by D M Cornish
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 Phoebë well descended from her apex and Darter Brown flapping ahead, Rossamünd flicked a caste of Frazzard’s powder into hand, took out his moss-light, climbed the stone steps and went inside.
27
CONTESTS DARK AND VENOMOUS
peltisade hiding place of significant size, large enough for a person to live in permanently, with space for staff and entertainments, often functioning as the dens of the ne’er-do-well set of folk with enough money and influence to create such havens. Such structures are more common in cities than authorities would care to ponder upon, yet as universal as they might be, they are little reckoned to exist by most folk, which is precisely the point.
ILLUMINATED feebly by a single yellowing bright-limn, the small front hall of the office of Messrs. Gabritas & Thring was dominated by a narrow stair. Europe was not here; nor, it seemed, was anyone else. Pausing, ear cocked, Rossamünd 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 Rossamünd 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, Rossamünd 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 Rossamünd on.
Sole-eye, however, remained in the hall.
Rossamünd 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 & 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, Rossamünd 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. Rossamünd 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.
Darter twittered softly in unease.
Frazzard’s held tense and ready, Rossamünd 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, Rossamünd 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, Rossamünd 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.
Rossamünd 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. Rossamünd 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 . . .”
“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, Rossamünd 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, Rossamünd 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,” Rossamünd 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, Rossamünd 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 Rossamünd’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,” Rossamünd 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, Rossamünd 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, Rossamünd 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, Rossamünd 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 Rossamünd 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 façade 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, Rossamünd 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, Rossamünd 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 Rossamünd’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 Rossamünd 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, Rossamünd hastened through and immediately stepped onto a landing bef
ore 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, Rossamünd 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. Rossamünd 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, Rossamünd 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.