of peltryfolk, a practice originating from the recruiting of skirmishing volunteers from the people best suited to skulking and ambushing: woodsmen and peltrymen.
Tail-sore Rossamund had been sitting stoutly for a goodly long time on the roof peak, right hand stiff from clutching the high chimney, legs twitching from holding his weight against the incline of the tiles. Attention drum- skin taut, his hearing pricked to every sound that disturbed the night's hush: the snuffles and hoof-stamps of animals tethered in the Scantling yard; the muffled conversation of folks watching from the attic just below them; the merest creak of pine bough; and beside him, Europe's near-imperceptible breathing. Indefatigable in her concentration, the heiress of Naimes had barely stirred for the entire watch. The priming in the pan of his broad- barreled flammagon already checked many times, Rossamund refused the compulsion to do so again and kept his drowsy eyes moving from shadow to shadow out on the meadow.
The color of rich cheesecake in the thin olive sky, rising Phoebe was a full hand span above the horizon and Maudlin green, already hoisting herself up heaven's darkling dome when something barely distinguishable shifted out in the gloomy fields. It came first as an unusual threwdish twitching, still far off, arresting Rossamund's tiring attention before he saw a subtle yet rapid motion.
'They come,' Europe exhaled, so softly it might have been the night breezes.
Shapes amorphous and shifting were approaching along the line of the blood-curdle trail, writhing shadows that refused to solidify into anything recognizable despite the creamy lunar light. At first Rossamund thought they might be a pack of little blightlings rushing in a horde. But when they reached the foot of the settlement, the shapes resolved into five large ambiguous silhouettes, each bending over its own pudding basin. At this the young factotum next thought them a tribe of brodchin-beasts like the horn-ed nickers that had attacked in the Briarywood near Winstermill.
As the creatures settled themselves to feed, Europe slid silently to the scale and, with infinite care, eased onto it, sucking an impatient breath as it softly creaked. Her right eye clear in a dapple of moonlight, she gave Rossamund a brief but pointed look, then descended with deft alacrity.
Near as fast as the lightning she held, the Branden Rose was out from the shadows of the south side of the cottage foundation. Springing between wall and pine trunk, fuse in hand, she was on the first shadow before it was aware of the danger. Rossamund watched her spin about the rock that held the basin to strike the shadow high on its back. Zzick! The briefest green-blue glare and everything went strange. Rather than bellow or collapse, the obscure figure burst into many parts. At first Rossamund thought the fulgar had simply hit it with such potency that it had been blown to splinders, yet he quickly realized, as the various parts sought to flee or fight individually, that their foe was something else entirely.
Bracing himself on the tiles, he fired the flammagon high, giving his mistress better sight as she swung at one of the pieces, striking it with another glaucous flash.
In the brilliant pink light of the flammagon flare swarmed slithering black saps, more like worms than serpents, working in disconcerting union, their slick, pulsating hides ridged and bulging, far stranger than any terrestrial nicker or bogle Rossamund had known before. Exclamations of disgust and wonder came from the watching cottagers witnessing from the windows below.
In defense of their fellows, the other forms fell apart into a mass of saps, how many hundreds Rossamund could not count. A score tried to surge Europe, to engulf her with their coils and their spiny sucking mouths. With a hurtling sweep of her sizzling fuse she kept them bayed, leaping lightly onto the boulder and sending the half-full basin tumbling. Gaining the higher vantage, she seemed for a moment on an island awash in a seething inky sea, swatting down every slick, black, lashing fluke with flash after flash of violent light.Yet a fight did not prove to be the wriggling things' primary desire. Protected by the aggression of a few, the great bulk of the foul worms slid away with astonishing speed into the benighted meadow.
A musket shot coughed, and another. An eruption of gun-smoke fouled the air before Rossamund.
'Stop!' he hollered, sliding upon his stomach down the incline of the roof, barely catching himself on the lip of the tiles, his thrice-high tumbling to the ground far below, the flammagon spared such treatment by the tangle of its strap about Rossamund's shoulders. Craning his neck to look beneath the eaves, he was confronted by the startled upside-down face of a determined Master Parfait, still with smoking long-rifle in hand. 'YOU'LL HIT HER!'
The admonition did nought to halt the disgruntled parmister, who, already in the throes of reloading, primed his pan and thrust his musket out of the upper window to take aim. Rossamund would have none of this, and stretching precariously, humours swelling in his head, he snatched the barrel of the firelock and wrested it from the uppity fellow's misguided grasp with a smart tug.
A muffled girlish shriek from a lady-watcher at another window and Rossamund looked up to see in the sinking glow of the flammagon that the remaining saps harrying Europe had wound themselves together into a single form. The bulging, oversized creature bent up, whipping its single worm head at the fulgar and forcing her to spring in elegant retreat off the rock.
Rossamund scrambled, almost toppling, to the scale and blundered down, leaping the last third in anxious hurry as he saw the secondhand flash and heard another arcing zzzock! Pouncing around the corner, stolen musket still in hand, he saw Europe standing higher up the slope, her back to the settlement wall. Brandishing the fuse like some ancient heldin's spear, she drove it right into the heart of the collective triple-sized worm. With a satisfying zzzzack! the foul things flailed apart, their grip on each other loosening in their demise. They fell twitching dead to the grass, until only one remained upright, skewered through its mouth by the fulgaris, its slimy hide hissing and bubbling where it had split apart under Europe's eclatics. With a grimace, she withdrew the fuse from the charry mess and scowled out to the moonlit pastures.
Rossamund could not find any others near; nor, as he clambered atop the very rock from which Europe had first fought, did he spy any hint of motion on the meadow. 'They've escaped,' he declared redundantly, unsure what to feel, touching his nose against the musty metallic stink hanging in the air.
'Exactly why I have already sought a pathpry,' said the fulgar tetchily, stepping beside him and handing him his hat. 'Tomorrow, first peep of dawn-if your masters have proved successful-we shall track them to their lair.' Stalking the mound, she set to finishing those saps that yet twitched with the weak ebbing of their previous animation, until all were dead. 'Oh,' she said placidly, standing over one lifeless worm lying by the foot of the mound, a neat bullet wound in its flank, 'they actually managed to hit one.'
'I tried to stop them.' Rossamund grimaced, holding up the purloined firelock.
'Hmm' was all the fulgar answered.
Monsiere Trottinott was thoroughly impressed, and all the citizens of Scantling Aire were amazed at the feats performed by the Branden Rose.
'The job is but part done, sir,' she replied to the Monsiere's breathless enthusiasm as they entered the safety of Scantling Aire's yard. 'There is one dead out there, pierced by a musket hole that one of your wayward franklocks ought to claim'-the Monsiere looked ashamedly to the floor-'though I do not think the ichor of such unnaturally foul things would be any use for puncting-nor would I risk it if I were you.'
The defense declared a great victory; it was universally agreed that the sloe saps-as folks began to call them-were unlikely to return.
As a precaution, Rossamund set small purple cones of repellent-compounded ash of Mehette-atop the rocks where the pudding basins of blood-curdle had previously rested. Found by the box in the saumery, the repellent had a familiar noxious reek that summoned a powerful memory of Licurius doing much the same about the night camp long ago.
With admirable persistence, Autos insisted upon helping, bearing candle and taper to light each cone and following so zealously close that the young factotum was grateful for the darkness to disguise his discomfort in handling it. The faint grassy breeze coming off the meadows shifted and sent the merest whiff of Mehette-fume up Rossamund's nose, stunning him, his vision flashing, intellectuals reeling, sending him staggering away from the vile stuff in a fit of coughing.
'It must be very strong,' Autos marveled, thumping Rossamund on the back as if food were choking him.
'It-is-,' Rossamund squeezed out between gags, sight blurred with tears, bent double and rocking under the well-intentioned blows. 'K-keep… b-back!'
Granted sleep for the remains of the night, he was shown by a plump-faced dame in earth-brown shirts up to one of the cottages' higher rooms. Its crude walls were white and lumpy, its shallow wood-beam ceiling angling
