many times more.
Cinnamon!
Here, surely, was the very creature who had deposited him, pink and wailing, into Fransitart's reluctant arms, now bartering mighty buffets with a jackstraw, terrible hits of hoof and beak and claw that sent the other reeling.
Thrown to the weedy cobbles only a few feet away, the other two clothmen righted themselves. Dribbling maddened spittle, Sackhead scuttered forward on bladed hands and toes to pinch the young factotum about his ankle with cruel iron fingers. Tripping back, Rossamund was saved from a fall by the stub of wall behind him. Levering against it, he kicked and lashed with his unhindered leg, pounding the jackstraw's arm and wrist, feeling bone and desiccated tendons crack and crush under heel. Above, Darter Brown flapped, cursing in the abominable creature's face and soiling on its already filthy clothes.
With a spang! of metallic joints, the wood-headed jackstraw rose sluggishly from the remains of the doorway where Cinnamon must have thrown it down. Its box staved in at one side, and seeping black, it fixed the appallingly vacant hole of its single eye upon Rossamund.
Rossamund heaved on the wall to flip himself over and was seized by the foot once more. Twisting away from the rotten merciless grasp, he tripped and slid jarringly down the wall onto his side.
Abruptly, a sizeable stone smote Woodenhead on its already damaged cranium panels. Another struck it an instant later and the jackstraw faltered in midstep. At this a veritable rain of rocks, branches, pinecones and dried dung began to hail on the cloth-man rever. Beyond the tumbledown wall Rossamund spied a tiny figure on the other side of the level, its yellow eyes angry-wide.
'Freckle!' he cried involuntarily, kicking with fresh vigor at the sack-faced fiend trying again to stand and lift him by his leg. Dear Freckle!
Flinging whatever came handy at the pestilent creature, the glamgorn blinked at him in recognition. Many of the lighter missiles bounced off harmlessly, almost comically. Some showered around Rossamund, but with the muffled clunk of rock on metal and wood, many stones flew true and the rever's body began to buckle under the mucky, stony sleet.
The flat staccato cough of a volley of firelocks sounded from the heights, accompanied by shouts and a single dull pop. Just as dread for Europe and his old masters rose, a blitz of lightning struck again, three swift strikes hitting the hill above, silencing all else as it shattered the very air.
With a mighty wrench of his fettered leg Rossamund pulled free of Sackhead, clawing and pulling at the cobbles to get himself away. Woodenhead collapsed to its knees but still crawled on. In that instant the young factotum glimpsed Cinnamon through the door gap of the other room, skipping under the third jackstraw's wicked grasp. The nuglung seized the abomination by hip and chest, and in a twinkling tore it completely in two.Without a pause the bogle-princeling tossed the top half of the rever far into the precipitous woods and, swinging the bestial legs, rushed to Rossamund's aid. Leaping lightly over boy and wall, he bore down on the limping jackstraw clutching relentlessly for its prey with a click-clack of its metal talons-battering the vile thing with the riven legs, hitting again and again with such savagery that bits of jackstraw quickly began to flick and spatter.
Arms full of old debris, Freckle sprang onto the top of the adjacent wall, pummeling Woodenhead with stone after stone. When his armload was spent, he jumped down to bounce upon the cloth-man, yipping loudly and with relish as he pounded the thing to bits.
In awe, Rossamund strove to stand, his whole body thudding with hurts, blasted hand slick with gore slithering off whatever they touched. Another pop of a firelock from the woods and he revived. At the left side of the level he saw a sheer flight of crumbling stone stairs that climbed the hill from the edge of the foundation. Running out of the ruin's vestigial entrance, he mounted this stairway, Darter Brown winging to join him. Sucking at the air in rasping gulps, Rossamund clawed up the sheer path. Many yards to the right, half hidden in a grove of pine trees, he caught sight of the woman in the white dress, sagging where she stood-heedless of the world-braced with one gloved hand upon a trunk, her face a sickly gray under its pretty bonnet.
A close clash of weapons and Rossamund had a brief sight of Fransitart higher up the bank, standing at the threshold of an enormous bush of olive that grew beside the steps. White hair flying, musketoon in one hand and his hanger in the other, the ex-dormitory master was sparring sword to gabelung with a fictler who was flailing with a young man's impatience against Fransitart's watchful defense. Across the curve of the incline, a wild Piltdowner man, bloodied and angry-eyed, crouched in the concealment of the tipped and broken landaulet to level a firelock on the old vinegaroon. Snatching up the first projectile handy, Rossamund pitched a pinecone, the seedy bullet humming smartly as it flew, hitting the Piltman on the cheek in a mighty spray of splintering cone at the very instant of firing. In the CRACK! of the shot, Fransitart struck his adversary a telling cut upon the neck and toppled with the dying foe to the ground.
The Piltman staggered off down the hill, tripping on weeds and roots. Rossamund did not wait to know the man's fate but pivoted and dashed to the great olive where Fransitart had fallen, terrified of what he would find.
Between him and his purpose crawled a lone jackstraw, legs torn away, pawing at the weeds and dirt, scaling the hillside with arms alone, metal teeth gnashing, more the mindless unrelenting predator now.
'Enough!' Fury boiling in a red instant, Rossamund snatched at a broken piece of wall embedded in the hillside-a stone as big as his own chest-and heaved it from the soil with both hands. In a spray of worms and wood-lice and soil, he hefted the stone high, and, dropping to his knees, brought it down with all his monstrous might right on the wretched laboring abomination's sack-cloth skull, burying the stone and putrid flesh with it a hand span deep into the mold.
About him silence settled on the woods: no crack of firelock, no clash of blows, just the anxious hush of an aftermath.
'Well done, dear lad…,' Fransitart's voice broke through his desolation.
Heart leaping, Rossamund looked up.
The old vinegaroon was limping toward him, clutching at his stomach and using the musketoon as a crutch along the uneven ground. His face was dreadfully swollen about the eyes, his bottom lip split and gory, his hair congealing with red.
With a sob of relief, Rossamund sprang the scant yards and clasped arms with the startled sea dog. 'And Craumpalin…'
In the cool of the enormous olive, Fransitart revealed the dispenser, propped in the deep bole of the tree, partially concealed by the roots and a smooth stone about which the olive had matured, making it almost a part of itself. Craumpalin was disconcertingly still, his eyes closed, his beard bedraggled with blood, his breath shallow huffs. A soaking bloodied scarf lay near, and another was bound about his throat.
'Master Pin…' Rossamund dropped to his knees beside the fallen fellow.
'He's been poorly handled, lad.That bang let off by them filthy scupperers gave 'm a prodigious bad gash in th' neck 'ere-' Fransitart drew a line on the left side of his neck with his finger as he spoke out of the side of his wounded mouth. 'I reckon 'is legs are broke… but 'e's holdin' together, though 'e'll need a seam-stitcher an' two good splints afore too long.'
'I have thrombis and strupleskin.' Rossamund reached for his left stoup. 'We can stop the holes at least.' Only now, in the numb astonishment after hand strokes, did he become properly alive to the sharp hurt of his own hand, finding too a vigorous ache in his shoulders, as if someone had tried to unattach his arm at its socket. He gingerly hooked the partscontainer-baldric and all-from his shoulder. 'Could you please find them?' he asked his old master sheepishly.
'What have ye done to yer paw, lad?' The ex-dormitory master scowled at the burnt flesh as he took the stoup.
'I–I broke a potive.' The young factotum made a wry face at his old master's sharp astonishment. 'Where are your hurts?' he inquired evasively.
'I've got a prodigious crack on me crown an' a smart thump to me chest beams,' Fransitart explained as he fossicked for th' right items. 'We were pitched cap o'er end down the hill. After clearin' me intellectuals, findin' an' a-haulin' dear Pin into th' bush, I found this 'ere musketoon still fit to fire an' took one of them baskets aimin' on yer miss with it, then swapped a swing o' blows with another. Did th' same again shortly after, then ye showed yerself…'
Underbrush rustled and a small form pushed into the haven of the dense olive boughs.
