'Now tell me, young Rossamund,' Europe demanded, 'what were you fighting that cost you yet another hat?'
'It was a rever-man, miss,' the young lighter said simply.
Europe went wide-eyed. There was a pause, incredulity hovering at its fringes. 'Truly?' she said eventually. 'How did you manage to get tangled up with one of those? More to the point, how did you survive it?'
'I found it deep in the cellars of Winstermill the very next night after you left.'
'Ah!You're playing a leg-pull on me, little man.' The fulgar started to smile knowingly. 'Your old home is far too tough to crack for some rotten-headed thing like a rever-man. That old Marshal of yours must be sadly slipping if he let one of those wretches in.'
Rossamund's gall twisted at this. 'I don't think he is slipping, Miss Europe, but still, sure as I sit here, it was a gudgeon I wrastled right down in the bottom of the fortress.' He went on to tell the whole tale, elaborating especially on the moment when he jammed the loomblaze into the rever-man's gnashing maw. That moment was powerfully satisfying to recall. 'It was somewhere in that fight I lost my hat,' he concluded.
'Aren't you the one for getting yourself into fixes not of your own making?' Europe's knowing gaze had not slipped for the length of his tale. 'You are still the strangest, bravest little man.Throwing a gudgeon about and blasting it to char is beyond even some of my ilk.You're not as helpless as you seem.' She looked at Threnody.
'Maybe.' Rossamund tried not to look too pleased. 'It was gangling and poorly made, with too-long arms and hairy, piggy ears, just like those'-he pointed to a sizzling porker's head that was being carried past at that very moment by a struggling maid-'and no great feat to best.'
'The Lamplighter-Marshal said it was a mighty deed,' Threnody stated proudly in a strange change of tack.
'I should think he would,' the fulgar said, taking a sip of wine. 'You did him a great service, Rossamund.'
'Yet it still did not stop the man receiving a sis edisserum from the Considine,' the young lampsman said sadly.
'Truly?' Europe murmured. 'You don't hear of that happening every diem. Your Marshal must certainly have gone awry then.'
Rossamund did not hear her. His thoughts had pounced on his own words, hairy, piggy ears. The gudgeon had large, furry, leaf-shaped ears, pig's ears, like those on the meal just gone by; pig's ears very much like those on the swine's head he had carried up to Swill…
And Europe had told of the dark hints that surrounded the surgeon; and it held that if Swill knew of the kitchen furtigrade when Doctor Crispus did not, he might be well aware of other secret ways, even down to the moldering cellars. Why, truly, would he need his deliveries of body parts if not to make a rever-man?… And there was the flayed skin.
Swill is a black habilist! A massacar!
The horrid, impossible idea rolled about his mind's view, an image of the surgeon clandestinely making gudgeons in his attic apartment: wobbling, raving creatures cobbled together from kitchen offcuts and dug-up corpse bits, then held and hidden in the fortress's depths. The young lighter could little fathom how such a capital evil as monstermaking-or 'fabercadavery,' as the peregrinat called it-could go on undiscovered within Winstermill's precincts. How was it possible that amid such a crowd of zealous invidists monsters were actually made?
With low and stuttering urgency, Rossamund explained his deductions as best he could. He talked mostly to Europe, who listened without interruption, her arms folded and her brow deeply creased with a scowl.
'The rever-man had pig's ears,' he repeated excitedly. 'I carried a pig's head up to Swill from the kitchens. That's why he reads from those banned books-they are full of all manner of ash-dabblings.'
'Well, one hardly needs to be an auto-savant to have spotted Swill as a nefarious cad!' Threnody argued.
A great roar of applause erupted about all levels of the Saloon: Hero had come to the end of her recital and was now bowing deeply to her adoring audience with great, cheek-busting smiles. Threnody looked down at it all and curled her lip. 'Yes, well, I suppose she was passable,' she sneered as she clapped politely.
Rossamund barely heard her or the cheers. Swill is a massacar! Sebastipole said he had not found how the rever-man could have got in: the fortress really was impregnable. It would not have to be if the abomination was already being kept inside Winstermill-indeed if it had been made there in the deep parts. Was it mere coincidence that Rossamund had found his way out only through the Master-of-Clerks' rooms? Swill was most certainly his man, brought in especially. It all fitted too horribly.
'My, what a hive of troubles you have kicked,' the fulgar said. 'The Soratche were right to suspect him, it seems, though one thinks they might have pressed their suspicions a little further.'
Threnody made a face as if to say she did not think much of the Soratche.
'But why do such a terrible thing?' Rossamund could not fathom it.
'Why else, little man, but for the oldest reason of all?' The fulgar paused. 'Money, of course. There is much to be made from the making and trafficking of rever-men and other made-monsters-as you have seen firsthandedly, with that filthy fellow Poundinginches or whatever his name might have been.'
Rossamund nodded. What precious relief it had been when Europe had rescued him from that vile rivermaster and sent him to the harbor-bottom with one arc to his beefy chest.
'All manner of people manage to require the service of the dark trades,' the fulgar continued. 'I have already caught the whispers of at least two rousing-pits within reach of here, and they are genuinely lucrative for those at the right end of the wagers. These must be supplied, and it seems Swill is the man to do so.'
The young lighter shivered at the implication of her words.
'If you know of such horrid places, why do you not do something about them?' Threnody interjected. 'Or tell someone who will?'
Europe's expression became owlish. 'Because, my dear, if I have heard rumors, then others certainly will have too.The excisemen and obstaculars and your once-sisters are better fitted to the chore.'
'But rousing-pits have monsters in them,' Threnody continued querulously. 'Surely that should move you!'
Europe fixed her with that dangerously glassy stare.
'Child, I am not some mindless invidist. I rid the world of teratologica for money's hand, not sport.'
Threnody locked eyes with her.
Rossamund ducked his head at the fizzing tension between these two lahzarines. He wanted to intervene, yet did not dare tangle with the friction between them, as inscrutable as the movements of the planets. In the end the standoff proved unbearable and he spoke. 'What of the Master-of-Clerks?' he tried. 'Swill is his man. Doctor Crispus said it so.'
'Every mad habilist needs a patron.' Europe sounded almost flippant, though her grim expression told otherwise.
'Why did you not speak of this before, lamp boy?' Threnody growled.
'Because I did not think of it till now, Threnody,' Rossamund sighed.
'I must write of all this to Mother!'
'For the little she might do,' said Europe, 'with the clerk-master sitting in control behind those unapproachable walls and little proof to go on but one small bookchild lampsman's conjectures.'
'She is a great woman,' Threnody bridled, 'and will do more than some to rid the Empire of a traitor.'
'But what if I'm wrong?'
'If you are wrong then rumors are exploded, suspicions disabused and everyone goes on to other troubles,' Europe said bluntly. 'Yet for now we have the suggestion of serious, dastardly things, little man,' she said. 'Gudgeons loose in Winstermill, marshal-peers summoned to the subcapital and prentices sent too far east: something is truly, deeply amiss in your reach of the world. Keep your eyes wide, Rossamund. You are in a dangerous tangle if all this turns out true. It may be that your assignment to Wormstool is not a simple lapse in wisdom.' She reached over to put a hand on his shoulder. 'You should have become my factotum after all,' she said wryly.
Rossamund could not help but agree. He could not now think of anywhere safer than by Europe's side. He noticed Threnody was looking at him with an envious scowl.
Europe summoned a footman and made provision for their bunking. There was no room elsewhere in the wayhouse. 'You can join me in my quarters if you wish, Rossamund. There is a bed for one other there,' the fulgar
