by D M Cornish
By their own instruction the calendars were not to be troubled for another hour. At last Rossamünd had a moment of his own, without press or crowd or the impel of orders—a precious-rare commodity, he had learned, in a lamplighter’s life. Secreting himself in a dim corner beneath the stairs that went up to the gallery, he hoped to remain inconspicuous, perhaps to read a little of his new pamphlet and avoid being discovered and set to some odious task.
He failed.
As the drums rataplanned again to wake the rest of the cothouse for another day, the house-major, on his way down to breakfast, spied Rossamünd. “You there! Lantern-stick! The one I spoke with last night,” the officer barked. “Feed the dogs. Their meat is in the kitchen.”
“Aye, sir,” the young prentice said with sinking wind. It was properly the duty of the house-watch to feed the dogs. The house-major must have known that though Rossamünd had been left behind, he was still part of the lantern-watch. He had rarely ever met a dog of any sort—they were not allowed in Madam Opera’s—and any time he had, the meeting had not been comfortable. Shaken, the young prentice nevertheless obeyed without demur, asking directions of a kitchen hand.
“They’re in the yard of the south keep,” a rough-shaven kitchen hand explained, handing Rossamünd a rotund pot of dog vittles. “Mind the weight!”
Wrapping his arms about the pot’s wide girth, Rossamünd did not find the burden a trouble and, arms full of reeking offcuts, made his way to the southern keep of Wellnigh. He wrestled the great pot past the house-watchmen, a half quarto of haubardiers pacing about the edges of the road who jostled him as he tried to get around them.
“Move your ashes, scrub!”
Tottering across the Pettiwiggin, he thumped with his elbow at the small sally port in the wall of the south keep yard. No one answered, and he kept thumping until one of the haubardiers came over and, with a sardonic grin, unlocked and opened the port to let him through. In the small, high-walled space beyond were the great kennels, built up against the keep’s base, barred with stout iron founded in stone. This was the cage for the dogs, five Greater Derehunds—enormous creatures with spotted flanks and slobbering jowls—that waited hungrily. Such dogs were kept at many cothouses and at Winstermill too, there to howl and yammer with great commotion if a nicker was ever near.
The Derehunds began an awful growling as soon as they saw Rossamünd, all five hunched and threatening, a terrible gurgling rattle in their throats, pointed ears flat along their pied necks.
“Hallo there,” Rossamünd tried, and waggled some stinking offal.
With a jerk one hound gave a savage bawling bark that sent the rest mad, leaping over each other, back and forth, crashing against the bars, baying like all wretchedness was loose.
Rossamünd leaped backward, scrambling and slipping on grimed cobbles.
Officers, lighters and haubardiers rushed from all points, some shouting, some soothing the dogs in vain, many demanding, “What did ye do?”
Some minor officer—a lieutenant—grabbed Rossamünd hard under the arm and pulled him away. “What are you practicing at?”
“Nothing, sir!” the young prentice quailed. “I . . . I just tried to feed them, as ordered.”
“He’s all right, sir,” offered a lighter from the day-watch. “He was a part of that confustication last night.”
“Ah, cunning beasts,” said a haubardier in obvious admiration of the hounds, “they can still tell the stink of the monsters on ye from yester eve.”
A GREATER DEREHUND
“Well, get him out of here,” demanded the lieutenant. “Find him another task.”
“You had best get back to them harum-scarum ladies, lad,” the lighter said quietly. “Quick now, before the dogs get wilder.”
Rossamünd gratefully left the pot and went back to the northern keep, up the stairs, over the gallery to the temporary lodgings of the calendars.
Threnody greeted his polite good morning with little more than a cold stare and silence. Dolours looked as poorly as she had on the night previous.
“May I offer you a draught mixed with bellpomash, m’lady?” Rossamünd inquired.
“You most certainly may,” she returned gratefully.
Rossamünd went quickly to the kitchen and asked permission of the cook to prepare the restorative. The best he could do was to mix it with saloop and add some lordia too, but Dolours did not fuss. She drank it down and returned the bowl to him with a smile.
“My thanks to you. We will be ready presently.”
He waited a goodly while by the door as the calendars prepared to leave.
Charllette the pistoleer was to stay behind and take a post-lentum back east by way of the Roughmarch, the threwdish gap through the Tumblesloe Heap. She would return to the Lady Vey and the stronghold of the calendars, bearing with her dispatches and the bodies of the two dead. Dolours,Threnody and the wounded dancer Pandomë, who lay unconscious on a bier with her face and head entirely bandaged, were to go west to Winstermill. Despite the bellpomash brew, the bane still showed the strain of her malady and Rossamünd asked after her health once more.
“Why, I thank you, young lighter,” Dolours replied. “Truly I would not have set out so ill had not the need been pressing. You understand the life of service, I am sure.”
Rossamünd nodded wholeheartedly. “I shall recommend you to our physician when we return, m’lady. They say there’s nothing he can’t mend.”
Dolours smiled and Threnody frowned.
When all was ready the small party set out in pouring rain—fighting weather, Europe would have called it. For a moment Rossamünd wondered where the terrible fulgar might be. Was she still in Sinster—that city famous for its transmogrifying surgeons, the makers of lahzars—to be mended after the near-fatal spasming of her artificial fulgar’s organs? Would she soon return, as she had promised, to see how he was getting on? A quiet ache set in his gall: despite his abhorrence of her trade—at her indiscriminate killing—he was actually missing the teratologist. After all, she had rescued him from that scurrilous rogue Poundinch.
Instead of an ox dray, the calendars traveled easy in a small covered curricle drawn by two sturdy donkeys. These were led by a laconic leer Rossamünd had never properly met but knew from the milling of rumor and reputation to be Mister Clement. The fellow confirmed this with a sour introduction to the calendars, giving them all a dour look with his weird yellow and olive-drab eyes, as if the task was a great inconvenience. Before the leer put on his sthenicon Rossamünd marveled at his wrong-colored eyes, so different from Sebastipole’s. For Clement was a laggard, like Licurius, better able to spy things hidden in shadows and darkness and nooks than a falseman, but less capable of spotting lies. His biologue in place, the leer took them out on the road. He talked little, instead bending all his energy to searching ahead and aside for the evidences of a monster.
After his experience at the strangling hands of Licurius, Rossamünd walked a little uneasily beside Clement. Exposed to the foul weather and equally silent, the young prentice was nevertheless grateful to have the leer’s senses to forewarn them. That at least was a genuine comfort.
The calendars themselves also proved ill-disposed to speak, and the whole journey from cothouse to manse was accomplished in near silence.
They traveled back through the Briarywood, back through its hinting threwd, passing the scene of last night’s violence. Despite a wet day, stains of spilled blood still showed black in the dirt of the road. Under a heavy guard of haubardiers, with the chortling morning chorus of birds making light of the grisly work, a toiling fatigue party from Wellnigh House’s day-watch struggled to build and light a pyre of the fallen nickers and dead horses. The bodies of slain monsters needed to be disposed of promptly, for it was held that, left to rot, a nicker’s corpse always attracted more of the living kind.
Walking through the Harrowmath, Rossamund started and stared at every rustle in the high grass. The rain increased and his thrice-high fi
lled with water, which spilled inconveniently whenever he moved his head.
With each lamp they passed he felt a steady urgency to wind out the bloom, even though it was day. He had been in lessons (Readings on Our Mandate and Matter with Mister Humbert) in which the prentices were belabored with the notion that the Conduit Vermis was the spine about which many towns and villages grew; that the road allowed these towns to be knit as more than just remote settlements; that it was for the lamplighters to toil and keep the Wormway clear; that if they did not, then the whole of civilization might fail and fall to rapid ruin. To light the lamps meant that the kingdoms of humankind could sleep well that night. Every lamp they passed was a memorial to him of this heavy responsibility. He sighed, letting his fodicar drag in the soupy slick that filmed the hard-packed clay of the revered road.
“Lift your lantern-crook, boy!” came the rough command of the leer, and the young prentice obeyed with an unthinking start. Shrugging his shoulders against the wet, Rossamünd pushed on. Between the silence of the calendars, the taciturn concentration of Clement, and the broad, brooding Harrowmath, he lamented how different life might be as a vinegaroon or—he wondered for a moment—even as Europe’s factotum.
4
AN INTERVIEW WITH THE SURGEON
post-lentum(s) among the carriages more commonly used to traverse the highroads and byroads of the Half-Continent, post-lentums deliver mail and taxi people (for a fare) from one post to another. They are manned by a lenterman or driver, an escort (usually armed and armored) known as a side-armsman or cock robin (if wearing a red weskit of Imperial Service) or prussian (if wearing a deep blue weskit of private employment) and one or two backsteppers—either splasher boys or post runners or amblers—sitting upon the seats at the back of the roof.When traveling dangerous stretches, another backstepper may join—a quarter-topman possessing a firelock and a keen gaze—for extra protection. This crew is collectively referred to as lentermen. Po’lent is the common term for these vehicles, an abbreviated derivation of po(st) lent(um).
WINSTERMILL grew step-by-step before them. An ancient stronghold, massive and lonely upon the flat moors of the Harrowmath, it was familiar and welcome to Rossamünd already. He still marveled at the squat, gray cartography of its lichen-blotched roofs and their chimney spires, at the mightily thick outer walls and the foundations upon which the fortress was lifted high above the plain. When he had first observed it those two months gone he had thought it like some great, overgrown manor house, but now he knew the fortress to be much more. Once a small outpost of the Tutins of old, the fortress of Winstermill had accreted over the centuries: towers added, floors added, the whole mound of Winstreslewe built up and encircled with a thick wall. Once it had stood at a junction of trade routes; now it had grown over and submerged these roads in its footings. The western run of the Wormway and the north-south course of the Gainway made tunnels in Winstermill’s foundations and joined beneath the very fortress. As far as Rossamünd knew, these tunnels were called the Bowels—if they had any other name he had not heard it. In the evening, great grilles were lowered over their gaping mouths to prevent monsters and vagrants from setting up a home there, and mighty steams of repellents were regularly flushed through in the small hours of the morning to force out any unwelcome lurkers. These duties were reserved for the house-watch, and Rossamünd was glad of that. Not in all recorded history of the current Empire had a monster ever won its way into the manse.
The broad Imperial Spandarion that usually flapped proud and defiant above the battlements hung limp now in the day’s damp.The morning was already long, limes missed and second morning instructions well under way. Rossamünd had never felt so tired. Passing through the mighty gates, their arrival counted by the tally-clerk and his cursors, they were greeted by one of the house-guard calling down to them from the wall.
“Hoi there, me fellows! There’s Lady Dry-stick ready to lash us with her dim-wits.Wit us too, like ye did our mates!” News of Threnody’s actions had already traveled ahead.
“Don’t goad at her, chum,” came another. “She’s as likely to fish us as soon as fart, from what I hear!”
“Fish” was a vulgar term for frission. Rossamünd shot a look to Threnody, sitting stiff on the seat behind. The young calendar’s chin jutted high in supercilious display, yet she betrayed her anger with the clenching and unclenching of her fine jaw.
The donkeys’ hooves and carriage wheels made a harsh grinding in the white quartz gravel that formed a broad drive from the gate to the manse’s main entrance.The drive skirted three acres of paved ground known as the Grand Mead, which fronted the manse itself. It was large enough to contain kennels, several strong-houses, room for the parading and evolutions of the whole fortress and yet still allow for the frequent coming and going of carriages and other conveyances. There was even space for a well-tended green by the wall of the manse proper with benches and a grove of pines for the officers to sit beneath. Here a convention of territorial rooks would caw and cackle every evening before returning to their roost in the manse’s ridge-caps, eyeing everything angrily and keeping pigeons away. At the end of the drive stood the Scaffold, a single gaunt tree that Rossamünd had observed the night he first arrived.
As he walked by the curricle, Rossamünd watched a company of haubardiers working through drills under the shadow of the eastern wall, standing and moving in well-practiced order. He could not see the other lantern-sticks; they would be at readings now, suffering dire boredom in the Lectury with Mister Humbert. A post-lentum came through the gates, overtook them and rattled on to the covered stables to the right of the main building. The postilion blew his long horn to herald their arrival. The post is here! The post is here! its call declared.
Rossamünd felt an instinctive thrill, the sweet anticipation of a letter from a loved one—from Verline perhaps (it had been a whole month since her first missive), or Fransitart . . . or maybe even one from Europe.
It was obvious the arrival of the calendars was expected, for a welcome of officials turned out in their finest threads emerged from the manse. As Clement took the curricle through to halt before the front doors, the women were greeted first by Podious Whympre, the Master-of-Clerks. An officious man who smiled too much, he was dressed in sumptuous Imperial scarlet. He had only that year become acting second-in-command of Winstermill, and with the promotion his influence had grown. Joining him, and accompanied by all their particular secretaries, were other senior martial-bureaucrats: the Quartermaster, the niggardly Compter-of-Stores, the rotund General-Master-of-Labors and his Surveyor-of-the-Works, and a scowling General-Master-of-Palliateers. Even the rarely seen Captain-of-Thaumateers was in attendance. A small file of clerks—the chief of which was Witherscrawl—followed, along with a guard of troubardier pediteers in their bright lour-covered, proof-steel loricas and soft square pagrinine hats. Rather than their usual poleaxes, the pediteers bore high umbrellas to provide a roof against the steady drizzle.
Yet one among them refused to dress the dandy. A skulking fellow in a midnight-dark soutaine, he hovered at the Master-of-Clerks’ back and stared viperlike with ill-colored eyes of red orb and pale blue iris. This was Laudibus Pile, leer and faithful falseman to Podious Whympre. He could often be seen whispering at the Master-of-Clerks’ ear, a telltale saying what was truth and what was lie. To Rossamünd he was a false-seeming falseman, and he was glad he had little to do with this fellow or his master.
The one person missing was the Lamplighter-Marshal.
“Lady Threnody, you honor us at last.” The Master-of-Clerks bowed, a perfect study of civility. “And Lady Dolours. We are met again. It has been almost a year since you helped us against those brutish ashmongers in the Owlgrave.”
Dolours gave the man a tired, knowing look.
“And what relief it was,” the Master-of-Clerks continued without pause, spreading his arms to include the various lampsmen in attendance, “to receive report that our tireless lighters did rescue you this
yesternight gone. How happy it is you have both arrived sound and intact.”
The bane had been looking most poorly but now she presented a hale front. “Clerk-Master Podious Whympre,” she said with a subtle frown at the falseman Laudibus a-whisper-whisper behind the man, “a delight.” She paused. “For the good deeds done last night I am grateful. Your Marshal is not present, I see. Matters more pressing keep him from us?”
DOLOURS
Even Rossamünd knew that the absence of the Lamplighter-Marshal was a great affront. Of all the officers of Winstermill, the Lamplighter-Marshal was not only the most senior, but also had the reputation as the most punctual and gentlemanly.
“Ah, ever-astute Lady Bane, you do your clave proud. The Lamplighter-Marshal, I am certain, would give sincere apology for his nonattendance were we able to find him.” Though the Master-of-Clerks’ face was apologetic, his eyes were bright.
Dolours stepped past and went to push through the gaggle of officers and clerks. “It is well, for proper meetings must sadly wait; our sister Pandomë is deadly hurt. I hear your physic Crispus is of fair repute. Would you consent to his immediately attending to her wounds?”
The Master-of-Clerks was obliged to step quickly, moving from the precious cover of his troubardier-held umbrella and leaving his falseman behind. “Indeed, madam, Doctor Crispus is a man of many parts,” he said, his smile broadening almost to a sneer as a troubardier hurried to cover him with a high parasol. “Alas, however, he is gone away to Red Scarfe to tend a disturbing outbreak of the fugous cankers. Ah, but all is not a loss! Grotius Swill, our surgeon and the physician’s locum, remains with us. He will serve, I’m sure.”
