water boiling all about the packet ram as the smaller sea-nickers sought now to take out their rage on this new foe. Immediately below, cold black eyes beheld him hungrily, and wide pouting mouths slavered as the nadderers twisted in frustration at the unwilling strength resisting them. Powerful were the grips that had him, yet glaring down at the vile sea-nickers Rossamund held fast to the cable and would not let go. In a moment of shocked recognition the beasts yielded a little, as if they realized something peculiar in the nature of their prey. In that hesitation, Rossamund heaved against them, even as Europe thrust through the port, face distorted with fury, striking down savagely with a metal worm and a flash of arcing into the dial of one of the beasts. The ravenous clenching slackened, and Rossamund drew himself inward with a prodigious jerk, to land face-first and panting in fright on the deck.
'Watch your step, little man,' the fulgar insisted mildly. 'I do not want you knocked on the head before we have properly begun.'
'Almost lost ye,' Fransitart murmured. The ex-dormitory master helped Rossamund to stand.
The thumping of guns could be heard now, getting closer, coming from some other vessel. Through the ports Rossamund saw a larger ram, a drag-mauler perhaps, cutting across the retreating bow of the Widgeon, the blade of the newcomer's overlarge rostrum forcing a deadly course through the waters teeming with sea-monsters. Beyond, he caught sight of the bastler freed from the sea-monsters' attentions and beating a limping retreat.
A confused din of frenetic footsteps thudded overhead, as if the crew there were dancing a wild jig. From fore to aft of the gun deck, crew and passengers alike contended with a great invasion of lagimopes-slippery creatures, small yet powerful, their backs vaned with tall fishlike fins. By the puffs of bothersalts farther back on the gun deck, Rossamund could spy Craumpalin proving his place in the fight, appearing to be creating a barrier of foul stinging fume to keep the sea-nickers away from weaker passengers. Caught in the thick, Fransitart lay about himself with a handspike like a younger man while Europe struck left and right almost perfunctorily with the bottom of her balled fist, bright arcs blinking, dropping a lagimope dead with every blow.
Rossamund took up the closest weapon to hand-a rope-handled pail-and swinging it in sweeping loops sought to drive any lagis before him from the deck and back out the gun ports whence they had come. At first the creatures proved unwilling to confront Rossamund directly, as if unsure upon whose side the young factotum fought. Yet, as he smote one after another, the remaining lagimopes soon settled him as an adversary and began to pay him especial attention. The more madly he swiped with the pail, the more madly did his foes beset him. Finally, the pail was stripped from his grasp and Rossamund fought with hands alone, wrestling back and forth across the deck, punching with fist and elbow, picking one little sea-nicker up bodily, grasping it hard through its slime to hurl it from a port. Strong, oddly jointed hands pawed and tore at him, tried to pin him down and pull away his sturdy proofing, but every time the young factotum found a way free.
In it all Europe was an indomitable force of scarlet and sparks. The lagimopes tried to drag her down from behind, but she would have none of this, and, twisting sharply, snatched the offending nadderers by their heads and filled them with death-dealing levin. Faced with the wrath of a fulgar at the height of her powers and a crew determined to resist, the shrunken swarm of fishy monsters quickly gave up and slithered back into the sea to disappear to wherever such creatures skulked.
Sooty with the dust of expelled potives, Craumpalin pushed through the passengers and crew silent in the shock of victory, the aging dispenser grinning to see his companions alive and well enough. 'How good it does me to see thee lay about thyself so manful,' he declared, grasping Rossamund enthusiastically by the shoulder.
Europe dusted a smudge from her sleeve. 'Well, I cannot say I see why the navy prefers wits over we fulgars in such straits,' she observed. 'As my first sea-fight, that was not too troublesome at all.'
'Aye, I suppose not,' Fransitart grudgingly concurred, throwing the fulgar a dark look. 'As thalasmaches can go…'
Stained and smeared in lagi oil, feeling badly bruised and half strangled, Rossamund gathered his hat- amazingly not cast a-sea in the fight-from the deck and simply leaned against the truck of a gun to catch his breath.
More rams arrived, chase guns thudding as they hounded the nadderers away south into deeper waters.The butcher's bill at nine wounded-the fellow seized overboard already retrieved, only slightly sizzled from the caustic waters-Master Right declared Europe the heldin of the hour. In a fit of gratitude he wrote up a recommendation promising to have his agents refund her the crossing fee for herself and her three worthy servants.
'Not all forces of the Empire are against us, it seems,' Europe murmured to Rossamund as they stood at the helm watching the heavy drag-maulers speeding to the south as they chased the kraulschwimmen off.
A little shaky as she resumed her original course, the aged packet ram Widgeon trod her way to Brandenbrass.
2
Cabinet pictures among those of disposable means and dark tastes there is a fashion for depictions of the foulest violence and horror, showing the spoiling of monsters by despicable acts. There is a vigorous clandestine trade in such images, and those who produce them are greatly esteemed by graphnolagnian connoisseurs and make good money from the trade. Many struggling fabulists have been forced by poverty to try their hand at such depravity, and though never signing such pieces, some who have gone on to more legitimate fame have an anonymous catalog of cabinet pictures ready to bring them to ruin.
The residence of Europe, the Branden Rose, fulgar teratologist and the Duchess-in-waiting of Naimes, was situated in the very midst of the great city of Brandenbrass. Cloche Arde it was called, its address-as Rossamund heard given to the takeny driver-Footling Inch, the Harrow Road, in the suburb of Ilex Mile. A pilot boat had brought the four travelers to the pier at the Fine Lady's Steps, where they had disembarked and passed, as they must by law, through the crowded files of the Arrivals and Admissions House. Europe's fame and station affording them a smoother passage among the long lines of newcomers and the frenzy of clerical rigor, they were soon in a hired takeny-coach progressing down long streets alive with a bustling mass Rossamund could scarce comprehend. It was a fair trot before they entered quiet, opulent suburbs where, set in their parklike gardens, each residence seemed like a thin vertical palace.
'Home once more…,' Europe declared softly, peering from the carriage's window as they crossed carefully now over a steep bridge that leaped the gap of a broad drain known as the Midwetter to a small artificial island.
Craning to see, leaning out from the glassless carriage window, Rossamund beheld the grandest house yet towering from behind an iron-spined wall of darkened stone. Founded on the very rock of an island, it stood isolated amid the graceful terraces and their well-groomed gardens, rising as high as all the noble roofs about. Six lofty stories of grim, dusken granite and stately staring windows; a solitary spire set against the flat, late-morning gray. However grand a structure it might be, Rossamund thought it somehow strange to consider the great adventuring Branden Rose as possessing something so domestic as a home.
The lentum turned abruptly through high wrought gates already opened in answer to the message Europe had sent ahead by scopp-a fast-running messenger child-of her arrival. In the gaunt space beyond lined with scant trees, the carriageway of white gravel quickly terminated in a large oval turnabout with a single thin cypress in its midst, a pivot about which carriages could circle. Arranged in near-martial order upon the front steps of the house like lighters and auxiliaries at a pageant-of-arms, a small quarto of senior staff was already waiting, turned out in black frock coats and stomacher-skirts with flashes or facings of red and magenta. One slender person was
