D Cornish - Factotum

Rossamund declined-such flash manners were not for him. Feeling eyes upon him, he peered up at the sagging tenements on the opposite side, their stained sills hung with washing. A nursing mother in over-laundered gray stared down at him sullenly from a high window.

"People live willingly next to it?" he marveled.

"Those who cannot afford the higher rents elsewhere, yes."

"Are they not bothered by the… by being so close?"

Carp made a puzzled frown. "I should think none has ever asked them-they should be thankful for a roof at all. It is as some say, young fellow: the starveling has no fancy…"

At the dyphr's hectic rate they were soon past this peculiar park, going through the high arch of a bastion-the Cripplegate-its heavy iron-studded doors open wide to the ceaseless human flow. Gate wardens leaned on muskets and watched all with complacent scorn, their fine spit-and-polish making many of the amblers look squalid. Passing along a congested thoroughfare of narrow-fronted countinghouses, Carp worked with frowning application to avoid the dolly-mops in bright versions of maid's clobber and low-grade clerical gents laughing and chatting and careless of horse or carriage. Finally the relentless momentum thrust them onto a vast rectangular circuit rushing with impatient traffic. Magnificently tall buildings rose even higher on every side, casting their long shadows in the thin morning light. Imposing like a bench of magistrates, most were fronted with soaring colonnades topped with rain-streaked friezes of stone that depicted portentous moments of great matter.

"The Spokes," the man-of-business explained as they launched into the mayhem of traffic that swarmed here. "That august building upon our right," he continued, pointing to a great square structure of dirty gray stone topped with a green-copper roof bright lit by the rising sun, "is where we need to be today.The Letter and Coursing House, postal office and knavery in one."

Post-lentums, town coaches, takeny-carriages and jaunty dyphrs barely avoided each other as drivers dodged balking horses, slow-moving planquin-chairs or white-suited scopps. These tireless children dashed to and from every cardinal with their precious messages, leaping headlong from the walkways without ever a look for rushing carriages. Several times Carp was forced to pull up sharply, his horses snorting in dismay. From the sumptuously furnished window of a park drag next to them, one gigantically corpulent fellow impatiently hollered, jowls wobbling, spittle flying as he blindly harangued the delays and glared at Rossamund as if he were the cause of not just the current impediments but of all the world's ills too.

Standing bravely at strategic places among the anxious commotion were grim-looking fellows dressed in long coats of black and doing their utmost to make order of the chaos. Duffers, Mister Carp called them, the strict constabulary of Brandenbrass. Their waists wrapped about with checks of sable and leuc and wearing black mitres like a haubardier's, they raised and dropped lamps as signal; when one lifted a clear light, humanity flowed left but ceased to go right; when a blue light was high, the reverse occurred.

Gripping the sideboard, Rossamund did all he could to hang on, his knuckles white, as the dyphr hastily circumvented a wide pond right in the center of the grand circuit. A great many ibis waded in its reedy soup and used a weather-grimed statue of old bronze and stone-some neglected commemoration of ancient victories-in its middle as a perch. A faint wakefulness seemed to hover over the water, though no one else appeared to heed it.

"That brackish bog has a proper name," Carp cried over the racket-Rossamund wishing the man would keep his eyes better fixed upon their progress-"but none of we goodly locals calls it by anything else but the Leak."

Rossamund saw a line of shackled folks, their heads and hands jammed in flat wooden casques and ranked in full and shaming view upon a stone stage at the edge of the pond. Passing people hissed and waved white kerchiefs at them.

"What did they do?" he asked, twisting in his seat to see, yet too far to read the bill of fault nailed to each casque.

"Oh," the man-of-business answered complacently, "you'll find them to be loan defaulters, pinch-dough bakers, fraudulent mendicants, suspected grabcleats, hat-snatchers and thimble-rig sharpers; contrarified malcontents and cheap-souled tricksters all-folk not worth your anxious looks."

Slowing easy among the clutter of other carriages waiting beneath the beetling loom of the Letter and Coursing House, Mister Carp deposited his dyphr to the care of the bridle-minders, scruffy fellows disguised by fine coats. Round-eyed, mind spinning at all this novelty, Rossamund followed the man-of-business closely as they joined the pedestrian throng. Pushing through a line of water caddies, shooing aside pleading crossing-sweeps and nosegay sellers, Carp negotiated his young charge about a rather noisome pile of various excretions of dung-including a great many rabbit pellets-but was brought up short by a quarto of serious gents. Robustly harnessed and bearing pistols and cudgels, they were moving through the crowd as a single mass, making a way for a singularly enormous fellow shambling with them, the very one who had bawled at him from the pack drag. Between the cleats of a tentlike soutaine, Rossamund spied a wheeled frame extending down from the overlarge man's waist-a lard-barrow-the device straining to hold up the pendulous massing of the man's satin-wrapped flesh. Here was one of the infamous elephantines of the Grumid states, the wealthiest, most powerful magnates who boasted their great affluence and influence by the equal extremity of their girth.

Mister Carp blessed the bloated fellow with a solemn bow.

Tiny porcine eyes coldly calculating, the sweating elephantine sneered at the man-of-business, said nothing, and the humorless assembly moved on.

"That was His Most Elephantine Pendulous Ib," Carp breathed with disturbing admiration, shepherding Rossamund before him to climb the broad steps of the coursing house. Between massive trunk-thick columns were two doors, the right-hand admitting and releasing a steady rush of scopps and postmen in their distinctive Imperial mottle hauling great bags of letters.

"Right for post! Left for knaves!" the man-of-business said, pausing only briefly at the left-hand portal to wait gallantly for an ebony-skinned skold in white conice, fitch and cloak with startling white spoor-stripes down either side of her dark face. A scion of lands well to the north, far away N'go or somesuch, this skolding woman nodded gratefully to Carp and dazzled Rossamund with her brilliant smile as she led a long line of servants from the knavery.

The interior of the Letter and Coursing House was a wide space divided down its middle by a massive wooden structure that reached up to the carbuncles of small, ever-glowing gretchen-globes hanging from a lofty dome punctured with a constellation of portholes. At the very back of the hall was a pair of huge arched windows, their central panes orbs of fiery scarlet encircled with rays glazed alternately deep transparent brown or translucent white. An arcade of pillars ran left along the wall, each post painted from base to capital with murals of teratologically violent scenes. Gazing up to the balconies, Rossamund saw bureaucratical folk leaning on the balustrades taking their ease and looking down smugly over the variety of adventuring sorts gathered beneath them.

A whole collection of teratologists and attached staff were milling in the echoing expanse, even more fabulous than the sell-swords who had paraded through Winstermill. Here were wits, fulgars, skolds, pistoleers, sagaars, ledgermains, leers and startling combinations of the same in one soul. Most sat easy in the arcade beneath the balconies, waiting for their servants to sort the finer points. Less gaudy, threadbare pugnators waited in line themselves, queuing with the ordinary factoti and agents before the lattice-windows of the knaving-clerks. It was an entire room of monster-slayers.