Wrapping his arms about the pot's wide girth, Rossamund did not find the burden a trouble and, arms full of reeking offcuts, made his way to the southern keep of Wellnigh. He wrestled the great pot past the house- watchmen, a half quarto of haubardiers pacing about the edges of the road who jostled him as he tried to get around them.
'Move your ashes, scrub!'
Tottering across the Pettiwiggin, he thumped with his elbow at the small sally port in the wall of the south keep yard. No one answered, and he kept thumping until one of the haubardiers came over and, with a sardonic grin, unlocked and opened the port to let him through. In the small, high-walled space beyond were the great kennels, built up against the keep's base, barred with stout iron founded in stone. This was the cage for the dogs, five Greater Derehunds-enormous creatures with spotted flanks and slobbering jowls-that waited hungrily. Such dogs were kept at many cothouses and at Winstermill too, there to howl and yammer with great commotion if a nicker was ever near.
The Derehunds began an awful growling as soon as they saw Rossamund, all five hunched and threatening, a terrible gurgling rattle in their throats, pointed ears flat along their pied necks.
'Hallo there,' Rossamund tried, and waggled some stinking offal.
With a jerk one hound gave a savage bawling bark that sent the rest mad, leaping over each other, back and forth, crashing against the bars, baying like all wretchedness was loose.
Rossamund leaped backward, scrambling and slipping on grimed cobbles.
Officers, lighters and haubardiers rushed from all points, some shouting, some soothing the dogs in vain, many demanding, 'What did ye do?'
Some minor officer-a lieutenant-grabbed Rossamund hard under the arm and pulled him away. 'What are you practicing at?'
'Nothing, sir!' the young prentice quailed. 'I… I just tried to feed them, as ordered.'
'He's all right, sir,' offered a lighter from the day-watch. 'He was a part of that confustication last night.'
'Ah, cunning beasts,' said a haubardier in obvious admiration of the hounds, 'they can still tell the stink of the monsters on ye from yester eve.'
'Well, get him out of here,' demanded the lieutenant. 'Find him another task.'
'You had best get back to them harum-scarum ladies, lad,' the lighter said quietly. 'Quick now, before the dogs get wilder.'
Rossamund gratefully left the pot and went back to the northern keep, up the stairs, over the gallery to the temporary lodgings of the calendars.
Threnody greeted his polite good morning with little more than a cold stare and silence. Dolours looked as poorly as she had on the night previous.
'May I offer you a draught mixed with bellpomash, m'lady?' Rossamund inquired.
'You most certainly may,' she returned gratefully.
Rossamund went quickly to the kitchen and asked permission of the cook to prepare the restorative. The best he could do was to mix it with saloop and add some lordia too, but Dolours did not fuss. She drank it down and returned the bowl to him with a smile.
'My thanks to you. We will be ready presently.'
He waited a goodly while by the door as the calendars prepared to leave.
Charllette the pistoleer was to stay behind and take a post-lentum back east by way of the Roughmarch, the threwdish gap through the Tumblesloe Heap. She would return to the Lady Vey and the stronghold of the calendars, bearing with her dispatches and the bodies of the two dead. Dolours,Threnody and the wounded dancer Pandome, who lay unconscious on a bier with her face and head entirely bandaged, were to go west to Winstermill. Despite the bellpomash brew, the bane still showed the strain of her malady and Rossamund asked after her health once more.
'Why, I thank you, young lighter,' Dolours replied. 'Truly I would not have set out so ill had not the need been pressing. You understand the life of service, I am sure.'
Rossamund nodded wholeheartedly. 'I shall recommend you to our physician when we return, m'lady. They say there's nothing he can't mend.'
Dolours smiled and Threnody frowned.
When all was ready the small party set out in pouring rain-fighting weather, Europe would have called it. For a moment Rossamund wondered where the terrible fulgar might be. Was she still in Sinster-that city famous for its transmogrifying surgeons, the makers of lahzars-to be mended after the near-fatal spasming of her artificial fulgar's organs? Would she soon return, as she had promised, to see how he was getting on? A quiet ache set in his gall: despite his abhorrence of her trade-at her indiscriminate killing-he was actually missing the teratologist. After all, she had rescued him from that scurrilous rogue Poundinch.
Instead of an ox dray, the calendars traveled easy in a small covered curricle drawn by two sturdy donkeys. These were led by a laconic leer Rossamund had never properly met but knew from the milling of rumor and reputation to be Mister Clement. The fellow confirmed this with a sour introduction to the calendars, giving them all a dour look with his weird yellow and olive-drab eyes, as if the task was a great inconvenience. Before the leer put on his sthenicon Rossamund marveled at his wrong-colored eyes, so different from Sebastipole's. For Clement was a laggard, like Licurius, better able to spy things hidden in shadows and darkness and nooks than a falseman, but less capable of spotting lies. His biologue in place, the leer took them out on the road. He talked little, instead bending all his energy to searching ahead and aside for the evidences of a monster.
After his experience at the strangling hands of Licurius, Rossamund walked a little uneasily beside Clement. Exposed to the foul weather and equally silent, the young prentice was nevertheless grateful to have the leer's senses to forewarn them. That at least was a genuine comfort.
The calendars themselves also proved ill-disposed to speak, and the whole journey from cothouse to manse was accomplished in near silence.
They traveled back through the Briarywood, back through its hinting threwd, passing the scene of last night's violence. Despite a wet day, stains of spilled blood still showed black in the dirt of the road. Under a heavy guard of haubardiers, with the chortling morning chorus of birds making light of the grisly work, a toiling fatigue party from Wellnigh House's day-watch struggled to build and light a pyre of the fallen nickers and dead horses. The bodies of slain monsters needed to be disposed of promptly, for it was held that, left to rot, a nicker's corpse always attracted more of the living kind.
Walking through the Harrowmath, Rossamund started and stared at every rustle in the high grass. The rain increased and his thrice-high filled with water, which spilled inconveniently whenever he moved his head.
With each lamp they passed he felt a steady urgency to wind out the bloom, even though it was day. He had been in lessons (Readings on Our Mandate and Matter with Mister Humbert) in which the prentices were belabored with the notion that the Conduit Vermis was the spine about which many towns and villages grew; that the road allowed these towns to be knit as more than just remote settlements; that it was for the lamplighters to toil and keep the Wormway clear; that if they did not, then the whole of civilization might fail and fall to rapid ruin. To light the lamps meant that the kingdoms of humankind could sleep well that night. Every lamp they passed was a memorial to him of this heavy responsibility. He sighed, letting his fodicar drag in the soupy slick that filmed the hard-packed clay of the revered road.
'Lift your lantern-crook, boy!' came the rough command of the leer, and the young prentice obeyed with an unthinking start. Shrugging his shoulders against the wet, Rossamund pushed on. Between the silence of the calendars, the taciturn concentration of Clement, and the broad, brooding Harrowmath, he lamented how different life might be as a vinegaroon or-he wondered for a moment-even as Europe's factotum.
4
