So soon . . .

"Well, this used to be more . . . fun," the fulgar muttered darkly. "The only felicity is the weather," she added, rolling her hazel eyes to the new diem's lowering cloud as the landaulet rolled back along the bridge they had arrived upon the day before.

No masked fictler awaited them at the intersection as Fransitart took them now left to continue on down a road named the Holt Street, riding between promontories of native stone thrusting from the heights, pouring with thin cataracts from their summits or fissures in their flanks. Eventually these gave over to low fells dark with haphazard woodlands of native myrtle, turpentine and beech. Frequently they pa.s.sed great lines of neatly planted teak and oak, ringing with the cough cough cough of distant chopping or the sighing rasp of a saw.Tiny tan-and-white birds chased even tinier bugs among it all, tetching minutely at the travelers for daring to trespa.s.s.

At the next major divergence they found a large stone-and-wood wayhouse signed THE SAWYERS' SLAKE and built right under the reach of towering ancient pines. Marked by a milestone, the main way went almost directly south to Coddlingtine Dell, hidden miles away in its leafy vale, whereas the lesser road-Holt Street-continued in a gentle curve slightly south of east. Drawing carefully through a herd of crotchety pigs let to graze the verges by their surly floppy-hatted swain, Fransitart eased the landaulet to a halt before the wayhouse to let Rufous and Candle water themselves from the common trough. On again, about a mile down the Coddling Road they found the route blocked by a handful of stationary conveyances, themselves stopped by a pair of enormous trees fallen directly across the road. Folks from the held-up carriages of either side were clambering over the mighty trunks, hacking at them with whatever tools were handy-hangers, hatchets, heavy knives-one fellow even bashing at lesser branches with the b.u.t.t of his musket.

"Some gent's gone to fetch a woodsman or sawyer or some such to cut us proper clear," a genial lenterman called over his shoulder to Fransitart-and by a.s.sociation his mistress-from his high seat on a glossy yellow lentum-and-four just before them. "Might be a while till they come though . . ."

"Aye," interjected a grumpy wagoner from his long tarpaulin-covered dray next to the lentum. "But it will still be a blighted sight quicker'n going the Holtway," he said, swinging his arm in an exaggerated arc, "all the way about to the Dell."

"I tire of rural main streets anyway," Europe declared. "We shall take the long way to Brandenbra.s.s and sleep rough for our last nights out."

Fransitart backed the landaulet, turned them about and returned through the swain and his hogs to take the old Holt Street. They ate a luncheon of crocidole and Scantling Aire cheese as they went, and the farther they traveled, the surer Rossamund became of human scrutiny.Yet, if it were so, no impertinent, blank-faced observer materialized this time to prove his suspicions.

The terrain became increasingly downhill, the way bending steadily south about the flank of a high round rise until it emerged from the woods between two house-sized boulders. On the right now between hill and road ran an open culvert fashioned of ancient concrete, its sluggish effluent congealed with algae of a deep and vibrant green. Hidden frogs buzzed with truculent grating voices, and humming emerald emperorflies hovered low, prowling ever-hungry over the sludge. Beyond this the side of the hill climbed, dense with pine and myrtle. Upon the left along the verge grew an unbroken line of elegant pines, and past their rough trunks the wooded land fell quickly to a panorama of a near-treeless wold, purple gray with flowering mercy jane, rolling down and away to the distant milk green sea. The pungence of the ocean blew gently on them, mellowed by the strawlike perfume of the downs.

Back p.r.i.c.kling apprehensively, Rossamund thought he heard travelers approaching from behind, but every time he turned, the bend of road stayed empty.

"Something bain't right," Fransitart muttered.

Europe pursed her lips, eyes flicking alertly from the height on their right to the drop on their left.

Taking the gentle unerringly right-handed crook of the culvert road slowly, Fransitart slowed yet further as the way ahead contracted to pa.s.s between two large olives growing from the base of the low wall that bisected the road.Where the wall cut the culvert like a gate, rusted bars stood vertically across the drain, a sieve collecting all manner of debris. Several yards beyond this obstacle, the unfolding bend of the road revealed a curricle leaning sharply on its side, one wheel off and sitting conspicuously across the road. Beside it stood a singularly white-skinned woman in a white summer dress, all embarra.s.sed smiles and fluttering lashes. Waving to them, her attention flicked to an angry twittering commotion in the olive trees.

Something small dashed in on the wing from the great bush, chattering angrily, diving at the ears of Rufous and Candle, flying almost into their faces, desperately seeking their attention otherwise blocked by winkers.

Darter Brown!

Fransitart cursed loudly as the two horses tossed their heads and jerked violently to the left and back, shying wildly to avoid the fierce sparrow's diminutive a.s.sault.

Standing in his seat to call Darter Brown to stop and knowing full well he had no such command over the perplexing bird, Rossamund saw hurried movement in the tree to the right, people hefting something large and round and then running with all haste. The horses reared, tossing him back into the seat. In an abrupt, shattering flash the ex-dormitory master's imprecations were cut short as the world burst, an eruption of soil and stones and sharp fragments that engulfed the poor horses with a detonation so loud it was like silence. The almighty gust of smashing air and dust lifted Rossamund from his seat, throwing him high and long to land with numbing impact, skidding and rolling on gra.s.s and needles to halt with a crack! in a cleft of spreading pine roots. Pummeled and confounded, for untellable moments he just lay there, cap-a-pie, ears deaf with a thousand stentorian ringings, unable and unwilling to move.Yet one thought shimmered clear. We have been ambushed!

18.

THE AID OF FRIENDS UNBIDDEN.

testudoe(s) heavy-ended bludgeon, five to seven feet long, k.n.o.bbled with metal studs or wooden knots and giving a powerful and nasty blow. A very old pattern of weapon finding its way into Soutland culture from the Lauslands-who took it from the pa.s.sionate folk of Ing-testudoes are traditionally made of wood and as such provide some protection from the arcs of a fulgar if you should ever choose to take on such a foe.

THE first sensation to puncture Rossamund's numbness was the shouting of many voices from every cardinal; angry cries surrounded them, accompanied by the dire pops of several firelocks.

NO! Fransitart! Craumpalin! Europe!

Sight still reeling, he felt rough hands grip him hard about each arm, lifting him well off his feet. At once he reckoned Fransitart and Craumpalin had endured the blast to come gather him, but there was something unkind in the handling, and the sweaty pungence that accompanied the two heavy figures hefting him was frighteningly foreign. Senses clarifying in his alarm, Rossamund saw his captors as strangers man-shaped and man-sized, robed in black and wearing white oval masks striped with two blood-dark bars. Rossamund's innards froze.

Fictlers ...

With a coughing growl he exerted his strength, and, to a duet of startled yelps, pulled his arms together, throwing both masklings into each other with a fatty slap. Skulls collided, masks cracked. Rossamund wrested himself free as the two would-be captors toppled to the ground. Dropped onto his knees, he spluttered and blinked at the fume of dust and powder smoke rolling about him and drifting down the incline. Thick as it was, the roil was quickly settling, revealing the landaulet between the trunks well above and to the left, the carriage broken and tipped back, its thills now splinders. Some large pallid bulk half hung over the road-edge between two pines. With a choke of grief Rossamund realized it was Candle, ripped and fatefully still. Sobbing in a rising rage, he clawed desperately at the slope, slipping on the mat of needles as he tried to climb, pulling on thistles and barely sprouted treelings. In confused and frantic fear, he cast about the trees for his masters.

No Fransitart.

No Craumpalin.

No Europe.

There was a great furor on the unseen side of the smashed carriage, a desperate struggle of life and limb. Three penetrating zzacks! rang clear, eliciting m.u.f.fled cries of agony. With this came a splash as a heavy thing slid into the mucky drain and two fellows in white masks scurried back down the road, hands over heads and wearing the scorching of a fulgar's defense.

The Branden Rose emerged swiftly from behind the landaulet, shockingly bloodied and sporting a limp, yet very much alive and alert. Her eyes deadly slits, her fuse already in hand, she did not heed her young factotum struggling through the saplings and berry runners below.

In the intensity of his relief, Rossamund let out a bubbling, choking laugh, yet the sound of it was blanked by the staccato popping of musket fire bursting with white puffs from among the dark conifers high upon the farther bank of the culvert where hidden musketeers plied fire down upon his mistress. Rossamund threw himself to the hillside by the roots of a tree, glimpsing Europe stagger and drop out of sight beyond the matted brink.

NO!.

Smitten dumb in horror, he flicked a caste from his right-hand digital and threw it at the musketeers, a prodigious lob flying clear over the landaulet and the drain.The orange glare of beedlebane flashed among the trunks where the marksmen hid. Another he tossed, and another after that, the blue gust of Frazzard's powder and the yellow-green glare of loomblaze flickering a yard left and right of the orange fire.

"You little muckhill!" someone shockingly close cursed.

Rossamund spun about to catch the b.u.t.t-end of a firelock in his right shoulder, the hit driving him to earth. In the flaring of pain he saw a person clad in leathers of bosky drab, face concealed behind a sthenicon, looming over him, flourishing a long-rifle high and clearly intent on staving his face with the stock.

Addled, Rossamund did the best thing that occurred to him in the moment and simply caught the swinging rifle b.u.t.t with both hands, stopping its savage momentum dead.

In shock the lurksman tugged ferociously to get his weapon back, but the young factotum held fast. Thwarted, the lurksman let go and went to draw a blade.

Still gripping the firelock by its stock, Rossamund did not afford him the chance but drove the barrel hard into the man's abdomen. Thrust bodily backward, the lurksman buckled in a whimper of agony about the blow, collapsing in on himself as he toppled and half slid, half tumbled down the steep hillside until he was halted by a tree. With a box-deadened gag, the fellow sagged and did not move again.

Struggling, slipping, dragging himself up the sharp slope, Rossamund could hear the increasing shouts of the hurried advance of a mult.i.tude rattling and tramping among the trees. Pivoting his gaze urgently one way and the other, he searched for sign of Europe, of Fransitart, of Craumpalin, of anything . . .

On his right, about the northern curve from where they had first arrived, he could see the heads of perhaps a dozen violent fellows coming with all haste. Half were masked fictlers wielding gabelungs, war-rakes and long spittendes-every one a wooden weapon that did not easily transmit a fulgar's arcs. With them came savage-looking fellows carrying large round shields and long th.o.r.n.y clubs, braces of pistols and wickedly barbed blades of black. Wildmen they were, their s.h.a.ggy hair bound in all manner of knots and spikes, wearing thick Piltmen skirts belted high over their bare chests, running barefoot, their lower legs bound in bands of hide. Most sinister yet among all these were heavier figures swathed about their shoulders in matted furs, their heads casqued in round helmets perforated with many holes sprouting horns or antlers. In thickly armored grips they bore immense wooden testudoes, wickedly barbed and k.n.o.bbled, each as long as a man is tall. Conspicuous among this motley horde was the feather-hatted stranger with the four-barred mask, the silent watcher from the day before clearly commanding those about with emphatic gesticulations.

His line of sight impeded by the camber of the road and trees sprouting all along its edge, Rossamund could hear yet another gang rushing from the left. Closer and closer the stouching parties drew, two jaws of a trap, coming headlong from north and south, caterwauling to steel their nerve. At the same moment the clatter of a small but violent turmoil sounded down past a screen of olives upon a lower slope.

Fransitart? Craumpalin!

Ready to dash to this new commotion, he was stopped as Europe's head and shoulders thrust into view above the matted verge of the roadside. The fulgar hunkered by the rear wheel of the landaulet, leaning on her fuse. Saved by the excellence of her proofing, her expression bleak yet unflinchingly resolute, she glared back and forth rapidly between the all-too-quickly encroaching gangs.

Hollering obscenities at their lonely foe as they drew in sight of her, the wild southern horde swarmed along the road on either side of the broken landaulet. Impa.s.sioned by more than common battle fervor and howling like crazed hounds, they pushed the carriage in their rage. It tottered on the brink, and with a great creak and a corporate shout of success tipped between the line of pines and off the road. In a clash of splinters it hurtled rearward down the slope, flattening myrtle saplings as it bore toward Rossamund. Its rear right wheel struck some unseen obstruction in the weeds and needle. The whole vehicle leaped, spraying chests and prizes and lesser effects as it flipped onto its side. Sliding, it smashed to a halt a few feet to Rossamund's left against a row of lower trees.

Driven into the open, Europe leaped away and back along the road, limp forgotten, spinning in a martial dance, frock and petticoats twirling. Fuse twisting faster than eye could follow, she made headlong for the northern party, now charging her too.

Overeager to grapple with their vaunted adversary, some wildmen sprang ahead to point and fire their pistols, their shots joined by those of the surviving musketeers skulking in the trees of the higher bank across the culvert. Once more the Branden Rose was felled, toppling to the bellowing glee of her antagonists and a cry of anguish from Rossamund.

s.n.a.t.c.hing the single caste of asper from its digital, the young factotum let it fly through the line of pine trees at the attackers. The caste struck an antlered foe. Boiling black falsefire expanded rapidly to completely engulf the fellow, spreading farther yet to swallow those about. Horrified, Rossamund watched as those caught in the oily vapor were blistered black, screeching their pain. Three fellows stumbled off the road and tumbled down the bank, to land steaming and lifeless.

However, the general press was not thwarted, and almost as a single creature the reckless ma.s.s of bravoes rushed to where the fulgar must have lain vulnerable on the road.

With an almost joyful "HA!" Europe abruptly appeared, springing to her feet and thrusting her fuse into the sky. A mighty lightning bolt spat down from the murk and struck the fulgaris, coruscating down the fulgar's upraised arm. Pa.s.sing right through her, it stabbed out blindingly from her outstretched hand. The writhing bolt struck the ma.s.sed company, leaping from one man to the next, calling more lightning from the roiling heavens independent of the fulgar's summoning, smashing all about her. Rossamund cowered at the roar, stumbling against the bole of a pine, hands over ears, sure that they and the whole world with them would rupture. Bolt after bolt stabbed with bursting, crushing thunderings-five-six-seven-eight, slaying most fellows instantly, leaving others shattered while the remaining few recoiled, some already scampering away.

Even as reverberations of thunder rolled about the wold, Rossamund was struck hard from the left, a potent blow skewering him in his kidneys, sending him sprawling to the mold. Seeing stars, he felt a rough-clothed arm pinch him about his neck in a malicious embrace, pressing his face into the leaf litter and dust. An all-too-familiar threwdless dread constricted in his soul. Rever-man! A second great strength pinned him in the small of his back, holding him to the ground while a cruel, cold grip took hold of his arms. He flailed his legs, bucking with all his might, near dislodging his captors' callous clutches. He got one brief and terrifying hint of an expressionless, empty-eyed face before a coa.r.s.e sack was jerked forcibly over his own head and then cords wrapped about his throat to be pulled choking tight.

Swallowing hard against the pressure on his gourmand's cork, Rossamund refused to let this be his end. Somehow he managed to get a toe-hold in the slippery needles and with every mite of his thew pushed, wrenching sideways, breaking the hold on his wrists. Kicking out savagely, his left foot connected with something yielding. Instantly realizing he was free of constraint, he flung himself down the slope, tumbling, hitting the ground hard over and over with shoulders and back. His career stopped with a neuralgic jolt, leaving him winded and sitting on flatter land. Tearing the cord from his throat and the bag from his head he saw that he had landed in the very midst of the tumbledown foundations of some roofless dwelling. Built on a small cobbled shelf, it was clearly long abandoned, its crumbling sandstone stained and moldering.

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 a.s.sailant 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 pa.s.sion.

A JACKSTRAW.

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 a.s.sailants 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 a.s.sault 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 peac.o.c.k 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!

Flinging whatever came handy at the pestilent creature, the glamgorn blinked at him in recognition. Many of the lighter missiles bounced off harmlessly, almost comically. Some showered around Rossamund, but with the m.u.f.fled clunk of rock on metal and wood, many stones flew true and the rever's body began to buckle under the mucky, stony sleet.

The flat staccato cough of a volley of firelocks sounded from the heights, accompanied by shouts and a single dull pop. Just as dread for Europe and his old masters rose, a blitz of lightning struck again, three swift strikes. .h.i.tting the hill above, silencing all else as it shattered the very air.

With a mighty wrench of his fettered leg Rossamund pulled free of Sackhead, clawing and pulling at the cobbles to get himself away. Woodenhead collapsed to its knees but still crawled on. In that instant the young factotum glimpsed Cinnamon through the door gap of the other room, skipping under the third jackstraw's wicked grasp. The nuglung seized the abomination by hip and chest, and in a twinkling tore it completely in two.Without a pause the bogle-princeling tossed the top half of the rever far into the precipitous woods and, swinging the b.e.s.t.i.a.l legs, rushed to Rossamund's aid. Leaping lightly over boy and wall, he bore down on the limping jackstraw clutching relentlessly for its prey with a click-clack of its metal talons-battering the vile thing with the riven legs, hitting again and again with such savagery that bits of jackstraw quickly began to flick and spatter.

Arms full of old debris, Freckle sprang onto the top of the adjacent wall, pummeling Woodenhead with stone after stone. When his armload was spent, he jumped down to bounce upon the cloth-man, yipping loudly and with relish as he pounded the thing to bits.

In awe, Rossamund strove to stand, his whole body thudding with hurts, blasted hand slick with gore slithering off whatever they touched. Another pop of a firelock from the woods and he revived. At the left side of the level he saw a sheer flight of crumbling stone stairs that climbed the hill from the edge of the foundation. Running out of the ruin's vestigial entrance, he mounted this stairway, Darter Brown winging to join him. Sucking at the air in rasping gulps, Rossamund clawed up the sheer path. Many yards to the right, half hidden in a grove of pine trees, he caught sight of the woman in the white dress, sagging where she stood-heedless of the world-braced with one gloved hand upon a trunk, her face a sickly gray under its pretty bonnet.

A close clash of weapons and Rossamund had a brief sight of Fransitart higher up the bank, standing at the threshold of an enormous bush of olive that grew beside the steps. White hair flying, musketoon in one hand and his hanger in the other, the ex-dormitory master was sparring sword to gabelung with a fictler who was flailing with a young man's impatience against Fransitart's watchful defense. Across the curve of the incline, a wild Piltdowner man, bloodied and angry-eyed, crouched in the concealment of the tipped and broken landaulet to level a firelock on the old vinegaroon. s.n.a.t.c.hing up the first projectile handy, Rossamund pitched a pinecone, the seedy bullet humming smartly as it flew, hitting the Piltman on the cheek in a mighty spray of splintering cone at the very instant of firing. In the CRACK! of the shot, Fransitart struck his adversary a telling cut upon the neck and toppled with the dying foe to the ground.

The Piltman staggered off down the hill, tripping on weeds and roots. Rossamund did not wait to know the man's fate but pivoted and dashed to the great olive where Fransitart had fallen, terrified of what he would find.

Between him and his purpose crawled a lone jackstraw, legs torn away, pawing at the weeds and dirt, scaling the hillside with arms alone, metal teeth gnashing, more the mindless unrelenting predator now.

"ENOUGH!" Fury boiling in a red instant, Rossamund s.n.a.t.c.hed at a broken piece of wall embedded in the hillside-a stone as big as his own chest-and heaved it from the soil with both hands. In a spray of worms and wood-lice and soil, he hefted the stone high, and, dropping to his knees, brought it down with all his monstrous might right on the wretched laboring abomination's sack-cloth skull, burying the stone and putrid flesh with it a hand span deep into the mold.

About him silence settled on the woods: no crack of firelock, no clash of blows, just the anxious hush of an aftermath.

"Well done, dear lad . . . ," Fransitart's voice broke through his desolation.

Heart leaping, Rossamund looked up.

The old vinegaroon was limping toward him, clutching at his stomach and using the musketoon as a crutch along the uneven ground. His face was dreadfully swollen about the eyes, his bottom lip split and gory, his hair congealing with red.

With a sob of relief, Rossamund sprang the scant yards and clasped arms with the startled sea dog. "And Craumpalin. . ."

In the cool of the enormous olive, Fransitart revealed the dispenser, propped in the deep bole of the tree, partially concealed by the roots and a smooth stone about which the olive had matured, making it almost a part of itself. Craumpalin was disconcertingly still, his eyes closed, his beard bedraggled with blood, his breath shallow huffs. A soaking bloodied scarf lay near, and another was bound about his throat.

"Master Pin ..." Rossamund dropped to his knees beside the fallen fellow.

"He's been poorly handled, lad.That bang let off by them filthy scupperers gave 'm a prodigious bad gash in th' neck 'ere-" Fransitart drew a line on the left side of his neck with his finger as he spoke out of the side of his wounded mouth. "I reckon 'is legs are broke . . . but 'e's holdin' together, though 'e'll need a seam-st.i.tcher an' two good splints afore too long."

"I have thrombis and strupleskin." Rossamund reached for his left stoup. "We can stop the holes at least." Only now, in the numb astonishment after hand strokes, did he become properly alive to the sharp hurt of his own hand, finding too a vigorous ache in his shoulders, as if someone had tried to unattach his arm at its socket. He gingerly hooked the partscontainer-baldric and all-from his shoulder. "Could you please find them?" he asked his old master sheepishly.