be clamoring at the gates, no doubt, once the sun’s up. So you will need to eat, because you might not get another meal today if we’re half as busy as I think. Now you should come with me.” Orinda led her off the stage.
“There’s a ghost in my room,” said Leodora.
Orinda stopped. “What?” she asked.
“A ghost. A voice. He spoke to me, but he wasn’t there. It’s not a very big room, and I reached all the way to the wall and there wasn’t anyone there, but I heard him. He knew it was dark outside, and he knew all about the theater.”
Orinda clasped both her hands. “Mr. Burbage, when he . . . He wanted to be close to the theater, so at the end he took to sleeping in the balconies of the stage, right across from your room. Do you think it could be Mr. Burbage who spoke to you?”
“He said he was a counselor.”
“We’ll go to your room and see. If it is my dear one, he will speak to me, surely he will.”
They climbed the stairs to her room. It lay dark still, closed off from the light of dawn, but it was possible now to distinguish the bed from the floor, the small armoire from the wall.
“Hello,” said Leodora. She knelt on the bed. “Are you still with me?” She half expected silence, but then the same voice as before drawled, “It’s not as if I can go off on my own.”
“There,” she told Orinda. “You hear him?”
“I do. It’s not Mr. Burbage, unless his voice has changed.”
“Are you Mr. Burbage?” Leodora asked the room.
“That would be impossible,” came the reply. It seemed to issue from the bed itself, right beside her. Orinda came up close behind her, and she turned, looked up.
“Why?” asked the proprietress.
“He has passed from this world and into Edgeworld.”
“Into it?”
“Why, yes. What else was he to do? But you are not my mistress, and I answer you from courtesy only, as she openly regards you as a friend.”
“Oh,” said Orinda, stepping back. Leodora pushed her hands through the bedsheets.
“Speak to me now!” she said. “I’m right on top of you, why can’t I find you?” She swept her hands through the covers, finding only the pendant with its chain, on which she was kneeling. She lifted it into the air.
“Thus you resolve the matter without resorting to assistance,” said the pendant.
“You?” Dangling it by its chain, she clambered off the bed and out the door past her hostess. In the hallway with the light coming through the distant curtains, she could make out the shape of the pendant, a smoothly crafted leonine face with golden eyes. “Speak now,” she said. “Tell me who sent you?”
“Sent me?” the lion head asked. “Why, no one sent me, you chose me.”
Orinda said, “It’s a Brazen Head. Oh, my goodness, I’ve never seen one before.”
“A what?” Leodora asked.
“A Brazen Head. There are so many of them in legends.”
“There are legends?”
Before Orinda could respond, the pendant chimed, “Indeed. There’s a most famous one in a play. It belonged to a man named Bacon. It only spoke while he slept, and it said ‘Time was,’ and ‘Time is,’ and ‘Time’s past.’ No one knows what it meant, but everyone suspects it was important.”
“What did it mean? What does it mean to say time is.”
“The nature of Brazen Heads,” explained the lion, “is that they speak in riddles or at least in ways that are most obscure. It’s not our choice, you understand. It’s simply how we’re made.”
Leodora pursed her lips. “That’s like Meersh’s argument that he isn’t bad, he’s simply consigned to try all the bad ideas he comes across.”
“I suppose it is, after a fashion,” the head agreed.
“I don’t believe him, either,” she told it.
The pendant and she considered each other, scant inches apart. Then the lion’s tongue unfurled as it yawned, revealing ivory teeth, and it blinked slowly several times. “Time is that which ends,” it said. Then it closed its eyes and fell silent, a piece of jewelry once again.
Leodora sighed. “If this is what I chose to bring back, I’m not hopeful of my acquaintance with the gods.”
“Oh, but,” Orinda said, “we now know that Mr. Burbage is in Edgeworld. It means a great deal to me to know that.”
“I suppose it wasn’t something we could have learned on our own.” She still wasn’t sure anything the head uttered could be relied upon. “It seems to have gone to sleep,