D Cornish - The Lamplighter

Rossamund nodded wholeheartedly. "I shall recommend you to our physician when we return, m'lady. They say there's nothing he can't mend."

Dolours smiled and Threnody frowned.

When all was ready the small party set out in pouring rain-fighting weather, Europe would have called it. For a moment Rossamund wondered where the terrible fulgar might be. Was she still in Sinster-that city famous for its transmogrifying surgeons, the makers of lahzars-to be mended after the near-fatal spasming of her artificial fulgar's organs? Would she soon return, as she had promised, to see how he was getting on? A quiet ache set in his gall: despite his abhorrence of her trade-at her indiscriminate killing-he was actually missing the teratologist. After all, she had rescued him from that scurrilous rogue Poundinch.

Instead of an ox dray, the calendars traveled easy in a small covered curricle drawn by two sturdy donkeys. These were led by a laconic leer Rossamund had never properly met but knew from the milling of rumor and reputation to be Mister Clement. The fellow confirmed this with a sour introduction to the calendars, giving them all a dour look with his weird yellow and olive-drab eyes, as if the task was a great inconvenience. Before the leer put on his sthenicon Rossamund marveled at his wrong-colored eyes, so different from Sebastipole's. For Clement was a laggard, like Licurius, better able to spy things hidden in shadows and darkness and nooks than a falseman, but less capable of spotting lies. His biologue in place, the leer took them out on the road. He talked little, instead bending all his energy to searching ahead and aside for the evidences of a monster.

After his experience at the strangling hands of Licurius, Rossamund walked a little uneasily beside Clement. Exposed to the foul weather and equally silent, the young prentice was nevertheless grateful to have the leer's senses to forewarn them. That at least was a genuine comfort.

The calendars themselves also proved ill-disposed to speak, and the whole journey from cothouse to manse was accomplished in near silence.

They traveled back through the Briarywood, back through its hinting threwd, passing the scene of last night's violence. Despite a wet day, stains of spilled blood still showed black in the dirt of the road. Under a heavy guard of haubardiers, with the chortling morning chorus of birds making light of the grisly work, a toiling fatigue party from Wellnigh House's day-watch struggled to build and light a pyre of the fallen nickers and dead horses. The bodies of slain monsters needed to be disposed of promptly, for it was held that, left to rot, a nicker's corpse always attracted more of the living kind.

Walking through the Harrowmath, Rossamund started and stared at every rustle in the high grass. The rain increased and his thrice-high filled with water, which spilled inconveniently whenever he moved his head.

With each lamp they passed he felt a steady urgency to wind out the bloom, even though it was day. He had been in lessons (Readings on Our Mandate and Matter with Mister Humbert) in which the prentices were belabored with the notion that the Conduit Vermis was the spine about which many towns and villages grew; that the road allowed these towns to be knit as more than just remote settlements; that it was for the lamplighters to toil and keep the Wormway clear; that if they did not, then the whole of civilization might fail and fall to rapid ruin. To light the lamps meant that the kingdoms of humankind could sleep well that night. Every lamp they passed was a memorial to him of this heavy responsibility. He sighed, letting his fodicar drag in the soupy slick that filmed the hard-packed clay of the revered road.

"Lift your lantern-crook, boy!" came the rough command of the leer, and the young prentice obeyed with an unthinking start. Shrugging his shoulders against the wet, Rossamund pushed on. Between the silence of the calendars, the taciturn concentration of Clement, and the broad, brooding Harrowmath, he lamented how different life might be as a vinegaroon or-he wondered for a moment-even as Europe's factotum.

Winstermill grew step-by-step before them. An ancient stronghold, massive and lonely upon the flat moors of the Harrowmath, it was familiar and welcome to Rossamund already. He still marveled at the squat, gray cartography of its lichen-blotched roofs and their chimney spires, at the mightily thick outer walls and the foundations upon which the fortress was lifted high above the plain. When he had first observed it those two months gone he had thought it like some great, overgrown manor house, but now he knew the fortress to be much more. Once a small outpost of the Tutins of old, the fortress of Winstermill had accreted over the centuries: towers added, floors added, the whole mound of Winstreslewe built up and encircled with a thick wall. Once it had stood at a junction of trade routes; now it had grown over and submerged these roads in its footings. The western run of the Wormway and the north-south course of the Gainway made tunnels in Winstermill's foundations and joined beneath the very fortress. As far as Rossamund knew, these tunnels were called the Bowels-if they had any other name he had not heard it. In the evening, great grilles were lowered over their gaping mouths to prevent monsters and vagrants from setting up a home there, and mighty steams of repellents were regularly flushed through in the small hours of the morning to force out any unwelcome lurkers. These duties were reserved for the house-watch, and Rossamund was glad of that. Not in all recorded history of the current Empire had a monster ever won its way into the manse.

The broad Imperial Spandarion that usually flapped proud and defiant above the battlements hung limp now in the day's damp.The morning was already long, limes missed and second morning instructions well under way. Rossamund had never felt so tired. Passing through the mighty gates, their arrival counted by the tally-clerk and his cursors, they were greeted by one of the house-guard calling down to them from the wall.

"Hoi there, me fellows! There's Lady Dry-stick ready to lash us with her dim-wits.Wit us too, like ye did our mates!" News of Threnody's actions had already traveled ahead.

"Don't goad at her, chum," came another. "She's as likely to fish us as soon as fart, from what I hear!"

"Fish" was a vulgar term for frission. Rossamund shot a look to Threnody, sitting stiff on the seat behind. The young calendar's chin jutted high in supercilious display, yet she betrayed her anger with the clenching and unclenching of her fine jaw.

The donkeys' hooves and carriage wheels made a harsh grinding in the white quartz gravel that formed a broad drive from the gate to the manse's main entrance.The drive skirted three acres of paved ground known as the Grand Mead, which fronted the manse itself. It was large enough to contain kennels, several strong-houses, room for the parading and evolutions of the whole fortress and yet still allow for the frequent coming and going of carriages and other conveyances. There was even space for a well-tended green by the wall of the manse proper with benches and a grove of pines for the officers to sit beneath. Here a convention of territorial rooks would caw and cackle every evening before returning to their roost in the manse's ridge-caps, eyeing everything angrily and keeping pigeons away. At the end of the drive stood the Scaffold, a single gaunt tree that Rossamund had observed the night he first arrived.