'I think it's talking to you, lamp boy,' Threnody muttered. 'Maybe it's been chatting with your Freckle friend.'
Rossamund swallowed hard but did not answer. Pink lips? This was the meaning of Rossamund's name- rose-mouth, pink lips. How did it know his name? Perhaps it had indeed been talking to Freckle? He looked to the tatters of Splinteazle's corpse beyond the monsters. His resolve hardened. He held out his fodicar, presenting arms as at a parade, inviting a challenge.
With a vicious snarl the slobbering nicker lunged at them, the other monsters rushing with it, whooping and yammering. Threnody witted, laboring to keep her frission under control. For a moment she checked the charge, Rossamund standing with fodicar and loomblaze ready, by her side. The monsters writhed and backed away. Suddenly the girl gasped, and without warning her frission faltered. The beasts were at them again, the slobberer foremost, and Rossamund sprang too. He hurled the potive with wicked aim, missing the slobberer and hitting a stocky bogle running just behind it. The wretched thing's head was splashed and engulfed with the cruel false-fire and it fell screeching. As he met the slobberer, fodicar swinging, so Threnody's frission returned and the small gnashers reeled. He swatted at the slobberer with the same thoughtless, clearheaded fluidity, hitting it smartingly on its shoulder. The thing shrieked and flailed its arms, swatting Rossamund in the chest and throwing him back- first to the road. Threnody's witting caught him and his vision dimmed, threatened blackness; but this was no time for stopping, for lying tamely down just because of a hurt. With a yelping kind of growl, Rossamund shook himself and rolled on to his side, his vision clearing. What had seemed to him like a dangerous pause had been just an instant. The slobberer bore down on him. Rossamund whipped his lantern-crook around, smacking the nicker's ankles. Its long legs were tripped out from under it and the thing toppled, a puff of dust erupting from its fall. On his feet in a beat, Rossamund took his advantage and struck the fallen monster wildly, not caring where, just hitting, hitting, as Threnody's frission lashed out again.
It was too much now-the bogles had had enough. They were quitting the fight, running back up the Wormway and off into the wilderness. Not satisfied, Threnody trod determinedly toward the cothouse, striving at the monsters inside. Still flailing in fury at the slobberer as it struggled to rise, Rossamund was vaguely aware that lumpy bogles were fleeing the tower: one even leaped from the roof, landing with a mighty crash in some bushes and, yipping girlishly, disappeared into the scrub. With their escape, the malice of the threwd flared strong for a moment then subsided, leaving only confused watchfulness.
Rossamund kept hitting, and only when he had smote the utter ruin of the stomping, slobbering nicker did he cease. He stared down at the shattered, mangled creature at his feet: somehow it still lived, glaring up at him, still defiant, still baleful, still hungry.Yet now Rossamund could not hate the fiendly thing, no matter what it had done to the doughty, friendly lighters of Wormstool. Now he just felt tired and sorry: sorry for the death of his comrades; sorry for the harm he had done the monster before him, to all the monsters; sorry that he had become the murderer, the hypocrite.
'I am sorry to have slain thee,' he whispered, little knowing from where the words came. 'But we were at odds and I could not let you hurt my friends.'
The creature's eyes glazed, a sadness-an ancient longing-seeming to dwell in them for a moment, and it ceased.
Gory fodicar still in hand, Rossamund dropped to his knees and wept.
'Surely you don't weep over the monsters!' he heard Threnody croak as she picked up her doglocks, still lying where she had discarded them. She sat exhausted on the road and thirstily downed a milky blue liquid.
Rossamund doubled over, keening agony in his very depths. He felt a subtle touch on his lantern-crook. Looking up, he saw that same familiar sparrow perched on the bunting-hook. It gave a single firm chirp as if it were chiding him, and whirred away.
'Oh, go away!' Threnody shied the empty alembant bottle at the departing bird. 'A fat lot of good you did for us just now! Go back to your master and tell him the happy news!'
'Threnody!' Rossamund cried as the flask missed well wide and disappeared into the thistles below.
In her sudden fury the girl turned on him, and for a moment he thought she might throw something at him too. But she did not.
Rossamund stood, leaning on his fodicar as if it were a geriatric's cane.
Though smoke was billowing from the upper stories and carrion crows were already perching upon the chimney pots, Rossamund and Threnody still walked to it and climbed to the front door, stepping with heavy grief over the body on the steps. It was Theudas. In the watch room the doors to the cellars had been torn from hinges and cast aside.The collapsible stair, now nothing more than a wreckage of timbers, had worked perfectly; yet this had not been enough to stop the murderous nickers from gaining the higher floors. It was, however, more than adequate in preventing the two survivors from getting above.They called out, screamed and screeched till they were hoarse, hoping to hear the answering plaints of a survivor from the upper levels. But no such answers came, only the hiss and crack of fire unchecked.
Together the two hastily scrounged whatever they could from the litter-food parcels and water skins found in the cellars and with them a flammagon. Among the ruination they discovered the inert white mass of Sequecious, bloodied and cold, collapsed across an equally fat, bilious-looking bogle with great bloodred fangs. It too was dead, the boltarde that slew it still clutched by Sequecious, the aspis-smeared blade thrust full through its ribs, scorch marks showing that it had received the blast of a firelock. Man and monster had died together.Whelpmoon lay faceup by his squat lectern, his glasses missing, his dead eyes staring. By the kennels the dogs had managed to destroy a brace of scaly, big-nosed bogles, perishing themselves as they did.
Men and dogs and monsters, everything was dead. Rossamund could only imagine the gore and carnage on the floors above. Too much… too much… His extremities began tingling, and just as his anguish became overwhelming it was quickly obscured by a weird, empty flatness.
A terrible smashing report thundered from the floors above and shook the fortalice.
'We must go,' Threnody insisted, standing at the top of the cellar steps.
Back down on the road, the two survivors tried to bring Rabbit with them, but the loyal, stupid beast would not leave his friend and master. Flat cart still hitched, it had slowly followed them and now stood forlornly by Splinteazle's remains and would not move. Not even a sprig of swamp oak could induce it to come away.The two young lighters would have had to drag it every single step to get the beast to Bleak Lynche, and they might have done but were desperate to be gone. So they unhitched the cart and left the faithful donkey standing at the base of the tower, ears down, head down, nosing the seltzerman's cooling corpse.
'What a waste,' Threnody spat, venting her angry grief as they fled. 'It's idiotic. Even out here, with hardly anyone to benefit, they still go on risking lives to light the lamps each evening and douse them each dawning. No one in the cities cares-not even in the towns around about are people mindful or grateful.Whoever uses this part of road? The Bleaksmen stay put. That place is nothing more than a cothouse with a fistful of desperadoes setting up shop about it-what's the point? Imperial waste!' She gagged back a sob.
'But if they did not make a stand here everyone west would suffer!' Rossamund's contradiction was reflexive, yet in truth he actually agreed with her.
'Do you really think the flimsy string they call the Wormway, with its few tottering towers so close to the Gluepot and the tired quartos that habit them, is a match for the gathered might of the monsters? Look how easy it was for a small band of brodchin to annihilate one cothouse. It's the work of my sisters that keeps your precious western folk safe!'
Rossamund had no answer for this-he just wanted to get to somewhere secure. He found himself hoping Mama Lieger might shuffle from the scrub and lend them aid. How can she have let this happen? Did she cause all this?Was the threwd of the land itself the culprit? Is that what I felt?
An almighty shattering boom roared behind them, scaring them so much they both let out a yelp.They looked back to see the shingle roof of the cothouse collapsing inward with a seething eruption of smoke, sparks jetting from the shell of the tower. Rossamund spied a hasty little shadow scuttling after them.
Freckle?
Walking on, Rossamund ached to speak with the glamgorn, to ask question after question, but most of all- why? Why were they attacked? Why did the glamgorn not help? Why was he still following him? However, with
