D Cornish - Factotum

"Blight me white, it's the Sparrownucker-man!"

Hurrying, panting, shuffling on, Rossamund thought he smelled powder smoke as he left the distressed natives to their alarm. Some way ahead came the echoing clatter of musketry, far off yet unmistakable. Gasping in air, he pushed against the waxing pangs in limb and lung.

The drove swollen surely beyond count, Rossamund was led on to broader streets, empty again, lined with sheers and loading stages: the stowage roads between storehouses, weighhalls and shipping clericies that went down to the harbor proper and the muffled tolling of buoys. At first lost, he still had a sense of heading south and east as he was guided far into this dockland, until as they came to a road of identically commonplace half-houses, he had notion he had seen such streets before…

On the way to the Broken Doll with Rookwood…

Brazen plaques fixed to the twin ranks of their front steps spoke universally of tolling offices, shipping clerks and maritime lawyers.Yet here on this dull street the great horde of coneys finally stopped. As a single creature they gathered on road and pavement to stare at one particular building some way down on the left and as unremarkable as every other grubby edifice on the entire row: same false arched windows, engaged columns and mass-produced entablatures, same rearing stone grindewhals projecting from curling pediments and clutching meaningless street numbers, same gray slate steps going up to glossy black doors.

Perplexed, Rossamund stood before the place, lifting his mask clear to suck in great lungfuls of sweet, healing air. There was no fight here, no battling roughs or debris of fallen bodies, just an empty street and these indistinguishable buildings.

Upon the homogenous post at the foot of the steps, a stained and corroded plaque read:

The structure did not look any different from the half-houses either side but for a lone rabbit sitting at its threshold at the summit of the steps.

With a chill of astonishment, Rossamund beheld that it was the very half-blind, broken-eared creature he had greeted in the yard of Cloche Arde.

"Oh, faithful beast!" Rossamund breathed. "All of you!" he wheezed to the mass of rabbits and Darter Brown too.

The coneys simply stared at him, snouts ever twitching.

Behind the sole-eyed rabbit the door to the house stood ajar.

Rossamund took it to mean only one thing: it was here that Europe had begun her assault on Pater Maupin and all those with him, and that somewhere within, his mistress was to be found.

There came another muted concussion, somewhere ahead and to the left.

The sole-eyed rabbit turned and pushed through the mere gap between door and jamb to disappear within.

With Phoebe well descended from her apex and Darter Brown flapping ahead, Rossamund flicked a caste of Frazzard's powder into hand, took out his moss-light, climbed the stone steps and went inside.

Illuminated feebly by a single yellowing bright-limn, the small front hall of the office of Messrs. Gabritas amp; Thring was dominated by a narrow stair. Europe was not here; nor, it seemed, was anyone else. Pausing, ear cocked, Rossamund listened. The building's emptiness was almost a presence in itself, an oppressive absence of activity, yet a memory of violence hovered in the untenanted space.

Sole-eye was nowhere to be seen.

To the left of the stairwell, light was faintly showing, as from a door ajar to a lit room. Boldly, Darter Brown disappeared into the dimness of the hall beside the stair, the sparrow's thin tweeting coming back to Rossamund as if to say, "All is well!"

Moss-light in one hand, caste of Frazzard's in other, the young factotum crept forward, regretting every groan or thump of the boards amplified in the surrounding silence. At the far end of the passage he could see a narrow lozenge-shaped bar of light-a door ajar indeed-and in its glow sat the sole-eyed rabbit waiting for him, Darter Brown standing between its ears.

Drawing toward them, Rossamund perceived a whiff of arcing in the sterile atmosphere. He felt a thrill of fear as he spied through the gap into the room beyond, the body of a well-armored fellow lying face to the ceiling, body bent in the telltale rictus contortion of an arcing demise. Not far into the room another sturdy rough was stretched, his countenance frozen in surprise, a neat bullet hole in the unfortunate man's brow.

To wing again, Darter flitted over these new-made corpses and in through the lit doorway, his peremptory chirp ringing from within, calling Rossamund on.

Sole-eye, however, remained in the hall.

Rossamund gave the dogged, scrawny creature a brief parting beck. "Thank you," he said, stepping cautiously over the dead warden into the room.

Here in the wan illumination of a single light he found some manner of clerical file. Its walls, of a particularly sickly hue of green, were hung with certificates of charter and lists of fares and tolls, its space cluttered with chairs, desks and cabinets arranged about a shoddy imitation Dhaghi carpet. Thrown down on this rug was a man in dark and innocuously ordinary clothes, laid upon his side, his face shockingly marred by some recipe of mordant script, tumblerpicks splayed from his lifeless hands on the bare boards.

A lockscarfe! A professional break-and-enter man.

By the body stood a posticum-a secret door made to look part of the wall-released and exposed. Disguised as a bracket for a dependent bright-limn, its lock was freshly scarred, partly melted too by the very trap that surprised and ended the days of the scarfe, partly scorched by some small but powerful blast.

Beyond the forced posticum-into what was most likely the building next to Messrs. Gabritas amp; Thring-the young factotum found a strong room. Still secured, metal-barred cabinets along the walls held a selection of firelocks and other implements devised for harm. At the far end a desk of hard and heavy wood had been hastily thrown over and now squatted like a bastion, straight-back chairs tipped and scattered about it; Darter Brown perched upon its uppermost edge. From behind this barricade protruded a pair of black-booted legs.

Europe!

Yet hurrying up he quickly discovered that-too large and too blunt-toed-the boots belonged instead to a flourishingly harnessed pistoleer slain by implacable eclatics, his many pistolas useless in their many holsters. With the shootist was another pair of fallen sturdies, their final stand overcome.

The levin-scent of a fulgar's labors lingered in the close space.

Beyond the table another innocuous slab of wall was slid aside to reveal a doorway-Pater Maupin was nothing if not determined to hide this back door into his realm. Through this was a thin passage, a slype running into darkness. Here Darter Brown did not go on alone, but with a small tweet! took his place on his master's shoulder. Edging forward, Rossamund shone his limulight into the chute and, determined to find his mistress come what may, entered. Mercifully short, the slype deposited him in a space that appeared limitlessly dark in the weak glow of his effulgent moss, thick beams above hardly high enough for a man to walk fully straightened. Rossamund listened. Nothing shifted in this sepulchral hush but the rush of his own inward parts in his ears. Some several yards ahead he gradually perceived an insipid light, picking out a veritable forest of thick supporting posts all about him, as if the floor above was expected to bear immense weight.The bright stink of eclatics was stronger in here, sharp against the flat damp of dust and old sacks.