Shadows of the Emerald City

by J. W. Schnarr

  “Nick, what’s wrong? Why won’t you look at me?”

  Ku Klip hurried to her side.

  “He’s still mending, young Miss. It’s a grievous injury, as you see…he won’t be himself for some time.”

  “Of course,” Nimmie Amee said, seizing at once on the explanation. “His poor leg. Will he ever walk again?”

  “Certainly not,” Ku Klip said with the callousness of the wise. “At best, this tin leg I’ve made for him will support his weight and allow him to hobble a little.”

  “Aye, hobble to the poorhouse,” Nick said suddenly, turning a frozen, unpleasant smile on the girl. “You wouldn’t care much for that, hey Nimmie? A pauper’s life wouldn’t much suit you, I don’t think.”

  The folk around the bed shuffled their feet uncomfortably. Some coughed and began edging towards the door, muttering about urgent business in the village.

  “Don’t say that!” Nimmie Amee cried. “I’ll love you even if you are a pauper…”

  It was perhaps an unfortunate choice of words. She then complicated matters by trying to climb onto the bed with the woodsman and get her arms around him.

  “Get off me, you whoring bitch!”

  The tin leg straightened viciously. The foot Ku Klip had constructed for it was roughly fashioned; an angular, sharp-edged thing. Had the kick connected, Nimmie Amee would have lost her face. She tumbled from the bed, her eyes moving to the gleaming metal limb. Even now it was bending and unbending at the knee, apparently of its own volition. There was something insectile about the mindless flexing. Something that called to mind the wing-beating of a butterfly newly broken from its chrysalis. The woodman stared at it in horror.

  The axe was fascinated. Something of the power that had given it life had apparently communicated itself to Chopper’s new leg. A hundred questions occurred to it–had it been equipped with a mouth and tongue it would gladly have spent the afternoon interrogating Ku Klip. It might not have gotten satisfactory answers though; the tinsmith had gone silent. His face was drawn and white.

  The Nola Amee picked that moment to make her appearance. The axe had the pleasure of seeing her face when it lit on Chopper’s flexing leg. She had entered the hut with an unctuous expression on her old face. The vicious gloating underneath was difficult to miss. When she saw her victim’s pistoning leg, her jaw dropped in a parody of astonishment.

  “Auntie Nola,” Nimmie Amee said. Her voice was expressionless with shock. “See how well Nick has gotten already? We’ll still be able to be married. Isn’t it wonderful?”

  “Tinsmith,” Nola Amee said slowly. “What did you do with his leg? His old one, I mean, the one he…damaged.” The axe took careful note of the question, and the fearful tone in which Nola Amee asked it.

  “Why, I burned it,” Ku Klip said dully, his eyes fixed on Chopper. “In the furnace out back. It was no good to him.”

  “Of course,” the old woman nodded, looking relieved. “Of course.” Her eyes turned on the axe; they held a wonder mingled with terror that it found delicious.

  “Auntie,” Nimmie Amee said fiercely. “Didn’t you hear what I said? We’ll still be married.” She hesitated a moment, then grabbed Nick’s hand and held it to her breast. Her face set and determined. The woodsman glanced at her with loathing, but he was apparently still weak from his ordeal. Too weak to push her away or spit in her face (as the axe somewhat wistfully suggested to him).

  “We’ll still be married,” Nimmie Amee repeated, at no one in particular. “Nick will be alright and we’ll be married, just as we planned. It’s a miracle. A miracle.”

  Within months, Nick Chopper had become a thing to frighten children. He was a clanking, shining nightmare creature. A generation of villagers would remember his name as a very effective threat against uneaten vegetables. He kept increasingly to himself, preferring the solitude of his hut or the forest to covert stares and whispers. He still plied his trade but the coin it brought him accumulated unspent. He no longer ate, or cared to drink. A regularly replenished can of oil, its contents applied carefully to his joints in the evenings, was his one material need. The wedding with Nimmie Amee was postponed, eventually, out of existence.

  Word among the villagers was that she had finally left her home, heartbroken, but doubtless glad to be away from Nola’s sharp tongue and incessant meddling.

  Still, Nick was a wonder, if a terrible one. Many in the village maintained that Ku Klip’s work could have made his fortune and made him a god among tinsmiths and physicians both. But a little more heart went out of the old man with every limb or part he had to replace–and these came more and more frequently as the axe continued its work. Replacing the woodman’s head took a particular toll on him, and shortly after Nick’s bleeding and mutilated torso–the last of his meat–had been replaced with a gleaming tin cylinder, Ku Klip found a stout rope and used it. His funeral was respectable, if sparsely attended.

  The axe rejoiced; was this not true happiness? To not only do the work one had been created for, but to excel at it so? Paradise. It loved the new Nick…to the extent it was capable of love. His metallic, sharp-edged frame was vastly more appealing to its logical sensibilities than the meat-body had been.

  The axe hated chatter. The new Nick barely spoke. His new tongue was ill-suited to the task. The axe required regular whetting and oiling; Nick’s new body understand those needs well. It felt them so keenly itself. Often the axe wondered how it had managed during those dreary early days, when most of Nick was still meat.

  Not that meat was completely without interest of course. The axe had seen that Nick carefully collected each piece of his old self that remained after Ku Klip did his work. He took it back to the hut where it joined its’ brothers in providing the evening entertainment. The arms, legs, toes and endless slippery organs fascinated the axe. They were so untidy in their design; so absurdly complex.

  All in all, the days and evenings both were very full. There was another development as well, one most pleasing to the axe; it had decided to appropriate Nick’s surname, since the woodsman was no longer using it. The decision was made on impulse, and there was no one to hear or know of it. Yet the axe—Chopper—felt a deep, preening satisfaction each time it remembered. It was like a man who had bought some luxurious item he could afford but had never considered before. It was more than a tool now. The bumpkins hereabouts didn’t know, but soon they would. Perhaps quite soon.

  Its ambitions were growing.

  One cloudy morning Chopper took Nick outside on an errand. The task it had in mind had nothing to do with cutting wood, though it still relished in the mechanical precision with which Nick swung it and the splintering bites it took out of the sides of trees. This was, after all, the closest it came to moving, and it was, in its way, another bit of work for which it had been designed. Still, it wasn’t wood they needed this morning.

  The axe had no intention of allowing the tin man to venture too far from the hut. A storm was brewing. That was plain to be read in the grey and rumbling skies. A drenching would not do Nick’s new body any good, and Chopper had left the can of oil behind, preferring that Nick not be needlessly encumbered.

  Chopper found the place it was seeking. A mossy place, riddled with small holes amidst the group of apple trees near the hut. It set Nick to work hacking up the moss and stomping until its quarry emerged: a burrowing rodent, not unlike a rat or weasel but much larger. The thing bared its teeth at Nick and was quickly bisected.

  The axe directed Nick to pick the mangled remains of the creature up and hold it in its imperfect line of vision. It was trying to decide if this one specimen would be sufficient for its purpose.

  “Nick? Nick…how are you?” Nola Amee’s nervous voice behind them was an unwelcome distraction. The old woman had kept well away from the woodsman since the initial incident with the leg. Chopper had put her out of its mind since then. It had no idea why she was here or what she might want, and was not particularly interested.

  �
��Whughhuhh…” Nick greeted her, his tin tongue clicking in his tin head.

  “Yes,” Nola Amee said, in the voice of one trying to appease a fully-grown and possibly dangerous idiot. “Yes, hello. See what I’ve brought you? Just look. Look and see.”

  Nick was already looking at her, having turned his head completely round on his shoulders. Chopper knew perfectly well who the old woman was really speaking to.

  Bored and now irritated, the axe directed Nick to swing it slowly around so it could see. It was almost amused; the silly bitch was holding another axe and grinning with large fearful eyes. They never once left Chopper’s gleaming head.

  “You see? A fine new axe for you, a real beauty! Far better than that old thing you’ve been hanging onto, eh? You can throw your grindstone away, this one practically sharpens itself. Its edge is fine enough to slice shadow.”

  Chopper understood her intentions. She wanted Nick to take this new inanimate axe in exchange for itself so that she could go hobbling off to the other old woman. The mutterer who had first woken it. She would then make good on the mutterer’s promise to destroy it. The audacity of this—the sheer wrong-headedness of the plan—amused the axe mightily. If it were capable of laughter, it would have howled.

  It made Nick laugh instead, throwing his head back and staggering, filling the forest with a grotesque, chattering roar. Nola Amee stepped back with goggling eyes, clutching the impostor axe to her droopy bosom. At that moment, fortuitously enough, the rat-weasel’s bloody remains spasmed in Nick’s fingers. The creature’s head rose, a semblance of life returning to it courtesy of the axe’s vitality. It made a queer, piercing noise—half angry chittering, half squeals of agony—that went badly with Nick’s metallic hilarity.

  This was apparently too much for the old woman. She threw the axe down and fled. A perverse urge made Chopper set Nick on her, suffering itself to be dropped so the woodman could have a hand free (he seemed reluctant to relinquish the rat thing, for some reason).

  Nick caught Nola Amee easily, seizing her arm with a force more than sufficient to crush the bone. Chopper found this interesting; it had been under the impression that there was nothing left of the old meat-born Nick. All his parts had been replaced with good, sensible tin. It was wrong; evidently some gobbets and smears of his original self remained. At least that part of him that had despised the old woman.

  What was there was little more than a vicious, childish perversity. He rubbed the rat-creature’s broken body in her slack-jawed face in an attempt to get her to eat it.

  Nola Amee surprised Chopper a bit as well; it would have expected her to faint or die of what must have surely been unbearable pain. Instead, she fought back with remarkable force, spitting fur and destroyed flesh back in Nick’s face. Her ruined arm dangled limp and bloody at her side but she managed to slap his cheek once hard enough to make him grunt.

  “Whoreson! And me a fool! I should have done you myself with honest poison! But no, I trusted a witch! Now I’ve lost Nimmie all the same and made a monster!”

  There was more, but pain was catching up with the old woman. Most of what came out then was babble, chiefly concerned with Nimmie and how her intentions had been blameless. She sank to her knees, wailing piteously and clutching her smashed arm.

  Chopper had a thought.

  It had Nick take Nola Amee by the hair and drag her back to the hut, picking itself up on the way. What it had in mind was simply too good to miss.

  “Yuh wun’ Nimmie?” Nick gurgled. “Wun’ see er?”

  He kicked the hut’s door open with one foot. Then he threw Nola Amee to the ground and kicked at her until she clambered in on her knees, supported by her one good hand.

  There was little in the hut these days: endless rows of stacked firewood, mounds of faggots Nick had busied himself tying during the long and dark nights.

  And there was one other thing, something that got up and looked at Nola Amee and made a horrible noise that she immediately echoed.

  The chunks and bits of meat Chopper had made Nick claim from Ku Klip had not stayed dead. Like the rat creature, like the metal parts that now composed Nick, they had in time succumbed to the remaining influence of the powder of life. They had squirmed in their basket, spewing blood and less appetizing substances. The nose snorted in and frantically exhaled air. The fingers clutched, the eyes rolled and saw. The organ of Nick’s that the axe had so coveted early on grew hard, softened and stiffened again in an endless cycle. All of this made for fascinating viewing—but merely watching didn’t satisfy Chopper for long.

  It had never been acquainted with the word experiment, but it would have understood it at once. It was in the spirit of experiment that Chopper had Nick apply lit matches and sharp-edged knives to his old skin and flesh, wrench his old teeth from his old gums and divide his old tongue and old penis by holding an end in either hand and pulling.

  Finally Chopper had grown bored…and still more ambitious.

  There was a heavy cobbler’s needle and a reel of stout twine in the hut. More twine was purchased on Nick’s next trip to the village, along with nails and steel clamps and solder. Chopper was curious; if the pieces of the old Nick were put back together in some reasonable semblance of his previous form, would it have created, in effect, two Nicks? One of meat and one of tin? It found the philosophical implications of this fascinating.

  Unfortunately, the experiment had only been partially successful. Somehow the parts did not make up a whole man, only a slouching, dripping, broken thing that gabbled and shuddered and filled the hut with unbearable stenches.

  Chopper had been undaunted. There were gaps, so they would have to be filled, t That was all. Rabbits and mice and a few dogs that strayed from the village provided initial pieces, but the effect their hastily sewn-in bits provided was less than pleasing.

  Then, one day, someone came tapping shyly at the hut’s door, someone who had taken herself from Nick’s life but could not bear to stay away. Chopper had been delighted.

  “Nimmie!” the old woman sobbed, tearing in mindless anguish at her cheek. “Nimmie, no! No, no…”

  Nimmie Amee’s blue eyes regarded her coolly from a face that had seemingly been sprinkled with eyes, as a cake is sprinkled with raisins. Meat Nick (as Chopper thought of it) reached out a torn and skinned and much-stitched hand. A hand with two thumbs but less than the requisite number of fingers. Those fingers it had it fit around Nola Amee’s throat, and with a quick, convulsive squeeze ended her life. Tin Nick shrieked and stomped.

  Having died but not by the axe’s blade, Nola Amee would not revive.

  There was a certain justice to the whole scene.

  The axe made two mistakes when it left the hut.

  First, it left behind the oil can. Meat Nick and Tin Nick had enjoyed themselves playing with Nola Amee’s remains for some time. For the first time since it had begun its association with the woodsman, Chopper had difficulty controlling him–either of him. It had felt that a bit of woodcutting to distract Tin Nick would be a good idea. With the abundance of new meat provided by Nola Amee, there was no need for any more rat creatures to stop up the remaining gaps in Meat Nick’s body.

  The second mistake was not locking the door behind it. The door had been damaged when Tin Nick kicked it open, but not too badly. The lock was still whole. Chopper could easily have had Nick repair it. But it was irritated with him and still excited from witnessing Nola Amee’s death. Meat Nick would be busy for some time yet with the corpse. There was no need to worry about anything so mundane as a broken door. Chopper relished the cold wind that had blown up; the rumbling thunder seemed to echo deep in its haft. It looked forward to burying its edge deep in some young wood.

  But when the storm hit minutes later it regretted its hastiness. Nick, busy demolishing an apple tree, had gotten into a rhythm and it was difficult to get him to break it. Even though the rain was soon sluicing over him and gathering in a wide puddle at his feet.

  Then Meat Nick ca
me bounding out of the hut. Until now, the creature seemed either afraid of its tin brother or regarded him with a certain reluctant deference. But now sibling tensions broke through.

  The two battled for nearly an hour in the downpour.

  That Tin Nick would win the fight was a foregone conclusion, but it took longer than it should have. As did the brief rest Nick insisted on taking afterward. Taking note of the rough red patches sprouting on his trunk and thighs, the axe forced urgent thoughts into his head.

  Oil can, it thought, keeping it simple. Oil can…

  “Oi-i-eel-c’n…” Nick grated obediently through a mouth that now would not open properly. He began walking, but the rain was still falling, and by now his joints were sticking. He was slow.

  And the hut far away.

  Meat Nick’s remains—ironically revitalized by Chopper’s power even as its blade had laid it low—rallied and attempted a final assault. The axe was furious at this effrontery and ordered itself raised, but the rust in his joints prevented Tin Nick from letting the planned blow fall.

  But Meat Nick was now little more than sinew and cartilage and mindless rage. The stitches and clamps could no longer effectively hold him together. As Tin Nick’s consciousness fell into a rusty sleep, the faulty structure of rotted flesh and bone splinters collapsed and lay twitching on the grass, waiting for the rain to wash it away.

  Rust had gathered on Chopper’s head as well. It was angry, but now that the traitor had been dispatched, it was philosophical.

  Sooner or later it would be rescued.

  Sooner or later someone would pass by the hut and this time it would not be slow. As the rain continued, its thoughts turned feverish.

  It had been foolish to restrict itself to one servant–or even two, if the Nicks were counted as separate beings. Since taking its name, it had felt itself growing ever stronger, more than ready to try another slave. And if it could take two or three, why not five? If five, why not a dozen?