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The Past Approaches
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T HE DAWN was a masked one, clouds making modest the exhibitionist sun.
Brrr, whose sleep had been erratic, sat up. In the corner, as yet un-struck by light, Shadowpuppet looked like watery milk. A small heap of shit, its tapering point like the head of a worm, lay coiled nearby. Brrr couldn’t imagine how a transparent creature could produce opaque offal, but if this was a philosophical question in disguise, he wasn’t up to considering it before breakfast.
He stood and tried to press the wrinkles out of his coat. Not that the humble maunts nor the blind oracle would care.
He couldn’t see out the window; what an appetite a window awoke. He wanted to look down on the terrain, to observe the nearer wheat fields and the oakhair forests farther off. To plot, if he could, the movement of opposing militias. To note if the chimney of that small farmhouse in the wheat was issuing the smoke of kitchen fires, or had the crusty residents finally abandoned their homestead during the night?
Lacking the window, though, his eye veered inward for a last, involuntary lurch toward his most private possession, the memory of Muhlama.
She’d gone, bounding with energy away from him, up an escarpment of rocks the color of pearlfruit rinds. Now that his whiskers were starting to whiten, he could imagine all too well some male Ocelot lurking beyond the rocks. Or maybe even a Fell Tiger—someone who fit Muhlama better, both in character and in the congress of sexual organs, than the stout and Cowardly Lion.
One thing was certain; she hadn’t been unpracticed at the art of receiving sexual advances. She worked herself to her satisfaction with a talent that Brrr had first mistaken for his own glorious technique. Later—again with the laters—he’d mused on her expertise. Lover in the underbrush somewhere?
Felinity. You never knew, as he was the first to admit.
“Come on, Shadowpuppet,” said Brrr, nudging the old cat with a sheathed paw. “Time to finish our interviews. Unriddle the riddles at hand, not the ones out of reach.”
The cat purred, and Brrr purred back. The best part of these late days was in their purring wordlessly together. The closest to companionship he got.
Then, hitting the society of crabby, tired, black-clad maunts on their way toward morning devotions, the best part of the day was behind them.
Sister Doctor and Sister Apothecaire were hotly arguing on a landing. They turned at his approach.
“Ladies,” he said, “I thought charity ruled in a house like this one.”
“Mind your own business,” said Sister Doctor.
“That’s your answer to everything,” snapped Sister Apothecaire. She held her hand to her side, as if she had a case of stitches; perhaps she’d been running. In any case, she was a stout little thing, and the staircase had not been built with Munchkinlander legs in mind.
“Anything I can help with?” His tone sounded grand this morning; maybe just remembering Muhlama once in a while had a tonic effect.
“You can finish your work and be on your way,” said Sister Apothecaire.
“You can join us in chapel to pray for those who died last night,” said Sister Doctor.
His ruff went up. “Not Yackle?”
“No, but if she keeps refusing to die, we can put her coffin on wheels and slide her into Kellswater like—like—” Here Sister Doctor, who was one hard cookie, lost a startled little tear from the outside of each of her eyes. The drops rolled slowly down, like glue, as if astonished at their liberation.
“Don’t be wet,” snapped Sister Apothecaire, and then gave a nervous snuffle. Inadvertently she’d made a joke of some sort. Sister Doctor glared with hatred at her.
Brrr had no use for either of them. “But what? A new military maneuver? A rash broken out among the novices? What are you talking about?”
“We have had news of last night’s engagement,” said Sister Doctor. “An itinerant dwarf came to our door early this morning for food, and told us what he knew. In the middle of the night, the Munchkinlander militia surrounded a contingent of Emerald City Messiars and drove them down the slope of a bluff. The dwarf saw it all, he said. The Munchkinlanders herded the hapless soldiers right off the strand of sour pebbles and into the dead reaches of Kellswater.”
“It is impossible,” said the Lion.
“They kept shooting, a volley of arrows and scattershot alike—I don’t know the terms of the military trade—and the soldiers were driven deeper, waist-deep deeper; and eventually dove down to escape the onslaught.”
“But Kellswater is poison water,” said Brrr. “That’s what is said. Nothing grows there; no animal drinks at its shores.”
“That’s what is said, and that’s what is meant,” said Sister Doctor. “And there is a good reason. The soldiers came up dead—their bodies began to rot once they were immersed. They bobbed like so many carcasses. Not a single soul taken hostage, no mercy shown to any man jack among them.”
“Well,” said the Lion. “A military operation that worked, then.”
