Without knowing it, Mosca Mye was at that very moment imitating his expression exactly, not twenty yards away, her stomach knotting itself with apprehension. As soon as the locks on the false wooden wall covering the secret frog-door had been unfastened and the sound of jingling faded, she had emerged and sprinted for the Twilight Gate. Now she sat watching from the furthest reaches of the street. The plan that she had contrived that afternoon with Clent and Sir Feldroll was about to be put into action.
As she watched, the little door to the Twilight Gate opened and five figures emerged. Without a moment’s hesitation they scattered, each taking their own pre-planned route. If there were spies watching for new arrivals, it was unlikely that they would be able to pursue
all
of them.
Mosca grinned with relief as she saw the plan being followed, then turned about and ran towards the agreed rendezvous. The rags she had tied about her clogs turned her feet into fat, ragged mopheads, but they did not ring out against the cobbles.
The reinforcements would be a medley of all the cooperative nightnames that could be mustered in desperation at a few hours’ notice. One ex-soldier attached to Sir Feldroll, one man with a visitor’s pass who had consented to join the rescue in exchange for the toll out of Toll . . . and three prisoners from the Grovels, the grisly cell into which Mosca had been thrown a couple of nights before. All three had leaped at the first chance of pardon and freedom they had seen in several long years.
The rendezvous point was a darkened archway that Mosca had chosen because the slanting light of the early-evening moon did not touch the neighbouring alleys, and it could be reached at a run without stepping into the light. She was the first to arrive, and tucked herself away into the recess, hugging her ribs and forcing her breathing to slow. At last she heard footsteps and panting breaths approach.
‘Prattler’s Jack!’ she whispered, tensed to run again if the right password was not given.
‘Sangrin’s Tumble!’ came the answer. Both were the names of dice games. ‘Is that Mye?’
‘Every inch. Tuck yourself in here with me – we wait five minutes for the others and then we wait no more.’
Three more figures arrived to whisper the right password within the next two minutes. Mosca clenched her fists and counted her heartbeats until five minutes had passed without any sign of their last comrade.
There would be no more waiting. The plan had been quite specific on that point.
If any of you thinks you are being followed, then do not go to the rendezvous. If you cannot lose your shadow, then lose yourself in Toll, and pray that you are not lost in good earnest
.
‘We’re in your hands, Mye.’ Mosca thought it was probably Sir Feldroll’s man speaking. ‘Where now?’
‘The Chutes,’ whispered Mosca. ‘Undertaker district. Stay close, and keep your steps soft.’
In your hands
. The hands in question were shaking, and not just with the cold. Fear of the Locksmiths and Skellow’s thumb-cutting knife flooded Mosca but did not fill her. Somehow there was room in her core for an angry little knot of excitement, tight and fierce as a pike’s grin.
Being a Locksmith meant never having to kick down a door. A flick, a click, and there you were in the hallway.
Sometimes there were screams, but usually the breath people drew in to bellow at you leaked out in little whimpers once they realized what you were. Sometimes the truth hit them like a fist to the belly, and they literally crumpled to the floor. Something had brought the Locksmiths to their door, and they would do anything, say anything, sell anyone to make them go away again.
‘Yes, Laylow does stay here sometimes – but she has not been here this last week! Here – let me show you the room she uses! And this is where she hides her packages, under the floorboard! Yes, I can give you the names of her friends . . .’
Search the room, picking up her few belongings. Gather up the chocolate-scented, muslin-wrapped packages from their hole in the wainscot. Snatch up a chicken leg from the landlady’s table on the way out.
Being a Locksmith meant never having to say sorry.
‘Nobody told me you were a
foreigner
.’ Sir Feldroll’s ex-soldier sounded disgruntled and suspicious. The little rescue party’s steps had taken them now into more open streets, and when they crossed a patch of moonlight Mosca’s outlandish garb and greenish skin had become visible.
‘Well, nobody told me
you
were a slack-bellied noddy with a busy jaw,’ Mosca retorted sharply. ‘I guess we both got cause to complain.’
‘Just show us the Chutes, you peppery little minx!’ the other snapped.
It was not just the fact that she was green, Mosca suspected, that was causing her new comrade’s sudden hostility. Perhaps he had not realized until now how young she was. Perhaps now he felt absurd at having placed himself under her captaincy. The giddy, terrifying sense that she was in control of a unit of men started to slip away from her, like a giant’s boot falling absurdly off her narrow foot.
‘How would you like a new grin for a necktie?’ came a sudden snarl from behind Mosca. She turned to find that one of the ex-prisoners from the Grovels was glaring at the soldier hot-eyed. His face seemed to have been used as a whetstone, and a mesh of scars folded his forehead and left his eyebrows as dotted lines. ‘Leave the little mort be, or I’ll tie your tongue to the railings!’
The threat, implausible as it was, served to silence the other man. Perhaps he reflected that even a failed attempt to execute it was likely to be very, very painful. Or perhaps he had noticed the way in which the other two ex-convicts had moved supportively to Mosca’s side.
‘Pratin’ popinjay,’ one of them whispered in her ear. ‘Bold enough in the street, ain’t he? But if
he
was dropped into the spring-ankle warehouse, he’d be keening like a kitten.’
Mosca understood, and turned her head to give the speaker a nasty little grin of agreement, which he answered with a wink. ‘Spring-ankle warehouse’ was a cant term for prison. Somehow, in spite of her disguise, the Grovellers had recognized her as their former cell-mate – perhaps because they had met her in darkness and known her only through her voice and temper. In the Grovels she had been their prey, but now they were part of the same fraternity – at least while there was a chance to gang up on somebody who had never known leg irons. Belatedly, it seemed, Mosca was getting her garnish-worth.
‘Any more gabble? No? Then come this way.’ She hoped she was sounding confident. The rescue party’s odds were poor enough without them fighting among themselves.
‘Laylow? Yes, came in here for a dram o’ gin two nights ago with that young radical cove, the firebrand with the mad eyes. No, I never listen in, but the Beloved put ears on our heads, and mine pull in sound something fearsome. So . . . I hear him asking her for help, saying he don’t trust some folks . . . something about a horse . . .
‘No, I do not know where she lays her head. Perhaps you ask her radical friend? What? No, not as such, but I have often seen him a-walkin’ off towards the Chutes . . .’
It was in the Chutes, of course, that the plans became shaky, for Mosca had never even been in this district before. There were a few wrong turns in the glistening streets, and Mosca’s hairs rose at the thought of her ‘followers’ losing confidence in her. On either side of the streets were ominous stacks of person-size boxes. Some were cracked and battered wood, and she slipped past them as fast as she could, fearful of glimpsing a dead eye or pallid hand through a crevice. Here and there in tiny shrines models of Goodman Postrophe stood sentinel, ready to squirt mellowberry juice into the eyes of any dead who decided to climb out of their boxes. His presence was only slightly reassuring.
There were sounds as well, from deep in the icy, intestinal tangle of streets. A stutter of wood being dragged across cobbles. A shriek of a metal winch. A clatter of hatches. A weightless handful of silent seconds, then a smash far below, softened by echo, so that it was little more than a cough in the Langfeather’s throat.
‘There.’ It was exactly as Brand Appleton had described, a cooper’s shop opposite an abandoned alehouse with a broken door. It stood on the corner, a small cask swaying from a chain over the door. It was a mean, narrow little shop with one small shuttered window at the front, and two floors above it.
‘How many inside?’ asked the soldier.
‘Five,’ answered Mosca. ‘Maybe six. And the lady.’
‘Then we’ll have to move fast – knock down anyone in the shop, then run upstairs, kick in the door and cover all within with our pistols before they can hurt the lady . . .’ The soldier trailed off, realizing that nobody was actually listening to him. Mosca and the other ex-Grovellers had formed a huddle and gone into muffled conference.
‘. . . milled a ken like this when I was nine,’ one was saying. ‘No point in puffing our way up the stairs and expecting to catch ’em winking – these old wooden steps ring out underfoot like a regiment of drums.’
‘Roof, maybe?’ Another ex-convict leaned back. ‘Boggarts take it, I can see no holes. Pity we cannot whip in at a glaze – and the chimney looks too narrow, even for Mye—’
‘No – the trick is to sneak up there, or bring those bullies
down
the stairs, one at a time,’ interrupted the first again, the man with the whetstone face. ‘We need a lay to hook ’em in.’
‘Well, however we gull ’em, it had better be sweet and swift,’ whispered Mosca. ‘Or we shall have the Jinglers snappin’ at our heels!’
She glanced up at Sir Feldroll’s man, and felt a bittersweet flush of malicious satisfaction. Perhaps she felt out of place in Toll-by-Night, but it was plain that this was nothing compared to the plight of the soldier. His eyes looked fearful, dazzled by the unfamiliar mosaic of murk and moonlight. The thieves’ cant terms that were starting to roll off her tongue so glibly bounced off his ears like pebbles.
Mosca was a fast learner, and after three nights she was starting to think and speak as a nightling. She was learning to see in the dark. At another time, this might have worried her.
A tall Locksmith came out of a gin-shop’s back room, pulling off his gloves. He tucked them in a pocket and replaced them with clean ones.
‘The cooper in the Chutes,’ was all he said to his companions. Without another word they rose and followed him out through the front-door. They left it ajar, letting the wind play over the broken furniture within.
The cooper looked up from the splayed staves of a half-fashioned firkin when the door of his shop swung open. Two men had entered, both of them strangers, rolling in a heavy-looking hogshead barrel over three feet high.
‘Hey, cooper!’ called one of them. ‘We’ve a barrel that’s split and starting to spill – can you take a look and tell us if you can mend the crack without taking out all the grain? We’re in a hurry.’
‘Not likely.’ Whistling under his breath, the cooper strolled towards his customers, a hammer dangling from one strong, calloused hand. ‘But let us have a look at it.’ He prised away the lid of the cask, and froze.
Holding her breath inside the barrel, Mosca saw the rounded roof of her cramped world tugged away abruptly and replaced by the face of a startled young man. He was not handsome, having a bunched sort of nose that wanted to be a fist. His lumpy, good-humoured mouth was pursed with whistling, but as he saw the pistol gripped tightly in her hands the whistle died and was replaced by a breathy little thread of sound.
Mosca could hardly breathe. Her knees were tucked tight against her chest. The metal of the pistol was very cold, and her two fingers tucked around the trigger shook uncontrollably. The cooper had wide, light-coloured eyes. She thought they might be green.
‘Keep whistling,’ whispered the Groveller with the whetstone face, ‘and put down your hammer.’
The cooper wet his lips and managed a husky warbled note. He stooped and obediently laid down his hammer.
‘Clever lad,’ murmured Whetstone-face approvingly. ‘Keep your wits this way, and you’ll live long enough to bounce grandchildren on your knees.’
While one of the Grovellers took up the cooper’s whistle, mimicking the tune perfectly, the cooper obeyed the orders muttered by Whetstone-face. He sat down on a barrel, and let his hands be tied behind his back. He answered questions about the rooms upstairs, the number of people, the stations of the guards. Mosca listened, her stomach curdling. Everything was going according to plan, but somehow she did not feel like a rescuer any more. She felt like a robber. It was the fearful eye-whites of the cooper, and the fierce, oily smell of the pistol.
‘Come on, Mye,’ said one of her comrades, tipping her barrel so that she tumbled out of it and dropped her gun with a clatter.
One Groveller listened at the door behind the counter, then very carefully turned a key from the cooper’s belt in its lock and opened it. The cooper was bound and gagged, and left in the care of the increasingly perplexed and disdainful ex-soldier. Two of the Grovellers slipped through the door and on to the stairway beyond, Mosca and the third Groveller just a few paces behind. The man in front of Mosca took the greatest care to step along the edges of the stairs so they did not creak, and Mosca copied him.
They had just reached the door at the top of the stairs when there was a crash from the shop below, and a hoarse cry. Instantly the door before them was flung open and two men hurled themselves out of it. To judge by their expressions, they only realized mid-hurl that they were flying past four flabbergasted strangers who had just flattened themselves against the wall to let them pass. With remarkable presence of mind, Whetstone-face stuck out a leg to hook the ankle of the foremost, and the pair went tumbling down the stairs, using their bellies and faces as toboggans.
Still pressed back against the wall, Mosca saw the Grovellers bound through the door into the open room. She wondered whether she was supposed to be holding the fallen men prisoner with her little pistol. But she could not bring herself to point the pistol at them, for in her mind’s eye she could so easily imagine hiccuping with fear and sending a little bead of death through somebody’s forehead. In any case, they did not seem ready to get up yet.