AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“That’s how the Grimmerie came to be at Kiamo Ko,” said Ilianora, almost in a whisper. “I remember my mother telling us about it once. An old peddler or a mystic of some sort left it there, and years later Elphaba found it in the attic.”
The book sat on the floorboards. The rest of the stage set was bare. Nothing happened.
Shadowpuppet chose this moment to comment. “A tiktok entertainment leaves something to be desired in the way of dramaturgy. The plot has gone slow here. Are we to wait here and watch the cobwebs grow, while armies are approaching? If you call this a reliable witness, Sir Brrr, why don’t you just haul the Clock of the Time Dragon back to the Emerald City magistrates? Get it to deliver your deposition for you? If you trust it so much?”
“I’m not sure I’d take advice from you, Shadowpuppet,” snarled Brrr. “Your transparency is just another one of your disguises, isn’t it?”
“As long as we’re chatting,” said the Cat, “the name is Grimalkin. Malky for short. Shadowpuppet is just so…so you.”
Yackle threw her fists in the air and uncurled her palsied fingers as far as she could. “Enough! Will nobody do as I ask? Dragon, dwarf, lady, Lion, someone: Ask the Clock for the book!”
Brrr was stunned. “Ask where it is now?” he said.
“Don’t you understand? I have seen how my story ends. It’s here. It’s here. In the clock. Bring it out.”
“It was a play-action, it was a fake book,” Brrr reminded Yackle. Was she losing it at last?
“Shhh, old mother,” said Ilianora, stroking the skin pleating on Yackle’s trembling forearms.
Even the dwarf showed some remorse at getting Yackle all wound up for nothing. “I’m afraid they’re right, Mrs. Mysteriousness. We’re out of tricks. Show’s over. Nothing to see here. Move along. Keep to the left. Tell your friends. Blessing of Lurlina on you, and all that rot.”
But the Time Dragon had other ideas. It flexed a forearm and draped an accordion-pleated leather wing across the central display chamber. It lowered its head with a clanking sinuousness both sinister and noble. Its ruby-glass eyes bulged in their leathern sockets. Its gooseneck armature struck forward, pinning Mr. Boss to his ground. From its nostrils issued a smell of scorch that wrinkled their noses. Calamitously thick smoke spilled from the dragon sinuses, clouding the courtyard, watering every eye.
Brrr wanted to rub his eyes, but in his arms Shadowpuppet…Malky…was squirming to escape in the sudden fog. “Stop, or I’ll snap every limb off of you, one at a time,” Brrr rasped, coughing. He had to do with trying to rub his face into his forearm. When his eyes stopped streaming, the smoke was lifting. Everyone was suffering from the stinging soot. Ilianora was wiping her face with her silvery veil, the dwarf with his beard. The boys were clutching one another and whimpering: They had all of a sudden seen one revelation too many, and they wanted to go home. Yackle rubbed her eyes, too.
“Look,” she said, pointing. The dragon wing was lifting at an angle. Brrr stared: The Clock was taking orders from no dwarf. It had its own agenda. The second dragon wing had started to lift in the opposite direction, an effect like curtains parting at a window, before it dawned on Brrr that it had been Yackle who had told them to look. But he couldn’t even turn to see what her face was like now that—could it be possible?—her eyesight had been restored by the dragon smoke. He just obeyed her instruction, and looked.
• 4 •
A SLIDING PANEL of stage flooring moved out, a wooden tongue on oiled bearings. In a drawer, on a carpet of green and gold silk, the Grimmerie waited for them.
Brrr didn’t need to describe it for Yackle anymore. He didn’t need Ilianora to identify it. It wasn’t a tiny stage prop. It was the real Grimmerie.
The volume sat half unwrapped in a traditional Vinkus hunting shawl, a fringed cloth with roses on a black background. There was something almost lascivious about the arrangement to Brrr, who had never admired books particularly. He didn’t remember that a mere book might reek of sex, possibility, fecundity. Yet a book has a ripe furrow and a yielding spine, he thought, and the nuances to be teased from its pages are nearly infinite in their variety and coquettish appeal. And what new life can emerge from a book. Any book, maybe.
“Nobody has the clearance to touch the Grimmerie,” said Mr. Boss, but his voice had gone faint; he was immaterial now, incidental, and they all knew it.
Yackle took hold of Brrr’s paw. She regarded him up and down with real eyes, which were, Brrr saw, adamantine blue and cloudless. “You’re not quite as I’d pictured,” she admitted. “A little baggy here and there. Still. Are you ready?”
Brrr was fairly certain Yackle wasn’t the angel of death come to take him to the breast of Lurlina. Still, he raised an eyebrow enquiringly, his underarms dampening. “I don’t think I’m quite that ready,” he replied. “I’ve made my fair share of mistakes and all, but hey. There’s always next time.”
Yackle laughed. “You idiot. Pay attention. Are you ready to choose, I mean. You came hoping to find information about the Grimmerie, and instead you stumbled upon the actual article. If you take this dangerous volume into custody, you might have redeemed yourself. There’s rehabilitation in this for you—or so you’ll be tempted to hope.
“On the other hand,” she continued, “a different choice. A lot less fruitful for you, perhaps. Nothing certain about the outcome.”
But that was the whole point. There is never anything certain about the outcome of a child’s life. She was reminding him about the child of Liir and Candle. Elphaba’s granddaughter, just possibly.
“You think you came up from the crypt to tell me about—” But in the presence of either the dwarf or the tiktok oracle, Brrr kept himself from saying the child. Yackle saw that he wasn’t going to give their secret away, at least not yet, and she grinned at him like a saucy schoolgirl. “But,” he continued, “you didn’t come to tell me anything. You were sensing the approach of the Grimmerie, that’s all. That’s what you were doing.”
“Never mind about why I jumped out of my sarcophagus. That’s ancient history now!” she said gaily. “Anyway, whoever insisted that two things can’t be true at once?” She put her old pale hand on the kinky hair of his chest where a medal for courage might have hung, did he still own one. “Make the right choice, Sir Brrr, when your time to choose arrives,” she said. “Oh, liberty at last!” Hiking her white sheets to her shoulder, she tottered forward with the tentative steps of the truly elderly. It was as if the return of her eyesight had reminded her how very infirm she must be. Ilianora moved beside her, ready to catch her by the elbow should she fall, but Yackle managed to keep her balance for the five steps left to her, from the crowd of Ozians to the threshold of the Grimmerie.
“Don’t you dare touch that book,” said Mr. Boss, the buzz of a fly, no more.
Brrr watched as Yackle reached out for the cover. It was made of a material he couldn’t identify, something that had properties of leather and cloth both—the slick coolness of leather, the cross-grain of cloth. The color of the binding suggested light on water, as if the warm color was emanating from a depth inside the book.
The spine was set with jewels arranged in an arabesque—every color but emerald—and an iron lock to clasp the secrets tight. But the pin was freed from the staple, and the hasp lay back upon its hinges.
Yackle lifted the cover and turned it over. The book didn’t allow any page to slide open; it turned itself to one page, a third of the way from the front, as if, for right now, the book consisted only of that page, and the other pages were glued shut.
