Fly by Night

by Frances Hardinge

  ‘What?’

  ‘The cream casaque – this should have been burned or ripped for scraps long since. We don’t want it recognized.’

  Mosca, who had drawn a breath to call out to the crew above, let the air out of her lungs slowly.

  ‘I’ll take it below and deal with it now, if you’re ghaisted about it.’ A pale square of sky appeared above, and a ladder of knotted rags tumbled down to brush the floor of the hold with its bottom rung.

  Mosca scrambled to a crouch. Beside her squatted an object that to her night-stricken eyes looked a lot like a wrought-iron harpsichord. Mosca’s long fingers told her that there were no keys to this harpsichord, but there were two iron shelves. The gap between them was narrow, but large enough to admit a Mosca, so she wriggled in, head first, while the rope ladder swung and jerked. By the time two heavy boots struck the floor of the hold, Mosca was tucked out of sight.

  As she listened to the sound of someone ripping cloth with a knife, her curious fingers were still exploring. The shelf above her did not feel like metal. It had a slightly downy roughness, like the hide of a drum, and with a shock she realized that she was stroking paper. She lowered her hand and ran it over the shelf upon which she lay. It was slightly oily, and covered in jutting shapes that felt like row upon row of little teeth. Her fingertips, when she held them in front of her eyes, were stained black as coal.

  On the upside, Mosca was now one of the few people in Mandelion who knew where the infamous illegal printing press was. On the downside, she rather suspected that she was in it.

  R is for Redemption

  At least, thought Mosca, at least his hand isn’t nowhere near the lever. So I probably won’t get printed to death when I’m not expecting it.

  Through the crack between the metal plates, Mosca watched the glimmering knife of the ragman called Tare as he rent the cream casaque into little squares and tossed the fragments on to a pile of rags in the corner. He slid the blade through the fabric with a patient and careful pride – obviously a man who enjoyed using knives. When the task was over, his silhouette moved across to the wall, where a dozen or so pale squares hung in the darkness.

  ‘Paper’s nearly dry,’ he called up.

  ‘Quiet, until we’re out of hearing of the town,’ was the growled response from above. ‘Let’s try to make good speed towards Fainbless before the mists clear. The breeze will be rising soon.’ The music of gullsong, horses’ hoofs and street cries were becoming softer. Somewhere above, a pole churned through the water, and the beams of the raft creaked like the frame of a broken bellows. The river had remembered a lot of deep things it wished to say, and spoke them at length.

  From time to time there came a tiny, ponderously regular sound like a whip-crack, which became louder and louder until it was almost deafening, and then was gradually left behind. In between times, curlews and warblers dropped thin spirals of sound into the stillness.

  The ragman in the hold grew bored with ripping rags. His trunk of darkness approached the side of the press, and, from somewhere above her, Mosca heard two clicks, like a key turning in a stiff lock. The plate above her jolted and dropped an inch.

  ‘Tare? Come up and take a look at this.’

  The dark shape at the side of the press receded, and there followed the sounds of someone climbing the ladder.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Take a look for yourself – I’m manning the pole. There, by the hatchway. Do you recall seeing that before?’

  ‘No, cannot say I have. Looks like a wigmaker’s box.’

  In the darkness of the hold below, two black eyes became as round as sovereigns.

  ‘Well, take a look and see if there’s anything in it.’ There was a huff of someone stooping to lift something, and then a muffled thump-thump-thump as if they had shaken it to find out if it was empty. ‘Careful there, you’ll crush the wig – hi, what’s the matter with you?’

  ‘Something . . .’ Tare sounded shaken. ‘Something moved in there, Sorrel. Don’t look at me that way. I’ll show you – hand me that boathook.’ There was a pause, a faint thwoop of a lid sliding away from a wig box, and then two men’s voices joined in laughter.

  ‘I was expecting a boggling or a snarp at least,’ gasped Sorrel after a while. ‘You’ve an admirer, Tare. Someone’s left you a present. Well, there’ll be goose in the pot tonight, anyway.’

  ‘Wait.’ The mirth had died in Tare’s voice. ‘By my troth, it is the goose from the Grey Mastiff!’

  It was happening, the preposterous scene Clent had painted for Mosca in words. The two men had recognized the valiant goose that had defeated the Civet of Queen Capillarie. They were touched, they were awed. They were remembering the exploits of their forgotten soldiering days and feeling noble impulses rekindle in their hearts. Mosca frowned. The kindling of noble impulses should surely involve less scuffling and shouting.

  ‘Tare! What are you doing? Are you mad? Put that pistol away!’

  ‘I tell you, it’s the goose from the Grey Mastiff! I’ve seen it break men’s legs like kindling!’

  ‘Fire that pistol, and everyone this side of the valley will hear it. Every farmstead, every Waterman between here and Fainbless. Tare, no!’ A mighty thump, a muffled thrashing, a clatter.

  ‘Well, that’s torn it. Did you see where that landed? White eyes of heaven, it’s coming for us!’

  A twin splash. Splutters, swimming strokes receding, and then, a short time later, faint voices in muted conversation.

  ‘The raft’ll tangle in that tree ahead. We’ll loop a towline and pull her in, then wait . . .’

  Mosca’s limbs were still tender from her fall, and she hoped that all of the moisture on her hands was ink. Wriggling out sideways was no mean task, and once the print plate chafed her face. As she tried to climb the ragladder, it swung foolishly and tried to steal her feet out from under her, but when she kicked off her clogs, climbing became a lot easier.

  After the darkness of the hold, the early light seemed like full morning. On a misty bank twenty yards away, two figures sat amid the blackberry bushes, wringing the riverwater out of their hats. Ahead, a fallen tree jutted from the bank and draggled in the water, bearded with dead leaves, foam and flotsam. The pole rested within Mosca’s reach, cradled on two metal hooks, but it looked heavy and cumbersome. The paddle seemed a much better bet.

  She crouched behind the pile of rags and paddled like fury. At first it seemed she was doing nothing to change the course of the raft, but then, when she looked up, the tree which had been dead ahead had moved a little to the left, and it seemed the raft might just slide past its grasp.

  The ragmen had seen her and were running along the bank. One of them, Tare she thought, struggled through the tree’s earth-caked fan of roots and scrambled along its trunk on all fours. Just as Mosca was fearing that he might intercept her, he lost his balance sideways and disappeared into the water with a sound like a gulp, leaving his hat bobbing on the surface. By the time he reappeared, huffing and blowing spray, the furthest twigs of the tree were drawing their nails along the boards of the raft. Using all her might, Mosca pushed the boughs away with her paddle, and the raft was caught by the river’s current and swung away into the mist, while Saracen stood at the pinnacle of the rag mountain, his neck raised high and wings beating as if he could move the raft with his own wingstrokes.

  ‘But, Saracen,’ Mosca whispered to him as the confused cries of the ragmen faded behind her, ‘after this we really got to stop stealing boats.’

  She was aware that as a loyal citizen she should be taking the printing press back to Mandelion to hand over to the Stationers’ Guild, and therefore she was going the wrong way. However, the river seemed to have strong opinions about their route, and it seemed rude to argue with it when it was being so helpful.

  The faint whip-crack began again, and had just become a furious clack-clack-clack when through the vapour the domed head of a windmill appeared, its aged sails sounding like gunfire. The
wind was rising and starting to tug away the mist like sheets from the furniture in an unused house. Beyond either bank lay empty fields and lowlands. At last an autumn sun peered above the grey woods, as bright and cold as toothache, and little golden fringes appeared along the tops of every treeline.

  Mosca had watched the ragmen poling up and down the river, and she was fairly sure that the pole was meant to be driven into the riverbed to push the raft along. Her attempts to master the art, however, left her sodden, exhausted and floating far from the bank so that the pole could not reach the riverbed at all.

  ‘Well, s’pose that’s just Fate, then,’ she said, flinging herself down on the deck. ‘We’ll just ’ave to be swept to sea an’ hope we get captured by smugglers ’stead of pirates.’

  Mosca wrung out her skirts, made herself a heaped rag mattress, and lay down upon it with her hands behind her head. Above, the clouds started to peel away like an old poster and show a sky of crystal blue. As she slid away from Mandelion, her heaviness of spirit also seemed to be peeling away. Would it be all that terrible if she did drift away to sea?

  She closed her eyes against the aching brightness of the sky, and in a very short time she did drift away, but into sleep. When she awoke, her sky was fringed with rushes, and the feathery fronds of reeds were brushing her face.

  The raft had drifted in among a great bank of reeds on the river’s edge and tangled there. Perhaps Fate did not want Mosca to run away to sea after all, and suddenly she was fairly sure that this was not what she wanted either.

  For a moment, Mosca’s mind returned to her fellow-traveller, the grim-toothed press beneath the deck. She could almost imagine spider-letters and mad thoughts pouring from between its plates and chittering in the darkness. And yet, her dread of the press was not unmixed with fascination . . . No, she told herself. She would not let it lure her into its den.

  The valley here was almost a plain, and the river had grown broad and lazy. Gleaming flats of mud pushed their faces above the water here and there so that geese and swans could hold conference. Much further downstream an ash-coloured dome seemed to hang unsupported in the morning light, and Mosca guessed that this might be the hill where the ruined city of Fainbless stood.

  Plying her pole, Mosca managed to force her raft through the reeds until it nudged against the bank. In the clear morning sun she realized that her hands were dark with more than grime, and that her gown and apron were a smudged mass of printed words.

  ‘Saracen!’ She gaped at him in horror. ‘Look! I’m all criminally printed!’

  Below the rushes, water gleamed, so Mosca pushed them aside until enough water was visible to offer her a little mirror. The disaster was more complete than she had first thought. Her reflection showed her a host of blurry, backwards characters across her forearms and face.

  ‘Well, I can’t go back to Mandelion like this,’ she muttered. ‘I got an illegal nose.’

  There was no saving her apron. She had knelt on it when wriggling out of the printing press, and her knees had crushed the cloth against the inky text plate. Mosca took it off hurriedly and paused to stare at a clear, black mark on the left-hand side of her apron. It was about the size of a hand’s palm, jet-black and shaped like a playing-card heart.

  Where had she seen a mark like that before? After a few moments the memory returned, but it placed her in even deeper perplexity. Back in the Grey Mastiff on the night of the beast fight she had seen a woman in a white dress up in the gallery. A woman who tried to look like Lady Tamarind but had a foolish, flabby face, a dress like Lady Tamarind’s but with a black heart just like this one marking the sleeve. Lady Tamarind’s dress, another woman’s face, a black printed heart . . . it was a dreamlike jumble of oddments that did not seem to fit together.

  She would make sense of it later. Cleansing herself of the ink was a more urgent matter. She dipped the corner of her apron into the water and began fiercely rubbing at her skin. After a while the letters on her face started to fade, but the printing on her right forearm was still clear and black. Indeed, it was so clear and black that Mosca was able to make out some of the words as she scrubbed.

  ‘. . . and where the sword and cannon hold dominion keep this heart from trembling . . .’ Mosca frowned. She’d been expecting some radical rantings, or political revelations, but this looked very like an old-fashioned ‘heart’s ease’ prayer. In the time of the civil war many soldiers had marched into battle with a prayer of this sort written out on parchment and folded in the pocket over their heart, in the belief that it would bring them luck and courage.

  ‘It’s like someone’s getting ready for a battle,’ she murmured under her breath. Why were the heart’s ease prayers being printed, rather than hand-written by a priest? Could it be that there was too little time to write them out – or too many soldiers to supply?

  ‘. . . the land has sunk into a sickness of the soul . . . a poison that can only be removed by letting blood . . . our figures seem dark for the Light is behind us . . .’ Mosca read on with new interest. ‘. . . our glorious brethren of the—’ The next word was hard to read, running as it did across Mosca’s wrist. She twisted her arm about and squinted until the smudged ink revealed its secret to her.

  She sat back with a crash. The air was suddenly full of birds. They erupted from the rushes on all sides, their wings beating like frightened hearts, the white undersides of their wings flashing with each beat. The air they left behind them shook and rippled and would not settle.

  But they’re dead, thought Mosca desperately, they’re all gone, everyone knows that . . .

  With urgent eyes she stared at the smudges on her skirts, skin and stockings, tracing the threads of sooty letters that wound about her like snakes.

  ‘. . . with a sword of fire . . . and even their children . . . purity . . .’

  And there again was the word she had found on her wrist. And there, and there . . .

  Birdcatchers . . .

  The morning air was as golden as ever, the wild rosehips still bobbed gaily on the hedges, but the breeze had a new taste now, and the cries of the birds sounded like tearing metal.

  Birdcatchers . . .

  Anything was possible now. Mosca thought she could hear bland hillsides groaning open to release the monsters of the past. The worst of the dead times were rising from their graves, and it would take more than Little Goodman Postrophe and a mountain of mellowberries to stop them coming home.

  But no, Mosca realized, the truth was less childish and more frightening. The Birdcatcher army that awaited these prayers would not be a spectral horde. Its soldiers would be flesh and blood, men and women of Mandelion, all waiting through the years for the right moment with a ghastly patience, like the Birdcatcher church attendant in Kohlrabi’s story. The Birdcatchers had never been extinguished at all. They had just remembered how to be invisible.

  And now they were ready to act. A battle was being planned, and beyond it Mosca seemed to see a world where trees screamed under the weight of hanged bodies, and the fears that still lurked like bats in the eaves of every mind surged out and blackened the sky.

  Before her the clear, black heart on her apron burned into her gaze until it seemed to pulse with the heartbeat she heard in her ears. It was the Heart of the Consequence, the essence of purity, the drum of an unseen army. But it was more than that, and as she stared, Mosca started to see a new meaning in the mark.

  Seven hours later, amid the crush of Mandelion’s main thoroughfare, two young girls huddled by a ragged outcrop of the old city wall and talked in low, urgent voices. The taller of the two had red ringlets too unruly for her cap, and she kept her hands bunched in her apron to keep them warm. The shorter had black hair, caked and clinging with earthy-pink powder, and she wore a patched olive-green dress of a style too old for her. On a strap over her shoulder hung a round, red wig box, and her clogs were caked with mud. Looking at the pair, a passer-by might think they were two shopkeepers’ daughters taking a moment out
of their errands to gossip. Few would suspect that they were discussing gods, and guilds, and the fate of the nation.

  ‘I’m still not really talking to you,’ the Cakes insisted for the sixth time. She scanned the crowds in front of the wrought-iron gates of the Eastern Spire. ‘Remind me – what does she look like again?’

  ‘Plump and peachy,’ muttered Mosca. ‘With a flouncety walk, and a nose stuck up like this.’ With a fingertip she pushed up the tip of her own nose.

  ‘I never done anything like this before,’ murmured the Cakes nervously.

  ‘You just got to throw her apron over her head, and hold on. You won’t need to say anything.’ Mosca grabbed the Cakes’ arm. ‘There! There she is! Come on!’

  The lavender girl had stopped at the gate to preen the frills at the bustle of her pretty saque-backed gown. She smiled her way past the guards, observing their admiration through lowered lashes, then paused to look for a gap in the ebb and flow of bodies and coaches. This hesitation was her undoing.

  The first the poor lavender girl knew of her danger was when she found herself with a face full of linen. Before she could recover or scream, four thin hands gripped her arms, hurried her off her feet into an echoing alley and pushed her against a wall. The Cakes held on to her like a drowning sailor clinging to a beam, while Mosca placed a couple of well-aimed pinches on the prisoner’s plump arms.

  ‘Who are you? What do you want? Ow!’

  ‘You weren’t supposed to sell that dress, were you?’ hissed Mosca.

  ‘What? What dress?’ The lavender girl was still too bewildered to pull the apron from her face.

  ‘Lady Tamarind give you a snow-white dress, foaming with lace and all over pearls, with a heart-shaped stain on the sleeve. You was told to burn it, weren’t you? But you didn’t – that’s stealing, that is. They’re holding an Assizes right now for people like you.’

  The lavender girl gave a whimper.