Lamplighter Read Online Free PDF

graciously. “It was foolish of me to have left both ill and without the chemistry for even a simple vigorant. Dispense away.”
    Putting down his fodicar, Rossamünd set about his task, also giving out lordia—to restore their humours, which, as he had read in a book from Winstermill’s small library, was essential after times of great stress and exertion. He had bought this from a hedgeman, a wandering script-grinder who had visited Winstermill not more than a month ago.
    Each restorative was gratefully received.
    Such a concentrated collection of teratologists Rossamünd had never seen before.While he dispensed, he sneaked beady, fascinated looks at their odd costumes.The calendars hid their well-proofed silken bossocks beneath mantles patterned in blue, orange and white. Dolours kept warm beneath a hackle of fur. She wore fleece-lined, buff-covered oversleeves called manchins tied to her shoulders with ribbons. Rossamünd could not help staring at her wings. Although they looked real—outstretched and ready to fly—he knew they were simply ornaments.
    Each of the calendars’ feet was shod with quiet-shoes: flat-heeled, soft-soled, coming to a pronounced, flattened point at the toe. The strange, ornate hats upon the calendars’ heads—known as dandicombs—varied, however. The pistoleer—whose name, he quickly learned, was Charllette—wore a broad thrice-high; the maimed dancer had been wearing a tight, vertical bundle of black ribbon and many, many hair-tines—these were being removed even as Rossamünd watched. Threnody, evidently sulking, wore her own hair, with no hat or other flamboyant head covering. She, too, had a spoor: a thin arrow pointing up from her left brow—the mark of a wit. Rossamünd had read that wits were always bald; he wondered how it was that this one was not.
    With sad, taciturn direction from Dolours, the lampsmen discovered the body of a sixth calendar in the mess of the carriage.The lampsmen placed it on the side of the road, near the lamp and away from the corpses of bogles. Beside it they laid the fallen dancer, covering both in their patterned mantles and returning to their vitriolic mutterings and the search for luggage. If there was one thing Rossamünd had learned well, it was that lamplighters liked to gripe.
    The three calendars stood by the bodies, their heads bowed.
    The lampsmen stopped their labors and watched, staying very much apart from the women as they grieved. Thinking it polite, Rossamünd removed himself too, sitting on the side of the road. Sad in sympathy, he thought he could hear Threnody softly weeping as Dolours whispered almost inaudibly, “Fare thee well, kind Pannette. Rest thee easy, dear Idesloe. The dove fold you in her down-ed wings . . .” More was said, special funeral potives lit to ward off scavenging bogles and hushed laments sung while the lampsmen stared.The sad task over, the calendars retired to the edges of the lamplight.
    Ritual done, the lampsmen recovered the last of the dunnage. “They expect her to join us!” Assimus piped up as he and Puttinger wrestled a trunk to the small collection of the calendars’ belongings. “They expect us to let a girl join! Have you ever, ever heard of such a thing, Putt? I don’t give a fig what the Marshal might do: I’ve never heard of such a thing in all my time!”
    Threnody, obviously overhearing, fixed them with an attempt at a withering eye.
    Rossamünd was caught by it, and though they were not his words, he blushed and shuffled awkward feet.
    “You there,” Threnody called, soft yet sour, “the little ledgermain. I am in need of evander, if you have this.”
    Rossamünd hesitated. Evander he did not have—only gromwell, a cheap substitute courtesy of the miserliness of the clerks—though it did in a pinch. He said as much, and the young calendar snorted in mild disgust.
    It will do, she said, and held out a hand to receive the restorative.
    He stepped over and gave to her a drab brown