Page 52 of Son of a Witch (The Wicked Years 2)

“Dunno about retreat. They’re attack dragons.”

Liir closed his eyes. “I can’t picture a dragon, try as I might, except for something fanciful in an illustrated magazine, or a stage prop. And a flying dragon!—sounds effective. Also a little scary.”

Ansonby remarked, “Trism bon Cavalish thinks that someone came up with the idea after hearing about those flying monkeys organized by old what’s-’er-face out west. The witchy witch. What was her name anyway?”

Nobody spoke. The wind soughed and the leaves scratched against one another. “Come on then, better get on,” said Liir nonchalantly. “The water’s heavy, and it’ll be a bitch to haul. We’re rested enough.”

“Who made you boss?” said the other fellows, without offense. They dusted themselves off and began to press back to camp.

THERE’D BEEN NO SIGHT of settlement nor even of a solitary hermit for days. No border marking, either, but they knew they’d reached Quadling Country by the change in landscape. Little by little the land was sinking, a series of overgrown meadows stretching for days, every few miles another half inch lower. The grasses went from emerald to the yellow of pears, and then to a ghastly sort of white, as if the fields were being tinged with hoarfrost in the height of summer.

At night they slung hammocks in stunted sedge trees, and tried to sleep, though a zillion mosquitoes emerged, and there was little protection against that. Also a soft, thumpy sort of airborne snail would constantly blunder into their faces at night, perhaps drawn by the steamy exhalation of human breath. The camp echoed with a night-long chorus of stifled girlish screeches or curses as the worm-clods landed wetly across noses, cheeks, mouths.

“No wonder this place is uninhabited,” said Burny once.

“It didn’t used to be. The Quadlings lived here,” Liir pointed out.

“It’s one huge stinkhouse. Any locals still preferring this to the rest of Oz must be cretinous. Or subhuman. En’t our old Wizard done them a favor to clear them out?”

BUT WORM-CLODS AND MOSQUITOES were hardly enemy combatants, and the Seventh Spear knew things could get worse. It had to get worse, or why were they being asked to suffer the indignity of this climate?

They gained an uncharacteristic hummock of land, a half mile across, from which the ground water had drained, more or less. Commander Cherrystone gave them permission to peel off their boots and air their feet. Eighty men scratched between their toes, where the itch was most maddening; flakes of wettish skin billowed before being borne away. It almost looked like snow.

Commander Cherrystone spoke about their mission.

“By my reckoning, we aren’t far from the outskirts of Qhoyre,” he said. “Common talk in the City treats Qhoyre as a provincial backwater, and compared to Oz’s capital, it is, of course. But it has a distinguished history of its own, predating annexation by northerners. In the modern times, there’s usually been a Viceroy stationed here to oversee. Not now. Were things calmer, we would have expected someone dispatched from Government House to serve as a translator of the native tongue, Qua’ati. We’ll do without, I’m afraid. Unless I have a secret linguist among my fine young men?”

No one volunteered.

“As I thought. It’s an ugly tongue but not hard to pick up, I’m told, if you work at it. I’m sure some of you will find yourselves fluent in a matter of weeks, and that will come in handy in due course.”

The matter of weeks stumped them. Also, in due course. Was this some sort of permanent billeting? To what end?

Commander Cherrystone explained. It seemed that the Viceroy had been abducted, and his wife had disappeared, too. No one in Qhoyre admitted to knowing who was responsible, but the indifference of the natives to the situation was unsettling to the Scarecrow’s cabinet back in the Emerald City. Quite offensively the Quadlings behaved as if life ought to go on much as normal, whether with a Viceroy or without one.

The job of the Seventh Spear was to befriend the locals, keep the public order, and—best-case scenario—identify and punish the perpetrators. If the Viceroy and his wife could be found and rescued, all the better, though he wasn’t an indispensable civil servant, apparently—otherwise he’d not have been saddled with such a hardship assignment. In any case, the brief of the Seventh Spear didn’t extend to recovery of the Viceroy; showing some muscle, however, was paramount.

“We’ll move into the city, reclaim Government House, and restore order,” he said. “There may be some bloodshed, men.”

They nodded and clutched their weapons.

“Let us bow our heads and put our holy mission of right governance in the sight of the Unnamed God.”

This, so far as it could be said for a fact, they did.

DISAPPOINTINGLY, THEIR RECLAIMING of Government House involved no bloodshed at all. The toothless old woman who had set up a loom in the eastern verandah merely handed over a rusty key that had been dangling on a string around her neck. For one so plump and wrinkled, she took off at a jaunty trot. Before nightfall a cohort of youngish teenagers, possibly grandchildren, appeared in the street to haul her loom away. They left a large tray of aromatic rice,

still steaming, and they tossed red blossoms on the verandah floor that, in the moonlight, looked like splashed blood.

Thus a military skirmish fizzled into a social call. The establishment of dominance proved all the more elusive because the native culture was one of deference, hospitality, and bonhomie. “This is going to be harder than I thought,” said Commander Cherrystone.

Being built large enough to be pretentious and commanding, Government House could just about domicile the entire company of the Seventh Spear. There was a lot of work to be done in terms of general upkeep, however. Cracks in the plaster, mildewing whitewash. The garden had run to seed and was a total embarrassment. How long had the Viceroy been gone? Or had he simply been a hapless steward of government property?

For a good price, the locals supplied acres of mosquito netting, which the men slung from hooks in the ceilings in the local fashion, cocooning each small grouping of cots. For extra protection, lengths of netting were nailed up at the windows, and a webbed arcade was erected from the kitchen door to the latrines at the back of the garden. In their smalls the men could walk to relieve themselves at night without fear of being bitten alive.

Some of the soldiers picked up Qua’ati, as Commander Cherrystone had predicted they would.

IT NEVER SNOWED in Quadling Country. The swamp forests held in the heat. Time seemed languorous and unchanging. How many years had they been there? Three? Four? They’d reopened a school and built a kind of surgery to augment the work of the local doctors. Some of the men had moved out of Government House, informally, and were consorting with Quadling women. This was forbidden during a campaign of occupation, but Commander Cherrystone looked the other way, for he had a common-law wife of his own by now and he hardly cared to enforce an inconvenient standard.

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