The very next night there would be nothing to stop the kidnappers from claiming the ransom, and Brand Appleton would spirit his unwilling bride-to-be out of Toll. Then the dreaded Clatterhorse would ride through the streets, and the Leaps would not be ready for it . . . and so Mosca and the Leaps would be lost.
And she could tell none of this to her day allies because the letter drop was compromised. Did that mean that Clent and his friends were also in danger? Desperately she tried to remember what she had put in her own letter. Had she been cryptic enough? She hoped so.
Mosca closed her eyes, and swallowed, and set about gathering her wits. Reinforcements vanished like smoke. Probably taken by Locksmiths. Probably dead. She muttered a prayer for them under her breath, but could not muster much real feeling. To her the lost men were as faceless as eggs, and there was nothing she could do about that. The crushing sense of dread and panic pushed out everything else. She tried to think of Beamabeth’s kitten-faced plight, but could not help feeling that her own situation was probably worse than that of the mayor’s daughter.
For one thing, Beamabeth was the last person in the world that Brand Appleton would ever hurt. Mosca Mye on the other hand had no such guarantee, and had an appointment with him that she would have to keep alone.
Cooper’s Dark, where Mosca had promised to meet Appleton, turned out to be a nightling version of Cooper’s Lane. A series of second-floor facings had folded down to form a new walkway that ‘roofed’ the street and turned it into a tunnel. The upper walkway was Cooper’s Perch; the lane below, Cooper’s Dark. Fortunately a couple of cloaked figures were being led into the darkness by a lantern-wielding linkboy, and Mosca was able to follow a few paces behind them in less than total pitch.
Appleton had told her to meet him at Harass and Quail’s, opposite the stone trough. Mosca was unsurprised to discover that it was a gin-shop.
Mosca’s hands were shaking, but she could not pause, even to calm her breathing. Hesitation was weakness, fox blood on the heather that hounds would smell out in an instant.
All right, Mosca Mye, we’re going to play a game, she told herself. A game where Sir Feldroll’s reinforcements came through safe and everything’s fine and there’s six men just waiting in the dark by the wall for your signal. Six men all pistolled up to the teeth, with shoulders broad as a barn. Walk like you got an army in your pocket.
She pushed open the door. Within, like most of the night-side buildings, the gin-shop was narrow and clenched, stools of varying heights clustering throughout like a mushroom epidemic. Given her preposterous appearance, she was glad to see that the lanterns were dim and low-placed, making a great deal of the customers’ chins and nose hair and pouches beneath their eyes, but a lot less of their brows and upper cheeks.
Brand Appleton was seated by a wall, beneath a mildewed tapestry of a cavalry charge from the Civil War. Even in the murk, Mosca could see that Appleton’s bruises had reached their full plummy glory. He had taken off his gloves and was busy twisting and torturing them in a fit of frowning impatience. To her relief, he appeared to be alone.
She cleared her throat, and he released the gloves, looking up at her suspicously. She recalled that he had never seen her face before.
‘Mr Appleton,’ she said, and watched recognition, realization, surprise and eagerness canter across his features. Usually it made Mosca feel safer when she met somebody whose expression she could read so easily, but somehow with Appleton it was different. The very helplessness with which his emotions escaped him made her feel uneasy. He was open, like a lion-cage door. He was unguarded, like a pistol at full cock.
‘Sit down,’ he said, and winced as the spread of his smile reopened a cut on his lower lip. ‘I thought you sounded young.’ He looked her strange ‘Seisian’ regalia up and down, and suspicion came out on a black hobby horse to join the caper of other emotions. ‘So . . . you say you’re from Mandelion?’
‘Not from.’ Mosca scrambled up on a tall stool that left her clogs dangling. ‘I said I been there. The ship I was on had to land somewhere, didn’t it?’ Mandelion was the area’s biggest port, and it seemed the best explanation for the presence of a mysterious foreigner in the town.
‘Ship from where?’ Suspicion’s canter seemed to have slowed to a trot, but Appleton’s brows were still furrowed.
Mosca wet her lips, tempted for a second to fling open the sluice gates of her invention and flood Appleton with tales of an exotic eastern past. But she was not Eponymous Clent, so she gave a mental grimace and pushed the images away.
‘Not somewhere I’ll ever be returning,’ she muttered sourly. ‘Not somewhere I’m in a hurry to think about neither. So don’t go dwelling on that. Mandelion is all you need to know about.’ A grim little mystery was better than a tall tale. Less likely to fall on its face, anyway.
She could read Appleton’s countenance like an open diary. He had been ready to bargain with some urchin who knew Mandelion, but strange green foreignness had confused everything. He was comparing her outlandish dress with her commonplace accent. He was wondering whether she was an impostor. And the possibility that she might actually be a heathen from the distant east had sent his small-town mind hunkering down in its kennel and growling suspiciously.
Mosca chewed her cheek, testing the edge of the situation with her mind, and then took a gamble. She let herself down from her stool.
‘I see how it is,’ she snapped. ‘You’re no different from all the others. One glimpse of a green face, and you’re climbing up the curtains like there’s a tiger in the room. Well, worry not, the tiger is leaving. You can stew in your own juice, Mr Not-so-radical Appleton.’
She made a small and hopefully Seisian-looking gesture with the entwined middle fingers of her right hand and then strode sulkily towards the door. Push something in someone’s face, and they will shove it away reflexively. Threaten to snatch it away from them, and sometimes they become convinced that it is what they want.
But Appleton had not called her back. She reached the door. Her fingers brushed the handle.
‘Er, no – wait! Wait!’
Without turning, the mysterious foreigner allowed herself a small green smile.
‘Come back – come, sit down. No more questions about your homeland. I promise.’
Mosca had to wrestle the grin off her face before she could turn round. In the end she managed this by reminding herself that, yes, she had persuaded the fish to bite down on the hook, but that she was armed with a small and fragile rod, and faced by a large, dangerous and unpredictable catch. With a grudging air she trailed back to the table and seated herself with all the regality of a shrunken empress.
‘So, you want to know how to be a radical.’
‘Yes, and I wanted to know – what did you mean about walking on the grass?’
‘I meant . . .’ Mosca took a moment to think of all the radicals she had met. ‘The heart of being a radical isn’t knowing all the right books, it isn’t about kings over the sea or the Parliament over in the Capital. It’s . . . looking at the world around you, and seeing the things that make you sick to the stomach with anger. The things there’s no point making a fuss about because that’s just the way the world is, and always was and always will be. And then it means getting good and angry about it anyway, and kickin’ up a hurricane. Because nothing is writ across the sky to say the world must be this way. A tree can grow two hundred year, and look like it’ll last a thousand more – but when the lightning strikes at last, it burns, Mr Appleton.’
Brand Appleton’s gaze was unblinkingly intense, and he seemed to be memorizing her every word.
‘Toll,’ he said under his breath. ‘A thousand injustices, bound up in one set of town walls . . .’
‘A rotten, stinking gin-trap of a town,’ agreed Mosca. ‘I can teach you all about seeing things the radical way. It will take lessons though.’
‘Yes, yes!’ Brand Appleton entwined both his hands into a giant fist and bounced it off the s
urface of the table. ‘I have given this thought. A good deal of lessons. So it is best if you teach me on the way.’
Mosca suddenly had the feeling that her great fish had just jerked at her line. She had formed plans for Brand Appleton’s lessons, and the words ‘on the way’ had not been involved.
‘On the . . . On the way to where?’
‘Mandelion.’ Brand Appleton glanced up at her, surprised and a bit impatient. Perhaps he expected her to have kept up with his unspoken thought processes. ‘Mandelion, obviously. You are clearly a traveller – you cannot be too fond of Toll-by-Night, surely? I will need you to come with me when I leave tomorrow night, that is very plain. I need a guide who knows the best way to Mandelion. Someone to explain radicalism en route. Somebody to make introductions when I get there. You need money. You must need money, or you would not be here.’
Beneath her thinly painted nationality, Mosca went pale. Brand Appleton was planning to leave the very next night – immediately after the hours of Saint Yacobray. He must already have a buyer for the jewel. Just as Sir Feldroll had suspected, Appleton would seize the ransom, sell it and leave with his captive ‘fiancée’ before anybody could act. And now he wanted to take Mosca with him, back through the county she had tried so hard to escape, maybe in company with Skellow and his minions, to a town she had been forbidden from re-entering.
‘How much money?’ she croaked.
The sum he named was large enough that Mosca’s hands crept down to the stool top to steady herself. ‘Not all at once though. I’ll pay your way out of Toll first. The rest when we reach Mandelion.’
Mosca’s plan was either going really really well, or really really badly. She could not quite work out which. The fish was still hooked, but it appeared to be pulling her tiny row-boat out to sea.
‘All right, Mr Appleton. Tomorrow, then. Tomorrow night. When and where?’
‘Two of the clock in Chaff’s Dryppe.’
For the second time, Mosca let herself down from the stool. She could only hope that her shivering would be blamed upon the bitter cold.
‘Wait.’ She tensed, but turned to find that Appleton was smiling. ‘I forgot to ask your name. This nightbound hellhole has destroyed my manners.’
It was a question that Mosca should have anticipated, the one question she could not answer falsely and could not afford to answer truthfully, for ‘Mosca’ was hardly likely to be mistaken for a Seisian name. But there are always ways of not answering a question at all.
‘You better call me Teacher. I got a real name but –’ Mosca remembered the Beadle in the white pavilion – ‘but in this country nobody’s tongues are pointy enough to say it properly. Till tomorrow, Mr Appleton.’ And a mysterious green stranger walked out of the gin-shop, hoping that she could come up with a very cunning plan in the twenty-four hours before their next meeting.
Mortal terror, like most things, is relative. Mosca was right in thinking that the majority of people in Toll-by-Night lived in fear, but some lived with more of it than others. And at that moment one man was living with about as much of it as a person could stand without shaking themselves into pieces.
A short while ago this unfortunate individual had been the leader of half a dozen men sent by Sir Feldroll to find Beamabeth Marlebourne. Now he was just a terrified, two-legged jelly. His mind was full of the ferocity of the wind that buffeted and swayed him, and the prickle of sweat droplets as they traced a course along his back and neck, then out of his collar and up into his hair. Or, to put it more accurately, down into his hair, since that was currently the lowermost thing about him.
When ambushed and captured, he had prayed to the Beloved with all his might and main that he would live long enough to find himself outside the walls of Toll. Being dangled upside down from one of the coffin-chutes in the western wall above the precipitous Langfeather gorge had not been exactly what he had meant.
His knucklebone dice fell out of his pocket and bounced off the underside of his chin, and he could only watch as his
luck and the favour of his Beloved plunged towards the half-visible roar that was the Langfeather. Wind-bitten scraps of a conversation above him reached his ears.
‘What are you doing?’ A rasping voice like pumice that he had not heard before.
‘One of the spies, Master Guildsman.’ A matter-of-fact sparrow-chatter voice, belonging to the man who had fastened the rope about the captive’s ankles. ‘Weren’t too talkative, so I thought maybe something was stuck in his throat. If you turn ’em upside down and shake ’em, all sorts of things fall out.’
‘We have no time for this kind of game.’ The first voice again, impatient, cold. ‘One of his fellows has already told us more than enough of their mission. This man is an unnecessary waste of our time. You had better . . . let him go’.
The spirits of the suspended man soared skywards, and just as quickly yo-yoed back down again as it occurred to him that right now the last thing he wanted was for somebody to ‘let him go’. Worse still, he could feel hands busy with the ropes around his ankles, confirming his worst fears. This could be his last moment.
‘Wait! Stop! I can tell you more than the others! I was the one that received our orders from Sir Feldroll! Please! Stop!’
A short pause, and then the captive felt himself being hauled back up the chute an inch at a time. Tears of relief and humiliation flooded his eyes and ran up his forehead.
Ten minutes later Aramai Goshawk knew everything the terrified man could tell him. As a matter of fact he had known most of it already, since the other five captives had been subjected to exactly the same ordeal and offhand-sounding conversation and had cracked with equal speed.
When it became clear that there would be nothing more from this prisoner but sobbing and expressions of his wish to see his family again, Goshawk had him locked up. It was, after all, still just possible that a use might be found for him and his fellows. Goshawk was not surprised that he had broken – like most desperate men, he had leaped for the only chink of hope he could see. The important thing, Goshawk knew, was to make sure that there was a chink of hope. Men who despaired, who were truly desperate, became dangerous. The night of Saint Yacobray, for example, was a carefully judged exercise in fear. Most people would manage to pay the tithe, and only a tiny minority would fail – and these could serve as warnings to the others.
To look into the pale eyes of Aramai Goshawk was to peer into a winter forest. Stark, wakeful, birdless, colourless, all its paths hidden beneath a smothering of white. You could stagger through it for leagues until you gave up hope, and your every footstep would be remembered, preserved and analysed by the unforgiving snow.
He understood fear too well to allow it a foothold in his mind. If you had pointed a pistol at his head, he would have looked at it with interest, noting every visible detail of its construction, because he knew that everything around him, even the weapons of his enemies, were tools waiting for him to use them. It was almost impossible to frighten him, but with a little work it was possible to annoy him.
Right now, he was downright irritated. In the world according to Goshawk, if somebody wanted something stolen, they should come to him. And if they wanted to recover something that had been stolen, they should come to him.
He mulled over what he had learned from his prisoners, from the two cryptic letters that had been found in the secret drop in the town wall, from the reports of his spy placed close to the mayor. A set of amateurs in Toll-by-Night, his town, had set their minds on a theft of a valuable young heiress, and they had not come to him, nor to the Locksmiths at all. Instead they had managed the matter themselves without as much offering the Locksmiths a cut or tithe.
Worse still, the mayor had not approached the Locksmiths about recovering his daughter. Nor had he told the Locksmiths that he was sending in armed men to rescue her. That was worse than rude, that was trespassing.
Last but not least, two familiar names had been brought to his attention. For some reas
on the charlatan poet Eponymous Clent and his girl Mye had become involved in the mayor’s business. Was Clent still spying for the Stationers’ Company as he had been in Mandelion, or was he working to his own agenda? If Clent did have his own scheme, Goshawk suspected that it would be small-minded, selfish and poorly planned, but he had noticed that Clent had a tiresome talent for entangling himself in more important matters. Eponymous Clent would need to be watched.
So – how could the whole situation be turned to his advantage? It seemed from his captives’ whimpering that a ransom was soon to be paid, though they could not say exactly what, when or where. Well, let it be paid. Even with the money the kidnappers could not leave the night town without his permission. If they did not offer the Locksmiths a suitably tempting deal, then why not capture them and their ransom, then bargain with the mayor for a reward for finding the girl?
Nobody but the Locksmiths, therefore, should be allowed to return the heiress to her father. The immediate threat had been defeated with the ambush of Sir Feldroll’s men. The child Mye had not appeared at the rendezvous point and had thus escaped capture, but that did not worry Goshawk greatly. If she was not already dead, then she had undoubtedly been scared into going to ground. She would be alone, unaided and incapable of receiving further orders from her scheming employer, so Goshawk could not imagine that she would cause further trouble.
However annoying this amateur kidnap was, however, Goshawk had larger fish to fry. He could not afford to be distracted from the imminent culmination of his own plans.
The mayor suspects nothing, he reflected, and by this time tomorrow night the mayor should be ready to do whatever I say . . .
‘Mistress Leap! Let me in!’
The front door opened a crack, allowing a greenish
foreigner, a groggy midwife and an emerald goose a sliver-view
of each other, and then was opened properly so that Mosca
could enter.
Twilight Robbery Page 28
