along the walk, bowed under a pole strung thickly with a great weight of onions. The seller glared at him, then stepped forward as if to offer a sale.The young factotum quickly looked away.
'How did you come by such a fancy name?' asked Carp as the dyphr passed on, turning down a broad way brimming with market crowds.
Closing his eyes, Rossamund groaned inwardly. 'It was written on a card that came with me when I was found on the doorstep of my foundlingery,' he sighed.
'I see,' the man-of-business uttered, as if for him this explained all he wished to know. 'And have you, perchance, come to Brandenbrass afore?'
Rossamund said he had not.
The farther Carp took them from Cloche Arde, the busier the streets became, and tighter too, long direct roads dissecting the city into small sections run through with alleys and lanes. Turning right off the Harrow Road as it bent west, mucky smokestacks, thin and very tall, began to show above the high rooftops blotched with lichen, leaking strange smokes into the morning smog.
'Ahh, old Brandentown,' the starchy fellow waxed encyclopedically, 'historied beauty of the Grume-of the whole Sundergird no less! — whose long-gone metropolitans sought to transact business with the Tutin invader rather than resist him, thus preserving much of the autonomy we still enjoy today. Such a superb mercantile tradition is the shrewd and potent praxis-the great egalitarian system-upon which even one as small and ignoble as I can rise to heights unattainable by any other man in other lands. Employ your money wisely here, Rossamund Bookchild, and you will surely find yourself elevated to a patron of the peers themselves…'
With a flick of reins, Mister Carp took the dyphr quickly about a crossway, a circuit where the road they were on met several other streets at oddly obtuse angles. A fat memorial pillar was raised at its center; flower sellers gathered at its base, and every corner was crowded with many-storied shop fronts. Bustling through, they clattered straight down a street signed simply The Dove and Rossamund suddenly found that they were running right by a stone-and-iron wall that enclosed a rather wild-looking park. From the elevation of his bobbing seat Rossamund could see a broad common beyond, its darkling trees shaggy with yellowing lichens and pallid trailing mosses, its grasses left to grow thick and wild. It seemed still and empty yet strangely pensive too, affording no glimpse of a street or buildings on the other side, just dim, brooding shadows. Any strolling folk kept to the farther side of the road.
'We call it the Moldwood Park,' Carp explained. 'Good for kindling, bird's nests, a million rabbit holes and not much else. It is said that its middle is a proper woodland-all that is left of the forest that grew natively here before our Burgundian ancestors arrived-not that I would know this for myself, having never ventured in.'
'It's threwdish!' Rossamund exclaimed reflexively. It was a subtle, suppressed feeling of watchfulness, a warning caution constrained on every side by human habitation. In the heart of an everyman's city: how can this be?
The man-of-business gave him a quick, curious look. 'It is an uneasy place, I grant you. People are daunted by antique stories of terrible consequences for those who have tried to clear it, though I am told thorough surveys have turned up nothing unpleasant. The place is a cleveland, protected by an ancient permanare per proscripta-a legal ban-and so it has been left, as you see, generally ignored by all but the very needy, the very cold or the very hungry.'
'The hungry? Hungry for what?'
'Why, the rabbits, sir! Rabbits-scrawny, barely eat-able rabbits-burrowed in walls, hiding in parks and forgotten nooks, but most of all in the Moldwood here.There is a reason, Master Bookchild, that such a beast is the sigil on our stately flag, for the city is veritably plagued with 'em-and their droppings, into the bargain! So much so that rats have a hard time establishing themselves. A good thing, mayhap, for our indigent and hungry masses- bunny daube is ate most nights of the week in downtrod districts. The city is famous for the dish.' Carp took a pinch of spice aura from a tiny silver vinaigrette as ward against the stink of this down-at-heel neighborhood, then offered some to his passenger.
Rossamund declined-such flash manners were not for him. Feeling eyes upon him, he peered up at the sagging tenements on the opposite side, their stained sills hung with washing. A nursing mother in over-laundered gray stared down at him sullenly from a high window.
'People live willingly next to it?' he marveled.
'Those who cannot afford the higher rents elsewhere, yes.'
'Are they not bothered by the… by being so close?'
Carp made a puzzled frown. 'I should think none has ever asked them-they should be thankful for a roof at all. It is as some say, young fellow: the starveling has no fancy…'
At the dyphr's hectic rate they were soon past this peculiar park, going through the high arch of a bastion-the Cripplegate-its heavy iron-studded doors open wide to the ceaseless human flow. Gate wardens leaned on muskets and watched all with complacent scorn, their fine spit-and-polish making many of the amblers look squalid. Passing along a congested thoroughfare of narrow-fronted countinghouses, Carp worked with frowning application to avoid the dolly-mops in bright versions of maid's clobber and low-grade clerical gents laughing and chatting and careless of horse or carriage. Finally the relentless momentum thrust them onto a vast rectangular circuit rushing with impatient traffic. Magnificently tall buildings rose even higher on every side, casting their long shadows in the thin morning light. Imposing like a bench of magistrates, most were fronted with soaring colonnades topped with rain- streaked friezes of stone that depicted portentous moments of great matter.
'The Spokes,' the man-of-business explained as they launched into the mayhem of traffic that swarmed here. 'That august building upon our right,' he continued, pointing to a great square structure of dirty gray stone topped with a green-copper roof bright lit by the rising sun, 'is where we need to be today.The Letter and Coursing House, postal office and knavery in one.'
Post-lentums, town coaches, takeny-carriages and jaunty dyphrs barely avoided each other as drivers dodged balking horses, slow-moving planquin-chairs or white-suited scopps. These tireless children dashed to and from every cardinal with their precious messages, leaping headlong from the walkways without ever a look for rushing carriages. Several times Carp was forced to pull up sharply, his horses snorting in dismay. From the sumptuously furnished window of a park drag next to them, one gigantically corpulent fellow impatiently hollered, jowls wobbling, spittle flying as he blindly harangued the delays and glared at Rossamund as if he were the cause of not just the current impediments but of all the world's ills too.
Standing bravely at strategic places among the anxious commotion were grim-looking fellows dressed in long coats of black and doing their utmost to make order of the chaos. Duffers, Mister Carp called them, the strict constabulary of Brandenbrass. Their waists wrapped about with checks of sable and leuc and wearing black mitres like a haubardier's, they raised and dropped lamps as signal; when one lifted a clear light, humanity flowed left but ceased to go right; when a blue light was high, the reverse occurred.
Gripping the sideboard, Rossamund did all he could to hang on, his knuckles white, as the dyphr hastily circumvented a wide pond right in the center of the grand circuit. A great many ibis waded in its reedy soup and used a weather-grimed statue of old bronze and stone-some neglected commemoration of ancient victories-in its middle as a perch. A faint wakefulness seemed to hover over the water, though no one else appeared to heed it.
'That brackish bog has a proper name,' Carp cried over the racket-Rossamund wishing the man would keep his eyes better fixed upon their progress-'but none of we goodly locals calls it by anything else but the Leak.'
Rossamund saw a line of shackled folks, their heads and hands jammed in flat wooden casques and ranked in full and shaming view upon a stone stage at the edge of the pond. Passing people hissed and waved white kerchiefs at them.
'What did they do?' he asked, twisting in his seat to see, yet too far to read the bill of fault nailed to each casque.
'Oh,' the man-of-business answered complacently, 'you'll find them to be loan defaulters, pinch-dough bakers, fraudulent mendicants, suspected grabcleats, hat-snatchers and thimble-rig sharpers; contrarified malcontents and cheap-souled tricksters all-folk not worth your anxious looks.'
Slowing easy among the clutter of other carriages waiting beneath the beetling loom of the Letter and Coursing House, Mister Carp deposited his dyphr to the care of the bridle-minders, scruffy fellows disguised by fine coats. Round-eyed, mind spinning at all this novelty, Rossamund followed the man-of-business closely as they joined the pedestrian throng. Pushing through a line of water caddies, shooing aside pleading crossing-sweeps and
