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it to trounce upon his frailest feelings?
Once the plea bargain had been struck and approved and signed in triplicate, and the copies filed and their receipts stamped in triplicate and themselves filed, he was free to leave his cell. In a brougham, Lord Avaric arrived to collect Brrr at the door of Saint Satalin’s Nook for Petty Criminals. The Margreave proposed luncheon at a respectable establishment, but Brrr said he had no appetite. This was only partly a lie, as he certainly had no appetite to be seen dining in public.
So Avaric took Brrr on a walk along the Ozma Embankment, where they couldn’t be overheard by pedestrians. Avaric had a little device called an air pistol that, when fired, made a sudden bang, and the nearby avian population involuntarily launched themselves into a frenzy. The swans on the canal hammered the water with their powerful wings, thwacking the lilies, splashing themselves airborne. No small winged spies remained near enough to overhear Avaric’s revelations.
“You’re right to ask about your obligations to the Court,” he confided to Brrr. “Secrecy is all very good, but an agent can best do his job if he knows the parameters.”
Brrr pulled the collar up around his ruff. He was furious, but he was free. The Ozma Embankment was in spring bloom. Butterflies, untroubled by the salute of the gun, pasted themselves on the limbs of miniature ornamental quoxwoods. Bees reprised their hymns to the goddess nectar. A street sweeper in leg irons sang, too, some pagan paean to Lurlina. The roses were a week from cresting. His eyes watered at the notion of how swiftly this could have been swept away. The beauty. The bastards.
“I don’t know why you took my part,” he said to Lord Avaric.
“Don’t be craven,” said the Margreave. “It wasn’t high sentiment, believe me. As I hear it told, you were once labeled a Witch’s familiar, back when she was public enemy number one. And—how talented you are, really—you’ve also been tarred as a collaborationist, taking the part of the Wizard against your own nativist Animal population. Both the left and the right have called you seditious. You’re despised by all. That’s a good profile in our line of work. If you’ve had some actual practice in betrayal, you’re better able to carry off the scheme again.”
Brrr did not reply. He had never considered himself either a defender of the Witch or a collaborationist with the Wizard; that had been an interpretation of the press and general public feeling. As if guessing his thoughts, Avaric continued, “Don’t mind me. A traitor can skew his moral compunctions around any new endeavor and make it seem the correct and even laudable course of action. That’s also part of the makeup of a spy: the ability to convince himself of the rightness of his aims.”
Brrr found the courage to say, “Sir, I am no spy.”
“Well, that’s just fine,” said Avaric, unflappable. “You’re just a Namory who has narrowly escaped imprisonment for treason. How lucky that you have such patriotic impulses. All ready to help the nation in a little fact-finding mission! And since you’re no traitor either, as I see you are about to claim, you’ll have no qualms in working on behalf of Secret Affairs.”
They had reached the place on the Ozma Embankment where one could turn around and look back along the Grand Canal to see the Throne Palace. It stood shining on its little blunted peninsula above the reflecting basin. The emeralds in its facade winked like reflections on a lake: at this hour, from this point, the palace looked as if it were built of the purest water.
This prospect was the subject of dozens of mettanite etchings and coldstone engravings. He knew it as he knew the back of his own paw. But seeing the view for real, in stone and jewel and waterway rather than in watercolor washed over ink on paper—well, it thrilled one to the bone, even as the power the Palace represented gave one a cramp.
“From what I hear tell,” Avaric was saying, “Old Elphaba, that crankina on a broom, once gave the Wizard of Oz a page from a book she called the Grimmerie. She was tempting him with it, using the book as a bargaining chip to arrange for the release of a political prisoner named Nor. The good Wizard refused to negotiate with a terrorist like her, but, frankly, he was tempted. He’d had knowledge of that magic book for some time, and he wanted it. The single page he managed to get from Elphaba that day was responsible for the knowledge of how to train dragons for use in military maneuvers.”
“Some book,” said Brrr cautiously.
“How much more the Wizard might have achieved had he gotten the whole book! But the Wizard abdicated—some say he was deposed, as he deposed the Ozma Regent before him—and notions of those magic gospels were forgotten for a while during the short, giddy reigns of Glinda the Good and the Scarecrow after her.”
“Yes,” said Brrr, unable to resist boasting about his connections. “I was once quite au fait with the Scarecrow, as it happens.”
“Indeed you were. Of course you were. Then you will remember how Shell, Elphaba’s brother, ascended to the throne in that smooth, unresisted way. The Scarecrow as good as a butler, the way he melted away without a murmur.”
“I was traveling at the time, but I learned of it later.”
“It was Shell’s ministers, combing the Treasury for negotiable commodities to fund his army, who came across the page on dragons.”
Avaric explained further. Since the writing on the reverse side of the page had seemed to be the second half of a spell, not otherwise identified, no one had paid it much mind at first. But then the Emperor had engaged a scholar of magic at Shiz—a Miss Greyling, spelled g-r-e-y, or maybe it is spelled g-r-a-y—something like that—to decipher what she could of the spell’s conclusion and to infer, if possible, the spell’s name and intention.
“That would take some talent,” Brrr ventured.
“She spent several years over it,” continued Avaric. “Eventually she made her report to the Emperor. As near as she could tell, the verso of the manuscript page was the second part of a spell to reveal hidden inscriptions. Codes, watermarks, the like. A universal spell for the deciphering of runes. Perhaps even the location of individuals in hiding; could it be? Either that or, perhaps, a recipe for oatmeal fritters. It was hard to be sure.
“‘What we need,’ our Emperor Shell replied, ‘is the rest of this text so we could use it to reveal the location of the Grimmerie to us. A circular ambition, but once we had the Grimmerie, what else we might be able to do!’”
“What does the Grimmerie look like?” asked Brrr. “Not that I was ever one for books or that sort of thing. My expertise was limited to flat pieces done on private presses.”
“Few could ever have seen it,” said Avaric. “So there’s no reliable description. By the size of the page that Shell has in his treasury, it is a big codex, a tome—a foot square, perhaps.” He looked narrowly at Brrr. “You were one of the few to go to the Witch’s castle while she was thought to have it in her possession. I mean, the others—dead or disappeared. The entire Tigelaar family, who held the castle called Kiamo Ko before the Witch took up residence, was captured and imprisoned. One of them, that child named Nor, escaped from Southstairs a few years ago—she might know the whereabouts of the Grimmerie.”
“Well, ask her.”
“You find her and ask her. Also, the boy named Liir, who some say is Elphaba’s son, had gone to Southstairs hunting for her. Perhaps he had seen the book, too, and was looking for his half sister to work with. But he also has gone into hiding. Oz is just riddled with hidey-holes, to judge by the number of useful folk that we can’t seem to locate. Can you imagine what a boon it would be, if the government could get its paws on the rest of the spell—to say nothing of the rest of that book?”
“Surely the Witch’s castle has been searched?” asked Brrr. He didn’t want to go back there again; he’d almost rather sign up for a season in prison. Those flying monkeys—it made his flesh creep to remember them.
“The place was turned inside out,” said Avaric. “Or so I understood. Nothing left there but an old family retainer and the monkeys. No, the guess is that someone took the Grimmerie from Kiamo Ko. But who—and why—is a mystery—and where it is now is an ever bigger mystery.”
“To whom does it actually belong?” asked Brrr. “I mean, if Liir actually is the Witch’s son, I suppose it is his book, really.”
