Lamplighter (28 page)

Without hesitation, Numps went down, encouraging Rossamünd to follow, pointing downward. Rossamünd 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 Rossamünd 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?” Rossamünd 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 Rossamünd’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 Rossamünd’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!
Rossamünd 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.

Rossamünd 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 Rossamünd’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?” Rossamünd asked at last.

Numps stood, leaned into the vat, shone the light within and said, “By the flippers flapping, of course.”

Rossamünd 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 Rossamünd 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. Rossamünd 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.

Rossamünd 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.”

Rossamünd 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.

They sat then, side by side in the soporific warmth, the glimner and the prentice, Numps humming, Rossamünd wishing heartily that he could come here again. Safe and warm and brimming with peace, it was simply the best place in the whole Half-Continent. In the soft darkness of the old forgotten bloom baths, Rossamünd slept.

moss-light
also known as a limnulin or limulight; this is a small, pocketable device, a simple biologue consisting of a lidded box holding a clump of naturally phosphorescent mosslike lichens (either funkelmoos or micareen), set on a thick bed of nutrient to keep it alive. This nutrient bed can be reinvigorated with drops of liquid similar to seltzer. The light provided by a limnulin is not bright, but can give you enough to see your way right on a dark night, and is diffuse enough not to attract immediate attention.

 

 

W
ITH a panicked, convulsing suck of breath, Rossamünd awoke. He sat up in disoriented fright, looking every way with hasty, sightless alarm as the swilling of water trickled all about.Then easy realization brought peace: he was still in the undercroft, with the bloom baths.

Numps stirred more peaceably, saying sleepily, “Oh, oh, wake up, sleepyheads, no time for dozing.”

“What’s the o’clock?” Rossamünd asked loudly, still a little mizzled.

Numps scratched his head. “Uh, sorry, Mister Rossamünd, I’m a glimner, not a night-clerk.”

Rossamünd got to his feet. “It feels late,” he said, and ran up the steps to observe the sky through the grate. With profound consternation he discovered that the clear black dome of night hung above. He could not quite believe it. His heart skipping several beats, he opened the grate and clambered up to the square to get a better view. Maudlin green was riding high in the dark. It was desperately, impossibly late. Douse-lanterns had come and was long gone and all prentices should be in their cells asleep. No one was permitted to roam the grounds at night, especially not some lowly lantern-stick. A quick trot to the jakes across the hall was all a prentice was allowed during the night-watches.To be at large now was the worst breach, punishable by an afternoon in the pillory by the Feuterer’s Cottage.

Rossamünd leaped back down the steps, three at a time, utterly flustered, dreading the worst punishments. “I’m late. I’m locked out. Frogs and toads, Mister Numps! How am I to get back into my cell?”

Numps was still sitting as the prentice had left him.

“I have to go right now, Mister Numps.” Rossamünd’s voice quavered with anxiety. “It’s past douse-lanterns . . . Oh, I’m in
so
much trouble . . .”

“Oh—oh—um, oh dear—there’s better ways home again.” Numps nodded. “Numps’ hiding-hole goes more places than just here.” With that he stood and jogged off through the baths.

Rossamünd followed.

Through the convoluted clearances between the battery of baths they hastened. In the farthest corner of the undercroft was a hole in the wall, round like a drain. Upon a hook at the apex of the drain’s arch hung a bright-limn with the healthiest looking bloom Rossamünd had ever seen glowing bright in its near-clear seltzer. Beyond the throw of clean light the cavity of the drain was exquisitely black and blank and mysterious. Numps took the bright-limn off its stay and, with a solemn nod to Rossamünd and a soft “shh,” entered the round gap.

Close behind, the prentice saw that they were in a tunnel, most probably an ancient sewer pipe. On left and right down the length of the tunnel they passed the small dark mouths of lesser pipes beady with reflecting retinas and echoing with light patters and rodent squeaks. The gray-mousers that haunted the manse could grow happily fat down here.

In this moldy, claustrophobic place Rossamünd’s sense of distance began to distort, and with it time. To him it felt that they had walked far enough to be somewhere out on the Harrowmath. Several times the tunnel kinked and branched till Rossamünd was disoriented and very glad that the glimner knew the way. Numps finally took a right turn and they began to descend. The new way was of greater diameter than the previous drain and took them down so sharply that Rossamünd was made to lean backward with the effort of climbing, scrabbling at the slimy bricks to prevent a slip.

Lifting the bright-limn high, Numps paused when the tunnel became level again. “We are right under the manse-house,” the glimner said, looking up and ducking his head.

Looking to the immuring bricks just above, Rossamünd shrank a little at the thought of the great press of masonry, the tons of stone and hundreds of sleeping lighters and staff all on top of him. It was so deep not even the vermin ventured here.

Shouldn’t we be going up?
Rossamünd fretted.

Numps continued forward, and there, by an intersecting pipe, was a small door of corroding iron a few feet above the floor, reached by three large steps. He grinned at Rossamünd, his geniality made ghastly by the play of seltzer light on his scars. Rossamünd smiled back, alive to the immense trust the glimner was showing him, the secrets the man was revealing.

“Through here now, and up, up, up,” Numps said softly. He produced a key pulled from somewhere on his person, unlocked the rusty door and shone the seltzer light through. Beyond was the landing of a tight stairway of near-failing timbers, rising into shadows of architectural gloom.

Unlike the one reached through the kitchens, this was not lit at all.

How often does he come here?
Rossamünd’s whole sense of Winstermill shifted with the thought of the glimner wandering about beneath them as they labored, ate, even slept.

Numps stood by the door, waiting.

“Mister Numps?”

“I don’t like to go up to the manse.” The glimner’s face was drawn and gray, his eyes animated with deep troubles. “I won’t go any farther—oh dear no; I don’t like it in the manse . . . never have.”

“Can I find my own way from here?” Rossamünd asked.

The glimner clucked his tongue. “Mister Rossamünd can indeed go himself.”

“What more is ahead?” the prentice asked.

Numps looked to the furtigrade distractedly. “Oh—oh, more tunnels, more stairs: just go up—up—up—up—do not stop at any doors until the very top and turn the bolt and slide the door, down the passage and through the hole and you shall come out on to the lectury floor.”

A start of panic knotted in Rossamünd’s innards. “Are you sure?” he pressed.

Numps nodded emphatically. The glimner had led him a long and twisted way but now he must go ahead alone—to a place that might not lead anywhere.
I could be lost or found out late!—between the stone and the sty, as Fransitart would say. I found my way to Winstermill and I can do this too.