The Gray House

“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.

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.