Oz Reimagined: New Tales from the Emerald City and Beyond (29 page)

In the Emerald City, we wear green, which is regrettable for my complexion.

Still, I am fortunate enough to own a very fine silk cloak, clasped with a very fine emerald cloak pin, both of which I inherited from my grandfather. While the former is threadbare, few people notice such things, as few people are used
to looking at the world with a jeweler’s eye for detail. It makes me seem much richer than I am, which is useful from time to time, such as when I visit the Palace.

A maid in a short frilly uniform, all white thighs and rouged knees, greeted me when I arrived. She threw her arms around my neck with overwhelming familiarity.

“Mr. Kristoff!” she exclaimed.

When I paused to take a second look, I noticed with embarrassment that she was not actually a maid at all, but Lady Flashgleam Sparkle in costume.

“Why in the name of Lurline are you dressed like that?” I asked.

Flashgleam scanned for witnesses. “Not here. Come on.”

She took my hand—so forward!—and pulled me across the threshold into one of the Palace’s many emerald-accented parlors. As she led me briskly through corridors lined with gems and mirrors, I expected someone to stop us and ask Flashgleam why she was in costume, but apparently no one pays heed to maids who are escorting visitors.

We reached her rooms. She closed the door behind us and then went to her windows—which overlooked a courtyard where gardeners grew green orchids, green roses, and green hydrangeas—and swept the velvet curtains closed.

Flashgleam Sparkle is the only remaining scion of the house Sparkle, which had once sent its noble sons and daughters to attend the courts of Ozma III through Ozma XVI. Now that the line of the Ozmas has been broken, and the Wizard sits in their stead, most of the old noble families have departed the Emerald City for country estates.

Flashgleam, as the sole Sparkle heir, remained in the City of Emeralds, surrounded by the remnants of her family’s glory. Last year, after she had the family’s town house closed, declaring it too large for a single person, the Wizard
offered her accommodations in his Palace as suited a person with her venerable lineage.

This was all according to plan.

While two people of our relative stations would not normally have interacted, Flashgleam had been my client for a number of years. Whenever she received gifts of jewelry—for instance, from suitors—she had the habit of commissioning me to craft facsimiles with which she could replace the original ornaments. Subsequently, she sold the genuine jewels through black market connections. It is always important—she says—for a woman to have unexpected reservoirs of cash.

My discretion in helping her create such forgeries had encouraged her to invite me into her secret cabal.

It has, I must say, made my life considerably more interesting than it was before.

Flashgleam arrayed herself on a divan. She crossed her legs, exposing white thigh with the casual disregard of dignity that only women of high station can afford. She said, “When I’m wearing this uniform, I can poke around anywhere.”

I asked, “What did you find?”

“The pot of treasure,” she said with a broadening smile. “We were right about everything. He’s a charlatan.”

When the show began, there were ten individual contestants. First thing, Glinda split them into teams. Team Dorothy (so named because she’d won the first challenge) approached the City from Munchkin Country. A group of three approached from Quadling Country and another three-entity group approached from Gillikin.

None started in Winkie Country due to the embargo against the Wicked Witch of the West.

The Quadling Team was the first to be eliminated. Their team leader, a lanky Quadling boy, lost a wrestling match with a Fighting Tree. After that, Dairy Belle, the animated butter pat, couldn’t figure out how to do a glamour shoot reflecting her unique Quadling heritage, not least because she melted under the spotlights.

At first it seemed as though Pulp, who was one of the famous living paper dolls fashioned by Mrs. Cuttenclip, might make it on her own. She folded herself into a paper airplane and caught a passing wind. It would have carried her to the Emerald City much faster than the other teams could manage, but alas, the wind blew her into a river, where she turned into mulch and was swept downstream.

Initially, the viewers—the cynical bathhouse crowd among them—were in it to watch blood and teeth. The Kalidah challenge mustered a great deal of excitement. The bathhouses echoed with ladies’ screams as the monsters’ ursine bodies lumbered into view. Even I admit having felt a tremor when the light flashed across their bared tiger-teeth.

If it hadn’t been for the first interview with Dorothy, perhaps the show would never have been anything more than a blood sport.

Glinda began the interview during a quiet moment. Dorothy sat under a peach tree in the evening light, her dog, Toto, running circles around her feet. Glinda knelt so that she was eye-to-eye with the child. She asked, “What do you wish for?”

Dorothy looked up. Breeze stirred her wheat-blond curls.

“I just want to go home,” she said.

“Don’t you like Oz?” asked Glinda.

Dorothy’s hand flew to her mouth. Her cheeks flushed with embarrassment. “Oh! I should mind my manners! Of course I like Oz. It’s a beautiful place!”

“So why not stay?”

Dorothy’s cornflower eyes cut shyly away. She smoothed her pinafore. “Kansas is…well, it may be boring, but it’s home. You have to go back home. It’s where you belong.”

A drop glittered in her eye.

She murmured, “And Aunt Em must miss me terribly.”

In the bathhouse, the intellectuals snorted derisively. “Sentimental manipulation,” they called it.

Even so, Dorothy’s words had taken what had been a silly amusement—no more significant than any game of cards—and transformed it into something that could tug at any of us.

We all remembered being children. We all remembered wanting to go home.

I am reasonably certain that Flashgleam Sparkle is the mastermind behind WISH.

I have not asked, and she has not volunteered the information. Still, the Good Witch of the South is reputed to be sympathetic to her cause, although the affiliations of witches are ever fickle.

More to the point, while Flashgleam and I avoided the subject of the show’s derivation, we
had
discussed how well it suits her agenda.

If the Wizard was indeed a fraud—as we had long suspected—then the show would present him a terrible dilemma.

Once WISH became popular—an instantaneous phenomenon—he couldn’t shut it down without revealing not only that he wasn’t the architect behind it, but also that he had so little control of what was going on in his own territory that he hadn’t been able to identify and halt such a large, rebellious magical undertaking before it began.

If he let the show run, he found himself tangled in yet another dilemma—he couldn’t refuse to grant an audience to the winner unless he was willing to show himself as both incompetent
and
heartless. Yet, if he was a fraud, he couldn’t admit the winner without being exposed as unable to grant their wish.

So far the Wizard had appeared to be biding his time, plotting his strategy as he allowed the competition to unfold. Flashgleam believed that he would eventually find a way to cut himself free of the dilemma; fraud or not, the Wizard was not stupid.

However, she also believed that the show would cause turmoil behind the throne. Frantic and furious, the Wizard would interrogate his staff, searching for his betrayer, disturbing the loyalties he’d so carefully built. During his reign, he’d quelled nascent rebellions with the mere threat of magic. Flashgleam hoped that disorder in his administration would give her the fingerholds she needed to pry the Wizard loose from his throne.

All this hinged, of course, on the thesis that he was actually a fraud.

“It’s all done with gears,” Flashgleam said. She smoothed the ruffled maid’s collar over her bosom. “And pulleys and levers and…I don’t know, I’m not a machinist. But it’s all machines.”

“The Wizard?” I asked.

“His audience chamber,” she corrected. “There’s a curtain drawn in front of it. But behind, it’s all machines. There’s something like a projector focused on the emerald throne. I think he’s using photographic stills to create illusions.”

“That’s why everyone reports seeing different things in the throne room,” I said.

“Right!” She raised her hands in excitement. Her fingers shone with the convincing forgeries of rings her lovers had gifted her. “Flames, and bats, and women carved from wood. They’re photographs. Manipulations.”

“So this is proof.”

“Proof,” she agreed. “Finally.”

I was no watchmaker, but as a jeweler, I had more experience than most with the intricacies of machinery. “If you can give me fifteen minutes or so with the machines, I can figure out how to disrupt them.”

Flashgleam looked up, a slight frown on her face. “Hmm?”

“He’ll be able to repair them eventually, of course.”

“Oh.” Flashgleam laughed indulgently. “Always thinking like a craftsman, aren’t you? You’d solve everything with a chisel if you could.” She leaned forward. “Chaos is well and good, but assassinations are simpler.”