D Cornish - Factotum

Grown used to daily walks in green and lively hills, Rossamund found his confinement in this bland urban setting hard to bear. After breakfast, four days out from the grand gala, he took a turn about the foreyard. Keeping clear of vintners' wagons and their hauling drudges laboring to enlarge Cloche Arde's already well-stocked wine cellar, Rossamund walked a circle about the pencil pine, watching Darter Brown hop and hunt amid the thin garden beds.

In the crystalline morning Rossamund could just make the faint tolling of far-off millhouse bells, telling of an approaching change of shift with knells loud enough to carry well across the city. He imagined the lines of stoop-shouldered swinks-mill workers-filing in and out of the dark-some mills in their sad queues. He peered up at the thin blue sky striated with icy white-unhappy fighting weather.

She will not attack Maupin today at least…

The sensation of Winstermill's fall had proliferated throughout the city, giving rise to a great unanswered fear that transformed into an impotent kind of anger. Unsatisfied, this anger was growing, becoming so palpable that even Rossamund-stuck at Cloche Arde-could near taste indignation in the very air.

On Rossamund's second turn about the yard, Doctor Crispus walked in from the Harrow Road and joined him in his stroll. "I have been designated to be one of the orators for the gala night," he declared after a cheerful greeting. "I had the briefest thought to posit the existence of goodly nickers. Unwise at the best of times, I know, and in light of the current temper"-he produced a creased and doubled broadsheet from under his arm, The Assessor scripted boldly at its head-"thorough folly. Consequently, I shall be hypothesizing upon the existence of Providence over the theory of Deeper Forces, especially as a benign corrective, and, if it does exist," he continued cryptically, "whether it is a personal cosmic action or an impersonal and reflexive cosmic rebalancing."

Rossamund just blinked and nodded.

"Have you read the newest papers, m'boy?" the physician asked abruptly. "Things have certainly taken a remarkable turn," he added, pressing the paper open at a bold heading among other bold headings on the foremost page. Expedition Relates of a Marshal 'Mongst the Fallen in the Sack of Sulk End Fastness; Survivor Gives Graphic Account of Terrible Atrocities Committed by Ravening Nickers

The survivor was named as one Laudibus Pile.

"That rascal made it out somehow," Crispus growled. "Probably by the cunning of his heightened senses…"

There was no mention of goodly monsters, nor of any of the dark deeds done that precipitated such atrocities.

"The sloppy erroneous scoundrel who penned the piece places Podius' rank incorrectly. He was Marshal-Subrogate, as you know, yet they have him as Marshal-Lighter. How-be-it, it is unquestionably Podius Whympre by description," Crispus explained, pointing to the finer print. "It is a form of due comeuppance, I suppose, though it does not make me smile…"

Such was the sum of the Master-of-Clerks' schemes.

On the next page Rossamund found a line of lesser type, yet no less stunning. Fabercadavery Uncovered in Emperor's Own Fortress!

Related by some other fellow, possibly a member of the expedition mentioned in the first report, it actually named Honorius Ludius Grotius Swill as the fabercadaverist implicated in the heading line, going so far as to make mention of his lectures held in Brandenbrass itself.

"Have you seen this, Doctor?" Rossamund asked, passing the paper back.

"So that is what you were at, Grotius!" the physician declared with grim satisfaction as if Swill were there with them. "Lah! Who could possibly prognosticate such a twist of path, my friend?" he said to Rossamund. "And in a mere two months?" Glancing up to a housemaid banging at a long Dhaghi carpet hung from Rossamund's set, he lowered his voice. "It certainly puts any accusations they have brought against you or the dear Lady Rose in new light, does it not?" The physician stared with disconcerting intensity at the young factotum. "To think he was correct…," he said after a moment's reflection.

"You mean Swill, Doctor?" Exposed or not, saying the surgeon's name set a subtle twist in Rossamund's innards.

"Indeed." The physician stroked his chin. "However unwillingly, my respect for that quackeen's research is materially increased. Ah, mistake me not, Master Bookchild! Swill was an unalloyed monster; but truth is truth, whomever alights upon it… If that butchering novice was correct about your nature, then he might well have been correct about how… well, how you came to be, my friend. The power of fecund muds and turgid earths as the source of monstrous life-indeed of all life-was once widely held, especially by the Cathars and the Phlegms, that brilliant foolhardy race without whose learning I would not have a trade… And if he is correct about how they connect to you, well…"

"What, Doctor?"

"If they have it right, then surely it can only mean that in your members dwell the secrets to perpetual life!"

"Perpetual life?" Rossamund almost did not want to know the answer-though in truth, he guessed at it well enough. The Lapinduce had said something of living on while the current generation passed.

"Perpetual life! Perpetuity, continual existence, vita semper, to live on and on unaffected by time or aging…This is a subject the dark trades find powerfully fascinating. Should more massacars and fabercadaverists discover your proper tribe, my boy, I do not think there will be any obstacle that would detain such determinedly contrary from trying to get at you."

"Such as ambushing us on some faraway road," Rossamund returned grimly.

"Such as that, yes…" Crispus took off his brown-glass spectacles and wiped them with a brightly striped handkerchief, observing the young factotum from the corner of his eye. "If you do not mind my saying it, that despite all this you are a most remarkably favored fellow, Rossamund, to be able to go on observing the course of history with your own eyes long after all today's scholars and matterns are slotted feet-first into the ground."

"And watch my friends and everyone I care for leave this world while I go on and on…"

"Ah… yes." The physician's crest fell. "There is that… The price of perpetuity… Something perhaps the massacars have not considered." He cleared his throat pointedly. "Stimulating as talking with you inevitably is, I must prepare further for my oratory… I shall see you at middens, perhaps." He bid Rossamund good morning and went inside.

Left to continue his constitutional alone, Rossamund found his attention caught by furtive motion at the gate. Sneaking between the very bars, a rabbit slipped into the yard to briskly hide itself among the roots and trunks of the glory vines along the wall. Its fur dagged and dirty gray, the creature was made for creeping unremarked along dull city slate and stone.

As Rossamund watched, another mangy coney passed nonchalantly across the mouth of the gate, disappearing farther up the Harrow Road.

Darter Brown hopped across the gravel to the glory vine to twitter at the first rabbit.

One ear tall and alert, nose twitching attentively, the rabbit-spy remained in its place, even when the young factotum sidled over to finally stand before it and cautiously look it in the eyes. One orb was glittering black, but the other was a filmy, sightless blue; the ear above it drooped unmoving down its neck-this creature had lived hard in this pugnacious city.