He loved the House. He’d never had any other home and had never known his parents. Here he grew up as one of many, and he was used to tuning the world out when he needed to be alone. His best flute playing happened when no one was listening. Then everything came out right, every song sounded as if the wind itself whistled into the instrument. He thought sometimes that he wanted someone else to hear it, but he also knew that if someone were listening it wouldn’t have come out this well. In the House it was customary to call those with humps “angels,” in reference to the folded wings on their backs. This was one of the very few tender names that the House allowed itself to give to its children.
Humpback played, keeping time on the wet leaves with his splayed feet. He inhaled the peace and the kindness, and placed himself in the circle of clarity that never would allow the pale hands of those who confuse the soul to worm their way through. Other people sometimes drifted past, behind the fence, but they did not disturb him. In his mind, the Outsides did not exist. There was only him, the wind, his songs, and those he loved. All of that was inside the House, and outside of it was nothing and no one, only the empty and hostile city that lived its own life.
The wind was burying the yard in leaves. Two poplars, the oak, and four nameless bushes. The bushes grew under the windows, clinging to the walls; poplars occupied the two outer corners of the fence, and some of their roots left the domain of the House. With its massive arms the oak pushed at the shed that it neighbored and overshadowed its corner of the yard completely. It had sprung up here long before the House came to be, and it remembered the time when all of this was orchards and storks made their nests in the trees. How far did its own roots extend?
The empty ball court with old crates for seats. The empty kennel, its roof leaking, the rusty water bowls in front of it full of rain. The bench under the oak, plastered with beer labels. Trash cans. White steam issuing out of the kitchen. Multicolored music out of the windows on the second floor.
Mangy cats stole along the boundaries of the yard. Crows marched across the bare lawns, pushing wet leaves. An aquiline-faced boy in a red sweater sat on an overturned crate and played his flute, locked in a circle of empty loneliness. The House breathed on him through its windows.
SMOKER
OF BATS, DRAGONS, AND BASILISK EGGSHELLS
The dorm was rocking. Humpback and I were sitting on the bed. Noble, Tabaqui, and Blind were on the floor passing around bottles and jars, sniffing, sampling, and pouring the mysterious contents of some of them into others. Tubby, in pink pajamas, watched them from behind the bars of his portable playpen.
I was watching through the bars of the headboard.
Humpback was whittling something from a blackened knobby root with his pocket knife. He had on his outside coat, decorated with Nanette’s droppings, and his shaggy hair was full of shavings.
“The pine needles are past their prime, is all I’m saying,” Tabaqui was droning halfway inside a jar of something murky and brownish. “The bouquet is completely off.”
“Take the other one, then,” Noble said. He took the jar himself, sniffed, and put it aside. “This is last year’s vintage. And quit jolting it, you are disturbing the sediment.”
Blind licked the drops he’d shaken onto his hand from another bottle, scowled, and said, “What’s oil doing here? Is this salad dressing or something?”
“Hey!” Tabaqui yelped. “Where did you get that from? That’s a scorpion drowned in sunflower oil! It’s medicine! I always store it separately!”
Noble brought the bottle closer and peered at it.
“Could be. Yep, there it is, floating there. You dummy, why did you have to do it in an opaque bottle? You can hardly see the bugger.”
“I used what was available at close proximity,” Tabaqui said sulkily. “Your choices are somewhat limited when you are holding a live scorpion in your hand, you know. And I distinctly remember putting a warning label on it. Must have dropped off at some point.”
“What use would your label be to Blind? What if he drops off right here? We’d be leaderless on the eve of a military coup.”
At this, Noble broke into a smile. It was tender and wistful.
It immediately brought to mind Tabaqui’s saying: “Noble only smiles once a year, and that when someone breaks a leg.”
Or when someone takes a swig from the bottle with a scorpion in it, I added silently.
“Blind, tell me, do you know any spells against poisons?” Tabaqui inquired anxiously. “Or how about a guarding amulet?”
Blind was already busy with the next bottle. He threw the cork from it into Tubby’s playpen and coaxed a drop onto his finger. He definitely didn’t look like someone in deathly peril.
“On second thought, what’s a mere scorpion to him?” Tabaqui said, mostly to himself. “He’s eaten much worse stuff than that. Just the other day, and other days besides the other day.”
Tubby, happy as a lark, was playing with the cork. He tossed it into the air with his two-fingered pincers and then tried to catch it. The cork kept falling through his grasp, but that didn’t faze him. Then he stuffed it into his mouth and started gumming it like a pacifier.
I watched them for a bit more and then turned over on my back. Humpback’s whittling was spraying the shavings in all directions.
“Sorry,” he’d say every time some of it fell on me.
“It’s all right,” I’d answer.
Humpback’s eyes were like moist prunes, and his eyelashes were so long they looked glued on.
“By the way,” he said, interrupting our monotonous exchanges of pleasantries, “Shuffle says that Pompey is practicing knife throwing, imagine that. He’s rumored to hit the mark from ten paces three times out of five now.”
“Who were you talking to just now?” Tabaqui said from down on the floor.
“Everybody,” Humpback said.
I turned over on my stomach again and pushed apart the bags hanging on the headboard.
“Then stop doing it. Basically, everybody already had enough of that talk from Lary.”
Tabaqui extracted a half-decomposed chili pepper from the jar he was holding, shook off the liquid, and chomped on it.
“Now this one is pretty good,” he said and closed his eyes. “There’s only one thing that’s currently perturbing me. By the time Pompey achieves perfection in his quest for accurate knife throws, Lary will have eaten all of our brains out with a spoon. He’s already on edge. Attacking people left and right. Well, he won’t be attacking anyone anytime soon now, but still. He’s clearly not himself. I think we all need to do something about it.”
“Why isn’t he going to do it anytime soon?” I said.
Noble sent another one of his radiant smiles my way.
“Yesterday we convinced Lary that he had killed you.”
My next question got stuck in my throat.
“He was bawling his head off somewhere in the bowels of the House,” Noble continued, “bidding good-bye to his faithful Bandar-Logs. It’ll be some time before he lives that down.”
“And you’re just reveling in the agony of your fellow human being!” Tabaqui said indignantly. “Happy that he almost hanged himself! Gleefully recounting this whole disgusting matter!”
“I’m sure Sphinx would’ve taken him out of the noose before anything bad happened,” Noble said airily. “He’s very considerate like that . . . sometimes. And besides, I get this feeling that you already forgot it was your idea all along.”
I was looking at Noble and thinking that at the time Sphinx was wringing me out in the bathroom, he already knew what his packmates had done to Lary. And that what they had done was by far the best protection for me that could be imagined. But he never said anything. He was testing if I was capable of snitching, and then testing if I was ready to be considered a snitch in the mind of Lary, whom I did not particularly respect. And maybe a bunch of other things as well, I couldn’t even imagine what. So that’s why I felt like I was navigating through some sort of test. Because I actually was. I knew I wasn’t going to forgive him this for a long while. And I also knew that I’d never tell anyone about it.