The tunnel-like lane ended abruptly, depositing them in a small, remote square where two other cramped lanes and their drains joined and gurgled down a large, sunken grate. As clear of debris as the lane was full, the square was surrounded on three sides by stone foundations and wooden walls and on the fourth by the works of Winstermill's battlements. Weakly illuminated through a drizzling opening between roof and wall, it felt as removed from the bustle of the fortress as any haunted, lonely spot out in the wilds. Wind and rain wailed on high, lightning crashed, but down here it was still; the bubbling waters and Numps' lilt the only tunes.
Pausing, Numps put a finger to his mouth, indicating quiet. They could have talked at volume for all anyone would have heard. Bemused, Rossamund nevertheless nodded, and clamped his lips together for emphasis. Giving him the lantern, Numps crouched by the sunken grate and reached down between its squared bars, grabbing at something on their underside. There was a slight clank and the grate sprang up slightly, splitting in two like a gate. It was an entrance. Stone stairs led down an arched tunnel into damp warmth and darkness. The water of the drains did not pour directly into the hole revealed, but was caught in a gutter about the rim and channeled into a pipe at one corner. The dark below smelled faintly familiar; the sweet salt of seltzer blended with that almost-but-not-quite neutral odor of high humidity.
Without hesitation, Numps went down, encouraging Rossamund to follow, pointing downward. Rossamund squeezed past and Numps closed the grate again and came after. "Down, down, down we go," the glimner enthused, giving Rossamund a gentle nudge.
As they went the din of wild weather above was dulled almost to silence. The prentice could hear drops dripping steadily below, and occasional soft mechanical squeaks as well echoing up the stone stairway. This stair went deeper than Rossamund expected, down into what must have been part of the structures of old Winstreslewe, the ancient bastion founded in Dido's time upon whose ruined piles Winstermill had been raised.
The stair ended in a low undercroft of indeterminate size, its slate floor crowded with square columns and arches of brick. Packed between each pillar were large, squat, square vats of blackened wood. Some vats shone clean light to the low ceiling, others a verdant grassy green and yet others showed little light at all. Together they lit the vast subfoundational space with soft effulgence like an early, misty morning. The warmth here was peculiar: the close air tepid and clinging. A tinkling music sounded in the dimness, made by the sporadic drizzle that formed in the humidity and dripped from the rough ceiling into the vats.
"What is this place?" Rossamund breathed, swinging the bright-limn about to shine on Numps' face.
The glimner grinned in lopsided delight. "This is where the bloom is made," he whispered. "Oh, where it used to be made long, long before old Numps became poor Numps. This old Numps and his old friend found these baths and we put some little bit of bloom from a broken lamp in and we kept it alive till it grew to fill one bath and then the other bath and then the other and then more baths still! I have kept them alive, all these times." Numps' smile became sentimental, even paternal. "They're my special friends-like you and Mister Sebastipole and Cinnamon. Look, go on-look inside." By the kindest pressure on Rossamund's upper arm, the glimner encouraged the prentice to peer inside a vat. "But be careful not to let the light shine in too long, and stay quiet, 'cause they like it still and dark and peaceful."
The black wooden vats had a girth of roughly twice the width of Rossamund's cot and, straining on his toes, the prentice could see that within was water or something akin to it, perhaps a little greener. In this water was row on row of trailing plant-like growths, long horizontal strands of a kind of submerged grass waving in its rippling bath.
Bloom! Rossamund realized. Native, unsprung, unprismed bloom!
To most they would have been simply a plant; just some kind of dull, underwater weed; boring old bloom: but to the prentice it was wonderful to see it growing freely, long and wild, bushy and eagerly verdant. Puncheons of the stuff were sitting in most domiciles the land over, stumpy, pruned sprigs ready to put into a bright-limn when the old had died. Here it was closer to how it might be in its native dwelling, the littoral waters of southern mares.
Rossamund stared for a long time, enjoying the deep echo of the drops, the faint trickling of the rippling water set in motion by some unseen agent, watching the elongated tendrils swaying, swaying, swaying in the green. It was a place of near-complete peace-a model of subterranean calm.
"This is wonderful…," he breathed.
Numps beamed even as he took the bright-limn from Rossamund's hand.
"Too much light," he explained, and sat down on a nest of hessian and hemp. "I come here and the bloom trickle-trickle-trickles to me and gives me sleep and kind noises."
They sat for a time, both silent in this hidden undercroft of bloom baths.
"How does the rippling in the tubs happen?" Rossamund asked at last.
Numps stood, leaned into the vat, shone the light within and said, "By the flippers flapping, of course."
Rossamund looked again and saw flat paddles waving slowly in the depths like the swimming feet of an idling duck. Numps took him farther into the undercroft, threading past many more baths than Rossamund had first reckoned. In the midst of it all Numps halted and pointed with open palm and a self-satisfied expression to a large brassbound wooden contraption. It was a pull-box, a small kind of gastrine about the size of a limber. From its flywheel a series of wheels and belts drove all the modulating paddles that set the tub water to gentle motion, squeaking occasionally in their lazy to and fro. Rossamund could see the convoluted connection of the belts all about the roof of the undercroft, one reaching down to the paddles of each vat.
"I feed it and muck it-and the bloom too, and keep it all running myself. No one else will." Numps closed his eyes like a fellow foundling reciting verse in one of Master Pin-sum's lessons at the foundlingery. "Sometimes I put a little of one of my friends into a great-lantern that's to go back out to the road, and these live and live and live much longer than the poor things they grow otherwise."
In anyone else, this claim would be discounted as pure boast, but not with Numps; not with such obvious proofs of his skill before them.
Rossamund was powerfully impressed. "What do you feed the pull-box?"
"The cuttings and prunings and dead bits from the bloom," Numps returned matter-of-factly, though a self-satisfied grin ticked at the unscarred corner of his mouth.
"What do you do with the pull-muck?"
Grin growing, clearly proud of himself, the glimner answered, "Feed it to the bloom. They reckon it's the tastiest stuff they ever have tasted.They feed the pull, the pull feeds them-on and on and on and on."
"Why aren't these used in all the lamps all the time?"
"Oh, they have their own blooms up there," Numps replied, "in tubs not so old and leaky nor hard to get to. I always have to plug the cracks and gaps in this soggy wood." He patted the side of a bath tenderly. "Besides, the master-clerker and all his clerker-chums wouldn't like a thing like this. It's him who says where the bloom comes from nowadays."
Rossamund stood and watched the entire mechanism in silent admiration, just listening to the deep soothe of the trickling, rippling waters. "You'd have to be the best seltzerman ever there was, Mister Numps!" he whispered.
"Ahh, not poor limpling-headed Numps," the glimner said bashfully, then grinned.