The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There(64)

“Oh, lay off it,” came a low, chuckling voice from behind the barrel. “Call off your cat and I’ll come out. Don’t you growl at me that way, young Sir. I’ll have your ears.”

Iago stood up and returned to his mistress, flowing around her and arching his back to rub against her shoulder. When he’d settled beside her, a large tapir emerged from behind the seed-store.

September, having grown up in farm country, could not be expected to know what a tapir was. The Marquess knew, as she knew all the creatures she had once ruled, though she thought of it by its proper name. For it was not only a tapir, which would be unusual enough, but a Baku. September thought it looked like a cross between a pig and an anteater. It had a long, velvety, double-barreled snout like a miniature elephant’s trunk, bright little eyes, dark purple fur with wild red stripes down its back, and round mousy ears.

“You interrupted my supper,” it complained. “Such a lovely one, too. He was dreaming of his mother. Those are always juicy meals, with all the fixings.”

“You eat dreams?” September said, and not without some wonder.

“Naturally,” said the tapir, licking its snout. “Everyone does.”

“I don’t!”

The tapir rubbed its cheek on the steamer trunk. “’Course you do. If you didn’t sleep and dream, you’d get sick and eventually you’d die. Dreams keep the heart alive, just like your boring old suppers keep your body alive. Just because you’re ignorant of how your own self works, doesn’t mean you ought to get snooty about how I make my way.”

“I never remember my dreams,” said the shadow of the Marquess quietly.

“You must have rich, tasty ones then. When you can’t remember a dream, it’s because a Baku ate it. We leave plenty for you to keep your health up, don’t worry. We’re very careful, just like a good farmer is careful how many cows he slaughters for meat and how many he keeps for milk. But people all look like cows to a Baku, just bursting with sweet cream.”

September thought she ought to introduce herself and the Marquess and the Panther, but when she began to do it, the tapir snorted. A little cloud of dirt puffed up from the earth below that powerful snort.

“Oh, I know who you are! He dreams about you all the time. Not the cat, but then, I never paid much mind to cats. They don’t dream, so they’re of no interest to me. My name is Nod, if it matters.”

“Do you mean Prince Myrrh?” September asked.

“Who else?”

“How could he possibly dream about us?”

The tapir shrugged. “That’s what magical objects do. They dream of the day when heroes will come and claim them.”

“But he’s not an object at all, he’s a boy, even if he is a boy in a box.”

Nod jostled the trunk with his round flank. It rocked a little. “Nope. He’s an object. Never comes out, never wakes up, could be picked up, put into a wagon, and moved like luggage.”

“Don’t you think it’s a bit awful, you hiding down here and … well, eating him, bit by bit?”

The purple tapir widened his eyes. “Oh, no, you misunderstand. It’s not like that at all.”

September flushed. “Well, I do misunderstand sometimes, when folk are slow about explaining.”


Nod chuckled, a watery, snorty, pleasant sort of sound. “I guard him. Surely someone told you that all magical objects have guardians. It’s good work when you can get it—times being what they are. When I was a calf, I just wandered from town to town, munching on an innkeeper’s nightmare about an endless hall of empty rooms with his lost loves’ names on the doors, or a wizard’s worried dream of retaking the same examination over and over again. Occasionally, I would find others like me, and we’d go in a pack for a while. We’d head down to Baku-Town in Pandemonium and rollick about, go to a dream café and sample something really exotic, maybe a Pooka in her real, original shape lost in a forest of all the faces she’s ever worn—maybe a changeling child dreaming of home. But I wasn’t a serious fellow. I didn’t have a calling and I didn’t have a care.” September’s heart leaned in to listen, for she had hardly yet heard of someone in Fairyland without a calling, who didn’t know exactly who they were. “But one night, I had too much vintage leprechaun gold-fever to drink and fell asleep in a twisty old alleyway. I dreamed that I was a zebra instead of a tapir. A lion asked me to dance, and I did, the way you do inadvisable things in dreams. But, lo, what do you know? All of the sudden someone was eating one of my dreams, which I did not approve of at all. The lion turned into a fellow Baku, a big, green female with a golden rump. I squirmed under the press of her snout on my dream, but I could not shake her. So I bit back—and discovered that she was the guardian of the Widow’s Polearm, a weapon that once belonged to Myrmo the Striped. Some witch somewhere says it cannot be wielded again until the end of the world. The Baku had gotten quite fat on the dreams of the Polearm, which were interesting and quite unlike the dreams of creatures who walk and talk and fight on their own steam. I suppose it would be like you were the first person in the world to ever taste caviar. It’s a bit funny, but you could really get to like it, if you hold on tight and take it slow. So when I woke up, I joined the union, Local Number 333—Guardians, Sibyls, Junkyard Dogs, and Scarecrows. That was ages ago now.”