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.

Stepping onto the tiny landing, Rossamünd looked up. He could see only a few flights above, beyond which darkness brooded. He listened: he could hear nothing but his own workings beating, lub-dub lub-dub.

“You must go gently-gently,” said the glimner. “Some others are up here too, all a-wandering. I hear them sometimes down here but they don’t hear me. Oh no.” He took something from his satchel and pressed it into Rossamünd’s hands. “Here, Mister Rossamünd, take this; it’s too dark up there.” It was a small pewter box, like those in which pediteers carried their playing cards, but this had a thick leather strap attached and felt almost empty. The prentice did not know what to say.

“It’s a moss-light,” Numps explained. “Push—push at the top.”

Rossamünd did as instructed.The top panel proved to be a lid that, when slid up, exposed a diffuse blue-green glow within.With a closer look he found the box was hollow with a glass top, and stuffed with a bizarre kind of plant, its tiny leaves radiant with that odd, natural effulgence like bloom.

“So you will find the way.” Numps blessed Rossamünd with his crooked smile once more.

“Oh, thank you, Mister Numps.” Rossamünd felt a small relief: at least he would see his way—even if he was not certain where that way would lead him.

“Go, go.” Numps bobbed his head bashfully. “Up up to the top, slide the door, through the hole and off to bed just like me. Bye, bye . . .” Mumbling, he shuffled back along the reverse of his path.

By the eerie nimbus-light of Numps’ gift, Rossamünd began to climb the furtigrade. It was steep, of course, and so very cramped he was obliged to climb slowly. Heeding the warning that the glimner had given of others above, he worked hard to make his footfalls light and prevent the flimsy stair from creaking. Three flights and still the furtigrade went on. At the fourth the looming shadows resolved themselves into a doorway, but the stair went on. No stopping at any doors, Mister Numps said. Rossamünd continued to climb. His ascent was soon foiled, however. Not more than another two flights higher he discovered to his great dismay that a part of the stair had collapsed, making a wreck of gray splinters that made the furtigrade impassable. He could go no farther. What now? His mind’s cogs raced. I’ll try the door I saw below.

Rossamünd crept down to this door, the glow of the moss-light muffled against his chest, and listened: nothing but drips and the rush of his heart. He dared a little more light and peered gingerly beyond the doorway. The floor of the space was a mirror of the ceiling, a broad shallow drain that formed a vaulted junction with three other tunnels. Forward or back he was lost, he figured, but back meant certain discovery and the pillory while forward at least held a chance of undetected return. So forward it is . . .

He had heard somewhere—probably from Master Fransitart—that when caught in a maze you should always go left and eventually you would win free. Taking a deep breath he went left. If this did not work he would simply return and choose again.

Rossamünd followed the leftward tunnel and it took him farther and farther from the junction, finally terminating in eight steps that led up to a brick wall. A dead end! But there, hammered into the mildewed bricks with corroded pegs of iron, was a crude ladder. Hanging the moss-light by its strap about his neck, the prentice scuttered up and pulled himself through into a deep tight valley in the masonry that smelled of century-settled dust and stillness. Brittle twig-weeds sprouted from any suggestion of a crack between floor and wall. How they managed to live at all down in this subterranean night he did not know.

Leftward was blocked by a wall, and so Rossamünd went right. In the meager moss-light, he thought he could discern what looked like the blank sockets of windows high in the walls above. Soon this architectural chasm ended bluntly in a redbrick barrier fronted by yet another furtigrade going up and going down. Up was closer to Winstermill, he reasoned, so he began to wearily climb again.

The night was never going to end!

Becoming used to this creeping dark, he took the ascent a little more confidently, but the stair sooned reached its end. At its summit he was confronted with a wall into which was sunk an oblong trap-hole, about his height and nearly an arm’s-length deep. It was blocked by a stained panel of dark rusted iron fixed with a corroded handle and barely held shut by a sliding bar of wood and iron. Rossamünd tried it in hope, and the flaking metal resisted at first but then slid back with a loud crack. Maybe this is the door Numps was thinking of . . . He tugged, and the door did not shift. He shoved with hearty frustration, and in a small burst of rusting dust from its age-blackened hinges the portal bulged inward—just a little. Through this crack was a glimpse into blackness, and from it exhaled the foul odor of decay, so much like that far worse hint he had once detected in the hold of the Hogshead. In the bowels of the cromster it had been heavily masked with swine’s lard, but here it was full and oppressively potent, smothering him in its dread stink.

A rever-man! he intuited, stepping away from the door. Down here? But how? He could not believe it.

There was a sound, some nondescript evidence of motion; a step, a shuffle—Rossamünd could not tell, but he knew something moved behind that stubborn-hinged door.

I must try another way! He reached for the handle of the panel to shut it.

Some misshapen thing lurched at the space from the black within. Pallid hands, blotched and scabbed, gripped door and post and wrenched powerfully. Metal groaned, wood buckled and the door-gap widened. A pale head thrust through, craning and twisting right, then left, its spasmodic breath coming in a quivering wheeze. Its toothy, lipless mouth seeped saliva, at which it sucked almost as often as it breathed. The abominable creature twisted about and fixed its callous attention on him, pinning him with its morbid fascination.With a white flash of dread he realized this was a gudgeon. Here truly was a rever-man—uncaged, unfettered, dreadfully free.

Rossamünd bit back a scream. His innards churned. His thoughts wailed. A rever-man! A rever-man here in Winstermill!

For a breath Rossamünd’s mind was overthrown as he tottered back, struggling to fathom what he saw.Yet with the cold, radiating dread that cried Run! Run! in a tiny, terrified voice within came a wholly unexpected rage. Faced now with a rever-man, a blasphemously made-thing, uncaged and visible, Rossamünd’s terror did not overcome him. His hand went instinctively to his salumanticum and found the Frazzard’s powder.

The gudgeon shifted its grasp. Tiny little piggy eyes regarded him coldly—soulless, dead—as slowly, inexorably the panel-door was forced open. Large, furry, inhuman ears swiveled and twitched at either side of its long and bulging skull. Swathes of filthy bandages and even a rope were wrapped about its trunk, keeping its heaving chest and stitch-grafted abdomen together. What struck Rossamünd most was the utter absence of any threwd about the thing. A threwdless monster: how could you ever tell it was coming? Indeed, it was devoid of even a flicker of real vitality: a man-made thing, a dead thing.Yet its full and putrid reek, unmasked by swine’s lard, was potent. The gudgeon opened its slavering mouth and a long tongue like a lizard’s lolled obscenely, flicking in the dusty air. Even as Rossamünd stumbled backward onto the furtigrade and down the way he had come, the abomination stared with hungry curiosity as the crack between door and wall grew ineluctably wider.

“Hmm,” it seethed, licking at the gap between it and the prentice, “yooouuu mmmake mmeee huuunnngreee . . .”

With one powerful spring, the made-monster flung itself through the gap, viper-quick, at Rossamünd, slamming into the balustrade as it made pursuit.

Tripping, nearly falling, Rossamünd blundered down the stair. The gudgeon staggered and turned with a dry, rattling hiss. On the lower landing Rossamünd twisted and flung the potive at it as it pounced at him from on high. His aim was as true at a natural throw as it was off with a firelock. The Frazzard’s powder burst against the creature’s neck and shoulder with a flash of bluish sparks and a series of tight detonations that sounded like the popping of corks.

“Aaiieeee!” The creature hit the wooden steps with a crash and tumbled into Rossamünd as it fell. A thousand stars erupting across his senses, the prentice was crushed over and over between wooden step and rever-man. Together they toppled a whole other flight, then another, striking the banister rail on the lower landing hard, causing it to crack dangerously.

The gudgeon was on him in an instant, pressing him down, its whelming stench all about him, teeth snapping clack! clack! seeking to nip at exposed flesh: fingers, knees, cheeks. In white, blind terror Rossamünd heaved the abominable creature off and shoved it—almost threw it though it was twice his size—across the tiny landing. Free of its imprisoning bulk, he sprang up the stairs he had just descended so painfully, pointlessly crying, “Help! Help!”

“Ahhh! Yoouuu liiittle beeeast!” he heard it hiss behind him.The rever-man was fumbling about on hands and knees, its piggy little eyes burned out by the Frazzardian chemistry. The distinct peppery-salty smell of the spent potive spiced the close fug of the furtigrade. “I caaan stiiill heeeaaaarrrr yoouuu . . .”

The gudgeon shuffled toward Rossamünd and he turned to face it, scuttering up each step upon his bottom.

It made a strange cackling. “I could eeeat yoouurrr kiiind aaall the looong looong daayyy!” It sprang catlike at what it believed to be Rossamünd’s position, and struck the banister three steps below the prentice with enough force to smash the rails to flinders, which toppled down into the darkness. Nothing could stop the gudgeon. It bounced off the ruined wood, its arm a spasming dead weight, the left shoulder dislocated and deformed by the blow—the vile creature so utterly ravening it was destroying itself to get to him. It pounced again.

Rossamünd kicked out with all the might his horror could muster—and missed. The unhallowed thing gripped his flailing leg and bit at his shin, a bite meant to tear away muscle. Its crooked teeth met proofed galliskins, cruelly pinching flesh against bone but failing to penetrate. Once again Rossamünd had been saved by the wonders of gauld. With a yelp, he lashed with his free leg, striking the putrid thing upon its face. The gudgeon must not have been well knit, for its jaw gave way with sickening ease under his boot-heel; teeth sprayed and clattered about the stair. The cobbled-together thing gurgled and shrieked and sought to grasp Rossamünd in a death grip. Kicking again, the prentice got his footing and bounded up the stairs.

Below, the gudgeon was hissing and sucking through its mangled mouth, struggling once again up the furtigrade seeking nothing but gory murder, utterly heedless of its broken parts.

Rossamünd extracted another salpert of Frazzard’s powder. Oh, for something more deadly! Yet he did not dare use the loomblaze for fear it would cause the dry, dusty furtigrade to take fire, and start an unstoppable conflagration right within the foundations of the manse. He threw the potive hard on the step before the gudgeon, seeking to make a brief barrier, to give the abomination second thoughts.The potive popped and crackled as it erupted and sprayed the gudgeon again. With its cries of rage oddly flat and muffled in the squeeze of the dusty furtigrade, Rossamünd dashed up the stairs, pain jarring up his bitten shin.

The foul thing was staggering up after him—he could see it through the frame and rails—eyes fizzing, weeping gore, utterly ruined by two doses of Frazzard’s powder, jaw a crooked mass, mouth dribbling unstoppably. There was something almost pathetic about this abominable creature with its terrible injuries, yet it did not heed its damage. With long, clumsy reaches of its arms, the gudgeon slapped its hands on a higher step, felt the way and pulled itself up, gaining pace. There was no escaping the thing. Rossamünd could only try to flee up the furtigrade and out into the unknown cavities of the vault above.

“Help!” he cried, a small pathetic sound in this claustrophobic fastness.

The gudgeon slunk around the landing below, starting up the very stair he was upon. It jabbered at him incomprehensibly, trying to form vile taunts with its broken, dribbling maw.

“Help!” Rossamünd bellowed again. He knew it was hopeless, but sanguine hope kept him crying.

He set his feet on the creaking boards of the tiny landing by the wrenched door, giving himself a little space to fight from, and seized a caste of loomblaze from his salumanticum. He had to risk it or perish. Rossamünd watched the ill-gotten thing climb, and waited. Waited till it was close enough.

“Whhyyy-bbll-ssooo-blbb-ssstiiilll-blbl, littbblle-bblmooorsel-bbl,” the horror drooled and, despite blindness, gathered itself to pounce.

With a tenorlike wail, Rossamünd leaped down the stairs and grappled the foul creature once more, hitting the banister rail as they collided, wrenching it with an ominous crack. The gudgeon tried to pound at him, but Rossamünd was in close, too close for its swings to be effective. It thumped at his shoulders, pushing him down beneath its wrath. He gagged and spat bile.Yet as it smothered him, the prentice gripped the gudgeon about its festering neck and shoved the caste of loomblaze down into the foul, broken mouth, right into its crop.The gudgeon tried to chew off his hand, its broken jaw doing little more than a gory flapping. It wrapped its tongue about Rossamünd’s wrist and with groping, gripping hands sought to gouge at the prentice’s face. Straining and twisting his head, Rossamünd wrenched himself loose and away, bringing his arm back sharply to chop at the creature’s throat, where the frangible vial had lodged. At the second blow the gudgeon gave a convulsing, gargling shriek: a half-human, piglike squeal. Yellow-green gouts of light flared from its mouth and nostrils as the loomblaze erupted within its neck. It writhed and arched its back, still screaming as Rossamünd kicked it away and fumbled for safety on higher steps. He watched in horror as the burning rever-man toppled against the already weakened rail. It gave way and the beast plummeted through the thin gap about which the furtigrade wound, shattering the rail below; falling, colliding and falling again a score of times more than Rossamünd could follow, before abruptly halting, a small bright fire in the darkest depths below.

Laboring for breath, shin a torture, his mind’s eye revisiting the horror over and over in a giddy spin, Rossamünd pulled himself away from the edge of the gap. He shook himself, stood, and on wobbling legs went as fast as he could down the furtigrade, terrified that some other revenant-beast might be waiting for him above. Far down the dangerously shuddering stair, deeper still, he could see the dying flicker of the loomblaze burning.The frame of the furtigrade began to crack and sag, the age-rotten wood not able to support such rough use. Back at the walled valley he leaped from the tottering stair and ran, legs still shaky, back the way he had come, finding the original four-way vault. Going left again he pushed on, listening always for sounds of pursuit, another caste of loomblaze ever ready in his grasp. So intent was he on knowing if he was followed he took little notice of the perpendicular twists and the turns, choosing left when he could, going either up or down with an instinct born of desperation. If he hit a dead end he would simply turn about and take the next left, eyes wide as wide could be, ears pricked for any wheezing shuffling of a gudgeon in pursuit.

Driven by the nauseating urgency to be free of this crowding, dusty labyrinth, Rossamünd pushed on through more and more cramped passages and buried, forgotten rooms. Stumbling dizzily several times, he had no notion of how long or how far he had come, but at some point the way became straighter and the architecture familiar. At the top of a solid flight of stone steps he stopped in front of a door with a very ordinary-looking handle in it, just like those on the doors of the manse. Excited, he tugged. The door resisted at first, but after a determined pull it opened with a clatter. The relief was powerful, hysterical. Rossamünd sprang out, all sense of decorum abandoned. “Raise the alarm!” he hollered. “A rever-man! A rever-man!”

And there, on the other side, he found himself staring directly at the shocked face of the Master-of-Clerks.