D Cornish - Factotum

Here at last was the hidden home of Pater Maupin.

Greened by artfully clipped shrubs growing from large hogshead casques, the "yard" of wooden boards before this indoor house was laid with many dead. Most of the slain were sturdy roughs in mixed proofing, but among them lay a single gaudily harnessed lesquin. Lorica and metal helm savagely dented and flesh pierced with a score of wounds, the fellow had sold his own life dearly. Bruised by inaccurate potive work, the yard's walls and boards were smeared in bursts of deep spraying green or gaunt mauve, their surfaces scored and pitted with the scorching of many arcs.

Europe's work…

From somewhere came a sullen booming.

Fixing his vent over nose and mouth against the faint and lingering fug of vapors and returning the sparrow mask over his face as further protection to hide it, Rossamund approached the entrance of the peltisade, a thick ironbound door more like the port to a vault than a dwelling, forced open now and hanging by one bent hinge.

To wing at last, Darter Brown shot into the house.

Quick to follow, the young factotum progressed into a broad and well-furnished hall, the once-dank setting entirely refurbished: carpets and cornice-work and all, complete with plinths bearing alabaster busts and wall-hung daubs of august yet forgotten figures.

Circling for a moment below the low warehouse beams dark with wax, Darter Brown alighted upon a broken side table, flicking his wings agitatedly as he waited.

Shoes clicking on polished boards, Rossamund stepped into this comfortably furnished and bizarrely urbane field of battle illuminated by a row of colorful glass carbuncles hung from the coffers between the ceiling beams. A score of bodies were flung to all points about spontaneous barricades built of tandems and bookshelves, overturned and thrown down vainly to halt the relentless fulgar and her supporters. Loopholes in the yellow-plastered walls stood open between the paintings, each a gaping black oblong scorched about its framed mouth, one seeping unctuous smoke that smelled distinctly of recently ruptured asper. The splintered punctures of musket and pistol ball perforated every surface, and with these, greater dents as large as Rossamund's hand. Horsehair puckered from rents in fine furnishings, statues lay fallen and shattered, threadbare carpets were blemished with darkly wet stains. A bright-clad pistoleer lay dead amid the defenders, and by her a stoup-bearing skold burned by the interrupted action of his own scripts.Three more lesquins lay dead here too, one laid back bent unnaturally over a toppled seclude, his casque struck off his head. Some of the fallen were still quick with life, wide-eyed with pain, flinching in alarm at Rossamund as he threaded his way among them.

The clash of arms rang from beyond white double doors agape at the other end of the hall.

With Darter Brown dashing ahead, Rossamund hastened through and immediately stepped onto a landing before a short drop. He had come to a gallery that looked down through wooden arches upon a sunken basement quadrangle ringed by several stories of finely molded balconies and narrow, mullioned windows. Below in the quadrangle square, the clamor of the fight swelled; an exclamation of angry insults, shouts of fright and rage, labored gasps and the clout of landing blows, the infrequent report of pistol-shot joined by the repeated crackle of a fulgar's arcs.

How the fight had come to be down in this lower court, Rossamund could not tell.

The uneven flicker of deadly levin and the flash of muzzle revealed figures in many fashions of lurid harness striving, spinning and swinging in the dance of death over colored flagstones laid in a spiral of red and white and strewn with human wreckage. For now the lesquins faced more than hired roughs and common door wards: sabrine adepts had joined the defense of Maupin's hidden house, and their grace and cunning were an obvious match for their opponents' brute power and thick skins.

In it all spun a figure in wide-swinging hems of black and red embroidered green, flourishing a short stave that arced with a revealing glaucous glare-zzack! — driving back two finely dressed sabrine adepts. Rossamund had seen such a harness before just once, many days ago, prancing about the ludion before admiring staff.

Europe!

Eyes staring terribly, her head high and poised, the Branden Rose skipped and stepped masterfully between the adepts' feints and ruses. Her fuse nowhere to be seen, she held only her shorter stage, brandishing it like a cudgel, the tip fizzing and hissing with deadly arcing potential.

Among the enemy, the most implacable was a swaggering swordist crowned in a soft tarbane hat and wielding a long pallid blade, the very fellow who had cut the Handsome Grackle in the rousing-pit and come with Maupin to Cloche Arde. In dismay, Rossamund beheld his therimoir sword, exotic and venomous, made eons ago to slay monsters and swung now with such expertise. He had already witnessed it cut deep into monster flesh and watched now as it tore through the steel of a lesquin's lorica with little hindrance; what it could do to a lahzar in fine proofing he did not want to behold.

Flash went this blade in the lamplight.

The lesquins were alert to its power too, and strove to keep well clear of the swordist and his deadly swipes.

About to leap down to his mistress' defense, Rossamund was baulked by at a sudden shiver of frission. The sabrine adepts and the few drab roughs left with them attempted to draw away, pulling back to the farther side of the quadrangle. Barely released from hand strokes, the reduced quarto of lesquins reeled under an invisible assault. Rossamund could feel the edge of scathing frission centered on the quadrangle below, the vaguest fluttering in the very midst of his head that brought a twinge of pain.

Yet under such inward violence only one troubardier collapsed, snarling so volubly through the constrictions of his casque that the young factotum heard it from his balcony perch just above. Remarkably, the other bravoes remained on their feet, shaking their armored heads dazedly but very much unconquered.

How is it possible?

Europe stood, eyelids fluttering with almost manic rapidity under the impulse of her own puissance, keeping the scathing at bay.

Presuming their foes unbalanced, the swordists rushed to attack.

A wordless shout and Europe leaped at them, her lesquins eagerly with her.

In pure reflex, Rossamund threw the caste of Frazzard's powder and another, true and fast, catching several sturdy roughs who hung back from the fight in a shower of popping blue sparks. Startled, the swordists writhed clear of the spray, glaring up at the floors above, trying to find the origin of the chemistry; their assault turned to defense as, with a brute cry, the lesquins pressed the sudden switch of advantage.

Despite this, from his perch, Rossamund could see that Europe was being cornered. A swordist in garish vermilion and white and a black arming-cap was pounding at the fulgar with an incessant gust of blows of his heavy wide-bladed sword, bravely endeavoring to dominate the fulgar's attention while lesser roughs sought to pull her down.

Eyelids still flickering, Europe turned the swordist's blade and pounced away to catch one rough with a vigorous revolving kick to the abdomen, then spun aside, to crack him ringing blows to head and arms with her stage.Yet there was no zap, no retaliating arcing flash-the very skill that saved her from the affliction of the scathing prevented the Branden Rose from afflicting others with her own puissance. With all her grace and deadly aptitude, under assault from within and without, Europe could surely not prevail long.

Rossamund clenched empty hands and knew that sturdier tools were needed. Dashing back into the hall behind, he snatched up a pair of pistols from the fallen pistoleer, thinking that their heavy barbed handles would make perfect cudgels once they were fired. Darting back to the balcony, he found that in this briefest divagation Europe and a mere pair of her lesquin allies were now left to contend against only two of Maupin's swordists-the one in garish vermilion brandishing the heavy sword, the other the turbane-hatted wielder of the therimoir, his dread spathidril blade held curving up behind his back as it had been before cutting the Grackle. The three against the two, they circled each about the other among the litter of hurt and dead with wary concentration until now the swordists stood between Rossamund and his mistress.