The Wicked Will Rise

EIGHTEEN


Polychrome’s so-called Lumatorium was a dim, windowless chamber hidden deep in the castle’s interior behind a revolving bookshelf. It was crowded with mysterious, vaguely scientific-looking instruments, long laboratory tables and beakers and flasks full of colorful liquids and powders.

Looking around the room, I was struck by how many different types of magic there were in Oz, and how many different ways there were of practicing it. For some people, like Mombi—and me, come to think of it—magic was something you just kind of did. It was all instinct, a power that came directly from within. For other people, it was a practice closer to science.

The first style seemed a lot more convenient to me, but, on the other hand, Mombi had sent me here because she thought Polychrome would uncover things that she hadn’t been able to. So I guess there was something to all this junk.

Polychrome moved around the room efficiently, gathering up her materials, while Heathcliff curled up in the corner, observing her lazily. When she had everything she deemed necessary, she gestured for me to empty my bag again.

“Let’s take a look at those,” Polychrome said, and I set the objects I’d taken from the Lion and the Tin Woodman on a table. Polychrome in turn placed each of them on either end of an old-fashioned scale, which indicated, improbably, that they were perfectly balanced with each other.

The metal heart thumped robotically; the tail continued to twitch as if attached to an invisible owner. Polychrome sprinkled them with a dusting of acrid-smelling powder, causing them to halt in their motion. She fastened a thick, old-fashioned set of goggles to her face and knelt to examine them.

“Just as I suspected,” she said after a bit. She lit a candle and then, after some consideration, picked up a long, hollow glass rod tipped with a tiny, red orb. She touched the orb gently to the Tin Woodman’s heart and held it there. The rod began to change colors, filling with a sort of pink liquid, which she emptied into a beaker before repeating the same process with the tail.

She held the beaker over the candle and we both watched as it began to heat up and bubble.

“What are you doing to it?” I asked.

“Just running a few magical tests,” she said. “My methods are somewhat different from those used by the witches. I’m isolating the mystic elements of the objects to determine their origin, as well as—hopefully—to divine their purpose. It seems strange, of course, that they have any enchantment on them at all; when the Wizard granted them to their owners, he had no facility with magic to speak of. So one wonders that they should now be imbued with such energies. But indeed they are. Is it something that Dorothy did? Or is there another explanation?”

The liquid in the beaker boiled quickly over the flame, until all that was left of it was a thick, red syrup resembling blood. Polychrome selected a wide, shallow silver bowl from a shelf, placed it next to the scale, and poured the strange substance into it. She crouched and peered at it carefully through her goggles, swirling it around a little with her finger.

Next, she waved her palm across the surface and mumbled a few quick words that I didn’t understand.

The liquid began to change color until it was transparent. Polychrome nodded to herself. “Look,” she said, and when I gazed into the bowl with her, I saw that there was now an image in it.

In the bowl, as clear as if I was looking out through a window, was a flat, dusty prairie under a gray sky, tall grass blowing in the wind.

I recognized it immediately—maybe not the exact, specific location, but the idea of it. Back home, the prairie was everywhere. Even when you were standing in a strip mall, or walking along a busy highway, it was always still there, just out of sight. The flat, flat everything, the gray, dusty nothing seeping into your pores. So I had no doubt of exactly what I was looking at.

“Kansas,” I said.

“Indeed,” Polychrome said quietly. “And yet. Is it?”

I looked closer. It was Kansas, but it wasn’t. It was like one of those games in the back of a celebrity magazine, where you look at two pictures of Jennifer Aniston, and in the second one, everything is just a little off. Except in this version, the difference wasn’t that Jennifer Aniston was wearing a pink bracelet instead of a blue one. It was something harder to put your finger on than that.

It was something about the way the wind was blowing, something about the thick clouds that were rolling in. It didn’t just look lonely. It looked sick. It looked evil. It sent a chill down my spine.

“What does it mean?” I asked quietly.

Polychrome was silent. Heathcliff padded over to where she stood and she peeled her goggles off, then knelt and touched her forehead to the cat’s horn, staring into his eyes. She seemed to be consulting with him in a silent conversation.

Eventually she turned back to me, still kneeling.

“It could mean several things,” she said. “I still have many questions about these items. But, certainly, it means that they bear a deep connection with the Other Place. Your home. The Wizard’s home. Dorothy’s home. I also sense something not quite right about them. Something evil, I suppose. There was something about these things that was corrupting their owners.”

It was time to stop holding back, I knew. “The Wizard told me that until I gathered them, I wouldn’t be able to kill Dorothy.”

Polychrome twisted a lock of hair around her finger. She chewed on her lip. “It makes a certain sense,” she said. “If these items were somehow holding a piece of Dorothy’s essence, it could explain this connection to the Other Place. It might also explain the evil about them. And yet”—she dipped a finger into the pool—“I don’t know. I sense nothing of Dorothy in the tincture. You would think . . .”

She crossed her arms and looked up at the ceiling, confounded. “I just don’t know,” she sighed. “Here in Oz, we understand so very little of the Other Place, or of how Oz is connected to it. We never have. It’s a shame that the one person who does have knowledge of it is the one person we can’t ask.”

“Dorothy?”

“No. Nor do I believe the Wizard has much expertise when it comes to matters of the Other Place, despite hailing from there. But Glinda has made a study of your world. Of Oz’s magic practitioners, she is the only one who has demonstrated an ability to summon visitors from the outside—though many have tried.”

“Do you think she’s the one who brought me here?” I asked. I was still struggling to put all the pieces together. Things were beginning to add up, but in a way I couldn’t quite see an order to. It was like being halfway through a calculus problem, knowing you’re on the right track, and having no idea of the answer or how the hell you’re supposed to get there. This time, I didn’t think I would get points for showing my work.

“It’s possible. But part of me doubts it. What reason would she have had? And why would she have made an enemy out of you so quickly, if she had been the one to bring you here?”

She was right. It didn’t really make sense.

“I’m sorry I could not have been more help,” Polychrome said. “Perhaps if we had the third item—the Scarecrow’s brain—it would complete the puzzle.”

“I’m already on it,” I said.

“And Amy? Do me a favor?”

“What?” I asked.

“When you cut him open, make it hurt.”

I smiled. “It’s a promise,” I said.

With that, some of the girlishness returned to Polychrome’s face. She gave me a conspiratorial look. “Even before Dorothy came back and turned everyone evil,” she said in a stage whisper, cupping her palm to her mouth, “the Scarecrow was always a bit of a dick.”

She giggled and tossed her hair, and some of the tension left the room.

“Now,” she said. “Before we retire for the evening, I wanted to look into one more thing.” She turned to her giant unicorn-cat. “Heathcliff,” she said. “Fetch me our friend the queen.”

Heathcliff stood up on command, took a powerful leap across the room, and, like a ghost, passed right through the wall.

When Polychrome saw my look of surprise, she pursed her lips. “Everyone doubts my unicorn,” she said tartly. “Just because he doesn’t grant wishes doesn’t mean he’s useless.”

“I can see that now,” I said. “But why do you need Ozma again?”

Polychrome pressed a finger to her chin. “When we were in my rumpus room, I noticed a disturbance in the princess’s aura,” she said. “Something that made me suspect there might be more to her . . . condition than I previously suspected. I would like to examine her. Is there anything about her that you would like to tell me?”

I couldn’t tell if I was being tested. Is it possible she knew about Pete? Or knew that I knew? So I decided to hedge for the time being. “Mombi was hoping you would be able to . . . fix her. Make her more like how she used to be,” I said, feeling guilty both for telling only half the truth and also for saying even that much. I’d been hoping to totally avoid the subject of Ozma. After my conversation with Pete yesterday, I was worried about what would happen if anyone started messing around with whatever magic was binding him to the princess. What if they were fused forever? What if Pete just . . . disappeared?

He had made good on his promise to help me find Nox, and I didn’t want to betray him now.

A few minutes later, Heathcliff came padding back into the room with Ozma at his side. The princess looked sleepy and listless, like she’d just been woken from a nap.

“Hello, cousin,” Polychrome greeted her. Ozma looked up with an open and curious face, and Polychrome gently removed her scepter from her hand. For a second, Ozma looked reluctant to part with it, but she didn’t put up a fight.

“Stand over here, just for a moment.” The rainbow fairy led Ozma to a small footstool, and helped the princess climb onto it. As Ozma stood there dutifully, Polychrome began to bustle around the room, pulling ingredients from the shelves in a way that looked random and combining them haphazardly into a small cauldron that she suspended from a small stand over an eldritch flame.

“What’s that?” I asked, watching her suspiciously.

“Oh, nothing much,” Polychrome said. “Just a little Tincture of Revelation. Old family recipe. Not to worry; it’s quite harmless. Tastes quite a bit like Earl Grey, I’m told.”

She sniffed at the cauldron, and when she was satisfied that the tincture had been properly prepared, she poured it into a little teacup ringed with a delicate floral pattern and a gilded rim.

“Unicorn?”

She placed the teacup on the floor where Heathcliff could reach it, and he bent his head and touched the liquid with his horn. I didn’t notice that it had any effect, but when Polychrome examined the mixture again she seemed happy with the result.

She handed the cup to Ozma. “Drink up, Your Highness,” she said. “And let all that is hidden be revealed. When all this is over, I hope that we can be lovely friends again.”

Ozma sipped tentatively from the cup, and then, appearing to like the taste of it, gulped thirstily. As she drank, her movements began to slow. The empty cup dropped from her hands, and shattered on the floor.

“Never liked that pattern anyway,” Polychrome said to herself.