"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.