Chapter 13

Thirteen

Jellia led the small group through a series of consecutive circles, each surrounding the next, like the center of a hedge maze or the inside of a Matryoshka doll. High walls and double doors prohibited any view of the next "room," though the rooms were more like wide hallways, vanishing around their respective curves. Empty of anyone.

Five circles in, Jellia halted.

"Five!" Straw whispered in an excited voice. "I told you five was the best number."

Dorothy cast him a sideways glance. How did he know there weren't more doors and circles ahead of them? Had Glinda, perhaps, put something of this in his head when she animated him?

Jellia's voice derailed her train of thought. "We will wait here for a moment."

"Here" was a pair of curved green doors—at least, they appeared green through Dorothy's tinted glasses. She wanted to be the honorable sort and stick to her word, but frankly, the hue and the undeniable prescription lenses were giving her a headache and a touch of nausea. Plus, the dang things were steaming up, making it doubly impossible to see anything. They were less sunglasses and more welding goggles. Dorothy lifted them up on their rubber-like strap, putting them onto her forehead like a pilot from a World War I movie.

She scanned the circular hallway, leaning back to see if she could spot anything of note. But the most surprising discovery was that it wasn't green. The rest of the Emerald City may have religiously decked everything in that prestigious jewel—she'd seen Nick peek but didn't want to anger the guards and try to as well—but the wizard's sense of décor was an act of rebellion.

The walls were a moody polished mahogany with brass accents, lit by sconces that glowed from the heart of trusty Edison-style bulbs. Sciencitch magic to the Ozians, good old electricity to her.

An almighty gong clashed, startling the group out of their various skins.

As Toto barked furiously, Jellia said, "We may enter."

On her mark, plumes of steam puffed diagonally across the entryway, as the doors whirred and retracted into the wall like some scene in a sci-fi show, revealing an even more sci-fi looking room. If sci-fi had been filmed in 1921. There had to be some, but she'd never seen any.

"Please, enter," Jellia encouraged. No one had moved yet.

Through the doorway, two enormous tables sat parallel to one another, the surfaces as warped and stained and well loved as Uncle Henry's workbench. They were weighty constructions, braced on four solid, cast-iron legs shaped like a lion's paws. The worktops were two feet thick and reinforced with black bands of metal, with all the brass-handle drawers any innovator, maker, handyman, or crafter could want. Positively medieval to behold, scattered with tools in a chaotic mess that would have made Uncle Henry see red.

A writing desk, curved to the shape of the room, stood off to the left in all its Gothic beauty: a masterpiece of woodwork, the edges adorned with carved vines and leaves and fruits, the legs using empty space to turn the same effect three-dimensional.

Something sparked, and Dorothy jumped for a second time, the lights going out.

Electricity arced and crackled, lights flashed and pulsed. Straw had ducked behind Lional, who was putting on a brave face, while Nick's expression remained as blank as ever. And Toto poked out between Dorothy's ankles, growling at every sound and sight.

But Dorothy herself relaxed, spotting the plasma balls dotted around the room, raised up high on thick stands. Impressive? Sure. Dangerous? Not a bit. She'd seen them at the science museum when she was a kid, spending ages putting her hands on the ball to get the pink-tinged electricity to come to her. A dramatic show to shock and amaze, nothing more.

In the center of this maelstrom of a black-and-white Frankenstein movie—but in cheery, Oz Technicolor—was an enormous globe-like sphere of glass with a vapor pulsating inside, captured within the sphere, expanding and contracting like some mechanism was breathing it in and out through the stand mounting it to the floor. A giant crystal ball or a giant version of the plasma balls? Dorothy didn't know, but she hoped they'd get answers.

Jellia bowed to the sphere and backed away from the door, allowing Dorothy and her crew to move further into the room.

The other three did so cautiously and with deliberate moves. Nick obviously expecting danger, Lional because he knew he took up a lot of space, and Straw since there was more than one lick of fire torching up from shallow iron dishes of bubbling liquid. But Toto took his lead from Dorothy, calming as she did.

Science tricks, she knew. Just pyrotechnics and physics. Makes sense from an Earth wizard.

"Hello?" Dorothy asked into the room, not seeing anyone at any of the workstations. She turned to Jellia, who gestured from the curved hallway outside to the large sphere in the center of the room.

The glass contraption was probably seven, maybe eight feet around and a few feet taller given the substantial iron stand it rested on. Brass carvings of open-mouthed gargoyles screamed out—three to each side of the square stand—presumably to intimidate. Dorothy thought they were kind of cute.

A voice boomed through the room, amplified and echoing from some apparatus hidden somewhere in the walls. "You have reached the great and powerful Wizard of Oz. Why do you seek an audience?"

Dorothy almost expected to hear a "please leave a message after the…" message, but a face began to appear inside the glass sphere as the words fell silent.

Fire and sparks shot up from grates in the floor around the large sphere as his face grew brighter in the swirling smoke. More bells and whistles. Dorothy had to resist applauding, at least not until after the show was over.

The Wizard looked even more like a wizard than the Wicked Witches had looked like Halloween witches. His distorted, wispy face was magnified and grotesquely large within the crystal. He had a gray beard that flowed out of sight and was probably long enough it touched the man's chest. The point of his charcoal gray hat had succumbed to gravity, flopping down to one side, giving him a sleepy quality. And his face was accented by a pair of gold-rimmed, half-moon spectacles, perched halfway down a veritable ski slope of a nose.

If his appearance had been any more clichéd, he would have started with an important mission pertaining to a special ring that needed destroying, pronto.

"You're the great and powerful wizard?" Dorothy asked with a cocked eyebrow, walking a little more confidently toward the sphere.

"Yes," the face replied, the sound coming from all about the room. "And you are Dorothy from Earth, I assume."

He was a little snippy, so maybe they had woken him up, forcing him to rush to throw on his wizard costume and get his machines switched on.

Lional, who had proven himself brave more than once, took a step backward toward the double-door entry. And even the normally curious scarecrow seemed upset by the floating, foggy head.

"Where is his neck?" Straw whispered to himself, distraught. "The poor Wizard! I should give him my body, but… oh goodness, it won't hold up a head so big. I can't math it."

Nick, as always, stood stoically, but she noticed he hadn't completely approached. Nor was he letting her go forward by herself. Toto, for his part, had ventured back out of the room, happily gaining scratches from the girl who had led them to the Wizard.

"You," Dorothy clarified, "are the great and powerful Wizard of Oz?"

"Of course. And you claim you are from the land of Earth?"

"I'm not just claiming it," Dorothy said. "It's a matter of fact. They say you're from Earth as well."

"I was, but now that I am here and learned the ways of the witches, I have become the great and powerful Wizard of Oz."

There was thundercrack that rumbled through the room. Every one of her traveling companions, except Nick, flinched and retreated from the room under the guise of checking on Toto. Meanwhile, the nostalgic charm was swiftly wearing off for Dorothy, who heard the telltale pop-scratch of speakers trying too hard to make a noise they didn't have the power to make. The magic had been explained, and now it wasn't magic anymore.

"I appreciate your whole aesthetic," Dorothy said. "Visit a lot of science museums when you were a kid?"

The wizard's distorted bug eyes widened.

"You may want to think about a different appearance, though," she went on, "or you might have trouble with the Tolkien estate."

"What?" he said. "I… um… excuse me?"

"I think you heard me, or did you pump in too much vapor?" Dorothy said as she hopped up onto one of the hefty workbenches and swung her feet back and forth, secretly enjoying every minute. She picked up one of the strewn tools and turned it over in her hand, realizing it was a busted, super-old pair of pliers. On closer inspection, most of the "tools" were useless, almost more prop than productive.

"Once you're done with the light show," she continued, "why don't you come out and let's just chat for a minute? Face to smaller face. I can't take you seriously like this."

Nick leaned a little closer to her, whispering, "Are you sure you should antagonize someone who is quite so… so…" He repeated the word and gestured around the room.

"Great and powerful?" Dorothy suggested.

Nick nodded.

"Well, like I said," she replied, "I can't take a floating head that's obviously using smoke and mirrors to try to frighten everyone away very seriously."

"That is not how I do this trick," the wizard declared, and then paused for a second after he realized he had used the word "trick." "I mean… that is not how true wizards from the… Earth… converse with their… uh…" he stammered slightly, unable to finish the sentence.

"Well, I could tell you one thing…" Dorothy mimicked his flustered pauses. "On the… part of Earth… where I come from… we like to talk in person. I don't have the patience for an Ozoom call right now."

The Wizard genuinely looked befuddled. Another minute of floundering later and the light show came to a turn-of-a-switch abrupt ending. The smoke inside the glass sphere began to reverse, sucked down some sort of vent and taking the projection with it, and the room fell dark.

A tarnished brass chandelier overhead, with its smattering of Edison-style bulbs, burst back into life, and with a swishing draw of curtains on the far side of the room, out walked a human man in his early forties.

Taking off the gray hat and pulling off his eyeglasses, fake whiskers, and nose, shedding a silvery robe to reveal a rather mundane shirt and pants not unlike the cotton number Nick was fond of wearing, he addressed the group.

"So, I guess that means you really are from Earth, since you saw through these tricks so easily," he said, sounding almost disappointed.

"Was this some kind of test?" Dorothy asked.

"Sort of," he said after a pause. "You wouldn't believe how many people lie and say they're from Earth. There have been more than a few, of course, and several of them have risen to great notoriety, and far too many would want to ride those coattails."

"Plus," he added, "I do have an enemy or two who would use a declaration of coming from Earth to try to get close to me. It was a good show, though, wasn't it?"

Dorothy cracked a smile. "Loved the plasma balls. Only criticism: you need better speakers."

"I do, but they're the only ones I have." He smiled back, relaxing. "So, tell me, Dorothy, where are you specifically from?"

"Kansas," she replied. "Me and my dog, Toto." Upon hearing his name, her pup sprinted into the room, skidded across the parquet, and nosedived into the Wizard's feet, where he promptly began nuzzling. "Like I had Jellia tell you, I'm originally from San Francisco, but I'm living in Wichita at the moment." She thought about it for a moment. "When I'm not trapped in a fairytale on some other planet…"

"Oh, really? Northwester University, right?"

"No, that's in Illinois. Wichita is in Kansas..."

"Ah, okay. Well."

"And you're from?" she asked.

"Ohio," he answered. "The north part, Cincinnati."

"Ah, well, hello, Wizard of Oz from Cincinnati. I don't suppose you have an actual name."

He smiled and stuck his hand out. "Isaac."

Dorothy took his hand and shook it once, but before she could ask her next question, Nick interjected, "Did you create this whole… theatrical?"

"You're right to ask. This stuff isn't even mine," he admitted. "I sort of inherited it with the job title. My predecessor, another human from Earth, built this decades and decades ago—hence the ropey speakers. Others have added to it. I have the honor of taking care of it.I've been adding to it whenever I can, picking up Earth relics from all the corners of Oz in an attempt to learn as much about the Wizards who have been here before me. It can be pretty slim pickings."

"Are you trying to get home as well?" the scarecrow asked. "We're trying to get Dorothy home."

Isaac shook his head. "It's home now, enemies and all. However, your tale has piqued my curiosity, Dorothy of San Francisco by way of Wichita."

"Well then, buckle up, buttercup," Dorothy said. "It's going to be quite the little story."

The group had goneto the second floor of the tower via a curved staircase in one of the outer rings of the first floor. They sat around a circular dining table with cool drinks in front of them and various—also circular—sweet and savory treats stacked on trays that Jellia had brought in when they first entered the room. Even the sandwiches were circles. Toto had already eaten four.

Isaac seemed to dote on Jellia like a father would, often insisting that she not bother with worrying about taking care of them all, despite her constant insistence to the contrary.

"It's just carrying platters and taking away plates," she'd said. "You know I like to be busy, and this redecoration boredom is driving me mad. Besides, there's a dog. I wouldn't be anywhere else."

Isaac had relented after that, turning his attention to Dorothy. He'd asked several questions about the current state of affairs back in their mutual homeland, but she'd pushed past them with as much speed as politeness would allow. It was more important that they got to the real business at hand. The wand. It was resting on the table in front of her, still in the spyglass tube, waiting for the right moment to be tossed into conversation.

"Since I don't really eat," Straw said, "can I go look at all the tapestries, Dot?"

Dorothy looked over at Isaac, who nodded. The scarecrow happily clambered to his feet and picked out one of the many geometric pattern tapestries on the wall and started tracing it with a finger just like before. Like putting a tablet in front of a toddler, he'd spend hours there if they let him.

Nick drummed his fingers on the rich wood dining table, his uneaten blushberry tart in front of him. "And you said you've been here twenty-plus years? Did you ever attempt to get back?" he asked the self-proclaimed Wizard of Oz.

"More than twenty now," Isaac replied, "and I did attempt to get back at first, but I found I enjoyed the people and places of Oz too much. It never lost its novelty. Maybe it will, one day, but what place doesn't?"

Dorothy considered that it was more likely he enjoyed his station and the unique position granted to him. It was confirmed by his next words.

"When I found out that the Wizard of Oz was a position given to outsiders to the land of Oz, having been inaugurated a hundred or so years earlier by the original Wizard, I found that I rather liked the idea of throwing my hat in the ring. That was some eight years back," Isaac said.

Dorothy smiled. "Your pointy hat?"

"Don't remind me!" He grimaced and, a second later, burst out laughing.

Dorothy's instincts told her not to completely trust Isaac. There was something about him that she couldn't quite put her finger on, but the more time she spent with him, the more he triggered storm sirens at the back of her mind. In fact, the only reason she had continued with the farce of asking for his help was because he was the only one who could. Glinda had said as much, and Glinda she trusted.

The conversation paused for a second, and Dorothy used the lull to bring up her own Oz problems. She tapped the spyglass tube and looked hard at Isaac.

"Glinda says there's no one, other than her, with more knowledge of wands and their workings," Dorothy said to the Wizard. "Perhaps you could take a look at this and give us your opinion on a very complicated question."

"Of course, Dot," Isaac replied. "May I call you Dot?"

"No." Dorothy raised an eyebrow, daring him to.

"Okay…" Isaac half smirked. "Well then, Dorothy"—he emphasized the name—"may I see the wand?"

He held out his hand, leaning forward across the round table.

Dorothy rolled the wood cylinder across the table to the Wizard. He struggled with the end cap to the point where she frustratedly got up from her seat, came around the table, and opened it for him.

The Wizard slid out the cloth-wrapped black wand and unwound the dish towels she had bundled it up with, studied the length of the ebony wand, checking the series of notches carved into the handle. Clearly intrigued, he took out a monocle-looking thing and held it to his eye, studying the wand closer, like a jeweler inspecting a rare diamond.

Dorothy sighed out a breath she didn't know she'd been holding when she saw that the wand was still intact after their journey to the city. No visible cracks, anyway.

"It's definitely a Wicked wand," Isaac said, pocketing his monocle magnifier. "I believe this one probably belonged the Witch of the East. Am I correct?"

Dorothy's worries about his expertise shrank in that moment. "Yes," she answered. He could've deduced some of what was going on based on the story of how they'd wound up there, but they had left out which of the two witch's wands they had brought with them. Only that there were two in question.

"You say this summoned you here through a tornado?" Isaac asked.

"It did," Dorothy replied. "Or Glinda thinks it half did, and there's the rub. She says if it's the only one to have brought me here, she can use it to send me back. But, if by some freak accident, it's both this wand and Zolesha's wand in tandem, then sending me back with one of the wands may end up sending only half of me back."

The idea really shook her up, but she didn't want her companions, or Isaac, to see it, so she turned it into a bit of a joke. "Of course, even if only half of me went back, it still wouldn't get my mother the half of my inheritance that she's after. But I'd rather keep the whole of me, the whole time, if possible."

Nick snorted out a breath and pinched his shoulders back. His fingers stopped their drumming on the table.

"Then we need to find out," Isaac said. He got up from the table. "If you'll come with me, we'll do a little test or two. Jellia, if you'd be so kind as to entertain our lion friend and our scarecrow. The room we're going to next is a little too cluttered for all of us to fit comfortably."

Jellia nodded and gestured for Lional and Straw to follow her.

"Oh, great and powerful Wizard of Oz." The ever-formal prince used Isaac's proper title, clicking his claws together anxiously. "It is my most pressing hope that we might talk about my issue as well, when you are done aiding my fine companions."

"Of course. One thing at a time, though. I'm only one man." Isaac chuckled to himself. "Let me look at this wand, see what can be done, and then I'll come talk to you privately. Will that suffice?"

"More than adequately." Lional bowed and joined Jellia as they exited the room, though the lionman had to forcibly tug Straw away from his beloved geometric patterns.

"Now, if you two and little Toto will follow me…" Isaac gestured toward Dorothy and Nick.

Toto kicked his legs and ran figure eights for a moment, whining and looking back in the direction Jellia went. The girl was also hesitating at the doorway, looking fondly back at Toto.

Dorothy laughed and said, "Go on, then. Traitor."

Her oldest companion raced from the room, yipping toward his new set of friends.

Two curved flights of stairs and the unlocking of a complicated series of locks on a solid steel door later, and the trio was standing in a windowless room at the very top of the tower.

The stone walls were almost completely concealed by glass cabinet after glass cabinet of wands. Each of the metal and wood magical devices were stored in bespoke display boxes, nestled in the same garnet velvet, pointing toward the ceiling, like the oddest display of guns Dorothy had ever seen. And it sort of made sense. They were as dangerous, if not more so, than Uncle Henry's coyote rifle back home.

There were a few unusual-looking testing devices sitting on even more unusual-looking tables. Half wands, broken wands, half-broken wands, full wands, nubs of wands, plus every other state imaginable were mounted in many of the machines, and all of them in various states of experimentation. Some glowing, some throwing off warmth, some fizzing wetly, all results being meticulously notated on short stacks of faintly red paper.

On the bottom of each of the glass cases were bookshelf after bookshelf of leather-bound volumes, in that same garnet-red shade. Their spines appeared identical yet were numbered and marked in gold gilt. Obviously, the loose-leaf notes all around would eventually find themselves booked up and shelved in the magical room.

"How many wands do you have in here?" Nick asked.

"Honestly," Isaac answered, "I don't even know anymore. More than a handful for certain."

Isaac opened up one of the drawers that separated the glass-top cabinets from the bottom bookshelves and gestured inside it. Laying like an office junk drawer of too-long pencils were hundreds more wands. A quick count of drawers said there were another thirty-plus, full of wands as well.

They had come to the right person after all.

Dorothy noted the different shapes and sizes and let out a low whistle. "And each of these are magical?"

"Not all of them," Isaac said. "Some were just being carved and never got enchanted. Some have been used. Some are yet to be determined. But my agents throughout all of Oz are constantly looking for remnants in castle ruins, former witch haunts, and old huts of those who no longer practice or are no longer alive."

"Did you inherit all of this from your predecessor, as well?" Dorothy asked.

"Actually, no." He paused and seemed to rethink his answer. "Well, sort of. The ones in the glass showcases were already here. They were the ones that had been confiscated directly out of the hands of witches. The rest you see here, plus all the books, are my personal attempts to study the chaos that is Good and Wicked magic."

"Why?" Nick bluntly asked.

Isaac turned to the pair of them but hesitated.

"I'm curious too," Dorothy verbally nudged him. "Are you trying to be a witch as well?"

His answer seemed close to the surface, but he shook his head. "I don't think we're quite such good friends, Dorothy." He emphasized her name again, and she knew he was still salty about her not wanting him to call her Dot. "I really can't discuss such a private matter, but rest assured that Glinda—despite her pretty vapid nature, actually—had the right idea to send you to me. A surprisingly bold and correct choice."

Nick tensed up next to Dorothy. Neither one of them liked to hear the lady being called vapid. But being in the middle of asking for a free favor wasn't the best time to call him out on it.

"I'm going to do a couple of very quick tests with these machines," the Wizard said. "And you tell me if you feel, hear, or see anything. Alright, Dorothy?"

She nodded.

But Nick spoke up, "Is this dangerous?" He took a half step closer to Isaac, and in the confined space of the room with the clutter and the workstations, that was close enough for the gesture to make an impression.

"It's perfectly safe, Nick," Isaac responded, trying to take a step back from the metal-skinned man and having nowhere to go. "The only danger, uh-hum, that could come, is if I accidentally broke the wand."

Nick finished the thought for him. "Which would just make Dorothy staying here permanent."

"Right, but with Wicked Witches using curse magic, and the Summer Solstoz so close…" Isaac let the implication hang in the air.

Nick shuddered and nodded, stepping back from the Wizard.

"Clearly, I'm missing something," Dorothy said.

"He's implying that if two wands did bring you here and one of them has been broken, when the Solstoz hits, the other wand holding you here will lose power long enough for you to go home," Nick told her. She thought she heard his voice crack at one point, but it could have been her mind cracking with the next logical step of the statement.

"So, half of me zips back to Kansas and half stays here?" She matched him with a shudder of her own.

Nick rubbed his silver hands on his hips. At first, it looked to Dorothy like he was wiping sweat off of his palms, but then he started pushing the heel of his hand into the bone, and she got the feeling he was trying to push away some kind of pain instead.

As young as he was, it hadn't occurred to Dorothy that perhaps his metal frame had worn so heavy on his body that he was suffering from arthritis. It would certainly explain his bouts of obvious pain and limping.

"But not to worry," the Wizard said. "I'm sure Glinda has anchored you here with her blessing magic when she adhered those silver slippers to your feet."

"You're the expert," Dorothy replied, though not entirely comforted with the tepid response.

Isaac looked to the wand in her hand and then back to Dorothy for permission. She nodded again. He took the black wand and put it on a stand with cup-like crystal ends. He pulled them forward until they touched the points of the wand as if it were a lathe and he was positioning a piece of wood.

Nothing happened after a few moments, and he moved the wand to a second stand. Three more tests on three more machines later, and still nothing had occurred. But when he took the wand over and placed it under a series of complicated mirrors, adjusting them in an almost chaotic sequence, and then opened a panel in the ceiling that let sunlight stream down through thick iron bars, the wretched thing finally gave up a reaction.

The sunlight bounced from mirror to mirror and impacted the black wand in a flash of hot light. The moment it struck, a wind rushed through the open grate above and wrapped itself in a furious coil around Dorothy, pulling on her pigtails and making her feel as if she had stepped backward into a new tornado.

Isaac slammed the shutter closed and the wind died down as quickly as the sunlight disappeared.

"There's some proof at least," Isaac said. "Apparently, this is one of the wands that brought you here."

"But is it the only one?" Nick asked. "Or did Zolesha's bring Dorothy here too?"

"There's only one way to find out." Isaac leaned over the table, pulling the wand out of the holder. But instead of taking it to another machine, he handed it over to Dorothy. "You're going to have to go to the Wicked Witch of the West's castle and bring me back the other possible culprit."