Gregory Maguire_Wicked Years_02 (32 page)

“You too,” said Liir. “You were brought through primary school to the services, and the Time Dragon dreamed you there at the head of this horrible stable. But you don’t know what he’s going to dream you to do next. Maybe it’s scamper and leave those dragons to their fate.”

“I said already. The family.”

They came to a newsstand shuttered up for the night.
ELPHABA LIVES
was scratched in char on the boards. The family! Hah. “They think they own her,” Liir said, suddenly disgusted. “The Witch would be foaming at the mouth. She was a flaming recluse and a crank.” Even the handwriting had an intimate, proprietary look to it somehow.

“What do you care?”

Liir changed the subject. “Maybe it’s your job to kill the dragons. Maybe that’s why you’re there. Maybe that’s why our paths crossed again today.”

“Are you
insane
? I couldn’t do that.”

“You could kill me, or at least you told me that you would. And I’m the least little lick of flame in your past. If it wasn’t Qhoyre, if that hadn’t worked, your superiors would have set up some other straw threat. I was being used no less than you are now. But I left, Trism. I did. You could, too.”

“I told you. The parents,” he said. “I’m trapped.”

“How would it work?” said Liir. “Quick and permanent? Burn the stables down? Slice their heads off?”

Eleven-thirty bell. Time to start back for the barracks.

“Poison?”

“Didn’t you hear me?” said Trism. “They’ll kill my next of kin.”

“Not if you didn’t do it,” said Liir. “I’ll do it. I’ll leave a note saying I did so, and that I kidnapped you as a hostage. You’ll be exonerated. They can’t kill my next of kin—I don’t have any.”

He didn’t add: Anyway, by some rumors, Shell is my next of kin, our holy Emperor. Let them go after the First Spear, if they must.

6

“T
ELL ME,”
said Liir as they stood outside the sentry gate, screwing up their courage, “how do you mesmerize a dragon?”

“It’s not mesmerism, quite. I focus and I—hum—”

Liir raised an eyebrow. “Sweet nothings?”

“Nothing sweet.”

“Come on.”

Trism balked, but Liir pushed. They were both avoiding the risky moment of trying to get into the base. “Oh, all right,” snapped Trism. “Truth is, my family’s not all that exalted, despite the fancy ‘bon’ in my surname. Gentlemen farmers in Gillikin a couple of generations ago, but the gentlemanly part couldn’t be afforded during the drought, and they farmed to eat after a while. I won a few hog-calling contests, which brought more shame than glory to the family, and then I did some sheepdog trials, too. I guess I have a knack. Proved there was dirt under the fingernails; it made my folks crazy. They were trying to breed up.

“Goes something like this,” he said. “But I’m not telling you the whole whack: I’ve picked up the benefits of need-to-know. So this is the general stuff. I get up close to a dragon, which is hard work by itself. They’re skittish and inbred, given the stocks we have to work with. Takes time. You have to be totally still and selfless as possible, become like a rag doll in their pen, till they relax. When they do, their breathing changes; it slows. I come in close and mount them. No, you can’t ride a dragon, I mean I just climb up the pinions of their wings and settle my chest on their long strong neck, and straddle them. I crook my knees around the forward phalange of their wing. I circle the neck with my arms, the way I’d choke a man if I had to, only gently of course. This makes their ears fill with blood and stand up. It’s arousal, basically. They’re suggestible but also hugely intelligent, and I hum into their ears. Usually the left one, don’t know why; it tends to cock backward a little more, I think.”

“It
is
sweet nothings!”

“Shut up. I hum, line by line, the shape of the task at hand. If I hum a dragon to sleep, he sleeps—and I could jump up and down on his sensitive wings without waking him. If I hum him to fly, to hide, to hunt, to act alone, to be a team, to unlatch his dangerous claws, to cut, to scrape, to preserve, to return…”

“But you didn’t hum four dragons to bully a boy-broomist out of the air and confiscate his broom…”

“No. And that’s the worrying thing. I didn’t. How would I know he’d be there? How could I?”

“Well,” said Liir, “we’re not a moment too soon, are we. But listen: why don’t you just hum the dragons into docility? Or make them fly themselves into dead and deadening Kellswater?” Burning letters of thatch drowning in Waterslip.

“I don’t think I could. I’ve always guessed that dragons are, essentially, antagonists. They take to attack more easily than to, say, flying in military formation.”

“You could try.”

“Not now. Not tonight.” Trism cast a sideways glance at Liir. “I wouldn’t trust myself to be able to concentrate so intently. One lapse of focus and I’m the midnight snack.”

“No, don’t try tonight,” agreed Liir hurriedly.

Trism threw his military cloak around Liir’s shoulders to finish what camouflage they could manage. “On we go, then, and see what happens.”

T
HE SENTRY WAS
yawning and ready for his relief to arrive. He was nodding over a pamphlet that looked suspiciously like “The Pieties of the Apostle,” the tract printed at Apple Press Farm. Anyway, its arguments must have proven leaden and soporific; he waved Liir and Trism through the guardhouse without a second glance.

At this hour, the yard was largely deserted. Without opposition Liir and Trism circled about to the basilica with the stables beneath.

Since the dragons needed to be stabled, and yet their claws kept honed for precise military use, the stalls wanted constant cleaning. Dragon fewmets tended to corrode dragon claws. But some months before, Trism explained, sloppy stablehands had left behind a bucket of cleansing solvent helpful in disinfecting the floors of their stone stalls. A dragon had lapped up a quart and died in its sleep an hour later.

Several kegs of the germicide, already tapped and ready for dispersal, stood in the cleaning shed. Trism had keys.

Liir didn’t want to look at the dragons. The coma he’d been in had blunted the memory of their attack, and that was fine with him. Still, out of his peripheral vision he allowed himself to take in the golden blur, the furnace heat, the sharp ammonia pong of breath and semen-sweet skin, the sound of deep-throated dragon purring.

But the first dragon turned its nose up at the bucket of risk.

“Not thirsty?” whispered Liir, when hearing Trism’s report.

“Dragons are smart,” said Trism. “That’s why they’re so trainable. They learn fast and they remember. This dragon may have seen the other die, or smelled his death and associated it with the smell of the cleanser. Maybe if we disguise it somehow.”

The first bell after midnight. They had to work fast in order to have time to get away.

“If they won’t drink, maybe they’ll eat,” said Trism at last. “Come on, the provisions cellar is down this way.”

Into a chilly storeroom they tumbled. Bricks of ice laid out on slate stones kept the meat cold. At least it was bundled in old newsfolds and tied with string, so they didn’t have to look at it closely. The parcels were sloppy, more mounded than squared off, about the size of saddlebags.

“Stop, don’t retch,” said Trism roughly. “The dragons will smell your stink and be put off their supper. Don’t think of this as human flesh. It’s the delivery of a necessary medicine, that’s all. And may the Unnamed God have mercy on these poor quartered souls, and on ours.”

“And the dragons’,” added Liir, but now he wanted to see them, wanted to remember that attack, their canny strength. He needed to block out the thought of what they were carrying, armload by armload, up the stairs, but when he could no longer do that—peppery tears an inch thick in his eyes, all of an instant—he steadied himself:

You poor corpse, you thought you had died in vain, selected for slaughter by Chyde. You didn’t. You’re bringing down the House of Shell. In the most ungodly way, you’re doing good. Bless you.

They doused the parcels with the poisonous decoction. As if they were tossing lighted coals into pools of flammable fluid, Liir and Trism dashed up and down the central corridor of the dragon stables, and along the several transepts, and lobbed the midnight snacks over the stout stone-ribbed doors. Those dragons who dozed woke up and ripped the packets open with their teeth. They ate so vigorously that small glistening gobbets of flesh spun in the air.

Only when the last one was done did Liir allow himself to climb up on a bench and look down into a stall.

The dragon faintly gave off its own coppery light. It was working at its meal without hesitation, snuffling with greed. The forearms twisted with a terrifying capacity for grace. The claws retracted, clicked, leaned against one another in efficient opposition, and gleamed a horny blue-silver. Then the creature turned and looked at Liir. Slobber fell from the back of its jaw as it slowed its eating. The intelligent eye—he could only see one—was gold and black, and its iris, shaped more like a peapod than a marble, rotated from a horizontal to a vertical slit, and widened.

He’d been recognized. This was one of the very beasts that had attacked him.

The creature reared up and slapped its heavy wings forward so that its body arced backward, slamming against the rear wall of the chamber. The snout raised and the mouth opened, and bloody teeth moved into position, and a sound issued that was not a bellow nor a snort, but the beginning of a dragon trumpet volley.

“Shit, that’s not good,” said Trism, grabbing him by the shoulder. “Let’s get out of here.”

“They’re raising an alarm,” said Liir.

“They’re dying, and they know it, and at least one of them knows why.”

7

T
RISM AND
L
IIR STOPPED
at the top of the landing. In one direction, the stairs continued farther up, to the vaulted basilica proper. The door to the outside, through which they’d come, stood ajar. There was no sound of anyone dashing about to see what, if anything, was wrong. Maybe dragons snorted and bellowed in their sleep all night long, and this was nothing new.

Liir waited. “What?” said Trism.

“I’m not leaving without the broom. I’ve promised myself that.”

“No reason you shouldn’t have it back. But we’ll have to hurry.” Trism fitted a key into the only other door opening off the landing.

“Wait here,” he said. “Inside is the stuff of nightmares.”

Liir followed him in regardless. In their treason the two men were bound together, at least for the night, and Liir didn’t want to lose sight of his accomplice.

The sloped ceiling suggested the long narrow room was a shed appended to the basilica. Probably built low so as not to interfere with the colored windows giving into the sacred space above, Liir thought. Unheated at this hour, the room reeked with the juices of pickling agents and tanning acids.

Trism used a quickflint to light a portable oil lamp. “Keep your eyes down, if you’re going to follow me in here,” he muttered, shielding the light from the glass chimney with one hand. “The broom is in the far cupboard, and I’ll have to fiddle with the lock.” He hurried between tall slanted tables on which some sort of piecework was in progress.

“How much danger are we in?” asked Liir.

“You mean in the next five minutes, or for the rest of our short, sorry lives? The answer’s the same: lots.”

The small light went with Trism toward the cupboard. In the returning shadows, Liir moved nervously and disturbed a pile of wooden hoops about a foot across. They clattered to the floor. “Shhh, if you possibly can,” called Trism in a hoarse whisper.

Picking up the materials, Liir listened to the sounds. The dragons below, snorting and nickering, and their wings like vast bellows pumping. The jangle of Trism’s key ring, heavy old iron skeletons throttling against the glassy tinkle of smaller jewel case keys. The snap and thrust of a lock being pulled back, and then the rustle of dried sedge and straw. The broom. Elphie’s broom. Again.

He had to see it, as Trism turned; he looked up in something like love. Trism had the Witch’s cape looped ungainly over one arm, and the broom under his elbow, as he fiddled to close the closet again and lock its door. Then he turned, and held the light up so he could see his way back to Liir. He was smiling. So, too, in a sense, were the semblance of faces that sprung out of the shadows on the inside wall of the chamber. Ten or twelve or so, plates of face: creepy voodoo stuff, Liir thought at first. The scraped faces, repaired with catgut twine where needed, were strung with rawhide cord inside beech-wood hoops like the ones Liir had upset.

“Shhh, will you shush?” said Trism. “I told you not to look.”

8

S
OME MOMENTS LATER,
when at Liir’s insistence they had finished removing the dozen remnants of human countenance, and had stored them in two satchels, Trism said, “If you’re really serious about leaving a note claiming responsibility, now’s the time to do it. Can you manage ink and a pen?”

“I know how to write,” said Liir. “I didn’t go to St. Prowd’s, but I
can
write.”

“Shut up. I mean, are your muscles shaking too much to control the nib?”

He had to work at it. The third parchment was good enough to serve.

“Son of Elphaba?” said Trism. “Not
the
Elphaba?” He looked at Liir with a new respect, or maybe it was outright disbelief. Or dawning horror?

“Probably not,” said Liir, “but if no one can prove it so, it’s equally hard to disprove, isn’t it?”

Trism looked at the note again. “Is
craven
overdoing it a bit?”

“Let’s go.”

“I hope this is only rhetoric, that I’ll pay for my offenses.”

“You will pay, Trism. You will. We all do. You’ll pay, but you won’t pay me.” He clutched the broom. “You’ve already paid me.”