HE DIDN’T like the look of Mother Yackle. Who could? She was a walking cadaver. Her eyes rolled, ungovernable but to the spectacle of her inner sight. Her lips were thin as string. Her nails had kept growing while she was interred, and they made a clacking sound like a set of bamboo blinds being lowered against the noonday sun. When she went to scratch a place on her scalp, she misjudged the angle of approach and nearly punctured her own eardrum.

It’s been a long time since I have seen Death this close up, he thought. This is Death refusing to die. She’s a centerfold for a mortuary quarterly.

“I was quite a looker in my time,” she said. Was she reading his mind, or only being smart, to know that she must be hideous?

“Oh, had they invented time as long ago as that?”

“A comedian,” she observed. “I come back from the very gates of death to be interviewed by a vaudeville wannabe.”

“Let’s get started.” He flipped open his notebook. At the top of the page he wrote a note to himself: Interview One. Don’t vomit.

She paused so long that Brrr thought perhaps she’d expired. My timing, he thought. Just my luck, if I believed in luck. I only believe in the opposite of luck, whatever that is.

But then she exhaled again. “What do you want from me, kind sir?” Her vowels were lengthy, as if she intended to wring out of her words every drop of nuance they might supply.

“I’m conducting an investigation,” he said. “Official business. Consider the codes quoted and the documents flashed at you. You’re blind, you can’t read them anyway, so take it on faith. We don’t have a lot of time. I’m chatting up anyone who had anything to do with a Madame Morrible. Your name has come up.”

“That’s no answer,” she said. “My name comes up everywhere if you dig deep enough. I want to know why Madame Morrible’s archives are being combed. Why are you bothering?”

“The Courts are building some kind of case, and I’m preparing a background paper.”

“A court case with Madame Morrible as a lead witness? I knew she was talented, but if she can give sworn testimony from beyond the grave, she has better connections than I thought.”

He snorted at this, and while his guard was let down, she jabbed at him, “Or are you sniffing around here for the young fellow named Liir? Last I heard, he’d disappeared into the lawless lands.”

The Lion started but hoped she hadn’t picked up on it. Once in his regrettable past he personally had known someone named Liir, a ragamuffin boy who had lived out west with the famous Witch. But Brrr would keep his own counsel. He sang softly in a lullabye voice, “I need to take your deposition, good granny. Don’t you worry your tired noggin over poor little me.”

“I needn’t answer you merely because you ask,” she said. “‘In this country everyone must pay for everything he gets.’ Isn’t that what the old bastard, our dearly departed Wizard, used to say?”

He hadn’t figured on her sass. “Perhaps you’ve been comatose through the current troubles. Oz has an Emperor now. One with an iron will, as it happens.”

“Threats don’t work on the chronically dead,” she replied, “which is close enough to what I am to make no difference. So try again, mister. You tell me something about yourself first. I want to know who I’m talking to before I decide. And what you’re really after. And for whom you’re working. And what immunity from prosecution I might be afforded. My testimonial privileges. Then we’ll see if I feel like rewarding you by answering your questions.”

He took a breath in. “And don’t lie to me,” she continued. “I can be vexed when I find I have been lied to.”

Where to start? Always the question. “Well, for one thing, I am a gentleman sporting a very fabulous weskit,” he said, partly mocking, and to see just how blind she was. But he regretted the gambit at once. If she leaned forward to feel his vest, she’d rip it to shreds with her nails, and it wasn’t in such good shape to begin with, actually. Secondhand, if not fourth-hand.

“Not a spot of mange?” she asked. Did she know he was a Lion, not a man?

“I’m not talking about my own hide. I mean I’m decked out in a gentleman’s item. A bespoke article. It swims on me a bit, since I’m leaner than I once was, but it’s a Rampini original. Teck-fur detailing, with a kind of red highlight. Can you see color?”

“No, but I can smell it,” she said. “Yellow, yellow, yellow.”

The cozy old invalid was sneering at him. He unsheathed his claws, just for a moment. Let her droopy ears catch the release of each horny talon from its velvet socket.

“A shame to start off on the wrong foot, don’t you agree?” he said. Plaintively, almost a miaow, to the castanet shuffle of his claws sliding against one another.

She heard his feline assertion. “You are a Lion,” she said, and whispered theatrically: “the king of the forest, no less!”

She used just the perfect phrase designed to poke the embers of his childhood into flamed memory despite his resistance. The King of the Forest. He shuddered involuntarily, hoping she couldn’t hear his jowls jiggle.

She pressed her advantage. “I’m neither a judge nor a jury. I’m a witness. Tell me who you are, Sir Brrr, and how you got here. And tell me the truth. Then maybe I’ll comply. You weren’t already weaselly when you were young, were you? Even weasels aren’t very weaselly at first.”

With elegant steps, looking sore of paw, Shadowpuppet paced to the legs of Brrr’s chair and purred to be picked up. Brrr obliged. The cat calmed him down.

Taking this deposition would be one campaign he wouldn’t screw up. For the love of Ozma, wasn’t he the equal of this crazy old coot draped in a tablecloth? And he had his writ in hand, permission to take her into custody if need be. He would get the goods if they were to be gotten.

If it was to be cat and mouse here, he had the genetic qualifications to play the cat. He had the motivation. He had the might of the bloody Court to back him up, too, if need be. He would redeem his reputation among the great and the good of Oz, and he’d wipe the smirks off their goddamn faces with his own beribboned tail.

“You’re an oracle, I’m told,” he said. “You ought to be able to see my youth, if you want to.”

“I like to hear it told,” she replied. “I have an appetite for childhoods. Insatiable, as it happens.”