Tabaqui continued to expound excitedly on Lary’s mental state, and it all boiled down to his conviction that Lary would be best helped by a nice cup of herbal tea. Noble countered that Lary would be best helped by Pompey’s untimely death. Listening to this made me realize that I’d been hearing rumors of some kind of coup for a while now, and that the nick of Pompey, Leader of the Sixth, was often mentioned in relation to it. When I had still been a Pheasant, this kind of talk never really concerned me, but now I was suddenly worried that there was some piece of common knowledge I didn’t have any idea about.
“So it’s Pompey who is behind this coup?” I said. “What does he want with it?”
Tabaqui, Noble, and Blind all raised their heads and stared at me. Or rather, Tabaqui and Noble did. Blind just raised his head. All three holding jars and spoons, all three in colorful bandanas to keep their hair out of the way, they hilariously resembled three witches busy with their potions. Tubby in his playpen could pass for a homunculus. Even the bottled scorpion fit. I giggled at the thought.
“What does he want with it?” The smallest weird sister, the one with the most hair, shrouded herself in cigarette smoke and went into a trance. “What-does-he—”
“One sentence!” the second one snapped. “And that’s an order.”
“What?” Jackal said indignantly, ruining the image. “Blind, have a heart, or Smoker shall forever remain unenlightened!”
This threat did not appear to have any effect on Blind.
“I see,” Tabaqui drawled menacingly. “So this is how you want to play. All right, so be it.”
He cleared out some space around him as if preparing for takeoff, sat up, and cleared his throat.
“Hear a tale then, O Smoker, and know that it is the true tale of Pompey, whom you might know a little about and who lately has been behaving in a not entirely satisfactory manner by taking things upon himself that he hadn’t before, even though ‘before’ is an imprecise notion in this context, seeing as there was a ‘before’ for some of us here where he did not figure at all, and so it is completely beyond our kenning what exactly his behavior was in the place where he found himself prior to the moment when he found himself with us, making it at best questionable that at that time he did behave more adequately, since this man has obviously traveled far from the spirit of true Tao by becoming thoroughly steeped in the effluvium of the Outsides and is therefore capable of earnestly imagining that he could be an adequate substitute for Blind in his demanding position, which delusion might, however, be more mundanely attributed to his being fed up with the constant overpopulation of the particular precinct entrusted in his care and thus yearning for your everyday peace and quiet, in which case the preferred course of action to alleviate this condition would have been to transport himself bodily within the confines of the Cage for a period of no less than three and no more than five days, undoubtedly resulting in deeper self-awareness and spiritual cleansing as well as development of a more public-minded level of conscience, or, not to put too fine a point on it, a more introspective state of being, but no, he needs something entirely more bombastic and earth shattering, he desires to conquer and to vanquish and to tickle his multitudinous ingrained insecurities, where the manifest insecurity of his person is easily apparent to anyone in sight of his cravats and sideburns, his manner of locomotion and body language, but especially the faces of the bats that he keeps adorning himself with, for those are the faces of creatures doomed to endless suffering, afflicted with all the infirmities, known and unknown, of their chiropterous kind at the same time, a regular Ozzy Osbourne he, except that, instead of mercifully biting off their heads, he condemns them to fester around his neck for months, take poor unfortunate Poppy, having shuffled off this mortal coil not quite last Wednesday, and lo! today Suzy is already in its place, considering that this is the best we can expect from someone completely ignorant of the science that is biology, who could not even be bothered to notice that Suzy is male, despite it flashing balls the size of walnuts, though it still isn’t going to make any significant contribution in the grand scheme of things since it, too, is not long for this world, this Suzy guy is, as Pompey buried quite half a dozen of its brothers already, making its demise a question only of time, besides it likely is a matter of indifference to a bat what name is attached to it as it breathes its last, while if I were representing the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals I’d be very interested to know the name of the scoundrel buying those wretches wholesale just to look cool, even though it’s highly debatable how much coolness can possibly be squeezed out of the bedraggled body of a bat, it’s not like it’s a coral snake, now that really would be something to write home about, whereas he who is not at home with the thought of his own death is quite unlikely to wrap said snake around his neck since that would require significant expenditure of time and effort to win its trust when instead one can so easily pave his way in this world with feeble bones of innocent leather-winged victims without even bothering to notice their gender, and it is quite likely that only the complete and utter impunity Pompey enjoys with respect to this specific question is what facilitates his mistaken belief that he is supposedly capable of trampling underfoot the bones of a considerably less innocuous creature without breaking stride, by which creature I of course mean Blind, but you must have already gathered that, my esteemed packmates, so this last clarification can be considered extraneous.”
Tabaqui paused and then nodded proudly at Blind.
“I trust that was within the rules. Even though limiting me in this fashion was really rotten of you.”
The room was totally quiet. Even the boombox had gone silent. Even Nanette stopped stirring. It was as though, all this time, Jackal had been chanting a monumental spell putting the whole world to sleep. Noble was cradling an open jar and swaying from side to side with his eyes closed. Blind had slumped against Tubby’s playpen. Humpback stared at the twisted root in his hands, evidently having no idea anymore about what he was doing with it. Their faces seemed drowsy and somehow unwell, bordering on sickly. Tubby was the only one immune to the spell. He was peacefully pulling on Blind’s hair and droning softly.
Once it became crystal clear that everyone else was completely bewitched, Humpback startled and translated, blinking sleepily.
“What Tabaqui is saying is that Pompey hankers after Blind’s job. I’m not sure this really came through, what with all those bats and other crap.”
“Objection!” Tabaqui said hotly. “I was acquitting myself quite eloquently, and, what’s more important, very vividly. To try and reduce this oration to a digest is criminal.”
“True,” Humpback said. “Except that Smoker might be a bit stunned, since it’s his first time, and so not really in a position to give it its due.”
Noble opened his eyes and peeked in astonishment into the jar he was hugging through all of this.
“Would it be possible,” he said, “to limit this monster next time to a certain number of words instead of sentences?”
“Of course not!” Blind said. He straightened up and snatched his hair out of Tubby’s grasp. “Just think of the many different ways one single word can be repeated.”