Twilight Robbery aka Fly Trap

Goodman Hobbleroot, Nurse of the Bitter Wound

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.

‘Come on,’ Laylow’s unclawed hand gripped Mosca’s arm with painful urgency, pulling her down the alley. ‘Brand’s a-waiting for you.’

‘He said he’d meet me here!’ squeaked the ‘Teacher’ as she found herself being propelled down the lane. ‘Him, and nobody else! I’m not a piglet to be dragged off by the nose!’

Without warning Laylow grabbed Mosca by the shoulders and shook her roughly.

‘You come with me.’ Only now that their faces were close could Mosca see the desperation and frustration contorting Laylow’s features. At the corner of her mouth a new cut was drying, and a swelling above her eyebrow had ambitions to become a bruise. ‘You hear me? No bleating. No running. No fun. Or I’ll hush you.’ Laylow was shaking, and Mosca could feel the hard points of the claws trembling against her shoulder blade, not quite piercing her clothes.

It was the bristling, dangerous desperation of a fox in a gin-trap, and Mosca knew better than to argue with it. She let herself be pulled like a mannequin down lane after lane, all the while watching her captor with hard black eyes, ready to pull free and run should the other girl’s grip slacken for a second. But Laylow’s grasp did not weaken, and before Mosca could form another plan Laylow was fumbling a key in a lock, then dragging her into a narrow, reeking room.

The air was clogged with fumes of different sorts: smoke from the dulling fire, spitting fat on the rushlights, vinegar and the acrid, stormy smell of injury. There were no windows, and the room was narrow enough that the straw mattress at the far end reached from wall to wall. The blankets draped over the figure on the bed were too short. They reached only halfway up his chest, and his feet and shins in their blotchy stockings jutted out below them. His pallid skin was now ghastly against his red hair.

Mosca did not need to be a physician to see that Brand Appleton was far from well. Indeed, if his eyelids had not kept up a feverish, moth-wing tremble she might have thought that he had escaped Toll-by-Night by leaving both the world and his body.

A dig in Mosca’s back. She turned to find Laylow staring past her at the prone kidnapper.

‘Can you…?’ Laylow swallowed awkwardly and grimaced, as if her throat was dry, or the rising words knobbly. ‘Can you physick him, then?’

‘What, me?’ Mosca stared in horror at the greasy pallor of his face, and the hand clutching at the folds of blanket.

‘You’re from the spice islands. Seisian or something, he said…’ Laylow was breathing quickly, and her claw-tips were gingerly, furtively tracing lines across the calloused palm of her ungloved hand. ‘Can you not… put him right with spices? Nutmeg or the like? Or… or rub him with tiger spittle or unicorn powder – something to put the claret back in him?’

Drawing closer, Mosca could see that Brand Appleton’s ribs were clumsily wrapped in yellowing bandages through which something dark red was painting rosettes. They looked sodden, and Mosca guessed they were soaked in vinegar. She pulled back, clamping a hand against a sympathetic tingle in her own side as if she was the one that had been bleeding. Prickles flowed up her face, and her head felt light, the smells stifling and sickening her.

‘So what put that hole in him?’ she snapped, unable to keep a creak of fear from her voice. ‘Moths?’ Even as she spoke, however, she guessed the answer. She remembered the collision between the Sheep-Skull and the Horse-Man, and the Horse-Man driving his knives into the forequarters of the Sheep-Skull. So Brand Appleton must have been inside the Sheep-Skull horse, at the front. But that had been a two-man horse. Who had been his partner?

Another easy question. Mosca remembered the gloved hand that had lashed out as she scrambled over the fallen Sheep-Skull horse, a hand that had slashed three parallel grooves through blanket and cloth and skin. A glove with claws. For whatever reason, Laylow had been playing horse’s tail during the grim Clatterhorse gavotte.

‘He thought you would help,’ intoned Laylow numbly, watching Brand Appleton. His breaths were audible. They rose, fell and whistled to their own private rhythm. ‘Told me to fetch you. Thought you would help.’

‘You need a proper sawbones, you do.’ Mosca clenched her fists and stared at the wall. She had a sudden sick horror that the wounded man might shudder and die right in front of her. ‘What would you have me do? Slap on a cobweb and tell him to mend?’

Laylow shook her head. Her face was numbly crumpled as she stared at the patient, her lips in motion like a child struggling to read. Perhaps the Locksmiths kept track of all the doctors.

As if her gaze had grazed his skin, Appleton’s breath briefly halted in its murmuring meander, and his eyes opened a straw’s breadth. His exposed hand stirred on the blanket, then the fingers curled and twitched in a feeble, clutching beckon. With some trepidation, Mosca drew closer and crouched beside the invalid’s bed, lowering her ear to hear his whispering.

‘Need… get me out of here… that girl over there… damned harridan… keeping me locked up here…’ His eyes were cloudy and unfocused, but there was still that blazing, bewildered stubbornness, like firelight behind a misted pane. Mosca could not stop her hand flinching away when his trembling fingers moved to grasp it. His breath smelt of some searing back-room brandy brewed from beetles and dregs. ‘I must get back… nobody to protect her… cannot leave her in their hands if I am not there…’

He was trying to sit up. Laylow sprang forward and shoved him back roughly.

‘Doddypoll!’ she spat, sounding almost tearful. ‘Ninny! What are your wits worth? Lie down and stay there, or I’ll break your pate!’ Mosca could not help feeling that Laylow’s bedside manner lacked a little polish. Appleton fell back with a thump, and a groan of pain and frustration.

‘Witch-kitten!’ Appleton sounded not far from tears himself. ‘You infernal haglet! If you had an ounce of heart…’ His eyelids drooped shut again, and his breath returned to its feverish murmuring.

Laylow gave Mosca another knuckle-nudge in the ribs, and drew her away from the bed to a distance where their whispers would not disturb the sleeper.

‘No doctors.’ Laylow’s eyes rested fully on Mosca’s face for the first time, and for an instant Mosca thought she saw a wrinkle of perplexity, a shade of recognition. But it passed. After all, how could a green foreigner possibly look slightly familiar? ‘There’s no trusting the doctors in this town. But once he’s outside Toll… Can you get him out, by magic or such? A sailor told me a story of a Seisian who had a flying carpet -’

Mosca groaned, and rubbed at her temples with her knuckles. ‘Look, miss – do you think I would still be here in this dreg-pot of a town if I could fly?’ She chewed her cheek, watching to gauge the older girl’s reaction. ‘Why don’t you pay his way out? He… he said there would be money.’

‘There will be!’ Laylow’s boxer-jaw jutted. ‘It’s just… not in our fambles yet.’

Fambles. Another word lodged in a grimy reach of Mosca’s mind, the part that had read every criminal chapbook and hangman’s history to fall into her hands. It was the part of her mind that she had long since given Palpitattle’s name and voice. As she remembered her thieves’ cant, it was Palpitattle’s rasping, sarcastic voice she seemed to hear.

Fambles is hands. Not in our hands yet, is what she is saying. So she and Appleton ain’t got the jewel, have they?

‘Listen!’ Laylow went on. ‘I do not know all the twists of it, but Brand come to me yester-eve and told me that he needed help with a lay. Said he was in deep with some parties, but did not trust them not to take the ribbin and run if they found it within their grasp. So tonight we was out to fetch the gilt, but a gang of scapegallows were waiting for us and set us about on all sides, and one of them stuck Brand through with a blade. They must have took the money – I went back after and searched half the streets in town, but it was gone. So somebody made a pair of calf-lollies out of us, but I will find them, and then Dark Gentleman take me if I do not beat the chink out of them.’

What she means, rasped Palpitattle helpfully, is that Brand was scared of a double-cross. So when he went to get the reward he didn’t trust the folks he was in league with, and asked this wildcat to come with him instead. And she don’t know what’s going on, but she thinks he was betrayed by his comrades, and that the parties what stabbed Mr Not-So-Radical Appleton took the money too. And she wants to get it back.

‘Did he mention any names?’ Mosca kept a sly watch on Laylow’s face. ‘Names of the folks in his gang he didn’t trust?’

Slow nod. ‘Said there was one fellow with a hang-gallows look and a snakish way about him. Name of Skellow.’

Had Brand been right? Had Skellow been waiting for a chance to double-cross him? Could Skellow have been the lean and capering Horse-Man who had stabbed Brand? He was tall and slight enough. Yes. It could have been him.

‘And now Brand wants to go back to his cronies, to their blasted lair!’ muttered Laylow, glancing across at Brand. ‘Cleft-pate gull! Walking in to let them finish their handiwork – that’s a plan and a half!’

‘He…’ Mosca hesitated, wondering if she dared go on. ‘He said something about a girl waiting there, one he had to protect-’

The effect was instantaneous and explosive.

‘Blight take her and every last ringlet! What right does she have – oh, that moping, cow-eyed, dunderheaded gull! I should throw him to the Jinglers! Like a bullock in love with the butcher’s knife! I will, I swear I will, that’ll be a lesson – I knew it, knew she was in Toll-by-Night somehow, knew it – kites and kettles, I’ll – why is the sun not enough for her? Well, plague on the pair of them! I do not care, do not need – but not even her scraps, her cast-offs – she never wanted – Why do you look at me like that.’

Mosca was goggling at her open-mouthed. ‘You’re in love with him!’ she exclaimed accusingly, as Laylow’s tirade ended. ‘You must be – you’ve stopped making any sense!’ Even thieves’ cant was more comprehensible than that.

‘Go kiss a cat,’ snarled Laylow. Which was not, Mosca reflected, exactly a ‘no’.

Mosca thought about trying to tell a hysterical, lovelorn, claw-handed renegade that her dear Brand had actually kidnapped another woman so as to force her to marry him, but she thought that might go down like a lead chaffinch.

‘I offered to go back there in his place – look to the lie of the land,’ Laylow went on. ‘But he would have none of it. Would not trust me. Or tell me where to find those blackguards’ stop-hole.’ She glared at Mosca with a sudden flare of suspicion. ‘So what did he want with you, if you’ve no medicine nor tricks to help him? What are you for?’

‘I – I’m a Teacher!’ squeaked Mosca quickly, eyes on her companion’s sharp claw tips. ‘Ask him yourself! Teaching him radical matters, telling him how to get to Mandelion -’

As soon as the words were out, she could have bitten her tongue. Laylow gasped as if the air had been knocked out of her.

‘Mandelion? He is… leaving? Never told me – never told me he was leaving…’

Brand Appleton was stirring again, but Laylow seemed too stunned to notice, and Mosca scrambled to his side unhindered, glad to be out of reach of the claws.

‘Teacher!’ He took hold of her wrist with furtive urgency. ‘Talk quietly, don’t let her hear us – she has a heart of flint, that one, won’t let me leave. I think she spikes the possets to keep me dizzy -’

‘That’s no spiked posset, Mr Appleton,’ Mosca whispered, feeling a reluctant sting of pity. ‘Look at you, you’re all leaked away, limp as an empty wine-bladder. I could help you till my face turned blue, but I would never get you on your feet – not with you like that.’

Appleton sagged with disappointment and frustration, then his grip on her wrist tightened again.

‘You could go! You could go and see how she is, tell her… tell her that I will make all right and she shall be sorry for none of this in the end. And tell the others that if they hurt her, if they frighten her, then I’ll… I’ll… make their hearts into… purses. Or tell them I’ll go to the Jinglers and turn evidence. Tell them I am well and strong and the knife missed me.’ His eyes drifted to Laylow. ‘That scratch-cat! You see how she is – I cannot send her – she would not understand – she hates… but you, you’ll go.’ Large, eager blue eyes met hers, open as summer, mad as hare hopscotch.

Mosca took three deep breaths one after the other, like a diver preparing to plunge.

‘Yeah,’ she whispered softly. ‘I will go for you. For three shilling extra. Paid when you got the rest of the money.’ She could not afford to seem too eager. She would let him think that her face was brightening at the thought of money. ‘So… where do I go?’

Mosca had to stoop to hear the kidnapper’s whispered words, and straightened with her eyes full of black mischief and wonder and suppressed excitement. She hardly dared meet Laylow’s gaze as she edged back towards her.

‘Your friend there – he has a notion that he will start to mend if he drinks a posset made of… whey and thistle wine. I told him I would find some, and it settled him down. For now, anyway.’

‘Whey and thistle wine.’ Laylow’s brow creased again. ‘Will that help him?’

‘Maybe. It cannot hurt.’ The door was six feet away. All Mosca had to do was talk her way outside it. ‘I can find you thistle wine for him, and honey, and… and blood sausage to help his strength, but I’ll want paying for it when you find that chink of yours.’

Laylow rubbed the back of her head, the callouses rasping against the wiry, cropped fuzz of her hair.

‘Well, then – go! Come back when you have them – and tell nobody what you seen or heard here.’

‘Of course not! I’m not a…’ Mosca remembered one of Laylow’s own choice words for idiot. ‘I’m not a doddypoll.’

A lock turned. A door opened. And then Mosca was out on the frozen streets again, quivering with the shock and disbelief of a fisherman who has trailed his rod for a particular large and dangerous fish, only to see it unexpectedly leap into the belly of his boat.

At long last she knew where Beamabeth Marlebourne was being held prisoner.