by D M Cornish
Music swelled from the oval stage below them: sweet chamber-sounds of fiddle, violoncello and sourdine, and adding mellifluously to it a soaring female voice. Rossamünd felt he had heard this singing somewhere before and, looking down to the stage, saw a quartet of scratch-bobbed, liveried musicians and, in a halo of light, Hero, the chanteuse of Clunes. Dressed in a smoke-green chiffon dress with broad, gathered skirts, black rumples at the elbows, her hair piled and rolled and festooned with flowers of similar color to the chiffon, she was the very same songstress he had watched in raptures at the Harefoot Dig. Yet here she was now, projecting sonorous verse all about the great room, arms reaching out imploringly. Rossamünd forgot his food and listened, heedless of time’s passing, arm on balustrade, cheek resting on arm, his eyes just a little doelike.
Threnody affected to be unimpressed. “It is adequate, I suppose,” she said in the applause between songs, “if you like those Lentine styles.”
Rossamünd decided he liked the Lentine style very well and could not understand Threnody’s remark.
Her own meal finished, Europe lounged on the comfortable bench and picked at a sludgy, creamy-colored delicacy known simply as cheesecake, soaked in syrup of peach-blossoms. With it came sillabub—a curdled concoction of milk and vinegar. She let Rossamünd try a little, and he came away from the taste smacking his lips in disgust. She did not, however, offer any to Threnody, who had become more and more sullen and sour-faced as the night deepened and did not show any care.
Washing out the vile aftertaste with the bitter small wine, Rossamünd asked solemnly, “Miss Europe, what do you know of Wormstool?”
“It is remote and dangerous and no place for new-weaned lamplighting lads and lasses.” Europe scowled. “What can your masters be thinking, sending you out there?”
“Oh, I was not sent,” Threnody said piously. “I asked to go. Those with greater capacities have to wait on those who do not. It’s how I have been taught and . . .” She looked at her fellow traveler. “Rossamünd will need the help—as you yourself probably well know.”
“Oh?” Europe turned a piercing gaze on the girl. “And who will look out for you, my dear?”
“Rossamünd,” the girl returned simply. “We lighters stick together, just like calendars.”
The fulgar laughed unexpectedly. “Aren’t you an adorable little upstart?” she purred.
Chin lifting then dropping, Threnody clearly did not know whether to be offended or pleased. She looked out into the Saloon at nothing in particular.
“Now tell me, young Rossamünd,” Europe demanded, “what were you fighting that cost you yet another hat?”
“It was a rever-man, miss,” the young lighter said simply.
Europe went wide-eyed. There was a pause, incredulity hovering at its fringes. “Truly?” she said eventually. “How did you manage to get tangled up with one of those? More to the point, how did you survive it?”
“I found it deep in the cellars of Winstermill the very next night after you left.”
“Ah!You’re playing a leg-pull on me, little man.” The fulgar started to smile knowingly. “Your old home is far too tough to crack for some rotten-headed thing like a rever-man. That old Marshal of yours must be sadly slipping if he let one of those wretches in.”
Rossamünd’s gall twisted at this. “I don’t think he is slipping, Miss Europe, but still, sure as I sit here, it was a gudgeon I wrastled right down in the bottom of the fortress.” He went on to tell the whole tale, elaborating especially on the moment when he jammed the loomblaze into the rever-man’s gnashing maw. That moment was powerfully satisfying to recall. “It was somewhere in that fight I lost my hat,” he concluded.
“Aren’t you the one for getting yourself into fixes not of your own making?” Europe’s knowing gaze had not slipped for the length of his tale. “You are still the strangest, bravest little man.Throwing a gudgeon about and blasting it to char is beyond even some of my ilk.You’re not as helpless as you seem.” She looked at Threnody.
“Maybe.” Rossamünd tried not to look too pleased. “It was gangling and poorly made, with too-long arms and hairy, piggy ears, just like those”—he pointed to a sizzling porker’s head that was being carried past at that very moment by a struggling maid—“and no great feat to best.”
“The Lamplighter-Marshal said it was a mighty deed,” Threnody stated proudly in a strange change of tack.
“I should think he would,” the fulgar said, taking a sip of wine. “You did him a great service, Rossamünd.”
“Yet it still did not stop the man receiving a sis edisserum from the Considine,” the young lampsman said sadly.
“Truly?” Europe murmured. “You don’t hear of that happening every diem. Your Marshal must certainly have gone awry then.”
Rossamünd did not hear her. His thoughts had pounced on his own words, hairy, piggy ears. The gudgeon had large, furry, leaf-shaped ears, pig’s ears, like those on the meal just gone by; pig’s ears very much like those on the swine’s head he had carried up to Swill . . .
And Europe had told of the dark hints that surrounded the surgeon; and it held that if Swill knew of the kitchen furtigrade when Doctor Crispus did not, he might be well aware of other secret ways, even down to the moldering cellars. Why, truly, would he need his deliveries of body parts if not to make a rever-man? . . . And there was the flayed skin.
Swill is a black habilist! A massacar!
The horrid, impossible idea rolled about his mind’s view, an image of the surgeon clandestinely making gudgeons in his attic apartment: wobbling, raving creatures cobbled together from kitchen offcuts and dug-up corpse bits, then held and hidden in the fortress’s depths. The young lighter could little fathom how such a capital evil as monstermaking—or “fabercadavery,” as the peregrinat called it—could go on undiscovered within Winstermill’s precincts. How was it possible that amid such a crowd of zealous invidists monsters were actually made?
With low and stuttering urgency, Rossamünd explained his deductions as best he could. He talked mostly to Europe, who listened without interruption, her arms folded and her brow deeply creased with a scowl.
“The rever-man had pig’s ears,” he repeated excitedly. “I carried a pig’s head up to Swill from the kitchens. That’s why he reads from those banned books—they are full of all manner of ash-dabblings.”
“Well, one hardly needs to be an auto-savant to have spotted Swill as a nefarious cad!” Threnody argued.
A great roar of applause erupted about all levels of the Saloon: Hero had come to the end of her recital and was now bowing deeply to her adoring audience with great, cheek-busting smiles. Threnody looked down at it all and curled her lip. “Yes, well, I suppose she was passable,” she sneered as she clapped politely.
Rossamünd barely heard her or the cheers. Swill is a massacar! Sebastipole said he had not found how the rever-man could have got in: the fortress really was impregnable. It would not have to be if the abomination was already being kept inside Winstermill—indeed if it had been made there in the deep parts. Was it mere coincidence that Rossamünd had found his way out only through the Master-of-Clerks’ rooms? Swill was most certainly his man, brought in especially. It all fitted too horribly.
“My, what a hive of troubles you have kicked,” the fulgar said. “The Soratchë were right to suspect him, it seems, though one thinks they might have pressed their suspicions a little further.”
Threnody made a face as if to say she did not think much of the Soratchë.
“But why do such a terrible thing?” Rossamünd could not fathom it.
“Why else, little man, but for the oldest reason of all?” The fulgar paused. “Money, of course. There is much to be made from the making and trafficking of rever-men and other made-monsters—as you have seen firsthandedly, with that filthy fellow Poundinginches or whatever his name might have been.”
Rossamünd nodded. What precious relief it had been when Europe had rescued him from that v
ile rivermaster and sent him to the harbor-bottom with one arc to his beefy chest.
“All manner of people manage to require the service of the dark trades,” the fulgar continued. “I have already caught the whispers of at least two rousing-pits within reach of here, and they are genuinely lucrative for those at the right end of the wagers. These must be supplied, and it seems Swill is the man to do so.”
The young lighter shivered at the implication of her words.
“If you know of such horrid places, why do you not do something about them?” Threnody interjected. “Or tell someone who will?”
Europe’s expression became owlish. “Because, my dear, if I have heard rumors, then others certainly will have too.The excisemen and obstaculars and your once-sisters are better fitted to the chore.”
“But rousing-pits have monsters in them,” Threnody continued querulously. “Surely that should move you!”
Europe fixed her with that dangerously glassy stare.
“Child, I am not some mindless invidist. I rid the world of teratologica for money’s hand, not sport.”
Threnody locked eyes with her.
Rossamünd ducked his head at the fizzing tension between these two lahzarines. He wanted to intervene, yet did not dare tangle with the friction between them, as inscrutable as the movements of the planets. In the end the standoff proved unbearable and he spoke. “What of the Master-of-Clerks?” he tried. “Swill is his man. Doctor Crispus said it so.”
“Every mad habilist needs a patron.” Europe sounded almost flippant, though her grim expression told otherwise.
“Why did you not speak of this before, lamp boy?” Threnody growled.
“Because I did not think of it till now, Threnody,” Rossamünd sighed.
“I must write of all this to Mother!”
“For the little she might do,” said Europe, “with the clerk-master sitting in control behind those unapproachable walls and little proof to go on but one small bookchild lampsman’s conjectures.”
“She is a great woman,” Threnody bridled, “and will do more than some to rid the Empire of a traitor.”
“But what if I’m wrong?”
“If you are wrong then rumors are exploded, suspicions disabused and everyone goes on to other troubles,” Europe said bluntly. “Yet for now we have the suggestion of serious, dastardly things, little man,” she said. “Gudgeons loose in Winstermill, marshal-peers summoned to the subcapital and prentices sent too far east: something is truly, deeply amiss in your reach of the world. Keep your eyes wide, Rossamünd. You are in a dangerous tangle if all this turns out true. It may be that your assignment to Wormstool is not a simple lapse in wisdom.” She reached over to put a hand on his shoulder. “You should have become my factotum after all,” she said wryly.
Rossamünd could not help but agree. He could not now think of anywhere safer than by Europe’s side. He noticed Threnody was looking at him with an envious scowl.
Europe summoned a footman and made provision for their bunking. There was no room elsewhere in the wayhouse. “You can join me in my quarters if you wish, Rossamünd. There is a bed for one other there,” the fulgar explained. “Or you may join your friend in the dog-dens.”
The “dog-dens” were the billet-boxes, tight cupboards—barely comfortable but inexpensive accommodation that all wayhouses possessed. Rossamünd felt such a strange and unwelcome tearing of loyalties he did not know how to act. In the end he chose to stay with Threnody, figuring that she had joined him voluntarily and stuck by him, and so he should do the same and sleep in the squash of the billet-boxes. The girl lighter was clearly gratified by his decision, looking as if she had just won some great moral victory.
With an enigmatic sniff, Europe paid the reckoning and bid them good sleeping. “I must retire. A girl needs her sleep to keep her beauty.” At that she left, reemerging surprisingly on the farther side of the Saloon to speak quietly with the horn-wearing caladine.
Seeing this, Threnody demanded, “Why does she talk to her?”
“Probably to let her know of our suspicions about Swill.” Rossamünd’s hopes lifted. Distracted by Threnody, he did not see Europe leave, but when he looked again she had disappeared to some other part of the wayhouse to do whatever occult things that fulgars did in the night hours.
With her departure Threnody leaned across the claustra. “Well, she is a disappointment—” she said, “dull and ordinary and not at all heroic. And I thought I wanted to be like her.”
Utterly baffled and not wanting a fight, Rossamünd ignored her and stared out at the emptying Saloon.
“You don’t really want to be her factotum, do you?” Threnody persisted, a hint of that envious look returning. “Being with her is like sucking on a lime dusted in bothersalts.”
No, Threnody, that’s what it’s like being with you! The bitter thought rose unbidden, but Rossamünd said, “I’ve made oaths to serve the Emperor, Threnody. I’ve accepted his Billion. I’m not free to be anyone’s factotum—Miss Europe’s, yours or even Atopian Dido’s, were she still alive!”
Apparently satisfied, Threnody too took her leave and went off to find a place to make her plaudamentum.
Rossamünd was left to be shown to his billet-box alone.
22
THE IGNOBLE END OF THE ROAD
rimple a curious-looking hairy-leather purse made from the entire skin of a small rodent, shaved, with a drawstring at the neck hole, and the skin of one limb sewn back on itself as a loop to fix on to a belt. Actually looking like some bloated rat, a rimple is all the fashion as a coin-bag among the wayfaring classes.
THE new day and Europe, teeth still blackened from her morning dose of plaudamentum, met the two frowsty young lighters as they were arranging themselves in the stabulary to leave with the first post.
“How was your night in the dog-dens?” she asked a little tartly.
“Like sleeping inside a sideboard drawer.” Rossamünd yawned. “I do not fathom how older folk can manage a single blink.”
Europe simply nodded. That was the sum of her sympathy. “I will be answering a plea for aid from some sorely put and well-heeled people from Bleak Lynche,” she explained to the sleep-deprived pair. “They need help with a gudgeon, wouldn’t you know. It would appear we are going on a concomitant path, little man.” Europe looked at Rossamünd pointedly. “So you shall wait for me as I complete my dealings with the knavery-underwriter and we shall travel together.”
Rossamünd agreed readily.
Threnody did not even acknowledge that the fulgar had spoken, speaking only when Europe had left them. “So we are to do everything she says, are we?”
“Hmm” was all Rossamünd replied as he stretched, arms in the air, to rid himself of the kinks and knots gained through his insalubrious night’s sleep.Their arrival at Wormstool was not expected; the delay of an hour or two would change nothing.
They waited in the knavery. There, as Threnody penned a letter to her mother, Rossamünd wrote two of his own, one to Sebastipole and the other to Doctor Crispus. He told them in guarded terms of his suspicions regarding Swill and the rever-man beneath Winstermill. It was worth running the risk of prying eyes if someone who might be able to do something were to know.
During the delay Threnody decided to liberally apply some flowery-sweet perfume, splashing enough to challenge the salty-sweetness of bosmath, Europe’s signature scent.Where she had procured the essence from Rossamünd did not know, but the funk of it filled the knavery waiting room.
The morning was well advanced by the time Europe’s negotiations with the knavery-underwriter were completed. With the proof of the head she carried in the sack, her prize was paid and her forearm etched by the punctographist on hand, with another small cruciform of monster blood. One less monster to trouble the lives of man. Consequently the three left with the third post of the day.
“It’s a post-and-six,” Threnody declared optimistically. “We should make good time.”
L
eaving the missives with the knavery-clerks, to whom they paid 4g a letter to have them properly sealed, they ventured out under a flat gray sky to the cheerful, unseasonal warbling of a magpie. The carriage was badly sprung and very noisy, rendering conversation below a constant shout impossible. For Rossamünd this was a small mercy, filling the frosty, aromatic silence between fulgar and wit with welcome clamor.
Across the Sourspan and over the Bittermere the lentum-and-six jerked and shuddered uncomfortably. No longer following a watercourse, the Wormway traversed hill and dale, the apex of most rises giving Rossamünd a grand view of the land about.The green upon the downs was grayer, the trees sprouting from them sparse and gnarled, growing in the shadows of enormous granite boulders lichen-blotched and anciently weathered. Indeed, the entire quality of the land declined markedly only a few leagues east of the Bittermere. There was a rumor of loneliness here, Rossamünd growing more certain of it the farther the lentum carried them—an absence of people, yet an absence of monsters too. In the struggle to possess it, the land had become useless to both.
They passed Bitterbolt and watered horses at the sturdy sprawling fortalice of Mirthalt. There the lighters wore dogged expressions and barely reacted to the premature advent of the young lighters.
They arrived at Compostor in the mist of day’s end. Bigger than Hinkerseigh, it was built on a broad hill, its curtain walls descending into foggy vales on all sides. There was a genuine air of money in this small city of long, broad avenues of stately sycamores and multistoried manors, of wide parks as green and tame as the land without was gray and wild.
“Tonight we shall stay somewhere out of the way,” Europe pronounced as they were granted entry to the city by the heavy-harnessed watch. She directed the lentermen to a hostelry called the Wayward Chair. From the outside it was a modest establishment, but the room proved of a high standard at odds with the humble façade. Regardless, Threnody oozed dissatisfaction. Throughout the leg from the Brisking Cat to here, she had sat gingerly, leaning forward to spare herself the bumping of the carriage seat. Now she looked terribly wayworn and irritated, lagging behind as they were shown to their rooms by a pucker-faced bower maid.
