Oh, that I could swoop with them.
As the day drew on, they crested the escarpment above the Milchfold and beheld Brandenbrass the Great, a many-spired crown sprawled along the coast and bejeweled with a hundred thousand lights-the glittering den of their foes. Rossamund smiled wryly. He had once, in a straightforward and carefree time not too far gone, thought cities a place of simplicity and safety.Yet as they drew down to the plain of the Milchfold, he regarded this great seat of civilization much as he was sure all monsters did, as a dark fastness of bloodthirstiness and brutality, the brink of all woes.
On the flat of the Fold they went rapidly, and in the encroaching gloom of early evening passed into the brutal city, entering under the Moon Gate into the elevated northern suburbs about the fortress of Grimbasalt. Come away so quickly from the freedom of Orchard Harriet to these narrow beetling streets, Rossamund was daunted by the sad, crowding business, the relentless pursuit of… of… whatever this ceaseless chasing served. Every face seemed turned to them, every eye watching for their return, every mouth ready to bring report of them to Swill and Maupin and their coterie of bloodthirsting allies. Muffling his nose with his still-torn vent against the stink of sluggish drains and close lanes and all ambition's decay, he glimpsed again a bill blazoned "Winstermill!" but now was too tired and too downhearted to care.
The lentum-and-six took them slowly into the yard of Cloche Arde, the high-house's solid grandeur bringing him some measure of comfort. There they discovered another coach arrived ahead of them. Rossamund was certain he could see an oddly familiar figure stepping from it-a tall, skinny man wearing his own snow-white hair slicked and jutting like a plume from the back of his head and small bottle-brown spectacles.
"Doctor Crispus!" he cried, leaning dangerously over the sash.
The physician's face was drawn, his expression deeply anxious and not a little bewildered. Under his smudged, yet still sartorially splendid pinstripe gray coat, his arm was wrapped against his trunk, bandaged against a break. "Well betide you, Lampsman Bookchild! Well betide you all!" he called. "Happy advents! This is your dwelling; my reconnaissance is proven true!" His face grew suddenly grave. "I have just come today from Vesting High…"
"And we from the hills," Europe answered a little more cautiously as he handed her out from the coach cabin. "You are an unlooked-for arrival, sir… Has the clerk-master given you some long-deserved leave?"
A strange, unreadable expression clouded the physician's face. "No, madam, no." He bowed low. "I bring the most pressing and astonishing news… Winstermill has fallen. The lighters of the manse are no more."
22
Speculator private most commonly called sleuths, also speculators, sneaksmen, snugsmen or deductors; fellows offering their cunning, contacts and guile for a fee, to be employed in the discovery or repression of whatever or whomever is desired. Existing almost exclusively in cities, they operate under official license and are often engaged by the more proper authorities as thieftakers. A good sleuth will employ several undersleuths and have a wide association of informants and seeds, even possessing connections in other cities.
Still in their frowsty travel clothes, the five sat in the hiatus while Clossette and her various maids bustled about them to turn bright-limns and bring a hasty supper. So settled, Europe, Rossamund and his two masters listened to Doctor Crispus' remarkable tale of panic and collapse in attentive silence.
The assault on Winstermill had come in the night. By devious means the nickers had foiled the portcullis guarding the roads that passed under the fortress and found their way in through the very clandestine passages and furtigrades where Rossamund once vanquished the pig-eared gudgeon and Swill and the Master-of-Clerks conducted their wretched business.
"Such cruel speed, such mortal efficiency!" Crispus pressed his eyes with thumb and forefinger. "They seemed to pounce from every subterranean orifice, every door and closet."
Though the defenders roused quickly, they could do little to halt the inward attack.
"I could hear the frightful clamor of conflict through the walls of the infirmary," The Doctor recalled sadly. "The bells of the Specular ringing ceaselessly, cannon on the wall tops booming, muskets loosed by quarto in the very halls of the manse joined by the ranting cacophony of a bestial host. I am ashamed to admit that my first thoughts were to flight. This would not do, of course; what of the hurt in my own care? Who would seek out poor Mister Numps?"
Rossamund wrestled the urge to interrupt and demand of Numps' fate.
"With only a lone epimelain to do the work with me-a dear girl who had stayed faithful through all the Master-of-Clerks' depredations-I sorted those who could walk out and those who needed carrying. Swill, the dog, would not help. Absent for the whole of last month, he had returned only a day or so before, come back from some dark errand, little doubt…"
Europe stirred on her tandem. "Little doubt, indeed…," she said.
"Coming from some hidden nook, he was clutching a wad of books and documentation. 'They're in the kitchen!' he was crying. 'In the slypes!' and kept uttering like a man in fever, 'He sent them! I do not know how, but that blighted child is having his revenge!' Who this child might be, I can only conjecture…"
Rossamund could not be sure, but he thought he saw the physician's harried regard flick to him ever so quickly.
"Swill useless, I sent the poor epimelain to get some other, sturdier help, but, alas!" The anguish on Crispus' face was distressingly candid. "She did not return…" He closed his eyes against foul memory. "If I had waited but a minute more, she would still be with us, for somehow in all the woe, our most wondrous Lady Dolours appeared, to pluck us all from the very clutches of doom. She and her columbines and that young Threnody lass you were chums with, Rossamund, had lurked a veritable army of nickers only days before: a great hoard come out from the east and north, bent on Winstermill, plundering cot and field as they drew closer." He took a deep breath and his aspect grew tight. "With the very advent of these doughty damsels a great frenzy of bogles spilled from the Kitchen Ends into the infirmary; swarthy, hirsute toadlike things right in the heart of impregnable Winstermill. Hard were the calendars pressed to keep us safe and lead us out, trying to bring that rascal Swill with them. But afraid of the calendars as much as he was of the bogles, he ran from the infirmary, raving like a mad man, 'I'm not the one you want! I'm not the one you want!'"
A knock and Kitchen arrived with glasses of refreshingly dilute claret complete with pulped pear for them all.
"The brave calendars defended the sick even as they carried them from the manse proper," Crispus continued after a lengthy sip. "Out in the Broad Hall by the infirmary I caught my last glimpse of the clerk-master. Sans wig, he was among his troubardiers-and Laudibus Pile with him-all defending a stack of furniture and books set across the doors from the Broad Hall to the Ad Lineam, shooting pistols and fusils and jabbing their spittendes at the squabbling rabble of hobnickers beyond. Where the black-eyed witting fellow that Podius brought in was at, I do not know; I felt his work twice or thrice but never caught sight of him." He took another drink. "Winning out onto the Grand Mead, we found the Feuterers' Cottage and the gatehouse blazing torches. By this wicked light I saw the once-impassable gates thrown open and stormed by obscure beslimed things surging from the dense grasses of the Harrowmath. A great battle was unfolding on the grounds where we had paraded so often and boasted of our impregnability. Yet in the violence I could plainly see that it was no simple massacre; I witnessed monster at fight with monster!"