Twilight Robbery

by Frances Hardinge

  A shape lurched and twisted into view, its motion grotesquely playful despite its bulk. Moonlight creamed over the sheep’s skull at the crest of its long willow-pole neck. The red ribbons that fluttered from its eye sockets gave it a festive ghastliness. The body was a shaggy mass of fluttering rags, patches and ribbons that trailed right down to the ground.

  The skull turned this way and that on its stick neck, as if the ‘horse’ was eyelessly scanning the icy street for prey. A slender rod tugged at its jaw so that it snapped with a clacket-a-clack, and Mosca had the uncomfortable feeling that it was tasting the air and would catch the flavour of their fear.

  Everybody in the deer-horse held their breath. And then, just as it seemed they would escape detection, Welter released his breath in a wordless cry of anguish. Mosca turned and found that a spectral green-white something, curved like the spine of a harp, had risen out of the tool sack at the back of the horse, in which it had presumably been sleeping, and had seized Welter by the nose.

  ‘Aaag! Ged de blarmuggin bird off by nose!’

  ‘Saracen!’

  There is an ideal time and a place for everything, particularly the discovery of unexpected homicidal geese. This moment of necessary stealth was not that time, and the confines of a fake horse not that place.

  Clacket-a-clack. The sheep-skull’s jaw snap-snapped as it turned to gaze sightlessly towards their hiding place.

  ‘It’s heard us!’ commented Mosca, proving it was possible to screech under one’s breath. The next moment she was nearly knocked from her feet. Mistress Leap had taken to her heels down the alley, hauling the rest of the horse with her. They took a high speed left, bouncing slightly off the corner as they went, and then another.

  ‘Is it chasin’ us, Mr Leap?’

  Gargling noises behind her suggested that Welter was still suffering from a goose-related speech impediment. Mosca could feel the rasp of busy wing feathers against the back of her neck. It was virtually impossible to see out now, the eyeholes jogging up and down too much to be useful. As they slowed for a second corner, Mosca pushed the entrance flap open a slit and dared a glance down the alley behind them. It was empty.

  ‘Mistress Leap, I don’t think it’s – aaarghh!’

  In speaking to the midwife, she had turned her head to face forward again. Thus, when they turned the corner, she had an immediate eyeful of the solitary figure waiting ahead of them. It was the very monster they had just fled, standing squarely in their path, dark ribbons a-flutter. Mosca’s shrill shriek of surprise was matched by that of Mistress Leap, who brought the deer-head Clatterhorse to a jarring halt.

  ‘Back! Back!’ Mistress Leap yanked her end of the frame widdershins, so that the whole deer-horse was dragged head-about-tail to face the other way, and set off at an impressive gallop. Just as the entrance flap fell back into place and cut off her view of the street, Mosca had the strange impression that the other horse was also whirling around to depart in the opposite direction. Perhaps it was playing with them, slipping away to head them off again until they ran themselves into exhaustion.

  Running, however, still seemed an excellent idea. After sprinting down several streets without pursuit, it became clear that Mistress Leap, true to her horsey role, had panicked, lost her wits and bolted, taking the rest of them with her.

  ‘They saw us,’ was all she would say when Mosca finally calmed her and persuaded her to slow. ‘Theysawusthey-sawustheysawus . . .’ Even Mistress Leap, who would dare murderer-infested streets every moonlit night, could apparently be reduced to twittering helplessness by fear of the Locksmiths.

  ‘We got unlucky.’ Mosca stifled the superstitious whispers in her own mind, and was glad that nobody could see her face in the darkness. ‘We rolled black dice, mistress, that’s all – but no matter, we got to roll those dice again. We got to go back for that gem. If we don’t grab it, somebody else will – maybe Skellow’s boys, maybe the Locksmiths, maybe both if they’re hand in glove. We got to race them all to that ransom, or we can say goodbye to Beamabeth Marlebourne and our own escape.’

  By day, the mayor’s counting house was in a broad and fresh-faced street, favoured for promenades despite its steepness. By night it turned treacherous, bristling with sudden alleys, its slope snared with unseen ice.

  A head gingerly emerged from one such alley and tilted to peer uphill towards the counting house. It was a smudgily painted deer’s head with no horns.

  ‘The radish is still there!’ came the word from Mistress Leap. ‘I can see it hanging from the lintel of the counting house!’

  Mosca felt her spirits rocket. ‘Quick! Let’s grab it and –’

  Clacket-a-clacket-a-clack.

  Without warning, a shaggy shape barrelled up the street past their alleyway hiding place, paying them not the slightest notice. There was no mistaking the spindly neck, the sheep’s skull rattling at its crest. The other Clatterhorse was making a beeline for the counting house and its precious radish, ignoring all the other vegetables arrayed to tempt it.

  ‘Oh, frogspawn!’

  ‘What do we do?’

  There was no time to do anything, or even to answer the question. It was scarcely out of Mistress Leap’s mouth before they heard another sound, this time from the uphill end of the street beyond the counting house.

  Click. Clickclickclick. Clickclick.

  Near the top of the street, something black had stepped out of the shadows with macabre grace. Something with the figure of a man, its arms and legs of spidery slenderness. Rising above its shoulders gleamed a ghastly hobby-horse head, its eye sockets hollow and its grimace charnel-white. From its shoulders hung a mantle of willow sticks, which dangled like finger bones and clicked against each other as it moved. It stirred every nightmare of beast-headed men who ate the hearts of children. It was a third Clatterhorse, and this one carried two long knives in its hands.

  This did not, however, daunt the sheep-skull-headed horse, who continued its uphill charge towards the counting house even when the shadowy two-legged horse broke into a sprint to meet it. Sheep-Skull reached the counting house first, and Mosca saw its skeletal jaw close about the radish, biting clean through the string. Instead of making its own snatch at the prize, however, the shadowy Horse-Man flung itself at the main body of the Sheep-Skull horse. Its clenched fists plunged deep into the Sheep-Skull’s ragged coat, driving in its daggers with all the force of its charge.

  There was a rough, tearing cry of pain and surprise. The Sheep-Skull kept its feet, but reeled. Its skeletal jaw fell open, spilling the radish on to the street. The Horse-Man aimed a snatch at the falling vegetable, but it rebounded off his knuckles and skipped away down the sloping street, slave to every quirk of the cobbles.

  The occupants of the deer-headed Clatterhorse watched open-mouthed as the radish danced past their hiding place, then without need for discussion set off in pursuit.

  The radish liked the central kennel ditch. Then it jolted off a boundary stone and found it liked the nearby breakneck flight of steps even better. Down and away it bounced, dwindling into darkness, its flourish of greenery trailing like a plume. After it scrambled the Deer-Horse, glass eyes a-goggle, then the Horse-Man, and finally the tottering Sheep-Skull.

  Certainty of disaster filled Mosca’s head from the moment the ground gave out under her and she realized she was running down steps. She could barely see her own feet, and these steps had been worn into slapdash slopes by centuries of soles. It was too fast, then it was faster, and then the frame she was gripping lurched and tilted around her, throwing her off balance. Her falling foot caught a step edge and the next caught nothing. A wall clobbered her in the flank, then with a ghastly inevitability the Deer-Horse tipped headlong amid snapping and splintering, and the stone angles came up to bite.

  Mosca lay in a heap of pain, smothered by the ‘horse hide’ blankets. Mistress Leap had broken part of her fall, but she had broken part of Welter’s fall, and her role as the filling in a Leap sandwich w
as crushing the breath out of her.

  She wriggled her head and torso free and shook the blankets from her face so that she could breathe. The first thing she saw was the Horse-Man leaping over her head, his boot-sole nearly grazing her nose, and landing on the cobbles beyond.

  The second thing she saw, looking back up the steps, was the ragged mass of the Sheep-Skull tearing down towards her with a haste born of lost balance. She was too terrified even to scream, but fortunately the Sheep-Skull’s occupants seemed to be devoting a fair bit of lung-power to that themselves.

  Then the Sheep-Skull was upon them, plunging them into darkness filled with the thunder of un-horse-like boots. Mosca took a kick to the shoulder and felt a foot fall not an inch from her head. Damp ribbons and greasy wool trailed across her face. A moment later she had the moonlight back and was gasping air into her lungs. She prodded and tugged at the blanket around her until a head-and-shoulder-shaped bulge rose up on either side of her. With whimpers and sobs of pain, the Deer-Horse staggered unsteadily to its feet again, its wooden ribs jutting and its head quizzically tilted.

  The radish, the radish! Nothing mattered but the radish.

  The Horse-Man was running up and down the alley at a stoop, scanning every gutter, its lean body quivering with agitation. The Sheep Skull was also stumbling about the lane, no longer capering, twisting this way and that in search. The radish was nowhere to be seen.

  And then the arctic silence of that realization was broken by a clear, crisp sound, like a mirror shattered by a bone knife.

  Clatter-clack. Clatter-clack. Clatter-clatter-clack.

  A clean, loud, hard sound that might chip the walls as it echoed off them. A sound the very hills would hear, and pull their forests about them for comfort. Suddenly the ‘horses’ in the street became figures in a mummers’ play, carnival games with a deer’s head and a child’s hobby horse and a sheep skull found by the roadside.

  The clatter hushed for an instant as if somewhere a black theatre curtain was being drawn back, and then the real Clatterhorse rode into view, flames burning in the depths of its bone-rimmed eyes.

  There was a moment of utter paralysis, a cool droplet of moon-madness. Large as a real horse, the Clatterhorse stood in the street, white winter steam huffing from flank and muzzle. Like a knight‘s horse it wore armour, but there was no knight and the armour was bone. Frills, spikes and scales of bone, rough and sallow as old wood, and bone blades jutting from its black wheels.

  The night could hold its breath no longer. A breeze rose, and the candle flames deep in the monster’s eye sockets flared. A chorus of whetstone swishes, and suddenly its flanks were bristling with swords. The Horse-Man took only half a second of quivering contemplation before spinning about and taking to his heels.

  ‘RUN!’ shrilled Mosca with all the power of her lungs. But her legs were tangled and unsteady, her companions still rising. Worse still, as she watched, the front half of the Sheep-Skull horse staggered and slumped, bringing the whole creation crashing down at the base of the steps to block Mosca’s own escape route.

  However, terror is the most calming thing in the world. Nothing makes life simpler. Suddenly nothing mattered but escaping the Clatterhorse as it glided closer. Now the phantom-like Sheep-Skull horse with its blood-red

  ribbons was just something in the way.

  ‘Run! Runrunrunrun!’

  Everything was frenzy and yet had the numb, painful slowness of a dream chase. Still draped in their splintered horse, Mosca and the Leaps lurched to their feet and scrambled over the prone Sheep-Skull beast in a bid to reach the street. Blanket-cloaked limbs stirred and squirmed under the weight of Mosca’s knees and elbows. Without warning, a black gloved hand shot out of the Sheep-Skull’s ragged trappings, raking wildly at the Deer-Head’s blanket hide. Mosca glimpsed a gleam of metal, and felt the hooked fingers draw lines of cold across her knee.

  A second later she was past the sprawl. Her clogs found the cobbles, and before she knew it she was running. Her spirits returned to her in a rush as she found the Leaps keeping pace, the little cloth horse galloping along around her. At the same time there was the warming, sickening, shameful relief that the Sheep-Skull had stumbled, that it would probably draw the attention of the Clatterhorse just long enough for Mosca and her friends to escape.

  Mosca ran as if the Clatterhorse behind her was no beast of strings and stitchwork, as if there were no gloved and pitiless hands holding its dozen gleaming blades. At that moment it might as well have been the bone-scaled beast of legend with the invisible Yacobray straddling its back.

  By the time the Deer-Head horse had holed up in the pleasure garden, panting with the force of six exhausted lungs, it became clear that Mosca and the Leaps had successfully shaken off all the monstrous and dangerous creatures besetting them. This included the real Clatterhorse, the Sheep-Skull Clatterhorse and the Horse-Man Clatterhorse. Unfortunately this also included Saracen.

  Mosca was frantic, and might have run back to look for him if he had not suddenly appeared at the park entrance in all his cabbage-hued glory, swinging his paunch with particular self-importance. Scooping him up, Mosca spotted a few threads dangling from his beak, and had an uneasy feeling that some tithe vegetables had ended up as goose-dinner. There was nothing she could do about it, however, so she put it out of mind.

  Three pairs of feet set a new record in their sprint for the Leaps’ house. Once inside, three pairs of hands made short work of driving home the bolts. Then at long last three intrepid Clatterhorsemen could fall into chairs and contemplate fully the events of the night.

  There was a silence, punctuated by panting.

  ‘. . . Ah . . . hah . . . heugh?’ Mistress Leap asked eventually, pointing an unsteady finger towards the door, beyond which lay the incomprehensible horse-infested streets.

  Mosca shook her head helplessly and managed a tiny breathy tittle of sound by way of explanation.

  ‘Graargh,’ creaked Welter Leap in agreement, and let his shoulders slump. For a little while there did not seem to be much else to say.

  They were, however, all still alive. After a while they noticed this fact and began a quiet inventory of their limbs to make sure that none were missing. Everybody was bruised and grazed, Welter Leap had lost a tooth on the steps and Mosca had three shallow but sheer cuts across her knee that looked as if they had been scored by razors. However, their little league had survived the hours of Saint Yacobray. The true Clatterhorse had evidently taken the turnip tithe from their door and passed on peacefully.

  But why had there been so many Clatterhorses on the streets? If the last arrival had been the real Locksmith Clatterhorse, then who had been inside the other two imposter horses? One explanation immediately sprang to mind, of course. Beamabeth’s kidnappers must have come up with just the same cunning plan as Mosca. They had realized that if they disguised themselves as a Clatterhorse they could romp through the streets, collect the mayor’s radish ransom and be gone before anybody knew any better.

  But that only explained the presence of one of the other false Clatterhorses. Why had there been two of them, both ready to seize the ransom? Their terror at the arrival of the real Clatterhorse made one thing very plain – neither of them had been working with the Locksmiths.

  So who had ended up with the world’s most valuable radish? With a feeling of deathly apprehension, Mosca realized she had one way of trying to find out.

  One scant hour after the reign of Yacobray had ended and the people of Toll-by-Night dared to open their doors, a greenish foreigner with badly scratched stockings and a basket-like hat could be seen making her way to Chaff’s Dryppe, a low-eaved, ill-smelling alley on the edge of the Chutes district, where moss-dyed wools hung from hooks and stained the walls like lichen.

  Mosca found a dark arch and pulled herself into it so that she could watch the street unseen. Brand Appleton had said that he would meet her there at two of the clock. She would risk talking to him if he came alone, but if he
did not she would stay in hiding and then follow him back to his lair. It was her only plan. If Brand Appleton had seized the ransom jewel, then by now he probably had the money he needed to flee the town and disappear into the night. This might be Mosca’s last chance to find out where Beamabeth Marlebourne was being held prisoner.

  She listened to the distant chimes of the Tower Clock. Two o’clock came and went, and nobody approached Chaff’s Dryppe.

  As a matter of fact somebody had come to attend the appointment, but it took Mosca ten minutes to realize it for the simple reason that they were doing exactly the same thing she was. In the end she became aware of the other person at the same moment that the other became aware of her. One of her legs cramped, so that she moved it hastily, causing her clog to click against the stony ground. In response there was a tiny startled movement on the roof opposite, and Mosca realized that there was a solitary figure crouching behind the stumpy chimney.

  It was not Brand Appleton. It was not Skellow. It was Laylow, the crop-headed girl with the clawed glove.

  ‘Fffsst!’ The girl cast a glance up and down the street, and then ventured to the edge of the roof to peer down at Mosca. ‘Below there! Teacher!’ It took a moment for Mosca to remember that this was what she had told Brand Appleton to call her. ‘Wait down there!’

  What to do now? The last time Mosca had met Laylow the older girl had helped her escape back to Toll-by-Day, but now everything was different. If Laylow was running errands for Appleton, perhaps she was in the kidnapping conspiracy too. And Laylow had met her as Mosca Mye; she might recognize her . . . Could she outrun the older girl? Mosca doubted it.

  Think Seisian, Mosca told herself as the older girl let herself down from the roof and advanced. Think spices and silks and people eating birds’ nests and monkey fingers.

  As she got close, Mosca realized that the older girl looked as nervous as she did. Laylow seemed to be much more interested in staring up and down the alley than examining her green companion in great detail.