The dwarf turned to the others. “North we go, boys, north to the edge of the woods but not out into the open, for we don’t know precisely where the Munchkinlanders are, and in the evening light we don’t want them to mistake us as their foe. We don’t want to draw their fire. Haste, or we’ll be collateral cost before midnight! If I haven’t lost my touch, sanctuary should lie just ahead of us.”

The boys to their harness, the dwarf to the seat up front. She tucked her pencil and her notebook into her apron pocket and pulled her veil back over her brow. Then she turned to join her family.

“I’m coming,” she announced, for it was her history to do so, and she could no more avoid her future than she could escape her past. However often she sat quietly apart, fretting over it. “I’m coming,” she called louder, so they could hear her over the sound of cannon.

A Question of Influence

1

T HE GLASS cat made a sound of complaint; Brrr returned to the present.

“Oooh, Shadowpuppet, supper will be coming soon. These poor servants of the Unnamed God won’t let you go hungry. Their brief doesn’t allow it.”

The cat came to his lap and licked at some old crumbs caught in the pilling of Brrr’s weskit. Brrr petted it, trying to provoke a purr. This was the only warmth Shadowpuppet could show, a tonal warmth: Its body was immune to changes of heat and cold, so far as Brrr could tell.

What an advantage. Maybe it came from old age. Something to anticipate, a reprieve.

Even ancient Yackle seemed somewhat inert, emotionally: She was enduring her apparent immortality with stoicism. He’d be driven mad if he thought the blandishments of death were to be denied him forever.

He tried to escape those memories that had crowded upon him this past hour: his disastrous incompatibility with clans either Animal or human, like the Ghullim, like the Shiz banking circle; his mistakes with rogues like Dorothy or Elphaba. His humiliation at the bar of Miss Eldersdotter.

Collaborator. But to collaborate implied a betrayal of one’s natural tribe, and if one didn’t have a natural tribe…

Perhaps Yackle possessed a shred of mercy; perhaps she had taken herself away not to pray, but to get out of the room while the more heinous memories surged upon him. Perhaps she’d been able to guess that, between Traum and this off-center cloister, he had endured a lifetime of collapsing hopes and misadventures.

If so-if he could credit the old bitch with that much feeling-he had a little to thank her for. Though given his record, he was probably wrong. He was another pawn in another campaign, and hadn’t sussed out yet what her angle was.

In any case, Yackle would be coming back from chapel soon, unless she’d died a death holier than the life she’d led. Meanwhile, the small stars showed up one by one, picking their way slowly, reluctantly, through the gloaming. (He’d preferred overcast nights ever since the creepy atmospherics of the Cloud Swamp.) The stars made a rash in a sky that glowed the color of those mythical seas painted by Dobbius and his followers. A serpent green wash overlaid with a smudge of blue-coal Conté crayon applied with forefinger. In another ten minutes the green of the heavens would drown under the black, and night would be fully and legally arrived. For now, the day played its last hand, the sky reveling in its fullest dimensionality, flaring up into all directions: height, breadth, depth, lastingness.