“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.”

“The Munchkinlanders were unnecessarily cruel,” said Sister Doctor. “With their penchant for thoroughness, they did in an entire regiment that might have surrendered.”

“You take a lofty point of view.” Sister Apothecaire, being a Munchkinlander herself, was denied loftiness of any sort. “The Emerald City forces have invaded Munchkinland to annex the other lake-the big lake, the good lake. An illegitimate exercise from every angle. Why shouldn’t the Munchkinlanders defend their territory any way they see fit?”

“Good water and bad,” said the Lion, wanting to avoid taking sides here. “One lake is dead-a depthless basin of venom as far as anyone knows-and the other lake, only miles away, is the fount of life for the greatest green basket of arable land that Oz has. How can water display such variety in character?”

“You can be of help, Sir Brrr,” said Sister Apothecaire. “If you will. The dwarf tells us that the Munchkinlanders suffered heavy casualties on the ground before they conceived of this maneuver. We have had all our cart horses and donkeys requisitioned by one militia or another over the past several weeks. We have no way of pulling a cart for the collection of suffering bodies. Would you oblige us?”

He looked at Sister Doctor, imagining she would disapprove of offering succor to wounded Munchkinlanders, since she disapproved of their tactics. But she disappointed him; her cold dispersal of mercy, such a mercy as it was, was unequivocal.

“I think we have a cart in whose harness you would fit,” she said. “An embarrassment, I know-an indignity-but this is war, Sir Brrr.”