Mosca realized that she could not imagine never seeing the sun again. It felt a bit like going blind. She did not look at Clent’s face, but watched his battered boots striding alongside her, taking one pace to one-and-a-half of hers.
The evening side of the sky was greening over and dulling like old ham, and there a few knifepoint stars were gleaming. Soon the sky would be prickling with them.
The Raspberry looked up when they arrived in the office of the Committee of the Hours, and his eyebrows climbed and tipped a fraction.
‘Ah! Yes…’ His eyes narrowed. ‘We were told to expect you both. Kenning, the boxes!’ Kenning obediently scampered away, returning with two boxes. One appeared to be full of light-coloured badges, one full of black wooden ones, and it was into the latter that the Raspberry now peered. ‘Ah… there.’
He pointed carefully into the box, and Kenning obediently fished out one badge with tongs and held it towards Mosca at arm’s length as if it was hot. She gingerly took it in her hands, half expecting it to burn. It was a jet-black badge with a fly carved on it, without the coloured border of the visitors’ badges.
The Raspberry spent a long time staring into the dark-badge box, then Kenning politely reached past him to the other box, pulled out a light wooden badge and placed it in his master’s hand. The Raspberry stared at it in some surprise, beckoned Kenning closer and whispered into his ear. Mosca caught mere fragments.
‘… thought that under the circumstances… change of classification… after all, given his associations… mistake?’
Kenning’s whispered return was just as indistinct.
‘… still bein’ decided… not yet… might still change…’
Both were darting quick glances at Eponymous Clent, a fact that was not lost on Eponymous Clent. He had flushed somewhat, and his gloved fingers were beating a pitter-pat tattoo against his pocket.
So that was it. Clent has been born under Phangavotte, a Beloved that was only just considered a daylight Beloved, and after Clent’s part in the terrible kidnapping of Beamabeth Marlebourne it sounded as if Phangavotte and all those born under her were within a hair’s breadth of being ‘reclassified’ as nightfolk. The badge in the Raspberry’s hands was a daylight badge, free from a visitors’ border, but he seemed reluctant to give it to Clent.
Given his associations. That could only mean Mosca. Clent’s fortunes were hanging in the balance, not only because of the failed ambush plan, but because he was seen to be friends with a nightling…
‘Well, good riddance to you, you fat maggot!’ Mosca rounded on Clent without warning. ‘Go ahead, suck up the daylight, what do I care? At least I won’t have to deal with your whining ways any more! All you ever been to me is a cart out of town, and a sadder, more rickety ride I couldn’t have picked. So let them tell you you’re worth more than me, let them tell you that you’re a “good name” and better off without me! It’s me that’s better off without you, you mincing, nettle-tongued, sorry sack of nothing!’ She blinked hard, and made the momentary blur of tears go away. All around, the guards were flinching with shock at her outburst.
Clent stared at her, the wind snatched from his sails, and then his face puckered into a most peculiar frown, one in which the corners of his mouth seemed in some danger of curling upwards. He coughed, covered his mouth with his hand and for a few moments seemed robbed of words.
‘Dreadful child,’ he murmured at last, his voice rather muffled. ‘Ah, now the asp rises from the apple bowl to show its fangs…’
‘This my badge, then, is it?’ Mosca waved her new badge over her head. ‘Good!’ She stripped off her visitor brooch and flung it on to the Raspberry’s desk, then pinned the all-black badge to her dress. ‘I’ll wear this with pride! Is it night yet? Can I go and find some people worth my time? Because I don’t care if I never see another two-faced, toffee-nosed day-lighter again!’ She turned on the Raspberry. ‘And that goes for you too, you pompous old pustule!’
‘Get her out of here!’ The Raspberry’s face had deepened in colour almost to the point of graduating to ‘blackberry’. ‘Get… Get her out of here!’
Two guards hurried over and hooked their arms under Mosca’s armpits, lifting her from the floor. As she found herself receding at speed towards the door, she locked gaze with Clent one last time.
‘Yes, take her away,’ he said gently, his brow a curious map of crinkles, a certain softness in his expression. ‘Nothing but a burr in my clothing, a cinder in my eye…’
‘’Ope you choke on your next pie!’ Mosca shrilled by way of farewell as the door closed between them.
Courtesy of the guards she flew, legs a-dangle, out of the room, down the corridor and into the chamber where she had been interrogated by Excise on first arriving in Toll. There she was dropped unceremoniously on to a bench, which jumped under the three people already sitting on it.
She reeled a little as the guards left the room, and realized that she was focus of every eye.
‘I don’t know what you’re all staring at.’ She pulled her bonnet straight. ‘Never seen anybody with a private escort before? Made an impression on the committee, that’s all.’
‘We know,’ came the chorus. Mosca’s quick eye travelled down the line, noting the jet-black badge pinned to every chest.
‘That voice of yours goes through oak doors like a bodkin through cheese,’ said a middle-aged woman, her threadbare scarf hiding all of her hair and most of her mutilated ear. Her thin mouth was spread in a smile of genuine delight.
‘Pumpus ol’ pusturl,’ quoted a wiry young man, shoulders palsied with laughter.
‘Everyone move up,’ said a tall, strongly built man with long, ragged black hair, cheeks rough with untended beard and a voice that made Mosca think of chutney and gravel. ‘She’s sitting next to me.’
There was a shifting and scrape of boots, and suddenly Mosca was sandwiched among the taller bodies and festooned with glittering smiles.
‘This one’s a little wolfcub.’The black-haired man grinned approvingly down at her. ‘Stay close to me when we go into the night, lass. I’ll see you safe.’
Mosca nodded, suddenly warm with self-consciousness.
‘Let’s all stick together,’ muttered the woman, casting a narrow glance at the darkening window. ‘Safety in numbers.’
Little red-haired Kenning ran into the room, his mouth still hanging open with shock, a handkerchief twisted in his hands. He scuffled to a halt in front of Mosca and stared at her, entirely failing to haul up his jaw. After a few small incoherent noises, he gave a squeaky hiccup of a laugh, pushed the handkerchief into her hand and fled the room with one fist in his mouth.
The handkerchief turned out to contain a hunk of bread and cheese. Apparently the sight of his eminent master entering apoplexy had been worth Kenning’s supper.
The conversation in the little antechamber was a strange mix of the frank and the careful. Like Mosca, each of the other three had night-time names and had come to the end of their allotted time as visitors, having failed to find enough money to pay their way out the other side. Everybody gave an account of themselves, and by unspoken agreement nobody asked questions about the obvious gaps. Nobody asked why Mosca had a large goose with her either.
Jade, the thin woman in the scarf, had previously been the accomplice of a travelling ‘doctor’. She used to come forward out of the crowd while he was proclaiming the virtues of his wares and pretend to be cured by them. In order to enter Toll she had needed to sell all the doctor’s bottles, his alchemical scales, his hat, his stuffed crocodile and even her own hair. (Nobody asked what had happened to the doctor or the top half of Jade’s right ear.)
The leaner, younger man was Perch. His gestures were a symphony of starts and jerks, and he smelt like a crate of frightened rabbits. He had spent the last few months trudging from village to town looking for work. But as winter crept in and belts tightened, nobody wanted to spend money on having crows scared or roofs mended or firewood ch
opped, and he knew he had to get to the lands beyond the Lang-feather. (Nobody asked Perch how he had found the money to get into Toll.)
Last was Havoc, the guttural, grinning giant of the group. He admitted to having been a ‘roaring boy’ with a company of ‘blades and brave lads’. He listed with some pride several heaths that carriages would no longer traverse for fear of meeting ‘the boys’. He admitted that he had experience of using a sword, twin daggers, a pistol, a cudgel and a blunderbuss. (Nobody asked him why he was no longer with ‘the boys’.)
‘So,’ declared Havoc, when everyone had finished, ‘we all have something to toss in the pot. Mye here can be our sneaker, micher and little snakesman, small enough to dodge a glance. Jade can be our face, our speak-piece, particularly if we need to do a bit of cony-catching. Perch here says he already has a cousin nightside who can help us get jobs if there’s no other way of finding the mint. And if anyone comes to us looking for trouble, the trouble they find is me.’
Mosca was relieved to hear that her companions were so well cut out for survival in Toll-by-Night, though it did occur to her that if the Committee of the Hours had been listening to that conversation, they would have heard very little to shake their belief that those born under night Beloved were destined for the shady side of the law. She knew enough thieves’ cant to know that a ‘micher’ was a sneak thief, a ‘little snakesman’ was a slang term for a child passed in through a window to open the door of a house, and that ‘cony-catching’ had more to do with con artistry than catching real rabbits.
‘’Tis a good thing my cousin Larkin had a sharp set of wits,’ offered Perch in his quavering tones, his country vowels spreading like butter. ‘Found a way to leave me a letter ’neath a stone. Says that running loose on the streets at night is a doddypol’s game and a good way to die.’ Remembering her brief excursion into Toll-by-Night, Mosca could not help but silently agree. ‘Told me to seek him out in Slake’s Way, by the grand old beech, in a tavern under a yellow sign – they call it the Whip and Masty. He’ll find us a place to stay.’
A little before dusk the guards returned for them, now looking somewhat stony and nervous.
‘You’ll come with us.’
Mosca and her new coterie were shown into a long, narrow stone-walled cell, which was almost entirely taken up with an enormous black iron turnstile, reaching from ceiling to floor and from wall to wall.
‘It’s the Twilight Gate,’ one of the guards said curtly. ‘Only turns one way. Through you go.’
Havoc went first, walking in among the black metal branches and pushing hard at one ‘bough’. There was a squeak, and then a long grinding note as the vast turnstile began to revolve, a jerk at a time. Havoc vanished beyond it, and Jade followed, then Perch, and finally Mosca ventured with Saracen into the forest of cold iron prongs. It took all her weight to turn it, and she found her comrades on the other side, squeezed between the stile and a small wooden door.
‘Hey!’ Havoc’s voice echoed through the cell. ‘How long do we have to wait here?’
No response.
‘Hey!’
‘They won’t hear us now,’ Jade said quietly. ‘We’ve passed through the stile. We’re nightside. They can’t admit we exist.’ The door beyond closed, leaving them in darkness.
There was no room to sit, so they stood in a non-existent huddle. They all sensed that silence was an enemy, so Havoc sang songs. Of a man who bludgeoned his landlady and her daughters, one, two, three, and went to the gallows without ever saying why. Of a gang of crows following Murthering Drack across the county, ‘For where Merry Drack has been, there the dead men lie.’ Havoc’s voice was deep and tuneless and bleak but with a terrible jollity, and the others held their tongue as they would during a hymn.
The sound of a bugle. Even Havoc’s tune halted.
Night air had a smell too, Mosca decided, as she heard the distant music of approaching Jinglers. Night smelt the way Havoc’s songs sounded. It smelt of steel and rushlights and the marsh welcoming a misstep and anger souring like old blood.
A rattle, a ring, a clatter, a clang. Bolts drawn away, a creak like a gate. Suddenly there was light through the keyhole of the nearby door. A long pause. A second bugle.
Havoc pushed at the door, and it swung open upon a silver scene, the cobbles glittering with frost stars. Once again Toll-by-Night had burst out of its captivity, like a monstrous jack from an innocent-looking box. And this time Mosca was a part of it.
Goodlady Bollycoll, Spirit of Solidarity
‘No dallying!’ hissed Havoc. ‘But no slouching or scurrying! Walk as if you eat your enemies’ hearts for breakfast.’ The others fell in on either side of him like a pack of mastiffs of varying size and tried to match his loping confidence.
Mosca knew that their group had been noticed, but their grimly determined stride seemed to afford them a certain magical protection. Their journey was full of meetings that did not quite happen. Shapes that flitted out of alleys before them, outlines of heads on rooftops that bobbed down and were seen no more, rapid exchanges of whistles ahead of them that caused a turbulence in the shadows and then stillness.
Jade had noticed the grand old beech’ in Toll-by-Day, and led the way, with more than a few false starts due to the changed position of the streets. Havoc insisted that they never stop, never look lost, so they continued to stride with fierce determination even when they had no idea where they were going. At last, however, they stood beneath the beech, and saw opposite a cream-coloured sign on which a man with a great whip was flogging a snarling but chastened-looking black dog.
Beneath the sign stood two great barrels, crude and splintered faces cut into their wood as if they were turnip lanterns. The light of the clustered candles within leered out through
narrowed eyes, chipped noses and quivering crooked grins. Between these an open archway led to a set of downward stone steps.
‘I’ll go first,’ said Havoc. ‘Mye – keep a pace behind me. You others follow up and keep an eye out behind.’
The steps descended into what was clearly a vast old buttery cellar. Where once barrels had been stacked, however, now the proprietors had decided to cram people. From wall to discoloured wall the stone-flagged floor was clustered with shabby tables, some of them no more than crates or upended butts.
There was no hearth, just a myriad sickly candles. Everybody was breathing white vapour, and Mosca guessed that the cellar might have been as cold as the street, had it not been warmed in some small measure by the press of bodies. Skinny-looking young children squeezed through the crowds with bottles or casks slung on their backs, and flitted from table to table taking money and filling tankards.
Havoc picked a table close to the wall.
‘I like this one.’ He ran his fingernail across a rugged set of gouges in the woodwork of the tabletop, as if testing the mill of a coin. ‘Someone’s been using a dagger on this. That’s good luck, that is. Don’t anybody light our candle – we want to see folks around us better than they see us.’
Mosca pressed her fingers against her eyelids for six seconds, then opened her eyes and blinked hard, willing her night sight to strengthen. Having a table on the edge of the crush made sense, but left her feeling as if she could be cornered. The backmost recesses of the buttery were very dark, and although she could glimpse the movement of figures, the taller ones stooping beneath the low vaulted roof, she could make out no faces. It was busy, and yet strangely quiet for a tavern, and it reminded Mosca of the times she had spent lying along one of the rafters of her uncle’s mill, watching the mysterious and dusky traffic of the mice down below. All the movement was full of meaning and stealthy signals that she did not understand. A language of whisker-twitches and tail-flicks.
A small dark boy with great, wary fish-eyes took coins from Havoc and poured what looked and smelt like dishwater into four wooden cups.
‘You know what I think?’ Jade whispered, as the boy moved on to the next table. ‘I think this is wher
e everyone comes to meet and talk – might as well be the town hall. See those down there?’ She nodded towards a series of passageways leading off the main cellar. ‘Private rooms, I’ll hazard. For making deals and talking quiet.’
Hearing this, Mosca glanced about her with renewed interest. She had, after all, her mission to consider. If this was Toll-by-Night’s talking shop, perhaps this would be a good place to start her investigations.
‘Someone’s coming our way,’ murmured Havoc. ‘Perch – is that your cousin?’
Perch looked up eagerly, and then the welcoming smile on his face faltered and faded. ‘No, that’s not him.’
The man approaching was bundled to bear-like dimensions in a great coat and two scarves, a large but lopsided hat perched on a small, pale, forgettable face.
‘My word,’ he said, through chattering teeth, which he showed a second later in a lifeless smile. ‘My word.’ He rubbed his gloved hands vigorously, held them palm out towards the dead candle on the table, then rubbed them again. ‘Havoc Gray. What a thing of wonders. You’ll let me buy you a drink. Fancy meeting Havoc Gray, what a story to tell the little woman.’ There was something oddly colourless about his tone.
A small girl ran up and placed a cup of wine on the table before Havoc, then scuttled away, a veil of fair hair hiding her face, and her chin tucked to her chest. The new arrival had not, as far as Mosca was aware, signalled to her in the slightest. The scarf-muffled man reached for a chair, pulled it over and seated himself, still warming his hands at the imaginary flame. Or perhaps he was warming them against Havoc, it was hard to tell.
‘I do not remember inviting you to join us,’ rumbled Havoc.
‘No.’ The smaller man took off his hat, and his thinning hair tried to follow it in surprised-looking wisps. ‘But forgetfulness is quite natural so soon after arriving. Quite natural. Anyway I really could not resist. What stories. What stories you must have to tell.’
Twilight Robbery aka Fly Trap Page 21