'When Crispus returns, I'll ask him to come here and do what he can,' said Sebastipole. 'Till then you'll just have to hop about, Mister Numps. Fetch that handle cup.' He spoke suddenly to Rossamund, and pointed to a ladle lying by a puncheon of water near at hand. 'He will need fluid. One who has let free much blood always does.'
Rossamund filled the cup and carefully brought it over.
Sebastipole let Numps drink with noisy thirsty gulps, cradling the glimner's head as he did.
Crouching by, Rossamund watched, feeling it all his fault. 'I'm so… so… sorry for…,' he tried.
'Don't fret, prentice-lighter,' Sebastipole said. 'Our Numps has never been right in the intellectuals since surviving a theroscade. He has hurt himself before. It was providential I met you when I did, wouldn't you say? Had I not needed pule-blande so urgently I would have already been in a meeting with the Lamplighter-Marshal.'
'Will Mister Numps mend, sir?'
'Doctor Crispus cites it the worst case of malingering horrors he has ever encountered,' Sebastipole continued, putting a friendly hand on the glimner's shoulder. 'We do what we can, do we not, Mister Numps, but it just isn't the same, is it?'
Clearly dazed, Numps still managed to answer. 'No, Mister 'Pole, never the same, poor Numps, and poor glass too.' He started to look around the floor about him.
'You know Mister Numps well, Mister Sebastipole?' Rossamund asked, feeling a sudden surge of affection for the leer, so different from the other leers the prentice had encountered.
'We are acquainted, yes,' Sebastipole said.
Rossamund hoped he might say more and waited, but the leer showed no inclination to speak further. He stood, helping Numps to sit against the glowing great-lamp. The glimner was shivering, and the lamp offered no heat.
Retrieving his thrice-high from where it dropped, Sebastipole said, 'Sit easy now, Numps. Don't you tread on those clever feet of yours-we don't want them to bleed again.'
To this Numps nodded slowly. 'Poor Numps' clever feet. You put me back together again, Mister 'Pole.'
'Indeed, we did what we could.' The leer looked pointedly at Rossamund. 'This young master and I shall find you a blanket.'
Rossamund followed as he went to the farther end of the lantern store.
Sebastipole turned over a bright-limn sitting on a shelf and its soft glow soon revealed a pile of sacks neatly folded in a flimsy crate. He gathered several and deposited them in Rossamund's arms, declaring lightly and loudly, 'These will answer nicely!' He fixed the prentice with his disconcerting eyes. 'It was I who found him,' the leer said low and serious, 'alone and horribly mangled after the other two seltzermen had been devoured or carried away.'
Rossamund's ears rang as his attention became very focused. 'Devoured, sir? Carried away?' he said, equally softly.
'Yes, carried away.' Sebastipole paused, closing his eyes. 'It was in the first year that our Master-of-Clerks arrived. I remember it so because one of his first acts was to insist on a thorough inspection of all the great-lamps along the road. Numps and others had been attending to a vialimn out east beyond the Heap, past the Roughmarch and Tumblesloe Cot. As you know, seltzermen go out in threes-two to work, one to watch with a salinumbus at the half cock-and return before the lantern-watch starts. But this day they did not arrive by the correct time, a remarkable thing, for as you know a lamplighter's life is punctuality.' Wry and knowing, Sebastipole looked to Rossamund, the blue of his eye showing strangely bright in the seltzer light.
The prentice was too intent on poor Numps' story to notice this small joke.
'Though not normally enough to stop the work of a lantern-watch,' Sebastipole continued with a cough, 'what they found sent them quickly back to Tumblesloe, half the lanterns still unlit. By East Sloe 10 West Dove 13 the seltzermen's tools lay scattered, their cart shattered, its mule torn and mostly eaten, and too close for comfort, they could hear a horrible inhuman calling from the hills.'
Rossamund let his breath out slowly. 'Were you with the lamp-watch, Mister Sebastipole?'
'No, Rossamund, I arrived the next day. Myself and Mister Clement and Scourge Josclin and a dragging party of pediteers, lighters and dogs. We did not have to go far to find poor Numps, though. He was sitting up against the same lamppost where the previous night only signs of attack had been present. His arm was gone, torn from his body at the shoulder. His face and jaw were badly gouged, yet somehow he managed to live, even to crawl back to the road. The cold must have kept him alive, freezing the flow of his terrible wounds. Before or since I've never known a man to survive such mortal harm.'
'Frogs and toads!' Rossamund whispered in awe.
'Indeed.' Sebastipole stood. 'But it gets more remarkable still. For not only had a man so mortally mangled and comatose somehow pulled himself along for who knows how long, he had also bound his own wounds and stuffed the socket of his shoulder too, using grasses and leaves with an expertise not even a two-armed man might achieve. How he did this is a puzzle that still beggars solving… We bundled him back to Winstermill. He woke on the way, yammering from the horrors and saying such things as you heard him cry today, especially about that little sparrow-man. From what I know of it, Crispus fought to revive the man while Swill thought it more a mercy to let him languish and die.'
'What a merciless sod-botherer,' Rossamund growled. 'Little wonder Mister Numps refused to go to the infirmary with only the surgeon about.'
'Indeed.' Sebastipole stroked his chin. 'Fortunately for Numps, Doctor Crispus is the senior man and a brilliant physician. Though I wonder if it would not have been the greater mercy to let poor Numption pass.'
Rossamund shuddered, glad never to have faced such an impossible choice. 'What of the other seltzermen?' he could not help but ask. 'Did you ever find them?'
'We searched as much as we dared.' The leer rubbed at his neck like a man exhausted. 'Josclin followed me as I followed the smell of the slot and sight of the drag far up into Hallow Sill. It was not like any monster's trail I had pursued before: foreign and much fouler. It was a trace I had only smelled once before, but knew only too well. It was gudgeons. For a week we searched but found only torn clothing and discarded equipage. The calendars of Herbroulesse joined us for a time, speaking of a mighty combat heard in the woods beyond their walls, and of driving off some terrible fear two nights before; but still there was no trace of the other men. I am sure they had been eaten, for the drag I spied through my sthenicon showed little hint of human traffic, and the slot smelled only of death and that evil revenant stink. We traced it back in hope of finding where the revers had come from. Yet the trail ended nowhere, out in the wilds of the southern marches of the Tumblesloes. We returned to Winstermill with nothing more than tatters and conjecture, though Lady Dolours searched on. A tenacious woman, she followed the foul, foreign trail far into marshy lands along the northern marches of the Idlewild, but she too returned with nothing.'
Rossamund's attention pricked at the sound of Dolours' name. 'The calendars helped you?' he asked.
'Indeed. I have worked with them from time to time, and they with me-especially the Lady Dolours-snaring corsers and commerce men, foiling the dark trades where we can, beating off the bogles and the nickers. It's inevitable; in a ditchland everyone must cooperate or perish in their isolation.The Idlewild prevails because of their work as well as ours.' Sebastipole peered at Rossamund.
'How did a gudgeon find a way out here?' asked Rossamund. 'Did it come from a hob-rousing pit?'
A cold and dangerous look set in Sebastipole's weird eyes. 'Not very likely. Such criminal and vile practices do not last long about here, my boy.'
'But I thought a dead monster was good whichever way it's done?' Rossamund spouted the usual dogma.
The leer regarded Rossamund closely for a moment. 'Some folk might say it's so,' he said carefully, 'but I don't care for the justifications they offer on rousing a bogle against a gudgeon. Coursing monsters as we have done is a needful thing, but making sport of them, especially with something as abominable as a revenant, is useless and cruel. More so, it ties up the monies of men who can ill afford it and is ruinous to the lives of the wagerers who lose.' He stopped, took a breath. 'We came down very hard on the lurchers after Numps' theroscade.'
'Why the lurchers?'
'Because these are the beginning of the whole rotten chain of the dark trades. You can only get live bogles from the lurchers or human remains from the corsers. If you stop them, then you stop the therlanes, who then can't supply the commerce men, who have nothing to give to the ashmongers, leaving them without stock to sell to the
