“Home?” asked Brrr. Her accent was curious; he couldn’t place it. Might she be a Winkie?
“None,” she said. “We’re itinerants. We’re the company of the Clock of the Time Dragon. You may have heard of us.”
“Yo ho,” said Brrr, recoiling. “I’ve heard of that. Yes. Didn’t know it was still a going concern.”
“Going nowhere fast, at the moment,” said the dwarf, amiably enough. He scratched himself at the base of his spine where, Brrr thought, a tail would have emerged had he one.
“You young stalwarts?” asked Brrr. The lads refused to name themselves. They settled down to deal a few hands of shamerika, a game that appeared to involve two sets of playing cards, a wodge of ersatz paper notes, a set of weighted dice, and a trapunto cloth map in which small brass flags could be stuck, moved, or removed. Brrr guessed that they had little to offer, and he scribbled “seven apprentices.” He could scare their names out of them later.
“So the Emerald City Messiars are approaching by the legions,” said Brrr. “A fine fix you’ve gotten yourself into, little man.”
“Truth or consequences,” said the dwarf. “My favorite game.” He sunk his teeth into a ham sandwich and smiled around the mouthful.
“Don’t eat so fast,” said Ilianora. “You’ll choke.”
“I wish,” said the dwarf.
“You sound like me,” said Yackle, surprised. “Life gone on a bit too long for you, too?”
“Don’t get me started,” said the dwarf.
“Mr. Boss is none of your concern,” said Ilianora to Yackle and Brrr both. To the dwarf, she continued, “Let’s use this time to rest.”
“Fair enough,” said the dwarf. “When we are ready to move again, we may need to move quickly.”
Ilianora sat on the floor and arranged the folds of her skirt to cover her ankles. “Take no notice of us, friends. We’ll sit silently and catch a midday nap, like your crystal cat.”
The cat opened one eye as if on cue. Never predict a cat, thought Brrr, somewhat proudly.
“Brrr, how delightful,” said Yackle. “We have just about reached the end of what we could say to each other, and look: Look. Fate, or the Unnamed God, or brute coincidence, whatever you will call it, has supplied us a coda. What is the Clock of the Time Dragon if not a device for telling the truth? And it has foundered up here on the shoals of our interview just when we were getting nowhere. A blessing, a curse, who knows? But the next thing, for sure.”
“I’m hardly here on official business,” hummed the dwarf through his nose, around his mouthful. “I’m on sabbatical this year.”
“What is your business, precisely?” the Lion asked him.
“I owe you no answers, you nosey parker.”
“I am supplied with the writ of the Emperor,” said Brrr.
“I have a master who is an independent agent, thank you very much. I don’t answer to the Emperor of Oz.” The dwarf was withering. “True, I was looking for a Lion, I thought. But I have no use for a minion of the state. Don’t suppose there are any other Lions on the premises?”
“Mr. Boss,” said Ilianora, in an affectionate but weary tone. “Oh, Mr. Boss.” She took an ivory comb out of her pocket and began to address the knots in her hair.
“You do have your fanciful equipment with you, no?” asked Yackle. “The fabulous theatrical clock with the Time Dragon coiled atop it?”
“He don’t park it for storage this season,” intoned one of the boys, rubbing an aching shoulder.
“I’ll park something in your nether nether land,” barked the dwarf. “If something is to be said, I’ll say it, or you’re history. Got that?”
“Got it once too often,” murmured the lad, pretending to protect sore hindquarters, but then he fell silent.
“I don’t want to talk to timepieces,” said the Lion.
“But just think!” Yackle was filled with energy. “I’ve run out of capacity to see beyond the end of my own imagined nose. And who walks in but yon Mr. Boss, let’s call him. Accompanying a tiktok legend: a device that can sniff out the hidden. Brrr, I’ll ask it about my death. I can stand to learn something new. I’m sick of being stuck here. What do you say?” She turned to where she knew the dwarf must be lolling. “Can you do an old friend a favor?”
“In what context might you be said to be friends?” asked Brrr.
“Yeah, what context would that be?” asked the dwarf drily.
“We’ve been circling around each other for years,” said Yackle. “Why don’t you take his deposition, Sir Brrr? He’s been on the outskirts of Elphaba’s life, too.”
“Pure coincidence, if it happened at all, which I’m not saying it did or it didn’t,” said the dwarf. “I had a different mission, lady. Don’t involve me in your hurly-burly.”
“You are involved,” said Yackle. “You wouldn’t have come here if you didn’t have business in the neighborhood. Don’t waste my time!”
“Why not? You’ve got plenty to waste,” he answered. “You may not be getting any younger, but you’re not getting any deader, either. No, I had reason to think I was looking for a Lion who might join us—but not this liverish lump. I must be off my game.”
“Your weird equipment knows where it wants to go, and when it wants to rest,” said Yackle. “So it wanted to come here, eh? It can look like a tiktok extravaganza, all gears and sequins and powdery flashes of light. Traveling theater. But what it knows, and what it shows! How do you account for that? Do you send your accomplices ahead of you as advance scouts, to sniff out the local gossip, to read the local tea leaves, so when you pull into the village you know what is on everyone’s mind?”
“Them? Hah,” said the dwarf. He plugged one nostril and mimed shooting a plug of mucus out of the other one. “Haven’t the brains among them to come in out of the rain.”
“Then it’s a charm—I’ve always guessed it. Some sledgehammer of a charm, that can read the world’s secrets correctly decade after decade.”
“Ninety-nine point ninety-seven percent accuracy,” said Ilianora. “That’s what the advertising panel says, anyway.”
“Hush, daughter,” said the dwarf, in a more kindly tone than before. “Pour me some water, will you?”
“Whose spell is as strong as that?” asked the Lion, becoming interested despite himself. “Whose spell could teach a puppet machine to spill secrets like that?”
“One whose name I don’t give out, as I don’t give out my own,” said the dwarf. “Ooh, this water is good. I’ve always wondered why the grand viziers of magic in the Emerald City—that is, if there are any—didn’t just get to work devising a spell to purify the whole of Kellswater. Reduce Loyal Oz’s dependence on foreign water. That lake is nearly as large as Restwater and if made potable could irrigate all of Loyal Oz. That would liberate the EC from its obsession with truculent Munchkinlanders, who, as I hear it told, never never shall be slaves.”
“One of the folktales I heard in my youth,” said Ilianora, “held that the ancient old demon-witch, Kumbricia herself, lives in the depths of Kellswater, or died there, perhaps, despoiling the supply for all time.”
“You and your tales,” said the dwarf. “One of the folktales I heard in my youth is that folktales are idiotic. Anyway, the cause is beside the point.”
“Sniff out the cause, and you conceive the solution,” said Yackle. “But who knows. Mr. Boss, Mr. Boss, if you won’t show Sir Brrr where in Oz the Grimmerie might be hidden—for that’s really what he is here to learn—then do some good for me, your old partner and nemesis on the hems of Elphaba’s life. Show me how I might die. I’ve told to this Lion all that I know. Let me reap some small benefit in return.”
“The Lion works for the Emerald City,” said the dwarf. “I should reward you for dealing him information that the EC might find useful? I’ve no opposition to the Emperor of Oz per se, but I’ve no affection either. Live and let seethe, that’s my motto.”
“The Clock is off-limits, anyway; w
e’re locked in,” remarked Ilianora, arranging a trio of white ribbons in her white hair. “This is probably the safest site in central Oz right now.”
“A sanctuary or a trap,” said the Lion. “I’ll bark the door down if I want to. As I said. But Mister Boss-man, why are you on the ‘hems’ of Elphaba’s life, as Mother Yackle puts it?”
“You’re here to interrogate the old brickbat, not me,” said the dwarf. “En’t that right? Give me that chair, you, so that I can look out the window and see if the armies are in sight.” He scrabbled up on the seat and raised himself on his toes.
The Lion could have told the dwarf what was visible: a low bolster of smoke to the southwest. The smoke must be heavy. Tendrils of it lifted up, like the heads of dark swans, then ducked down again. There was no acridity in the air, though. The wind must still be from the north or northeast.
“They’re burning the oakhair forest,” said the dwarf. “Pushing the Munchkinlanders farther south, away from the lake, I guess.”
“Unless the wind swings around,” said Ilianora, standing beside him. “Then it might smoke the Munchkinlanders out into the open. They’d be mowed down like wheat by a scythe.”
“We don’t take sides,” the dwarf reminded her. “Not in our brief.”
“We can take the side of mercy without being compromised,” she replied. “Surely?”
“If it don’t compromise our mission, why not?” He munched his sandwich with gusto. “Knock yourself out with mercy, honey.”
“Mr. Boss,” she said. “The Messiars may have gotten their idea of a smoke-out from the dragon. Their fellow infantrymen were blinded by smoke from our Clock—and driven into the obsolete lake.”
“It appears Fate may have caught up with those who advertise as Fate’s voice,” said Yackle, not, Brrr thought, without a touch of satisfaction. Even smugness. Professional jealousy among oracles!
“Ha,” replied the dwarf, grousing. “Fate. Some call it fate. Some call it lunch.”
“You fault your own profession?” Yackle seemed to be enjoying this. “Shame on you.”
“Fate brought you here,” said the Lion. “You must admit that.”
“Listen,” said the dwarf, “consider a pack of nursery children on a church picnic. They are about to mount a grassy hilltop. Clouds gather while one of them stops below to tie the laces of a lisping junior. Then lightning strikes at the crown of the hill. Say it strikes the meanest child, the one who wouldn’t pause to help and so has forged on ahead. Or say the cruel child has already passed to safety, so lightning kills the kindly laggard child, who is second up the slope. Or say, even, that both who act, either in churlishness or charity, cross the upland meadow safely, so it is the innocent toddler who is killed. Any of those three deaths are possible without a moral being drawn. Do you think that lightning has chosen its victim on the strength of character?”
“Then where does fate come in?” asked the Lion. “Wouldn’t this Clock of yours have been able to name what was to happen? Or any blind old oracle worth her salt?”
“Fate is only fate once it has happened. Even our own deaths are only theoretical until we croak.”
Ilianora pursed her lips as if trying to decide whether to join the conversation. She did. “There is a fourth child at the base of the hill who can read the weather enough to know that lightning is likely. The child can rush forward to chase all the others off the mound, and she risks being killed in the process. If that brave child is slain by lightning, it is sullen fate at work. But the other children’s lives have been altered. History has been vexed by the intercession of a bit player. It is what we hope for, and what we dread, too. Isn’t it?”
The dwarf replied, “I dread nothing but garlic muffins. Listen, the child who can read the portents of weather may well have hurried the others back down the slope into the jaws of a manticore, itself sensible about lightning and waiting out the storm in the down-slope shrubs.”
“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?