AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Not to act is to act, too,” insisted Ilianora.
The dwarf seemed to agree with this, or perhaps he was tired of the discussion. “Couldn’t be truer, sweet-cakes, but we haven’t time to keep nattering like this. I haven’t been stepping sideways for half a century just to be caught, by fate or accident, in some WC in a mauntery, of all godforsaken places. Break down that door, Lion, and we can all get out, and leave these holy women to their immolation. Might be lively entertainment for a maunt, to be violated and then martyred, but I can’t subject my Ilianora to the danger. Lion, the door.”
Brrr had little inclination to snap to the dwarf’s commands, but he had no inclination at all to stay put. “Always with the doors,” he said. “When I broke through at the Witch’s castle, I was in better nick.” He took off his weskit and folded it neatly as the boys surrendered their cards and collected their ivory quad-ribbed pieces. The little glass cat blinked, obedient and even docile, but it seemed ready to quit the company of oracles and acolytes.
Ilianora, with a placidity that under the circumstances suggested a mild mental incompetence, straightened the margins of her veil and stood up. “After you,” she said to the Lion, indicating the door.
For the Lion, staying in fighting trim had never been a daily ambition. He did several deep-knee bends and sprang back and forth across the room to get his blood going. Turning to Yackle, he asked, “Are you coming with us? Or is this what you’ve been waiting for? Death by an army sharpshooter? I shouldn’t hang around any longer than necessary—”
Yackle appeared to have passed out.
“The sight of me taking any exercise, I know: a taxation to credulity,” said Brrr.
“She’s ill,” said Ilianora. She moved without apparent urgency to the old woman’s side, but her voice betrayed some fretfulness at last. The ancient oracle had sloped sideways to the floor and—oh, not a pretty thing to witness—her eyes had actually rolled back in her skull, just as oracles were said to be able to do, so the blind eyes looked inward. Only a glaucous white showed between the remaining shreds of ancient eyelashes.
Ilianora took Yackle onto her lap, like a mother to a child, but reversed.
“She’s shamming,” said the Lion without conviction.
“Oooh, that’s revolting,” said one of the boys. “Those eyes.”
“She’s trying to hold us here,” said the dwarf as Yackle began to shake. “She is in cahoots with the powers that be. Pay her no mind. Lion, bust down that door before I bust your chops.” He stumped across the floor and showed the Lion a laughable little fist, so close that the pig-bristle hairs growing out of the knuckles went all blurry, and the Lion had to pull back to get them in focus.
“Can we do something to help?” asked Ilianora. Yackle had torn her robes open, and Ilianora tried to close them again. Her attempts were rebuffed by the ancient maunt’s thrashing limbs. The sound unreeling from her mouth was a taper of protest; it hummed against—he could hear it now himself, Brrr could—the groan of the oakhair trees as their harp strings swung in the smoke, and shimmered atonally, and then snapped. All this he could hear, and more besides: The room had fallen so very still as everyone watched Yackle in the throes of some condition, as if in the maw of some invisible beast.
“Water for her,” murmured Ilianora, and one of the boys brought forward a tumbler of water. But Yackle’s mouth wouldn’t stay still enough to cup the liquid, and it drained off her face to stain her robe.
Brrr watched as old Shadowpuppet, who had kept its tail tightly wound about its furled legs, now stretched with effort and scrabbled, you’d have to say, across the floor. It put out a paw tentatively against the heavy cross-laid door, and walked its front legs stiffly up the panels till it was leaning against the door like a fragile glass buttress. The cat meowed. Brrr had heard purrs from Shadowpuppet before, but in all these weeks, nothing more expressive than a glottal hum. This complaint was vicious, like the voice of a tomcat being crossed, and reminded him, just for a second, of Muhlama’s high-flown irritability.
&nbs
p; “Let’s go. We’re all agreed,” said the dwarf. “Even your shattery cat can tell that it’s time.”
Brrr flipped his notebook closed. Was Yackle shamming? He wouldn’t put it past her. But why would she want to hold them there? Not to do him harm—the EC Messiars wouldn’t lay a finger on Brrr, not with his letter of introduction from the EC on his person. Did Yackle know something more about the dwarf than she was letting on?
But who cared? He’d gotten a good deal of what he had come for. The old bag of bones could suffer and crumple if she wanted. That was what she had wanted. And anyway, wasn’t bolting from a crisis his special skill and trademark?
He turned back to stalking up and down a few more times. It moved the blood, loosened the joints, bulked up the muscles. It had been a long time since he had had to throw his weight around. Humiliating if he couldn’t actually defeat a door in a mauntery, but he tried not to think about that yet. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the dwarf rooting through the pocket of the Lion’s own weskit.
“Hey, what do you think you’re doing—”
Too late. The dwarf had folded the piece of official vellum into a chevron, and was aiming—
“You don’t dare!”
The paper soared out the window before the Lion could snatch at it. “Now we’re all in the same boat,” said the dwarf affably. “No one is supplied with special defenses against being aggrieved by the Messiars, or whichever army gets here first. So stop stalling, Lion. Get us out of here before the soldiers arrive.”
Brrr could have sprung on the dwarf, swiped him sideways out the window. Mashed him to an ugly organic patty, internal organs extruded like sausage meat through a grinder. Good-bye to Mr. Boss’s unblinking unretreating stance, his outthrust bearded chin and agate eyes. His belligerence. His confidence. In one so small: so concentrated. Like Sakkala Oafish. Where did it come from?
Was the dwarf a Glikkun—avenging the Traum Massacre, after all this time?
No: That was his own nerves attacking him, a case of the humors. Or, as some called it, paranoia. As much to shake himself up as anything else, Brrr roared. The boys started. The dwarf did not.
The Lion tensed and sprung, rolling his spine forward and sideways, to take the brunt of the impact on his shoulder rather than his skull.
There was a gratifying thud, a shriek of splitting wood, and an echo, but the door did not split. The old oaken planks ran in two depths on the bias, they were laid tongue-and-groove and reinforced by iron braces. And the doorjamb was stone.
“Good one,” said the dwarf. “Very nice, that. Expected no less.”
