Lamplighter (22 page)

Rossamünd knew the basic constitution of seltzer water: spirit-of-cadmia, bluesalts, chordic vinegar and wine-dilute penthil-salts. He had been shown this by Seltzterman Humbert, and at first Numps followed the recipe properly but then he put in only half the chordic vinegar, left out the penthil altogether and began to add other things—unusuallooking things. Of what Rossamünd saw, he recognized a dash of ethulate and pinches of soursugar, plus a fine sandy powder that smelled like the vinegar sea and sludge that looked ever so much like the muckings of a gastrine.

“What are these for, Mister Numps?” the prentice inquired of the extra parts. “I have seen seltzer made—Seltzerman 1st Class Humbert has shown us, but he never added these.”

“Oh . . . ah . . . Mister Humble-burt is good at the simple seltzer, but this is our own seltzer. Better seltzer for Numps’ friends. Numps and his clever old friend, we figured this, figured it out before poor Numps’ poor clever old friend went swimming in his red too. No one else knows how to do it right and his clever old friend is gone now but Numps still remembers; makes the bloom bloom it does, good for Numps’ friends.”

“What friends, Mister Numps?” Rossamünd was finding it hard to follow the thread of wandering talk. “Do you look after all the bloom?”

The glimner became silent at this, and would say no more on the subject of bloom or seltzer or friends new or old. Rather he kept pointedly at his mixing until he had made three kegs full of seltzer—smelling far more rich and full than seltzer usually did.

As the day waned someone came a-calling. At first they simply heard her. “Numps! Numps!” was the demand. “Hullo there, my darling muddle-head! Help me git this glass through yer door!”

“Oh, oh, oh,” fretted Numps, up to his bicep in seltzer. “The barrow woman is here. The barrow woman.”

“I’ll go.You stay here.”

Rossamünd answered the shout in the glimner’s stead, stepping down the avenue of shelves to discover a woman wrestling a heavy load through Door 143. She wore a buff-leather apron over her maid’s clothes and was towing a barrow stacked high with panes and lantern-windows. When this laboring lady saw a well-presented prentice-lighter she pulled up short and smiled. “Oh, hello, my lovely.”

“Hello,” Rossamünd replied. “May I take that?” He had gripped the barrow by the handles before she could reply.

“What a precious little mite you are!” she exclaimed. “Doing my job for me? And grateful I am too.” She leaned toward him and whispered conspiratorially, “That seltzerman is a bit too gone in the intellectuals for my liking. I don’t much enjoy having to come down here. Folks avoid him, you know.”

“No need then for you to see him today, mother labor,” Rossamünd replied peevishly.

The woman gave Rossamünd a sharp, appraising look. “Ye must have done summat right bad to be sent here, lad.” She peered closely, seeking the fatal flaw. “Ye’ve got to take him in hand, pet, if ye’re going to get anything done with him,” she said. “He’s naught but a limpling-head,” she finished loudly, for Numps to hear.

Rossamünd felt a surge of anger. He almost forgot his manners as she bid good day, scowling after the woman as she left.

With her departure Rossamünd and Numps set to stacking then polishing these new deliveries and kept at this for what remained of the day. Neither spoke, and there came no other noise but the chink of picking up and putting down till mains was rung and Rossamünd realized he had missed middens, entirely forgotten.With a bow he went to hurry off. “Good evening to you, Mister Numps,” he said as he left. “I hope your foot heals right quick. Don’t walk on it nor use it for any work, please. Wait for Doctor Crispus to see you.”

Numps blinked at him, nodded—with a small, cryptic smile lighting his face—and said, “Will you come back tomorrow and check poor Numps’ poor foot?”

“I will, Mister Numps.”

Rossamünd returned to the manse, wishing he had met this fascinating fellow well before today.

 

The other prentice-lighters were not due back from Silvernook till after mains—part of the vigil-day privilege. Rossamünd took himself to the mess hall to eat alone. There he found Threnody back from interviews with her mother and by the fire, sitting on a tandem chair reading a book—a novel no less, that most frivolous of frivolous things. Two small pots, one of delicious muttony-greasy and one with gray pease, bubbled over the fire for any who had stayed. On the table there was also some hard-tack and apples still untouched from middens, and piping Domesday pudding. As he was serving mutton into a shallow square pannikin, Threnody walked wearily over and did the same. She sat before Rossamünd, full of mystery and reticence.

Rossamünd broached the hush. “I thought you’d eat with your mother.”

“So did
she
.” Threnody smiled sourly, then added, “I told her I was a lighter now and was duty bound to mess with my fellows-in-arms.”

“She came a fair way to see you. Did she not insist?”

Bent over her food, the girl looked at him sharply through her brows. “She ranted and railed, as always.”

“What did she say?” Rossamünd knew he had asked too much as soon as he said the words.

Threnody stared at him owlishly. “Insufficient to detain me . . . clearly.”

Muteness descended and stretched out into a heavy awkwardness. The cooking fire crackled in the hearth. Merry fife music, distant, rhythmic stomping and timely claps drifted through the mess-hall door. This was the ruckus of soused lampsmen and pediteers cozy in their own mess-room making happy on their vigil-day rest.

Rossamünd sighed. Threnody
was
hard work. “And Pandomë—is she healing?”

Threnody bowed her head.

Have I said too much again?
Rossamünd wondered.

“She . . . recovers,” the girl replied eventually. “She will return with Mother though both physic and surgeon agree that she is unlikely to fight again.” For a breath she looked truly, openly sad. “Do
you
think I’m to blame, Rossamünd Bookchild?”

Rossamünd hesitated. “Blame?”

“For Pandomë’s hurts!” Threnody stared hard at him. “For—for Idesloe’s death . . .”

He was unsure of how to soothe her sorrow.

“I returned from Sinster’s sanguinariums little more than eight months ago,” she continued, her whispered words spilling, wide eyes imploring. “I have only been
allowed
to begin using my new ‘skills’ in the last month.Yet, I am a wit: what else could I do? I had no pistols. We were attacked. I did my part, defended my clave, did duty to
them firstmost
! The others were all too battered by the crash. I had to act! If I had been made a fulgar I would have done better, and better yet as a pistoleer—you saw how frank my shots were against that umbergog thing. It was not some self-centered display of valor. Was it? Did I set us all to risk like Mother insists I must have?”

This was more than Rossamünd wanted to answer.

“Practice makes it, miss,” he tried, feeling very inadequate. “It’s as my dormitory master used to say: learn it as rote and it’ll work freely like hearth-softened butter, if you get my meaning.”

Impatience flickered across Threnody’s face. “I’m not sure that I
do
.” Her earnest openness vanished like the snap of a closing lid.

“Well—I was—” Rossamünd started and did not know where to go—
trying not to be rude,
he concluded to himself.

Threnody arched an eyebrow.

“Will you be returning to your mother this evening?” Rossamünd quickly changed tack.

“No, she has said all she wanted to say—and more besides,” Threnody answered sourly. “We are done. Fortunately she will leave again tomorrow and take Dolours and dear Pandomë back to Herbroulesse.”

With a thump the prentices, soused and swaggering from their vigil-day excursion, bundled into the mess hall.

The strange, strained conversation ceased.

“Hoy there, you sobersides! You should have seen it!” Punthill Plod effused.

“Seen what?” Threnody returned icily.

“Aye, Rosey, you missed a real bust-up,” bragged Arabis, completely ignoring Threnody. “A carriage was attacked by some nickers—horses dead, lentermen dead, passengers dead.”

“Just like we saw on lantern-watch,” Plod continued.

“I heard them say in town that it was done by some nasty grinning blightlings,” Crofton Wheede added.

Rossamünd’s milt went cold.
Grinnlings?

“That company of lesquins we saw camped just a mile farther down was not much use to them poor folks, was it?” said a prentice named Foistin Gall.

Rossamünd’s ears pricked up at the mention of lesquins, those gaudily dressed sell-swords—the best, most arrogant fighters, who gathered into legions and sold themselves to fight in the petty wars of the states.

“What are
they
doing there?” Threnody frowned.

“People are saying because we can’t stop the baskets on the Wormway that the Gainway is under threat!” said Onion Mole in awe.

“Not as under threat as that sweet li’l dolly-mop at the Drained Mouse, not from the looks you were giving her, Moley,” guffawed Twörp stupidly, and several boys brayed in drunken delight.

Threnody gave them all a single dirty look and left.

Mind spinning with memories of Licurius collapsing under a press of grinning bogles, Rossamünd was not long in following.

 

The routine of the next day began as it always did, with the ritual wake-up cry, hurried dressing and stomping out to line up for morning forming on the Cypress Walk by the side of the manse. There Grindrod confirmed the attack on the carriage between the fortress and Silvernook, everyone slaughtered. He quickly moved on to properly inform the prentices that the coursing party had returned the previous day while the boys were living it large in Silvernook. The coursers’ homecoming had been somber. They were less five dogs, including the leader Drüker, and Griffstutzig was badly hurt. An ambuscadier was dead, the badly wounded Josclin borne back on a litter. These were bitter blows indeed after Bellicos’ death. Even mortally hurt, the harried umbergog had proved a terrible adversary, trapped in a hollow on the western flanks of the Tumblesloe Heap far to the north. It was slain at last by the chemistry of Josclin and a final, fatal shot from Sebastipole’s deadly long-rifle. The severed head of the vanquished monster had been dragged all the way back by the mules.

The prentices did not know how to react to this: was it good news? Was it bad?

Grindrod also advertised that that very night in the Hall of Pageants there would be the puncting—the marking with the monster’s blood—of those who had had a hand in slaying the Herdebog Trought. Collected from the dead umbergog at the time of its slaying, the cruor was in the care of Nullifus Drawk. He was apparently eager and ready to mark the monster’s killers. Rossamünd did not want to go. He had lost his fascination for cruorpunxis. Their gaining was surrounded by too much sorrow and confusion. He well understood why his old dormitory master was ashamed of the tattoo he wore.

After breakfast the prentices were set to more marching. Rain set in, a gray shimmering swathe, and dripping-drenched they formed up along the side of the gravel drive to mark the Lady Vey’s otherwise unfeted departure.
“Present arms!”
came the order. Next to Rossamünd, Threnody obeyed, staring fixedly ahead, chin high, a sardonic half smile barely hidden. For her part, as the dyphr clattered by, the august ignored her daughter and the twin-file of prentices with her, her neck held stiff and chin raised.

As mother, as daughter,
Rossamünd observed.

 

For 2nd morning instructions the prentices went to the lectury for lantern workings with Seltzerman 1st Class Humbert. Rossamünd liked the subject: he actually understood and admired the mechanism of a seltzer lamp and the constitution of seltzer water itself. This study was a relief from marching and evolutions and targets. In fact, and despite himself, he welcomed the safety of routine. The last week had been as event-filled as ever he wanted. Too much adventure left him craving easy predictability. With a contented lift in his regular-step Rossamünd entered the lectury carrying stylus, books and lark-lamp—a small replica of a great-lamp given to all the prentices. Rossamünd was intrigued by the curious way its covers folded open upon many hinges, fascinated with the down-scaled workings revealed within, which were just like those that operated the real lights of the road. He paid close attention to all that was taught, but most of the other prentices could not have given two geese about the what or how or why of a great-lamp’s internal parts. Humbert noticed neither. He simply droned on.

Rossamünd had quickly learned that lampsmen naturally, though unfairly, regarded seltzermen as failed lighters who only ever ventured out into the wilds with the sun, and then only when need demanded. They were appreciated, certainly—repairing the great-lamps was necessary work—but not respected. Consequently, it was with mixed gratitude that Rossamünd received Mister Humbert’s uncharacteristic praise when, in the face of his fellow prentices’ ignorance, he speedily identified a limp, pale yellow frond the seltzerman held up as “glimbloom drying out and past saving, Mister Humbert.”

“Correct!” the seltzerman returned. “How long can the glimbloom survive out of seltzer before it reaches this irrevocably parched state?”

“No more than a day, Mister Humbert.”

“Well, Master Bookchild, you know what you’re about with them parts.” The seltzerman 1st class brightened. “It takes just this kind of nous to keep these plants working. We’ll make a seltzerman out of you yet.”

“Aye,” Rossamünd heard muttered behind him, “or maybe you’d make a good weed-keeper, Rosey?” There was the sound of soft laughter.

Rossamünd did not look around.

However, Threnody did. “Better to be good for something than a good-for-nothing bustle-chaser,” she hissed, unable to tell between good-natured jape or insult.