by Jack
Bunting did have money: oscadrils — debased Imperial coin, long held to be made of inferior metal despite their golden twinkle. Spleen had proved in no mood to accept such stuff, the cold dull gold of common sous was his whole desire. After conversion by the only money changers who took the business of those of his ilk — and their high tellage fee — Bunting was left with scarce enough to eat once properly each day and fit himself for his current venture.
To compound poor Bunting’s woes, Master Pypsquïque, ashmonger and the corser’s usual agent, was being especially punctilious about this newest order. Typically Bunting would fill as much of his toll ticket as he could with corses of the required states of category and decay then meet the rest with odds and sods dug from any old plot and with this what in the trade they liked to call windfall — bodies found beddened, that is, newly dead, on gallows or Catherine wheels or the sides of roads. Though most ashmongers did not like it much, such a practice was only disallowed by the hinge in as much as it threatened good relations betwixt a corser and their usual agents, as Bunting’s properly printed and much treasured edition of the hinge read. Yet, little matter how Bunting might consider himself an honourable fellow — as honourable as one of my ilk might be, he thought wryly — in lean times such ambiguous ploys were within his habits.
Haphazard bits and sods, however, would not do this time.
Master Pypsquïque, ever alive to his suppliers’ ploys, had been pointedly unambiguous in his insistence for this most recent order. ‘Fill the toll full and properly, Mister Faukes!’ the ashmonger had declared imperiously when presenting the list. ‘The whole toll, that is — our client waxes impatient with shortcuts and if he don’t get every corse as he wants it, he has said he won’t pay me ... and if he don’t pay me, I won’t pay thee!’
The toll was fairly typical:
2 of the male kind, adult of young or middling years, wormed;
1 innards only of the female kind, adult, young or middling, decadent;
1 of the male kind, adult middle-yeared, tanned;
1 of the female kind, a child of elder years, scarce beddened.
... typical, but for that last item. Such fresh ashes were rarely called for but by the worst ash-dabblers. Still, the principles of those upon the other side of the transaction with Master Pypsquïque were not of Bunting’s concern. His labours were trial enough without fussing with such mewling niceties. He — and most corsers with him — prided and consoled himself that as long as he kept to his iniquitous yet necessary work, the need for kidnap and murder by lingerlaces and other bodysnatching wretches was diminished.
Be that as it might be, his current cause had not been aided by the fact that his usual rivals, the Micklethwart brothers — always desperate to make good themselves — seemed to be beating him to every patch within easy journey. The one time he had got to a plot ahead of them, they drove him off violently in blatant disobedience to the hinge and against common decency among fellow wayfarers too.
Not all are honour, Bunting reflected bitterly.
Keenly sensitive to any lapse in her master’s attention, Anvil the smaller donkey — fit as she ever was — slowed in an attempt to feast on a few wilted thistles struggling through the mat of russet needles on the verge of the ill-kept path. Flicking the left rein irritably, Bunting prompted her on. Probably a near-forgotten mine or woodsman’s road, their course had kept tenaciously and somewhat disorientingly to the north-western flank of a convoluted valley, snaking right then left then right again amongst the young and murky wood.
Peering higher to the low, leaden sky, Bunting breathed a long draw of stagnant, resin-scented air. At least the weather is turned cold again.
In grasping anxiety he had resorted finally — despite the ban on such conduct — to chasing the Micklethwarts off in turn, firing all seven barrels of his heptibus at them, only to find he was left scant pickings of the new plots. Moreover, hinge prevented him from revisiting Spelter Innings necropolis — his favourite necropolis and ever a source of fine fresh corses. He had been there not more than a month ago and, obliged by the hinge, was compelled to leave an interlude of two months — half a season — before returning. Yet, Spelter Innings was too far away anyway regardless, if he was to go and dig and be back in Brandenbrass by the 5th of Unxis. Steered by desperation, he delved far to parts of the Brandenfells he had once promised himself never to tread, trundling amidst the infamous black hills of half-mad boar-swains and violent backwards bumpkins seeking their private humegrounds in the baffling warren of gullies and combes.
Bunting stared warily at the tall crooked pines, gaunt turpentines and lichened boulders a brooding sullen grey, the perfect hide for rabid men clotted with filth and gore or worse, a slavering bogle fit to eat whatever it could lay its hand to. There had been talk in a woodsman’s ham down south, Whittle Sawsly, of some giant hobnicker stalking the hills about — especially in these more northern hills.
Yet despite all the obstacles, our man — avoiding bumping with even one wild bumpkin — had managed to find much of what he needed in these secluded plots, disinterring the right and proper ashes of every item on the toll.
Every item, that was, but that last ...
1 of the female kind, a child of elder years, scarce beddened.
The plethora of plots of Brandenbrass would surely hold such rare ashes. Yet in fear of tempting the short mercies of Weakleefe Spleen and his stinking bandage-wrapped scourge, Bunting did not dare return to Brandenbrass early, not even to spoil the boneyards of that city. Even if he had, such an endeavour would have been futile, for the city’s deadpatches had, after a winter of especially heavy plundering, been bounded for the spring by common accord between corser and ashmongers alike. Moreover, ever since that misunderstanding last year with the corse of the Archduke’s cousin’s youngest daughter and a prominent ashmonger, the mortigriphers of the city — responsible for the rites, burial and recording of the dead — had shut their doors to the dark trades. The only recourse had always been the usual remote plots; but when these did not yield the necessary harvest and the city was out of bounds, what was a fellow to do?
Short of abducting some girl from her dear mother’s bosom — embed, or kill for himself, a soul who dead would fit the toll, and present them after some treatment with the necessary chemistry as if legitimately exhumed — he had no notion how he would fill it. For a breath in the darker regions of his soul, such a grim notion was beginning to hold merit ... As much as many ashmongers would be perfectly at ease with such murder, the hinge held it expressly forbidden, serving not the posterity of our ancient and necessary trade — or, as his father had put it, ‘just cause we’re part o’ the dark trades dun’t mean we ‘ave to behave darksomely’.
Aside from guilty, vaguely lofty notions of honour, Bunting was not sure he had the courage for such an act. Messing about with the members of some long dead soul was amusing enough, but killing cold and calculated was a whole other dastardly stripe of deed. Should he truly consider such a deed it did not matter anyway: deep in the Brandenfells now, he was too remote from properly settled places to find anything so fresh and civilised as a young girl. Yet times were waxing so desperate so quickly, should he find such a creature, he could not rightly say which way he might decide.
My neck or another’s ... ?
Abruptly he was brought out of his reverie.
Was that a shout?
Someone — or something — had cried out.
Bunting listened but heard no repeat of that first cry over the light clatter of his cart. He shook his head as he leant back on the reins, Hammer and Anvil only too eager to halt and chew upon drooping weeds. Reaching back from the small bench of his cart, the corser patting searchingly for a green glass bottle of vin settled between four long, burlap-wound bundles. Disturbingly suggestive of a human form, they were lain side by side in the cart’s tray beneath the folded framed of wooden struts that made the simple sheer he used to haul prizes from the mould, and
over this several great obscuring stooks of kindling. A scent of myrrh mixed with rot rose from them, though Bunting found it neither unpleasant nor overpowering, in part for the skill of their wrapping, in part the censers of sweet powders fixed to rods on either side of the cart’s bench, and in part because he was numb to such odours. Like vinegarroons in their rams treading the acrid vinegar seas, corsers possess a measure of dumbness to all manner of bad airs. A most necessary qualification, he smiled sardonically at himself. Swatting at a knot of flies hovering about his ears, he took a toss of sharp sweet vin and set the cart in motion.
A startling boom, like the discharge of a mighty cannon, cracked through the narrow defile, reverberating over and over like the whole wood was about to collapse on itself.
Bunting near dropped his bottle.
Though there was no reckoning where such a heavy sound came from in these frowning furrowed hills it certainly seemed disconcertingly near. Soon this was followed by the flat popping of what could only be musket or pistol fire. Ducking instinctively though the threat was surely some way off, Bunting reached for his heptibus and quickened the pace of his donkeys.
Coming easy as he could about a sharp right-hand crook in the road, he peered ahead to see if the road was threatened. Cut into the hillside, the road bent around a short precipice of rust-stained stone little more than the height of two tall men. Shouts and the tell-tale popping of flintlock fire seemed to sound from directly above.
Bunting scarcely turned in time to witness a figure dressed in dim grey and black, head and shoulders swathed in brilliant red appear suddenly directly above him. Face hidden behind an all-seeing sthenicon box, the figure looked down at him for a mere breath before launching itself from the blunt crag. Even in his fall, the red-swathed lurksman twisted to plummet back first, a pistola pointing in each hand back up to where he had just left. Crack! Crack! the pistols fired as at that very instant two strangely pale heads rushed into sight at the summit of the overhang. One ducked nimbly from view, the other simply slumped, hat tumbling, pierced through the brow with a leaden ball even as the red-swathed fellow landed with a great jarring rattling crash of kindling and groaning joints, and a gust of dust, right into the laden tray of Bunting’s creaking cart. Hammer and Anvil bellowed and brayed in dismay. Striving to keep the beasts from bolting, the corser instantly thought his cart ruined and the man dead — I might find a buyer for him, a cool and ever-present calculation inwardly turned — but with a quick jerk, the red lurksman sat up.
‘Hurry on, man!’ he cried to Bunting, voice clear despite the impediment of the simple oblong sthenicon box, its single optic hole swivelling rapidly from Bunting to ledge-top.
Without a second thought, the corser obediently flicked his poor donkeys to start, the two creatures only too keen to be on their way.
‘Petulcus Sprawle,’ the lurksman introduced himself with the tone of an educated man as he hastily reloaded his irons. ‘My chief will be shortly ahead at the bridge ... You may take me there.’ He turned abruptly and let loose with a twin of pistol shots at the foe still chasing them atop the rolling precipice. Under the bulky folds of his red cowl, Bunting could see this Sprawle carried a hefty wad of dark cushioning cloth strapped in a bundle to his upper back, as if to soften many a backwards fall. Such acrobatics were common for this fellow it seemed.
Hammer and Anvil took them as fast as they might on such an awkward path over the spur of the hill, the cart-axles rasping with stricken groans Bunting knew had not been there before. The crook in the road straightened and began to bend back to the left as the land rolled down to a shallow gully rising steadily on the right. Only a couple of fathoms ahead stood a neat crossing of arched and ancient stone traversing a small runnel bubbling its course down the needle-thick gully between root and rock and tree. Climbing steeply on the other side, the gloom beneath the black pines was hurrying with white-faced shadows. Looking quickly Bunting could see that they were grubby fellows in mixed proofing stalking amongst the dark trees, their pallid faces grubby white blanks. In a nonce, he could see that they were masks bearing one or two horizontal red bars across their dials.
‘Fictlers!’ Bunting hissed.
Falsegod worshippers, fictlers were the worst fashion of backwards hill-dwelling nincompoops, filled with delusions of a world ruled by their deep-dwelling masters, the slumbering idiot falsegods.
‘Indeed ...’ Sprawle proclaimed, his boxed face an unnerving blank.
Balls spanged and slapped about them as Bunting whisked his team to a brisk trot, one striking Hammer on the well-proofed petraille that covered the startled donkey’s back and flanks, another knocking his master’s tall hat from his crown. So astonishing was this blow that Bunting did not notice a stout gent in costly proofing of luxurious blue stooped behind the cover of the high stone abutments upon the further side of the bridge until he was nigh upon him. The corser hauled hard to slow their scampering pace.
That very moment there came a mighty flash high up the slope, quickly accompanied by a crackling roar. A great gush of debris and orange and clearly toxic smoke engulfed half the height of the gully, flinging fictlers down with implacable force, overcoming them in a thick, dirty fume.
‘The timing of your fuse is as excellent as ever, Mister Sprawle!’ the short thickset gentleman in blue called with grim cheer to Bunting’s passenger, the red-wrapped lurksman leaping lithely from the wreck in the cart’s tray to the wall of the bridge. ‘I see you have brought a jaunty fit to extract us from this stouche,’ he added, reaching up to halt Hammer and Anvil without any reference to the cart’s proper owner.
At first Bunting thought this fellow was still bent for cover, but he quickly discerned that though he was hunched, he was standing at his full height as he gripped Anvil’s bridle, barely taller than some middling child. ‘Hoy! I ain’t your champion, old muck,’ he retorted hotly, trying to provoke his donkeys to keep going away from all this danger. ‘I’m not here for your saving!’
‘No,’ the stunted, blue-harnessed gent returned rapidly, the intent in his gaze hidden behind murky spectacles. ‘But you’re a humble, hucillucting soul who’ll help his fellow wayfarers in their need.’
Bunting frowned, feeling utterly exposed sitting high on his cart bench. ‘If it isn’t the hinge it’s the cordiality of the road,’ he muttered bleakly and stared nervously up the gully.
For now, threatening silence ruled.
Beyond the squat blue fellow crouched a third figure, hidden behind a hefty boulder that jutted near the bridge. Clad in a heavy black weskit over his clean white shirt, he was taking aim with a prodigiously long long-rifle up the left flank of the gully. The weapon spoke, offending the hush with its violence, the bark of its deadly voice crackling back to them through the convolutions of the gullies. After the great blast of before, Bunting could not see who there was to shoot at, but the fellow set to reloading with great yet practised haste: powder from a horn, already-patched ball from a pouch, all rammed with steady alacrity. The corser thought this oddly old-fashioned — waxed cartridges had been about for near as long as he could recall — until he saw that this fellow, too, wore a sthenicon, no doubt to give him a franker aim yet preventing him from biting a cartridge, as was necessary.
With a queer shriek, a new figure dashed down the left slope of the gully, coming at them through the residue of fume. Dressed in closed-fitted proofing, this one too wore a mask, though instead of a dirty menacing blank it was the clean white of a regal egret with sharp yellow bill. Here surely was a sagaar, a skipping tempestuous dancer of the dread dances of war, the many hems of long protective skirts flying behind like madly fluttering wings of moonlit night.
Bunting reckoned them undone. Why does he not fire! he thought, watching in rising horror as the black-proofed franklock set aim on the rushing dancer but no more.
Taking up his heptibus, Bunting resolved to act. Set to fire all seven shots at once, he levelled it on the charging foe when the cluster of barrels
was abruptly seized and the weapon near wrenched from his unready grasp.
‘Rather you didn’t, friend,’ Sprawle smiled thinly while the gent in blue declared to him mildly, keeping hold of the firelock, ‘She is rather valuable to us,’ clearly meaning the egret sagaar.
She? Bunting marvelled darkly. What stripe of crank panto-show have I met with? Eying the man dismally as he let the heptibus go and turned to welcome the return of his weird egret-faced comrade, the corser’s next thought was for flight. I’ll leave these uppity lurksmen to their fate, he determined when his attention was arrested by a young lady.
Fair-haired, perhaps a third his age, she sat huddled and very still beside the busy black-clad franklock. Draped by an overlarge cloak covering the shame of her too simple slip, her eyes were round and terribly solemn, yet she appeared indifferent to her immediate danger. Darker thoughts possessed her attention.
An impulse deeper than a conscientious notion of honour or habitual obedience to the hinge made Bunting stay; indeed, it moved him to pull his cart to halt beside the great boulder and clamber down ready to proffer any aid required to the frighted young thing.
