The stuttered cough of firelocks resounded flatly from the trees above, followed by a shout diminishing in volume and a powerful zzack!
Europe!
Crashes in the nearby underbrush descended swiftly toward him. Scrabbling to stand and drawing a caste of Frazzard's powder, Rossamund spied a misshapen figure plunging down the hill. Pulling his clammy vent about his mouth and nose, the young factotum recoiled as the assailant burst through a stand of juvenile pines at the edge of this level shelf. But for the threwdless emptiness of this being, he might have thought by its filthy frock coat and jauntily tilted tricorn that he was beset by a drunkard. Formed from cloth and wood and metal springs as much as of fleshly parts, this thing was not the headlong, bloodthirsty bits of meat the revermen he had met before had been. It seemed careful, almost calculating, as it regarded him from the black holes in its sack-cloth head, its eyes perpetually open in an exaggerated expression of horror.This was a jackstraw, the acme of a black habilist's arts.
Regardless, the swift familiar hatred expanded within Rossamund's bosom. Drawing away, he had the strangest impression of a subtle almost-witting, not the stark frission of a neuroticrith, rather something communicative fluttering on the boundaries of sensation.
Gurgling, the jackstraw sprang at him, reaching with arms ending in long fiendish blades scissoring where palm and fingers should have been, their filthy corroded edges glinting dully.
Reeling, Rossamund pitched the Frazzard's at the thing's head with a deft flick, the repellent bursting with blue-flashing detonations right upon its sack-draped face. The jackstraw stumbled briefly yet righted itself, dribbling fizzing mucus from a rent scorched in the cloth. The young factotum retreated through the remnants of a door, reaching into his stoup for a lepsis of greenflash, putting a broken stub of a wall between him and his hunter.
In a glimpse of something incongruously pale above, he spied the white woman in the summer dress who had first hailed them on the road, now standing several yards farther up the incline, her eyes knotted closed in an expression of severe-almost ravenous-concentration. Arms bent out at the elbows, both her hands were stretched and grasping at the blank air with jerky and ferocious passion.
The thin witting sensation fluctuated. Surely she and the cloth-man were connected. She witted, it moved.
Was such a thing possible?
Attention fixed on the jackstraw stalking before him, Rossamund found and clasped the caste of greenflash. As he drew it forth, a crushing blow slapped him upon the side of his head, sending him sprawling, skidding across the moss and paving to crumple into the roofless remains of a small room. Intellectuals swimming, he shook his head to right himself, a sharp iron tang in mouth and nose. Sight blurred and swimming, he forced himself to his feet even as he realized that there was a second cloth-made reverman coming at him, leaping over the wall, the newcomer possessing a wooden box for a head. They were on him just as he understood his peril. With no time to think, Rossamund clapped the egg-caste of greenflash still in his grasp on the chest of the nearest jackstraw.
In a white flash, a thousand writhing agonies tore at him within and without. All notion was obliterated in a vast, ringing nothing… Something heavy in his hearing reverberated with a damp gonging. His skin crawled; his innards writhed. With a nauseating heave the cosmos reformed again, leaving Rossamund anguished and beaten, gagging for air against a sucking wetness about his mouth and nose. He clawed clumsily at his face with limbs sluggish and unhelpful, half tearing the vent away in suffocating distress to let blood flow unhindered from his nose. He looked in amazement at his hand, discovering the palm of his glove scorched completely away, the flesh beneath blistered and bloodied, and marveled dumbly at how little it hurt.
Burnt and torn, the two jackstraws had been thrown back too, sprawled akimbo against the farther wall. The rever with the wooden head was missing an arm, but far from undone, it staggered to stand, trying to reach for him with its remaining hand, mummified and black.
Suddenly, over the near wall of the ruin, only a few yards from Rossamund's shoulder, a third cloth-man reared. With cruel deliberation, it pulled itself over the stonework to crouch upon the crumbling masonry on what appeared to be the legs of a donkey. Giving voice to a hissing ruttle through sagital teeth of befouled iron set in gums swollen and diseased, it reached for him.
Rossamund shrank from the vile grasp, pushing wildly with wounded hands and aching legs to win clear, the tenuous, clutching witting all about.
His two original corpse-made assailants righted themselves and the three cloth-men pounced at him. Pitiless claws seized him. Iron bit at his proofing. But the costly gaulding proved its worth and held. He kicked and felt something squish and yield, yet the more Rossamund struggled, the more he seemed to be ensnared. A loathsomely cold hand clamped across his throat but did not squeeze. Without the vent to shield his nose, he inhaled the purulent fetor of his half-rotted foes and screamed a loud, long wordless terror.
A distant chirruping fury grew rapidly louder, a strange and angry chatter-chatter-chatter in the boughs above clear in the nearly silent struggle below it.
Darter Brown!
Impossibly, his tiny friend had not perished in the great blast on the road.
Right in the madness of the struggle, pressed down in the corner of a broken building, Rossamund could hear the vehement chattering, swooping and harrying just above.There was a sudden ferocious whirling and much of the overpowering assault was abruptly released.
Jerking free from the confusion and heaving himself upright on the foundation wall, Rossamund perceived a small, oddly proportioned figure in what would have once been the very next room, grappling viciously with the much larger donkey-legged jackstraw. Dressed in a frock coat of peacock blue, it had the greatly enlarged head of a sparrow. In an astonished inkling, Rossamund knew that he had seen this creature once before and heard of it many times more.
Cinnamon!
Here, surely, was the very creature who had deposited him, pink and wailing, into Fransitart's reluctant arms, now bartering mighty buffets with a jackstraw, terrible hits of hoof and beak and claw that sent the other reeling.
Thrown to the weedy cobbles only a few feet away, the other two clothmen righted themselves. Dribbling maddened spittle, Sackhead scuttered forward on bladed hands and toes to pinch the young factotum about his ankle with cruel iron fingers. Tripping back, Rossamund was saved from a fall by the stub of wall behind him. Levering against it, he kicked and lashed with his unhindered leg, pounding the jackstraw's arm and wrist, feeling bone and desiccated tendons crack and crush under heel. Above, Darter Brown flapped, cursing in the abominable creature's face and soiling on its already filthy clothes.
With a spang! of metallic joints, the wood-headed jackstraw rose sluggishly from the remains of the doorway where Cinnamon must have thrown it down. Its box staved in at one side, and seeping black, it fixed the appallingly vacant hole of its single eye upon Rossamund.
Rossamund heaved on the wall to flip himself over and was seized by the foot once more. Twisting away from the rotten merciless grasp, he tripped and slid jarringly down the wall onto his side.
Abruptly, a sizeable stone smote Woodenhead on its already damaged cranium panels. Another struck it an instant later and the jackstraw faltered in midstep. At this a veritable rain of rocks, branches, pinecones and dried dung began to hail on the cloth-man rever. Beyond the tumbledown wall Rossamund spied a tiny figure on the other side of the level, its yellow eyes angry-wide.
"Freckle!" he cried involuntarily, kicking with fresh vigor at the sack-faced fiend trying again to stand and lift him by his leg. Dear Freckle!