by D M Cornish
Indeed, the malign feeling waxed strongly even as they spoke, and the monsters prowled closer.
BOOOOM! An almighty crash reverberated about the Frugelle, startling flocks of complaining birds to wing. Down the road smoke began to issue from Wormstool, belching from a fourth-story loophole. A tongue of flame licked out and up the outside wall. A lighter stumbled out of the high door of the cothouse and started down the steps. A large nicker with great, snapping jaws emerged and pounced on the retreating lampsman, crushing him down onto the stairway, jumping on him over and over till his screams ceased and red flowed.
Threnody stared in dumb shock.
Taking shrewd advantage of the distraction, the four remaining monsters rushed the two young lighters. Shrieking fiendishly, they charged in, then skittered away again when Threnody rallied and finally strove. They were testing her. She began to growl in frustration as time and again they fooled her into scathing pointlessly, wearing her down. Rossamünd threw another charge of loomblaze at the largest bogle, the one with peglike teeth in its spadelike jaw, but missed. The fiery chemistry burst bright but uselessly in a thicket of bushes beyond the road, and the dry branches eagerly took to flame.
Observing the commotion, the slayer of the lighter on the steps descended and pranced up the conduit, joining its fellows on the road. The largest of them, this new beast strutted on its thin legs and slavered through its long snout at the two young lighters. It regarded them beadily then called across to them in a weird, slobbering voice, “What are you, pink lipsss?”
“I hate it when they talk!” Threnody seethed.
“What are you, pink lipsss!” it slobbered again. “Why do you ssside with themmm?”
“I think it’s talking to you, lamp boy,” Threnody muttered. “Maybe it’s been chatting with your Freckle friend.”
Rossamünd swallowed hard but did not answer. Pink lips? This was the meaning of Rossamünd’s name—rose-mouth, pink lips. How did it know his name? Perhaps it had indeed been talking to Freckle? He looked to the tatters of Splinteazle’s corpse beyond the monsters. His resolve hardened. He held out his fodicar, presenting arms as at a parade, inviting a challenge.
With a vicious snarl the slobbering nicker lunged at them, the other monsters rushing with it, whooping and yammering. Threnody witted, laboring to keep her frission under control. For a moment she checked the charge, Rossamünd standing with fodicar and loomblaze ready, by her side. The monsters writhed and backed away. Suddenly the girl gasped, and without warning her frission faltered. The beasts were at them again, the slobberer foremost, and Rossamünd sprang too. He hurled the potive with wicked aim, missing the slobberer and hitting a stocky bogle running just behind it. The wretched thing’s head was splashed and engulfed with the cruel false-fire and it fell screeching. As he met the slobberer, fodicar swinging, so Threnody’s frission returned and the small gnashers reeled. He swatted at the slobberer with the same thoughtless, clearheaded fluidity, hitting it smartingly on its shoulder. The thing shrieked and flailed its arms, swatting Rossamünd in the chest and throwing him back-first to the road. Threnody’s witting caught him and his vision dimmed, threatened blackness; but this was no time for stopping, for lying tamely down just because of a hurt. With a yelping kind of growl, Rossamünd shook himself and rolled on to his side, his vision clearing. What had seemed to him like a dangerous pause had been just an instant. The slobberer bore down on him. Rossamünd whipped his lantern-crook around, smacking the nicker’s ankles. Its long legs were tripped out from under it and the thing toppled, a puff of dust erupting from its fall. On his feet in a beat, Rossamünd took his advantage and struck the fallen monster wildly, not caring where, just hitting, hitting, as Threnody’s frission lashed out again.
WORMSTOOL BRODCHIN
It was too much now—the bogles had had enough. They were quitting the fight, running back up the Wormway and off into the wilderness. Not satisfied, Threnody trod determinedly toward the cothouse, striving at the monsters inside. Still flailing in fury at the slobberer as it struggled to rise, Rossamünd was vaguely aware that lumpy bogles were fleeing the tower: one even leaped from the roof, landing with a mighty crash in some bushes and, yipping girlishly, disappeared into the scrub. With their escape, the malice of the threwd flared strong for a moment then subsided, leaving only confused watchfulness.
Rossamünd kept hitting, and only when he had smote the utter ruin of the stomping, slobbering nicker did he cease. He stared down at the shattered, mangled creature at his feet: somehow it still lived, glaring up at him, still defiant, still baleful, still hungry.Yet now Rossamünd could not hate the fiendly thing, no matter what it had done to the doughty, friendly lighters of Wormstool. Now he just felt tired and sorry: sorry for the death of his comrades; sorry for the harm he had done the monster before him, to all the monsters; sorry that he had become the murderer, the hypocrite.
“I am sorry to have slain thee,” he whispered, little knowing from where the words came. “But we were at odds and I could not let you hurt my friends.”
The creature’s eyes glazed, a sadness—an ancient longing—seeming to dwell in them for a moment, and it ceased.
Gory fodicar still in hand, Rossamünd dropped to his knees and wept.
“Surely you don’t weep over the monsters!” he heard Threnody croak as she picked up her doglocks, still lying where she had discarded them. She sat exhausted on the road and thirstily downed a milky blue liquid.
Rossamünd doubled over, keening agony in his very depths. He felt a subtle touch on his lantern-crook. Looking up, he saw that same familiar sparrow perched on the bunting-hook. It gave a single firm chirp as if it were chiding him, and whirred away.
“Oh, go away!” Threnody shied the empty alembant bottle at the departing bird. “A fat lot of good you did for us just now! Go back to your master and tell him the happy news!”
“Threnody!” Rossamünd cried as the flask missed well wide and disappeared into the thistles below.
In her sudden fury the girl turned on him, and for a moment he thought she might throw something at him too. But she did not.
Rossamünd stood, leaning on his fodicar as if it were a geriatric’s cane.
Though smoke was billowing from the upper stories and carrion crows were already perching upon the chimney pots, Rossamünd and Threnody still walked to it and climbed to the front door, stepping with heavy grief over the body on the steps. It was Theudas. In the watch room the doors to the cellars had been torn from hinges and cast aside.The collapsible stair, now nothing more than a wreckage of timbers, had worked perfectly; yet this had not been enough to stop the murderous nickers from gaining the higher floors. It was, however, more than adequate in preventing the two survivors from getting above.They called out, screamed and screeched till they were hoarse, hoping to hear the answering plaints of a survivor from the upper levels. But no such answers came, only the hiss and crack of fire unchecked.
Together the two hastily scrounged whatever they could from the litter—food parcels and water skins found in the cellars and with them a flammagon. Among the ruination they discovered the inert white mass of Sequecious, bloodied and cold, collapsed across an equally fat, bilious-looking bogle with great bloodred fangs. It too was dead, the boltarde that slew it still clutched by Sequecious, the aspis-smeared blade thrust full through its ribs, scorch marks showing that it had received the blast of a firelock. Man and monster had died together.Whelpmoon lay faceup by his squat lectern, his glasses missing, his dead eyes staring. By the kennels the dogs had managed to destroy a brace of scaly, big-nosed bogles, perishing themselves as they did.
Men and dogs and monsters, everything was dead. Rossamünd could only imagine the gore and carnage on the floors above. Too much . . . too much . . . His extremities began tingling, and just as his anguish became overwhelming it was quickly obscured by a weird, empty flatness.
A terrible smashing report thundered from the floors above and shook the fortalice.
“We must go,” Threnody insisted, standing at the top of the cellar steps.
Back down on the road, the two survivors tried to bring Rabbit with them, but the loyal, stupid beast would not leave his friend and master. Flat cart still hitched, it had slowly followed them and now stood forlornly by Splinteazle’s remains and would not move. Not even a sprig of swamp oak could induce it to come away.The two young lighters would have had to drag it every single step to get the beast to Bleak Lynche, and they might have done but were desperate to be gone. So they unhitched the cart and left the faithful donkey standing at the base of the tower, ears down, head down, nosing the seltzerman’s cooling corpse.
“What a waste,” Threnody spat, venting her angry grief as they fled. “It’s idiotic. Even out here, with hardly anyone to benefit, they still go on risking lives to light the lamps each evening and douse them each dawning. No one in the cities cares—not even in the towns around about are people mindful or grateful.Whoever uses this part of road? The Bleaksmen stay put. That place is nothing more than a cothouse with a fistful of desperadoes setting up shop about it—what’s the point? Imperial waste!” She gagged back a sob.
“But if they did not make a stand here everyone west would suffer!” Rossamünd’s contradiction was reflexive, yet in truth he actually agreed with her.
“Do you really think the flimsy string they call the Wormway, with its few tottering towers so close to the Gluepot and the tired quartos that habit them, is a match for the gathered might of the monsters? Look how easy it was for a small band of brodchin to annihilate one cothouse. It’s the work of my sisters that keeps your precious western folk safe!”
Rossamünd had no answer for this—he just wanted to get to somewhere secure. He found himself hoping Mama Lieger might shuffle from the scrub and lend them aid. How can she have let this happen? Did she cause all this?Was the threwd of the land itself the culprit? Is that what I felt?
An almighty shattering boom roared behind them, scaring them so much they both let out a yelp.They looked back to see the shingle roof of the cothouse collapsing inward with a seething eruption of smoke, sparks jetting from the shell of the tower. Rossamünd spied a hasty little shadow scuttling after them.
Freckle?
Walking on, Rossamünd ached to speak with the glamgorn, to ask question after question, but most of all—why? Why were they attacked? Why did the glamgorn not help? Why was he still following him? However, with Threnody by Rossamünd’s side, Freckle would never come near. Strangely, irrationally, the young prentice felt safer with Freckle at their backs.
The day grew darker still and, as poor dead Splinteazle had predicted, it began to rain. Monsterlike shapes seemed to lurk and lunge in the gloom, phantasms made by the rapid fall of water. At least I have my hat, Rossamünd thought bitterly.
A far-off cry—a shriek and a gabber—came from somewhere out on the flatland. It was an inhuman call, a monster’s voice. Rossamünd cringed at the noise and almost tripped, expecting any moment to be waylaid again. Though they were exhausted, desperation and blank terror set the two lighters running, a weary stumbling lurch, each helping the other if ever one flagged.
When the glimmer of the lights of Bleak Lynche hove in sight, Rossamünd eagerly took up the flammagon and shot its spluttering pink fire into the air. The flare drew a high, lazy arc, the falling damps carrying it northward. It winked out as it fell on the downside of its curve. They had little hope of it attracting attention, yet it did: a ten-strong foray of the Bleakhall day-watch.
The band of lighters that found them could little believe what they were told: a whole cothouse slaughtered? Surely not! Several lampsmen gave shouts of lament. Scrutineers were sent to Wormstool, the sneakiest of the band, while Rossamünd and Threnody were hustled back to Bleakhall. There the astounded Fortunatus the house-major conducted a hasty inquiry. He kept asking the same questions: “What happened? Where are the other lampsmen? How is it just you two survived?”
Rossamünd did not know how to answer except with the truth.
Fortunatus could not accept their shocking tale until the piquet of scrutineers returned, dragging Rabbit, braying mournfully, with them. These doughty fellows confirmed the blackest truth: a whole cothouse slaughtered; friends torn and all dead, the ransacked fortlet open to the elements. They brought with them body parts and several bruicles of cruor as proof, and offered one of these to the two survivors. “So ye might mark yeselfs proudly!” they said.
Rossamünd refused. The handing out of awards at such a time seemed so wrong to him—ill-timed and disrespectful. It did not occur to him that his feats would warrant a marking, maybe even four according to the grisly count that revolved ceaselessly in his mind.
“Not want a mark?” was the general, incredulous reaction. “That ain’t natural!” But they did not press him.
Threnody, however, gladly received the blood, and this was a great satisfaction to the other lighters. “My first cruorpunxis,” she murmured, scrutinizing the bruicle closely. Either way, all agreed that Grindrod must have improved greatly in his teaching of prentices to raise such doughty young lighters.
27
A LIGHT TO YOUR PATH
obsequy what we would call a funeral, also known as a funery or inurment. These rites typically include a declaration of the person’s merit and then some traditional farewell given by the mourners. In the Haacobin Empire it is most commonly thought that when people die they simply stop: a life begins, a life ends. In the cultures about them and in their own past there have been various beliefs about afterlife and some all-creating elemental personage, but such notions are considered oppressive and outmoded. They would rather leave these ideas to the eekers, pistins (believers in a God) and other odd fringe-dwellers.
GIVEN his own room in the Fend & Fodicar and saloop spiked with a healthy dose of bellpomash, Rossamünd slept two days through after the attack, while outside the rain became a fierce storming downpour. He did not know till he had woken again that a dispatch had been sent to Winstermill informing them of the terrible things done at Wormstool and of the two young survivors. Neither was he aware that the loss of that cothouse had occasioned the temporary suspension of lamplighting along the entire twenty-five-mile stretch of highroad between Bleak Lynche and Haltmire. Nor did he know that Europe had returned from a course while he slept and after a brief inquiry into his health, left again, quick on the trail of the surviving nickers. How the young lighter wished she had been with them at Wormstool; what lives might have been spared with the Branden Rose at the task.
As he slowly awoke, eyes heavy and senses murky, Rossamünd was gradually cognizant of a figure looming at his side. In fright his senses became sharp and he sat up swiftly, pivoting on his hands ready to jump, to run, to shout red-screaming murder. With clarity came truth and with truth came the profoundest delight. It was Aubergene—his old billet-mate—sitting by Rossamünd’s recovery-bed on an old high-backed chair, dozing now as if he had been waiting at the bedside a goodly while. Even as Aubergene’s presence fully dawned on Rossamünd, the older lighter snorted awake.
“Aubergene!” Rossamünd exclaimed. “Aubergene!”
“Ah, little Haroldus.” The older lighter grinned, though sadness lurked at the nervous edges of his gaze. “Dead-happy news to find you and the pretty lass hale! I’ve heard from the house-major here how you won through. A mighty feat for young lighters.”
Rossamünd swallowed a sob of relief. “I thought y-you were killed with the rest!”
Aubergene nodded leadenly in turn. “Aye, I suppose you would—but me and the under-sergeant and Crescens Hugh were sent out with deliveries for the Mama not so long after you went off with Splint.” He hesitated. “Poor Splint, poor Rabbit . . .” He put his chin in his hand. “We weren’t anywhere nigh the Stool when those wicked unmentionable baskets did their worst there. We were still set on, though. We’d only just begun the return. Mama Lieger warned us not to venture out again, but we figured she was just
feeling for some comp’ny.Yet we weren’t more than half a mile gone when Hugh put his box on and, certain enough, kenned something odd in the air and had us hurrying back to the Mama’s seigh with a whole handful of the blightenedest hob-boggers in chase.”
Rossamünd listened with amazed relief, glad to hear that Mama Lieger was not to blame, glad to know that some had won through that day.Yet these three fellows had survived in that small high-house where the might of Wormstool had failed. “How—how did you live through it?”
“We tried our aim from the Mama’s windows and hacked at ’em by the door if they tried to shimmy up, Mama Lieger laughing and shrieking like a soul gone mad, poking at the baskets with this great long prod of hers.” A strange, troubled thought suddenly haunted Aubergene’s brow. He looked to his right and hunched as if he was about to enter into a conspiracy. “Rossamünd,” he said low and halting, “we—we was defended by other—by other bogles too.”
A chill shivered down Rossamünd’s scalp. His hearing whined. “You were defended by monsters?”
Aubergene looked at him hard, almost aggressively, yet there was something pleading in his brittle gaze; he seemed more troubled by what he had just said than by the destruction of his billet-mates. “It’s not sedorner talk, Rossamünd! I’m no bogger-loving basket—it’s just what I saw with the same eyes that look on you now . . .”
“You’ll never hear me call you a sedorner, Aubergene,” Rossamünd answered, an image of Freckle flickering in his mind. “I know there are kindly monsters . . .”
The older lighter’s dogged expression loosened. “Poesides warned Hugh and me about speaking on it,” he said in a grateful hurry, “but I reckon the Mama might be right about you, Rossamünd, that you do see things more in her way; I reckoned you’d not begrudge me what we witnessed,” he finished, almost imploring Rossamünd to say it was so.
