Factotum ft-3

by D M Cornish

  Darter twittered softly in unease.

  Frazzard's held tense and ready, Rossamund crept deeper into the cavity, progressing obliquely through the posts toward the weak glow, passing down one of the passages made among the countless square posts. In the stagnant twilight, he tripped over something fleshy-soft. Stumbling, he swung the moss-light, ready to hurl chemistry. Yet there was no lunging attacker. Rather he discovered an inert lump tepid with ebbing life lying at his feet, some unguessable breed of dog, large and lean with a blunt black snout and great rounded ears, vile and frightful even in death. The smoking burn of arcing unmistakable in its flank, it stank repulsively of an almost monsterlike musk. The dog's breathless mouth was jellied with gore, as if it had savaged another before its demise. Progressing cautiously, yet desperate to find his mistress, Rossamund passed a feeble seltzer-light, accounting for two more of the blunt-snouted beasts in the paltry illumination, both slain by a fulgar's power.

  A cough wheezed out of the dusty gloom, setting his heart leaping, freezing him in mid-creep.

  It had almost sounded like a call.

  Easing his foot flat and pressing his limulight against his belly to douse its glow, Rossamund harkened wide-eyed to every nuance and shift of air. There ahead, someone-or something-was breathing heavily… Frazzard's ready, the young factotum slid toward the sibilant clue, keeping a row of posts between him and where he imagined the wheezer to be.

  "H-hello, young sir…," a voice called feebly from the dark.

  Rossamund near dropped his caste in shock.

  Peering about a thick post, he spotted a man dangerously drawn and pale, spread-eagled on the gritty floor, head leaning against a wooden pillar. Rossamund took a moment to recognize the fellow in the diffuse, almost powdery glimmer of his moss-light.

  "Mister Rakestraw!" he hissed, shuffling hastily to him.

  "One and… and same." Clutching a sthenicon to his chest, the sleuth smiled fitfully, his weird laggard's eyes rolling, focusing for a moment, rolling again. "I am of the… of the thinking that y-your mistress would be unhappy you… you are here…"

  "Is she well?"

  "Aye, aye, last I saw of her… better'n me in the least." Rakestraw looked down at his broken body. Bound inadequately in neckcloths and handkerchiefs, his hand and wrist were mangled, and his right thigh torn by jaws powerful enough to break flesh even beneath the good proofing of his longshanks. "I… I told your mistress to leave me… No time to lose… I'll be right enough… been worse…," he said with obvious braggadocio. "Just getting my… my wind back…"

  Rossamund frowned over the horrid and hastily tended wounds.

  "H-how'd you find us…" Rakestraw roused a little. "It took my best… sneaks and many dabs o' precious… precious anavoid to… to crack this place and-" He winced. "And here you stroll in… like it's… it's a common shop."

  Dipping his head as if peering with necessary concentration at the man's wounds and making much of his investigations of his stoops, Rossamund let the question by without a word. Applying the flesh-brown strupleskin paste to any tear of skin or tissue, he bound the fellow's thigh tightly with bandages from his stoup.Twice he paused, thinking he heard portentous bumping in the murk of this hall of shadow.

  "They got me with their foreign dogs…," Rakestraw murmured, shaking his head in chagrin.

  "I saw three of them." The young factotum cocked his head to indicate the fallen beasts lying like a trail behind.

  Rakestraw grimaced. "Aye… I'd say they were left… left in here to prowl about these garners… unhindered… A permanent guard. I smelled them easy enough… great blighted tykehounds… Saw 'em too, pacing in the dark… c-coming for us. But the one that got me was a… surprise…" He tried to chuckle, to make light of the terrible. "Striking from the side while our… our attention was taken by those in front of us, it was snapping and shaking at me before I… before I knew better.Your Lady Naimes did it in before it had too much of me, though not soon enough to prevent my dis… disqualification from… from the rest of the venture." He smiled wanly.

  As many cuts and gashes as he could find with the scanty limulight daubed and bound, Rossamund gave the man a dose of levenseep. He was gratified to see it promptly restore some of the flush of vigor to Rakestraw's cheeks and a glimmer of clarity to his gaze.

  "Give the siccustrumn time to firm, Mister Rakestraw," Rossamund warned, "and then you may hobble as best you can anywhere you like-though I reckon right out the way you came in will be the best path for you."

  "Th-that'll be enough for me, lad-I shall win out on my own handsomely now." The sleuth gritted his teeth, forcing himself to sit straighter. "Our ladyship planned this expedition down to the dot," he wheezed. "Even as we sit here, you and I, having our nice little chat, she has an armed party at the beck of that antlered Maids of Malady lass raiding a meeting of necromancers gathered unawares in their coven's cellar down south, while not too far from here Lady Madigan and that surly Threedice chap are leading a company of lesquin troubards to make strike at Maupin's seaside chancery."

  Shaking his head to himself, Rossamund marveled at the full scale of Europe's plan. "Where is she now?" he asked, standing and resettling his stoups.

  Rakestraw gestured ambiguously to the left of Rossamund's original path. "I sent her down that way, with a dozen stout lesquin sell-swords and my remaining two scarfes to sniff out the proper path. As I warned her ladyship, have a care, young fellow… I might give you this to guide your way by"-he patted the sthenicon, still grasped at his bosom-"but it would only confuse your unperspicuous senses…"

  "I reckon a trail of the fallen will lead me near as well, Mister Rakestraw," Rossamund replied.

  Darter Brown ruffled himself and made a peculiar burring noise as if to be included in the tally of guides.

  The sleuth snorted a weak laugh. "Well they might… There's always a path for the patient eye. But they have sunk pits in here to catch ignorant intruders and… as fortunate as you have been to come so far without tumbling in one, you had better step careful…"

  Giving Rakestraw a parting draught of lordia for humours dangerously unbalanced by blood's free flow, Rossamund thanked him and pressed onward into this dark forest of beams. Alert now to the threat of pitfalls, he crept among the seemingly ceaseless rows of posts, the greening light of poorly maintained bright-limns haphazardly piercing the murk, the faintest eddy in the lifeless air drawing him on.

  Hopping before him, Darter Brown tested the boards for abrupt voids. Suddenly the little sparrow disappeared, only to flutter into view with a surly cheep! from the cavity of a pitfall.

  Circumspectly, Rossamund toed the boards to left and right, feeling his way about the trap and pressing on, Darter resuming his reconnaissance in front. Several times they found their path steered by high stacks of blocking crates and hemmed by pits. Growing quickly tired of the obstacles, Rossamund drew on his strength and simply heaved the crates opposing him until in a great clattering crash they toppled and the way was cleared.

  Ahead the gloomy light was becoming a little more general, its source more than the infrequent and ill-kept limns, until Rossamund found himself standing at the edge of the forest of pillars before a most astonishing sight. Like a glade in a wood, a great oblong space had been made through every level of this vast storehouse, the vacancy rising above him for four whole floors to open out to the wide night-gray sky. At the far end of this clearing stood the facade of a grand terrace house, not some small abscondary but a full-blown peltisade ascending for all four stories.

  Here at last was the hidden home of Pater Maupin.

  Greened by artfully clipped shrubs growing from large hogshead casques, the "yard" of wooden boards before this indoor house was laid with many dead. Most of the slain were sturdy roughs in mixed proofing, but among them lay a single gaudily harnessed lesquin. Lorica and metal helm savagely dented and flesh pierced with a score of wounds, the fellow had sold his own life dearly. Bruised by inaccurate potive work
, the yard's walls and boards were smeared in bursts of deep spraying green or gaunt mauve, their surfaces scored and pitted with the scorching of many arcs.

  Europe's work…

  From somewhere came a sullen booming.

  Fixing his vent over nose and mouth against the faint and lingering fug of vapors and returning the sparrow mask over his face as further protection to hide it, Rossamund approached the entrance of the peltisade, a thick ironbound door more like the port to a vault than a dwelling, forced open now and hanging by one bent hinge.

  To wing at last, Darter Brown shot into the house.

  Quick to follow, the young factotum progressed into a broad and well-furnished hall, the once-dank setting entirely refurbished: carpets and cornice-work and all, complete with plinths bearing alabaster busts and wall-hung daubs of august yet forgotten figures.

  Circling for a moment below the low warehouse beams dark with wax, Darter Brown alighted upon a broken side table, flicking his wings agitatedly as he waited.

  Shoes clicking on polished boards, Rossamund stepped into this comfortably furnished and bizarrely urbane field of battle illuminated by a row of colorful glass carbuncles hung from the coffers between the ceiling beams. A score of bodies were flung to all points about spontaneous barricades built of tandems and bookshelves, overturned and thrown down vainly to halt the relentless fulgar and her supporters. Loopholes in the yellow-plastered walls stood open between the paintings, each a gaping black oblong scorched about its framed mouth, one seeping unctuous smoke that smelled distinctly of recently ruptured asper. The splintered punctures of musket and pistol ball perforated every surface, and with these, greater dents as large as Rossamund's hand. Horsehair puckered from rents in fine furnishings, statues lay fallen and shattered, threadbare carpets were blemished with darkly wet stains. A bright-clad pistoleer lay dead amid the defenders, and by her a stoup-bearing skold burned by the interrupted action of his own scripts.Three more lesquins lay dead here too, one laid back bent unnaturally over a toppled seclude, his casque struck off his head. Some of the fallen were still quick with life, wide-eyed with pain, flinching in alarm at Rossamund as he threaded his way among them.

  The clash of arms rang from beyond white double doors agape at the other end of the hall.

  With Darter Brown dashing ahead, Rossamund hastened through and immediately stepped onto a landing before a short drop. He had come to a gallery that looked down through wooden arches upon a sunken basement quadrangle ringed by several stories of finely molded balconies and narrow, mullioned windows. Below in the quadrangle square, the clamor of the fight swelled; an exclamation of angry insults, shouts of fright and rage, labored gasps and the clout of landing blows, the infrequent report of pistol-shot joined by the repeated crackle of a fulgar's arcs.

  How the fight had come to be down in this lower court, Rossamund could not tell.

  The uneven flicker of deadly levin and the flash of muzzle revealed figures in many fashions of lurid harness striving, spinning and swinging in the dance of death over colored flagstones laid in a spiral of red and white and strewn with human wreckage. For now the lesquins faced more than hired roughs and common door wards: sabrine adepts had joined the defense of Maupin's hidden house, and their grace and cunning were an obvious match for their opponents' brute power and thick skins.

  In it all spun a figure in wide-swinging hems of black and red embroidered green, flourishing a short stave that arced with a revealing glaucous glare-zzack! — driving back two finely dressed sabrine adepts. Rossamund had seen such a harness before just once, many days ago, prancing about the ludion before admiring staff.

  Europe!

  Eyes staring terribly, her head high and poised, the Branden Rose skipped and stepped masterfully between the adepts' feints and ruses. Her fuse nowhere to be seen, she held only her shorter stage, brandishing it like a cudgel, the tip fizzing and hissing with deadly arcing potential.

  Among the enemy, the most implacable was a swaggering swordist crowned in a soft tarbane hat and wielding a long pallid blade, the very fellow who had cut the Handsome Grackle in the rousing-pit and come with Maupin to Cloche Arde. In dismay, Rossamund beheld his therimoir sword, exotic and venomous, made eons ago to slay monsters and swung now with such expertise. He had already witnessed it cut deep into monster flesh and watched now as it tore through the steel of a lesquin's lorica with little hindrance; what it could do to a lahzar in fine proofing he did not want to behold.

  Flash went this blade in the lamplight.

  The lesquins were alert to its power too, and strove to keep well clear of the swordist and his deadly swipes.

  About to leap down to his mistress' defense, Rossamund was baulked by at a sudden shiver of frission. The sabrine adepts and the few drab roughs left with them attempted to draw away, pulling back to the farther side of the quadrangle. Barely released from hand strokes, the reduced quarto of lesquins reeled under an invisible assault. Rossamund could feel the edge of scathing frission centered on the quadrangle below, the vaguest fluttering in the very midst of his head that brought a twinge of pain.

  Yet under such inward violence only one troubardier collapsed, snarling so volubly through the constrictions of his casque that the young factotum heard it from his balcony perch just above. Remarkably, the other bravoes remained on their feet, shaking their armored heads dazedly but very much unconquered.

  How is it possible?

  Europe stood, eyelids fluttering with almost manic rapidity under the impulse of her own puissance, keeping the scathing at bay.

  Presuming their foes unbalanced, the swordists rushed to attack.

  A wordless shout and Europe leaped at them, her lesquins eagerly with her.

  In pure reflex, Rossamund threw the caste of Frazzard's powder and another, true and fast, catching several sturdy roughs who hung back from the fight in a shower of popping blue sparks. Startled, the swordists writhed clear of the spray, glaring up at the floors above, trying to find the origin of the chemistry; their assault turned to defense as, with a brute cry, the lesquins pressed the sudden switch of advantage.

  Despite this, from his perch, Rossamund could see that Europe was being cornered. A swordist in garish vermilion and white and a black arming-cap was pounding at the fulgar with an incessant gust of blows of his heavy wide-bladed sword, bravely endeavoring to dominate the fulgar's attention while lesser roughs sought to pull her down.

  Eyelids still flickering, Europe turned the swordist's blade and pounced away to catch one rough with a vigorous revolving kick to the abdomen, then spun aside, to crack him ringing blows to head and arms with her stage.Yet there was no zap, no retaliating arcing flash-the very skill that saved her from the affliction of the scathing prevented the Branden Rose from afflicting others with her own puissance. With all her grace and deadly aptitude, under assault from within and without, Europe could surely not prevail long.

  Rossamund clenched empty hands and knew that sturdier tools were needed. Dashing back into the hall behind, he snatched up a pair of pistols from the fallen pistoleer, thinking that their heavy barbed handles would make perfect cudgels once they were fired. Darting back to the balcony, he found that in this briefest divagation Europe and a mere pair of her lesquin allies were now left to contend against only two of Maupin's swordists-the one in garish vermilion brandishing the heavy sword, the other the turbane-hatted wielder of the therimoir, his dread spathidril blade held curving up behind his back as it had been before cutting the Grackle. The three against the two, they circled each about the other among the litter of hurt and dead with wary concentration until now the swordists stood between Rossamund and his mistress.

  That very moment, Europe looked up and she saw him, knowing him full well in his fancy mask. A distinctly protective fury convulsed for a beat in her face, making her thoughts plain-What are you doing here! — and setting a guilty gripe in Rossamund's milt.

  Suddenly, beyond her, a fresh commotion thrust into the quadrangl
e, bursting from an oblong tunnel set between heavy beams well back in the deep shadows beneath the balcony at the far end. Proofed in deep green, these arrivals were clearly door wards from the Broken Doll, fighting desperately against unseen assailants in the passage beyond, and collected protectively about a singular figure. In the quick glare of a gunshot Rossamund saw clear that it was Pater Maupin, limping as he came, shouting directions and warnings, stout hanger in one hand, pistol in the other, marvelous wig askew.

  With their appearance the frission ceased, its dread and unseen wielder perhaps overset in the confusion.

  Attention swiveling quickly between the sabrine adepts before her and this new scrimmage behind, Europe must have discovered Maupin too, for she became sudden action, pressing with her last two lesquins to finally get at him.

  Realizing he was beset from in front and behind, the proprietor of the Broken Doll called warning, and the rearmost of his lifeguard faced about to meet this new assault.

  Yet even as Europe went for her prize, the swordists went for her.

  Eyes fixed in horror on the gore-smeared white of the therimoir blade, Rossamund leaped the railing to drop down to the quadrangle floor, springing forward the very moment his feet slapped on the flagstones and sprinting at the adepts. He gave a shout to draw their attention away from his mistress, which for a moment appeared to succeed. Thinking themselves properly ambushed, the pair of swordists looked to him in surprise, expressions quickly composing in realization of their error.The therimoir swordist gave a disdainful scowl and, showing his back to Rossamund, set himself against the Branden Rose, leaving a mere boy to his vermilion-clad brother-in-arms. The vermilion swordist came at Rossamund directly, swatting at him with many mighty swings of his broad, heavy blade. Tripping back, the young factotum fired a pistol at the adept, the shot striking the man square in the bosom.Yet the bullet was foiled by stout proofing. Pointing the second firelock directly into the swordist's scowling face, he fired, his aim knocked aside in the very moment of detonation by a deft sweep of the vermilion adept's arm. Driven into the shadows beneath the balcony from which he had just sprung, Rossamund was nearly ended by several strokes, contorting himself left and right, scarcely fending each artful blow with his borrowed pistols. Desperate to get to Europe's side, he could see her, alone in a press of green door wards, twisting, skipping, striking left and right, the therimoir swordist trying to close, her arcs free again and keeping all at bay.