o_

the gate, now on a dirt road leading into the countryside, Wolfgang spoke in a more normal tone of voice.
“There is no patron saint of lunatics,” he cackled. “Plenty for criminals, of course, but we raving types have been read out of the state of Holy Grace. Quite absurd, really, when you consider that almost all saints were obviously demented. How they get sanctified, you know? Going off and irritating all sorts of aborigines who boil them in oil or shoot them full of arrows or whatnot. I ask you, who but a madman would do such things?”
I interrupted what, with my growing experience, I could detect as a new round of witless babble.
“I should think the Commandos will capture the wizard soon enough,” I remarked.
That set off a new round of cackling from the icon. Gwendolyn’s shoulders were quivering—with humor, I realized, considerably relieved.
“And why not? Sure, they’re as sorry a lot of soldiery as I’ve ever seen, but they’re still soldiers on horseback pursuing a coach. I grant you, the coach left two days ago, but they should still be able to catch up easily, even allowing for drunken binges along the way.”
“No doubt, if they could simply follow the coach. But the coach took the direct route, through the Grimwald, whereas the soldiers will have to take the roundabout road, through the marsh and the mountains.”
“Why don’t they just follow the coach?”
More cackling.
“My boy, you are such an innocent! Clear enough, you’re a stranger to Grotum. The Grimwald, lad, is Grotum’s oldest and greatest forest.”
“So?”
“So! Are you that ignorant? Snarls, boy, snarls! They abound in the Grimwald—and forest snarls, to boot! Goes without saying, of course—what other kind of snarls would you find in a forest but forest snarls?”
I pondered his words, trying to decide if I was the butt of a joke. It’s a crude but common form of humor—to mock a newcomer by telling him tall tales of the local surroundings. I had heard of snarls, of course. What Ozarine was not enthralled, as a child, by the endless tales of those monsters of the Groutch wilds? But as I grew older, I wrote the tales off as fiction for children—in a class with Good Saint Nick and the Tooth Fairy.
I decided Wolfgang was too weird for crude mockery.
“So the snarls actually exist?”
“Of course they exist! You can find