Lamplighter (42 page)

“The Brisking Cat,” Europe declared grandly as they sat. “Wayhouse, knavery and my current abode.”

The Saloon was wall to wall with pugnators and their hangers-on, coming, going and ordering about the staff with high-handed carelessness. Rossamünd watched the gallimaufry of teratologists in wide-eyed wonder. Indiscriminate monster-killers written about in public print or gossiped about in civic rumor, a fabulous collection like the pages of a pamphlet come to life. Seeing his fascination, Europe began to name some of them.

“There are the Boanergës—the ‘Sons of Thunder,’ ” she explained, watching three grim-looking fellows huddled together in grim conversation, periodically glancing suspiciously over their shoulders. “A competent band, each one a fellow astrapecrith, though none too bright.”

“And that is the Knave of Diamonds,” said Threnody, keen to show her worldliness. Rossamünd looked and saw a large man pass below. He wore a “crown” of tall spiked reeds upon his head; upon his body a heavy-gaulded smock or lambrequin of dirty white with its single, large red diamond on the front; and upon his fierce face a large deep blue diamond spoor.

A solitary calendar from a different clave than Threnody’s walked across the Saloon floor and took a booth across the other side. She was wearing a bossock of prüs and sable checks and her face was striped like that of a grazing animal from far beyond the Marrow. She wore a dandicomb of long, elegant horns that her claustra was fortunately high enough to contain.

Threnody watched her closely. “She need not have come,” the girl huffed with the strains of territorial jealousy. “The Right has these troubles in hand.”

“Who is she?” Rossamünd said so softly he barely spoke at all.

“She’s a caladine,” Europe answered.

“Entering our diet without a by-your-leave,” the girl lighter added icily. “I doubt she has presented herself to Mother. Saphine is her name. She is from the Maids of Malady.”

“Truly?” said Europe. “Your surgeon had perhaps best watch himself.”

“Miss Europe?”

“I have the understanding that these Maids of Malady have allied themselves with the Soratchë. Maybe they lend their help to the Soratchë, and Saphine is coming to investigate that Swill fellow. Wheels inside wheels, and all that.”

Rossamünd hoped this was true. He stared at the caladine until she felt the scrutiny and turned to look at him. Flushing, the young lighter looked away quickly and found a teratologist
he
knew by sight. He had seen etchings of her in the more sensational pamphlets. Epitomë Bile was her name, a woman written of as a myth: lupine and pitiless and astoundingly daring.Yet here she was, a woman as real as his own hand, all in glossy black soe, white-faced with staring, black-rimmed eyes and oddly cropped black hair.

Europe showed clear distaste. “Cruel and heartless,” she warned. “Stay well clear of her.”

Aye,
Rossamünd wondered,
but has she ever sparked a child in the head?

Epitomë Bile looked up, caught Europe’s cold eye and returned it, giving a slow, taunting curtsy. A wicked smile flitted across the strange woman’s mien. The two teratological women kept each other fixed with stares of mutual loathing, until Epitomë Bile walked out of the common room, sly, malevolent amusement never leaving her face.

Rossamünd felt a shiver of dismay. He hoped never to cross her path more closely.

Europe clucked her tongue quietly and looked elsewhere. “There you have the Three Brave Brothers,” she said, pointing with her chin to a group of men below them (just returned perhaps from the course), turning her guests’ attention to other things. “They actually number four, are not related to each other . . . and are not particularly brave, either.” Rossamünd, who had read of these Brave Brothers, was stunned to see walking before him their infamous scourge, Sourdoor, in his swathes of black lour—proofed velvet.

“And so my kind gather, looking for violence.” Europe sighed. “Collecting together like crows about a corpse.”

All the great folk, and the lesser known too, strutted the common room and the privatrium, eyeing one another, ego against ego, and generally getting in the way of the wayhouse’s even routine.

“The Maid Constant.” The fulgar indicated a wit with an arrow-spoor pointing up from each brow and brilliant-hued blue hair. “She too must needs wear a wig, as you do, my dear, but her hair was green last week and blue for this.”

Threnody went beetroot blush and sat up. “No wig for me, madam,” she said quickly, glowering nervously at Europe.

“Not yet, anyway,” Rossamünd put in, trying to be helpful.

She glared at him.

“By-the-by,” said Europe, unconcerned.

The fulgar rattled off many more names, of so many teratologists that Rossamünd could not keep track, and he simply listened to the smooth sound of her voice. His wonder became a little numbed, and he sat a little easier in the comfortable booth. The young lampsman felt the strains of the road ease out into the soft seating, and he became quickly acquainted with just how tired he was. Food was ordered—from the Best Cuts, of course, Rossamünd trying “Starlings in Viand-Royal Sauce”—and an awkwardness persisted while they waited for it to arrive, wetting their thirst with the sourest rich-red wine Rossamünd had ever been served. With the wine came a tankard of steaming Cathar’s Treacle for Europe.

“It’s testtelated in bulk in the kitchens, by a tandem of skolds of faultless reputation,” she explained, “at a hefty charge, of course. You may want some yourself, my dear.” She nodded gravely at Threnody.

“No thank you, Duchess,” Threnody returned, still sitting stiff-backed, hands clasped on the table before her. “I have always been taught that one does best to make one’s own plaudamentum.”

The fulgar became suddenly expressionless.

“Indeed,” she said, after a long, discomfiting moment, “one would prefer to have it made perpetually by the same trusted hands at a day’s two ends, but what one wants and what one gets are rarely the same.The one I once had confidence in is . . . no longer available—and another unwilling.” She peered at Rossamünd.

Threnody looked sharply at the Branden Rose, then narrowly, almost enviously, at Rossamünd.

He tapped purposefully at the tabletop, not meeting either gaze. He had vowed to serve the lamplighters and the Emperor, yet as the troubles of the lamplighters increased, so did the appeal of being the Branden Rose’s factotum.
If only she was more careful about which bogles to kill.

Providentially, mains arrived and all talk ceased for a time as, in the rust glow of red-, orange- and yellow-glassed lanterns, they ate in hungry silence.

Music swelled from the oval stage below them: sweet chamber-sounds of fiddle, violoncello and sourdine, and adding mellifluously to it a soaring female voice. Rossamünd felt he had heard this singing somewhere before and, looking down to the stage, saw a quartet of scratch-bobbed, liveried musicians and, in a halo of light, Hero, the chanteuse of Clunes. Dressed in a smoke-green chiffon dress with broad, gathered skirts, black rumples at the elbows, her hair piled and rolled and festooned with flowers of similar color to the chiffon, she was the very same songstress he had watched in raptures at the Harefoot Dig. Yet here she was now, projecting sonorous verse all about the great room, arms reaching out imploringly. Rossamünd forgot his food and listened, heedless of time’s passing, arm on balustrade, cheek resting on arm, his eyes just a little doelike.

Threnody affected to be unimpressed. “It is adequate, I suppose,” she said in the applause between songs, “if you like those Lentine styles.”

Rossamünd decided he liked the Lentine style very well and could not understand Threnody’s remark.

Her own meal finished, Europe lounged on the comfortable bench and picked at a sludgy, creamy-colored delicacy known simply as cheesecake, soaked in syrup of peach-blossoms. With it came sillabub—a curdled concoction of milk and vinegar. She let Rossamünd try a little, and he came away from the taste smacking his lips in disgust. She did not, however, offer any to Threnody, who had become more and more sullen and sour-faced as the night deepened and did not show any care.

Washing out the vile aftertaste with the bitter small wine, Rossamünd asked solemnly, “Miss Europe, what do you know of Wormstool?”

“It is remote and dangerous and no place for new-weaned lamplighting lads and lasses.” Europe scowled. “What can your masters be thinking, sending you out there?”

“Oh, I was not sent,” Threnody said piously. “I
asked
to go. Those with greater capacities have to wait on those who do not. It’s how
I
have been taught and . . .” She looked at her fellow traveler. “Rossamünd will need the help—as you yourself probably well know.”

“Oh?” Europe turned a piercing gaze on the girl. “And who will look out for you, my dear?”

“Rossamünd,” the girl returned simply. “We lighters stick together, just like calendars.”

The fulgar laughed unexpectedly. “Aren’t you an adorable little upstart?” she purred.

Chin lifting then dropping, Threnody clearly did not know whether to be offended or pleased. She looked out into the Saloon at nothing in particular.

“Now tell me, young Rossamünd,” Europe demanded, “what were you fighting that cost you yet another hat?”

“It was a rever-man, miss,” the young lighter said simply.

Europe went wide-eyed. There was a pause, incredulity hovering at its fringes. “Truly?” she said eventually. “How did you manage to get tangled up with one of
those?
More to the point, how did you survive it?”

“I found it deep in the cellars of Winstermill the very next night after you left.”

“Ah!You’re playing a leg-pull on me, little man.” The fulgar started to smile knowingly. “Your old home is far too tough to crack for some rotten-headed thing like a rever-man. That old Marshal of yours must be sadly slipping if he let one of those wretches in.”

Rossamünd’s gall twisted at this. “I don’t think he is slipping, Miss Europe, but still, sure as I sit here, it was a gudgeon I wrastled right down in the bottom of the fortress.” He went on to tell the whole tale, elaborating especially on the moment when he jammed the loomblaze into the rever-man’s gnashing maw. That moment was powerfully satisfying to recall. “It was somewhere in that fight I lost my hat,” he concluded.

“Aren’t you the one for getting yourself into fixes not of your own making?” Europe’s knowing gaze had not slipped for the length of his tale. “You are still the strangest, bravest little man.Throwing a gudgeon about and blasting it to char is beyond even some of my ilk.You’re not as helpless as you seem.” She looked at Threnody.

“Maybe.” Rossamünd tried not to look too pleased. “It was gangling and poorly made, with too-long arms and hairy, piggy ears, just like those”—he pointed to a sizzling porker’s head that was being carried past at that very moment by a struggling maid—“and no great feat to best.”

“The Lamplighter-Marshal said it was a mighty deed,” Threnody stated proudly in a strange change of tack.

“I should think he would,” the fulgar said, taking a sip of wine. “You did him a great service, Rossamünd.”

“Yet it still did not stop the man receiving a sis edisserum from the Considine,” the young lampsman said sadly.

“Truly?” Europe murmured. “You don’t hear of that happening every diem. Your Marshal
must
certainly have gone awry then.”

Rossamünd did not hear her. His thoughts had pounced on his own words,
hairy, piggy ears.
The gudgeon had large, furry, leaf-shaped ears,
pig’s
ears, like those on the meal just gone by; pig’s ears very much like those on the swine’s head he had carried up to Swill . . .

And Europe had told of the dark hints that surrounded the surgeon; and it held that if Swill knew of the kitchen furtigrade when Doctor Crispus did not, he might be well aware of other secret ways, even down to the moldering cellars. Why, truly, would he need his deliveries of body parts if not to make a rever-man? . . . And there was the flayed skin.

The horrid, impossible idea rolled about his mind’s view, an image of the surgeon clandestinely making gudgeons in his attic apartment: wobbling, raving creatures cobbled together from kitchen offcuts and dug-up corpse bits, then held and hidden in the fortress’s depths. The young lighter could little fathom how such a capital evil as monstermaking—or “fabercadavery,” as the peregrinat called it—could go on undiscovered within Winstermill’s precincts. How was it possible that amid such a crowd of zealous invidists monsters were actually made?

With low and stuttering urgency, Rossamünd explained his deductions as best he could. He talked mostly to Europe, who listened without interruption, her arms folded and her brow deeply creased with a scowl.

“The rever-man had pig’s ears,” he repeated excitedly. “I carried a pig’s head up to Swill from the kitchens. That’s why he reads from those banned books—they are full of all manner of ash-dabblings.”

“Well, one hardly needs to be an auto-savant to have spotted Swill as a nefarious cad!” Threnody argued.

A great roar of applause erupted about all levels of the Saloon: Hero had come to the end of her recital and was now bowing deeply to her adoring audience with great, cheek-busting smiles. Threnody looked down at it all and curled her lip. “Yes, well, I suppose she was passable,” she sneered as she clapped politely.

Rossamünd barely heard her or the cheers.
Swill is a massacar!
Sebastipole said he had not found how the rever-man could have got in: the fortress really
was
impregnable. It would not have to be if the abomination was already being kept inside Winstermill—indeed if it had been made there in the deep parts. Was it mere coincidence that Rossamünd had found his way out only through the Master-of-Clerks’ rooms? Swill was most certainly his man, brought in especially. It all fitted too horribly.