* * * *

 

An illustrator by training and a deeply unrepentant word-nerd, D.M. Cornish is old enough to have seen the very first Star Wars (the now unhappily titled ‘Episode 4’). From such flights of delight and fancy he has developed an almost habitual outlet for his passion of word conjuring through the invention of secondary worlds. A fortuitous encounter with a children’s publisher gave him an opportunity to develop these ideas further. A thousand words at a time, this has lead to the writing (and illustrating) of the Monster-Blood Tattoo series — Foundling, Lamplighter and Factotum (yet to be released). Rumour persists that he possesses a life outside of these books, but it is a vague and shadowy thing.

 

* * * *

 

The Corsers’ Hinge:

A Lamplighter Tale

 

D. M. Cornish

 

 

Corsers’ Hinge, the ~ (noun) the vernacular and long-standing policy of conduct supposedly governing the behaviour of corsers — that is, grave robbers (a corse being a dead body, of course) — stipulating such ancient customs as how frequently a single boneyard or crypt or surgery may be plundered, disallowing such foul practices as employing murder to fill a toll (quota) and providing the modes of etiquette when corsers meet over a coincidentally prized tomb. Adherence to the hinge is, of course, entirely voluntary, but its existence helps a corser to hold to a certain illusion of respectability in their ignoble trade. Ashmongers — dealers in dead bodies and their parts — do not of course hold themselves to such missish restrictions.

 

* * * *

 

The first spring month of Orio had been especially poor for Bunting Faukes, corser and perpetual wayfarer; one of those times to bring a weaker soul to despair of the path of their life and to stoop to consider an early exit from under the world’s wearying weight. The cause of such disconsolation?

 

Money.

 

Forever money, Faukes reflected glumly, drawing out his long iron corse-pole to prod Hammer, then Anvil, his brace of donkeys drawing the rattling cart, as if the dogged beasts were to blame.

 

As was the way of his profession, winter with all its maladies, its early gloom and low flesh-preserving temperatures was typically a boon. Yet this year’s frosted months had brought an inexplicable increase in the want for corses of all ripenings. Bunting could not account for it. Perhaps necromancy or some other fabercadavery has become all the fancy among high-flown society? Yet, what he knew all too well was that a multiplication of orders had made for a multiplication of work, bringing corser all too close to corser, contact that left only one with the prize and the other with ... well, amongst bruises and shovel wounds, potive burns and bullet holes, an empty order. In added insult, fresh-plucked spring was proving to be especially cheery, its balmy promise of a fine summer ripening ripe flesh all too quickly, inviting a torment of flies and making fraught the already chancy traffic of corses; its shortening of the nights denying him time to work.

 

For only the second spell since his clumsy, best-forgotten start so long ago as a boneman, Bunting was enduring a genuine crimp in his career. As of late, no matter how excellent the money that came as a necessary recompense for such odious and dangerous labours, Bunting always seemed to have none and owe much.

 

Only a fortnight gone, in the mighty mercantile city of Brandenbrass, Weakleefe Spleen — that infamous money-lending shaky benchman — had called in his debt. Accosting Bunting while he sipped a well-earned knuckle of Ol’ Touchy in the drinking room of the Mother’s Nudge, Spleen along with his terrifying malodorous scourge, Welkin Mull, and a quarto of sturdy roughs had left the corser in no doubt as to his responsibilities — as the master benchman liked to call it. Pressing Bunting painfully and making crude insinuations to his scourge’s flesh-melting skills, Spleen had demanded on point of death payment by a month; an entire season’s necessary living all due Newwich next — a mere seven days.

 

Bunting did have money: oscadrils — debased Imperial coin, long held to be made of inferior metal despite their golden twinkle. Spleen had proved in no mood to accept such stuff, the cold dull gold of common sous was his whole desire. After conversion by the only money changers who took the business of those of his ilk — and their high tellage fee — Bunting was left with scarce enough to eat once properly each day and fit himself for his current venture.

 

To compound poor Bunting’s woes, Master Pypsquïque, ashmonger and the corser’s usual agent, was being especially punctilious about this newest order. Typically Bunting would fill as much of his toll ticket as he could with corses of the required states of category and decay then meet the rest with odds and sods dug from any old plot and with this what in the trade they liked to call windfall — bodies found beddened, that is, newly dead, on gallows or Catherine wheels or the sides of roads. Though most ashmongers did not like it much, such a practice was only disallowed by the hinge in as much as it threatened good relations betwixt a corser and their usual agents, as Bunting’s properly printed and much treasured edition of the hinge read. Yet, little matter how Bunting might consider himself an honourable fellow — as honourable as one of my ilk might be, he thought wryly — in lean times such ambiguous ploys were within his habits.

 

Haphazard bits and sods, however, would not do this time.

 

Master Pypsquïque, ever alive to his suppliers’ ploys, had been pointedly unambiguous in his insistence for this most recent order. ‘Fill the toll full and properly, Mister Faukes!’ the ashmonger had declared imperiously when presenting the list. ‘The whole toll, that is — our client waxes impatient with shortcuts and if he don’t get every corse as he wants it, he has said he won’t pay me ... and if he don’t pay me, I won’t pay thee!’

 

The toll was fairly typical:

 

2 of the male kind, adult of young or middling years, wormed;

1 innards only of the female kind, adult, young or middling, decadent;

1 of the male kind, adult middle-yeared, tanned;

1 of the female kind, a child of elder years, scarce beddened.

 

... typical, but for that last item. Such fresh ashes were rarely called for but by the worst ash-dabblers. Still, the principles of those upon the other side of the transaction with Master Pypsquïque were not of Bunting’s concern. His labours were trial enough without fussing with such mewling niceties. He — and most corsers with him — prided and consoled himself that as long as he kept to his iniquitous yet necessary work, the need for kidnap and murder by lingerlaces and other bodysnatching wretches was diminished.

 

Be that as it might be, his current cause had not been aided by the fact that his usual rivals, the Micklethwart brothers — always desperate to make good themselves — seemed to be beating him to every patch within easy journey. The one time he had got to a plot ahead of them, they drove him off violently in blatant disobedience to the hinge and against common decency among fellow wayfarers too.

 

Not all are honour, Bunting reflected bitterly.

 

Keenly sensitive to any lapse in her master’s attention, Anvil the smaller donkey — fit as she ever was — slowed in an attempt to feast on a few wilted thistles struggling through the mat of russet needles on the verge of the ill-kept path. Flicking the left rein irritably, Bunting prompted her on. Probably a near-forgotten mine or woodsman’s road, their course had kept tenaciously and somewhat disorientingly to the north-western flank of a convoluted valley, snaking right then left then right again amongst the young and murky wood.

 

Peering higher to the low, leaden sky, Bunting breathed a long draw of stagnant, resin-scented air. At least the weather is turned cold again.

 

In grasping anxiety he had resorted finally — despite the ban on such conduct — to chasing the Micklethwarts off in turn, firing all seven barrels of his heptibus at them, only to find he was left scant pickings of the new plots. Moreover, hinge prevented him from revisiting Spelter Innings necropolis — his favourite necropolis and ever a source of fine fresh corses. He had been there not more than a month ago and, obliged by the hinge, was compelled to leave an interlude of two months — half a season — before returning. Yet, Spelter Innings was too far away anyway regardless, if he was to go and dig and be back in Brandenbrass by the 5th of Unxis. Steered by desperation, he delved far to parts of the Brandenfells he had once promised himself never to tread, trundling amidst the infamous black hills of half-mad boar-swains and violent backwards bumpkins seeking their private humegrounds in the baffling warren of gullies and combes.

 

Bunting stared warily at the tall crooked pines, gaunt turpentines and lichened boulders a brooding sullen grey, the perfect hide for rabid men clotted with filth and gore or worse, a slavering bogle fit to eat whatever it could lay its hand to. There had been talk in a woodsman’s ham down south, Whittle Sawsly, of some giant hobnicker stalking the hills about — especially in these more northern hills.

 

Yet despite all the obstacles, our man — avoiding bumping with even one wild bumpkin — had managed to find much of what he needed in these secluded plots, disinterring the right and proper ashes of every item on the toll.

 

Every item, that was, but that last ...

 

1 of the female kind, a child of elder years, scarce beddened.

 

The plethora of plots of Brandenbrass would surely hold such rare ashes. Yet in fear of tempting the short mercies of Weakleefe Spleen and his stinking bandage-wrapped scourge, Bunting did not dare return to Brandenbrass early, not even to spoil the boneyards of that city. Even if he had, such an endeavour would have been futile, for the city’s deadpatches had, after a winter of especially heavy plundering, been bounded for the spring by common accord between corser and ashmongers alike. Moreover, ever since that misunderstanding last year with the corse of the Archduke’s cousin’s youngest daughter and a prominent ashmonger, the mortigriphers of the city — responsible for the rites, burial and recording of the dead — had shut their doors to the dark trades. The only recourse had always been the usual remote plots; but when these did not yield the necessary harvest and the city was out of bounds, what was a fellow to do?

 

Short of abducting some girl from her dear mother’s bosom — embed, or kill for himself, a soul who dead would fit the toll, and present them after some treatment with the necessary chemistry as if legitimately exhumed — he had no notion how he would fill it. For a breath in the darker regions of his soul, such a grim notion was beginning to hold merit ... As much as many ashmongers would be perfectly at ease with such murder, the hinge held it expressly forbidden, serving not the posterity of our ancient and necessary trade — or, as his father had put it, ‘just cause we’re part o’ the dark trades dun’t mean we ‘ave to behave darksomely’.

 

Aside from guilty, vaguely lofty notions of honour, Bunting was not sure he had the courage for such an act. Messing about with the members of some long dead soul was amusing enough, but killing cold and calculated was a whole other dastardly stripe of deed. Should he truly consider such a deed it did not matter anyway: deep in the Brandenfells now, he was too remote from properly settled places to find anything so fresh and civilised as a young girl. Yet times were waxing so desperate so quickly, should he find such a creature, he could not rightly say which way he might decide.

 

My neck or another’s ... ?

 

Abruptly he was brought out of his reverie.

 

Was that a shout?

 

Someone — or something — had cried out.

 

Bunting listened but heard no repeat of that first cry over the light clatter of his cart. He shook his head as he leant back on the reins, Hammer and Anvil only too eager to halt and chew upon drooping weeds. Reaching back from the small bench of his cart, the corser patting searchingly for a green glass bottle of vin settled between four long, burlap-wound bundles. Disturbingly suggestive of a human form, they were lain side by side in the cart’s tray beneath the folded framed of wooden struts that made the simple sheer he used to haul prizes from the mould, and over this several great obscuring stooks of kindling. A scent of myrrh mixed with rot rose from them, though Bunting found it neither unpleasant nor overpowering, in part for the skill of their wrapping, in part the censers of sweet powders fixed to rods on either side of the cart’s bench, and in part because he was numb to such odours. Like vinegarroons in their rams treading the acrid vinegar seas, corsers possess a measure of dumbness to all manner of bad airs. A most necessary qualification, he smiled sardonically at himself. Swatting at a knot of flies hovering about his ears, he took a toss of sharp sweet vin and set the cart in motion.

 

A startling boom, like the discharge of a mighty cannon, cracked through the narrow defile, reverberating over and over like the whole wood was about to collapse on itself.

 

Bunting near dropped his bottle.

 

Though there was no reckoning where such a heavy sound came from in these frowning furrowed hills it certainly seemed disconcertingly near. Soon this was followed by the flat popping of what could only be musket or pistol fire. Ducking instinctively though the threat was surely some way off, Bunting reached for his heptibus and quickened the pace of his donkeys.

 

Coming easy as he could about a sharp right-hand crook in the road, he peered ahead to see if the road was threatened. Cut into the hillside, the road bent around a short precipice of rust-stained stone little more than the height of two tall men. Shouts and the tell-tale popping of flintlock fire seemed to sound from directly above.

 

Bunting scarcely turned in time to witness a figure dressed in dim grey and black, head and shoulders swathed in brilliant red appear suddenly directly above him. Face hidden behind an all-seeing sthenicon box, the figure looked down at him for a mere breath before launching itself from the blunt crag. Even in his fall, the red-swathed lurksman twisted to plummet back first, a pistola pointing in each hand back up to where he had just left. Crack! Crack! the pistols fired as at that very instant two strangely pale heads rushed into sight at the summit of the overhang. One ducked nimbly from view, the other simply slumped, hat tumbling, pierced through the brow with a leaden ball even as the red-swathed fellow landed with a great jarring rattling crash of kindling and groaning joints, and a gust of dust, right into the laden tray of Bunting’s creaking cart. Hammer and Anvil bellowed and brayed in dismay. Striving to keep the beasts from bolting, the corser instantly thought his cart ruined and the man dead — I might find a buyer for him, a cool and ever-present calculation inwardly turned — but with a quick jerk, the red lurksman sat up.

 

‘Hurry on, man!’ he cried to Bunting, voice clear despite the impediment of the simple oblong sthenicon box, its single optic hole swivelling rapidly from Bunting to ledge-top.

 

Without a second thought, the corser obediently flicked his poor donkeys to start, the two creatures only too keen to be on their way.

 

‘Petulcus Sprawle,’ the lurksman introduced himself with the tone of an educated man as he hastily reloaded his irons. ‘My chief will be shortly ahead at the bridge ... You may take me there.’ He turned abruptly and let loose with a twin of pistol shots at the foe still chasing them atop the rolling precipice. Under the bulky folds of his red cowl, Bunting could see this Sprawle carried a hefty wad of dark cushioning cloth strapped in a bundle to his upper back, as if to soften many a backwards fall. Such acrobatics were common for this fellow it seemed.

 

Hammer and Anvil took them as fast as they might on such an awkward path over the spur of the hill, the cart-axles rasping with stricken groans Bunting knew had not been there before. The crook in the road straightened and began to bend back to the left as the land rolled down to a shallow gully rising steadily on the right. Only a couple of fathoms ahead stood a neat crossing of arched and ancient stone traversing a small runnel bubbling its course down the needle-thick gully between root and rock and tree. Climbing steeply on the other side, the gloom beneath the black pines was hurrying with white-faced shadows. Looking quickly Bunting could see that they were grubby fellows in mixed proofing stalking amongst the dark trees, their pallid faces grubby white blanks. In a nonce, he could see that they were masks bearing one or two horizontal red bars across their dials.

 

‘Fictlers!’ Bunting hissed.

 

Falsegod worshippers, fictlers were the worst fashion of backwards hill-dwelling nincompoops, filled with delusions of a world ruled by their deep-dwelling masters, the slumbering idiot falsegods.

 

‘Indeed ...’ Sprawle proclaimed, his boxed face an unnerving blank.

 

Balls spanged and slapped about them as Bunting whisked his team to a brisk trot, one striking Hammer on the well-proofed petraille that covered the startled donkey’s back and flanks, another knocking his master’s tall hat from his crown. So astonishing was this blow that Bunting did not notice a stout gent in costly proofing of luxurious blue stooped behind the cover of the high stone abutments upon the further side of the bridge until he was nigh upon him. The corser hauled hard to slow their scampering pace.

 

That very moment there came a mighty flash high up the slope, quickly accompanied by a crackling roar. A great gush of debris and orange and clearly toxic smoke engulfed half the height of the gully, flinging fictlers down with implacable force, overcoming them in a thick, dirty fume.

 

‘The timing of your fuse is as excellent as ever, Mister Sprawle!’ the short thickset gentleman in blue called with grim cheer to Bunting’s passenger, the red-wrapped lurksman leaping lithely from the wreck in the cart’s tray to the wall of the bridge. ‘I see you have brought a jaunty fit to extract us from this stouche,’ he added, reaching up to halt Hammer and Anvil without any reference to the cart’s proper owner.

 

At first Bunting thought this fellow was still bent for cover, but he quickly discerned that though he was hunched, he was standing at his full height as he gripped Anvil’s bridle, barely taller than some middling child. ‘Hoy! I ain’t your champion, old muck,’ he retorted hotly, trying to provoke his donkeys to keep going away from all this danger. ‘I’m not here for your saving!’

 

‘No,’ the stunted, blue-harnessed gent returned rapidly, the intent in his gaze hidden behind murky spectacles. ‘But you’re a humble, hucillucting soul who’ll help his fellow wayfarers in their need.’

 

Bunting frowned, feeling utterly exposed sitting high on his cart bench. ‘If it isn’t the hinge it’s the cordiality of the road,’ he muttered bleakly and stared nervously up the gully.

 

For now, threatening silence ruled.

 

Beyond the squat blue fellow crouched a third figure, hidden behind a hefty boulder that jutted near the bridge. Clad in a heavy black weskit over his clean white shirt, he was taking aim with a prodigiously long long-rifle up the left flank of the gully. The weapon spoke, offending the hush with its violence, the bark of its deadly voice crackling back to them through the convolutions of the gullies. After the great blast of before, Bunting could not see who there was to shoot at, but the fellow set to reloading with great yet practised haste: powder from a horn, already-patched ball from a pouch, all rammed with steady alacrity. The corser thought this oddly old-fashioned — waxed cartridges had been about for near as long as he could recall — until he saw that this fellow, too, wore a sthenicon, no doubt to give him a franker aim yet preventing him from biting a cartridge, as was necessary.

 

With a queer shriek, a new figure dashed down the left slope of the gully, coming at them through the residue of fume. Dressed in closed-fitted proofing, this one too wore a mask, though instead of a dirty menacing blank it was the clean white of a regal egret with sharp yellow bill. Here surely was a sagaar, a skipping tempestuous dancer of the dread dances of war, the many hems of long protective skirts flying behind like madly fluttering wings of moonlit night.

 

Bunting reckoned them undone. Why does he not fire! he thought, watching in rising horror as the black-proofed franklock set aim on the rushing dancer but no more.

 

Taking up his heptibus, Bunting resolved to act. Set to fire all seven shots at once, he levelled it on the charging foe when the cluster of barrels was abruptly seized and the weapon near wrenched from his unready grasp.

 

‘Rather you didn’t, friend,’ Sprawle smiled thinly while the gent in blue declared to him mildly, keeping hold of the firelock, ‘She is rather valuable to us,’ clearly meaning the egret sagaar.

 

She? Bunting marvelled darkly. What stripe of crank panto-show have I met with? Eying the man dismally as he let the heptibus go and turned to welcome the return of his weird egret-faced comrade, the corser’s next thought was for flight. I’ll leave these uppity lurksmen to their fate, he determined when his attention was arrested by a young lady.

 

Fair-haired, perhaps a third his age, she sat huddled and very still beside the busy black-clad franklock. Draped by an overlarge cloak covering the shame of her too simple slip, her eyes were round and terribly solemn, yet she appeared indifferent to her immediate danger. Darker thoughts possessed her attention.

 

An impulse deeper than a conscientious notion of honour or habitual obedience to the hinge made Bunting stay; indeed, it moved him to pull his cart to halt beside the great boulder and clamber down ready to proffer any aid required to the frighted young thing.

 

‘Well done, sir,’ the gentleman in blue said, his expression tight, even grief-stricken, and he stepped now to Bunting. The fellow was truly short, the top of his three-cornered thrice-high barely coming to the corser’s chin. ‘Atticus Wells, sleuth and theoretician,’ he added, presenting first a courtly bow that provoked a sour reaction in the corser’s proudly simpler manners, then a manly hand. ‘How come you to this fine neck of the world?’

 

It was then that Bunting realised this one called Atticus Wells was actually moving by aide of a sturdy walking cane. What by the precious here and vere ...? he cursed inwardly, but said, ‘Fetching stooks,’ tossing his hand evasively to the broken kindling still masking his true load, his eyes glassy with a what-do-you-reckon stare. ‘How is it you are here, my chum?’

 

Wells peered at Bunting a moment. ‘We are here, sir,’ he declared with a flourish of his hand towards the girl as the big fellow in black weskit put her into the cart, ‘to rescue her ...’

 

* * * *

 

On the low streets and rear lanes of any city in the Soutlands — or the Half-Continent or even the entire Harthe Alle, for that matter — the disappearance of some reduced or destitute girl is regrettably common and goes largely ignored. A hazard of moll potnies, goodday gala-girls, posy vendors, snugman snitches and songbird beggars are routinely snatched from benighted streets by sinister souls; the disappeared typically unmissed but perhaps for a meagre and equally powerless collection of needy relations and impoverished acquaintances. Such folk as these can do little to prevent their rough darlings from being carried off on secretly-fitted vessels to distant lands and there to be auctioned into marriage or servitude; or set to hard labour in some impossibly remote mill or mine; or worst yet, delivered up to an ashmonger and on-sold to anthropists, massacars, parts-grinders or the transmogrifying surgeons of Sinster and other notorious butchering cities.

 

Yet though they keep their operation to the fouler districts of the city, occasionally these malevolent abductors unwittingly misstep and pinch some lass who is actually in possession of superior connexions; and these superior connexions almost always send shrewd and doughty fellows to restore their missing damsels to them.

 

It was for this grievous and dismal reason that Monsiere Valentin Pardolot of the Pardolots of the suburb of Steepling Oak, Brandenbrass — receiver of the Garland of Courtesy and chief senior indexer at the Grand Plus Banking & Mercantile — had shifted himself to seek the apartments of one Atticus Wells, the city’s most illustrious, indeed celebrated, sleuth. If asked, Valentin would readily confess he was not the kind of gentleman to run with such sneaking and clandestine fellows, however fine their reputation. Yet the complete and suspect vanishment of the wayward eldest daughter of Grey, his dear wife’s much admired and hardworking housekeeper, pressed him to such extremes. Need, as he had put it to himself on the quarter-hour journey by day carriage from his townhouse in Steepling Oak to Bankers Lane in Risen Mole, makes beggars of us all.

 

And so it was that this vaunted mercantile clerk ventured up the narrow flight between a fine-cut poulterer and a violin maker to the upper-storey rooms of the vaunted sleuth. Shown by a blank-faced servant from the small pristine vestibule to a sparse but tastefully furnished upstairs drawing room, he was greeted by a tall, profoundly capable-looking man in a silken bagwig. Introducing himself as the great Atticus Wells, the fellow offered Valentin to join him and sit on gilt and velvet armchairs before an alabaster hearth. Here, comforted by a tott of malmsey thinned with a little water, Monsiere Pardolot poured out the whole sorry story.

 

Viola Grey, a defiant child barely in her majority and — as with many city girls thinking in their misjudged adventures to follow the steps of the such fighting women as the Branden Rose or Epitome Bile — determined to make herself a spectacle. Breaking free all too frequently from lock and window, she sought to live it high in the make-merry districts of Pantomime Lane and the Fairerside. Always, she would return the next day, either of her own accord or fetched back from her favourite haunts by one of Pardolot’s stablery men. But on Midwich last, she had absconded one final night, never to return, and the house staff unable to find any tell of her for the past three days.

 

‘Mother Grey is the finest keeper-of-house I have ever employed,’ Pardolot concluded soberly, almost to himself. ‘My wife — and I too, of course — would hate to see her permanently distempered by her daughter’s non-return.’

 

‘As would any employer worth the service, sir!’ Wells returned with frank concern.

 

The chief senior indexer passed over a large pane of paper. It was figured with a rather skilfully executed spedigraph of poor Viola Grey, drawn by one of the many nameless struggling fabulists; creative folk of irregular trade who, along with many other night-merchants, do hover about revelling high-society crowds like gulls for an opportunity to make a little money. ‘This is a most excellent likeness,’ he said, ‘done only a day before her last outing ...’

 

The sleuth regarded the image with pursed lips, glanced for a moment to the far end of the room but said nothing.

 

‘I can pay very handsomely, Mister Wells,’ Pardolot offered at last, sitting straighter as he reached into his waistcoat pocket, giving a hearty clearing of his throat. ‘Whatever is required to secure Viola’s restoration to the embrace of her good mother’s bosom.’ Money, he was sure, was the most compelling incentive for such fellows as sat before him — however smart their clothes or sturdy their frame — and he was prepared to part with a considerable sum ... though decency proscribed excess.

 

‘My fee, most generous monsiere, is the same come peer, peltryman or pauper,’ the sleuth replied smoothly, lifting his well-defined chin gallantly. ‘The best recompense is the job done well.’ For but an instant he seemed to glance quite pointedly to a great storied weave hanging at the far end of the room.

 

Pardolot went to look too, but before he could get a good view, Wells returned his keen attention to the chief senior indexer and declared, ‘We accept your mission, sir.’

 

Nobility, manifest with such fine address and fine bearing, were always fit to impress Pardolot most, and he could see plainly the why of this man’s high reputation. Smiling gratefully, he returned his wallet to its usual deep pocket. An interview followed — as extensive as the little he knew could provide — during which his attention was continually drawn to the huge tapestry. He could not say why, but he held the distinct impression that the near wall-high figures playing out a moment of history upon it were in truth watching him. Clearing the notion with a shake of his head, the chief senior indexer answered every inquiry as best he could, which after many, many questions did not amount to much more than her last known position: Ratio’s Swing, a rowdy drinking house of low reputation found on the barely accessible fringe of the slums named by its mucky denizens as the Alcoves.

 

‘I shall need some manner of weargild from the young lady’s person, something truly her own and bearing her true scent ...’ It will help us to locate her.’

 

Pardolot frowned but with only the slightest arching of his brow, agreed.

 

It all seemed such paltry evidence, but this Wells fellow exhibited such verve and confidence that — after paying the retaining fee to an impressively efficient clerk in the small file attached to the drawing room — Pardolot left the unremarkable narrow-fronted apartment on Banker’s Lane with a bill of receipt most properly filled and spirits greatly improved. He had expected to return to his wife with little more than a lighter purse and shuffling excuses but here he could bring the happy report to Lady Pardolot that housekeeper Grey would see her daughter again, he was certain of it.

 

For the real Atticus Wells the prospect was in truth not nearly so clear, though such doubts would never do to be made plain to clientele. Indeed, Wells did not make himself plain to anyone at first interview and often not beyond. ‘A sad and vexing yet all too common set of circumstances, ‘tis sure,’ he proclaimed as he shuffled out from behind the very tapestry that had aroused Pardolot’s sensitive curiosity. While it was a very striking hanging, its main function was to screen a recess in the wall from where the real sleuth could sit and watch unseen while others would play his public role. For short and stocky strong, with an oddly long face and a large nose like a smashed fruit, Atticus was a most unimpressive fellow at first glimpse. Yet under his thick, melancholy brow peered glitteringly intelligent eyes, quick to see for a mind yet quicker to perceive, their irises stark cerulean blue in orbs a complete and bloody red. These were the eyes of a falseman, washed in painful potent chemistry so that Wells might see speciousness in people’s words and treachery in their deeds. These eyes gained him a respect his own filial connexions had never done, causing some to reconsider his stunted frame and ugly dial. Yet the curse of all such power was a strange disconnected loneliness, surrounded by people but never properly engaged with them. Mentored by that eminent falseman, Nestor, telltale to the illustrious Duchess Pymn, Wells himself well knew that when pressed or in genuine dread every person might dissemble or lapse in truth. He himself relied on trickeries and sleight of language daily -— by the hour even. Yet only those in possession of a mostly clear conscience or the constant self-ease borne of a forthright and uncomplicated soul were able to remain in his company for long.

 

Still slouched in the highback, the noble — nay, leonine — man who had played him in the interview, was one such soul. Petulcus Sprawle was his name — tall, lithe, dangerous-looking; a man of action and the precise opposite of his chief. This surrogate ‘Atticus Wells’ cocked a handsome brow and promptly removed the powdered and beribboned bagwig from his crown. Glad to free his natural flaxen thatching, he let out a long puff of breath. ‘I do wish you’d have Mister Door do this more often,’ he carped. ‘He does not mind the itch of this scratchbob,’ he added, tossing the wig around and around upon his finger.

 

‘Indeed, Mister Sprawle,’ Atticus returned, ‘as you say every time; and as I ever reply, security and fine impression are most necessary; my notoriety is problematic enough without every man-jack knowing my face, and my ... awkward condition,’ he flourished his sturdy cane, tapping his legs, slightly bowed and somewhat stunted, ‘is unhelpful for introducing properly placed confidence in prospective custom.’

 

‘Fie and dash to prospective custom and their misjudgements,’ Sprawle swore faithfully.

 

Wells smiled vaguely and took up the thin sheaf of papers that constituted his aide’s notations of the interview to peer at them closely. ‘Beside this, Mister Door does not possess your eloquence, and is — as you well know, my man — better for ... humbler clients.’ Staring long at the cheap spedigraph of poor Viola Grey, he sought to fix the visage of the girl in his thoughts.

 

The faint scrape of fiddle being tortured into tune yowled from the shop below.

 

‘Did you mark my line about “peers, peltrymen or paupers”?’ Sprawle grinned, stretching complacently to stare at the high pale ceiling divided into ovals and oblongs of convoluted moulding. His face abruptly contorted in a lion-like yawn that distorted his voice as he continued, ‘Heard you pronounce that one last week to a patron — I thought it very convincing. Seemed to please our present chap some too.’

 

Nodding absently, the senior sleuth stepped to the rightmost of three long windows that stared east over the great stretch of suburbs hiding the city’s teaming civil mass, his regard shifting out to the pallid grey sliver of Brandenbrass’ harbour and the high dome of wan sky. The sun was barely at the 10 o’clock. ‘Call Mister Thickney’ — by whom he meant that impressively efficient clerk in the adjoining file —’for the coach, the day is yet young and time is scarce for the truly disappeared. We have a darling young daftling to find.’

 

* * * *

 

Busy with people of every station moving in this margin of decent society and desperate poverty, the outer districts of the Alcoves were safe enough — during the day at least. In this city where money moved more quickly than conscience, the anonymous affluent governors of all the illicit trades came down from their fine suburbs in undisguisedly fancy lentums, arrogantly riding the squalid streets in flashing carriages as they rushed to sponsor the next venture of profitable darkness. Thus Wells’ own glossy lentum was perfectly commonplace as it drew over the Falindermeer trickling its malodorous way thickly to the harbour, and eased before the Ratio’s Swing. Built mostly of grey brick and murky white stone, the drinking-house was a remarkably well-kept establishment, surrounded as it was by mouldering houses built as quick as could be — and often without permit —upon the ruin of any previous structure. Under the see-all stare of Atticus Wells and the striking glower of Petulcus Sprawle, the Ratio’s portly sour-eyed boniface did not recognise the likeness of Viola, no matter how much he wanted. He did, though, make out the style of the spedigraph.

 

‘It’s the hand of a certain Mister Peltfelt,’ the fellow offered, staring down Atticus with peculiar, unwilling yet anxious fascination. ‘I — I have several by him of my wife. H-has a room down at Mother Wrist’s common lodging house ... on the Scramble Street.’

 

In thanks, Wells bought the boniface a jug of his own best stingo, the fellow mumbling something approaching fidgeting gratitude, keen for them leave.

 

Deeper into the Alcoves, inside the tottering third-hand edifice of Mother Wrist’s, the shrewd-eyed lady herself informed them that the fabulist Peltfelt was not in but had stepped out for some necessary or other. Deciding to shift themselves to a dingy tomaculum conveniently situated directly across the road and down in a half-cellar with slippery steps the sleuth and his agent sat to wait. Wells keeping a weather-eye through the grimy lights of squat arched windows for their mark’s return, Sprawle ordered early lunch: pullet and ramsin broth and vinegar pie for them both, sluiced down — though it was before midday — with pitchers of the best Patter Moil beer. It was an aromatic combination and they spoke little as they ate.

 

Brow cocked and mouth bent wryly, Sprawle finally uttered, ‘She’s as likely to have eloped with some gambling-debted naval captain.’

 

‘And if that is so then that is what we shall find and that is what we shall report to Monsiere Pardolot. Ah! Our man cometh!’ Wells, draining the dregs of his beer, stood and hurried up the tomaculum steps with the surprising nimbleness he possessed when fixed entirely on his current prize.

 

Accosted at the door, Peltfelt blearily confirmed the drawing as of his own execution, but who the girl was, he could not recall.

 

‘I scrawl so many dials it gets so I cannot tell one person from next.’

 

There was no lie in him, Atticus could see it easily enough, just hunger and a craving for forgetfulness.

 

Returning to the vicinity of the Ratio, they attempted some simple canvassing, asking all they passed if they had seen the girl in the sketch. It was remarkable how often such a seemingly haphazard method succeeded in unearthing important traces, but by midafternoon their endeavour was proving to be little more than finding the pin amongst the needles.

 

‘I guess its down to my box-bound nose, now,’ Sprawle said lightly as they rattled home aboard the lentum.

 

‘We shall see what inklings Messrs Door and Thickney have mined,’ the sleuth returned, ‘but yes, as I presumed it would always be, your facility with a sthenicon may once again be the only key to our success.’

 

‘Let us hope then that her trail has not gone too stale,’ his companion countered, serious for the first time that day.

 

Leaning chin on hand, Atticus covered his smile under a suede-gloved hand. It was always a great satisfaction when Petulcus Sprawle grew serious.

 

Things happened.

 

Good things.

 

* * * *

 

Back in Banker’s Lane, the two found Door and Thickney also returned, having achieved some better success interviewing two of the four girls who claimed themselves as disappeared Viola’s friends. It turned out that the initial tale told to father Pardolot had been thin in extremis, but between Mister Thickney’s dour gaze and Mister Door’s amiable half-smile a fuller account emerged.

 

The five girls had been dancing the vinegar’s jig with a group of lively, heavily-tattooed vinegarroons, ticket-of-leave men from some Gottish main-ram. After some addling drink the girls did not know the name for, they were taken — near dragged — to some night-cellar not far from the Ratio’s Swing, where the vinegars promised the waters were harder and the fun with them. It is here that Viola’s friends finally applied some wisdom and left. Alas, the eldest Grey, thinking she found at last her moment for complete infamy, remained and would not be prevailed upon to do otherwise. That was their last sight of her, so small and careless among all those huge, sweating men.

 

‘Do you have the name or location of the night-cellar?’ Wells inquired when Mister Thickney’s accounting was done, standing again by the drawing room window to watch the city in the latening light.

 

‘No,’ Thickney returned, chin thrust into his copious neckerchief as he thumbed rapidly through his several notations. ‘They did not notice. Miss Amfibia Pardolot — our client’s daughter and Viola’s chief inducer and ally — did say that she might find it again by sight.’

 

‘I suppose it might be too much to hope the sweet lasses cared to mark what vessel those coarse vinegars served aboard.’

 

‘It is, sir ...’ the clerk looked up. ‘I have already sent to Mister Settlepond at the Harbour Governor’s for the necessary vessel lists. It should be arriving any moment now.’

 

Wells suppressed any exhibition of weariness or dismay; it would never do for his assistants and fellow sleuths to see him burdened or flagging no matter how head or body ached.

 

‘Might have been good to have this tale clear at the first,’ Sprawle murmured grimly from the further end of the room, the lurksman pacing his usual track on the fine Dhaghi carpet that near obscured the floor. ‘A day wasted ...’

 

Exhibiting admirable efficiency of his own, Pardolot had — by way of messenger sent from his palatial file at Grand Plus Banking & Mercantile — furnished them with the required keepsake. Delivered by one of the man’s servants in a plain flat box of card, it was rather startlingly a petticoat assured by way of a brief sealed note with it, to have been frequently worn by the young lady, and to have been rescued from the fuller’s basket before it could be cleansed. For all his swagger, Sprawle blushed when he discerned exactly its nature.

 

‘Well — I —’ he tried.

 

‘What ails you, good sir?’ Wells spoke goadingly over his shoulder. ‘You are forever goosing about the faintness of the smells typically provided you, yet here a proper odour is presented and you are complaining still. As good a slot-trace you’ll never get.’ He took in a long breath and turned abruptly. ‘Come, gentlemen! Put on better proofing and arm yourselves discreetly. We shall have dear Miss Pardolot show us this night-cellar.’

 

* * * *

 

At first dear Miss Pardolot proved predictably reluctant. Yet with a few dashing smiles from ‘Mister Wells’ and the timely return of her father, Monsiere Pardolot himself, she agreed finally to retrace the night as best she could. After some tears, gentle cajolery and even a dark prediction of Viola’s possible fate, she proved her worth, directing them to a dangerously cramped part of the Alcoves. While Mister Thickney returned the young lady to her home, Wells, Sprawle and Door found themselves at the top of what locals satirically named ‘gullies’ — narrow sunken channels between the towering, tottering houses. As much cloaca as laneway, the ‘gully’ bending slightly right ahead of them was rank with sewer-stink, mixing with the reek of the harbour coming on the gentle evening breeze.

 

‘’Tis surely faint, but I can smell that Viola was here,’ Sprawle muttered through his sthenicon box and hared down the gully-way, sending a pair of rabbits nosing unseen amidst the refuse fleeing ahead of him.

 

Wells — Door at his back — came as quick he as could, ignoring the resentful observation of a pair of surly locals peering from their inadequate apartment window above.

 

Slowing some to let his chief catch him, Sprawle soon halted at a stony stair on the right that lead down deeper than a cellar stair ought to the entrance of a sinister establishment with a tiny marmorine — false-marble — sign quietly pronouncing the unseemly name of The Empresses Bosom. Little doubt it was a lewd reference to ancient Dido. ‘She went in, but there is no slot of her coming out again ...’

 

Here insisting on taking the lead, Wells trundled laboriously one step at a time to the bottom, ignoring the deep ache of hip and knee. Keeping his tall-brimmed, three-cornered thrice-high with its inner proofing band firmly upon his crown and, setting the murky glasses that hid his eyes more firmly upon his nose, he stepped within.

 

Perched on a highback chair and flipping lazily through an out-of-date copy of Military and Nautical Stores, the greasy doorward showed scant interest in this trio of heavy-harnessed gentlemen; every sort of fellow came for a visit with the Empress. His role was not to stop them going in but, when required, prevent them leaving. With scarce more than the merest look, he gave Wells and his assistants a darkly knowing nod and returned his attention to last year’s news only to find a well-drawn spedigraph thrust in his face. Did he recognise her? He drew back his head like a turtle might retract into its shell, blinked languidly at the image and shrugged.

 

Without the fellow speaking another word, Wells could fathom from the shift of humours beneath his skin that this was true — just as with the boniface of Ratio’s Swing, it was a case of too many faces. A variation in the hue of the door-clerk’s temper gave Atticus a moment’s warning as the fellow made a strangled kind of bark.

 

A pair of hefty doorwards emerged from handy nooks in the walls, the biggest standing over the stunted sleuth to bend menacingly over him.

 

‘Get thee lost!’ he breathed stinkingly into Wells’ face. ‘No fluffs allowed!’

 

Neither Sprawle or Door, immediately behind, moved to intervene.

 

Mistaking this as reluctance born of fear, the big vinegarroon seized the short sleuth before him by the arm. Quick as an asp Wells struck, dropping his cane to drive the nose of this fellow into his face, snatching a second doorward by the wrist even as the rough lunged and threw a swipe. Twisting the fellow’s entire frame about, the sleuth pressed his assailant’s hand down, thumbs pushing on knuckles, pinning him entirely with pain so that the lout was forced bawling angrily to his knees.

 

‘Awrigh’! Awrigh’! I knows when I’m beat!’

 

‘I wish an interview with the procuress of this fine establishment,’ Wells stated matter-of-factly.

 

‘Deglubius!’ the pinioned rough hollered to the clerk blinking a little stupidly at the doorward writhing with broken nose on the cold stone flags.

 

The clerk snapped to like a foot-slogging pediteer in the Archduke’s army.

 

‘Tell the Empress some f —’ Wells gave his arm a smart bit of pressure, ‘fine gents wants to see her in-personal.’

 

The clerk hastily went and hastily returned: they could meet the Empress.

 

Wells let his adversary free, standing back and ignoring resentful glowers as the two doorwards guided them to their interview.

 

Peculiarly sweet narcotic fumes wafted about the over-warm common room lit by little more than the enormous hearth in the left-hand wall. Under the low, ponderously-beamed ceiling sozzled men representing the entire human catalogue of Soutland citizenry lounged amongst genuinely exotic cushions and falsely exotic women of hard faces. In fluffing dresses like sombre subterranean flowers, these predatory lasses were uniformly thick with pastes and rouges that went some way to obscure the falseman’s reading.

 

Wells was almost grateful for it.

 

Everyone looked more stark and bizarre to him, their skin shifting, flushing, nigh oh crawling at every turn of thought, every falter of soul, every unspoken cruelty. The almost corpse-like distortions that flushed across a person’s visage as they concealed or deceived, growing ever more grotesque with the increasing convolutions of their lies was for him a daily and ghastly spectacle. Despite half a life with such singular lucidity he yet remembered the pasty blank a face presented to usual eyes and was glad sometimes not to know the turnings of another fellow’s mind.

 

Punch-drunk, brawling, howling or throwing lots, patrons and ladies alike ignored them entirely as the three were taken deep within the night-cellar.

 

What desperate nadir one must reach in themselves to call on such a place for amusement, the chief sleuth marvelled quietly, hobbling by grimy amorerobes — love-cupboards — holding half-concealed displays of depravity, their suggestion perhaps more shocking than the reality. Not all these men would make it out again tonight, Wells was sure of it — but there was little he could do to prevent the fate of men so given over to dissipation, and his current mission must come first.

 

The Empress turned to be one of the many hard-faced, over-painted ladies dwelling here, dressed in a full-bosomed dress of wide-flaring scarlet taffeta. Settled in a tall elbow chaise of ruby-red leather, she sat in a cheaply plush boudoir, fanning herself and making show of her apparent unconcern.

 

It was only skin deep.

 

Wells could well tell the disturbance of her spirits. Still hot in soul after the scuffle, he wasted no time revealing his telltale eyes to this madame.

 

Deeply unamused at the persecution of her own, the woman regarded him evenly from her lustrous couch. Cold comely eyes rimed in thick black flicked to Sprawle lithe and dangerous with his red hood and boxed face; to Door well harnessed, and barely able to fit through the gleaming red portal to her chamber; and finally to the pair of sturdy roughs hovering tensely behind them. A brief calculation passed across her gaze. ‘Fetch in Caspar,’ she finally called to her uneasy wards with a voice so jaded Wells nigh felt sorry for her.

 

‘Our girl was brought in here,’ Sprawle murmured in his chief’s ear as they waited.

 

The Empress sipped at a flute of dark purple vinothe and made show behind her beauty plaster of indifference, while bloody-nosed, the taller rough shuffled.

 

A small neat man in a worn but well-mended coat of silver-grey silk emerged from some back chamber. Wells closely observed his detached face blatant with ugly and habitual dishonesty as the fellow stopped by his mistress’s wide desk and paled by the merest degree when he saw that there was a falseman before him.

 

‘These men have lost something, it seems, Mister Caspar,’ the Empress said in dangerous hush, glaring at the fellow, thought clear in her eyes, What quandary have you got me in now! ‘Answer them as best you can where they might go to find it and leave us to peace.’

 

Caspar recognised the image of Viola, though he did not say as much. Indeed, upon seeing the spedigraph he peered at Wells as if to say, Do I truly need to tell you what you can already see ...? His expression turned dogged, as if expecting some retributing blow. ‘She seemed a ripe cherry, so little an’ bright amongst all them rowdies. So I plucked ‘er away from ‘em, an’ I — I ... passed ‘er on to a ... more deservin’ gent ...’

 

‘Passed her on ...’ Atticus repeated like the pronouncement of a Duke’s Bench magistrate. This fellow was a chattelman — a vile stealer and seller of people as mere goods. It was such people as these that kept the sleuth in constant work — how hard it was not to lash out and destroy this deliverer of misery where he stood. I shall return perhaps and shut this place down, he promised himself.

 

‘Ah,’ Caspar glanced uneasily at his mistress. ‘Aye ... I soporified ‘er an’ carried ‘er down the trap right below yer feet, sirs,’ he nodded to the imitation rug upon which the three questers stood.

 

Clearly furious with her employee, the Empress struggled to suppress her dismay at such an admission.

 

‘To who?’ Wells persisted with the fellow, ignoring the woman’s poorly hid discomfort.

 

‘Um’ ... a nervous chappie I ‘ave done trade with from time to time ...’

 

‘WHO!’

 

‘One Mister Emptor Settlepond; he owns a whole bunch o’ tallowbellies and is constantly seekin’ sturdy souls to work ‘em on account of ‘im always openin’ more. Money must be good in th’ fur business, I’d say ...’

 

‘There is more, sir,’ Wells persisted, bizarre blue-on-red gaze narrowing. ‘Your eyes might have been blinded with a bribe but I can still see.’

 

Caspar baulked a little. ‘J-just that yesterday a fine chappie comes in looking for a body just as her. Not a-feared of any old body, that one, has the Enigmatic Mouth of Sucathes cribbed on neck an’ ‘ands, clear as a bum in a bath-’ouse.’

 

Sprawle caught an involuntary draw of breath.

 

Wells simply blinked.

 

The Enigma of Sucathes was the allegory — the cult-sign — of a particular group of falsegod worshippers.

 

Emboldened by even slight dismay, the chattelman smiled wickedly but hid it hastily behind a cough. ‘Called hisself Monsiere Jack.’

 

Wells simply sniffed at such an obviously fake appellation

 

‘Was set fast on a girl of such a one as this’un, so I obliged him with Settlepond’s address and beyond that I am done.’

 

‘You shall furnish us with this man’s particulars too, of course.’

 

The chattelman nodded impatiently, wrote an address upon a fold of paper and passed it over.

 

‘There you are, man,’ the Empress said frostily. ‘You have all we can give. Go now and bully some other poor soul trying to make his way.’

 

‘Thank you, madam, I shall,’ Wells said blandly, with a tight bow first to the procuress then the chattelman Caspar. Pivoting on his heel, the sleuth and his two allies departed, the chief sleuth remarking as he passed the doorward with the pummelled face, ‘Sorry for your nose, man. I am sure you and your social life shall survive it; I have a perfect mess of a proboscis yet my friends are devoted to me still.’

 

* * * *

 

Orotund and utterly bald, Emptor Settlepond — owner and master of several tallowbellies and other sweatmills beside — sweated nearly as much as his desperate or impressed workers endlessly treading tallow into new-skun fur. While the work he offered was by no stretch pleasant, it was for some the only thing keeping them from a empty stomach and death. Settlepond was more than happy to provide such indigent souls with the necessary labour to keep them from such an end, and that perfectly efficient Caspar fellow seemed to have an endless supply of the wretches.

 

Looking down from his third-storey file over the bustling convergence of Mole End Circuit, the owner congratulated himself on avoiding such misery. Below him a fine-looking lentum drew to a halt and disgorged three fellows, one remarkably and misshapenly short, all three possessing the faces of men with set, serious purpose who would brook no obstacle. Hate to be the sod who has to deal with them, he smiled to himself as he watched the short chap and his fine-looking friend enter the building while the biggest fellow waited by the coach. Sipping long at his warm morning saloop, Settlepond extended his delight to the warming sun peeping low through early clouds.

 

A sturdy thump at his file door gave him a sharp start and he span about to see the very same dangerously determined men from below sweep into his very own comfortable file. Well, one swept, the other shambled.

 

‘Who are you?’ Settlepond finally mastered himself. He was inclined first to be impressed by the sweeping fellow — tall, brawny, flaxen-haired. Yet it was the stunted shambling fellow who arrested his attention most, peering as if right through him with the blue-in-red of a falseman’s stare.

 

‘Are you a gnosist, sir? A fantaisist?’ the shambling gent pressed accusingly, ignoring this very fair enquiry and forgoing any introduction as he and his tall, impressively-set comrade barged up to his very table. ‘Someone who believes themselves supplied with the secret knowledge of the falsegods?’

 

‘I — n-no not I, sir!’ the owner half stood, expression switching rapidly from ire to fear to complete befuddlement. ‘Just a gentleman attempting to make his place in the usual mercantile setting.’

 

‘By selling and buying souls,’ the impressive younger man said in aside, through gritted teeth.

 

Empty of excuses Settlepond’s mouth gaped, shut, gaped again. Completely absorbed with the function of his business and faced with such grim-looking men — one of them a lie-seeing falseman into the bargain — he quickly confessed under their close questioning to knowing the girl, if only to get these two froward fellows to leave. ‘What did you say her name was again?’ he asked, glistening head ducking forward obsequiously.

 

‘Viola Grey,’ the short fellow answered, adding portentously, ‘a ward of Monsiere Valentin Pardolot, Companion of Courtesy.’ For all his stunt stature he was patently the leader of the two.

 

‘Ah ...’ The owner’s innards leapt with dark dismay; this was the name of a man whom he greatly admired, of great means to which he greatly aspired. ‘Well, the problem is that I — I have on-sold her, sir.’

 

‘To who!’ the short gent glowered while, with equal measures of exasperation and infuriation, the fair one bristled frighteningly beside him.

 

‘I — I — it was some strangely marked chap with excellent address and his quiet servant,’ the owner stammered. ‘Master Jack it said on his card. He seemed exceedingly pleased with the girl — Viola, you said her name was?’

 

Mister Short nodded gravely.

 

‘He paid a dazzling amount for her, enough for me to replace her ten times over, so I am afraid I passed her to him ...’ Settlepond could hear his voice trail to nought as he realised what he was admitting. He wiped with a large kerchief at the sweat dribbling on his dimpled crown. ‘This Mister Jack bore the oddest patterns on his knuckles, like — like a series of lesser case e’s ...’ He obliged them by attempting to draw one on a blotting sheet.

 

‘No doubting it’s fictlers now,’ the impressive fair chap muttered despondently when he beheld the fully-formed sign.

 

‘Are you in the possession of this Mister Jack’s whereabouts, sir?’ the short man pressed.

 

‘Uh ... no — no I am not ...’

 

‘Of course ...’ the fair-haired one continued his grim mutter.

 

‘And his servant?’ the short man pushed yet more.

 

‘I — he seemed a simple lad ... with big wet eyes and a much-itched ginger beard,’ Settlepond shrugged — normally a gesture he despised as insufficient in good company — and smiled weakly. Please just go, his mind kept repeating.

 

This final revelation seemed to appease the short man. He gave a brief, barely meant apology and the two left poor Mister Settlepond to call his maid to bring a draught of Dew of Imnot and calm his over-exercised humours.

 

* * * *

 

Returned to their carriage and well on the way back through bustling streets broad and narrow to Bankers Lane, Atticus pinched his brows, knuckles pushing into perpetually aching dents of his upper eye-sockets.

 

For folk supposedly seeking creatures who dwelt in the vinegar-washed depths of the sea, fictlers did not do anything so predictable as live near oceans, where regular patrols of landsgarde rams might spot them. Amongst the most despised of all the idiot fringe, neither did they dare to meet or remain in numbers in the city for the Archduke’s constables to find and apprehend them. Rather — as rumour told it — they kept themselves hidden in the backwoods and far recesses of the Brandendowns, avoiding prosecution and though often small in number, thriving.

 

Yet not all their adherents were so shrewd ...

 

‘Brother Scritch,’ Wells thought aloud.

 

‘The brother does what?’ Sprawle frowned quizzically.

 

Sitting across from him, Door, as always, said nothing but waited with mute and steady intent.

 

‘The simple fellow with the wet eyes our Mister Settlepond spoke on,’ Wells returned. ‘Brother Scritch is the only name he answers to; we shall find him sitting atop the Veil where it runs through Oghbourne Sunt Gage. He is a confirmed adherent of Lobe and one of the few fictlers who dares remain in the city. Sits by the harbour all and every day, watching and waiting for his chosen god to emerge from the water. He will appear to you a wretched fellow — unmotivated and useless, but he is remarkably well connected amongst his category. He aided me once with some morsel of information regarding his fellow fantaisists. Oghbourne Sunt Gage, Mister Thickney,’ he cried through the fine grille at the head of the lentum cabin. ‘Take us to the sea!’

 

* * * *

 

Pulling easy beside the squat seawall of the Sunt Veil, Wells pointed from the lentum window at a lone figure perched atop the poked and corroded barrier.

 

‘There’s our man!’

 

Avoiding the eel-vendors and tunymongers —’Five goose a brace o’ unsweetened tun!’ they called, ‘A cob, a coil of fresh-hiked maraine, saps sniggled straight fro’ the wine!’ — they drew to a halt and alighted.

 

Peering at the precipitous climb offered by a scale of iron rungs, Wells knew there was no way up for him but on the ample back of Mister Door. The sleuth sighed long-sufferingly, called for his assistant and tried to ignore the shame and the quizzical watchers as he was bodily carried to the summit of the seawall. Finally set safe at the top of the Sunt Veil, Wells marvelled at the spreading vista of thousands of busy boats, self-important cargoes and prowling rams moving across every yard of Middle Ground, Brandenbrass’ main harbour, all its minor anchorages and the waters beyond.

 

There on his left a mere handful of fathoms sat his intention, Brother Scritch, a gaunt, malnourished man cross-legged between the row of foot-tall thorns blackened with monster-slaying aspis that crowned the ponderous rampart. Muttering through scrawny beard, he stared longingly out to sea as if all his satisfaction might spring bodily from the milky waves. Drawing close, Wells could make out the blue spoors that marked the man’s jowl, like the rounded figure of a ‘3’ — the allegory of Lobe the Listening. Slowly the fellow became aware he had company, large limpid eyes blinking almost torpidly then narrowing in sharp comprehension. Half-standing, he turned clumsily to flee, completely untroubled by the precarious narrowness of the lofty perch in his intent to escape. Sprawle clambered into view from a scale on the further side, smiling ruefully as he blocked Scritch’s exit. The haggard fictler’s shoulders slumped in all too common defeat and he sat again, hugging bony knees now drawn up under his chin.

 

While Door waited at the scale, Wells negotiated the slight and thorny path, feeling the breeze pick up and tug at him as if to throw him to the flags and the bustling mongers. ‘Who only seeks truly the overthrow of the interminable monstrous plague?’ he intoned sombrely.

 

Brother Scritch brightened just a little. ‘The seekers and the knowers, the sons of the deeps,’ he returned with equal solemnity.

 

‘And bring the ruin and damnation of the domain of men with them!’ Sprawle murmured and looked out to sea, thereby avoiding Wells’ quick warning glower.

 

‘There is no damnation for the properly blest, sir, grant me ...’ Brother Scritch returned coldly.

 

‘Indeed,’ Wells nodded in a show of continued gravity. ‘Beluae nunquam superarum — may the monsters never get you,’ he added, mimicking a fictler’s cantric phrase.

 

The wizened fellow stared at him searchingly. ‘I ain’t playing muttering mouse for ye, Mister Wheel. No matter what good turns ye have done fer me, grant me, I’ll not speak out ag’in a brother like you had me that other day ...’

 

Wells could well see that nothing short of harm would make this simple searching fellow say what was needed and the sleuth already had a tally enough of regrets. ‘Fair is fair, Brother Scritch,’ he returned. ‘Is there some other help you might give us, nothing specific mind, just some broad advice.’

 

‘Well ...’

 

‘Come now, sir, you know I can see you avoiding an answer.’

 

Scritch fidgeted, but kept his attention on the endless industry in the harbour. ‘I got me a silver counter, from one knowing brother to another, grant me, for me help,’ he said finally.

 

‘You are ever the obliging chap,’ Wells smiled. ‘They should call you Brother Help, I understand.’

 

Scritch grinned blandly. ‘Master Jack said so, too ...’ he murmured.

 

Ahah! Wells kept his voice even. ‘But Master Jack is brother to Sucoth,’ he let his words linger. He did not know much of the falsegods — or even believe them true — but what he did ought be enough to draw this fellow out. ‘I thought you were brother to Lobe. Sucoth never listens like Lobe ...’

 

‘Aye, Succoth does not listen, he only eats ... Only eats ...’

 

‘But ...’ Wells trod now with care. ‘But you helped a brother of Sucoth?’

 

‘I’m no follower of Sucoth, grant me! Vile destroyer.’ The simple fellow gnashed his teeth then muttered incoherent imprecations. ‘Now Lobe — he’s the Listener; he listens, see.’ Scritch tapped his forehead. ‘Everyday I talk with him and he listens to me. He’ll know I alone have held to him and he’ll keep me safe ...’

 

‘May I see this silver counter, sir?’ Wells asked in continuing amiability.

 

After an agony of indecision, Scritch finally relented and produced the smudgy sequin coin from the little used fob of his equally smudgy weskit.

 

‘How about I swap this single dull silver for a shining one,’ the sleuth offered, pulling a new-minted sou from his own pocket.

 

The larger coin glinted in the misty high-noon light.

 

No small amount, it was probably enough for someone of such rudimentary needs to sustain him for a whole season. Yet Wells could easily compass it. He had been shrewd enough to make the modestly substantial inheritance left him by his loving, long-dead parents grow to one thousand sou a year; enough to keep him, his under-sleuths, clerk and housestaff in roof, board and wages. Nevertheless, a small, continuingly calculating part of his thinking ruefully acknowledged the wrestle of conscience he would later have over its inclusion in the bill of expense that would be passed to Monsiere Pardolot once Viola was restored.

 

Scritch licked his lips.

 

A mollyawk glided above, the midday sun casting the scavenging bird’s thin hovering shadow over the cripple and the simpleton. Realising there was no food to be had here, it gave voice to a churlish croak and glided away on the piquant airs.

 

The simple fictler put out his hand, the dull sequin lying there.

 

Wells duly passed the sou over.

 

If falsegods were real then such a bribe was in support of a tiny but genuine menace; if not, then it was adding to the corruption of a vulnerable soul. Ignoring this dilemma, the sleuth quickly took up the dirty sequin in an unscented kerchief and wrapped it in his fist. He took little joy from beguiling such a harmless man for his own ends — however noble — especially one who trusted him so completely; whose soiled face was so rarely distorted by the truly unsettling deformations of falsehood.

 

‘Where did he give this to you?

 

‘The Bird,’ Scritch nodded. ‘Outside The Bird where I put that girl, grant me, aboard a lenty-coach. They want to use her to sing the proper cantricles to Sucoth ...’

 

Wells’ neck prickled. His innards griped cold. He shot the merest glance to Sprawle who watched on with hawkish expectation.

 

‘Them Seven-Sevens, they want to be Emperor of it all. They say their cantricles from Case Nigrise and reckon the Great Devourer will make them lords but he eats, he only eats...’

 

‘You would never ... sing with the Seven-Seven at Case Nigrise, would you, Brother?’ Wells asked in a manner most concerned.

 

Scritch looked at the sleuth sharply and eventually shook his head. ‘No, grant me ... You sing up Sucoth and may bid goodbye to — to ...’ he cast about, his distant gaze beholding imagined scenes of horror, ‘to all this living and eating and sleeping and boats and fishermen.’ He took a deep breath and returned his attention to the milky waters of the harbour. ‘You’ll never get me out to the Witherfells neither, too far from the sea ... far too far ...’

 

The fictler continued in his rant but Wells and his compatriots did not remain for it to play out; all that was needed Brother Scritch had divulged, whether he wanted to or not.

 

‘There you are, Mister Sprawle,’ Atticus declared without a mite of satisfaction as deposited back onto surer ground by Door, he passed the bundled kerchief to his aide, ‘another weargild to sniff out our quarry.’

 

* * * *

 

Three storeys of venerable grey stone and stone arched windows, The Bird by Madam Nutkin Cloth proved to be a fine little hostelry in Steepling Oak, a mere handful of streets from Viola’s own home.

 

‘This Mister Jack is a cultivated soul, it seems,’ Wells observed as he negotiated the three short white steps to the blue front door.

 

‘All this chasing over the city and we might have just jinked over here from Pardolot’s house and saved ourselves the trouble,’ Sprawle returned tartly.

 

Madam Cloth, the proprietoress, met them in the clean, sky-blue vestibule, Sprawle — playing Wells — dazzling her with his handsome dash and air of natural authority. Having already determined with his chief that openness was most politic, he told the blank shocking truth upon the nature of their call. Astonished and patently aware of the great sleuth and his good repute, Madam Cloth burbled out her evidence.

 

‘He did have some young creature with him,’ she explained, her face wide with dismay, ‘said she was his niece. The little lass seemed very poorly. I offered to fetch him a physician or dispensurist but he said no, he was about to take her to the hills for some better air.’

 

‘And that was all?’ Sprawle-come-Wells pressed.

 

‘That was the all of it, sir. He was scrawled all over with markings like some teratologist but his coin was true and his manner even, so I asked no more of it.’ Eyeing the true Wells — playing quiet assistant — a little uneasily, Madam Cloth allowed them access to the room their quarry had occupied not two days ago, the proprietoress insisting upon accompanying them.

 

‘You’ve cleaned, I see,’ Sprawle-come-Wells declared flatly, peering about at the glaucous walls, brow arched unamusedly.

 

‘Of course I have, Mister Wells,’ the proprietoress bridled. ‘What common kind of bunk do you think I run?’

 

Fixing his sthenicon over his face, the lurksman spent much time still in the middle of the room, the faint hollow sounds of snuffling coming from the round cavities upon either side of the dark wooden box fixed over his face. After a while he began to rove about, bending down to sniff at corners, behind the simple walnut commode, under the washstand, beneath the long narrow bed, then returning his attention to the coin nestled on its kerchief in his palm. Pressed by needs of present guests, Madam Cloth was forced to leave them, promising to presently return.

 

With her gone, Sprawle straightened. ‘I thought she’d never go!’ he hissed as he slowly removed the sthenicon, eyes squeezed shut and only opening slowly, trying to avoid the disorientation that would sweep over him even after so short a stint in a sensory box. It did not work. Swooning for a moment, he sat upon the bed, creasing its perfect folds.

 

The true Wells waited patiently.

 

‘There is definitely a scent of the same slot that is on dear Scritch’s coin,’ his companion soon recovered and confirmed. ‘It was nigh unperceptible on the coin but now I have found it a little stronger in here I can say they match. Even had they not,’ Sprawle added, ‘Viola has been here. Her slot is everywhere ...’ the lurksman trailed off severely.

 

Madam Cloth returned, cheeks bustling rosy, and blinked at the two sleuths as if to say, Surely you are done ...?

 

‘How did he go?’ the true Wells asked — meaning by he of course, Mister Jack, and forgetting himself for a moment in the rapid preoccupations of his thoughts.

 

The proprietoress gave him a look as if he was a most impertinent fellow, but after Sprawle-come-Wells did not rebuke this apparently overweening servant, answered, ‘He left by morning post departing the quarter of six from the Knave & Post for Coddlingtine Dell and Pour Claire.’

 

Without another word, Atticus departed, leaving Sprawle to make a gallant goodbye.

 

Wherever this Case Nigrise that Brother Scritch had spoken of might be, Coddlingtine Dell would be their next port.

 

Now was the time for adventure well beyond the city’s many curtain walls.

 

Now Wells would need help.

 

* * * *

 

When pressed with the need for some fighterly stripe of person, most folk choose the Letter and Coursing House — or the Knave & Post — found on the Spokes in the midst of the oldest innermost part of the city. Here in its cavernous hall you can charter from one of its many knaving-clerks an entire catalogue of bravos, from monster-battling teratologists to life-guarding spurns. Prices are fair, operation efficient, prizes and recompenses are paid promptly and in full, and its register includes many pugilists of high reputation, especially surgically-altered lahzars. Yet, for all their vaunted power, Atticus Wells did not trust the mind-bending wit or the lightning-throwing fulgar, reckoning them too clumsy — too apt to kill — for the fine work he typically required. Moreover, a bad incident between a scourge in his hire and a patron left him wary too of an exitumath’s extreme smokes. Unfortunately, the regulations and practice of the Knave & Post did not allow for one to easily choose who it was who answered your call for a fighter. Consequently, Atticus habitually sought a small agent knavery, Messrs Prighmy & Till on the Knot Street, in the shadow of the second curtain wall in Higher Brandt, faithful representatives of the more mundane pugilists he preferred.

 

There were three enterprising sets of bravos he regularly engaged when such strength was needed, every one of them commonplace in regards to surgical improvement or employment of chemistry: the Double Irons, a brace of pistoleers and their holstermen for when dash and pith were the order; Mister Ptolemis, a franklock with impeccable aim for when accuracy from afar was necessary and Mister Door alone was not enough; and the battle-dancing sagaar sisters, Cilestine and Paraclesia Pail, subtle, fearless, patient. With each of these there was no chance of a misthrown potive bringing instant death or the ill-directed puissance of a lahzar, just flashing weapons and cool professional deference ... And of them, the Pail sisters were his foremost preference. Stocky and somewhat plain of face, both wore bird-masks as was the inclination of their particular school of dance — Cilestine the regal egret, Paraclesia the noble heron — and both fought like wild things. Wells had witnessed them singly subdue men twice their mass — ferocious men cornered and fixed on tearing their way free — with nothing more than their armoured hands and the sublime skill of their steps. What is more, Wells knew that the Pail sisters had contended with fictlers before and would be happy — even keen — to do so again.

 

Happy fortune, Mister Prighmy, chief knaving clerk of the Knot Street, informed his valued client that the pair had returned only the week before from hunting nickers in the southern wilds of Chessers’ Gall. ‘In fact they have only just put themselves back up for hire this very day,’ Mister Prighmy declared with modest clerical cheer. ‘I am sure they shall be most delighted to know you are hiring again.’

 

Filling a certificate of assignment and taking out a Singular contract, Wells returned to Banker’s Lane to continue the multiplicity of preparations required to venture forth: harness, weaponry, clothing, the necessary chemistry to ward off monsters — however rare they might be in the long-inhabited hills — wayfoods and water and other less necessary but more toothsome liquids, travelling papers, and all the rest. After so many years, Wells, Sprawle and Door knew just how little could be taken and a certain degree of comfort still maintained. Their plan — as always — was to remain in civilised regions for as long as practicable as they followed the indications of the evidence, eating wayhouse fare and sleeping in wayhouse bunks until they had no choice but to leave known or populated paths. Hoping to leave within the next day or two and including travel time, Wells reckoned on their return by a fortnight.

 

The following morning the sleuth sent a note by footman to his physician, Doctor Ganymede, then ignoring the growing qualms of knee and lower back, stepped out alone. On Green Lady’s Walk he hired a takeny coach to Foursdike athenaeum where fledgling concometrists learnt how to record, to fight and to measure the world. Entering the grand institution with its high sombre walls and paved, tree-shaded quadrangles, he called on his old, age-ed friend, Grimwood, Undermarshal-Archivist at Foursdike’s great library. With the aid of the librarian, he hunted for most of the day amongst the numerous documents — ancient and new — on this mysterious den of fictlers, Case Nigrise. In a dusty shelf of obscure facsimiles of historied records he finally found the tiny glimpse he needed. Scribed by Imperial asseyors — the forefathers of the concometrists — in their multiple assessment surveys of the then newly-conquered lands, each held great tallies of the figured worth of ever-increasing territories, the Brandendowns included. For all their fine high-flown Tutin they were basically the ledgers of a man counting his coffers. Yet in these tedious lists was a single mention of an unconquered fortalice made by the native Pilts. Built from swarthy stone, it was named rather derisively by the invaders as the ‘Black Hut’ or — as recorded by the learned Tutin-speaking asseyors — Casa Nigrum ...

 

‘Or Case Nigrise!’ Sprawle declared brightly and with no small measure of self-satisfaction when Wells had returned in the waning of the hour to explain his find.

 

‘Perversely,’ Wells elaborated, sitting heavily on a favourite turkoman squatting by the green-grey hearth of his cluttered yet properly ordered file, ‘as a purely numerical record of estimated value, the facsimile contained no map, so the location of this Case Nigrise was little more than vagaries; somewhere northeast beyond Coddlingtine Dell.’

 

‘Put me on the proper heading,’ Sprawle proclaimed, without any false showing away, ‘and I will smell our way to our despairing damsel!’

 

‘Well, I hope you can smell quick, Petulcus,’ the sleuth returned seriously. He passed a marked book Grimwood had allowed him to take away. ‘I have been able to clarify Brother Scritch’s dark hints on the nature of her ultimate abductors ... and I fear that the wedge is getting perilously thin for Miss Grey.’

 

Sprawle took the small yet hefty duodecimo bound in a humble red cloth and peered at its hard-to-read title:

 

A Continuing Survey of Marginal Cults in the Grumid States, with Especial Attention on those deemed Dangerous to the Continuing Harmony of our Most Pacific Empire.

 

He turned to the marked pages and found the following lightly indicated with the even silvery pale lines of a stylus:

 

* * * *

 

Septs are the many and various obfusc collections of people whose membership name themselves helots, but universally are named fictlers or fantaisist (for they believe in fantasies). On either hand, these helots are the willing thralls of those reputed yet barely encountered ‘beings’, the falsegods. Mentioned often in rare and dubious text, these falsegods are supposed to lurk in the deepest parts of the oceans, imprisoned there by some unknown force and desiring above all things the rule of dry land and all the creatures dwelling on it; yet they are so seldom seen that ascertaining their true nature, or more fundamentally, verifying their proper existence has proved impossible (and, in the reckoning of this pen, supremely unlikely).

 

Regardless of my opinion or that of sensible rational society, the septs believe the falsegods (or alosudne as is their supposed proper appellation) real enough to attempt summonings at certain propitious junctures in the seasons (times understood only to the higher members of each sept), employing many peculiar and loathsome techniques to draw their chosen ‘god’ from the lightless pits of the oceans where they are legended to be interned (if such stories are to be countenanced). Among the more benign customs is a quaint practice known variously as grammar, cantrics or cater legite (there are meant to be distinctions between each, but these are lost on this pen) whereby the helots sing through some manner of amplifying device into the water, hoping to wake their trammelled and slumbering ‘god’ and excite them enough to throw off their fetters and rise to take their place as lords. In the grip of such luxuriant fancies they use these ‘songs’ to call on the supposed servants of their chosen ‘god’, famuli they called them, (or pseudotheons in some learned manuscripts), beslimed, often massive things who become the ‘mouth-pieces’ for the helots to commune with their ‘god’ and if some Phlegmish texts are to be believed, the ‘god’ communicates with its thralls in return (what a reportedly slumbering idiot beast might have to say this pen cannot pretend to conjure) ...

 

* * * *

 

Sprawle’s eyes skipped impatiently over continuing verbose elaborations of one baffling practice to another until his gaze was arrested by sentences darkly and double lined ...

 

* * * *

 

... Of all these exercises the most extreme is the ‘sacrifice’ of life to their master. Typically this will be an animal, something to give the ‘god’ a taste of vitality they are said to crave but cannot get for themselves. At its worst expression the life will be that of a person, for the falsegods and their famuli are said to crave everyman meat above all else and most of all the delectable flesh of the very young. As the adherents of the falsegod Sucoth (so named the Devourer), the Seven Brothers of the Seven-Mouthed Lord or simply the Seven-Seven (also the Sucathene), are among the more malign and degenerate of all the septs, and it is this final wretched practice that they to their unmitigated shame, employ most often ...

 

* * * *

 

There was more — of course — but the underlining ceased here and so did Sprawle. He did not need to read anymore had he even desired to. The cause for his friend’s solemn urgency was clear enough: scant as it was, the evidence they possessed told that Viola was in the clutches of the Seven-Seven and that — if not already — she would soon be slain in the worship of a crude and fabulous notion.

 

‘I see ...’ was all he said in pointed conclusion. ‘Do we know much of this Sucoth — this Devourer character, other than this and what Brother Scritch uttered?’

 

‘No, not really ...’ Wells answered, distractedly kneading his often paining shins.

 

The lurksman peered through the tall windows out on the great grey city spreading out low under the leaden mantle of louring waterlogged sky. It was all so quiet and usual. He could not quite conceive that somewhere out under the milky waters might dwell such powerful embodiments of enmity and horrific all-devouring ambition.

 

‘Anything of your own to report?’ Wells inquired.

 

‘The Pail sisters called by in person to accept your Singular,’ Sprawle replied. ‘They could not remain, though; needed to pack so as to be ready to depart on the morrow.’

 

‘Most excellent!’ said Wells, brightening some. ‘I am sorry to have missed them,’ he added, a little too lightly.

 

‘Indeed,’ Sprawle returned, cocking a brow. Despite clear apprehension of the futility of such an action, his chief had spent the better half of a decade trying to foster a deeper association with these noble sisters — especially the elder Cilestine. To little avail. They were certainly amicably acquainted, as best as one could be with taciturn women who rarely ceased motion as they pursued the Perpetual Dance.

 

‘And the packing?’ Wells asked through a heavy sigh, rising to pour himself a double draught of watered obtorpes for the pain. Moving to a tandem, he sat and stretched out his crooked panging excuses for legs.

 

‘Door and Thickney are doing splendidly.’

 

‘Excellent ...’ Wells returned muzzily, head lolling, eyes drooping under the rapid influence of the draught. ‘Will ... will you be returning for a final night of conjugal bliss with your wife?’

 

‘Not tonight, good sir, I have said my goodbyes to my dear Flymmsia and shall stay here with you tonight so that we might be off a promptly as possible the morrow morn ...’

 

... But snoring ever so slightly, Wells was no longer listening.

 

Perceiving more of his friend’s struggle than he knew Wells would find comfortable, Sprawle smiled to himself a little sadly and went carefully from the room to help in the final preparations.

 

* * * *

 

Soon after, Doctor Ganymede made his call, prescribing the usual rubbing ointment — salve varante — to apply before the start of each new day, and slake of subvenire, one of a new strain of restorative scripts called alleviants, said to dull pain without the drowse. After so many quackery salves, Wells was gratified to find subvenire seemed actually efficacious, bringing his various algias down to a blunt throb.

 

‘I am sorry I cannot do more for you, my friend,’ the physician apologised in parting. ‘Short of you climbing back into the womb to re-emerge more properly knit,’ he added with his usual gallows humour, ‘I do not fathom what is to be done.’

 

Wells knew this all too well. He strove to keep self-pity bayed, yet there was always the lingering wish to walk fast and free like others did and without this constant pain. He had heard unsubstantiated whispers that the surgeons of Sinster, who make people into lahzars, could help him into a better pair of limbs. Such was their dark reputation, however, Atticus did not want to go upon the shanks of some poor dead man or worse, those of a mule or other brute beast.

 

For the thousandth time, he dismissed the notion, ignored the lingering pain and returned his attention to immediate need.

 

* * * *

 

In the grey and brilliant pink-shot dawn of the following day — barely four days since Monsiere Pardolot’s first approach — the quest to extricate Viola Grey set out aboard a pair of privately hired lentums, a profound sense of the rightness and urgency of their cause beating in each bosom. In the chilly hush of the waking city they clattered through clear streets, sending many loping shadows of mangy rabbits retreating in to the fog, a mere glimpse of the great multitude of rabbits reputed to inexplicably haunt this city more plaguingly than its rats, dogs or cats. Wells smiled at the flash of their retreating tails. These were creatures just like he, thriving where they ought not and despite himself, he regarded them as a good portent.

 

Through the Moon Gate, the last bastion port in the northern arc of the city’s outermost curtain wall, the five were taken as rapidly as six-horse carriages might through dew drenched upland pastures. While Door and Sprawle travelled in the first fit, the necessary day-bags and linen packets beside them, Wells went aboard the second lentum accompanied by the Pail sisters, ‘To explain details,’ he had said to Sprawle before boarding.

 

The lurksman was not convinced. ‘If only I had your eyes,’ he had muttered mordantly.

 

As it was, they changed seating after a change of horses and middens meal at the Plum & Apple wayhouse nestled at the leafy feet of the Brandenfells proper. Mister Door — all blushes and mumbles — joined the laconic dames, while Atticus and Petulcus sat together to continue their own discussions of their next action.

 

‘Wonderful sincere damsels,’ Wells elaborated when teams were changed and they were on their way again, ‘but one can only compass so much ponderous silence, meaningful half-avoided glances and slow, endless sagarine restlessness.’

 

Well acquainted with the peculiar cross-legged poses and measured elegant contortions of the limb that marked a seated sagaar committed to the Perpetual Dance, Sprawle knew well enough that this was not the problem. ‘Indeed ...’ was, however, all he said.

 

By the time cold twinkling evening descended and Phoebe lifted her august lunar face early over the rim of the world to shine it full upon all the scurrying souls below, all plans had been discussed, all conversation exhausted. It was silent, travel-weary souls that clambered tail-sore and hunched from the lentum cabins, across the coach yard and into the cheery welcome of the Green Mile, finest wayhouse in Coddlingtine Dell.

 

* * * *

 

Since before the first peep of sun, Sprawle had been up on the wooded slopes about the town, sthenicon strapped to face, sniffing, sniffing, sniffing, while the wagtails warbled to each other in the shrinking dark and the branches cracked and snapped with frost.

 

Yet he found nothing.

 

None of the goodly locals nor the boniface of the Green Mile asked the next day knew of any such place as Case Nigrise, Casa Nigrum, or Black Hut; neither were the clerks or officials of the town willing to spare their time.

 

‘If it is an account of property yer after,’ one friendly clerk offered as Atticus made inquiry in the town’s small but fine civic hall of lofty pillars and glowing coppered dome, ‘then I’d recommend ye seek the temporal registers kept at the Fallenthaw in Pour Claire.’

 

With a rare genuine smile, Wells said that he most certainly would and hurried as fast as cane and crooked leg would allow to tell his comrades of this lead. Soon enough they were back aboard their lentum-and-sixes rumbling through increasingly steep woodlands that rang with the chock of axe and rasp of saw, making good time to reach to the remote city of Pour Claire by nightfall. Slowly they trundled across its long, heavily fortified bridge, Wells staring almost hungrily at the high white walls before him, white towers and dark spine-like chimneys climbing behind, all built upon the summit of an utterly enormous pinnacle of rock that split the flow of a ravine-running river. The trail had better go on from here, because time was running short and he was running thin of clever notions ...

 

Above the clatter of the carriage he could hear the roar of tumbling waters far far below.

 

* * * *

 

At the beginning of a fresh day — while Sprawle and company made inquest of their own in other parts of the city — Wells made his way by planquin-chair to the administrative focus of the Fallenthaw. Standing in the small space granted common folk in the expanse of the main file, he asked gracefully for access to the temporal registers. At the first, thinking he was come in answer to a singular their civic masters had sent to the city seeking to be rid of the monstrous night-prowling horror named the Gutterfear, the clerks had greeted him most cordially. Yet, upon discovering he was not there to rescue them, they became stiff and aloof. No, he was told, only to be informed that such a thing was only granted to proper representatives of state or empire or high-placed mercantile league, or someone bearing a proper Notation of Release from the Inland Ordinance Board back in Brandenbrass would induce them to change their mind. Neither a sincere recounting of Viola’s terrible abduction nor the dropping of Monsiere Pardolot’s name moved these stony-faced adjuncts.

 

These were not stupid men before him, in their powder bagwigs and sleek clerical soutanes, but they were what the sleuth liked to call over-efficient. However much Wells might usually enjoy the chase of paper and a good clerical stouche, ever mindful of slipping time and the girl’s life, he was growing swiftly impatient of this delay.

 

A tight bow and Wells bid them good day; yet he was not to be thwarted. Returning to the common hall of dark beams and wide stretches of white walls hung with portraits of generations of the city’s lords, he took out the spedigraph of Viola folded, blank side outermost, and clutched it like it was a document of import. One can do anything in a file as long as you have a piece of paper in hand, he reflected wryly, and began to stroll about the attached passages as if he was meant to be there. At the end of an extended passage hung with the likenesses of the hall’s long line of bureaucratic masters, he found what he was looking for, a plain door helpfully signed:

 

Catalogues, Registers & Annals

 

This door was locked.

 

Without hesitation or any suspicious casting about to see who saw — thereby drawing attention to himself, Wells produced his faithful tumblerpicks from the small padded case he ever carried on him, quickly had the lock released and was through. Down a cold stone stair he descended to a wide cellar chamber filled to the broadly arched ceiling with filecase upon filecase of swarthy wood. Here he sought among the chilly rows for items sharing the vintage of the clue gained at Foursdike library, and following the clearly dated labels on each long filerow found himself in a seldom visited part of the archive. Supping on a paltry cache of wayfoods he had brought in a satchel with him — ox charcut, nine cheese and an apple — he quietly, carefully rifled the efficiently filed papers gathered in the great avenues of vertically slotted shelves. Often he was forced to struggle up stepscales that slid conveniently on runners, nearly tumbling as his rebellious legs failed to lift high enough. Finally, perched high on a scale, he found the one scrimp of knowledge needed to unlock the next step. In the loose-sheeted record of one of the many ancient mining ventures out in the darksome hills, the Emperor’s faithful long-passed registrars had dutifully reported of a hidden fortress. Calling this place the Widdenhold, it was from here that the wild Piltmen of old — the Widden, they named them — did launch their frightening ambushes upon the mining surveys. All rather standard stuff, but there in the margin notes Wells barely discerned a time-faded scrawling ...

 

Dunnbyre.

 

It was Old Pilt; which he was versed in enough to know meant dark cottage ...

 

‘Or black hut!’ the sleuth muttered in fatigued triumph.

 

They had found their place.

 

* * * *

 

Equipped with such local knowledge, they soon engaged a swain well acquainted with the hindermost parts of the Brandenfells who knew of such a place as Widdenhold, finding him through advice from the common room of the Spout & Hearth and other drinking places. Younger Pemple was this fellow’s name, come in to town without his pigs on a point of business. Born of a line of hog- and goat-herds long-lived in the district, he wore a sagging, well-used tricorn upon his crown and was clad in a long herdsman’s smock over which was buckled a sturdy lambrequin of proofed hide. Smelling strongly of the pigs he tended, he had excellent repute amongst his fellow drinkers and, more importantly to Wells’ unnaturally percipient gaze, possessed a natively honest soul. Declaring that he was venturing near that way himself, Pemple readily accepted the offered imbursement, though Wells could tell that there was a caution in him.

 

‘Them Piltfolks were right proud of it once,’ the swain said of the isolated fortalice, ‘or so I’m given to understand. They used to cause no end o’ mayhem from it, afor the Tutins came.’

 

‘Then why is it so obscured to universal knowledge?’ Wells returned loudly over the rattle of their progress.

 

‘Cause I reckon usual folks — and our masters most — don’t hold that the Pilts is got much t’say nor do that’s worth taking ken of,’ came the sagacious reply.

 

‘Do people live there now?’ Cilestine Pail asked one of her rare questions.

 

‘Not so I know of,’ Pemple answered, ‘though some speak of floating lights and fearsome hoots coming from it. P’r’aps hobpossums have taken their home here,’ he shrugged easily enough but underneath his bold show the sleuth could see he was nervous. ‘Still, it bain’t a place with a wholesome reputation at either stretch,’ the swain warned, ‘and with the Gutterfear loose and unchecked about them parts, if ye won’t be minding, I’ll take ye but be on me way again right quick. Best to be indoors by night.’

 

‘Most certainly, Mister Pemple,’ Wells gladly agreed. The last thing he desired was involving another in dangers not of their own choosing or perhaps more truly, have some curious bumpkin hovering and foiling the entire enterprise.

 

All settled and arranged they set out under Pemple’s guidance at day break, myriad weapons cleaned and oiled, each member of the party dressed in full harness and ready for daring exploits. Almost immobile when he rose with stiffness from all yesterday’s climbing in the stony cellar chill, Wells reluctantly let himself be lifted in to the lentum that they were to take to the site of their rescue. The carriage was drawn by a six-horse team of stout well-proofed beasts —‘The better to make a hasty exit,’ as Wells said to Cilestine — Door driving now and Pemple acting as his sidearmsman, directing the way from his seat, Sprawle and the Pail sisters stayed in the cabin.

 

Initially they took the main way back south again towards Coddlingtine Dell. Yet Pemple soon went right onto an ambiguous path possessing barely enough width for the carriage. On this they went south-westwards further and further into the strange tower-like hills and pinnacles of rusting stone so distinct to this part of the hills proclaimed on maps as the Witherfells.

 

Wrapped in his usual thick scarlet hood and sthenicon on his face, Sprawle sporadically drew forth a stick knotted with a wad of porous cloth from a leather-sealed cylinder about his belt. With this he would lean dangerously out of the cabin window to daub the dark scabrous trunks with scent — a trail to follow back to safer paths. Should Pemple get them lost, he would find them out again. As the day grew to full and the sky more sombre, the lurksman began to speak of faint clues on the wind and several times called for a halt, so that he might take care to discriminate between a real slot and teasing hints that promised a lead but led to nought.

 

Occasionally they passed through ramshackle settlements huddled behind a sagging palisade of high thorny wood; wooden hovels crouched on uneven foundations of stone as tall as two tall men, keeping their dwellers high from the reach of night-prowling monsters. For as close as this region was to the wide-reaching influence of Brandenbrass and technically held to be safe parishland, such a maze of vales and ravines hid hobpossums and skulking nickers as easily as it did its many degenerate rebellious citizens. As they passed through, narrow regard was ever on the party, jealous heavy-lidded gazes lingering upon the fine harness and glinting weapons of these strangers. Once Wells gave a wry tip of his thricehigh to one especially curious denizen. The soiled sullen fellow snarled, considered violence, but let them be.

 

Winding a convoluted route along steep-sided gullies through young pines and bent turpentines marching up on either hand to shadows, the vague path Pemple picked carried them deep into untenanted lands haunted by little more than muttering crows and whistling choughs and small azure-headed snakes. Several times they eschewed perfectly serviceable roads in favour of the increasingly obtuse and crooked route, traversing sudden cracks in the ancient stone upon wooden bridges of uncertain construction. These were often so narrow, the passengers were forced to alight and walk behind while Pemple coaxed the team of six and their lentum across. The further they went, the more an ineffable heaviness beyond mere internal abstraction began to weigh on the party, enough to dampen even the swain’s simple cheer. It was with something akin to relief when Pemple called a halt and through the coston’s grate in to the cabin, invited his temporary masters to alight.

 

‘There’s yer pointy place,’ he declared, pointing up and away to their right with a nod and a poke of his ivory-ornate heirloom musket. ‘An ne’er a more unrote establishment will ye find.’

 

Out of the black trees rising now row upon row to their right, upon a heel of corroded orange rock thrusting from the slope of a higher summit, stood a high black tower flanked by two smaller keeps. Case Nigrise — the black house, lair of the Seven-Seven, cult of Sucoth, looking all the more dismal under the heavy grey of a lowering afternoon sky. Where the mighty blocks of its jet-black walls might have come from was a mystery, for all the rock about it and upon which it grew was rusted sandstone. It was built so cunningly upon its perch that Wells could easily see a mere company of determined souls might preserve it indefinitely from an entire army railing at its feet. Now that they beheld it so brooding clear, the adventurers wondered why the melancholy fortress had not been remarked by one of them earlier. Yet such were the contortions of these forsaken combes that only when a traveller was under the very caste of its long shadow would they see the Black House looming.

 

A lonely wind seemed to descend from it, a frosty sigh that brought with it brooding fear and a promise of doom.

 

Sniffing, sniffing, Sprawle quickly set to work and soon found a trace, the thinnest sandy trail in the needles, snaking and switching back upon itself, disappearing in the dull shadows of the higher woods.

 

‘It’s our Master Jack,’ he hissed through his box into the creaking hush of the dry shadowy woods.

 

‘Bless your accurate senses, sir!’ Wells enthused, then turned to the swain climbing down from his high seat at the front of the carriage. ‘You have done admirably, Mister Pemple.’

 

‘Thank’ee, sir,’ the swain becked. ‘Will — will ye be needin’ more of me?’

 

Wells smiled graciously. ‘No, Mister Pemple, your labour is complete — as agreed. Go your way, sir, and may your path be always clear.’

 

‘And yours, sir,’ the swain smiled in open relief. Giving them all a final deeper bow, he went quickly back along the way they had come and going about a gloomy bend, soon ambled out of sight.

 

Hanging until this moment at their backs, the Pail sisters now fixed their avian masks over their faces, their aspect instantly becoming warlike.

 

‘And now to getting in,’ the egret-faced Cilestine declared, her voice thick with irony and her eyes twinkling grimly through the slots in her mask as she peered up at the stronghold and swayed like a viper set to strike.

 

Wells stared up into the gloom of the precipitous woods. There was no means for the lentum to ascend among the threatening trees and knuckled boulders to the dreary bastion’s stony feet; time was running too short to search for a possible hidden entrance. Their path had come — as the sleuth had expected it might — to a difficult climb. As much as his curiosity might burn within him to look within the den of a fictler cult, his clumsy legs would only be a liability where speed and lithliness and all fashions of physical cunning were best. Wells had got them to this juncture, but now was the moment when Mister Sprawle came most fully into his own.

 

‘My curiosity can wait,’ Wells proclaimed stoutly. ‘Your safety and Viola’s rescue are paramount!’

 

‘I shall as always give you as full a description of all I see as I can when this is done,’ Sprawle declared gently to his resolute friend.

 

Wells smiled gratefully and, relegated to mere spectator, wrestled with the bitter all-too-familiar frustration — his old friend — that threatened its own darkness whenever he was forced to such a choice. With Door as guard and bridleminder beside him, Wells shoved the rising melancholy back down to the pit of himself from whence it rose and fixed his attention on his comrades as Sprawle and the Pail sisters alone climbed.

 

Following the zigzag route of the path — a mere sandy scrape switching back and forth between the creaking whispering trees, the scent of Sprawle’s quarry became clearer and clearer to him with every step of their cautious yet rapid ascent. Just the once when the lurksman was about halfway up, while the Pail sister leapt and stalked weirdly ahead, did he allow himself a glance down to Wells now far below. In the weird washed-out sight granted by the sthenicon his friend was a small yet clearly pallid blot among the shades of the trees, the larger blot of Door and the duller heavier blemishes of the six horses near obscuring him. No other lurid shapes showed themselves in the trees of the valley. Sprawle always loathed leaving Wells behind, in part because he hated to see his ally so dismayed, but also that he felt somehow exposed and ... well, limping without the sleuth’s sharp mind working away beside him.

 

Near the summit the three adventurers found a dim channel of steps hand-cut into the stained and lichen-splotched rock. Grotesque statues made of the sandstone of the cliff stood at the end of this stony conduit, effigies depicting a squat figure clutching at its own head and covered in gaping mouths. Should he care to count them, Sprawle was sure he would find seven sets of orifice upon each form. Coming slowly through this carven lane they found the great black footings of Case Nigrise proper and were deposited at last at the base of the dour stronghold. They were in a closed and weedy yard, the leadening sky above, the beetling cliff to back and the inky walls of Case Nigrise on the other three sides.

 

Waiting in the cover of the statues, the three kept themselves hidden, listening; Sprawle peering into every cleft and shadow above and about, the Pail sisters strangely still next to him, the constant motion of the Perpetual Dance an allowable sacrifice for the cause of safety.

 

Nothing but tiny furtive wall-dwelling skinks moved here.

 

All else was silence.

 

The drag of Mister Jack was so strong now Sprawle could near see it leading to a mighty black gate in the wall of an attached annex to the main tower. As high as the annex itself, it was out of proportion with the structure of the keep it sat within. By the evidence of hewn and patched stone work about its arched frame, it had clearly and more recently been enlarged for some unguessable reason. Indeed, the longer they observed it the more the masonry about the arch looked like jagged teeth, rendering this ponderous door a perversely gigantic mouth.

 

‘The Devourer ...’ Sprawle murmured to himself as the three carefully approached. Checking the priming yet again in his pair of twin-barrelled pistola, the lurksman sniffed and peered in the quiet for any sign of his allies’ progress or of a foe.

 

For long moments hidden in the mouth of the channel, they observed and waited, yet the walls were too thick to peer through and beneath the obvious scent of Master Jack, the smell of occupation general. All seemed clear enough; people lived here certainly, but they were not currently present. A bent wandlimb grew before the very front of the gate, showing that it had not been opened for some years. Typically there would be some smaller sally-port in the base of such a gate, but close examination did not reveal it.

 

‘There must be some hidden way in,’ Sprawle muttered as he stepped carefully up to this impossible portal to pace to and fro before it. ‘The slot brings us right here ...’

 

Without a falter in their subtle dance, the Pail sisters went to the wall, each upon either side of the gate, and abruptly, began to climb. Finding sufficient claw holds in the uneven slabs of the keep wall, they hauled themselves adroitly upwards, scaling the swarthy surface with astonishing ease while their skirts fell clear by their ingenious cut from the women’s proof-stockinged legs. Near the acme of the wall ran a row of loopholes, mere slits from which to ply fire down upon thwarted and milling attackers, yet with abnormal twistings of their frames, the Pail sisters each found a loophole to their liking and wormed a way through and inside.

 

‘Well, well ...’ Sprawle exclaimed softly, hands on hips as he watched the two sagaars disappear into the black bastion. He never tired of the resourcefulness of these two fighting ladies.

 

Before long and with a hollow thunk!, a thin vertical fracture appeared in the overlarge gate, instantly widening to the sought-after sally-port. Cilestine and Paraclesia stepped gracefully out, eyes twinkling with self-satisfaction.

 

‘I understand you wanted in, sir ...’ the elder sister offered with a slight curtsey.

 

Within they discovered a great hall made from the removal of the original floors and mezzanines clear up to the aging beams and rafters, an echoing untenanted space hung about with vast woven and painted fabrics depicting nigh-orgiastic scenes of destruction.

 

At their feet, the rescuers beheld a great e-form — the Enigmatic Mouth of Sucathes — painted in white upon the flagstones in the centre of the chamber. On the right from the door stood a monumental image carven in swart stone, yet another seven-mouths monstrosity formed with unnerving clarity, its oddly crooked arm holding aloft a tiny, clearly struggling figure dangled over a hungrily waiting maw.

 

‘It appears that no one is here,’ Cilestine declared, peering about cautiously.

 

Sprawle nodded in confirmation, his box-augmented senses revealing that though this place was usually — and until recently — occupied, its current residents were at this moment elsewhere; no sentinels, no guards, no milling idlers, all were absent.

 

But where? Sprawle surveyed the hall in brief bafflement.

 

Upon the left of the wall of what must have been the flank of the main tower, there was spread an immense tapestry woven with a complex scene of a thousand figures of ever-decreasing size gathered in clear groups. In the centre of them all stood a man-sized figure, its comely ruddy frame ringed about with an aberrantly murky light, its thickly-haired head set with seven mouths: one where it ought to be, one for the nose, one either side for the ears, one each for the eyes, and above them one set in the very middle of the smooth forehead — all full-lipped and disturbingly pretty.

 

‘A heirarchograph,’ Cilestine explained gravely, the beak of her mask pointing up at the bizarre piece of fabulary. ‘In the middle is Sucoth in his human form, and all about him in diminishing importance are his servants, man and bestial.’

 

Despite all the dark and dreadful deeds Sprawle’s adventurous life had forced him to witness, he could not help a shiver of disgust and felt Paraclesia beside him also shudder. Suddenly something caught his attention and with a flash of relief mingled with a kind of dogged consternation realised what it was.

 

‘I smell her,’ he hissed. ‘I smell Viola!’

 

It was faint but it was unmistakable amongst the miasma of older male odours. Lifting a mere corner of the disquieting arras, the lurksman discovered that the wall had been mined, almost entirely removed, the great gap opening onto a conical vacancy rising to the grey heavens and sinking to incomprehensible gloom — an enormous gaping emptiness from which seemed to emanate an oppressive pall.

 

This must be the inside of the tower proper.

 

‘Here ...’ the lurksman confirmed.

 

Before him a slender stairway coiled down into darkness and this the three now vigilantly descended, Sprawle leading the way with his perspicuous, pit-fall seeing sight. Rain set in, falling through the yawning rooflessness above and making the steps perilously slick. On they declined, the rain becoming a diffuse drizzle then ceasing entirely as they climbed deeper and deeper. Water dripped with conspicuous plops, the echoes bringing an insinuation of some other almost melodic muttering.

 

Still they went down.

 

Finally the descent terminated in a cavernous hand-hewn grotto, and though Sprawle could see easily enough, the sagarine sisters were forced to unhood a small mosslight to see by. All about them was the same lustrous black stone from which the tower above was fashioned, somehow cut and hauled by ancient, rude-living Pilts, all the way to the light.

 

Though there were many small openings, the slot of Viola and Master Jack went through the largest, an exit of massive height and girth, the tunnel beyond like some mighty throat that whispered and mumbled with what for all the gird sounded like distant choral music. Though far below the round peaks of the shunned hill, air seemed to shift and move in that throat, bringing along with the drag of their quarry, the tangy stink of the sea.

 

‘The Grume!’ Sprawle muttered. ‘Can you smell it?’ Cilestine nodded.

 

As the three wended through dripstones hanging like carnivorous teeth from the hewn ceiling or rising from the paved floor, Sprawle could well imagine them descending into the very gullet of Sucathes himself.

 

If one can believe such things, the lurksman scoffed inwardly. Yet whatever massive bulk was meant to come along this mighty passage, it had clearly not yet done so.

 

Ahead the choral murmur began to resolve itself into definite singing and soon enough into tangible words ...

 

Hi O! Shiggeloth! Hyr thy pegen sop!

Haeg to thee aenlig famuli of Suthas!

Harken as thy cynn sange dethe

ofer thou afaerende wepan welas,

Of Maegan Sucathene!

 

Hi O! Shiggeloth! Hyr thy pegen sop!

Gripan them gast and mod in fyrht

And aefter don wael abeodan

of us to thou maegen dryht,

O! Maegan Sucathene ...

 

On it went in bizarre tongue, a song at turns strident and demanding, at turns plaintive and beseeching, reverberating over and over upon itself in the mighty chamber until with each pace closer it became an almost painful booming. Pressing on into this clamour, they spied a small doorway on the left and Sprawle quickly ascertained that Master Jack had gone through this lesser way, while Viola had continued on.

 

This was the path they kept.

 

All too soon the three met another massive portal, oblong and opening out to the most profound foreboding. Here the chanting song resounded in full and pounding volume, and suddenly, over it, the single high voice rang clear:

 

Succedere, O! Sigilot Magni! Succedere!

Vos off a dulcis ego deferre!

 

This Sprawle understood well enough. It was Tutin, the old language of erudition and the Empire, droned indelibly into him at the hands of Master Tope through the long afternoons of young years at the juniary, and he grimaced at the import of the words. Come up! had been the cry, Come up! O Mighty Shiggeloth! I have brought a sweet morsel before you!

 

Shiggeloth? Sprawle wondered briefly. I thought these fools served Sucathes ...

 

There came a sudden flash, some manner of flare launched from well above them, lighting the murky scene starkly as it trailed down in a lazy arc that struck the chanting dumb and near blinding Sprawle in its abrupt glare. Clutching at the wood over his face, blinking rapidly to clear his dazzled sight, he was grateful when the flare dropped steadily before them to disappear down some long drop, leaving a sickly sweet scent.

 

In the lingering light as Sprawle’s sight returned, it was clear they had come to a small, roughly circular shelf of rock that jutted into a cavernous bottomless amphitheatre, the oddly light air sighing ever so gently on their cheeks. The gigantic door where the three now stood was flanked by columns carved from the jet rock like the facade of some historied edifice. Within the great clash of odours here, of the sea, the aromatic flare, of cold ancient stone, of perhaps a hundred men in various states of cleanliness, the smells of both Master Jack and Viola were strong indeed.

 

They are here!

 

A faint light came from somewhere high beyond the great door, and the three edged vigilantly out into the amphitheatre, the sagaars’ dance reduced to a pent rocking motion.

 

High and directly above them was a throne-like balcony cut in the sheer rock. On it stood an arrogant figure, partly luminous in Sprawle’s superior vision, face masked behind white striped with four horizontal bars of red. Here at last was the elusive ‘Master Jack’. Wrapped in a heavy, fur-collared cloak of the deepest purple, his arms were raised, his fingers twirling odd figures in the lurid smokes that rose from the metal stands at either hand. Crested with a high three-corner hat sporting a ray of five large white feathers, it was apparent he was the grammaticar — the leader — of this degenerate cult. Arranged on either side of their leader upon steps chiselled from bare stone curving from the height of the crested grammaticar down to well below the shelf, stood two lines of pasty forms — maybe three score or more on each side. It was the entire conventicle of helots, every one robed in thick red and masked in white bearing one, two or sometimes three bars. Long sinuous tubes were fixed before them, bending away from their mouths to run down in to the occult darkness of the abyss. Silent now, they too had their bare arms stretched, the flesh there torn and bloodied as they swayed from side to side in practised unison.

 

None seemed to heed the intruders.

 

Clearly, in the throes of their ‘summoning’, the fictlers were not expecting an expedition of rescue.

 

Succedere, O! Sigilot Magni! Succedere!

 

The grammaticar cried again, flourishing a flammagon that with a spark and cough of flint and pan, released another perfumed flare.

 

This time Sprawle shut his eyes in the nick, and in the fading blaze, he could see before him at the very edge of the shelf a high-backed chair of carven stone and he knew who he would find seated there. As if to confirm his certainty, a small figure sagged sideways in the seat and there before them was the drooping, insufficiently wrapped figure of Viola Grey.

 

Before Sprawle could act, a great dread assailed him, rushing upon them all suddenly — adherent and as yet unseen invader alike — up from that gaping abysmal hole, bringing with it a horrid, nigh-maddening fishy stink mixed with the vinegar reek of the sea. Quickly, Sprawle pushed at a slot on the side of his sthenicon to deaden the stench and spare himself its worst. Before him something glistening and loathsome reeled from the pit, something so grotesque as to defy reckoning rising from the infinite depths. Thrice perhaps a man’s height, its movements as it scaled the precipice before the sacrificial seat sounded like the slap of wet leather. Surely it had not come all the way from the waters of the Grume? At its appearance the worshippers together began a great ululation of unhallowed joy that shrieked and leapt about the stones of the drear amphitheatre.

 

Viola in her swoon barely stirred.

 

A bizarre gibberish — more felt than heard coming from this grotesque thing — smote the party, shrieking in their inner beings of sodden brooding hatred sunken but living still in crushing sightless deeps. With this came dread images printed directly on the mind’s eye of the vile inescapable degradation of the human race, whose only escape was to give over yourself and willingly join the horror.

 

For a flash, Sprawle fought not to throw himself down appalled and grovel to be granted this one slender escape. Could it be that the falsegods did truly dwell in the bleak ocean deeps, brooding and waiting to be freed and then to visit horror upon mankind? How was it possible that such bee-rumours — fantastical folk tales — typically the credo of the credulous and the weak were actually true! What will Atticus make of such a thing?

 

With astounding presence the Pail sisters leapt forward, the elder sagaar seizing the abducted girl.

 

A sibilant piercing squeal, thick with wrathful frustration, drowned all other noise as the Shiggeloth beast realised its morsel was being stolen from its very grasp.

 

Spurred into action, Sprawle bellowed wordlessly and fired his heavy hauncet pistol at the rising behemoth come in from the sea.

 

And with this chaos reigned.

 

* * * *

 

Rueing every degree the sun sank on its meridian, Atticus Wells stood alone upon the bank of the road and peered intently up into the darksome wood. In the interminability of waiting, Door had taken the carriage on to find a place to turn it about so as to be pointing the correct direction for departure and to prevent the horses from becoming too cool and so unable to leave promptly should hurry be needed. Wells had insisted on waiting at the foot of the ambiguous path. His assistant had gone out and only after some time come back with the lentum right-facing and an apology that it had taken him a fair trial to find anywhere roomy enough to turn about, but still Sprawle and the Pail sisters had not returned.

 

Closing his eyes, Wells listened for any clue of his friends, of anything. There was nought but the jink of harness and thump of hoof, the creak of crooked boughs and sigh of drooping needles. Yet it was too hushed; even the mournful whistling calls of the choughs that had rung so persistently during their journey here were stilled.

 

A cracking sound above, followed by a clatter of dislodged pinecones and hillside soil. Up in the trees, hurrying forms descending fast towards him. Figures skidded and skipped a dangerous career between the trees, ignoring the winding and safer route, making a more direct path of their own. Gasping great gulps of air, the rescuers slid the last yards and sprang on to the road. Yet only two of the original three returned.

 

‘We must fly!’ Sprawle cried, the rescued Viola in arm, the girl barely sensible under the influence of some stupefying draught.

 

‘Where is Paraclesia?’ Wells asked hotly. By the strained look on Sprawle’s face and the unquiet humours surging beneath his skin, he almost did not dare the question.

 

‘She is ... she is dead,’ Cilestine answered, her voice hard and thick, her grief hidden behind egret mask.

 

Door already flicking the horses to start, the three survivors and their young charge sprang aboard the lentum and the party fled the dismal bastion of Case Nigrise. The horses whinnied loudly in protest at the ferocity of their flight, Door did his utmost to build and keep pace yet not tip the carriage upon its side in the tight turns.

 

‘We uncovered more than our damsel and her captors,’ Sprawle explained ominously as they were jostled violently in the hurrying lentum. ‘Master Jack and his thralls were in a cavern that must reach even to the sea, calling up some sea-born beastie the very moment we arrived. No doubt this beastie — this Shiggeloth — was to eat poor Viola but Cilestine snatched the girl from under its very maw as it went for her. Paraclesia leapt to challenge the Shiggeloth and kept it bayed while Cilestine carried Viola away. I shot at the thing and Paraclesia wrestled bravely, yet four times her size it over-powered her. My grenadoes did little to it and we were forced to flee ... Men we can face but not some monstrous evil summoned up from the deeps too.’ The lurksman pressed his palms against his eyes.

 

Her mask removed, Cilestine said nothing but clung to the frame of the carriage door and her face set cold, peered back to see if they were pursued.

 

‘What is this Shiggeloth anyway?’ Sprawle vocalised his original thought. ‘I thought these fools served Sucathes or somesuch!’

 

‘It is, from what little I have read, the famuli of Sucoth,’ Wells returned. ‘Its servant...’

 

‘So are we to conclude falsegods as real!’

 

‘So it might seem.’ Wells could scarcely credit it himself.

 

As they bounded along, he took a phial from one of the padded pockets hanging from the protecting sash that bound his middle and unstoppering it, waved the open neck under Viola’s nose.

 

The girl grunted, her groggy, wildly rolling eyes snapping into clarity.

 

‘It’s hartshorn, m’dear,’ Wells said as if by way of greeting. ‘Very invigorating.’

 

She blinked at him uncomprehendingly for a beat, then her whole expression went round with alarm and an agony of horror. Realising she was free, Viola tried to spring away and out of the carriage, but was tumbled from her seat by the precipitous and dangerous careen of the lentum cab.

 

‘Fear not, Viola Grey,’ Wells cooed with especial calmness. ‘You shall see your mother again.’

 

The girl stared at him hopelessly, barely grasping his words or her salvation. Already in an attitude of defeat, she capitulated quickly, sagging where she had been thrown.

 

Suddenly the team’s wild nickers turned to shrieks of fright. Door cried out so loud as to be heard over the crash and rattle of their progress. Something unhallowed hissed and jabbered in a loathsome simulacrum of speech. The cabin lurched more violently yet and its occupants realised they were being lifted off the very ground. For a beat the whole fit was suspended then with a mighty shock and the wails of terrified and agonised horses, it crashed back to earth.

 

Stunned and momentarily immobile, Wells lay on his back, head spinning, realising he was collapsed across the door of the lentum half crushed and tipped on its side.

 

‘Out! Out!’ someone cried. ‘The Shiggeloth has caught us!’

 

... Sprawle’s voice?

 

A strong grip seized the sleuth and he was hauled clear of the wreck. Door had him, carrying him now under strong arm like an invalid child, striding as fast as he could up the steep embankment flanking the road. Horses screamed still, and gripped firm in Door’s grasp, Wells caught sight of their foe.

 

They had all seen their share of monsters, yet there was something disconcerting in the frame of this beast: tall as three tall men — big even from one hundred yards — its massively broad shoulders came in sharply to a narrow cylindrical waist, its strange triangular hips from which came three long, strong, oddly-jointed legs, and its elongated skull ending in a fish-like fin. Running down the face was a great vertical mouth extending down the what ought to be the chin and thick ropey neck to the midst of its chest. So this was the Shiggeloth, devoted servant-monster to Sucathes the Devourer, its very reality portentous with dire implications on the truth of the sunken falsegods. Even as he watched the mighty famuli devoured the last horse, stripping the poor nag’s armoured shabraques with its curling arms like a child peeling an orange, its gory perpendicular mouth quivering and yawning perversely as it ate. Swallowing a last mouthful, barrel trunk bloating with this equine feast, the Shiggeloth turned and cast about as if looking. Though it possessed no eyes, it fixed its dire attention upon the tiny fleeing figures of the carriage’s previous occupants scrabbling up the further slope and away from Case Nigrise. With a peculiarly sibilant and triumphant hoot, it pivoted awkwardly and strode on tripod limbs to catch them, its long supple arms writhing with the jaunting rhythm of its walk.

 

A bleakness and hopeless terror took grip of Wells’ soul.

 

Door stumbled and slipped upon the slick of pine needles underfoot, sending his chief tumbling as he sought to catch his fall.

 

Clutched in Cilestine’s arms, Viola screamed.

 

Despite himself, Wells froze, watching this incomprehensible horror of the deeps stride towards them, and some small, removed part of him wondered matter-of-factly if he was finally done in.

 

There was a flash and a sharp crack. One of Sprawle’s grenadoe detonated with a flat thump on the Shiggeloth’s flank, engulfing the creature in a rapidly expanding deep red fizz.

 

The dark enchantment broke.

 

Wells scrabbled to stand. Helping Door to do the same, the sleuth made his own way up the cleft in the hill now, forcing his ungainly legs to move at pace with great agonising gyrations of hip, pulling himself along by his arms, too.

 

With a great whooping, fictlers appeared on the road far to left below, several dozen of them and more still sprinting in their long red robes, catching the party now that they were beset and their transport a ruin.

 

At the top of the cleft the rescuers found a long ridge that ran off southwest into further gloom. Achieving the higher ground, Cilestine put Viola into Door’s care and without a parting word or a second look, veered away into the trees and down towards the fictlers. Regretting this last goodbye, Wells knew her intent, to take the fight to their pursuers and purchase them all some distance.

 

Its aberrant mouth wide with hooting rage, the Shiggeloth swatted at the foul air as Sprawle threw yet another grenadoe, slowed but coming on still, crashing through limb and trunk as if they were mere twigs in its increasingly maddened career.

 

From the left — beyond even the chasing fictlers — blared a sudden and shocking roar.

 

‘What new horror has come to defeat us!’ Sprawle cried angrily, pivoting, a third caste already in hand to hurl at this new threat.

 

Bearing down the knotty road, throwing trees of its own aside as it came, loped a second monstrosity half seen through the woods, a horned, bearded giant of hairy terrestrial aspect, heedless of the little fictlers running terrified from under its cruel cloven feet.

 

‘The Gutterfear!’ were the cries of the terrified helots of Sucoth.

 

Bellowing stentorianly like a beast defending its territory from a rival, this shaggy newcomer gave challenge to the smaller Shiggeloth. Thwarted, the famuli did not hesitate but turning aside from its pursuit, sprang nimbly from the height with appalling dexterity in a creature so large, and in that single bound grappled tremendously with the larger Gutterfear.

 

‘Well I never ...’ Wells breathed heavily in dread fascination, reprieved and vaguely aware of the reverberations of the shattering struggle quivering through his feet and bowed shins. ‘Saved by a monster.’

 

Barely visible now among the trees, it seemed the Shiggeloth was trying to wrap its great vertical maw about its opponent’s long-bearded head as if to swallow it whole. Smaller it might be, but more quick and cunning too, winding its quasi-tentacle arms about its foe, pinning the Gutterfear’s arms to its mighty trunk. Staggering and writhing to get an advantage, the shaggy giant barked thunderously in dismay, its tiny glittering black eyes wide and rolling.

 

With profound yet rapid calm, Door placed Viola in Sprawle’s care and kneeling, took aim with his longrifle and fired at the wrestling behemoths, striking the Shiggeloth upon its elongated crown.

 

The tiny sting of an insignificant wasp, this single frank shot still caused the sea-horror to recoil as if from a much mightier blow, loosing for a beat its grip on the Gutterfear. The shaggy defender took this merest chance and snatched the famuli by its unwrapping arms, tugging the Shiggeloth away. Grasping one of its triplicate legs, the Gutterfear lifted the squirming bulk high, bent it with a foul squelch deleteriously in two, and threw it back into the pines. The half-broken Shiggeloth fell with an astonishing crash that flattened entire trees and sent splinters bursting lethally all about. One such deadly sliver sped straight at Wells, striking him sharply on the right shoulder, and though its needle point was foiled by the excellence of his well-proofed frockcoat, its force smote him to the needle-matted ground. It was the Gutterfear’s turn to pounce, scrabbling up the further slope to where the Shiggeloth even now was recovering with preternatural vigour. Pinning its enemy with its brawny calloused knees, the Gutterfear reached far into the sea-monster’s quivering mouth and with an inordinate wrench of his powerful arm, seemed to pull the Shiggeloth’s insides out.

 

The surviving fictlers wailed at the overthrow of their adored one. Yet they were not undone, for even as Sprawle helped him to his feet, Wells could see the feather-crested leader below, rallying scores of his helots about him; he could hear the fellow calling for his brethren to forget their fallen prince and the now-feeding Gutterfear — Sucathes has many such servants — and seek the end of these ignorant defilers. In their raging distress, the fictlers threw themselves up the incline to overrun this arrogant handful who dared thwart the sacred venerations of their unhallowed lord, swarming around Cilestine who, skipping between black trunks, danced destruction amongst them. Despite her ferocity, a great host streamed up through the woods, cackling like crazed things, firing fusils and pistols at their prey.

 

From the cover of a knot of youthful pines sprouting from a tall statuesque boulder, the three men plied fire down from their advantage of height, felling several fictlers whose places were promptly taken by another, four score or more white masks coming on undaunted.

 

‘We have certainly kicked the wasp’s nest, haven’t we,’ Wells declared over the din, reaching out and firing his own long-barrelled pistol into the massing foe, striking a fictler square in their chest.

 

Hard hit, the fellow fell forward on hands and knees while his cult-mates stepped around him, shook himself and stood again.

 

‘I think these dullards’ humours are charged with more than mere nerves,’ Sprawle returned as one of his own targets rose once more to come on. The lurksman tossed grenadoes amongst the advancing helots — one, two, three, popping in cruel gusts orange or mauve, felling maybe a dozen at a time; yet still their adversaries pressed forward, bawling in fury as they came.

 

At threat of being overwhelmed, Wells and his companions were forced again to flight, hurrying across the easier level of the ridge, the sleuth’s legs an agony he could not afford to heed. Twice as they ran, Sprawle pivoted in an almost offhand manner to return fire; twice a fictler fell, never to rise again, while hidden now in the trees far behind and echoing through the hills, they could hear the Gutterfear still bellowing as if to challenge any other sea-born intruders to show themselves. Finally they came to a gap in the thick trees: the summit of another shallow gully, a natural drain for a spring that bubbled out from its subterranean flow and chuckled down to an ancient stone bridge and a proper road that curved away ahead.

 

‘There!’ Sprawle insisted, pointing to the cover of the bridge and a large monolith of dark rock to the right of it.

 

Partners with him on many a quest, his fellow adventurers did not quibble but scurried and skipped down the course of the runnel, while Sprawle held back. Worming a delaying primer into the new cracked neck of a grenadoe, he laid it in the bole of age-ed turpentine a little way down the furrow. Returning to the top of the ridge he made sure to catch the attention of their pursuers then ran off to the left. Some fictlers followed him, but most thought themselves too clever to be so simply fooled and led by their grammaticar continued on the path after Viola and her two guardians.

 

Scaling the footings of the bridge to the road, Wells and Door — Viola in arms again — took cover as best they could to wait for their comrades; the sleuth would rescue this girl, but not at the complete abandonment of his friends.

 

Placing Viola in the shelter of the boulder and covering her quaking, inadequately covered frame with his outer coat, Door knelt again in the shadow of the stone to load his longrifle. Levelling it on the gully, he waited. All too soon the fictlers showed themselves, the feather-crested grammaticar directing his minions to range out about him and flank their prey from the heights above the road, levelling their own firelocks to send balls spanging about.

 

Door fired.

 

In the nick of time the grammaticar must have seen the flash in the pan, for the hateful figure veered sharply, avoiding the shot while a less fortunate helot stepping where he had just been, fell.

 

A clatter of hoof and cart sounded to the right and scuttling to hide behind the wall of the bridge, Wells aimed his hauncet ready to face whatever came. A simple donkey cart slewed about the acute bend beyond the crossing driven by a rather gaunt fellow with honest eyes but an ill-favoured face whose liniments were currently contorted in a grimace of panic. Under fire from fictlers on the ridge, the driver’s battered copstain hat was set flying. Better hat than head! The companion who rode precariously beside him was facing the way they had come, flourishing and firing a pistol in each hand, and Wells instantly recognised the heavy drapes of Sprawle’s scarlet hood.

 

Dear Sprawle!

 

A sudden flash and thudding report. The grenadoe at the summit of the gully detonated, engulfing a mass of fictlers, sending survivors reeling away, silencing musket-shots for a breath.

 

‘The timing of your fuse is as excellent as ever!’ Wells cried to his friend and leapt up to grab at the bit strap of the nearest ass as the cart slowed on Sprawle’s clear command. ‘I see you have brought a jaunty fit to extract us from this stouche!’

 

The owner of the cart seemed none too pleased with such an arrangement, yet an angry retort from Wells seemed enough to cause him to turn a more agreeable cheek. He was a peculiar fellow, this smudgy cart driver; lies and truth swept in turn over his visage like the swell on a shore, yet his shrewd gaze spoke of a forthright soul.

 

A shriek from the rise of the gully heralded the return of egret-masked Cilestine, the surviving Pail sister dashing about the spreading fume of Sprawle’s grenade, came dextrously down the slope to her comrades. Plainly thinking her a foe, the cart driver drew forth a heavy volley gun of seven barrels, only to be stopped by Sprawle before he could do any more harm. Battered and bleeding, the sagaar returned to them as one come back from the dead.

 

‘There are more,’ the sagaar breathed heavily, taking a moment, sipping

 

‘Then let us take this jink out of here,’ Sprawle declared, moving to alight in the cart.

 

In an abrupt act of compliance the cart driver helped Door to lift Viola in his humble transport, making room in the oddly odiferous tray of his cart for them all.

 

‘Well done, sir,’ the sleuth declared, introducing himself quickly. ‘How is it you are here?’

 

‘Fetching stooks,’ the man said — a patent lie.

 

Despite this Wells let himself be handed hastily to the seat next to the troubled driver. He caught one glimpse of the long notched iron pole, the folded winch-frame and several species of spade in the fellow’s cart-tray and fathomed exactly the nature of his trade. Here was a corser. In any other circumstance the sleuth would have avoided such a man, but need drove and whatever qualms he might have, here was not an occasion for them. They did at least among the dark trades, have a code of ethics; their hinge, or whatever it was called.

 

‘Come on, my chums,’ Bunting growled, spying white masks skulking yet in the gloom at the summit of the wooded gully. ‘I don’t want to die out here!’

 

No sooner were the five clambered aboard than the cart lurched to a start.

 

‘Fear not, my man!’ Wells returned with forced flippancy to the cartman as he clutched his hat to head. ‘If you’re born for the gibbet, you’ll never drown.’

 

With a shake of his head Bunting snorted darkly, flogging poor Hammer to set a better pace for Anvil.

 

Not a moment too soon. Fictlers dashed across the heights on the left in an attempt to outflank the escapees, firing vigorously on them, balls smacking the frame of the cart and slapping painfully on good proofing.

 

‘How many are there!’ Bunting cried.

 

Too intent on their pursuit, on reloading Sprawle’s pistols, Wells did not answer, yet wondered the same himself. White masks were everywhere on the slopes behind, undaunted and unrelenting. How gravely I have underestimated them, the sleuth berated himself bitterly. An idiot fringe they might have been in social reckoning, but these fictlers were a genuine and organised threat.

 

First one ball then another struck Door. He fell back with a huff among the obscured bundles of corpses, his proofing saving him from immediately mortal harm. Shaking himself, the hefty fellow simply sat up, levelled and fired, piercing a fictler sprinting along in plain sight through the eye-slot of his mask. In a patter of returning shot, Door coolly reloaded and fired again, bringing an end to another foe.

 

Still the implacable fictlers came on.

 

Leaping abruptly from the cart, Cilestine gave a parting glance to her comrades — there would be no returning for her this time. Rapidly she scaled the ridge to the heights on the right and crisscrossed back through the trees. They lost sight of her in the woods, but her angry screeching shouts rang out through the folds of land over the racket of the dashing cart.

 

Careering about one turn then another, they picked up pace as the gradient of the road steepened and the pursuit seemed to falter. Bunting kept his donkeys at pace, too far was not far enough from such dire mayhem.

 

‘You always in such straights?’ he called over the racket of their haste to the one named Wells, juddering along on the seat beside him.

 

The stunt fellow seemed a mite put out by this. ‘No, as it happens,’ he returned rather tightly. ‘Today has been especially hard ... Do you always venture out to such awkward places to find corses?’

 

Wells peered over his darkened spectacles and Bunting had a brief sight of the weird blue-on-red eyes of a falseman.

 

Bunting suddenly felt rather trapped. ‘I —’ As true as he tried to be to the hinge, it would never be true enough for such a fault-spotting chap as rode with him now. How low can my days drop?

 

Of a sudden, Wells pitched forward from his seat by Bunting, clutching his neck, gore sputtering through the man’s oddly elegant fingers. Bunting tried to grab at him without losing grip of the reins but Wells fell from his seat to the road, the hurry of the cart quickly leaving him behind.

 

Sprawle would have none of this. ‘Girl be dashed!’ he seethed and sprang down from the back of the cart and ran to his stricken friend.

 

Glancing about wildly, Bunting caught a glimpse of some grand-looking fictler standing on a rock behind, his thricehigh splayed with gaudy feathers and a musket in hand. ‘How did they catch us so fast!’ The corser slowed.

 

‘Leave!’ Wells barked angrily, sprawled on the dirt, spitting dark thick blood. ‘Go, Mister Door! Go! Return her ... to her mother ... GO!’

 

Fictlers caterwauled in the trees.

 

‘GO!’ the one called Door cried, the agony clear in his stifled voice but obedient none-the-less, urging Bunting onwards.

 

Whipping reins cruelly, the corser set Hammer and Anvil back to their ungainly gallop, the girl, Viola, cringing in the jumble of stooks and covertly wrapped corses, pressing herself into the corner of the cart-tray below and beside him. Merciless in his fear, Bunting kept his beasts at their jaunting pace, looking back to see Sprawle standing in defence over his friend, throwing a caste high and long at the oncoming fictlers, then stand and deliver with his pistols.

 

Sobbing, Door loaded and fired, loaded and fired from the back of the cart — each shot a kill, yet to little avail as the massing fictlers jumped from all points along the road and closed about the still flailing Sprawle and Wells surely dying on the road.

 

Abruptly the road about them erupted in a great magenta cloud obliterating all sight of the rushing foe, and the desperate end of those bizarre fighting men.

 

Viola shrieked.

 

A handful of fictlers or more were running along the right-hand bank, keeping impossible pace with the jauntily speeding cart.

 

‘How do they run so fast!’ Bunting cried as he lashed his poor team to greater exertions. Long had he striven to preserve his own hide and he was not about to lose it in such a meaningless fashion.

 

Just as the cart was pulling ahead, the fictlers veered and sprang from the bank at them. Door’s musket spoke and one masked adversary fell in mid-spring. Another misjudged and struck hard the side of cart, falling to the road where the right wheel jolted shockingly as it rode over the hapless fellow. Yet four of the mindless cultists had succeeded in their aim, landing in the tray of the cart or gaining a hold on its side. Two collided squarely with Door, the three toppling together onto the bundles of corse and twigs. The franklock twisted mightily in their corporate grip, striking one fictler savagely before being stunned as the second tore the sthenicon from his face and felled him under a whirl of blows of knife and handle.

 

A white mask loomed all too close and Bunting was clutched rudely about the throat. A pale knife blade danced before his face; ‘No one violates the sanctuary of Sucathes the Devourer and lives!’ hissed in his ear. From the corner of his popping flickering vision as the wind was choked from him he could see the fourth fictler struggling with Viola, trying to heave her out of the tray. For a wee lass she put up a prodigious fight.

 

‘I haven’t violated nothing, ye hackmillion sprattling!’ Bunting spat.

 

Letting go the reins, the corser grasped the knife-wielding hand and gripped the hold about his throttle [throat], and pulled — a life of digging up the dead got you nothing if not great strength of arm. In the scant reprieve, the corser snatched up his heptibus and thrusting its muzzle backwards under his arm into what he presumed was his assailant’s belly, discharged all seven barrels at once. The clutching at him vanished as the fictler was flung savagely out of the cart.

 

Pivoting in his seat, the corser could see that Viola was overcome, the fictler even now lifting her to toss her over the side. Yet the vile fellow’s ambitions were brought instantly to nil as the butt of the heptibus stove in the back of his cranium.

 

As if realising he alone was left, the last fictler looked up, bloodied knife poised above its masked head. With a harrowing growl, Door bloodied and half-broken, snatched the cultist by his collars and with a great heave of his legs, flipped the fellow up and out of the cart, sending him toppling and crashing down the bank of the stream on the left.

 

‘Get her home to her ma,’ Door wheezed, pierced by many wounds despite the quality of his proofing, and lying terribly still amongst the morbid wrack.

 

Needing no second invitation, Bunting drove Hammer and Anvil like a wild thing, the cart shaking violently, tipping dangerously on the sharper bends, driving on and on until the sounds of battle were far behind. Only when they were clear of the darksome knotty path and Viola’s shuddering sobs had subsided as she tended the ailing lurksman, did Bunting ease his donkeys’ pace. Yet seeing phantoms of white-masked faces in every nook and shadow, he did not stop, not at the descent of evening nor at the fall of night to get in and away from monstrous night-lurking threats as was common practice, not even to find poor Door better care. Them fictlers could get us yet! No, he kept steadily on, pausing only to give the donkeys brief respite. It was only when they trod at last in broader downs and more regularly settled lands that he felt that they were properly safe and relented. It was here that he found that the fellow called Door was dead.

 

A windfall addition to my toll at least, Bunting thought dismally.

 

‘W-what has become of them?’ the girl had asked yet again of her saviours.

 

But Bunting had no reply. Surely the fate of those brave, done-for fellows was clear ...

 

‘We should go back!’ she persisted.

 

However right she might have been, they had won free by such slim margins there was scant chance Bunting would actually act on such compunctions. How he wished there was a guide to follow, a set of accepted conduct to ascribe to and ease his misgivings, but there was none that he knew of and the hinge was no use to him here.

 

Unanswered, the girl lapsed to silence and eventually to sleep.

 

Still Bunting drove on under a misted veil of silent stars, his mind turning, turning, turning upon the hinge, upon his debt, upon this sorry juncture of his life.

 

My neck or another’s ...?

 

He looked sidelong at the slumbering girl.

 

Would her parents grant him a prize or other monetary distinction if he passed the girl back to them? That Wells chap had said nothing on it before he was overtaken by doom, and Bunting had had little joy in his dealings with the higher crusts of society. He scratched his chin ruminatively. The final item on his toll turned like an unwelcome song through his thoughts ...

 

1 of the female kind, a child of elder years, scarce beddened.

 

Curled against him was just such a one.

 

Shivering even in sleep under the borrowed coat of a man violently dead, Viola Grey could never reckon on her second-hand rescuer’s unsmiling contemplations.

 

In the glow of dawn they approached a thickly wooded junction in the south-running cartway while wagtails in the trees above chortled their welcome to the day. Here, the corser halted in an agony of choice. Head hanging he remained motionless for the longest time, eyes closed, hands clasped in his lap. Finally he looked up and peered at the lightening land.

 

He had made his choice.

 

With a flick of the reins, Bunting Faukes, corser and perpetual wayfarer, urged his two faithful donkeys to take a left turn and the road back to Brandenbrass.

 

* * * *

 

AFTERWORD

 

‘The Corsers’ Hinge’ is set in the very same place in which the Monster-Blood Tattoo series occurs, the Half-Continent. ‘Hinge’ explores the lives and dilemmas of several ordinary people in, what is for them, their common struggle to live and breathe in such a place where corpse-trafficking and monster-hunting are the norm.

 

My gratitude to Tiffany, my wife, and Will and Mandii, my friends, for reading drafts, the Clare for joining me in the journey, and Jack and Jonathan for letting me take part.

 

— D.M. Cornish

 

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