There must have been water about, despite the arid soil and thirsty plants, for as they walked the young lighter could hear frogs croaking, creaking and ponging at every hand; it might have been a friendly chorus, but the uneasy threwd, amplified by the fetid eastern breeze, turned the amphibious music sinister. Sometimes they would stop, leaving an eerie hush that set Rossamund anxiously searching for a lurker.
Untroubled, Sequecious pushed effortlessly through a thicket and the young lighters followed in the wake the great man's girth made, unhindered by stem or twig. They were in the stand of swamp oaks at last, a dim grove that soughed uneasily in the wind.
Clearly pooped by the effort of the short walk, the cook puffed, "Yee find out yonder, boyo," pointing to the farthest end of the modest wood. "An' yee, girly, go between." He indicated the middle ground to an unhappy-looking Threnody. "I am being right hereabouts. Look in between th' roots an' under tha leaves an' be putting thrumcops in these an' I bring them back to pot when full, tank yee," he concluded, giving the two an old post-bag each.
Barely comprehending the cook's odd talk but following his intention, Rossamund went to his designated end of the trees, his footfalls gritty on the dry, spongy mat of needles that kept the thicket floor clear of weeds and other choking grasses. Threnody walked a little ahead of him. He could hear her muttering, "I've been in the hands of the best sectifactors in the land and they have me out here looking for toadstools." Without another word she turned aside at an arbitrary place and began looking about the ground with little conviction, toeing here and there among roots.
Rossamund moved deeper into the grove.
Wings whirring, a sparrow alighted suddenly on an over-arching branch.With a sharp turn in his innards, Rossamund had the odd, almost threwdish sense that this was the same bird that had flown up to the doorsill of the carriage when the post-lentum was waiting at Cothallow. He stopped, hands on hips, and stared at the remarkable, persistent bird, which swiveled its head, observing him cannily in return.
"Hallo," Rossamund said softly, "has the Sparrowling sent you?"
The sparrow chirruped loudly.
Was that a reply?
The tiny bird chirped again and shot away, Rossamund losing sight of it in the thick foliage. Cautiously he followed its path until he came to a small dell whose entire opposite flank was overrun by a large boxthorn crowding the roots of several tall swamp oaks. A loud chattering sparrow-song sang from within.
Rossamund froze, looking left, looking right, but nothing untoward appeared. He glanced behind and could just make out the massive white bulk of Sequecious clambering about the farther end of the woods. Threnody was not visible, though Rossamund thought he could hear her foraging a short way off. Keeping an eye out, he crouched on his haunches and began to carefully poke and rake among the needles and dry soil along the lip of the dell, prospecting for the round fungus with distinct white spots. Somewhere in the treetops, doves softly cooed… cuh-coo-hoo-oo, cuh-coo-hoo-oo… in the hissing quiet. Becoming engrossed in the search, Rossamund worked his way from tree to tree, half filling his bag in quick time. It was only very gradually that he became alert to creeping movements nearby, a sound different from the constant susurrus of the needle-leaves, a sly stepping on needly ground. He first thought it was Threnody, but the subtle sounds were from the entirely opposite direction. Without putting down the sack, the young lighter eased his free hand into his salumanticum.
A dark shape sneaked into view, creeping around the side of the boxthorn, a small figure, mottled and unexpectedly familiar… Was it? Surely not! It couldn't be… Yet it was! Shuffling on the opposite side of the small dell was Freckle. There before him was the glamgorn who had comforted him in the hold of the Hogshead, one hundred and fifty miles and over two months away. For a shocked breath they simply looked at each other.
"Freckle?" Rossamund hissed, remembering himself and looking quickly about, too startled to fuss with greetings. "You can't be here! There's half a platoon of lighters in that cothouse back there." He pointed over his shoulder at the shadowy tower. "Many of them, watching us!"
"No, no, no, little once-weepy Rossamund, it is you that cannot stay, and stay you can't," the little fellow said musically, hopping from one foot to the other, deep yellow eyes catching the meager, dappled light brilliantly. These eyes were limpid and anxious-wide, and Freckle's cheeky, once-happy face was now drawn with worry and fatigue. "Not here. Not with these people who don't know yet what they ought never to know. I have come and you must get away with me."
"What do…? But how…?" Rossamund wanted to dash over and hug Freckle, but this would be the action of an outramorine-the worst kind of sedorner. Indeed, Freckle himself proved keen to keep a little space between them.
"I kept a good long look and I saw you and I followed you and I waited," the little barky-skinned bogle said quick and low, "and sometimes Cinnamon would do the following and the waiting for this one while I went on other ways."
Cinnamon has been watching too? Rossamund could not quite fathom what he was hearing.
"I have watched you learning all the dividing, conquering ways with your friends who would not be friends if they knew. Come along now, now come along," Freckle said, waving with his hand. "You saved me so I save you.The Sparrowling will have you and keep you, just as he ought.You belong nowhere, but it is safer for you to be with him. He-"
"Rossamund?" came a soft, too-familiar voice. "Wh-what are you doing with that-that thing?"
Threnody! "Ah-I-" He looked back. There she was, picking through the underbrush, looking deeply anxious. She was staring with stark intensity at Freckle, and even as she came, the girl put her hand to her forehead.
"Threnody, NO!" Rossamund cried and was instantly overwhelmed with her ill-practiced scathing, which drove him to his hands and knees. "Threnody… no…" Gritting teeth, Rossamund forced himself to clarity, growling under his breath as he struggled to sit and reach into his salumanticum for something to-to stop Threnody from hurting Freckle!-but it did not matter, for the clever little glamgorn was already clean away.Threnody sprang after it, sending again, running wildly past the boxthorn and into the net of low branches through which Freckle had first come. Her hat was sent flying as she crashed through the growth, falling at Rossamund's feet. He heard her flailing about fruitlessly, feeling the frequent edges of her scantly managed witting.
Rossamund had seen Freckle avoid a fulgar, and now the glamgorn had eluded a wit-albeit an unskilled one.
Forcing herself back through the thickly interleaved branches Threnody returned, the clinging stems tangling with her hair.With a prolonged and angry grunt she pushed clear, yet something remained behind: her lustrous black curls.They were now a knotted mass weighing down several snaring twigs. For an awful breath Rossamund thought the wicked undergrowth had wrenched her hair from her very scalp. With another shock he realized it was actually a wig. She had lost her hair from witting after all.
The girl stood in the clearing, blinking and pale, caught in a confusion of shame and fear and doggedness, her now bald head part hidden beneath white bindings.
"Haven't you ever seen a wit without her hair before?" she said darkly as she snatched her wig back from the twiggy snare, bringing most of it with her.
Utterly astounded and perplexed, Rossamund said nothing.
Sequecious came rolling over, rubicund face dribbling sweat.
"What is being yee problems?" he huffed, then puffed, "No yelling or crying, tank yee! Come! Come! We must be to going back at castle," which was his term for Wormstool. "Yee noises make for th' ungerhaur to come!"
For the short walk back to the cothouse Threnody remained tight-lipped, fidgeting with her wig, unable to set it right without a looking glass. "If mother had let me be a pistoleer…," Rossamund heard her mutter, "and not made me into a stupid hair-losing neuroticrith!"
They achieved the safety of the cothouse unharmed. Hands on head, Threnody fled to her cot. Down in the cellar, Rossamund washed himself, expecting some angry observer to hurry down and haul him before the house-major as a monster-loving outramorine. Required in the common-mess, he went as quietly as he might. Despite his fears there was not one comment; no one grabbed him and cried "Sedorner!" as he shuffled past the observers on the entry floor. Shamefaced and with his head down, he returned the hack-watch to the house-major. Grystle said naught, while Semple the day-clerk simply gave Rossamund a firm, gentlemanly nod-a greeting and nothing more. No one saw me with Freckle! They do not know! Rossamund could not decide which was the stronger emotion: his guilt or his relief.
In the common-mess he and Threnody came back together and were set to cleaning the thrumcops: sitting at the trestle, lopping the stubby stalks just above the ring, rubbing dirt from the spotty caps.
Vanity restored,Threnody refused to look at Rossamund.
"Th' good in these here," Sequecious chuckled, holding up a thrumcop, "is these are being making us uneatable to the ungerhaur. Gets in tha sweats and so we tastes too bad. Very very good, tank yee."
Rossamund nodded, scarcely following the cook's monologue, wrinkling his nose at the off-smelling fungus. I don't blame them.
Sequecious rolled out of earshot.
"What were you doing with that blighted bugaboo today?" Threnody whispered in a passion. "You had your salt-bag-you could have fought it. Instead I find you talking to it?"
"I-I was…" Rossamund had been caught and there was nothing to do but admit it.
"Tell me, what in the Sundergird were you doing with it?" Threnody pressed. "Swapping potive recipes? Bogles are for slaying or driving away, not chitter-chatter! I did not get it, and now the little blightling will be off to murder someone's chickens-or worse!"
"Not every bogle is a ravening gnasher, Threnody, deserving nothing but a hasty death-and certainly not Freckle! He helped me-"
"That's the talk of a sedorner, Rossamund! Watch your words," Threnody seethed under her breath, looking to Sequecious obliviously chopping at something in the kitchen proper. "I cannot believe you actually know the wretched thing's name."
"I'm not a sedorner just because I can see that not all monsters are bad," Rossamund countered quietly but hotly. "Else you could accuse me a murderer just for saying that not all folks are good!"
"Ugh, lamp boy!" The girl rolled her eyes. "You sound more like Dolours every time we talk!You should have been an eeker, not a lamplighter.You're most fortunate the cook did not spy what was what, or someone else on sentries for that matter. If you meet the thing again, get rid of it!"
"I will not!"
Threnody looked at him with slit-eyed scorn. "To be hung on a Catherine wheel is a bad way to end," she warned.
"How is it a good end to murder a friend?"
"You just don't understand, do you, lamp boy? Well at least you can trust me to keep this between you, me and the rising moon."
Rossamund did not answer. He was happy he did not understand and if understanding meant slaughtering every bogle in sight, he never wanted to either.
They worked on in angry silence. Between the guilt over the accidental tryst with Freckle and the regret for his falling-out with Threnody, Rossamund kept to himself that night. Instead of joining his fellows in the gap between the Limpers' arrival and douse-lanterns for games of checkers and lesquin and tots of grog, he sat on his cot and wrote a letter to Fransitart. Dating it the fifth of Herse, he described his safe arrival, gave his new address and sent his deepest affections to all who had them. It was a brief message. He did not mention the incident with the friendly glamgorn, though it sat heavily in his thoughts: such things should never be committed to paper. Rossamund had never mentioned Freckle in any of his previous communications home. Asking the house-major if he might use his wafer, Rossamund sealed the missive in a second blot of paper.
The next morning he went to Aubergene, intending to ask him to pass his letter on to the Post-Master of Bleakhall at the end of the next night's lighting-leg. The lampsmen had just returned from dousing, and were down in the cellars washing. Aubergene stood by a well bucket with hat on yet shirt off, showing bare back and shoulders crawling with scars and cruorpunxis: gruesome faces that glared and sneered from shoulder, back or chest, mute witness of a lamplighter's violent life.
Rossamund almost slipped the last few steps in shock.
Of course he had seen cruorpunxis before, but not so many on one person. This fellow seemed too young to possess such evidence of experience and slaughter. What great and terrible things had Aubergene done to earn such markings? How many of those snarling faces had actually deserved to end so ignobly as pictures to adorn a man's trunk?
Shaking, the young lighter turned and hurried back up and away. I thought Aubergene was only against the worst monsters-how many of the worst ones can there be? He would ask someone some other time for the letter to be delivered. Later that week an unexpected thing occurred. A letter came for Rossamund.
Rossamund Bookchild Lampsman 3rd Class Wormstool Cothouse The Pendant Wig The Idlewild 16th Heimio HIR 1601
Rossamund,
I thank you for your communications of the 2nd of Heimio and the 6th of the same. I shall start with congratulations on your promotion. Its gaining might be early but it is still well deserved: you shall make a fine lighter.
The matter of Numption and his bloom baths was so disturbing I nearly took the fast advice-boat in harbor back to the manse. Whatever I can do from here I will and shall.
As you have no doubt deduced from the address line, the Marshal and I remain in the subcapital. The whole process of interviews and reviews goes interminably slow. One day we might get a brief meeting to simply make a time for another brief meeting that might occur another week later. After all the rush and bluster of the first summons, the bureaucrats here are in no great hurry to give us a hearing.
All of this is made more troublesome by the unsettling buzz that the Marshal might actually be relieved of his post, and the longer we are delayed our proper review, the more likely this wretched injustice becomes.There is certainly something most insalubrious and cunning in the coincidence of events. What you have written to me in your second communique is unfortunately of no small surprise, but with so many good folk all so unfortuitously removed from the manse there is currently little that can be immediately done. What is more we need harder proofs than we currently have.
I wish I could write you happier things, but now is not that season. Nevertheless it is wise to remember that the most important battle to win is the last.
Of Discipline and Limb,
Lamplighter's Agent
Falseman to the Earl of the Baton Imperial of Fayelillian, Lamplighter-Marshal of Winstermill
Epistra Scuthae The Considine The Patricine
Do not write to me upon these matters any further-some seals have been tampered; information is going where it should not.
Once he had read it, Rossamund simply looked at the missive numbly. He wished too that Sebastipole could have written happier things. Eventually numbness turned into an anxious, angry gripping up under his ribs as he realized just how helpless he was to aid the Lamplighter-Marshal or Sebastipole or even Numps. So much good in Rossamund's small sphere was being brought to dust by the skillful machinations of a self-serving few. He showed the letter to Threnody, who snorted cynically when she was done reading it.
"The Marshal and the Agent flummoxed too: what are we to do now?" she said, apparently more interested in cleaning and admiring her pristine pistolas. "The honorable suffer and the crafty prevail."
Rossamund thought to show it to the house-major, yet what would it matter to him really, besides which he was sure Sebastipole would rather his private messages were not shown about. So Rossamund continued to heed Europe's warning and keep his thoughts to himself.Yet no matter how many nights he lay half sleeping, fretting over a solution, it never came. All he could see before him were limitless days of duty at Wormstool-small, remote, irrelevant.
Surely something good will come from all this wretchedness? One crisp, clear and early evening where the air itself felt as if it could snap with the chill, Rossamund was at sentry on the roof with Under-Sergeant Poesides and Lampsman 2nd Class Theudas.
The Fighting Top was a spectacular perch when no fog was about to hide the scene, a whole-compass view of the Frugelle, flat as flat could possibly be in any direction he cared to look. There were no hills, few very shallow valleys-mere depressions in the earth, and endless withered shrubs and drought-blasted trees. Indeed, from up on the roof, the only notable feature-apart from a tiny wood of swamp oaks to the northeast-was the Wormway itself. The Pendant Wig went west on the left hand, and kinked to east-northeast on the right: the final length of road before all habitation ceased completely and only wide, empty wilds were left. On the horizon, drawn as a deep reddish-purple line, was the western border of the fabled Ichormeer, the Gluepot, the Blood-Marsh, a brooding mark on the edge of vision. He could almost feel threwd radiate from it, reaching even here, like the heat of a bonfire.
Yet tonight, sitting quietly, Rossamund observed the lantern-watch at the lighting instead, already four lamps down the way. How he loved the beauty of the gradual increase in the light of a newly wound great-lamp, the colors shifting from grassy-green through straw-yellow and, if the water was new, to wine-vinegar clear.
As he watched, a fifth lantern began to glow green.
High off the ground, on watch with brave men, he felt his troubles markedly diminished here. A long and distant caw of a crow drifted in on the cold, fennel-perfumed breeze while restless wrens twittered and dashed about in the thistles. Rossamund relished the lightening of his soul. Threnody and he were talking once more, though they were yet to fully heal, and the passing of only a little time left him feeling less troubled about Freckle. He gave an almost contented sigh.
Poesides, who had been staring out to the south with a perspective glass, suddenly scuttled across the narrow walk between the tiles and the wall, crouched behind a rain-butt and waved the two others to do the same. "Stay out o' sight," he hissed excitedly. "There's some li'l bogle-thingy creeping down by the runnet there, not much more than one part of a mile yonder. If it don't spot us we might get a chance to take a few shots at the pot and spare ourselves a nasty end when we're out lighting."
Grinning grimly, Theudas peeked over the battlement. "I see it! The movement by them dwarfish willow-myrtles, aye?"
"Aye!" On his haunches, Poesides edged forward, easing up his firelock, creeping its muzzle on to the rim of the fortification.
Straining his neck, Rossamund could not see what they saw among the low twine of dry long-grass and tangled thickets of parched trees all across broad moorlands. Then he did: something small and furtive not more than two hundred yards away, making quick scutters from root clump to root clump along the shallow bed of a barely running creek, one of the many that curled east then north past the cothouse, to eventually drain into the sluggish river Frugal. In one horrid breath Rossamund realized he was looking at Freckle. The midget glamgorn obviously thought it was being rather cunning, coming at the fortlet from behind, and seemed unaware that it was observed.
Does he still want to take me away?
"Come on, Master Haroldus, get yer firelock up," Poesides chided. "Ye cain't hit naught with it slack at yer side."
"But what would Mama Lieger say?" Rossamund cried.
The under-sergeant hesitated for a mere beat. He gave the young lighter a look as if to say "Who has a care for what Mama Lieger might say!" and lifted the butt of his own long-rifle, leveled it and, nice-and-easy, squeezed the trigger.
Hiss-CRACK!
The shot cracked out across the flats. Water hens burst from some covet away to the right and quit the scene in fright; teals hurried away, their wings whistling loudly; little wrens scattered to all points, their angry chirrups and the hurry of their flight filling the air.
Miss-miss-miss… Rossamund panicked, on the verge of a scream.
Poesides cursed under his breath as he realized he had missed his mark.
Rossamund could have burst with relief.
"Cunning little skink," the under-sergeant growled. "I reckon he ducked that!"
"Let me have a pull," said Theudas. "Where is it?"
"Leftmost of the three thickets, down by that huge thistle-bush," answered Poesides, sitting back down on the angle of the roof, rapidly reloading his long-rifle.
"Ah, I see it…," the younger man muttered, "I think." Making a show of presenting his fusil, a cold sweat of guilty horror clinging in the small of his back, Rossamund had gratefully lost sight of the glamgorn again. For the first time he was glad for his lack of skill with a fusil.The chance of him actually scoring a hit was remote at best at this range. "Shouldn't we just send someone out to grab it or fright it off?" he asked in a hoarse croak, wanting to buy the little fellow some time to escape.
"What!" Poesides exclaimed huskily. "And chance some bigger basket springing at us from some nell? I have seen little blighters cooperatin' with some great gnasher, lure ye along thinking ye're in for an easy marking to add to yer skin and boo! Out of no place: something thrice as big, and ye're the mug being chased right back the way ye came." He primed the pan. "Our li'l mite out there is probably in cahoots with that nasty skulker we almost met out in the fog the other morn," the under-sergeant added as he rammed the wadding home.
"No! I heard that handsome Branden Rose dig got that one," Theudas corrected.
"Well, either way, ye can't let a bogle go free-it just ain't moral."
Rossamund just wished Freckle would get away and save himself. He winced as Theudas took aim.
Hissss-FSSST!
A misfire!
Theudas had taken a shot, yet all he got was a flash in the pan, no burst from the breech, nor ball hurtling from the muzzle. "Not again!" he cried. "I don't care what Shudder-crank says, there is something a-foul with the touchhole!" Amid a flurry of uncouth words Theudas wrestled with his weapon to find the fault.
"It's fossicking about in the thicket over yonder… Do you think it suspects it's been found out?" Poesides chuckled, and humming "Stand While You Can" to himself, paused between the third and fourth stanza to let go another shot. "Ah, blight it! It's surely a crafty li'l bugaboo!"
The musket fire brought the other lampsmen, poking their heads through the trap in the roof or out of the unshuttered windows a floor below, to catch sight of the spectacle. Aubergene arrived on the Fighting Top bearing his own long-rifle, but he and the onlookers were to be disappointed.
The glamgorn was gone.
Rossamund sat blank-faced, frazzled nerves tingling in strange and anxious relief.
"Well, either we hit it, or it found some way to scurry off," the under-sergeant said, chewing his bottom lip, " 'cause there ain't been a movement down in the creek for a little while now." Poesides searched through his perspective glass till it was too dark to see, and prevailed on Crescens Hugh the lurksman to aid him.Yet, to Rossamund's secret delight, not a trace of the diminutive creature could be discovered.
He lay his head to sleep that night with the barred, misty light of the waxing moon shining on his face through a high window, feeling keenly the huge difference between him and his fellow lighters. After their visit with Mama Lieger, Rossamund had nurtured the notion that these men were of a more subtle cast.Yet after that afternoon's shooting, they had confirmed themselves to him as unthinking monsterhaters. What they called moral, he called mindlessness; what he would call right knowing, they would call treachery most foul. He lay and watched the moon a long time, understanding full well Phoebe's cold isolation.