“Keep your eyes peeled for trouble,” Tuni hissed, again sounding like he’d escaped from some old-timey movie about a hard-boiled detective.
I made a motion like he shouldn’t talk. Then I used two fingers to point to my eyes, before scanning my fingers out over the landscape around us.
“What is that? Do you think we’re in some kind of police show or something?” Tuni scoffed, totally not bothering to keep his voice down.
I rolled my eyes. My birdbrained friend was so annoying. Ignoring Tuni, I continued to scan the roadside, my weapon at the ready. It didn’t take us long to see where the string was coming from. A few yards away from where I’d crashed the rikshaw, a woman sat by the edge of the road. She was spinning the threads, which flew off her spindle as if by magic, coating everything in sight. She lifted her head as we approached, but she didn’t exactly look like she was about to attack us or anything. On the other hand, there was something odd about her. I mean, what were the chances of bumping into yet another old woman so soon on our journey?
I put down my weapon. “All right, Bunty!” I laughed, striding toward the spinning granny. “I know it’s you!”
“Take off that wig already!” Tuni added, dive-bombing the old woman’s gray hair and trying to pull it off with his beak.
The only problem was, the old woman’s hair didn’t come off. “Stop that! Who are you and why do you hurt a helpless old woman?” she shrieked, almost knocking over her magic spinning wheel.
“Wait, Tuni …” I was starting to get a bad feeling about this.
“Who are you?” The old woman moved her head in my direction, and I realized she probably couldn’t see me, as her eyes were coated in a white film.
“You can’t fool us, tiger!” Tuntuni yelled, dive-bombing her hair again. This time, even Tiktiki One got in on the act, climbing up to the old woman’s white-sari-clad shoulder, then flicking its tongue at the woman’s wrinkled face.
“Stop! Stop! Why do you hurt me so?” the pathetic old lady cried, sounding so real that my stomach dropped about a thousand feet.
“Tuni! Tiktiki One! Hold on! Halt!” I went to pull the bird and lizard off the granny. “That’s not Bunty!”
“Let me go!” Tuntuni squirmed in my hands, his claws aiming at the old woman’s face. “I’ll rip that cheap mask off! I know it’s the tiger under there!”
“What do you demented dilettantes think you’re doing?” The voice coming from behind us was way too familiar. I turned around to see Bunty the tiger bounding toward us from the direction we’d left them. “Stop assaulting that spinner! Stop mauling that matriarch!”
Tuni did that cartoon thing where you look at one person, then the other, then back at the first. His little yellow head swiveled from Bunty to the old woman to Bunty again. And then he retracted his claws with a horrified expression.
“I’m so sorry, you sweet old, darling, dearie grammy,” he burbled, flying around her head and trying to smooth down her hair with his wings. “You just keep on spinning and forget this ever happened.”
As Tuni said the word spinning, however, the old woman’s spinning wheel suddenly flickered. It transformed from a wooden wheel spinning the sticky white threads, to a spinning toy top, to a giant salad spinner spitting out glistening strings like they were a bed of leafy greens.
“Oh!” the old woman shrieked. Then she rose from her seat, and suddenly, she flickered too. Her white sari transformed into some dirty patchwork robes and her gray hair into a crooked jet-black bun on the side of her head. Her neck was loaded down with shell and bead necklaces, and her bare feet were thick with dust. In one hand, she held a one-stringed ektara, and with her other hand, she played a small drum that was strapped over her shoulder.
“I am no grandmother!” the woman shouted. “I’m a Baul khepi, a crazy one, a mystic minstrel whose life is dedicated to that which is more powerful than us all!”
I knew Bauls were wandering singers who made music and lived on donations, not bothering with the normal social rules like living in one place or having a job. I thought about the khepi’s words and figured they must be some kind of a riddle, like so much in the Kingdom Beyond Seven Oceans and Thirteen Rivers.
“Your life is dedicated to that which is more powerful than us all,” I murmured. “Is it love?”
“No, no, I know this one!” said Tuni, waving a wing in the air like he was in a classroom. “It’s snacks!”
“No, the answer is obviously death!” volunteered Bunty, gnashing their teeth.
Tiktiki One just blinked, flicking out its rubbery tongue to eat some mosquitos. I guess its answer was hunger.
“Silence!” the khepi shrieked, lifting her small one-stringed instrument in the air. The dried-gourd base of the ektara glowed as if reflecting her own emotions. “I wasn’t asking for answers! It was a metaphor, you doofuses!”
“Well, you could have told us that before we started guessing,” said Tuntuni, but the bird’s words got quieter by the end of the sentence. The woman raised her glowing ektara even higher in the air. As she strummed the one string with her finger, the instrument not only made its twangy sound but seemed to generate some sort of energy force field around it that made the Baul khepi glow like a meteor. “I may enjoy sitting in forests and spinning stories in my spare time, but I can still smite you for your insults!”
“No, no, no need for smiting!” I assured the furious woman, trying to back away as quickly as I could. “We’ve already been smote this week. I mean, smitted. Smook?”
“Definitely!” added Tuni, flying backward even more quickly. “We’ve totally fulfilled our smitings quota! We’re all set! No need to put yourself out!”
Tiktiki One just click-clacked its tongue, which could have meant anything, and Bunty the tiger gave a little shrug. “Regardless, I was not with these ignoramuses, Your Baulness! Indeed, I am hardly acquainted with them! Never even seen them before!”
The spinner-slash-mystic-minstrel ignored all this and squinted at me, halting her playing as she did. “Wait a minute, I recognize you. You’re that Moon Girl, aren’t you?”
“I’m Kiranmala—the daughter of the moon,” I said hesitantly.
“She’s an old friend of mine, your mother,” said the khepi. “She too is a wanderer, never the same, not attached to the illusions of this earthly life.”
Wasn’t that the truth, I thought. I just wished my moon mother could be a little more attached to at least one thing in this earthly life—me. But still, she was the only one who could help me right now, and maybe this mystic could help me find her. “Do you think you might be able to help us get my mother’s attention?”
The Baul woman thought for a minute, her eyes now clear and shrewd. “Why?”
“It’s a bit of an emergency,” I said, noting how low the sun was now in the sky. “I have to get to New Jersey, rescue my friend Lal, and then make it back here to help stop Sesha from taking over the Kingdom Beyond.”
“Fine, fine.” The singer nodded. “All very noble and worthy of you. There will be a price, though.”