'Master Come-any-later-and-we'll-be-here-till-Chill-ends!'
Even the lampsmen shuffled their feet as they watched and grumbled testily.
'What ails ye, Master Lately?' fumed Sergeant Grindrod. 'If ye cannot get the crook in the hole, then what business have ye being a lighter? Ye boys'll be the end o' me afore I can make ye fit for lighting!'
Rossamund could not help but agree. As he was about to fumble a third time, Threnody stepped up. Her expression dared Grindrod to argue. She took the fodicar in a firm hand and guided it true.The hook end connected into the ratchet with that pleasant, snug, metal-on-metal sensation that told it was properly engaged.
'Ah… Thank you, miss,' Rossamund breathed. Shamefaced, he lifted the lantern-crook up for three ticks of the gears and let it fall under its own weight; lift and let fall-up two three, down two three it went, to work the gears that wound out the bloom.
The other prentices were stunned to muteness by Threnody's actions.
Threnody said nothing and stepped away, keeping apart from the other lighters.
'Well, by front door or back, one still gets into the house.' Grindrod was clearly amused. 'Wind it out faster, lantern-stick, there's only a set count of hours in a night!'
With much puffing and aching arms, Rossamund did his duty, the lamp rewarding his effort with a gradually increasing gleam, and the prentice-watch moved on. Behind them the brooding safety of Winstermill, with its thousand lamps and window-lights, diminished with every vialimn lit.
At East Winst 15 West Well 10, Rossamund fared better with the winding, and at her own lights Threnody displayed her natural facility, working the ratchet with ease.
The glow of Lantern East Winst 17 West Well 8 on the approach to the Briarywood was discovered, once it was wound out, to have become a purulent yellow-green. The seltzer water had been gradually deteriorating.
Time to change the seltzer, just like a bright-limn.
A clothbound record was produced from Bellicos' satchel and the lantern's state recorded for Wellnigh House's seltzermen to attend to the next day.The wind gathered pace as this was done, buffeting out from icy storehouses down in the southeast, making ears noisy with its passing and quieting frog song. On the walk again, Rossamund twisted and craned his neck to relieve his hearing from the gusting airs, desperate to catch suspicious, dangerous sounds. Sebastipole kept at his ceaseless vigilance.
Too soon they reached the Briary, its tops creaking in the wind but at its roots deathly still. The pyre of nicker corpses was a soggy charred mass that, even after three days, hissed and steamed with incomplete combustion. Wet woody smells sat heavy in the atmosphere. It was as if the threwd had worsened, not diminished; that the killing of the horn-ed monsters in the wood had only stirred that place, not quelled it. Even the hardheaded, stonehearted Grindrod felt the horrors tonight. The lampsmen hurried the prentices through, insisting upon winding the great-lanterns here themselves to save time and their nerves. At each winding Rossamund truly expected Sebastipole to cry out that a nicker was nigh upon them-yet he did not.
With Phoebe lifting her nightly shrinking face over the darkling hills, the prentice-watch found themselves gratefully passing the great fuming censers of Wellnigh House and entering the safety of the cothouse confines.
'How was it?' one of the house-watch asked.
'The threwd grows' was Bellicos' curt reply.
'Aye,' the house-watchman returned, 'don't it always, these days?'
7
Burges small flags for signaling, made in sets of distinct patterns for the representation of letters, numbers, cardinal points, titles of rank or social elevation, even whole words. The color of a burge is first and foremost for distinction, though the meaning of the colors can be inferred if a small multistripe, multicolored flag-known as the parti-jack-is flown with them. Burges are used for both civil and military purposes on land and the vinegar seas
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As it had been on their previous prentice-watches, Rossamund's quarto was rudely awoken before the sun had properly started its own day. In the hurry of breakfast Rossamund thanked Threnody for her help with his lantern-crook.
'I could not help myself,' she said a little stiffly. 'It is the way of a calendar: strive against the oppressor, relieve those oppressed, work for those who cannot afford a teratologist's labors, feed them that cannot afford the food, give roof to the roofless, a bed to the bedless.' She spoke her creed with the monotone of rote learning.
The prentices were blessed with a friendly greeting from Sebastipole as they formed up to leave, a profound contrast to the surliness of Assimus, Bellicos and Puttinger.The leer at the lead, out went the lantern-watch, out into the early gray when the air seems especially clear and still and cheeks hurt with the cold and everyone speaks in a hush; out to quell the lights for the glory of Ol' Barny once more. Dawning glimmers expanded to an astounding rosy brilliance as they returned-as they must-through the Briary's brooding shadows.
Red dawning, traveler's warning…
Even the hard veteran lampsmen kept quiet and looked often to the leer. Rossamund was sure he heard suspicious rustlings and rattlings in the winter-barren woods, thick with faintly luminous fogs, but Sebastipole did not give an alarm.
Out on the raised dike-road of the Harrowmath and free of the claustrophobic thicket, the prentice-watch walked a little easier. From some hidden roost in the wild pastures the occasional lonely trilling of a wagtail echoed about the quiet. At lamppost East Winst 5 West Well 20-only four more lamps till they could consider themselves safe within the fire arcs of the manse's great-guns-Grindrod allowed them to take their ease. For a moment they sat on the roadside to sip at skins of water, chew on hardened slogg-porridge and listen to the tinkle of a runnel that flowed under the highroad. Called the Dribble, it apparently came from boggy ground to the north, went through a pipe beneath them in the dike's foundations and down to a small marsh known as Old Man's Itch in the south. Rossamund loved its bubbling melody and was grateful they had stopped by it.
Only Sebastipole did not stand easy, but took a quick drink through a tube stuck into his sthenicon and resumed his silent survey. Something in the gloom of the Briarywood through which they had passed only a little more than an hour before seemed to fix his attention. Noticing the leer's pointed stare, Rossamund tried to discover what lay there. Surely not a monster? All he could see was the thick mist condensing up from the grasses and settling over the highroad. However, he did spy a hard-covered transport emerging from the rising fume. It was a boot truck pulled by a fully shabraqued mule hurrying as fast along the Pettiwiggin as the fractious creature could manage.
'First traffic of the day,' called Bellicos. 'Clear the way!' This was redundant, for all of the prentice-watch were sitting easy on steep verges.
'He cracks on apace!' spat Assimus.
Though it was still a fair way off, the broad blue and white stripes that covered its windowless sides could be easily spotted. It was a butcher's wagon; something that belonged in a town or city.
'He is out of his normal pond,' Puttinger mused.
'What business has a butcher got in the early morn on haunted roads?' Bellicos wondered aloud.
'I reckon I've seen him and his before,' Assimus posited.
'Comes and leaves from the manse twice or thrice a year, more frequent yet ever since the old Comptroller- Master-General left.'
The approaching vehicle did not distract Sebastipole. He pushed at one of the three small, slotted levers on the side of his sthenicon and kept staring beyond it, farther down the road. After a long, far-looking scrutiny, he
