fellow, spreading farther yet to swallow those about. Horrified, Rossamund watched as those caught in the oily vapor were blistered black, screeching their pain. Three fellows stumbled off the road and tumbled down the bank, to land steaming and lifeless.
However, the general press was not thwarted, and almost as a single creature the reckless mass of bravoes rushed to where the fulgar must have lain vulnerable on the road.
With an almost joyful 'HA!' Europe abruptly appeared, springing to her feet and thrusting her fuse into the sky. A mighty lightning bolt spat down from the murk and struck the fulgaris, coruscating down the fulgar's upraised arm. Passing right through her, it stabbed out blindingly from her outstretched hand. The writhing bolt struck the massed company, leaping from one man to the next, calling more lightning from the roiling heavens independent of the fulgar's summoning, smashing all about her. Rossamund cowered at the roar, stumbling against the bole of a pine, hands over ears, sure that they and the whole world with them would rupture. Bolt after bolt stabbed with bursting, crushing thunderings-five-six-seven-eight, slaying most fellows instantly, leaving others shattered while the remaining few recoiled, some already scampering away.
Even as reverberations of thunder rolled about the wold, Rossamund was struck hard from the left, a potent blow skewering him in his kidneys, sending him sprawling to the mold. Seeing stars, he felt a rough-clothed arm pinch him about his neck in a malicious embrace, pressing his face into the leaf litter and dust. An all-too-familiar threwdless dread constricted in his soul. Rever-man! A second great strength pinned him in the small of his back, holding him to the ground while a cruel, cold grip took hold of his arms. He flailed his legs, bucking with all his might, near dislodging his captors' callous clutches. He got one brief and terrifying hint of an expressionless, empty-eyed face before a coarse sack was jerked forcibly over his own head and then cords wrapped about his throat to be pulled choking tight.
Swallowing hard against the pressure on his gourmand's cork, Rossamund refused to let this be his end. Somehow he managed to get a toe-hold in the slippery needles and with every mite of his thew pushed, wrenching sideways, breaking the hold on his wrists. Kicking out savagely, his left foot connected with something yielding. Instantly realizing he was free of constraint, he flung himself down the slope, tumbling, hitting the ground hard over and over with shoulders and back. His career stopped with a neuralgic jolt, leaving him winded and sitting on flatter land. Tearing the cord from his throat and the bag from his head he saw that he had landed in the very midst of the tumbledown foundations of some roofless dwelling. Built on a small cobbled shelf, it was clearly long abandoned, its crumbling sandstone stained and moldering.
The stuttered cough of firelocks resounded flatly from the trees above, followed by a shout diminishing in volume and a powerful zzack!
Europe!
Crashes in the nearby underbrush descended swiftly toward him. Scrabbling to stand and drawing a caste of Frazzard's powder, Rossamund spied a misshapen figure plunging down the hill. Pulling his clammy vent about his mouth and nose, the young factotum recoiled as the assailant burst through a stand of juvenile pines at the edge of this level shelf. But for the threwdless emptiness of this being, he might have thought by its filthy frock coat and jauntily tilted tricorn that he was beset by a drunkard. Formed from cloth and wood and metal springs as much as of fleshly parts, this thing was not the headlong, bloodthirsty bits of meat the revermen he had met before had been. It seemed careful, almost calculating, as it regarded him from the black holes in its sack-cloth head, its eyes perpetually open in an exaggerated expression of horror.This was a jackstraw, the acme of a black habilist's arts.
Regardless, the swift familiar hatred expanded within Rossamund's bosom. Drawing away, he had the strangest impression of a subtle almost-witting, not the stark frission of a neuroticrith, rather something communicative fluttering on the boundaries of sensation.
Gurgling, the jackstraw sprang at him, reaching with arms ending in long fiendish blades scissoring where palm and fingers should have been, their filthy corroded edges glinting dully.
Reeling, Rossamund pitched the Frazzard's at the thing's head with a deft flick, the repellent bursting with blue-flashing detonations right upon its sack-draped face. The jackstraw stumbled briefly yet righted itself, dribbling fizzing mucus from a rent scorched in the cloth. The young factotum retreated through the remnants of a door, reaching into his stoup for a lepsis of greenflash, putting a broken stub of a wall between him and his hunter.
In a glimpse of something incongruously pale above, he spied the white woman in the summer dress who had first hailed them on the road, now standing several yards farther up the incline, her eyes knotted closed in an expression of severe-almost ravenous-concentration. Arms bent out at the elbows, both her hands were stretched and grasping at the blank air with jerky and ferocious passion.
The thin witting sensation fluctuated. Surely she and the cloth-man were connected. She witted, it moved.
Was such a thing possible?
Attention fixed on the jackstraw stalking before him, Rossamund found and clasped the caste of greenflash. As he drew it forth, a crushing blow slapped him upon the side of his head, sending him sprawling, skidding across the moss and paving to crumple into the roofless remains of a small room. Intellectuals swimming, he shook his head to right himself, a sharp iron tang in mouth and nose. Sight blurred and swimming, he forced himself to his feet even as he realized that there was a second cloth-made reverman coming at him, leaping over the wall, the newcomer possessing a wooden box for a head. They were on him just as he understood his peril. With no time to think, Rossamund clapped the egg-caste of greenflash still in his grasp on the chest of the nearest jackstraw.
In a white flash, a thousand writhing agonies tore at him within and without. All notion was obliterated in a vast, ringing nothing… Something heavy in his hearing reverberated with a damp gonging. His skin crawled; his innards writhed. With a nauseating heave the cosmos reformed again, leaving Rossamund anguished and beaten, gagging for air against a sucking wetness about his mouth and nose. He clawed clumsily at his face with limbs sluggish and unhelpful, half tearing the vent away in suffocating distress to let blood flow unhindered from his nose. He looked in amazement at his hand, discovering the palm of his glove scorched completely away, the flesh beneath blistered and bloodied, and marveled dumbly at how little it hurt.
Burnt and torn, the two jackstraws had been thrown back too, sprawled akimbo against the farther wall. The rever with the wooden head was missing an arm, but far from undone, it staggered to stand, trying to reach for him with its remaining hand, mummified and black.
Suddenly, over the near wall of the ruin, only a few yards from Rossamund's shoulder, a third cloth-man reared. With cruel deliberation, it pulled itself over the stonework to crouch upon the crumbling masonry on what appeared to be the legs of a donkey. Giving voice to a hissing ruttle through sagital teeth of befouled iron set in gums swollen and diseased, it reached for him.
Rossamund shrank from the vile grasp, pushing wildly with wounded hands and aching legs to win clear, the tenuous, clutching witting all about.
His two original corpse-made assailants righted themselves and the three cloth-men pounced at him. Pitiless claws seized him. Iron bit at his proofing. But the costly gaulding proved its worth and held. He kicked and felt something squish and yield, yet the more Rossamund struggled, the more he seemed to be ensnared. A loathsomely cold hand clamped across his throat but did not squeeze. Without the vent to shield his nose, he inhaled the purulent fetor of his half-rotted foes and screamed a loud, long wordless terror.
A distant chirruping fury grew rapidly louder, a strange and angry chatter-chatter-chatter in the boughs above clear in the nearly silent struggle below it.
Darter Brown!
Impossibly, his tiny friend had not perished in the great blast on the road.
Right in the madness of the struggle, pressed down in the corner of a broken building, Rossamund could hear the vehement chattering, swooping and harrying just above.There was a sudden ferocious whirling and much of the overpowering assault was abruptly released.
Jerking free from the confusion and heaving himself upright on the foundation wall, Rossamund perceived a small, oddly proportioned figure in what would have once been the very next room, grappling viciously with the much larger donkey-legged jackstraw. Dressed in a frock coat of peacock blue, it had the greatly enlarged head of a sparrow. In an astonished inkling, Rossamund knew that he had seen this creature once before and heard of it
