For a moment Rossamund had an inkling of how peculiar he might look clad in his heavy proofing and laden with stoups and digitals like a proper skold.

"Where was this, young sir?" the Monsiere interjected, betraying no little amazement himself in his quizzically frowning mien.

"Ah . . . Out Bleak Lynche way, sir . . . on the Conduit Vermis," he added.

"Ahh, yes. I have heard some fluttering rumor that speaks of disquiet among the therian over that way," Trottinott observed. "I wonder if it bears any connection with our own distress."

"Perhaps," came Europe's soft reply.

Scantling Aire consisted of four round towers arranged in a square, the s.p.a.ces between closed with a tall fence of stone and iron. Smilingly self-sufficient, the local parmister in plain gray soutaine greeted them in the iron-girded yard between these four tall cottages. They were quickly joined by many tired, solemn-eyed women dressed in white bagged sleeves and long-hemmed bibs of gray or brown, and ruddy barefoot children clad in sacklike smocks regardless of gender. These were the sheepwives and their bantlings-amiable enough, yet their hospitality was diminished by a deep fatigue.

There were, however, no other men.

Introduced as Master Parfait, the parmister was a windy, posturing, rooster of a man. He showed Europe about his tiny const.i.tuency with all the self-satisfaction of the sole male among a throng of frightened women.

"The men are all out in field or sleeping," Parfait explained to his lofty lady guest. "Some brave fellow has to keep eyes out for these lonesome ladies."

Rossamund looked away to hide his sour face.

"I am sure their menfolk have much to say about your bravery," Europe returned coldly.

The smug fellow's countenance fell. "Well . . . They . . . I-uh . . ." He spluttered and blundered to silence and was ignored forevermore.

In a flurry of curtsies and breathless "M'lady's!" the sheepwives were nevertheless reluctant to sacrifice a sheep to the demands of a fulgar.Yet, with some quiet encouragement from Trottinott, they singled out a young beast from the domestic pen. To their relief, Europe required only a little of its ichor let run into a bucket from a small hole p.r.i.c.ked in its neck, and the life of the bewildered hogget was spared.

At the fulgar's instruction, this bucket of gore, two pails of soured sheep's milk and an armful of pudding basins were hefted by a quarto of doughty wives, carried outside of Scantling Aire's wall and about it to the meadow behind. This procession-Europe, Rossamund, the Monsiere and his son, and the senior-most wives of the village-was joined by children crowding and shouting and running after them as if it were a summerscale vigil.

Europe put Rossamund to work under the giggling gaze of the fascinated children peeking from the shade of the village wall.

The natural mound on which the community had been founded was k.n.o.bbled with ancient, lichen-blotched boulders. Standing down on the meadow proper, elbow in hand, knuckle pressed to lip, the Branden Rose instructed Rossamund to set six pudding basins on the rocks, calling left, calling right until she was satisfied the bowls were s.p.a.ced the correct number of yards apart along the whole eastern slant. His next task was to ladle soured sheep's milk from pail to basin, followed by a little sheep's blood.

"Make it twenty parts milk to one part red!" Europe instructed him as if it were some regular script.

The gore stained the curdlings the color of a person's skin; this sight and the accompanying smell made Rossamund's digesting stomach queasy.When all the pudding basins were full, he followed Europe out into the gray, broadly undulating land, dribbling a trail of blood-curdle from a gory bucket onto the teeth-mown turf. At a hundred yards he was instructed to place an earthen bowl down and fill it. He then trickled the bait for a similar distance and placed another blood-curdled bowl. This was repeated until the bucket was empty. To Rossamund's astonishment they had come near on a quarter of a mile.

"This should make an excellent slot for our hob-possum to follow to the bait proper," Europe observed, peering out into the pastures and up at the great hemisphere of patchy sky. "How sits the threwd?"

Found dumb for a moment by the directness of her question, Rossamund squinted into the east, to where they were told the threat usually arose. "It is unsettled," he replied carefully. "Not unfriendly, more . . . uncomfortable." It was the best word he could reckon.

The fulgar pursed her lips, her sharp gaze shifting from tussock to tussock as if monsters skulked behind every one.

"Miss Europe, what if this nicker is blithely?"

"I think you will find, Rossamund, that these humble people care little how blithely a nicker might be" was her quick reply, hazel eyes still intently scrutinizing their surroundings. "A beast of any stripe is a bane to a farmer if stealing his flocks."

Rossamund sighed. "Aye."

Europe arched a brow. "This nicker has begun to a.s.sail people's houses-hardly the evidence of a kindly nature, I would have thought . . ." Her expression abruptly hardened, and her attention fixed on something behind them, something toward Scantling Aire. "We are followed."

Rossamund spun about.

Maybe fifty yards behind stood Autos, hesitating, expression shifting manifestly between unease and keen inquisitiveness. "What are you doing?" he called as he dared to approach. Behind him, back by Scantling Aire, his father was standing among the boulders, watching apprehensively, hands cupped to mouth to shout his son back.

"I am making a slot for the unkindly nicker to follow," Europe explained bluntly. "Go back to your papa ..."

"But he is no older than me!" Autos pointed stubbornly to Rossamund, his cracking voice an honest plea. "He helps you! I have an excellent fowling piece and can course with a whole kennel of talbots-"

"He is my factotum for a reason, child," Europe replied, her tone a warning, "holding vastly greater parts and practice than you! Go! I do not want to be forced to souse you with this b.l.o.o.d.y milk and leave you out here as part of the bait!"

Autos paled, blushed, then scowled-torn between horrified belief in her words and the desire to remain and appear very brave.

"She is jesting, young master," Rossamund finally said when it became clear his mistress was going to leave the poor fellow in his distress, frowning to hide his own satisfaction at her compliments.

"Just barely," the fulgar breathed.

Autos pulled himself up and puffed out his chest, his brow deep-furrowed, his eyes holding insult and hurt. Snorting through his nose like some panting horse, the boy looked on the brink of a petulant retort.Yet the anxious calls of the Monsiere finally gained the attention of the young heir of the Patredike with their uncommon rancor, provoking him to pivot quickly and hurry a retreat.

Europe clucked her tongue and addressed Rossamund as if nothing had occurred. "Now, throw the bucket out farther; it shall be the first incentive of our little trick . . . Mind your pitch!" she added quickly as Rossamund wound back for the toss. ". . . Not too far."

In his keenness to oblige, he fumbled his toss so that the empty bucket so that it fell a paltry distance.

"Perhaps a mite farther than that . . . ," Europe offered, touching her lip with her long forefinger to hide a grin.

Rossamund gritted his teeth on an embarra.s.sed retort.

The second attempt a better length, they walked back to Scantling Aire.

As they climbed the settlement's mound to where the Monsiere and his party waited, Europe's manner was all innocence and serene expertise. "At night's fall my factotum and I shall sit ourselves up there and watch," she declared to the Monsiere as she stepped up to him, pointing to the roof of the southeastern cottage, partly obscured by the thick growth of a pine. "Have a scale set upon the southern wall that I might climb and descend again quickly at need."

Though Trottinott and his embarra.s.sed son were to remain with them through the night, Europe would not allow them to join her on the roof, insisting they sit and watch from the small windows of the round houses' upper stories. "I do not want to be accountable for your hurts should you stumble into my way," she warned. "And please do not shoot at anything until I have endorsed such activity." She arched a brow at the Monsiere's long-rifle. "I will not like a musket ball in my back, and whoever delivers it will like it even less."

Smiling uneasily, Trottinott nodded.

Autos stayed behind his father.

At day's end, with the clear sky a glorious dusty pink, the husbands, sons and fathers of Scantling Aire returned home to a mood of increasing hope: the Branden Rose had come to deliver them all from their terrors. Sending the large roof-dwelling skinks scuttering to hide, Rossamund and Europe climbed the triangular scale to sit on the slightly shifting tiles. Screened by resin-scented needles, they had an excellent sight of the six baited pudding bowls below. From such a height the spreading pastures, broad and flat to the north, appeared to sink to the east down to a far-off patch of murky ground and the smudge of low hills well beyond. At middle distance, shepherds bearing long, faintly glimmering limn-thorns could just be made out goading white fluffy lumps by the hundred before them, driving them north. To the right, away to the south, Rossamund spied the twinkling window lights of Patredike.

Breathing deeply of the tepid evening, the young factotum checked the priming of the flammagon supplied from the Monsiere's own modest armory. He wondered absently if his old masters were even now returning with a cunning lurksman or other patefract in tow.

A hamper had been packed by the Monsiere's kitchen-under instruction from his wife-and as evening came, he shared this with all the cottagers and the two roof-borne watchers too.

"The long night begins," Europe murmured, sitting cross-legged on the tiles and nibbling deftly on cold quail's wing and taking sips of fresh-brewed plaudamentum in between. "Let us hope our prey is an early riser ..." After a moment she added with hushed words, "When we come to the fight, I think it best-if you are resolved to action-that you stay to using potives, little man; we do not want to startle these simple people with uncommon feats of thew." She lapsed to silence.

Similarly mute, Rossamund shifted the flammagon over his shoulder, ate and watched.

16.

THE HUNT FOR THE SECRETED EVIL.

peltrymen though once used to mean trappers, this term is more and more coming to include venators-that is, hunters; indeed, it is becoming the catchall word for any woodsman. One of the notable historical details of peltrymen is that the ambuscadiers of armies of the Half-Continent model their own harness on the accoutrements of peltryfolk, a practice originating from the recruiting of skirmishing volunteers from the people best suited to skulking and ambushing: woodsmen and peltrymen.

TAIL-SORE Rossamund had been sitting stoutly for a goodly long time on the roof peak, right hand stiff from clutching the high chimney, legs twitching from holding his weight against the incline of the tiles. Attention drum-skin taut, his hearing p.r.i.c.ked to every sound that disturbed the night's hush: the snuffles and hoof-stamps of animals tethered in the Scantling yard; the m.u.f.fled conversation of folks watching from the attic just below them; the merest creak of pine bough; and beside him, Europe's near-imperceptible breathing. Indefatigable in her concentration, the heiress of Naimes had barely stirred for the entire watch. The priming in the pan of his broad-barreled flammagon already checked many times, Rossamund refused the compulsion to do so again and kept his drowsy eyes moving from shadow to shadow out on the meadow.

The color of rich cheesecake in the thin olive sky, rising Phoebe was a full hand span above the horizon and Maudlin green, already hoisting herself up heaven's darkling dome when something barely distinguishable shifted out in the gloomy fields. It came first as an unusual threwdish twitching, still far off, arresting Rossamund's tiring attention before he saw a subtle yet rapid motion.

"They come," Europe exhaled, so softly it might have been the night breezes.

Shapes amorphous and shifting were approaching along the line of the blood-curdle trail, writhing shadows that refused to solidify into anything recognizable despite the creamy lunar light. At first Rossamund thought they might be a pack of little blightlings rushing in a horde. But when they reached the foot of the settlement, the shapes resolved into five large ambiguous silhouettes, each bending over its own pudding basin. At this the young factotum next thought them a tribe of brodchin-beasts like the horn-ed nickers that had attacked in the Briarywood near Winstermill.

As the creatures settled themselves to feed, Europe slid silently to the scale and, with infinite care, eased onto it, sucking an impatient breath as it softly creaked. Her right eye clear in a dapple of moonlight, she gave Rossamund a brief but pointed look, then descended with deft alacrity.

Near as fast as the lightning she held, the Branden Rose was out from the shadows of the south side of the cottage foundation. Springing between wall and pine trunk, fuse in hand, she was on the first shadow before it was aware of the danger. Rossamund watched her spin about the rock that held the basin to strike the shadow high on its back. Zzick! The briefest green-blue glare and everything went strange. Rather than bellow or collapse, the obscure figure burst into many parts. At first Rossamund thought the fulgar had simply hit it with such potency that it had been blown to splinders, yet he quickly realized, as the various parts sought to flee or fight individually, that their foe was something else entirely.

Bracing himself on the tiles, he fired the flammagon high, giving his mistress better sight as she swung at one of the pieces, striking it with another glaucous flash.

In the brilliant pink light of the flammagon flare swarmed slithering black saps, more like worms than serpents, working in disconcerting union, their slick, pulsating hides ridged and bulging, far stranger than any terrestrial nicker or bogle Rossamund had known before. Exclamations of disgust and wonder came from the watching cottagers witnessing from the windows below.

In defense of their fellows, the other forms fell apart into a ma.s.s of saps, how many hundreds Rossamund could not count. A score tried to surge Europe, to engulf her with their coils and their spiny sucking mouths. With a hurtling sweep of her sizzling fuse she kept them bayed, leaping lightly onto the boulder and sending the half-full basin tumbling. Gaining the higher vantage, she seemed for a moment on an island awash in a seething inky sea, swatting down every slick, black, lashing fluke with flash after flash of violent light.Yet a fight did not prove to be the wriggling things' primary desire. Protected by the aggression of a few, the great bulk of the foul worms slid away with astonishing speed into the benighted meadow.

A musket shot coughed, and another. An eruption of gun-smoke fouled the air before Rossamund.

"STOP!" he hollered, sliding upon his stomach down the incline of the roof, barely catching himself on the lip of the tiles, his thrice-high tumbling to the ground far below, the flammagon spared such treatment by the tangle of its strap about Rossamund's shoulders. Craning his neck to look beneath the eaves, he was confronted by the startled upside-down face of a determined Master Parfait, still with smoking long-rifle in hand. "YOU'LL HIT HER!"

The admonition did nought to halt the disgruntled parmister, who, already in the throes of reloading, primed his pan and thrust his musket out of the upper window to take aim. Rossamund would have none of this, and stretching precariously, humours swelling in his head, he s.n.a.t.c.hed the barrel of the firelock and wrested it from the uppity fellow's misguided grasp with a smart tug.

A m.u.f.fled girlish shriek from a lady-watcher at another window and Rossamund looked up to see in the sinking glow of the flammagon that the remaining saps harrying Europe had wound themselves together into a single form. The bulging, oversized creature bent up, whipping its single worm head at the fulgar and forcing her to spring in elegant retreat off the rock.

Rossamund scrambled, almost toppling, to the scale and blundered down, leaping the last third in anxious hurry as he saw the secondhand flash and heard another arcing zzzock! Pouncing around the corner, stolen musket still in hand, he saw Europe standing higher up the slope, her back to the settlement wall. Brandishing the fuse like some ancient heldin's spear, she drove it right into the heart of the collective triple-sized worm. With a satisfying zzzzack! the foul things flailed apart, their grip on each other loosening in their demise. They fell twitching dead to the gra.s.s, until only one remained upright, skewered through its mouth by the fulgaris, its slimy hide hissing and bubbling where it had split apart under Europe's eclatics. With a grimace, she withdrew the fuse from the charry mess and scowled out to the moonlit pastures.

Rossamund could not find any others near; nor, as he clambered atop the very rock from which Europe had first fought, did he spy any hint of motion on the meadow. "They've escaped," he declared redundantly, unsure what to feel, touching his nose against the musty metallic stink hanging in the air.

"Exactly why I have already sought a pathpry," said the fulgar tetchily, stepping beside him and handing him his hat. "Tomorrow, first peep of dawn-if your masters have proved successful-we shall track them to their lair." Stalking the mound, she set to finishing those saps that yet twitched with the weak ebbing of their previous animation, until all were dead. "Oh," she said placidly, standing over one lifeless worm lying by the foot of the mound, a neat bullet wound in its flank, "they actually managed to hit one."

"I tried to stop them." Rossamund grimaced, holding up the purloined firelock.

"Hmm" was all the fulgar answered.

Monsiere Trottinott was thoroughly impressed, and all the citizens of Scantling Aire were amazed at the feats performed by the Branden Rose.

"The job is but part done, sir," she replied to the Monsiere's breathless enthusiasm as they entered the safety of Scantling Aire's yard. "There is one dead out there, pierced by a musket hole that one of your wayward franklocks ought to claim"-the Monsiere looked ashamedly to the floor-"though I do not think the ichor of such unnaturally foul things would be any use for puncting-nor would I risk it if I were you."

The defense declared a great victory; it was universally agreed that the sloe saps-as folks began to call them-were unlikely to return.

As a precaution, Rossamund set small purple cones of repellent-compounded ash of Mehette-atop the rocks where the pudding basins of blood-curdle had previously rested. Found by the box in the saumery, the repellent had a familiar noxious reek that summoned a powerful memory of Licurius doing much the same about the night camp long ago.

With admirable persistence, Autos insisted upon helping, bearing candle and taper to light each cone and following so zealously close that the young factotum was grateful for the darkness to disguise his discomfort in handling it. The faint gra.s.sy breeze coming off the meadows shifted and sent the merest whiff of Mehette-fume up Rossamund's nose, stunning him, his vision flashing, intellectuals reeling, sending him staggering away from the vile stuff in a fit of coughing.

"It must be very strong," Autos marveled, thumping Rossamund on the back as if food were choking him.

"It-is-," Rossamund squeezed out between gags, sight blurred with tears, bent double and rocking under the well-intentioned blows. "K-keep ... b-back!"

Granted sleep for the remains of the night, he was shown by a plump-faced dame in earth-brown shirts up to one of the cottages' higher rooms. Its crude walls were white and lumpy, its shallow wood-beam ceiling angling down to a dormer window that looked west onto a field of vibrant stars and black land. Rossamund found that a simple wool-stuffed pallet had been laid for him on the floor at the foot of a remarkably downy boxed bed where Europe reclined still fully harnessed, already sighing in the depth of easy sleep.

In the fresh of the morning, Fransitart and Craumpalin arrived by the Monsiere's coach midway through breakfast and treacle testing, their relief at Rossamund's well-being evident in their gruff greetings. Accompanying them were three hard-looking fellows in woodland-hued proofing of leather and buff, animal pelts draped over their shoulders. They bore barbed boar-spears and elegant fusils with muzzles fashioned in the form of snarling b.e.s.t.i.a.l mouths. These were peltrymen from Lambingstone-or so they said of themselves-working the folds of Broad Trim and happy to accept the lucrative terms offered by Europe through her two crusty mediums. The eldest of them spoke for all with a thick accent Rossamund at first found hard to follow. Introducing himself as Quietis Furrow, he first presented his brother, Agitis Furrow, and then their young prentice, Bodkin Ease, who wore an olfactologue upon his face much like the box of a sthenicon except that it covered only his mouth and nose. Buff-brown faces clenched in permanent squint beneath greasy, battered tricorns, they greeted the Branden Rose and the Monsiere with deep, frowning nods that did for a bow and listened silently, expressions sharp, shadowed eyes bright to the recounting of the night.

"Thee can keep thy dollars and scruples, missus, till job's did done," Quietis Furrow said when part of their fee was offered. "That'n way thee'll know we 'tend to see this all right through to satisfaction."

Europe happily accepted this, saying, "Your integrity is laudable, sir."

"Hark!" Trottinott declared warmly. "Happy the day spent dealing with straight country lads. A boon on those who found you!"

Fransitart and Craumpalin limited their display of satisfaction at this approbation to a slight puffing of the chest.

The three peltrymen were provoked to the slightest surprise when shown a single sap, spiked now to the inside gate post. Stretched as it was from the spike, it still kept much of its structure: fat in its middle, tapering to either end, its spiny sucking mouth sagging viscously from the lower termination, the disturbingly fleshy pallor of the gums a stark contrast to the glistening black hide. No eyes were evident, just a series of holes open to the air and running down every quarter of the creature. Orange ooze leaked from the bullet wound and the spike hole, and the whole thing smelled oddly flat, almost odorless but for a fetid hint like rotting kelp washed on a sh.o.r.e.

"Looks like a smaller kind of them siphunculus beasties we fought off Langoland, 'ey, Pin?" Fransitart observed quietly.

The old dispenser nodded sagely.

"A right squirmerly bull-beggar," the younger Furrow brother muttered dourly.

"I reckon I made out a reddleman cove yesterday, while Pin an' me were on th' look for these 'ere fellows," Fransitart went on to report. "'E was much like th' one ye exchanged a word with back at Spelter Innings, Rosey me lad. But it can't 'ave been, for 'ow could the ruddy fellow 'ave got ahead o' us already on only feet, an' pushin' a cart?"

Rossamund frowned. Surely this was more than coincidence or mistaken ident.i.ties.

"Hmm, most perplexing, Master Vinegar," Europe said airily, but, preoccupied with the saps and the course ahead, she offered nothing more.

Advised by the still-sulking Parfait-now restored to his weapon-that the meadows were unfit for carriages, the landaulet was left and Craumpalin and Fransitart with it. The ex-dormitory master was well displeased with this arrangement, but his old friend was resolute.

"Thy joints will not suffer such wearing, Frans," Craumpalin scolded. "Thee daren't want to be laid up and useless by unneedful confustication to thy joints."

To this Fransitart only growled.

A billy-pot, f.a.ggots, kindling and a tinderbox were provided in a burlap sack for boiling Europe's treacle. After a quiet word of encouragement from his old masters, Rossamund fixed his vent better about his throat, ordered his stoups, reloaded the flammagon, stowed food in his satchel, shouldered waterskins, and stood ready to go.

The creased foreheads of the peltrymen creased only slightly more at Rossamund's inclusion in the course.

Taken out back to the scene of the adventure, Quietis Furrow and his colleagues quickly picked the faintly slimed slot, a metallic gossamer shimmer scarcely detectable among the spring-fresh gra.s.s.

"Thy worms are cunning baskets," Quietis informed the half circle of watchers. "They squirm out in line wit' each other to keep their count a secret, yet e'en wit' so many they barely trouble a blade or weed."

Like a pack of slothounds eager for the chase, the peltrymen set off. With a strange lift of excitement in his belly, Rossamund paced after, Europe close behind.