We saw the first inhabitant of the place as it came mincing across the pavement, and for a moment I thought I had not managed the Shift of my eyes properly. Something was monstrously wrong with the shape which confronted us, and it stood before us for some time before my mind believed what my eyes saw. This was no Shifter. It was a true-person, or perhaps two persons. From the waist up it was two, two heads, two sets of shoulders, four arms, two chests tapering into one waist, one set of hips and legs. It chortled, “Dupey one,” out of one mouth as the other mouth said in a deeper voice, “Dupey two.” I looked up to see Izia trembling upon her seat and Laggy Nap striding forward with every expression of confidence.
“Oyah, Dupies. Will you stable the beasts in the yard, or would you rather we stake them outside the walls?” His voice was ingratiating, a tone I had not heard him use except when he had sought to seduce me into his train outside Betand.
The tenor head answered, ‘Oh, here, here, Laggy Nap, here. Where Dupies can watch them, feed them, brush their pretty hides. You let Dupies have them. We’ll love them all to bits nice things, great, wonderful beasties.”
Beside me Dolwys trembled. I, too, at the lustful endearments which sounded to me much like hunger. The deeper voice said, ‘Oh, see how it shivers, pretty beasty is cold, all cold from the shadow. Bring it in the sun, Dupey, where it is warm.”
“Fine,” said Nap heartily. “You take them along into the sun and bring them food and water, Dupies. They’ll love you for that.”
“Ooooh, love us all to bits, the big things will.”
“Love us, yes they will.” The two led us off, the one led us off, caroling their—its pleasure. Beside me Dolwys trembled again and again. I wondered what he was thinking. We were too much in evidence to talk. It would have to wait. We were taken to a sunny spot near a trough of water, and a cart of hay was pushed near to us. We swished our tails and swung our muzzles under the pattering hands and constant voices of the Dupies, trying to see through them or around them to what Nap and the others were doing.
“Where is Fatman? Dupies, where is Fatman?” Nap was persistent in the question, as he needed to be to draw the monster’s attention away from us.
“Fatman? Oh, Fatman is here. Maybe in a little while, Laggy Nap. He was here a while ago. Patience, patience. He will be here.”
“Tallman? Is Tallman here as well?”
“Oh, yes. Tallman is always here. Always sometimes. He goes and comes, Laggy Nap. Patience, patience.” The two heads turned to one another, kissed passionately, hugged one another fiercely and went back to their patting and brushing of the horses. They had not groomed us yet. I found myself begging that they would not. This was not to be, however, and I was thoroughly fondled as was Dolwys at my side, with such hungry tenderness that we were both shaking by the time the Dupies had made off and left us. At last we could watch the people of the train, but they might have been made of stone, slumped as they were on the shadowy pavement of the place near one of the great, mouthy doors. None moved except Nap, striding among them, slapping his hands along his thighs, clicking his heels upon the stone, toe, toe, toe, an erratic rhythm. From some hidey hole we could hear the Dupey voices calling, “Patience, patience, Laggy Nap.”
The first evidence of other inhabitants came in a shrill, premonitory shrieking, like a tortured hinge crying stress into the quiet of the place. It came from within one of the towers, behind the mumble lips of the doors. The shriek became a rumble, the rumble a clatter and one of the mouths began to open, reluctantly wider and wider until the eyes disappeared in wrinkles and the teeth gaped wide above a metal tongue extending outward, toward us. Down this ramp rolled a figure as strange in its way as the Dupies were in theirs, round, so fat that the shoulders bulged upward and the cheeks outward to make a single convex line which blended into a spherical form, a balloon, a ball, an egg of a man. He rode in a kind of cup, like an eggcup on wheels, and it was this vehicle which made the extraordinary shrieking noise.