Shadows of the Emerald City (41 page)

The girl.
Yes. Nimmie Amee. And their wedding, of course, the prime cause of his present stupor. Why waste time on other trivialities? Nick Chopper’s daydreams of the girl would provide the perfect entry-point. The axe got to work as the woodman swung it against a fine tall oak.

“
My sweet Nimmie. She loves me so.”

Does she? She has no other lover? She’s never looked at any of the other young bucks in the village? Never once?

The woodman’s mind accepted the axe’s insinuations as thoughts of his own. The rhythm of his strokes against the tree helped them sink deeper, unnoticed, as he met them with hidden doubts that till now had been kept smothered.

“
The butcher’s lad. She’s turned an eye to him more than once…”

The butcher’s lad, yes. A fine brawny specimen. You’re a good-enough looking man, but you’ve some years on you, eh? And chopping wood doesn’t build the muscles that hefting sides of beef does.

Nick swung the axe harder, biting more fiercely into the white wound it had chewed into the tree. Sweat began to flow. His blood quickened.

Chop
.

He was confused.

Chop
.

He was angry.

Chop
.

And how much coin does a woodcutter make? Any fool can gather a few twigs for the fire, but who these days cares to bloody their hands slaughtering their own pig?

“
Nobody…”

Nobody. She’ll tire of you eventually. After all, what can a clodhopper like you give her? A hut in the woods is all very well for romantic fantasies, but women are practical, Nick. Love? They harp endlessly on the subject, yet it means nothing to them. Not really. Men are toys to them. She laughs at you, this girl of yours.

It took the axe less than an hour to get the woodman to turn its hungry head on his leg; it needn’t have taken even that long. He was a very faulty vessel, this Nick Chopper, full of hidden rages and embarrassing flaws. Once he began listening to the axe in earnest, leading him to that final red moment was no work at all.

Even so, the axe was somewhat disappointed. it had its heart set on something a bit tastier than splintered femur and a ruby-glistening mess of thigh-meat. In reviewing Nick’s fantasies of the marriage bed, it had formulated a delightful idea involving Nick laying his shrunken manhood on a stump. Then, holding the axe’s blade in both hands, chopping it off. Perhaps it had taken too much pleasure in its own plans; perhaps Nick had somehow gotten a whiff of them and at the last moment chose a less insulting blow.

Still, it was done now, and done well; the idiot was howling like a madman, clutching his ruined leg with a luscious, betrayed expression. Already a couple of other bumpkins—a pair of fools come calling from the village—were running to him.

Nick?

Nick!

Oh, Nick, what did you do?

Nick suffered himself to be seized and carried clumsily into his hut. The axe lay in a spreading pool of gore, waiting patiently for one of the clods to seize it up and take it inside as well.

Because it
wouldn’t do
to leave the man’s tool behind. It was his livelihood, after all, and more than that, the measure of his character.

The village tinsmith, Ku Klip, was one of those half-wise idiots who have always been plentiful in any country or age; apparently not content with an honest trade in metalworking he had to venture down the shadowy paths of scientism and philosophy. And why should he not? The axe, hungry for new information, had taken advantage of the pious sheep gathered around Nick’s bed, its mind grabbing hungrily at theirs. It caught glimpses of absurdities it could hardly believe. Apparently some decrepit old goat from foreign lands was kinging it in the Green City, having seized the throne with nothing but gall. There were talking beasts roaming unchecked in the countryside, and shoemakers turned sorcerer. Why not a tin-smith turned savant then?

Yet this Ku Klip was an irritating bastard; just canny enough to guard his thoughts, not discreet enough to keep them out of his mouth. As he carefully manipulated the grotesque, shining limb he had grafted onto the woodman’s hip, he droned on. He loved an audience.

“
I sense some fell influence at work here,” he said. “You say the axe slipped?” The question was directed at Nick, but before his patient could so much as open his mouth the tinsmith went on. “Unlikely. This entire matter reeks of an arcane significance. There are patterns in the earth, laid there long ago for
who knows
what purpose? They can have an influence. The witches…”

That remark caught the axe’s attention, but it was distracted the next moment by a sudden commotion: a girl had appeared and was fighting her way through the crowd to Nick’s side. This, then, was the adored Nimmie Amee. She was certainly limber-looking enough.

She seized her man’s arm, cooing and whining. Nick smiled tightly at first, and nodded, then looked away, as though anything in the room was more interesting than the face of his beloved. This was plainly not the welcome the girl had expected. Her pretty face fell and she pouted. The axe watched carefully.

“
Nick, what’s wrong? Why won’t you look at me?”

Ku Klip hurried to her side.

“
He’s still mending, young Miss. It’s a grievous injury, as you see…he won’t be himself for some time.”

“
Of course,” Nimmie Amee said, seizing at once on the explanation. “His poor leg. Will he ever walk again?”

“
Certainly not,” Ku Klip said with the callousness of the wise. “At best, this tin leg I’ve made for him will support his weight and allow him to hobble a little.”

“
Aye, hobble to the poorhouse,” Nick said suddenly, turning a frozen, unpleasant smile on the girl. “You wouldn’t care much for that, hey Nimmie? A pauper’s life wouldn’t much suit you, I don’t think.”

The folk around the bed shuffled their feet uncomfortably. Some coughed and began edging towards the door, muttering about urgent business in the village.

“
Don’t say that!
” Nimmie Amee cried. “I’ll love you even if you are a pauper…”

It was perhaps an unfortunate choice of words. She then complicated matters by trying to climb onto the bed with the woodsman and get her arms around him.

“
Get off me, you whoring bitch!
”

The tin leg straightened viciously. The foot Ku Klip had constructed for it was roughly fashioned; an angular, sharp-edged thing. Had the kick connected, Nimmie Amee would have lost her face. She tumbled from the bed, her eyes moving to the gleaming metal limb. Even now it was bending and unbending at the knee, apparently of its own volition. There was something insectile about the mindless flexing. Something that called to mind the wing-beating of a butterfly newly broken from its chrysalis. The woodman stared at it in horror.

The axe was fascinated. Something of the power that had given it life had apparently communicated itself to Chopper’s new leg. A hundred questions occurred to it–had it been equipped with a mouth and tongue it would gladly have spent the afternoon interrogating Ku Klip. It might not have gotten satisfactory answers though; the tinsmith had gone silent. His face was drawn and white.

The Nola Amee picked that moment to make her appearance. The axe had the pleasure of seeing her face when it lit on Chopper’s flexing leg. She had entered the hut with an unctuous expression on her old face. The vicious gloating underneath was difficult to miss. When she saw her victim’s pistoning leg, her jaw dropped in a parody of astonishment.

“
Auntie Nola,” Nimmie Amee said. Her voice was expressionless with shock. “See how well Nick has gotten already? We’ll still be able to be married. Isn’t it wonderful?”

“
Tinsmith,” Nola Amee said slowly. “What did you do with his leg? His old one, I mean, the one he…damaged.” The axe took careful note of the question, and the fearful tone in which Nola Amee asked it.

“
Why, I burned it,” Ku Klip said dully, his eyes fixed on Chopper. “In the furnace out back. It was no good to him.”

“
Of course,” the old woman nodded, looking relieved. “
Of course.
” Her eyes turned on the axe; they held a wonder mingled with terror that it found delicious.

“
Auntie,” Nimmie Amee said fiercely. “Didn’t you hear what I said? We’ll still be married.” She hesitated a moment, then grabbed Nick’s hand and held it to her breast. Her face set and determined. The woodsman glanced at her with loathing, but he was apparently still weak from his ordeal. Too weak to push her away or spit in her face (as the axe somewhat wistfully suggested to him).

“
We’ll still be married
,” Nimmie Amee repeated, at no one in particular. “Nick will be alright and we’ll be married, just as we planned. It’s a miracle.
A miracle
.”

Within months, Nick Chopper had become a thing to frighten children. He was a clanking, shining nightmare creature. A generation of villagers would remember his name as a very effective threat against uneaten vegetables. He kept increasingly to himself, preferring the solitude of his hut or the forest to covert stares and whispers. He still plied his trade but the coin it brought him accumulated unspent. He no longer ate, or cared to drink. A regularly replenished can of oil, its contents applied carefully to his joints in the evenings, was his one material need. The wedding with Nimmie Amee was postponed, eventually, out of existence.

Word among the villagers was that she had finally left her home, heartbroken, but doubtless glad to be away from Nola’s sharp tongue and incessant meddling.

Still, Nick was a wonder, if a terrible one. Many in the village maintained that Ku Klip’s work could have made his fortune and made him a god among tinsmiths and physicians both. But a little more heart went out of the old man with every limb or part he had to replace–and these came more and more frequently as the axe continued its work. Replacing the woodman’s head took a particular toll on him, and shortly after Nick’s bleeding and mutilated torso–the last of his meat–had been replaced with a gleaming tin cylinder, Ku Klip found a stout rope and used it. His funeral was respectable, if sparsely attended.

The axe rejoiced; was this not true happiness? To not only do the work one had been created for, but to excel at it so? Paradise. It
loved
the new Nick…to the extent it was capable of love. His metallic, sharp-edged frame was vastly more appealing to its logical sensibilities than the meat-body had been.

The axe hated chatter. The new Nick barely spoke. His new tongue was ill-suited to the task. The axe required regular whetting and oiling; Nick’s new body understand those needs well. It felt them so keenly itself. Often the axe wondered how it had managed during those dreary early days, when most of Nick was still meat.

Not that meat was completely without interest of course. The axe had seen that Nick carefully collected each piece of his old self that remained after Ku Klip did his work. He took it back to the hut where it joined its’ brothers in providing the evening entertainment. The arms, legs, toes and endless slippery organs fascinated the axe. They were so untidy in their design; so absurdly
complex.

All in all, the days and evenings both were very full. There was another development as well, one most pleasing to the axe; it had decided to appropriate Nick’s surname, since the woodsman was no longer using it. The decision was made on impulse, and there was no one to hear or know of it. Yet the axe—
Chopper
—felt a deep, preening satisfaction each time it remembered. It was like a man who had bought some luxurious item he could afford but had never considered before. It was more than a tool now. The bumpkins hereabouts didn’t know, but soon they would. Perhaps quite soon.

Its ambitions were growing.

One cloudy morning Chopper took Nick outside on an errand. The task it had in mind had nothing to do with cutting wood, though it still relished in the mechanical precision with which Nick swung it and the splintering bites it took out of the sides of trees. This was, after all, the closest it came to moving, and it was, in its way, another bit of work for which it had been designed. Still, it wasn’t wood they needed this morning.

The axe had no intention of allowing the tin man to venture too far from the hut. A storm was brewing. That was plain to be read in the grey and rumbling skies. A drenching would not do Nick’s new body any good, and Chopper had left the can of oil behind, preferring that Nick not be needlessly encumbered.

Chopper found the place it was seeking. A mossy place, riddled with small holes amidst the group of apple trees near the hut. It set Nick to work hacking up the moss and stomping until its quarry emerged: a burrowing rodent, not unlike a rat or weasel but much larger. The thing bared its teeth at Nick and was quickly bisected.

The axe directed Nick to pick the mangled remains of the creature up and hold it in its imperfect line of vision. It was trying to decide if this one specimen would be sufficient for its purpose.

“
Nick?
Nick…how are you?” Nola Amee’s nervous voice behind them was an unwelcome distraction. The old woman had kept well away from the woodsman since the initial incident with the leg. Chopper had put her out of its mind since then. It had no idea why she was here or what she might want, and was not particularly interested.