Lamplighter (21 page)

Rossamünd filled the cup and carefully brought it over.

Sebastipole let Numps drink with noisy thirsty gulps, cradling the glimner’s head as he did.

Crouching by, Rossamünd watched, feeling it all his fault. “I’m so . . . so . . . sorry for . . . ,” he tried.

“Don’t fret, prentice-lighter,” Sebastipole said. “Our Numps has never been right in the intellectuals since surviving a theroscade. He has hurt himself before. It was providential I met you when I did, wouldn’t you say? Had I not needed pule-blande so urgently I would have already been in a meeting with the Lamplighter-Marshal.”

“Will Mister Numps mend, sir?”

“Doctor Crispus cites it the worst case of malingering horrors he has ever encountered,” Sebastipole continued, putting a friendly hand on the glimner’s shoulder. “We do what we can, do we not, Mister Numps, but it just isn’t the same, is it?”

Clearly dazed, Numps still managed to answer. “No, Mister ’Pole, never the same, poor Numps, and poor glass too.” He started to look around the floor about him.

“You know Mister Numps well, Mister Sebastipole?” Rossamünd asked, feeling a sudden surge of affection for the leer, so different from the other leers the prentice had encountered.

“We are acquainted, yes,” Sebastipole said.

Rossamünd hoped he might say more and waited, but the leer showed no inclination to speak further. He stood, helping Numps to sit against the glowing great-lamp. The glimner was shivering, and the lamp offered no heat.

Retrieving his thrice-high from where it dropped, Sebastipole said, “Sit easy now, Numps. Don’t you tread on those clever feet of yours—we don’t want them to bleed again.”

To this Numps nodded slowly. “Poor Numps’ clever feet. You put me back together again, Mister ’Pole.”

“Indeed, we did what we could.” The leer looked pointedly at Rossamünd. “This young master and I shall find you a blanket.”

Rossamünd followed as he went to the farther end of the lantern store.

Sebastipole turned over a bright-limn sitting on a shelf and its soft glow soon revealed a pile of sacks neatly folded in a flimsy crate. He gathered several and deposited them in Rossamünd’s arms, declaring lightly and loudly, “These will answer nicely!” He fixed the prentice with his disconcerting eyes. “It was I who found him,” the leer said low and serious, “alone and horribly mangled after the other two seltzermen had been devoured or carried away.”

Rossamünd’s ears rang as his attention became very focused. “Devoured, sir? Carried away?” he said, equally softly.

“Yes, carried away.” Sebastipole paused, closing his eyes. “It was in the first year that our Master-of-Clerks arrived. I remember it so because one of his first acts was to insist on a thorough inspection of all the great-lamps along the road. Numps and others had been attending to a vialimn out east beyond the Heap, past the Roughmarch and Tumblesloe Cot. As you know, seltzermen go out in threes—two to work, one to watch with a salinumbus at the half cock—and return before the lantern-watch starts. But this day they did not arrive by the correct time, a remarkable thing, for as you know a lamplighter’s life
is
punctuality.” Wry and knowing, Sebastipole looked to Rossamünd, the blue of his eye showing strangely bright in the seltzer light.

The prentice was too intent on poor Numps’ story to notice this small joke.

“Though not normally enough to stop the work of a lantern-watch,” Sebastipole continued with a cough, “what they found sent them quickly back to Tumblesloe, half the lanterns still unlit. By East Sloe 10 West Dove 13 the seltzermen’s tools lay scattered, their cart shattered, its mule torn and mostly eaten, and too close for comfort, they could hear a horrible inhuman calling from the hills.”

Rossamünd let his breath out slowly. “Were you with the lamp-watch, Mister Sebastipole?”

“No, Rossamünd, I arrived the next day. Myself and Mister Clement and Scourge Josclin and a dragging party of pediteers, lighters and dogs. We did not have to go far to find poor Numps, though. He was sitting up against the same lamppost where the previous night only signs of attack had been present. His arm was gone, torn from his body at the shoulder. His face and jaw were badly gouged, yet somehow he managed to live, even to crawl back to the road. The cold must have kept him alive, freezing the flow of his terrible wounds. Before or since I’ve never known a man to survive such mortal harm.”

“Frogs and toads!” Rossamünd whispered in awe.

“Indeed.” Sebastipole stood. “But it gets more remarkable still. For not only had a man so mortally mangled and comatose somehow pulled himself along for who knows how long, he had also bound his own wounds and stuffed the socket of his shoulder too, using grasses and leaves with an expertise not even a two-armed man might achieve. How he did this is a puzzle that still beggars solving . . . We bundled him back to Winstermill. He woke on the way, yammering from the horrors and saying such things as you heard him cry today, especially about that little sparrow-man. From what I know of it, Crispus fought to revive the man while Swill thought it more a mercy to let him languish and die.”

“What a merciless sod-botherer,” Rossamünd growled. “Little wonder Mister Numps refused to go to the infirmary with only the surgeon about.”

“Indeed.” Sebastipole stroked his chin. “Fortunately for Numps, Doctor Crispus is the senior man and a brilliant physician. Though I wonder if it would not have been the greater mercy to let poor Numption pass.”

Rossamünd shuddered, glad never to have faced such an impossible choice. “What of the other seltzermen?” he could not help but ask. “Did you ever find them?”

“We searched as much as we dared.” The leer rubbed at his neck like a man exhausted. “Josclin followed me as I followed the smell of the slot and sight of the drag far up into Hallow Sill. It was not like any monster’s trail I had pursued before: foreign and much fouler. It was a trace I had only smelled once before, but knew only too well. It was gudgeons. For a week we searched but found only torn clothing and discarded equipage. The calendars of Herbroulesse joined us for a time, speaking of a mighty combat heard in the woods beyond their walls, and of driving off some terrible fear two nights before; but still there was no trace of the other men. I am sure they had been eaten, for the drag I spied through my sthenicon showed little hint of human traffic, and the slot smelled only of death and that evil revenant stink. We traced it back in hope of finding where the revers had come from. Yet the trail ended nowhere, out in the wilds of the southern marches of the Tumblesloes. We returned to Winstermill with nothing more than tatters and conjecture, though Lady Dolours searched on. A tenacious woman, she followed the foul, foreign trail far into marshy lands along the northern marches of the Idlewild, but she too returned with nothing.”

Rossamünd’s attention pricked at the sound of Dolours’ name. “The calendars helped you?” he asked.

“Indeed. I have worked with them from time to time, and they with me—especially the Lady Dolours—snaring corsers and commerce men, foiling the dark trades where we can, beating off the bogles and the nickers. It’s inevitable; in a ditchland everyone must cooperate or perish in their isolation.The Idlewild prevails because of
their
work as well as ours.” Sebastipole peered at Rossamünd.

“How did a gudgeon find a way out here?” asked Rossamünd. “Did it come from a hob-rousing pit?”

A cold and dangerous look set in Sebastipole’s weird eyes. “Not very likely. Such criminal and vile practices do not last long about here, my boy.”

“But I thought a dead monster was good whichever way it’s done?” Rossamünd spouted the usual dogma.

The leer regarded Rossamünd closely for a moment. “Some folk might say it’s so,” he said carefully, “but I don’t care for the justifications they offer on rousing a bogle against a gudgeon. Coursing monsters as we have done is a needful thing, but making sport of them, especially with something as abominable as a revenant, is useless and cruel. More so, it ties up the monies of men who can ill afford it and is ruinous to the lives of the wagerers who lose.” He stopped, took a breath. “We came down very hard on the lurchers after Numps’ theroscade.”

“Why the lurchers?”

“Because these are the beginning of the whole rotten chain of the dark trades. You can only get live bogles from the lurchers or human remains from the corsers. If you stop them, then you stop the therlanes, who then can’t supply the commerce men, who have nothing to give to the ashmongers, leaving them without stock to sell to the massacars or the rouse-masters.Try as we might, there have yet been other gudgeons marauding, though never again an assault on a lighter. Enough now! Let us tend again to the needs of Numps. I can hear him shuffling about. We have muttered overlong on his past and now should labor for his present, after which I must leave you to your duties as I attend to mine.”

Rossamünd returned with the leer, back to the clutter of lamps and lanterns. There Numps, against instruction, had moved to sit again in his wicker chair and, patiently humming, was polishing another lantern-window.

course
(verb) to hunt, particularly to hunt monsters; (noun) the hunt itself, usually referred to as a coursing party, or in such phrases as “to go on a course.” A course is, obviously, a dangerous affair. One undertaken lightly will always result in the doom of some, if not all, of those involved. A prospective courser is always advised to take at least one skold and one leer—or, if they are unavailable, a quarto of lurksmen, even a navigator or wayfarer, and a hefty weight of potives and skold-shot. Not to be confused with “corse,” meaning a dead body, a corpse.

 

 

T
HOUGH Rossamünd was wanting to ask Sebastipole of the coursing of the Trought, the leer soon left him and Numps, saying that he was well overdue for an interview with the Lamplighter-Marshal.

Numps, wide-eyed, watched the leer leave and then bent to his labors once more, humming as he cleaned. Rossamünd did not know how to talk to Numps. He was afraid to frighten the nervous glimner again and so he moved slowly, looking for work to do. He found a rag, sat on an empty chest on the other side of the bright great-lamp and silently began to polish lantern-windows.

Wrapped in the canvas sacks for warmth, Numps did not complain. He did not even acknowledge Rossamünd. Instead he took every pane the prentice cleaned and polished each one again just as fastidiously as if it had never been worked, adding it to the stack of other lustrous panes. Frustrating as this was, Rossamünd did not grumble but kept at the task. Every so often he would lean down and check Numps’ feet, to make certain no blood showed through the bandages, or chide the glimner carefully if, from habit, he should try to use his foot to grip or hold. They kept at this for an hour or more till he accidentally grasped at the same dirty pane the glimner grasped from the top of the diminishing stack.

“Oh” was all Numps said, letting the pane go and humbly placing his hand in his lap.

“Sorry, Mister Numps . . . and I’m sorry about before. For scaring you and making you drop the glass and cut your feet.”

Numps must have rarely received an apology, for with each contrite word that Rossamünd uttered, the glimner interjected with a blink and an odd, hesitant “Oh.”

“That’s just silly poor Numps forgetting his-self. All a-flipperty-gibberty since Mister ’Pole found me swimming in red.” He hung his head. “I’ve never been as I was.” He sat like this for several minutes, Rossamünd not daring to move or interrupt. “Time to make seltzer!” Numps suddenly straightened, ready to get to his feet.

“
No!
Mister Numps!” Rossamünd lurched to his feet, forgetting his caution in his concern for the man’s wounded sole. For an instant he feared he might have spooked the man again, but Numps just looked at him, puzzled, holding himself between sitting and standing. “You must have a care to stay off your bad foot. Hop on your good foot like Mister Sebastipole said, till Doctor Crispus has declared you whole.”

Offering himself as a small crutch, the prentice helped Numps out of his seat and guided the limping glimner over to where he pointed: a collection of barrels and chests gathered in a corner between the wooden wall of the store and one of the tool-cluttered shelves.

“They say I’m struck with horrors,” the glimner said, pressing down heavily on Rossamünd with each hop, “and I know I’m not the old Numps, just poor Numps now; but I still remember how to mix the seltzer—they still come to me to make it ’cause no one makes it as well. I might be rummaged all about up here,” he said, patting himself on the side of his head, “them pale runny monsters saw to that, but that don’t mean I have forgotten.”

Numps prized off the lid of one barrel, releasing a distinct tang into the stuffy lantern store, and Rossamünd immediately recognized the sealike odor of sweet brine—the beginning of seltzer water. Humming tunefully, the glimner began to take all manner of chemicals from chests and boxes close to hand.With precise care he dripped, scooped, tapped and tipped each part into the barrel of brine. At each addition he stirred with slow, fine movements; first one turn of the clock then the other for set counts that he spoke under his breath. “Once clockingwise, fours contrawise . . .”