The Foundling's Tale, Part Three: Factotum

by D M Cornish

  lard-barrow also called pinguiflecterns, fattrusses or strollers. It is the fashion in Burgundis, Brandenbrass and some of its closer southern neighbors for those of wealth who want to show it to allow themselves to grow fat, proving the abundance of their success—and with it their larders. For the highest order of magnates—the elephantines and vulgarines—this fashion is taken to absurd excess, their prosperity and worldly circumstance proved with grotesque obesity. This can become so extreme that they require devices to help them move around. These are the lard-barrows, contraptions of stiffened bone framing with broad belts and strapping of leather lifting up the fat about the magnate’s middle and putting the weight onto wood-and-metal struts reaching to the floor, their bases attached to small wheels. The most effective version of such machines allows the wearer to coast along with small kicks of the toe, barely having to walk unaided. Such stoutness cannot, of course, be good for thew or soul, so these adipose magnates take treacles distantly related to those imbibed by fulgars to keep themselves in the realms of the living for as long as possible. Indeed, many are eager to find the vaunted life-extending properties said to be sought by the black habilists and are frequent secret supporters of the same. As for lard-barrows, the states of the lower Soutlands know of them as mettre gras or gros etalage, and Gotts call them speckenstands , both names containing the idea of fatty meat laid out for sale at a market and expressing the mutual disgust at such a fashion and its related practice.

  lard of Nmis tallowlike jelly; one of the parts usually employed in sanguinary draughts, its inclusion in Cathar’s Treacle produces some of the performance-enhancing euphoria it does in its more typical use.

  Laughing Spectioneer, the ~ alehouse in Brandenbrass, getting its name from an eel inspector of the State File of Comestible Reference.

  lectry folk fifth and sixth tiers of society, the middle class. See social status in Book One.

  leonguile meaning “cunning lion”; what we would call a cheetah, living and thriving in faraway N’go, its skins inevitably furnishing a robust fur trade for almost every land in the Harthe Alle.

  lepsis egg-caste, also called oodis or quasspots; castes made from the emptied eggs of various birds, an old technique of the first skolds still employed in these modern times, especially by those saumieres who hold that certain scripts remain more stable inside a lepsis, and those who simply like the style of such castes.

  lesquin(s) also called landsaire, the “high end” of mercenary soldiering, with equally high fees, the best proofing and weapons, and long lists of honors. Some companies are given to taking sanguine draughts in order that they might ignore pain, fear, and even for a time resist the frission or scathing of a wit. See Book Two.

  leviate room set aside at rowdy or lively society events to allow guests to withdraw without disgrace from the otherwise often incessant activity. A good leviate will have gentle music playing to aid the calm.

  Lillian of the Faye simply an old designation of Fayelillian, the home of the Lamplighter-Marshal. See Fayelillian in Book Two.

  limner makers of bright-limns, including the mixing of seltzer and the growing and tending of bloom.

  limnlass, limnlad young girl or boy who makes a meager living carrying a light to guide lightless customers at night; limnlads are young boys who do the same. It is a highly dangerous occupation, lighting the path for unknown people to wherever they wish to go throughout the entire city for a flat fee of one guise. After an especially long journey, a limnlass or lad can demand another half-goose to go farther but will as likely as not get satisfaction. Such vulnerable souls are among the most commonly disappeared, abstracted for the nefarious demands of benighted laboratories and dark habilistics.

  Lobe more fully, Lobe the Lord of Listening, the Great-eared One, the Ear of All; a well-known famuli (lesser servants to the false-gods, also known as autonids, pseudotherpës, pseudotheons, theärpids) who are said to be in communion with many great fichtärs (false-gods). There are many stories about all kinds of fichtärs, and Lobe is a major player or minor participant in most of them. The Saccour hold Lobe as the “lover” of Bathst, (the Grieving One, Consort of Sucoth, Lips to the Ear), communing with “her” while the Swallower of Men sleeps. They say that if you can rouse Lobe to continue to make advances to Bathst that either “she” will rouse her slumbering lord, Sucoth, to tell him or Sucoth himself will rise up in jealousy.The trick is actually getting Lobe to do such a thing, what with him being so busy running errands for all the other septs.

  loblolly assistant to a ram’s surgeon or—if they are fortunate enough—physician.

  lockscarfe break-and-enter thief skilled in foiling locks and other barriers, in sniffing out traps and hazards placed about hidden things.

  lorgnette pronounced “lorn-YET”; a somewhat basic version of what we would call opera glasses.

  lots what we might call dice, though their construction is different from that of our six-sided cubes, being blunt hexagonal cylinders with one end marked 7 and the other usually red or marked with a death’s head or other significant sign and the six faces etched with signs of ascending value. Originally a Nenese invention, lots are used widely about the whole civilized world.

  Low Brassard, the ~ original stronghold built by the Burgundians when they arrived to subdue the lands of the northwest Grume, and sister to the fortress of Grimbasalt in the north of the city. Over the years it has been enlarged and beautified, but in all this the first fortress remains, dominating the Brandendirk with its sinister spires.

  ludion room in a house or attached to it dedicated to physical activities: sports, jousting, fencing—usually windowless but for a ring of small ventlike windows all about the tops of the walls. In Cloche Arde the ludion occupies the entire third floor with a great fireplace at one end, and its walls are entirely of glass.

  M

  madamielle Etaine for “miss”; used for a young, usually unwed woman.

  Madigan, the Lady ~ the Marchess of the Pike (a collection of suburbs in the western part of Brandenbrass’ Second Ward [see Brandentown] known as the Pikemarch), she is responsible for the civic needs of the people living there. As a fulgar of no mean skill, she is also one of the few women in the Empire with whom Europe, the Duchess-in-waiting of Naimes, can happily keep company.

  Maids of Malady calendar clave seeking to curb the activities of the dark trades and the excesses of black habilists, working toward this end in partnership with an even more aggressive clave, the Soratchë. See Book Two.

  make-weight fifth wheel; an unnecessary appendage, a useless item.

  mandricard exceptionally long and sharp goad that can be used as a weapon too. manikin common name for a rare and little-known aberration in the

  natural order, a monster in human form. Many insist that it is impossible for such a creature to exist.

  man-of-business one who acts partly as lawyer, computer, counter-man, broker, manager, representative, secretary and clerk. They are either hired in their hundreds by the great mercantile firms or work individually for select, well-paying clientele, those with kinder souls representing the less shrewd in the maddening world of bureaucracy. In practice these fellows can range from the most sedentary quill-licks to the keenest, most ruthless minds of the day. Men-of-business are a veritable plague in the cities, the gears of private bureaucracy unable to shift without them, many with open or secret ambitions to themselves rule the organs they slave within. This is no idle fancy either, for some of the most powerful magnates were once lowly men-of-business; more so, this is how many of them still refer to themselves. Most of the middling classes are utterly dependent on the patronage of the higher stations (commonly very erratic), and it is a known but seldom acknowledged practice that men-of-business ride the successes of their patrons—and line their own pockets on the way—to achieve heights of their own.

  maschencarde papier-mâché; apologies to some for the seemingly gratuitous reinvention of a perfectly usable word. In my defense, sometime
s a word will just look too rooted in our own reality, and so I change it to maintain verisimilitude.

  matter(s) events of history.

  mattern as matter is history, so a mattern is a historian.

  Maundersea, Battle of ~ naval battle fought in 1588 HIR between an allied fleet of Grumid and Sangmaund rams (the Brandenbrass squadron at the command of Rear-Admiral Patchword Fyfe) against the might of picaroons from the Pontus Canis—known together as the Sea Dogs or Sea Beggars and grown so much more active immediately after the general weakening of naval strength in 1585—and their sponsors the Lombards. It was fought in the Maundering Sea east off the Sangmaund coast and began with a long chase started by Fyfe aboard the drag-mauler NB Rebuke. Leading a wide-flung coursing squadron of drag-maulers and fast frigates on the prowl along the usual trade routes northeast of Start Point for piratical activity, the Rebuke was alone when she surprised the piratical freebooter (a type of fast overgunned frigate), Vinegar Strumpet, in the very act of waylaying a Boschenberg packet ram. One sight of the larger ram and—in the usual pattern of picaroons—the Vinegar Strumpet fled south. The Rebuke gave chase, setting flares and running out her mile-line (a large kite by which to send signals high into the air) to summon the assistance from her scattered fellows, the drag-mauler NB Redoubtable and the frigate NB Likely. Three hours into the chase a Brandenard privateer frigate, Fox, out on a mission of its own, joined them. Matched speed for speed, they gained little headway. The Strumpet sent up a kite, gaining the aid of two more freebooters, the Black Joke and the Red Dart (its hull painted a brilliant and bloody red). After a brief stouche the freebooters took flight once more, rounding the northern tip of Lombardy and drawing the four Branden rams on. Whether by chance or some prefigured scheme, the chase was now met by a small but proper fleet of Lombardy cruisers—five drag-maulers and an equal number of frigates (too many to name here). Fortunes were reversed and it came for Rebuke and the other Brandenard vessels to take flight, going directly west into the setting sun, heading for the distant shores of the Soutlands well over the horizon. Lanterns were doused and silence kept all through the night—but for the necessary communication from vessel to vessel—yet morning revealed the Lombard picaroons still in sight, stretched from north to south across the glorious arc of the world’s morning rim. Harried by the shot of the picaroons’ chasers, all limbers to the screw and hands to the treadle, the Brandenard rams kept just ahead in the “blightedly empty sea!” Finally, on the morning of the third day, with the coasts of the Sangmaund barely in view and the overworked gastrines near collapse, Fyfe and his faithful followers found fortune of their own, coming within hailing distance of a squadron of five main-rams of Maubergonne. After much frantic, terse and rather politically loaded signaling, these heavy rams turned rescuer and entered the fray on the Brandenard side. Odds evened and the picaroons’ wind welled up; a great melee ensued, where the Rebuke rammed and sank three vessels, including the lone Lombardy capital, the seventy-four-gun-broad Serieux. Even as she pulled back and away from the savagely holed main-ram, the Rebuke herself was struck by the Black Joke, and she and the Serieux sank side by side with all hands, including the dashing Rear-Admiral Fyfe. Soon after, the remaining picaroons, including the Vinegar Strumpet, fled. The Battle of Maundersea is also notable as a fleet action fought more by cruisers than by rams-of-the-line.

  Maupin, Pater Pontiflex originally of a poor yet well-to-do dog-breeding family of Languedock on the Sangmaund, he fled to Brandenbrass as a young man to avoid embarrassing connections to the operation of a syndicate of grabcleats and profit from the same. Immediately after he arrived in the vaunted city, he continued where he had left off, wheedling his way into many schemes both legitimate and criminal, finding greatest success with Fench Tinger, the former owner of the Broken Doll gambling house. After Tinger’s “mysterious” demise, Maupin presented himself up as the old proprietor’s heir, taking control of the chancery and gathering about him a crowd of similarly ambitious souls to do his bidding. He has continued his own twist on the family interest in dogs through his investment in the hidden rousing-pit below the chancery.

  mercy jane also jenmerry, a hardy, prickly weed with small violet flowers that, when in great numbers, can make a field a spectacle of spreading purple.

  metrician common truncation of the name “concometrist,” those learned and purposely equipped souls trained at one or several athenaeums about the Soutlands. Great rivals of the more contemplative and introverted mathematicians, the metricians pursue the great quest of measuring and documenting the entire known and—better yet—the unknown world.

  metropolitan(s) original lords and now senior ministers of the Archduke of Brandenbrass.

  Middle Ground one of the main harborages of Brandenbrass, occupying—as its name suggests—the central part of the eternally busy waters before the famous city. Other parts of the harbor (though not all) include Gatlin Pond (also known as Admiralty Sink), where only naval vessels might anchor or move; Ives Steps; Mill Pond, the waters before the milling districts of the city; Sour End, the quieter weedy waters at the farthest reach of the harbor proper; the Branden Roads—calm sheltered waters northwest off Exodus Island where vessels wait to be piloted into a proper harborage; and the Chops—rip waters out beyond the Branden Roads not safe for sailers or smaller gastriners.

  moilers farm laborers, especially those employed in turning the soil.

  Moldwood Park, the ~ remnant of a once-great woodland stretching untamed upon the coastal plain that became Brandenbrass and its immediate pastureland of the Milchfold. Felled and steadily shrunk over the years, its borders were established by legal compact between the Lapinduce and one enlightened Burgundian prince. If the current lords of the city know of the power that dwells at its heart, they do not let on.Yet despite all the pressure of progress and a city pressed at times for room, the boundaries of the park remain. Greensmen keep its fringes somewhat manicured now, but in its heart the Moldwood is as untamed as it ever was.

  moll potny women (usually girls) on street corners and circuits who sell dubious-looking stews from steaming cauldrons, doing trade with only the famished or the ironclad of stomach. If you know which moll potny to go to, however, these rough-made victuals can be highly tasty and not too distempering to your inner workings.

  much exercised worried, anxious and fretful, given to sleepless and troubled nights.

  Munkler’s Court, the ~ collective of panto plays whose central story revolves around a woodsman in search of love; one of the more outrageously invidical stage shows written by Pendrift.

  murmurs lesser players on a stage who, in certain forms of play, give clues to the audience about whether the moments in it are happy, sad, frightening or relieving, and whose ultimate ends in the tale are determined by the deeds of the main players, perishing or thriving as the protagonist perishes or thrives.

  Myrrh, Anaesthesia a native of Flint, she began her career in teratology as a pure fulgar. Witnessing and indeed suffering the wrong end of the potency of a wit, she became jealous of their puissance and returned to Sinster to go again under the transmogrifer’s catlin. Originally plying her trade about the Gott protectorates of the Enne, she was compelled by troubles with a highly stationed woman over the latter’s husband to seek a less complex situation. Taking passage over the Pontus Canis, and after many adventures, she found herself in Brandenbrass. Here she learned that the money was better and the “targets” less troublesome doing the dark work of the well connected, and committed herself to spurning work.

  N

  nadderer(s) common name for sea-nickers of all kinds, but specifically any of those that are not kraulschwimmen or false-gods.

  naeroë said in the most ancient of myths to be the original patrons of the air, of sky and cloud and rain and storm, driven away by the malice and violence of the rebelling alosudnë. None now know where they have fled to; the rare ancient texts that speak of them insist on their eventual return and mark the occasion as the
end of all things.

  naivine person who has never ventured far beyond a city or safe town, who has never seen a monster or is sensible of them beyond story, tradition and rumor. Some of the more “knowing,” self-approving naivines with a voice and an audience declare monsters to be a fiction, to be nothing more than large and rampant animals or other natural forces talked up into terrible beasts to keep society meek and pliable.

  naval college some cities have naval colleges (or nautical academies) where if you are independently well off, have married guardians or are sponsored by a patron (e.g., a captain or the state), you can get a much more fulsome lesson in the skills of running a vessel: rimitry and orthitry (mathematics), weltergraphie (wind and waves), tungolitry (astronomy), naval architecture, and instrument construction. Much more thorough, and producing more learned captains and lieutenants than those trained twixt cockpit and quarterdeck, though what these lesser fellows lack in formal education they amend for with experience and levelheadedness in battle.

  Nenin major realm of the Occidental kingdoms to the far, almost mythic west of the Half-Continent across the great western gurgis. Though for most “Sundergirdians” the name is a catchall for the whole Occident, it is indeed just one of many realms therein, and certainly among the most dominant.

  Neo-Athic more recent artistic style and movement reviving the acute attention to detail so revered in the ancient fabulists of long-gone Attica.

  night steppers people out for fun at night.

  nissë name not even known among everymen but in the most abstruse texts; the ancient designation for the nuglungs, second born after the eurinië, sent to aid them against the alosudnë.