Twilight Robbery

by Frances Hardinge

  ‘No shooting!’ shouted the Luck, loud enough to carry to both ends of the bridge. ‘No shooting at us, or . . . I fly away!’ He bounced on the balls of his feet, to the consternation of the crowd who clearly thought he was mad enough for anything.

  Laylow ducked between two statues to make herself a small target, breathing heavily and waiting for the rain of musket-balls. None came. After a while she peered out to dart a glance up and down the bridge. The guards had ceased their stealthy advance and stood frozen, staring at the capering Luck in shock, frustration and terror.

  ‘Listen!’ Paragon’s unguarded laughter bounced off the overhanging cliffs. ‘Everybody listen to me now!’

  And they did. Even the Locksmiths who pushed stone-eyed through the crowds at the town end of the bridge to glower impotently at the delighted Luck. Even the mayor who appeared at a second-floor window of the Clock Tower, looking down upon the scene. Most of the town-end crowd was watching Paragon’s precarious slithering and capering with their faces set in a wince, both hands raised as if to placate or fend off a blow. The eyes of many watchers crept to the sheer fall below, the merciless bellowing engine of the water.

  It took Laylow several stunned seconds to understand why his threats were working where hers had not. Her words had not been lost on him after all, she realized now, and in one swift, canny move he had turned the tables on everybody.

  None of the spectators wished to see a careless boy fall off a cliff to his death, particularly one saintly enough to have such a good name. But nearly all of them were much more worried about the whole town following him. A dead Luck was a tragedy, a murdered Luck a shocking blasphemy. But a Luck who ‘left Toll’ by jumping off a bridge before dying a watery death could be a catastrophe. In their minds, if Laylow cut Paragon’s throat, then the next-best name would become the Luck and the town itself would be none the worse. However, if he jumped or fell, he would have ‘left’ the town while still living, taking Toll’s luck with him once and forever. Who could say what would happen then, or how quickly? Would people even have time to run for the gates before calamity struck?

  ‘Now . . . everybody . . . make the gates be open!’ Paragon’s eyes were shining.

  This was the great test. All eyes rose to the mayor, who was clutching the sill of his window with such force it seemed he might tear it apart like pastry crust.

  He bristled, and gave a short sharp nod. The small group of guards at the gate end of the bridge boggled, then set about cranking up the portcullis.

  ‘All the gates!’ crowed Paragon. ‘All the gates and doors open! All over the town!’

  Even from below it was possible to tell from the mayor’s strained body language that the prospect of obeying was tearing at his very soul. He gave another curt nod.

  ‘You heard the Luck! Tear down the house-facings! Open all the doors! Do everything he says!’

  Nobody felt like telling the mayor that a lot of his citizens had been doing that for some time.

  The townspeople busy battling the fire had need of every strategy they had to hand, for the fire was hungry and ingenious. It leaped from balcony to jutting jetty with the agility of a burglar, crossing streets in a single flurry of sparks. It found out hidden stores of gunpowder, oil or liquor in cellars. However the people of Toll were fighting back. Some grabbed small barrels, butter churns and leather buckets and formed chains, passing water in a line from the wells to the blaze. Others ran for ladders and axes for making firebreaks, or even came up with proper long-handled firehooks for tearing down roofs and masonry.

  At first breaking through the Locksmith barriers had been an impossibility, then the recourse of a courageous few, then a terrible necessity. But the mood had changed. Now the self-appointed firefighters attacked the locks and barriers with a passion. Daylighter and nightling fought the flame side by side without a glance at each other’s badges. The only enemy was the fire.

  The fire was not ready for this solidarity, and as the wind dropped it grew dispirited. It let itself be cornered, drenched, covered in wet hides. It waited for another wild wind, a chance to show the town what it could do. But the wind did not come, and a lane at a time it was beaten back.

  It was then, while the frontline troops were gasping and soot-stained, hammers and axes still in hand, that word came through. The mayor had ordered the destruction of every Locksmith barrier and lock in the town. Why? Nobody cared. With a new and wild intoxication bolts were yanked from their frames, locks burst, walls cloven. No terrible Locksmith vengeance ensued. The townspeople plunged on with the glee a very young child feels the first time they realize that their parents are not all-seeing and that plates break very easily.

  Then another whisper rushed through the town, like a cold rain through a desert wasteland.

  ‘The gates! The gates are open!’

  Most of the newly released nightlings responded to this news with admirable promptness. The resourceful ran home, seized their belongings and fled through the eastern gate, heading for the plumper, richer counties around Waymakem and Chanderind. The even more resourceful did the same but with other people’s belongings.

  The shivering shanty town on the western bank of the Langfeather was only slightly slower. Abandoning their makeshift shacks, they hoisted their packs on their backs and were through the portcullis of the western gate, across the bridge, through Toll and out through the eastern gate before you could say ‘starvation’. On the Luck’s insistence, the western gate guards followed them across the bridge, so that nobody now guarded the portcullis. Laylow was hunched next to Paragon, ready to slash out at anybody who made a lunge for her or for the Luck. Everybody gave them a wide berth.

  On Paragon’s orders all prisoners were released, including the weary, lank-limbed members of the toil-gangs and everyone in the Clock Tower jail.

  ‘And . . . Brand Appleton has to be brought here. To this gate,’ insisted Paragon, in response to Laylow’s muttered prompting.

  The hushed crowd had to wait for two solid minutes while the mayor emitted sounds like a man gargling with starlings. Then he made a choked ‘gah!’ noise and gave a wave of his arm, which his guards correctly took as a sign of consent. Five minutes later a bruised, battered, red-haired man of eighteen years limped on to the bridge, one hand gripping his clumsily bandaged flank. When he drew level with the two fugitives, Laylow stepped out to join him and placed a supporting arm around him.

  ‘Mandelion better be all you say,’ she muttered. She gave Paragon a glance of concern, but he cackled and capered, waving her away towards the unguarded gate.

  The mayor could only glare helplessly as Brand limped across the bridge, supported by Laylow, and vanished through the gate to a world beyond his control.

  At last there was only Paragon Collymoddle on the bridge. The sun had gone in, extinguishing the rainbows, and he was shivering with the chill of the wind and the drenching from the spray.

  ‘Cold now,’ he said through chattering teeth.

  The mayor came down to the bridge and ventured out on to it. His steps were slow, for he was acutely aware that nobody now stood between the Luck and the open portcullis.

  ‘Come, boy,’ he said, not without kindness and some reverence, for was this not the Luck? ‘Enough is enough. You are not used to this light or this cold, are you?’

  Paragon shook his head. He pulled himself up enough to hug the head of Goodman Fullock as if his arms had grown tired of the strain.

  ‘It is all over. We will take you and make you warm and safe. No more troubles. No more dangers.’ The mayor cautiously took step after step. ‘Just . . . take my hand and come home. You are needed here. You have a job. You know that, do you not?’

  The boy laid his cheek against the wooden head of the Beloved as if suddenly tired, and nodded. ‘Yes. Job. Save everyone,’ he murmured. Then he laughed, waved at somebody in the crowds behind the mayor, and with the same unexpected speed he had shown before swung himself back on to the bridge and broke in
to a run.

  ‘Quick!’ spluttered the mayor. ‘Shoot . . . leg . . . something . . . !’

  Musketfire vented in a patter like applause, but Paragon’s run was lolloping and unpractised, and so lopsided that the bullets missed him. He leaped through the arch of the gateway and was gone.

  ‘After him!’ shouted the mayor.

  Nobody moved but for one guard bolder than the rest, who darted forward on to the bridge and sprinted past the gesticulating mayor who was already retreating back to the safety of land himself. Two steps later, however, there was a splintering crack and one of the planks of the famous unshakeable bridge of Toll gave under the guard’s feet, so that he dropped halfway through the hole. Desperately clutching at the boards, he was able to halt his fall and managed to haul himself back up and drag himself to safety.

  There was a deathly hush, of just the sort that never lasts.

  ‘Flee! The Luck has run out! The Luck has flown away! The bridge is falling down! Flee the town!’

  With such cries all around, the mayor glanced behind him to see who the Luck had waved to before his flight. But there was only a heaving crowd full of faces made anonymous by fear. And in the corner of his eye just a fleeting glimpse of a lilac-coloured gown.

  Toll emptied with surprising speed. The inhabitants of Toll-by-Night had needed little prompting, and now that their Luck was gone those of Toll-by-Day had lost their golden sense of self-assurance. People took what they could carry push or drag, and they left. By dawn the next day, the town was entirely empty.

  Of all those who had been within its walls the preceding dawn, only three were left from the western side, namely Brand Appleton, Laylow and Paragon himself. It was widely supposed that Brand and Laylow had headed to Mandelion. As for Paragon, nobody had any idea where he had gone or even intended to go. He had plunged into uncertainty at a gallop, and the moors kept his secrets for him.

  Everyone else had poured out of the east gate to the bemusement of Sir Feldroll, who saw more people pouring out of Toll than he had reason to believe lived there. Worse still, he found that his armies absolutely refused to advance across what they all now firmly believed to be a cursed bridge. They were not alone. As a matter of fact, virtually nobody was willing to go near it.

  There are, of course, exceptions to every rule.

  In the grey of dawn, at what would once have been first bugle time, a solitary figure could be seen stepping on to the eastern end of the bridge of Toll. As a matter of fact it did not simply step, it stamped. Then it put its full weight on the board, jumped up and down with all its might and moved on to the next.

  Mosca had her shawl wrapped tightly around her to shield her from the wind, and her pipe clamped hard between her teeth. She slammed her clogs into the weatherbeaten timbers as hard as she could.

  When she had seen the guard put his foot through the bridge, just for a moment Mosca’s convictions had been shaken into a jumble. Briefly she had believed that Paragon must have been the real Luck of Toll after all, and that his flight had left nothing holding up the bridge or protecting the town. Even when she had gone to sleep that night on a blanket loaned by one of Sir Feldroll’s soldiers, she had still half believed it. And she knew that if she left things at that she would always partly believe it.

  ‘All right,’ she said through the teeth clenched about her pipe, ‘show me how cursed you are, then. Show me that it wasn’t just a plank getting weak because hundreds of people came crowding across the bridge all at once. Go on, drop me, then.’

  She was so caught up in her experiment that she did not notice another figure walking, a good deal more quietly, towards her from the other end of the bridge. Thus it was only when she caught sight of a pair of boots in the corner of her vision that she stopped mid-clump, slowly straightened and looked Aramai Goshawk in the eye.

  He was dressed in the same simple black she had seen him wear before, but with a travelling cloak over the top, and cream-coloured kid gloves.

  ‘I believe you owe me a town, Mye.’

  Mosca’s heart lurched as she remembered her words to Goshawk the previous day. You can have Toll. Mosca pulled the pipe out of her mouth and gave a twitch of her arm towards the town behind her. Toll, with its dull windows, its doors creaking open and ash-flakes still chasing across its empty streets.

  ‘Take it, Mr Goshawk. Toll’s yours. Nobody to quarrel over it with you. Not even a pigeon.’

  ‘A town is more than the sum of its bricks and the tons of its mortar. Toll numbered several hundred souls, now all flown.’

  ‘But you didn’t care about the souls, did you, Mr Goshawk? All you wanted was the bridge.’

  ‘A useless bridge.’

  ‘And you wanted it to be useless. You’d have pushed it into the Langfeather if you could.’

  ‘Indeed? Why would I do that?’

  Mosca risked a glance at Goshawk from under her lashes. ‘Because you’re in the fear business, Mr Goshawk. It’s frightened people come running to you, wanting you to deal with radicals, or criminals, or spiders under their bed. They’re the ones that give their towns to you and let you tell them what to do.

  ‘So you know what I think? I think maybe Mandelion turning radical was the best thing that happened to the Locksmiths for a long time. Because now everybody’s seein’ radicals in the closet, radicals in the fruit bowl, radicals hiding in every drawer. They’re terrified. I bet there’s dozens of governors all bobbing and doffing at you in their best wigs, beggin’ you to stop the radicals jumping out of their suet pudding. But that all ends if somebody marches into Mandelion and puts some puffy-wigged noble back in charge.

  ‘So it wasn’t enough for you to hold Toll-by-Night. You had to hold Toll-by-Day as well, to make sure no armies marched through without your say-so.’

  The air was particularly cold, and the morning frost had left the Beloved statues with dandruff. Goshawk’s face was impressively impassive as he gazed down at the Langfeather.

  So far Mosca had been lucky. She had never quite crossed swords with Goshawk. Rather, their aims had chanced to slice in parallel, like a pair of scissors. Granted, a pair of scissors with one blade finger length and the other half a mile long, cutting out the sky and slashing buildings in two as it hissed through the air. However this time she wondered if she had pushed things too far. Perhaps she should have pretended more stupidity, let him dismiss her as a foolish little girl caught up in things she did not understand.

  ‘Mye, do you ever think of the future?’

  ‘Do I get to have a future?’

  Once again, her sidelong observation showed her a slight dimpling in his pocked cheeks, like fingerprints pushed into lumpy dough. It was that rare and unnerving phenomenon, the Goshawk smile.

  ‘Are you still in fellowship with Eponymous Clent, the Stationer spy? I suppose he is a useful enough model for a starting apprenticeship . . . but sooner or later you will need to make some decisions. About your future. Your loyalties.’

  Mosca steadied herself against the wooden forehead of Goodlady Syropia, and felt a prickle as ice crystals melted against the skin of her palms.

  ‘I . . . I think Mr Clent can still teach me a lot of things right now, Mr Goshawk.’

  ‘Very well. Someone will come and speak to you on your next nameday to see if you have had any more chance to consider. In the meanwhile, remember that I am still looking out for that missing ransom jewel . . .’

  Sir Feldroll’s encampment had become the hub for a sprawling temporary camp of the refugees from Toll. As Mosca returned to it, she found that many were already hoisting their goods on to their backs again and setting off for the cities to the east. In the distance Mosca could see the Raspberry, blinking bemused at the bookless wilderness. Further down the road were the nightlings Blethemy and Blight, the former carrying a babe that looked a lot like the Gobbet. Evidently there had been a family reunion.

  Clent, with his usual shamelessness, had managed to find space for himself and his secretar
y in one of the campaign tents, as temporary diplomatic attachés to Sir Feldroll, and it was here that she found him quietly scrawling some notes in his black book under the heading ‘Toll’.

  ‘Kidnaps,’ it read, ‘bone horse – FIRE – no more town.’

  ‘Ah, Mosca.’ Clent glanced up at her and passed her a letter that lay beside him. ‘Another consequence of your ingenious double-dealing, I believe.’

  Dear Mr Scragface Pimplenose,

  I am not overfond of jests, and I am even less fond of traps. My long wait at the time and place agreed for our meeting was wearisome and disappointing, but not nearly as wearisome and disapponting as the sight of a gaggle of ruffianly individuals staggering in to the market square at an hour after the appointed time, and then settling down to crouch behind the stocks under the apparent impression that they were invisible.

  The guild of Pawnbrokers informs me that your breach of the terms of a contract they have brokered leaves them likewise disappointed. Indeed I am to inform you that unless substantial recompense is made to them and to me, your rights will be revoked.

  Your obt Servant,

  The Romantic Facilitator

  ‘That dozy footman Gravelip!’ exclaimed Mosca. ‘I was right! He and the rest of the mayor’s men did let the Romantic Facilitator slip out the net! Blunderin’ in, all red-eyed and an hour late.’

  ‘Do not curse them too wildly – I daresay their young mistress probably gave them a tot or two of rum to share the night before, enough to ensure their failure to rise early.’ Clent sighed. ‘Ah well, it would seem that we can now add the Guild of Pawnbrokers to the list of people who would be lethally upset with us if they ever found out precisely what we had done.’

  Mosca thought he was probably right. She had seen the Pawnbrokers ‘revoking rights’ during the auction, and she still had a vivid memory of watching the ‘revoked’ individual plummeting down a mineshaft.

  ‘Fortunately,’ continued Clent, ‘I believe if we vacate the scene nimbly enough, most of the blame will land upon the odious Skellow and the Marlebourne creature. I suppose you know that she and her adoptive father have vanished?’