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“I have,” he said. “We’re looking for Liir, don’t you know? To make sure the Munchkinlanders don’t rally behind him as the proper Eminence. To make sure that Shell’s claim to the breadbasket of Oz isn’t challenged—”
“There is no more time to lie,” she told him, rather peacefully. If she could have found his huge paw and patted it for comfort, she would have. “You haven’t really come here to find out about Liir and Trism and Candle and all. You knew most of that already. You knew about Liir and how he would suffer, thinking that Trism and Candle had fallen in love. Fine for him to love two—not so fine for him to watch two others loving in turn.”
“I take a lot of notes,” said Brrr, “but I don’t pay attention to that aspect of people’s lives.”
“You don’t want to,” she noted, “because it is too close to home, I suspect.”
“None of your business,” he growled. “If you are so ornery and right all the time, then how am I lying? What have I come for that you haven’t yet told me? Tell it to me now and we’ll have done with this interview. I can smell death frying up in the skillet alongside the lunchtime bacon. Let’s finish up.”
She stood and with unerring accuracy she pointed a bony finger right along the seam of his nose. “You want to find out the location of the Grimmerie,” she said. “You want the great book of magic. Sure you’d be glad enough to learn where Liir is, and his little circle of oddities. But Liir isn’t the firebrand that Elphaba was; he’s nothing without that encyclopedia of spells. The Emperor has dispatched you here to see if I can tell you where the book is. Elphaba’s magic book, and someone else’s magic book before it was hers. You’ve been lying all along. Liir is only part of it. You want the book.”
He sat very still for a long long time. The glass cat watched with an unblinking eye.
“If you’ve known that all along,” he said softly, “then you must also know where it is.”
“Ah, no, not that,” she said. “Your comrade-at-war, then a mere commander, blinded me, and I have lost what powers I had. Tell General Cherrystone to come back and rip out my heart and fry it alongside your lunchtime bacon, and then we’ll see if I can lose the rest of my powers—like breathing, and thinking, and remembering, and hating. I should be glad to let go of some of these functions.”
“Let go of the drama, why don’t we. Tell me why you can’t just have a vision and find out where the Grimmerie is. That’s all I want. To get out of here with some hard information. We’re counting in hours now, not days, before this place becomes a militarized zone. Madame Morrible’s notes suggested you were Elphaba’s sentry angel. No one has a better chance of knowing where the book went but you.”
“An angel!” She began to laugh. It was a hideous sight, her eyes rolling about in her skull. She clutched her ribs and bent over. “Oh, that’s rich! An atheistic angel.”
He had to wait for her wheezing to peter out. “Please,” he said. “What must I promise you in exchange for the location of the Grimmerie?”
“It’s hopeless,” she said, her voice giddy now, as if having abandoned all hope. “One doesn’t have visions on demand. And even if I knew, dear Brrr, how could I tell you? We’re at cross-purposes. The EC would use it against—”
But she went from breezy hopelessness to a sudden frenzy; her face contorted.
“Are you all right?” he said. She shook her head. It wasn’t a pang of death—nothing as useful to her as that—but a grief mortal enough to carry away anyone less immortal than she continued to be.
“Stop,” he said. “It’s not that bad. It can’t be.”
“What will you do if you can’t locate the Grimmerie?” she asked at last. “Who is your next witness?”
“I have none.” He slapped his notebook closed. “Madame Morrible’s papers turned up precious little, actually. She was a bit of a sorceress herself—you must have figured that out—and she was sharp enough to have known exactly what to discard. Even her references to you were cryptic—more in the line of deducing your existence by a kind of magical algebraics. And learning your name through the agency of a mechanical spy named Grommetik.”
“All that lead-up, and I’ve given you precious little. What will you do next?”
“Assuming I can get overland without being molested, I will have to return to the Emerald City with what I’ve been able to gather. The Court won’t be pleased with me, but I’ve done my best.”
“They won’t drop you into Southstairs?”
“They won’t. My plea bargain has sorted that out, at least.”
“You trust the Court not to revoke its understanding?”
After this review of how his life had run so far? Only one answer. “No. I don’t trust the Court at all.”
“Then that’s the first evidence of good sense I’ve witnessed in you.” She twisted her fingers ghoulishly. “I will trust you, and hope that when you leave here you might come to your senses. The Emerald City will never take you in. You’re too raw and obvious for them. Look, I have no other option. I’m not going to trust any dwarf with this matter; his allegiance is already pledg
ed. You will have to do. You are a creature bedeviled with foolishness and bad luck, but if you’re finally smart enough to be skeptical about the honchos in the EC, well, I suppose there is some hope.”
“Let me save you from making a mistake,” he said. “You are too smart to trust in me.”
“I need your help,” she replied. “There’s no one else. It’s come down to that. I have to trust you whether I should or not.”
Well, that was it, wasn’t it? For her, for him, for anyone? Being needed? The sorry old approval game? Either it would work or it wouldn’t: She had no choice.
“All right, then, tell me,” he said. “Tell me what you have to tell me. Maybe if I become rehabilitated in the EC, I’ll be in a position to help sometime.”
