by D M Cornish
With the household staff arranging themselves in neat quasi-military order on Cloche Arde’s front steps for the farewell, Latissimus brought a pair of sturdy young horses stretched now and ready for harness. Rufous and Candle, Rossamünd heard a stableryhand call them, the first dull russet, the other soap-white. Both were partially shabraqued in petrailles of black lour thoroughly doused in sisterfoot, a nullodour that Rossamünd had himself made in the restlessness of the previous afternoon from the pages of the compleat.
“Fine-stepping horses for town, cobs fo’ the country,” the gentleman-of-the-stables had explained. “Though you are going out into caballine lands where horses ought to be safe,” he explained, patting the beast’s proofing, “there’s still wisdom in keeping them from harm’s chances.”
The young factotum grinned at the beasts and fancied they grinned at him too.
“Back to simpler lives now, Mister Kitchen,” Europe said in goodbye as Rossamünd handed her aboard. “You may drop the flag; I leave you to peace and routine.”
“Farewell, my gracious lady,” the steward returned. “Return to us hale.” He bowed, a long stoop, and the household did the same, openly displeased to see the fulgar depart.
“Drive on, Master Vinegar,” the fulgar called to Fransitart’s back.
“Aye, aye, ma’am. Drivin’ on!” With a flick of reins and a click of the tongue, the old vinegaroon started the horses.
The knaving was begun.
Obedient to Europe’s laconic directions, Fransitart proved—to Rossamünd’s enduring satisfaction—that handling a two-horse team was within his grasp; he humored the reins with surprising subtlety.
Out beyond the substantial suburbs they went, through mighty curtain gates, by row on row of cheap half-houses that coagulated about the stacks of tall isolated mills or long work halls, through markets already teeming with dawn-risen custom.
Looping along beside the landaulet in that hurried, dipping way such birds do, Darter Brown shot from fence-spike to red lamp-crown. Rossamünd looked kindly at his little escort.
Progress became spasmodic as eager early traffic—farmers’ wagons, firewood drays, stinking night-soil carts—crammed the highroads.
A smartly clad figure stepped out of the disorder and made directly for the landaulet. Before a warning was properly forming on Rossamünd’s lips, this impertinent fellow sprang up and, grasping the sash of the door, stood upon the side step to pinch a ride.
“Good morning, Lord Finance,” Europe said in quiet greeting.
“A hale morning to you, Lady of Naimes,” the importunate side-step coaster returned between heavy breaths, miming a bow with his free hand. “Not as spry as I once was.”
“Have you taken up cadging as your latest sport, good baron?” the heiress of Naimes asked mildly. “Is my mother not giving you enough to do . . .”
“No fear, gracious lady.” Finance took a breath. “Could I by some trick of habilistic conjury live three times over, I should still be hard pressed to complete all the labors you and your most estimable and Magentine mother provide.”
The fulgar smiled slightly. “I thank you for the service of your Mister Slitt last night—he is a very useful fellow.”
“He is indeed, m’lady, a genuine jewel in our already glittering staff.” The Chief Emissary dipped his head gratefully. “And it is about his usefulness to you that I come once again. The Archduke was none too pleased after his interview with you yesterday ...”
“That makes us twin,” Europe murmured astringently.
“Yesternight was but the first bout with Pater Maupin, Secretary Sicus and his surgeon pet—an unhallowed alliance if ever there was one. They grow bold with the Lord of Brandenbrass’ support.Your absence may not be enough this time, duchess-daughter.”
“Yet I go nonetheless, dear baron.” Europe remained unfazed.
Finance regarded his mistress long, a passion of esteem gleaming from his eyes. “Have a care, fine lady,” he said, “and an eye for followers . . .” and with the nod of a bow leaped from the landaulet and disappeared into the press of people and carriages.
“And you, sir,” Europe murmured once he was gone.
Craumpalin revolved in his seat and with a polite cough asked, “Are all thy commerces in this city so . . . botherous, m’lady?”
The fulgar peered at him thoughtfully. “I find my time in Brandenbrass either sappingly dull or intrusively troublesome. If it were not so conveniently placed to my common work, I doubt I would ever come here at all. However, I find it best to leave boredom and trouble to themselves.”
“A storm avoided is a wrecking saved,” Fransitart concurred.
“Aye,” Craumpalin said into his beard, “but a difficulty shirked is adversity delayed.”
“Are you always so dreary, Master Salt?” Europe retorted.
The old dispenser’s shoulders lifted briefly. “ ’Tis usually Frans’ part,” he said with a grin.
Smiling, Rossamünd could see his onetime dormitory master hunch and mutter unintelligibly, flicking Rufous and Candle to quicken their step.
At last, after inspection by a platoon of black-and-white-mottled gate wards, the landaulet passed into the left of a twin of tunnels that ran beneath an immense bastion, the last port in the outermost curtain of Brandenbrass. The Two Sisters—or so Europe called it. Above the massive fortress with its steep roof of iron and spiny watchtowers flew enormous spandarions—one half leuc, the other sable—cracking proudly like thunder in the rising winds from flagpoles as thick as ram masts.
Out again, Rossamünd saw a brazen statue set proudly on the projecting keystone of the arch and standing guard above the entrance of the tunnel. As tall as three tall men, dressed in flowing robes, lower legs metal-armored, the figure clutched a mighty sword to her bosom; this was the southern sister, green-streaked with rainwashed corrosion. The likeness of a windswept veil was fashioned with great cunning as if blowing across her face, yet her fixed expression of wild defiance was unmistakeable.With a shiver, Rossamünd realized this was the image of one of those very ouranin sisters upon which the Lapinduce spoke, ancient rossamünderling defenders of Brandenbrass. Twisting in his seat, he stared at the effigy like some long-gone kin and smiled grimly at how quickly this majestic protector would be torn down should the citizens of this city discover her true monstrous nature.
Beyond the twin gates the city yet lingered, the last of the high-houses and dormitories clinging like children to the outward hem of Brandenbrass’ pristine wall. Then, all too quickly, it gave way to a more bucolic scene. One moment they were in a Brandenard street, the next running by wicket-fenced fields where stupidly dignified goats with great, flopping ears and fat, overlong noses stared at them solemnly. A wide fertile plain spread out before them—the Milchfold, lively with cows and goats and laborers. Reached by long tree-lined lanes that crossed and recrossed the whole plain, the homes of dairy herds and landholders stood like martial towers. A handful of miles to the west the land rose to a blunt escarpment, becoming the feet of dark crouching hills, the Brandenfells.
The red lamps and paved stone of the Hardwick gave over to the lightless, packed clay of the Athy Road, going northwest by lush flat fields of peas, cow pastures, goat-breaks and barren saltpeter farms where moilers masked in vented scarves tilled in the brimstone stink.
In a blur, Darter Brown joined them, fluttering up to land on Rossamünd’s knuckle as it rested on the sash.
“Good morning, my shadow,” the young factotum murmured genially to his feathered friend.
It twittered at him urgently, as if trying to communicate something more complex, but Rossamünd could not decipher its meaning.
“My, my! He doth speak with the animals!” Europe declared. “Perhaps you could call in a bird each for us, little man; then we could start a menagerie, charge a subscription for people to come and see, and cease this violent life for good.”
Rossamünd knew the fulgar was jesting, but he blushed anyway.
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The fulgar cocked her head to scrutinize the sparrow with a raised brow. “I cannot say that when I first submitted myself to the hands of Sinster’s sectifers I anticipated taking on the services of a bird to hunt the monster—and a rather scrawny one at that.”
To this the watchful sparrow gave an irritable tweet!
“And saucy too,” the fulgar continued with an amused sniff. “My, what a collective I have gathered about me. I doubt any other teratologist could boast such peculiar staff.”
The ground rose gradually to the bluffs reaching around from the northeast, bending gradually southwest to disappear from sight behind themselves. Farther south Rossamünd could see mounts of black tumbling east to the coast: the Siltmounds, great dunes of swarthy sand hemming the city’s southern walls. At a crossing of minor drives with the main way stood several lofty poles, thick like trees, buried deep in the compacted soil and topped with overlarge cartwheels. Daws, magpies and crows hovered, squabbling over several of these mucky and blackened platforms, yet leaving one to the mastery of a single bald-headed assvogel. Startled, Darter Brown took wing and vanished among the stalks of wide hilly pastures.
A dread chill flushed from Rossamünd’s innards to his crown.
Catharine wheels ...These were the infamous mechanisms of torture and execution for murderers, traitors and . . . sedorners. Thick-growing briars were twined and pinned about the lower portions of the mast to prevent rescue. From one roses were blooming, declaring to all the world—so tradition held—that the judged soul rotting on high was a sedorner through and through.
Pulling his sight free, Rossamünd refused to gaze any closer as they passed beneath this grisly stand.
“Pay no mind to these wicked coldbeams, Rossamünd,” Fransitart called doggedly over his shoulder.
There, bizarrely, standing under them, was a reddleman with his many dyes in a square handcart, smock and skin stained by his products. As they rattled by, Rossamünd could hear the fellow singing, as happy as you like, cawing along with the carrion birds:
Hey, ho, what’s the time?
Hang my smallclothes on the line.
If they tear,
I don’t care,
I’ll just dye another pair.
His head down, the young factotum watched Europe fixedly from the corner of his vision. The fulgar stared ahead, glancing occasionally at the foul devices, undaunted. Catching her factotum’s unease, she laid her hand lightly on Rossamünd’s clenched fist until they were past, her simple-seeming yet uncommon kindness touching him so profoundly it banished his alarm.
The sun was shining as the landaulet climbed, yet mile upon mile away south a dark churning horizon sparked elegant lightning straight to the ground—kinked electrical charges miles long, arcing against the black. An arrowed formation of silent ibis winged high above, driven over the hills by the freshening winds that brought delayed levin grumbles.
“The pipistrelle turns dirty,” Fransitart said of the distant thunder, Rossamünd recognizing the vinegaroon name for the light winds of the Grume. “The spring glooms have come. Ye’ll be needin’ a bolt-hole to keep yer pretty pate dry, m’lady, afore the day is out.”
“For you such turns of weather might be dirty, Master Vinegar,” Europe replied, “but a levining sky is a happy roof for a thermistor.”
Climbing beside a rocky winding stream made rapid by the slope, the Athy Road took them steadily higher into the drab hills of the Brandenfells. Even from this distant vantage, Brandenbrass looked enormous, her many rings of fortification clear, her long pale harbor with its countless berths and piers squashed with vessels, a poisonous haze hanging low over the seaside milling districts.The lofty towers of the countinghouses and the great many fortified gates thrust high above the great spreading mass. Highest and sturdiest of all in its midst stood the Brandendirk, seat of the ducal line, and a little north in the city’s very center brooded the dark smudge of the Moldwood, unguessed, untroubled and unchallenged; two powers opposed, with Brandentown pinched between.
Ahead, myrtles and bent pines sprouted in ones and twos like thinning hair on the near-bald crowns of the Brandenfells, thickening into woods down in the convoluted valleys twisting steeply back through many spurs and folds.
While the four travelers supped on prunes, cold beef clumsy smeared with soft Pondsley cheese and claret, the sky grew louring dark and heavy with water.
With a suppressed rumble, rain arrived, large dollops that had an uncomfortable knack of landing on exposed skin: the back of the neck, the wrist at the cuff . . . Sorry for his old masters left out in the wet, Rossamünd extended the bonnet-like canopy as Craumpalin struggled on his oiled pallmain.
Some miles ahead, upon the summit of a distant spur, Rossamünd spied a single orange glimmer, lit perhaps against the growing gloom, the only evidence of a dwelling.
“Wood Hole,” Europe explained. “Pleasant enough for a hill town, though it is not our goal. There is a wayhouse in a dell about a mile from here.We shall shelter there.”
The road veered behind the lee side of the hills, descending to loop about the folds of land, the mossy stones of its foundation reaching down to the bubbling creek only a few yards below. A tenuous threwd dwelt here, as if the stream brought the watchfulness from more haunted heights. But for the dripping trickle of rain-wash and runnel, and the uneven viscous clops of hoofs, the world was reverentially silent. Trees grew densely along the verge: dark olive, age-twisted pine and pale laurel. Between their trunks Rossamünd thought he could see a light ahead, the corona of cool clean seltzer light, a welcome pilot in the sodden obscurity. The shadows slowly parted to reveal a great-lamp on the right of the way, lifted on a black post above a solid gate in a high stone wall. Nestled in a cleft beyond this gate was a house half excavated into the hillside beside a brimming, chattering weir.
There was no sign, just this single signal flare.
“Welcome to the Guiding Star,” said Europe. “We shall abide here for now.”
With no small relief they entered the foreyard and got out of the rain.
The foul weather had blown itself out overnight and now, in the still cool, a lustrous blond sky joyfully declared the new day. Cooing encouragements to the horses and sipping one of Craumpalin’s restorative draughts from a biggin, Fransitart guided the landaulet away from the wayhouse. No one spoke as they wended through woodland din, the gray bosky half-light whispering with the lingering riddles of the long night.
Bending around several tight spurs, the valley road climbed the grassy flank of a low hill, bringing them to a new and welcome prospect. Soft-lit by the porcelain radiance of heaven’s dome, wide downs of ripening pastures folded away before them, fresh with soaking dew, scattered with trees, tall garners and low farmsteads and oddly regular woodlands as far as vision could grasp.
From an ancient myrtle on the crown of the next hillock, a magpie gave throat to its happy quavering music full of primeval wisdom, and morning’s joy. Inwardly, Rossamünd soared with the birdsong.
“The Page,” Europe proclaimed, interrupting his flight. “Here, Rossamünd, is parish land, a pleasant change from the ditches where you last served.” She pointed with open hand to the vista.
To Rossamünd the scene seemed tilted to the left, descending to the far-off basin, a dark line at the edge of sight where the entire southern sky was brooding again upon another squall. To the north, the hill they stood upon reached for miles to join with its sisters, rising yet farther to meet a distant hedge of grimmer higher mounts.
“Take us on, Master Vinegar, if you please.”
Moilers and faradays were out early in the fields, scything and wrenching at weeds that grew thick at this part of the season and threatened to overwhelm whole crops.
“They could come and clear the verges while they’re about it,” Fransitart grumbled, veering the landaulet into the sprays of mustard weed and fennel thick on the brink of the road as he attempted to find a path through a herd of dairy cows
.
The beasts’ hay ward—a fellow in the meager proofing of a long smock—gave the four travelers a bold “halloo!” and a cheerful wink from beneath the wide brim of his catillium as he lazily goaded his charges with a spearlike mandricard.
“Halloo to ye too, ye mischievous grass-combing kinekisser,” the ex-dormitory master muttered under his breath as Craumpalin adopted a cheerier face.
The day-orb rose and spring’s early bees hummed about them inquisitively before winging away to pollinate the feral plants. Butterflies, bright azure or patched orange and black, tumbled their crazy courses. Droning wasps and emperorflies hovered, hunted, joined by curious predatory bugs unusual in bright colors. Somewhere near, just beyond sight, a cow bellowed.
“Cowherds and honeybees; what an enchanting place,” Europe uttered sardonically.
“Aye, this is a pleasant way to serve,” Fransitart offered with gruff cheer. “Sittin’ high aboard a wheel-ed barque upon a sea o’ weeds is a fine way to see out yer days.”
“Very poetical, Master Vinegar,” said the fulgar, affecting just the right pitch between interest and indifference.
The ex-dormitory master half turned to catch Rossamünd’s eye. “Can’t say I’ve e’er wanted to perish mopin’ in some damp hut complainin’ of the rheum.”
“No, indeed,” Europe returned with a smile. “That is not an end I intend for myself either, chair-bound and sciatical. ‘To die in harness’ is the phrase, I believe.”
“Aye, madam, that’s th’ one.” Fransitart nodded philosophically. “To perish with yer hand to the plow, to bow out still swinging—”
“To push on to th’ end ...,” Craumpalin added glibly.
“We are of one accord then, sirs,” Europe declared with a flourish of a graceful hand. “A life of adventure for us it is, until the very end.”
The two ex-vinegaroons chuckled together.
Rossamünd joined them with a sad smile of his own.
