Rossamund extracted another salpert of Frazzard's powder. Oh, for something more deadly! Yet he did not dare use the loomblaze for fear it would cause the dry, dusty furtigrade to take fire, and start an unstoppable conflagration right within the foundations of the manse. He threw the potive hard on the step before the gudgeon, seeking to make a brief barrier, to give the abomination second thoughts.The potive popped and crackled as it erupted and sprayed the gudgeon again. With its cries of rage oddly flat and muffled in the squeeze of the dusty furtigrade, Rossamund dashed up the stairs, pain jarring up his bitten shin.
The foul thing was staggering up after him-he could see it through the frame and rails-eyes fizzing, weeping gore, utterly ruined by two doses of Frazzard's powder, jaw a crooked mass, mouth dribbling unstoppably. There was something almost pathetic about this abominable creature with its terrible injuries, yet it did not heed its damage. With long, clumsy reaches of its arms, the gudgeon slapped its hands on a higher step, felt the way and pulled itself up, gaining pace. There was no escaping the thing. Rossamund could only try to flee up the furtigrade and out into the unknown cavities of the vault above.
"Help!" he cried, a small pathetic sound in this claustrophobic fastness.
The gudgeon slunk around the landing below, starting up the very stair he was upon. It jabbered at him incomprehensibly, trying to form vile taunts with its broken, dribbling maw.
"Help!" Rossamund bellowed again. He knew it was hopeless, but sanguine hope kept him crying.
He set his feet on the creaking boards of the tiny landing by the wrenched door, giving himself a little space to fight from, and seized a caste of loomblaze from his salumanticum. He had to risk it or perish. Rossamund watched the ill-gotten thing climb, and waited. Waited till it was close enough.
"Whhyyy-bbll-ssooo-blbb-ssstiiilll-blbl, littbblle-bblmooorsel-bbl," the horror drooled and, despite blindness, gathered itself to pounce.
With a tenorlike wail, Rossamund leaped down the stairs and grappled the foul creature once more, hitting the banister rail as they collided, wrenching it with an ominous crack. The gudgeon tried to pound at him, but Rossamund was in close, too close for its swings to be effective. It thumped at his shoulders, pushing him down beneath its wrath. He gagged and spat bile.Yet as it smothered him, the prentice gripped the gudgeon about its festering neck and shoved the caste of loomblaze down into the foul, broken mouth, right into its crop.The gudgeon tried to chew off his hand, its broken jaw doing little more than a gory flapping. It wrapped its tongue about Rossamund's wrist and with groping, gripping hands sought to gouge at the prentice's face. Straining and twisting his head, Rossamund wrenched himself loose and away, bringing his arm back sharply to chop at the creature's throat, where the frangible vial had lodged. At the second blow the gudgeon gave a convulsing, gargling shriek: a half-human, piglike squeal. Yellow-green gouts of light flared from its mouth and nostrils as the loomblaze erupted within its neck. It writhed and arched its back, still screaming as Rossamund kicked it away and fumbled for safety on higher steps. He watched in horror as the burning rever-man toppled against the already weakened rail. It gave way and the beast plummeted through the thin gap about which the furtigrade wound, shattering the rail below; falling, colliding and falling again a score of times more than Rossamund could follow, before abruptly halting, a small bright fire in the darkest depths below.
Laboring for breath, shin a torture, his mind's eye revisiting the horror over and over in a giddy spin, Rossamund pulled himself away from the edge of the gap. He shook himself, stood, and on wobbling legs went as fast as he could down the furtigrade, terrified that some other revenant-beast might be waiting for him above. Far down the dangerously shuddering stair, deeper still, he could see the dying flicker of the loomblaze burning.The frame of the furtigrade began to crack and sag, the age-rotten wood not able to support such rough use. Back at the walled valley he leaped from the tottering stair and ran, legs still shaky, back the way he had come, finding the original four-way vault. Going left again he pushed on, listening always for sounds of pursuit, another caste of loomblaze ever ready in his grasp. So intent was he on knowing if he was followed he took little notice of the perpendicular twists and the turns, choosing left when he could, going either up or down with an instinct born of desperation. If he hit a dead end he would simply turn about and take the next left, eyes wide as wide could be, ears pricked for any wheezing shuffling of a gudgeon in pursuit.
Driven by the nauseating urgency to be free of this crowding, dusty labyrinth, Rossamund pushed on through more and more cramped passages and buried, forgotten rooms. Stumbling dizzily several times, he had no notion of how long or how far he had come, but at some point the way became straighter and the architecture familiar. At the top of a solid flight of stone steps he stopped in front of a door with a very ordinary-looking handle in it, just like those on the doors of the manse. Excited, he tugged. The door resisted at first, but after a determined pull it opened with a clatter. The relief was powerful, hysterical. Rossamund sprang out, all sense of decorum abandoned. "Raise the alarm!" he hollered. "A rever-man! A rever-man!"
And there, on the other side, he found himself staring directly at the shocked face of the Master-of-Clerks.