much.
'I have heard of gudgeons so cunningly made they dissolve into a puddle after they expire,' Sebastipole expounded further. 'Do not worry, Rossamund, you are believed,' he added, seeing the young prentice's dismay. 'But I must tell you it was touch and go to even find your path; we found our way more by your instructions than your trail.Were you using a nullodor last night at all?'
Rossamund felt a caustic flush of guilt, as if he had been caught out. 'You can smell a nullodor?' He had no reason to feel this, yet he did.
'Actually, no: they do their job just as they should-all smells gone where applied. It is rather that absence of scent that is the telltale signifer. Think of it like reading a letter where a clumsy author has cut out his errors with a blade and as you read there are great holes in the sentences.You know something was there but you'd be hard- pressed to say what it was.' Sebastipole sniffed, then blew his nose. 'Such a ruse will work against a brute beast but not against the pragmatical senses of a well-learned leer.' He looked at Rossamund searchingly.
'Oh,' the young prentice said in a small voice, 'and there were no smells down there?'
'Exactly so.' The leer's expression was impenetrable. 'The whole area was a great blank, with only the merest suggestion of many obliterated smells. If you pressed me I might say that more than one nullodor was employed, but it is too hard to prove so now.'
'Oh… I am sorry, Mister Sebastipole,' Rossamund murmured. 'My… my old masters have me wearing a little each day… to keep me safe, they said, from sniffing noses.' He could not see the sense in hiding it now.
'Indeed?' The leer looked astutely at him, held him with a silent, penetrating regard. 'I detected a nullodor on you the night we went out lighting together.'
Rossamund ducked his head and blushed. 'My old masters are very protective of me.'
'And you are very obedient to them, it would appear.'
Rossamund nodded sheepishly.
Sebastipole smiled. 'Yet, Rossamund, I did manage to detect the merest smell of your foe. It was exactly like the foreign, foul slot of Numption's attackers.'
'What does that mean, sir?'
'I have not encountered enough gudgeons to know beyond doubt, but the similarity seems suspicious to me. It may well mean the creature that beset Numption and that which you slew last night-though separated by three years or more-have come from the same benighted test, made by the same black habilist. If that is so, the wretch has grown arrogant enough to try his constructions on us again!' The anger in Sebastipole's eyes was made more terrible by their unnatural hue. 'More galling still, we did not find how the homunculid found its way in. Others could come.'
Rossamund's imagination fired with the abhorrent scene of the fortress overrun with rever-men.
'Hmm.' The leer became ruminative. 'I can say that it certainly did not come from the region of Numption's bloom baths.'
'I did not want to tell about them,' Rossamund confessed forlornly.
'I know you did not, Rossamund.' The leer spoke up quickly. 'You are an honest fellow and your honesty last night made proceedings easier. Fret not for dear Mister Numps: he is protected, and his 'friends' with him. I asked him to let us in and only took those with me who would treat him kindly.'
Rossamund felt a little relief at this.
Sebastipole put an encouraging hand on the young prentice's shoulder. 'No more nighttime wanderings for you, my boy. Play the man, Rossamund, be not afraid but be on your guard and carry your salumanticum with you always: strange and suspicious things turn in the manse now.' With this warning the leer left him, and Rossamund went out of the infirmary and rejoined the slightly awed prentices stepping regular out on Evolution Green. At middens Rossamund rushed down to the lantern store, the guilty conviction that he had failed Numps a heavy weight right in the pit of his gizzards.Yet what else could he have done? Oh! If only I hadn't slept past douse- lanterns!
His compunction was not eased either when Numps looked at him only very briefly with big, timid eyes and said nothing for a long time. 'I heard it that you were set upon by a pale, runny man yesternight, Mister Rossamund,' the glimner eventually muttered softly, not looking up from his working. 'Just like old Numps was.'
'Aye, Mister Numps, I was,' Rossamund answered.
'Oh dear, oh dear-I'm sorry, Mister Rossamund, I'm sorry!You wanted my help and I showed you into trouble-poor, limpling-headed Numps!'
This made Rossamund feel more miserable than ever. 'I–I could have turned back, I suppose. Besides, I beat the rever-man and got out.'
Numps stopped polishing the lamp-pane gripped by the nimble toes of his left foot.
'It is me who must say his sorries, Mister Numps, for telling them about the bloom baths,' Rossamund blurted out. 'I did not want to say… but I had to be honest-I… I…' Rossamund's words felt very thin and meaningless.
For a while Numps sat, staring at his lap. Finally he looked up. 'Fair is fair. One 'sorry' each. You had to fight the runny man because of Numps' limpling head and then some people want to talk and talk about it and ask things, the same things over and over till you're all done with it. I remember it, just the same on the day of all my red.'
'Aye, I suppose.' Rossamund was not soothed by all this sorrying.
The hollow sensation of friendship part-fractured persisted, and the two cleaned panes in reflective silence.
'Mister Sebastipole reckons my gudgeon and the one you fought might come from the same maker,' Rossamund finally tried. 'He said they could not find where my rever-man got in, though. Do you have any notion, Mister Numps?'
Numps shook his head. 'No one can get from out there into here.' He smiled. 'Even I know that. Only the sparrows of the Sparrowling make it here… oh, and you. But I reckon they let you in 'cause you look right, but it is still clever to cover the smell.' He tapped his handsome nose and his smile grew cryptic.
With the chime from a bell, Rossamund realized with a sault of fright in his chest that middens was ended. Having learned his lesson for lateness only too well, he scrambled his tangibles together, and with a quick bow and a short 'good afternoon,' took hasty leave of the startled glimner. Though the discovery of a gudgeon within was disconcerting news, Rossamund's victory over it was powerfully encouraging, and the lighters particularly held him a mite-sized example of true lampsman valor. Among the greater share of the clerks, however, the rumor prevailed that he had made the whole tale up to cover his disobedience. From what Rossamund had heard, the Master-of- Clerks was furious that no disciplinary action was to be taken for either Rossamund's lateness or his unauthorized presence in Whympre's chambers.
'I think that bump on yer brain-box serves ye a better reminder to do yer duty than any reprimand I can give ye,' the Lamplighter-Marshal had declared during a brief interview the next morning.
Coursing for rever-men beneath the manse continued, Sebastipole finding alternative routes into the foundations other than Numps' undercroft. The progress was slow and incomplete, the searchers hampered by the strange terrain and, as rumor would have it, by the Master-of-Clerks' insistence that underneath was the sole property of the Emperor and not somewhere for lighters to be roaming about carelessly or without proper permissions or reports in triplicate.
Meanwhile the prentices went on with their routines, and the awe of the other lads toward Rossamund waned. Out on Evolution Green each day, Rossamund noticed Laudibus Pile sometimes lurking, watching them at their marching and training where he had never lurked nor watched before. It was not constant, but enough to be annoying.
'See, it's him again,' he pointed out to Threnody as the prentices were between drills.
'Perhaps he finds our movements appealing,' she offered lightly. 'Though what interminable stepping-regular and fodicar movements have to do with lighting lamps I do not know. I'm glad there is only a month left of it.'
Scowling at the leer, Rossamund was glad too that the last month of prenticing was approaching. He would be able to serve on the road at last and do his part. On the last day of Pulvis, with only one month and four pageants-of-arms left till Billeting Day, Rossamund was with Numps again at middens. Door 143 gave a rattling bang, and Sebastipole quickly appeared from the avenue of shelves and parts. He was disturbingly, uncharacteristically agitated, the blue of his eyes too pale, their red like new-spilled blood.
