mark my words. And I’m not crazy about the otter.” At Lir’s lowered brow, the Goose hurried on, “Not that I mind, of course. I love trouble. The spice of life and proud progenetrix of al progress, yes yes.

Don’t mind
me
.”

“I think someone’s being sentimental,” suggested Lir. “We’ve never had reason to see how a Goose gets sentimental before. High emotion is nothing to be ashamed of, you know.”