The Wicked Will Rise (9 page)

“Monkeys,” Mombi muttered as soon as we were outside and out of earshot. “Winged, wingless, makes no difference. They're
all
a damn pain in the ass. Now let's get out of here before they change their minds. I could use a good foot massage after a day like this.”

She flashed me a sly grin, baring two crooked, slimy rows of teeth the color of moldy corn chips.

“You were amazing in there,” I said. “I've never heard you talk like that. All this time, I was never totally sure that you really cared.”

Mombi replied with a guffaw that turned into a hacking cough. “Oh, please,” she croaked when she'd recovered herself. “You really bought all that? I doubt even the queen herself believed a word of it. But, you know, Lulu and I go way back. This is at least the third time I've had to go before the monkey court, and it's always exactly the same. In the end, she's nothing
but a puffed-up scullery maid at heart. You have to make her feel powerful—let her have her little trial; drum up some tears to show you respect her.”

I looked at her incredulously, kicking myself for being taken in by her load of bullshit in front of the monkey court. But
had
it been bullshit? With Mombi, you never really knew.

“But . . . ,” I started, and then stopped. Whether or not Mombi had actually been sincere was the least of what I cared about right now, and I didn't have the patience to play games anymore. “Just tell me what's going on,” I said. “After everything I've done for you, I deserve some honesty.”

We had come to the twisting, narrow staircase that led down to the rest of the village. She took a deep breath when she realized that she had to get down there somehow.

“Well, isn't
this
nice,” she said. She looked totally humiliated as I put an arm around her waist to steady her. I clutched her frail body tightly, worried that if I didn't drop her I might break her, and we made a slow, careful descent into the trees.

“Where were you?” I asked her. “What happened?” I was desperate to know what was going on, and at the same time, I wasn't sure if I wanted to hear the answer. “After I . . .” I trailed off.

What I couldn't say:
after I failed
. After I abandoned everyone. After I let Dorothy get away with her life. I knew it wasn't my fault. Nothing I could have done would have changed anything. According to the Wizard, the only way to kill Dorothy was to remove the Tin Woodman's heart, steal the Scarecrow's
brain, and take the Lion's courage—something Mombi and the Order had failed to mention. But it didn't matter what I knew now. The fact that I'd been given a job, failed, and ran away had been eating away at me ever since I'd left the Emerald City.

“Let's just say it didn't go exactly as planned,” Mombi said. “Then again, I suppose you know that already.” She glanced at me ruefully.

“It was fine at first. Better than fine, actually. While you tried to deal with Dorothy, and I worked to place a field around the palace to block her from using her magic, Glamora and Annabel led several of the Order's other members on a mission to destroy the devices that Glinda had placed around the city to store and convert the magical energy they had been mining from Munchkin Country. Their success is the reason you may have noticed a sudden resurgence of enchantment throughout the kingdom.”

I nodded. I'd already figured most of that out, but I would have liked to have known about it from the start. “And then?” I asked.

“Then? What do you
think
happened then? You failed, and we did what we've always done. We kept fighting so you could have a running start without anyone following. Wanted to give you the best chance of escaping that we could.”

“Thank you,” I said simply.

Mombi reacted by rolling her eyes. “We weren't doing it to be nice,” she said. “We were doing it because we need you. Personally, I would have given you right up, if I didn't know how important you are. Lucky you. It wasn't a fun fight, or a fair
one. There were too many of them. Glinda, the Lion's beasts, the Tin Soldiers. It felt like it went on for days—maybe it did. By the end, I don't even know who we were fighting. Some of them were Dorothy's people but others . . .” She shook her head. “Hell, maybe we were fighting our damn selves by the end. I just don't know.”

With that, she sighed a creaky, defeated sigh. I felt like someone had stepped on my heart. She hadn't answered the only question I really cared about.

“What about the others?” I asked.

“It was chaos. Nox, Glamora, and I were separated from the rest of the Order. We were surrounded. Cornered. There were just too many of them. You see the shape I'm in now. I didn't look any better back there, and neither did they. Let me tell you, it's going to take a mighty long trip to the hair salon for Glamora to get herself all clean and pretty again. We weren't going to make it. Simple as that. So I zapped us out of there. It was the only thing to be done. Tried to get us back to headquarters. But teleporting's tricky stuff even on a good day, and with more than one person? Over that kind of distance?” She let out a long whistle. “That wasn't a good day, and I was in no shape for spelling around. Didn't go so well.”

I couldn't stand it. “What happened to Nox?” I asked more urgently. “Just tell me.”

Mombi squinted at me. “Let me explain it this way. When I teleport, I travel through another place. A kind of limbo, I guess you'd call it. It's not very pleasant but you move through
it so quick you barely even know you were there. Not this time. I lost my anchoring point—the part of the spell that takes us where we're going. Lost my hold on the others, too. Before you know it, I'm stuck in limbo, and they're gone. They're not teleporters really, don't have much of a feel for it. They could be anywhere. For all I know, they're still in the in-between trying to get out.”

I let out a breath I didn't even know I'd been holding. It wasn't great news, but at least it meant that Nox was still alive. Probably. Maybe. “We have to find them,” I said.

We had finally reached the bottom of our descent through the trees, and Mombi gingerly stepped onto a platform. She wriggled free from my grip and fixed me with a withering glare.

“Don't you think I know that? How do you propose we do it?”

“We have to go back in and get them. Into the in-between or whatever.”

“Go back? It doesn't work that way. It's not like taking a weekend in the country—you can't go in without fixing your out first.
That's
how you get stuck. And speaking as someone who was stuck in there for longer than I care to think about, I'm not willing to take that risk. Especially since we don't even know that's where they are. Just as likely, they never got stuck in the first place—could have been spit out the moment I lost them; could be anywhere in Oz. You just can't say.”

I wasn't happy with her answer, but I could see that she was right. Still, I wasn't going to give up on finding Nox. I kept that
to myself, though. I had a feeling Mombi wouldn't be happy with my priorities.

“How did
you
get out?” I asked instead. “And how did you know to come here?”

“My, my, aren't
you
full of questions? Don't you think I've got a few of my own to ask you?” Mombi countered tartly. Then she paused, and sighed. “The truth is, I don't know,” she said with a grimace, like it pained her to admit there was something she didn't know. Or maybe she was just in actual pain.

“It's like being underwater in there. Like under the mud, really. It's dark, it's cold as a fairy's ta-ta, and you can't see past your own two fingers. There are
things
in there, too—and I don't mean kitty cats. Evil, slimy things. Things you'd run away from if you saw them caged up in a zoo—not that you can see them anyway. They just hiss in your ear, drool on you, rub up against you in the dark. I'm a tough old witch, but even I have my limits. You want the truth? I was about to call it a day, just flip the off switch on this old bag of bones. There's a spell for that, you know, and I was ready to cast it. To just give up for good. And that's when I saw you.”

I stepped back in surprise. “Me?”

“No, I'm just pulling your braids. Yes,
you
. Now, don't get confused—you're no favorite of mine, but seeing you in there, out of nowhere, lit up bright as day in all that darkness, you were a sight for sore eyes. So I followed you. You disappeared before too long, but by then it didn't matter—I had myself a new anchor point, and it was you. Had to sniff it out some, but I kept at it,
and then I was here. Would have preferred somewhere with less monkeys, sure, but beggars can't be choosers, can they?”

I tried to sort it all out as we walked, with Mombi staggering along behind me. What did it mean that she had seen me? Had I sent a signal to her somehow, without meaning to?

I was still thinking about the question of how to find Nox and the others when we were finally back at our hut. It had taken forever for Mombi to drag her battered body across the rope bridges and suspended platforms of the monkey village and now the sun was beginning to set. It occurred to me that time had been passing with a surprising regularity. I wondered who was turning the Great Clock—Dorothy sometimes forgot to do it until it felt like it had been the same day for a year. I put my hand on the door and then stopped.

“I'm sorry,” I said quietly.

“Sorry? Sorry for what?”

“For leaving you guys. For screwing up. If it weren't for me . . .”

Mombi rolled her eyes and shook her head dismissively.

“Look, you did good, kid. Didn't kill Dorothy, but the way I hear it, she's on the run now, and that's a start. Heard about what you did to the Tin Woodman, too. Good for you. We got the magic back, for now at least, and that's not nothing. We tore the whole damn city down while we were at it, too, just to show Dorothy we could. Got that princess out of the palace, hopefully for good. Plus”—she wiggled her eyebrows—“we weren't the only ones who got beat up. I had the pleasure of taking a big
chunk out of Glinda's pretty face. Been waiting a while to do that. So buck up, girl. Could be worse.”

Mombi gave me a weak little swat on my arm. I knew that my guilt wouldn't disappear completely until I saw with my own two eyes that Nox was safe—and that he didn't hate me leaving him when I should have stayed behind to fight—but knowing that Mombi had forgiven me made me feel a little bit better. I gave her a thin smile and opened the door, eager to tell Pete about everything that I'd learned.

I felt a surge of disappointment when I realized I wasn't about to get my wish. Pete wasn't there. Instead, Ozma sat cross-legged on the floor, amusing herself with a game of cat's cradle using an old string she'd found somewhere. She was so engrossed with her private game that she didn't even notice us come in.

“Oh,” Mombi said sourly. “It's
you.
Did the boy go back into his hidey-hole?”

That got Ozma's attention. She looked up and stuck her tongue out at Mombi. “Go away, witch,” she said. “You're not my mother.”

I should have been proud of her, but I was too busy being annoyed for the umpteenth time to learn yet another thing that had been kept from me. “So how long have you known about him?” I asked.

“
Known
about him? I created him, didn't I? Wasn't until more recently that I learned he could still come out to play, but I wasn't too surprised. Doesn't matter much, in the end, does it?”

“Obviously it matters. I'm sick of being in the dark about
everything,” I said. “You should have told me. It could have been useful to know.”

Mombi gave a little chuckle. “You still have a lot to learn, don't you?” she said. “In a war, here's how it works: we tell you what you need to know to do your job, and you don't ask questions. That way, when they torture you, you can't give up anything important.”

I put my face right up against Mombi's.

“That changes now,” I said. “If I'm going to be a part of your little revolution, it's going to be as an equal, not as your stupid pawn. From now on, you tell me everything, and I'll decide whether I listen or not.”

Mombi looked at me like she didn't get what the big deal was. “Sure,” she said. “Not many secrets left to tell anyway, but if I come up with something I'll be sure to let you know right away. Until then, I need to rest these old bones.”

She flopped into my hammock and stretched her arms. “At least I've got a nice place to heal up. Those monkeys may
say
they hate magic, but if there isn't something magical about these beds then I'm no witch. Pity though”—she gestured toward Ozma—“I was so looking forward to letting the boy give me a foot massage, just like old times. He was
so
good at them.”

I didn't understand Mombi. Sometimes she seemed
almost
human, and then sometimes, like now, she . . . didn't. She had practically raised Pete. No. Scratch the
practically
. She
had
raised Pete. Maybe she'd done it under unusual circumstances, but still. She was basically his mom, she hadn't seen him in years, and
now, when she'd almost had her chance, she didn't seem to care at all that she'd missed it.

The last time I'd seen my mother she'd been in the passenger seat of Tawny Lingondorff's beat-up red Camaro, riding away from the home we'd shared together, knowing the cyclone was just about to hit. She hadn't even looked back.

“Is that all Pete was to you?” I asked Mombi, feeling my face flush. “Just someone who rubbed your feet? Don't you care about him at all? I guess it figures. He told me all about what it was like growing up with you. He said you treated him like shit.”