Chirrup! cried the sparrow emphatically. Chirrup! Chirrup!
Humours beating loudly in his ears, Rossamund unfastened the lock of the gate and stepped out onto the Harrow Road to find three more rabbits, meaner, mangier-looking beasts surviving in the city itself, noses patiently twitching. Have they actually done as I have asked? he marveled. Securing the lock, he properly belted his digitals and stoups about his waist as Darter Brown took a perch upon his shoulder.
At the lead, this little drove of rabbits immediately set off, taking him south over the Footling Inch Bridge and toward Brandentown proper. On puddled moon-shone streets, Rossamund followed the pallid flash of the rabbits' cotton-tails as the blithely beasts bounded steadily from shadow to shadow. Often they would spring well ahead to wait on the edge of lantern light. When Rossamund drew near, on they would hop to the next bend or corner to wait once more. Whenever some night-active person crossed their path-a night-soil-man with stinking cart or a desperate takeny seeking a late fare-the rabbits would scurry into the murk and obstacles of the street, to emerge once more when the way was clear.
Going left off the Harrow Road it was a long jog before they finally approached the circuit before the Moldwood. Rossamund wondered for a moment as they passed its ironbound entrance what the Lapinduce might think of his little charges heeding Rossamund's bidding. He must surely know… Here they were met by another rabbit, as large as Ogh and Urgh yet with velvet fur of distinguished and near-invisible black, who took the lead and without hesitation continued onward down the Dove.
The blockhouse of the Cripplegate loomed, guarded even at this waning hour by a trio of flagging gate wards drooping on their muskets by a burning brazier in the shadow of the gate's great arch. Senses taut, Rossamund watched as first Ogh and Urgh passed through unremarked in the shadows of the deep slate gutters between road and walk, barely daring to breathe as he went along himself.
'A little late for the little lord, ain't it?Yer mistress got ye baiting lovers, 'ey, boy-o?' was the sole comment, which set the three gate wards to lewd chuckling. Mercifully, however, they did not press further with awkward questions.
Just beyond the Cripplegate the rabbits halted.
Grateful for the pause and wishing he had thought to bring a skin or biggin of water, Rossamund cautiously drew closer and saw them in silent communion with another of their tribe, a small and shabby beast.Their conference complete, the growing trace of coneys sprang off as one, made an abrupt left off the Dove and went down a street, running in the shadow of the curtain wall and its hem of half-houses. Rossamund glimpsed a sign calling it Cannon Street, and it proved a long curving way, the rabbits keeping to it as Phoebe reached her acme and began her descent of the murky, partly spangled sky. Finally at a fork they were met with another shabby city-living lapin-beast who assumed the role of pilot and took them right. On a lesser perpendicular junction yet another coney met them and took charge, keeping to the way they were on.
Abruptly a bedraggled hungry-eyed dog sprang bawling from some narrow alley and bore down on the coneys, intent on making one its late supper.The mangy rabbits disappeared in a trice, haring back past Rossamund, while Ogh and Urgh and their larger brother remained frozen in lantern light. Rossamund leaped forward to intervene, his sudden action flinging a sleepy Darter Brown from his shoulder roost. He need not have worried, for as soon as the cur closed, all three rabbits jumped high about it and kicked the dog savagely in its snout and neck, avoiding snapping jaws and kicking again and again.
The dog howled and stumbled. Utterly confounded, it scrabbled back.
Ogh and Urgh chased it down, still trying to kick it, sending the dog yowling to vanish down the lane whence it had sprung.
From a window high above, some surly soul half hollered for quiet.
Grown to a crowd of well over a dozen, the rough-rabbits reappeared and the weird band continued, new coneys materializing from obscure nooks at each significant change in course to take the lead. On streets empty and strangely still, Rossamund jogged stumblingly on, the rabbit-drove ever before and about him. Spotting a grand fountain bubbling on his left, set at the end of a very short alley in a tall alcove made into the side of some windowless wall, he called quietly for his guides to halt. Slaking his thirst with rapid slurping handfuls of the musty waters and joined by many of the rabbits too, he stared at the sculpted faucet. Made of black marble, its eyes a glaring gleaming white, it was a full-proportioned figure of the heldin Tascifarnias wrastling the great sea-wretchin Lampedusa, gripping the nadderer in a mortal stranglehold even as the beast pierced him through with its spines.Though he was certain the sculptor had not intended it, the image seemed to him apt: that the more everymen fought the monsters, the more they did themselves in…
Wetting a handkerchief broidered elaborately at the corners with red and magenta, he went to dab at his forehead and found that the sparrow mask was still there, pushed up on his crown and forgotten.
A boom like the detonation of a cannon seemed to roll up from the harbor.
Europe's assault was proceeding more violently than he had imagined.
With one last noisy mouthful of water, Rossamund was quickly on the way again, a whole herd of rabbits stretched before him across the ancient paving.Though he could not be certain, their number seemed to have increased to near three dozen even as they had paused, becoming a tide of downy fur flowing through the streets and the small-hour hush of the city.Yet, such a crowd as they were, loping before or beside or behind him and even through his legs, Rossamund neither trod on one nor was tripped.
On the other side of an elegant four-arched bridge crossing a broad, hissing stream, Rossamund realized he was being escorted into the seedy side of the city: the dockland suburbs, where shadows were long, streets crooked and terrible affairs easily hidden. They moved in a patter of paws like muted rain down ancient stinking laneways whose cloacal reek even the approaching pungence of the Grume could not cover, passing rickety tenements whose foundations were laid before the Tutelarchs first arrived.
Somewhere near in this brooding den a fiddle and fife trilled a merry jig and voices called and jeered in desperate, almost angry pleasure.
Fastening his frock coat higher as if to ward himself, Rossamund pulled his sparrow mask over his face, hoping his own bizarre appearance might give folks given to violence cause to think again.
Grown to more than two score and ten, the drove of rabbits proved strangely and surprisingly certain in this menacing place, keeping confidently to their path despite the many blind lanes and bad-ending ambulatories. They surged by the few folk milling in self-absorbed groups or stumbling, soused, along the threatening row. Amazingly, the rabbits went largely ignored, and if acknowledged, they were greeted with either flabbergasted stupefaction or a kind of fumbling, familiar horror, even sending some poor soul blubbering and hastening some other way.
'Away with thee, Rabbit-o'-Blighty! Ex munster vackery!'
The sweetly acrid stink of the vinegar sea was doubled by an undeniably fishy odor as the streets gained a clutter of lobster pots and smudgy upside-down jolly boats.
Another powerful boom ahead set windows rattling.
Heads poked from windows and doors, all looking in the same direction.
'Been goin' on fer an hour now,' he heard called above him by a crotchety onlooker.
'Full-blowed war right in the Alcoves,' complained another. 'Good gracious, what's that below us?'
'Blight me white, it's the Sparrownucker-man!'
Hurrying, panting, shuffling on, Rossamund thought he smelled powder smoke as he left the distressed natives to their alarm. Some way ahead came the echoing clatter of musketry, far off yet unmistakable. Gasping in air, he pushed against the waxing pangs in limb and lung.
The drove swollen surely beyond count, Rossamund was led on to broader streets, empty again, lined with sheers and loading stages: the stowage roads between storehouses, weighhalls and shipping clericies that went down to the harbor proper and the muffled tolling of buoys. At first lost, he still had a sense of heading south and east as he was guided far into this dockland, until as they came to a road of identically commonplace half-houses, he had notion he had seen such streets before…
On the way to the Broken Doll with Rookwood…
Brazen plaques fixed to the twin ranks of their front steps spoke universally of tolling offices, shipping clerks and maritime lawyers.Yet here on this dull street the great horde of coneys finally stopped. As a single creature they gathered on road and pavement to stare at one particular building some way down on the left and as
