Fly by Night

by Frances Hardinge

  Pelted with carcasses, the lugger slowly burned to the waterline. There was no call for aid from on board, however. No boats were lowered, no survivors were fished out of the water. A superstitious fear settled, and some whispered that the the unknown ship might as well have been crewed and captained by the dead.

  It was during the journey back to Mandelion that a sharp-eyed sculler spotted a chilled and feverish Mosca Mye huddled on one bank in the middle of a nest of rags.

  Two days later, in a secret antechamber of what had once been the Duke’s Western Spire, Mosca and Clent found themselves standing before a group of quietly insistent men in very clean but well-worn overalls. Some of them wore pince-nez and ink-spattered cravats, and had thick pen-callouses on their third fingers. Some wore gloves and chatelaines of keys, and their colourless eyes watched the world narrowly, like oysters peeping from their shells. Some were tanned brown as conkers, and wore sashes bearing the design of a silver pond-skater against a black background.

  ‘What amazes me,’ declared Mabwick Toke in a wormwood tone, ‘is that two human beetles of this sort should have played such a large part in creating this diabolical mess.’

  Mosca used her free hand to wipe her nose, which was still sore and runny after her recent cold. Her right arm was being held captive by Aramai Goshawk of the Locksmiths’ Guild, while he tried to make out the faint print on her skin.

  ‘How did this child come by so many bruises? I can hardly read the words.’

  ‘As I hear it, she has been clambering into, over and under anything that would permit it.’ Toke barked a laugh. ‘Count yourselves lucky you have not found her hiding in your writing desks or frolicking in your afternoon stew.’

  Eponymous Clent gave a warm gust of laughter, which cooled when everyone else in the room remained stony.

  ‘We have little enough to laugh about, Clent,’ Toke commented coldly. ‘A few weeks ago, Mandelion was a stable and thriving city, with one problem – an illegal printing press. The Stationers’ Guild called you in to find this press, in exchange for overlooking your past misdemeanours. We did not order you to fling bodies in the river, throw in your lot with radicals, release savage animals in popular alehouses, or investigate the Duke’s family.

  ‘The Duke himself is stone-cold dead, and with him a decade of our careful diplomacy down the drain. His men have completely lost control of the city, and Mandelion is being run by a common highwayman whom your ballad has turned into the darling of the people. Thanks to you, the people of Mandelion will not be ruled by anyone but their famous Captain Blythe and his gang of radical reprobates.’

  ‘We might have controlled the Duke, once he had reached an understanding with us,’ Goshawk remarked quietly.

  ‘From what I seen,’ muttered Mosca, ‘the Duke din’t have much of an understanding at all.’

  Clent cast a beseeching look in Mosca’s direction.

  ‘The Duke was mad,’ Toke conceded, ‘but we knew where we were with him. This man Blythe is another matter. ’

  ‘Ah now, I quite understand your concern, but I can assure you that beneath that burly, boorish, black-dog exterior lurks a dapper wit and—’

  ‘Clent!’ Toke’s voice slammed Clent into silence like a gavel. ‘You have talked quite enough already. I hear from my counterpart here –’ he gestured towards the head of the Locksmiths – ‘that you showed every willingness to join his guild when he caught you listening in on his meeting at the Grey Mastiff. Furthermore, the constables tell me that when you were arrested, you happily answered all their questions about our guild secrets, and a few more they lacked the wits to ask. And finally, there was the letter in which you promised me evidence linking Lady Tamarind Avourlace to the printing press and the Birdcatchers. What if we had arrested her on your word, and then found ourselves explaining to the Duke that our only evidence was a black mark on an apron, blurred beyond recognition by a sojourn in a herring barrel?’ Toke’s mouth closed itself into its cold little V. ‘You may count yourself lucky that my men were able to find evidence of forgery and treason in Lady Tamarind’s chambers. Two letters forged to look like the Twin Queens’ handwriting, and a copy of their signet ring, no less.’

  ‘Of course it may be argued that the lady’s behaviour is evidence enough,’ Goshawk added.

  ‘What did she do?’ Mosca could not help asking.

  ‘She set her crocodile on my men,’ Toke snapped. ‘It shook one man around like a sheaf at threshing, then grabbed a second by the ankle. My man Caveat put a bullet in its skull, but by then the lady had her own pistol to his head, and he was forced to escort her to a fast horse. She could be sipping wine in the Capital by now.’

  . . . sipping pale golden wine with the late light in it, pouting her mouth carefully so that the paint on the lips could not wrinkle, pale and perfect as porcelain, with a snow-white guinea pig on a leash at her feet . . . Part of Mosca’s heart was glad that Lady Tamarind was still free, though something in her soul still roared with hate like a forest fire.

  The head of the Watermen turned to Mosca.

  ‘That other Birdcatcher.’ His tone was low, almost confidential, as if they were the only people in the room. ‘The one who killed the barge captain. Coldrabble?’

  ‘Linden Kohlrabi,’ Mosca said quietly. Perhaps it had not been his name at all. She supposed that a Birdcatcher would care nothing for the wrath of his nameday god. Maybe he had put names on and off like gloves.

  ‘Dead, you said?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The Waterman sat quietly nodding, his eyes on her face. His expression was not unfriendly. After all, what was it to the Watermen who ruled Mandelion? They were river-kings, and the Slye still flowed.

  ‘We might know more of this Birdcatcher plot if we had the printing press,’ Toke continued. ‘The press that you discovered and concealed from the proper authorities. Do you have anything further to say on this?’

  ‘I told you.’ Mosca met Toke’s gaze boldly and blackly, without blinking. ‘I sunk it.’

  ‘Sunk it?’ The head of the Watermen cast a questioning glance at Toke.

  ‘The raft ’ad these little barrels strapped under the planks, for keepin’ her afloat, I’ve seen the kind of thing b’fore. So when I got scared, with me out in the wilds an’ the press just sittin’ there, full of wickedness, I sharpened a stick an’ poked it in the barrels, an’ they bubbled a lot an’ the river sucked up the raft like a mouthful of dry bread.’

  A sigh settled upon the room, a sigh of disappointment mixed with relief.

  ‘Clent, you will stay here and answer more questions,’ Toke dictated crisply. ‘The girl must be taken away and washed – her skin is an incitement to treason.’

  Mosca spent the next two hours being scrubbed red and raw by two muscular matrons until not a trace of Birdcatcher doctrine smudged her skin. Just when she felt there was no skin left, she was bundled back into her stolen olive-green dress and brought out into a corridor, where Clent was waiting amid bags and bundles, fretting the ends of his cravat to feather-wisps. His ears were bright red as if they too had been well scrubbed.

  Toke emerged, his parchment-yellow face older than ever beneath his glossy, caramel-coloured wig.

  ‘You, girl.’

  Mosca obediently drew closer.

  ‘Who was your father?’

  ‘Quillam Mye.’ Mosca could not help speaking his name with pride, as if she expected everyone to know it.

  ‘I thought so.’ Toke peered at her. ‘I knew him. I knew him well. Your father had a brilliant mind – I have never known a keener. The hardest thing I ever had to do was to give the order for his books to be burned.’ He barked his laugh. ‘And the second hardest was persuading the Guild that they should not burn him as well as his books. Did he ever mention me?’

  Mosca shook her head.

  ‘During the Years of the Birdcatchers, he was the only man I truly trusted. We worked together, fighting the Birdcatchers. I found new recruits for the Resi
stance, and he wrote tracts that were circulated in secret, giving the people the hope and courage to rise up against the Birdcatchers.

  ‘I only found out how wild his opinions were once the Birdcatchers were overthrown. He thought that letting the people worship the Beloved freely again would be only the first step. He had fantastical ideas of letting everyone adopt whatever crazed and treasonous views they pleased, and print their own books without limit. He told me that if the Stationers burned books, we were no better than the Birdcatchers and their shrine-burning.

  ‘He would not be silent, and he would not flee Mandelion. One half of Mandelion called him a monster, the other half a hero. The Guild disowned him, and the Duke sent men to arrest him for spreading sedition. Do you know what happened? An infatuated mob overpowered the Duke’s men, untethered the horses and pulled the carriage themselves through the streets as if he was a war hero, shouting, “Mye and a Free Voice”.’

  Mosca could picture this, but in her imagination her father looked embarrassed and annoyed.

  ‘The Duke ordered his men to fire into the crowd. Dozens were injured, and ten killed outright. That very night I had Quillam kidnapped, and spirited from Mandelion in my personal carriage. It saved his life, but I did not expect him to thank me for it. I think he would have returned to Mandelion if he had not seen the crowd that followed him falling to the Duke’s muskets that night. He did not appear in Mandelion again, but his books did, each wilder and more seditious than the last. We burned every copy we found, but we couldn’t stop men like your friend Pertellis smuggling them in, or copying them by hand, or learning chapters by rote and teaching them to others.’

  Toke stared at her, using the knife of his gaze as if he wanted to prise her apart like a walnut shell.

  ‘Quillam is dead, isn’t he?’

  Mosca nodded.

  ‘I knew that he had to be. I have not seen a new work by Quillam for four years, and only one thing on earth could have stopped him writing.’ Toke looked briefly annoyed, as if the walnut shell was proving more difficult to open than he expected. ‘Tell me, do you have any brothers?’

  ‘No, nor sisters neither. I’m all there is of him left.’

  ‘Good. If Quillam had sons, they would grow up too much like him, and cause no end of trouble.’

  Mosca Mye said nothing, and Mabwick Toke looked into her smoked-glass eyes and saw a mind full of nothing he could understand.

  Toke started to turn away, then paused. ‘Caveat!’

  The quiver-cheeked guildsman entered the corridor. From his hand trailed a leash. At the end of the leash a leather muzzle was fastened about a beak the colour of pumpkin peel. Saracen had lost a few feathers around the shoulders, and there was a black bar across one wing which looked like a powder burn, but he was as puffed and pugnacious as ever.

  ‘Do not think of leaving without your goose,’ Toke said crisply, and his mouth set once more in its poisoned triangle as he left for the antechamber.

  Mosca took the leash and, following Clent’s lead, hefted one of the bundles on to her shoulder. It seemed to be stuffed full of Clent’s coat and her borrowed blanket. An empty place in her heart swelled full as Saracen swaggered beside her, trying to match her pace.

  ‘What’s it mean?’ she hissed as she followed Clent to the door.

  ‘It means that against all the odds we have a small but palpable chance of surviving this whole adventure, providing we leave the city now. Keep walking.’ The guards at the gates to the spire opened them without looking at their faces.

  A spirit of carnival had seized Mandelion. Clamouring Hour had broken its banks like a river after rain, and many people hung out of their windows to ring their god-bells with gleeful abandon. Upon the railings that surrounded the Western Spire, turnips and beets had been impaled. They had crudely carved faces and wigs of straw, and Mosca guessed that they were meant to represent the Duke.

  There were traces of past riot as well as present revelry. A couple of boys in battered, broad-brimmed hats dawdled by houses that were freckled by musket-fire, and used clever little knives to pick out the shot when no one was looking. In the old marketplace a burned-out sedan chair tilted on a pile of blackened timbers, and Mosca’s heart lurched as she saw what seemed to be a charred human figure inside. As she passed, however, she saw that beneath an enormous, singed wig shaped like a wasp’s nest, the white face was chill and unmarred, except for the chin, which the flames had tiger-striped in bars of soot and sallow. It was a marble statue of the Duke that had been clumsily dressed and given to the pyre.

  ‘Mr Clent? We fixed everything an’ prevented a war an’ stopped the Birdcatchers, din’t we? How come everything’s suddenly our fault?’

  ‘The privilege of the weak, I fear. People must have someone to blame. If you live to be older and wiser, you will look back and wonder not that we were turned out of the city, but that we were allowed to walk away. Keep walking.’

  Mosca thought about the sullen, heavy-wigged guildsmen fretting that their power had been taken away and given to a highwayman, and knew that she did not feel at all sorry. In fact, she felt fiercely pleased about it.

  ‘Mr Clent . . .’ Mosca remembered the discussion in the antechamber. ‘Lady Tamarind had a pocket watch shaped like a pistol, didn’t she?’

  ‘The same thought had occurred to me.’

  ‘But you don’t think we should tell . . .’

  ‘No, madam, I do not propose to tell the Stationers that one of their best operatives was probably held at pocket-watch point long enough to let an arch-criminal escape. I do not think they would take the news well.’

  ‘S’pose not. You got bits of cotton stuck ’tween yer teeth, Mr Clent.’ It looked as if he had been nervously chewing the ends of his cravat.

  ‘Yes . . . a rather trying interview, what with seven of Mandelion’s keenest minds all trying to fillet me like a fish. If I were a vain man, I might have taken offence at how many of their questions were about you. They seemed particularly eager to know whether you had read any of the infamous Birdcatcher books. Fortunately, I was able to put their minds at rest.’ Clent cast Mosca a twinkling glance. ‘“She is as sharp as a hornet’s breeches,” I told them, “and keen to learn, but her education has been sadly lacking. She can scratch out her letters, but she has no particular way with words.”

  ‘Curiously, I am not convinced that they believed either of us. The Stationers will probably have us followed out of the city and beyond, to see if we lead them to the press.’ Clent gave Mosca one of his sharp, questioning looks. ‘Of course . . . you really did send the press to drink deep of the Slye, did you not?’

  ‘Course,’ answered Mosca without hesitation.

  ‘Naturally. Though . . . sweet petals of Goodlady Aesthelia the Flower-faced, I could not have done so,’ Clent murmured with feeling.

  ‘It was tricky,’ admitted Mosca.

  ‘All those books unborn, waiting to spring out of it,’ added Clent.

  ‘Stories of genies an’ songs about kings with their heads cut off,’ said Mosca. They exchanged guilty, hungry smiles. ‘So, s’posing someone jus’ let the raft with the printing press slide off down the river – what do you think would happen to it?’

  ‘Well . . . if it was not found by the Stationers or nests of waiting Birdcatchers . . . I rather think it would float right out to sea to haunt the visions of late-night helmsmen and perhaps wash up against an exotic shore to cause more mischief.’

  ‘Good,’ muttered Mosca. When she had released the rope and watched the ragman’s raft float away down the river, she had felt much as she had watching the lantern fall from her hand into the gorse stacks on her last night in Chough. It occurred to her that perhaps, just perhaps, a part of her really had decided to set fire to her uncle’s mill, so that she would have no choice but to run away. ‘Some kinds of places need some kinds of trouble,’ she finished gnomically.

  Mosca and Clent trailed their way along the Drimps, laden like two pedlars, a
nd won hardly a glance from the shopkeepers, who were decorating sills and eaves with every ribbon, kerchief and stocking they could find to serve as flags. Many boats on the river had run up the silver swallowtail flag of celebration, and the kites of the coffeehouses danced and spiralled instead of hauling their strings in a workaday fashion.

  ‘I suppose,’ Clent asked casually, ‘I suppose there were no ready-printed books lying around the press? Not that I am saying you would sully your eyes with Birdcatcher books . . .’

  They walked in silence for a few minutes.

  ‘Y’know what, Mr Clent? I don’t think books make you mad at all. I mean, I started readin’ ’em really slow, an’ stoppin’ now and then to see if I felt any more inklinged than before. Once I was feelin’ all fuzzy and light in my head, an’ I thought maybe that was me startin’ to go mad. But then I realized that I was just bored. The Birdcatcher books were mostly just boring, and a bit silly.’ Mosca wiped her nose up the length of her sleeve. ‘My father’s book was much better.

  ‘It was this funny story ’bout how all these people up in the Capital was arguing ’bout how they had to have a king or queen, and they had to choose right, cos the Beloved knew who should get the crown and you couldn’t wish it different without being sinful. They argued so loud, the Beloved heard, an’ started tryin’ to decide between ’em who should rule. They held a big, old meeting in the horizon-halls but they couldn’t agree to anything. Syropia wanted to crown the meanest and maddest to show her forgiveness, an’ Cramflick wanted someone with an ’ead like a potato, an’ Sussuratch wanted a sailor, an’ while they were arguing Palpitattle an’ Varple stole all the food for the meeting. An’ while they was all cooin’ an’ squeakin’ an’ boomin’ an’ shriekin’ like six winter winds trapped in a chicken coop, each of ’em thought of a sudden that if they ran back to the world of men, they could get their word in first.

  ‘So all the men praying for the Beloved’s advice felt a great big wind about them which swivelled their wigs an’ blew their garters right off so their stockings came down. They run out of the cathedral with Beloved swarming all over ’em, like bees over a beekeeper, all buzzin’ their wishes at once. The men run straight to the river an’ jumped in, but the Beloved hung on. When the men was almost goin’ mad with the sound of thousands of voices, they covered their ears and yelled for the Beloved to leave ’em to decide everythin’ for themselves. The Beloved said they were needed there to keep the moonblot beetles out of the lanterns, an’ peel the skin from the milk, an’ stop the snarps stealin’ children. But the men told ’em to leave the world anyway . . . an’ the Beloved did. And nothin’ changed at all, cos there never were any Beloved, just people making their voices up in their heads, the way I often do with people.’