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You’ve dropped your bones in the sod.
Yield up, yield up, yield up your souls
To the darksome, nameless disappearance:
The heart of the Unnamed God.”
When Sister Doctor approached the podium to offer a eulogy for the dead soldiers, Yackle stood up and rambled away.
• 3 •
S HE WAS almost back to the chamber where Brrr was conducting his interviews when she was interrupted by an unfamiliar smell. In the corridor’s chill stony breath, a mild, milky reek of tubers. At about the level of her thighs.
“Who is it?” she said, thinking: A dog? A raccoon? A Munchkinlander she hadn’t met yet? (Sister Apothecaire was the only Munchkinlander in residence, and her musk was redolent of rotting tea leaves, no matter how much lavender she doused herself with.) Then Yackle thought: I’m a bit potty—I imagine this to be old what’s-’er-name, the Glikkun from the Lion’s past. Sakkali Oafish. A Glikkun would smell of root vegetables; they all live underground.
But it was a male voice that replied. “Sticky trickle, who’d have guessed this? You old thing? Still? What’s propping you up?”
She knew the voice, from years and years back. “Making trouble again?” she snapped at the dwarf.
“I never make trouble,” he protested, chuckling. “I make way for trouble.”
“What are you doing here? In a cloister of religious women, of all unseemly places?”
“Not my first choice,” he admitted. “But small and incidental as I am, no more than a straw in the floods of history, I am pushed ahead of the approaching Messiars. The Emerald City will be catching news of the attack this morning. Retaliation time. Of course it’s all in the cards, don’t you know? The armies are already here, prepared for the next provocation. What an obvious game, what a tedious one. But I agree: I don’t like being washed up on the banks of a religious establishment any more than you do, I suspect.”
“Well, get out of here, then,” she said. “I want nothing to do with your meddling.”
“But I don’t meddle,” he repeated. “I don’t even comment. I simply perch and watch. Keep my own counsel. Lips sealed, eyes open. How have you managed to stay alive, you old heathen?”
“One gasp at a time. And I have no time to grant you an audience just now. Get out of my way, you imp. You hobgoblin.”
“My feelings are hurt.” His voice wheedled, almost affectionately. “And we go so far back.”
“So far back, and no further forward,” she said. “Get out of my way.”
“You haven’t run into a Lion slouching along these corridors, have you?”
She rounded on him. “What is your game, you miscreant?”
“Oh, you know me, Missus Madame Maenad. You think you’re the only one with an eye to the future, but I take my marching orders from a pretty terrific instrument on wheels. I was led to believe I’d find a Lion about here. Times being what they are, I suppose I need another conscript, maybe one with claws.”
“You—you stay away from him. If you find him. He’s on a mission.”
“You defending some craven beast? Say it ain’t so. I thought you were never out for any but yourself.”
Yackle didn’t answer. She just saw in her indeterminate way a kind of shadow of the Lion, slump-spined, bejowled, bewhiskered. A hat rotating in his hands, a stain on his vest. Afflicted with the twitch of always looking over his own shoulder. “The Lion’s not in play here,” she said.
She left the dwarf. As far as Yackle knew, the dwarf was as nameless as the Unnamed God—but not as blameless. Assuming that the Unnamed God was blameless in the matter of human suffering—and if you assumed that, you could have no use for such an ineffectual deity.
She ground her teeth as she moved on by. And then she thought: Maybe that sore old stump of a dwarf is my salvation, after all. Maybe the Lion is just a decoy, a distraction. Maybe it was the dwarf’s impending arrival that called me from my unquiet tomb, and Brrr just happened to be in the way. Surely being in the wrong place at the wrong time seemed to be that unlucky scalawag’s single occupation in life.
• 4 •
W HEN SHE came into the chamber she was agitated, but Brrr hardly noticed. His own fur was ruffled at the news of the military debacle. “We will finish our work this morning,” he said to Yackle, before she’d even had the chance to settle into her chair. “The reprisal for last night’s disaster at Kellswater is aiming right this way. I can feel it. I intend to have cleared out before it strikes. Let’s get this interview wrapped up.”
“Nothing can be wrapped up,” she snapped.
“Save your irritation for the lunch menu,” he replied, as brusquely. He flipped open his notebook. The glass cat looked a little alarmed at the sharpness between them, and regarded the window ledge. But the sash was swung open this morning, letting in light and air, and perhaps the cat was just smart enough to know that it was too old to rely on being able to jump and perch without tipping out the window and plunging—to shatter into shards?—into the gravel far below.
