Twilight Robbery aka Fly Trap

Goodman Doublethread, King of Consequences

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 secretary 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?’

Mosca nodded. The Marlebournes had emerged from the eastern gate with the general exodus, Beamabeth veiled in a vain attempt to avoid the new scorn with which she was widely regarded.

‘I still feel… Mosca narrowed her eyes. ‘I feel like she got away with it.’

‘Would you have her birched in the public square? Baited by dogs perhaps? Madam, we have destroyed her good name, and she will find the world a much colder and darker place as a result. Even now her father is probably changing her name to Buzzletrice.

‘And you may comfort yourself with the thought that you have been the caltrop under her satin shoe every step of the way. You misdirected the Romantic Facilitator she had hired, you turned up in her own house and reported her plans to her father and when she was on the brink of snatching the ransom you careered in from stage left dressed as a pantomime horse and threw everything into disorder. And then, just when she was probably working her way towards claiming a second ransom, you rescued her.’

This did indeed make Mosca feel a good deal better. After all, she reflected, I got an idea what happened to that radish of hers.

‘I wonder what did happen to the first ransom?’ Clent reflected wistfully. Evidently his own thoughts had strayed in a similar direction.

‘No idea, Mr Clent,’ Mosca declared, her eyes two spoonfuls of black innocence.

‘Alack. Well, child, at least I have good news. I chanced upon a member of the Guild of Stationers, and after only a little scuffing of the truth made it plain to him that we had nobly and ingeniously prevented a town falling into the hands of the Locksmiths, for the sake of the Stationers. Once again, madam, our star seems to be in the ascendant, our colours climbing the pole. In short, it seems I shall have buyers for my poems… and we might not need to live on rocks and grass this winter.’

He glanced across at Saracen, who was happily tugging at the grass with his beak, his neck a muscular loop, the grass giving with a deep, meaty ripping sound.

‘Though one of our number seems to favour that diet. I can understand the grass… but why does that perilous creature of yours eat pebbles?’

‘Cos he’s only got teeth for biting, not chewing,’ answered Mosca, not quite meeting Clent’s eye. ‘He swallows little rocks and they sit in his crop and roll around each other, grindin’ his food up like little grindstones.’ She gave Clent a brief needle-sharp glance, but his interest seemed to be idle. She decided to change the subject completely.

‘Mr Clent? I… I just had a word with Mr Goshawk.’

Clent looked up sharply. ‘Well, you appear to be still breathing, though your countenance is not reassuring. What did Mr Goshawk have to say?’

‘He… He didn’t quite offer me a job, and I didn’t quite say no.’

‘I see. Well, I suppose there is only so long one can make a hobby of deciding the fates of cities before it attracts attention. Did he quite manage to say whether the morn will find our battered bodies in the river’s embrace?’

‘I told him you still had a lot to teach me, an’ he said he’d send somebody to ask me again on my next nameday.’ Mosca gave a grimace. ‘Borrowed time, that’s all.’

‘I generally find,’ Clent murmured after a pause, ‘that it is best to treat borrowed time the same way as borrowed money. Spend it with panache, and try to be somewhere else when it runs out.’

‘And when we get found, Mr Clent, when the creditors and bailiffs come after us and it’s payment time…’

‘… then we borrow more, madam, at higher interest. We embark on a wilder gamble, make a bigger promise, tell a braver story, devise a more intricate lie, sell the hides of imaginary dragons to desperate men, climb to ever higher and more precarious ground… and later, of course, our fall and catastrophe will be all the worse, but that later is our watchword, Mosca. We have nothing else – but we can at least make later later.’

Saracen showed no distress at being scooped up with every sign of haste. His world was one of disaster and near-disaster, and he was used to sudden exits, often accompanied by screams, pursuit and the smell of smoke. Another day, another exodus. He met the future with tiny, black and fearless eyes, his bully brow full of goosely daring and a crown jewel of the realm in his crop.