Page 68 of Out of Oz (The Wicked Years 4)

Then Brrr thought, maybe Chalotin set Rain up to steal that shell. If all magic totems are forbidden, Chalotin herself might be safer to be shy of a powerful item.

Oooh, but what a narcotic, paranoia.

I5.

Rain had never taken into account creatures en masse. To her, the companions of the Clock retained a stubborn and incomprehensible separateness. But the otters conjoined like individual autumn leaves into a single pile.

She remembered the original lonely fish against her finger, the mouse in the field that was her oldest memory—maybe these were instances of aberration. Single creatures in their single lives.

One rice otter, maybe a little bit smaller than its mates, had a slightly rosier cast. (She couldn’t tell genders even when they were fucking; they seemed entirely too limber to be limited to a single gender. She found herself thinking of the rosier one as it.) Since she could identify it in the horde, she cared for it more than the others.

Miles beyond Qhoyre, miles beyond the ruins of Bengda on Waterslip, the rains began. A throng of pilgrims huddling under palmetto leaves, on their way back to Qhoyre from some ceremony in the swamplands, said in kitchen Ozish that the high city of Ovvels was only a day or two away. The companions would find succor there for the rest of the rainy season if they pressed on, said the pilgrims. Though the pilgrims might have softened their promise of a welcome if they’d known about the white river of otters following like a scourge behind.

High city? In this lowland swamp? What could that mean?

They found out. The track on which the companions had traipsed from Qhoyre slowly raised itself on gravel-banked shoulders. The ramp proved so slight an incline that Brrr hardly felt the strain, even though the wheels sucked into the mud. On either side of the highway—a literal highway—grew a town much smaller than Qhoyre, and more real, in a way. Ancient suppletrees, knitting their elbows together, supported small huts from which walkways were slung. A village of treehouses. Every roof was palmettoed, every window netted with gauzlin. Even in the drenching, some people were fishing from their front doors with strings let down into the swamp.

“Bird people!” cried Rain, though in many ways they proved to be more like fish people.

The main track on which the companions had arrived leveled out on top of a thick wall built of granite blocks. Twenty, twenty-four feet high, and just as wide. “Quadling know-how isn’t up to this job. The flatboat to haul such heavy stone has never been built. This wall was here long before the town,” said Mr. Boss.

“But the stones must have been cut by masons, and laid by engineers, time out of mind,” said the Lion. “If the Quadlings didn’t build this, some earlier population did.” Rain ran her hand over marks left in the surface by ancient adzes and chisels.

The characteristic hospitality of Quadlings asserted itself. Some kind of mayoral commission dragged itself together to negotiate lodging for the itinerants. The side of the wall that slanted northeast had been fitted with ledges and steps leading to cells and stalls. Maybe dug out by later generations. The company could take their choice of rooms. The floors might be muddy, but there were shelves on which the companions could dryly sleep.

It was a simple enough matter to drag the Clock into a barnlike warehouse in which it just fit, to cover the thing with banyan leaves until the rain moved over. The natives were fascinated by it, but Mr. Boss said, “Go away. No looky look.”

Rain was beginning to call the rosy-chinned otter Tay, after a Qua’ati word te, meaning “friend.” Rain and Tay slept in a cell with the Lion and Ilianora. Mr. Boss and Little Daffy took a chamber beyond that. Rain would rather have been in a tree.

She instructed the other otters to sleep outside. They didn’t mind. She couldn’t tell Brrr how she had done this. She didn’t know. The otters weren’t talking Animals.

On the outer wall of the defensive rampart, if that’s what it was, the Quadlings had painted illustrations of huge glowing fish. Gold and blue, ingesting each other, smiling at each other in passing, eliminating one another cloacally. “Is these fish as big as life?” Rain asked Ilianora. “Any fish so big en’t fitting in any rice paddy.”

“These fish look like giant ancestors dating back to the dawn of the gods. It’s art. Pay it no mind. It’s all fabrications and lies. I have no patience for lies of any kind, especially the lies of art.”

“What about the Clock?” asked Rain. “And what it says, or won’t say?”

Ilianora wouldn’t answer.

Rain loved the great staring ovoids. She was living in a wall of fish that were swimming toward her from the past. She hadn’t thought about the past much—not even her own past—but now her memory of the fish in the ice pocket accrued some meaning. It had wanted to get back to its gods or its grandparents. It had had someplace to swim to.

Wouldn’t that be nice, to be a fish. And have someplace to swim to.

I6.

It took a while for the companions to realize that the monsoons weren’t necessarily annual events. A monsoon began when it began, and it lasted as long as it wanted. Until this one was over there was no hope to move on. Endless, endless rain. The company of the Clock of the Time Dragon spent almost a year in Ovvels waiting for a spell clear enough for the high road to dry.

A whole year in which no battalion of pursuers from the Emerald City swam up to the long island of the high road.

A year in which no foot-free seer from Qhoyre managed to stump up the ramp to demand her money back or to reclaim her purloined shell.

A year in which no news of the battle between Loyal Oz and Munchkinland seeped into t

he backwashes of soggy Quadling Country.

It was, therefore, a year of quiet. Mercy to some—including Rain—and hard luck on others. She learned to watch her companions more closely, even if she kept her distance.

Mr. Boss declared he’d had decades learning how to kick back when the opportunity presented itself. He could busy himself, thank you very much. Out of balsa bark he whittled figurines handicapped by oversize genitalia. To Rain they seemed more dead than mud, and when he wasn’t looking she stole them and sent them flying through the air, to swim a while and eventually drown.

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