Twilight Robbery (53 page)

There were a lot of other words that Clent used after this, mostly to describe his opinion of Mosca’s conduct. None of them were profane, but all of them were long and highly specific, and Mistress Leap might as well have been a goose for all the sense she could make of them.

Over Toll, the gunpowder-scented smoke that had been rising lazily was suddenly tugged and pulled apart like a dragged cobweb. Birds who had been beating their wings spread them and soared, washing lines came to life and the town’s few weathervanes started awake with a quiver and swung to point the opposite way.

Outside the town, Sir Feldroll twitched, stared about him, then wetted his forefinger and lifted it into the rising wind.

‘Hellfeathers! The wind has risen again, and now it is blowing from the south! Where did those mortars land?’ From the trails of smoke it was clear that one had, in any case, landed closer to the centre than intended. Mortars were hard to aim at the best of times, and on such uneven ground the times were anything but best. ‘Have our diplomats gone in yet to negotiate the mayor’s surrender? No? Good. Hold them back until we can see whether the fires in the town get out of control.’

Eponymous Clent puffed into earshot just in time to catch Sir Feldroll’s words.

‘Sir Feldroll – am I to understand that the town is now in real danger of burning?’

‘The wind changed direction,’ snapped Sir Feldroll. He had been shaken by this new lesson in the imprecision of war. He was many things, but an experienced soldier he was not. ‘But the townspeople must have arrangements for such . . .’ He did not finish his sentence. Perhaps, like Clent, he was thinking of Toll’s complacent reliance on their Luck to defend them against calamity.

‘Sir Feldroll, I . . .’ Clent closed his eyes as if in pain, made a few grimaced attempts to continue, then pressed his fingertips together and steeled himself. ‘I would like,’ he went on, with an expression that indicated the very opposite of liking, ‘to volunteer to take the place of your diplomats and approach the mayor for you. Fate . . . fate has clearly allotted me this role. After all, I belong to neither of your cities – what better intermediary could you choose?’

‘Mr Clent!’ Sir Feldroll stared at him, his features managing a remarkable tug of war between gratitude and suspicion. ‘After all that has happened, you are happy to go as my ambassador into Toll?’

‘Happy? No. Willing? Barely. Compelled by some pustule of honour I shall lance if I survive the day? So it would seem.’

One of the canisters had rattled down to street level, where it had blown in shutters, shattered windows and left its fragments smoking on the cobbles and a little stream of flaming liquid running down the kennel ditch at the centre of the street. But the second had lodged in a cluster of chimneys, where its explosion had scattered burning oil over tile and thatch. Now the wind was stroking the young flames, and dozens of tiny red-gold sparks were taking wing like thistledown.

They blew out across a town full of timber and plaster, covered in facings of wood light enough to be moved at dusk and dawn. A crowded town where flames might leap from house to house and never be made to halt. A town just waiting to be burned.

‘Fire! Fire!’ Mosca ran from street to street, screaming it at the top of her voice, and heard it echoed everywhere. ‘We got to stop it spreading! We got to tear houses down so it cannot spread along the rows!’

That was what had been done in the Ravens, the soot-blackened neighbourhood where Clent had met with Skellow in Brotherslain Walk. There had been a fire, and in spite of all their rules about who should be locked indoors at which times of day, the people of Toll had grabbed something heavy and torn down houses, locked doors and all, to stop the spread of the flames.

Mosca was counting on them doing the same now, if she could fill them with enough panic. Brand and Laylow were on the wrong side of a locked door, and so was the Luck. She could only reach them if the barriers started to fall. Everybody was terrified of the Locksmiths, but you could fight fear with fear. If there was anything that the townspeople would fear more than the Locksmiths, it would be fire. And it didn’t matter whether it was a dangerous fire, providing everybody thought it was.

‘Fire! F—’

Mosca smelt smoke, turned a corner into a wave of unexpected warmth and gaped at a blazing street. Windowpanes were popping, plaster blackening, black smoke churning between timber joints. This was no smoke display. Sir Feldroll’s ‘warning’ had decided to carry itself out in good earnest.

‘Oh dungbuckets!’ she exclaimed breathlessly, then turned to yell at other fleeing figures. ‘Hey! HEY! Come back! We got to tear down these houses! There are people locked in there!’

‘Lass! Come away!’ A tall man in a smithy’s apron ran out and seized her by the arm, dragging her away from a large shower of sparks. ‘Lass, what—’

He stopped dead. Now that he had joined Mosca in the street, he could hear what she could hear: a chorus of thin, muffled cries from behind the plasterwork of the buildings.

‘Goodlady Syropia’s mercy! The nightlings!’ His honest features contorted with indecision as his eyes flicked between the blazing timberwork and the gleaming Locksmith locks just visible at the edges of the facings. She could see the agony of fear and superstition, and she thought for a moment he would flee and pretend he had not heard the cries. Then he spun Mosca around and took her by the shoulders. ‘Run down to my forge – corner of Tattle Street – and find my brothers. Tell them to bring as many hammers as they can, and rally some strong arms willing to wield ’em.’

Mosca was running even as he finished his sentence, and was soon back with a gaggle of the smith’s family and friends. The smith seized the largest hammer out of his brother’s hand and ran forward to confront the locks that held the nearest facing in place.

‘What are you doing?’ Another man ran forward, catching at the smith’s arm as he raised the hammer to strike at the locks. ‘What about the Locksmiths – have you gone mad? And the nightlings, you will release them upon us all!’

The two men struggled for the hammer, and Mosca felt the watchers stir, uncertain which side to help. Then the smith knocked his attacker down with a short, sharp punch to the jaw. He stared around belligerently, then stepped back towards the lock, raising his hammer once again.

‘Beloved preserve me,’ he muttered tremulously, and brought the hammer down upon the lock with shattering force.

Everybody flinched with each blow of the hammer, and when the locks finally splintered and the facing was slid aside to reveal a door, most people there took a step back, as if they expected Night to ooze out of it like star-infested gravy and drown them. But when the door opened, all that staggered out was a young woman with dull fair hair, wild, bitter eyes and an imp-like boy of six clasped in her arms. She shivered in the daylight, and flinched with fearful hostility from the dayfolk around her. The surrounding gaggle gawped aghast at the pair, who were clearly the worse for smoke, shuddering coughs shaking their pitiably thin frames.

‘Break these doors down!’ shouted the smith. ‘Smash those locks and take the sliding house-fronts off! Do the same on that side! You, boy, run to the mayor and tell him what’s happening!’

Nobody noticed a twelve-year-old girl stooping next to a charred timber, testing its warmth with a fingertip, then using the soot to smear her face, arms and dress.

In shattering that first day-night door, the smith appeared to have broken a spell. Breaching the barrier between day and night was still dreadful to the dayfolk, something that could barely be managed without trembling, but at least now it was possible, thinkable. The nightfolk that scrambled coughing out of their cramped homes might be fear-maddened, ragged and earthworm pale, but none of them had slitted pupils or needles for teeth. They were people. And so more and more daylighters set about wrenching the false faces off the houses, kicking in doors and battering their way past shutters. The impulse spread outwards across the town from that first hammer blow, like a ripple from a dropped stone.

Mosca was not slow to help it spread. Satisfied that here at least people were starting to deal with the fire, she was soon running down another street.

‘Fire!’ she shouted as she went. ‘Fire in Myrtle Street!’

‘Fire in the Winces!’ she shouted a few streets later.

‘Fire in Scupper’s Way!’ soon became her warcry. ‘We got to tear down the houses to break up the rows!’

As she suspected, people were a lot more ready to believe her declarations about the fire when she looked slightly singed. And naturally it was not enough to have people tearing houses down and breaking down doors near to the fires. She needed it to be happening all over Toll, which is why she needed to spread the panic far and wide.

Of course there was one house in particular that she wanted to see torn open, and soon she was cursing Eponymous Clent for selling her map. She had only been to Laylow and Brand’s hideout once, and then it had been dark and half the streets had been in different places.

At last she found what looked like the right street. Naturally there was no door there for her to recognize, only an expanse of innocent-looking plaster criss-crossed with timber, but she was fairly sure that behind it lay Brand Appleton’s sickroom.

‘Please, sirs!’ Her cry halted a set of tradesmen who were hurrying past with hammers, chisels and a set of thatching tools. ‘Can you help me break into this house? There’s a fire a few streets down, and . . .’
And I need you to help me break into this house in particular for reasons I can’t tell you
. ‘And . . .’ she inhaled and took it at a run, ‘and I had a little baby sister born a month ago and she was born to a night name and they took her away nightside and I think she’s living in this house because I hear her crying through the wall some days and can you break in for me please before the fire gets here and roasts her like a piglet?’

Whether her story would have been believed if she had been wearing a dark Palpitattle badge will never be known. However with her borrowed day badge and cast-off gown she had magically become a respectable young lady in distress, albeit a slightly sooty one. She watched hungrily as the false front of the house was levered away with a crack to show the stained wall behind. The dingy door gave in to a few solid kicks.

‘Go find your sister.’ One of the men chucked Mosca under the chin, and then the group of them hurried on. Gingerly Mosca pushed open the splintered door, and jumped back just in time to avoid a claw in the face.

It was probably as well that Laylow had not been the first nightling to stagger into daylight. She was doing a very good impression of the dayfolk’s worst nightmare, squinting ominously against the sun, her metal claws raised ready to strike and various bruises and cuts livid on her face.

As she peered at Mosca, however, bemused recognition clouded her eyes.

‘You . . .’ She peered, and her face hardened. ‘Seisian, is it? “Teacher”, is it? You’re no more a foreigner than I am! You’re one of those visitors I helped get dayside some nights ago! What’s your game?’

‘I scarce know misself any more. But we’ll all lose if we don’t play on the same side. Listen – the mayor’s gone limp, Sir Feldroll’s gone mad, the Locksmiths are taking over and the town’s on fire. Beamabeth Marlebourne is safe, and as long as she is nobody else will be. And now we need to rescue the Luck. Can I come in?’

Gabbling through the truth behind Beamabeth’s actions to Brand Appleton was a grisly and unnerving business, but Mosca could see no way to leave it out of her story. At first he simmered at the slightest insinuation against Beamabeth, but as she went on she could see him taking her words on board, and a terrible lost expression crept over his face. Even Laylow looked away, her blunt features pained and embarrassed.

‘So –’ Laylow crushed the silence as she would have done a poisonous bug – you say you have a plan? A way out of this?’

Mosca nodded. ‘We rescue the Luck.’

Laylow rasped a laugh. ‘From the Jinglers? Are you mad? How would that help us anyway?’

‘It
will
help – if we save him from
everybody.
From the Locksmiths, from the mayor, everybody. Get him outside the town walls.’

‘Outside the walls?’ Brand glanced at Laylow, who returned his look of shock, and Mosca remembered that they were born and bred Tollfolk, brought up on stories of the Luck’s protective power.

‘Oh Prill’s snout – don’t tell me you believe the town will fall off the cliff if the Luck steps outside!’ Their expressions

suggested that they might. ‘Well – and what if it does? This town is
rotten
. All that matters is the people in it, and most of them want to get out of it. Any town that has to keep folk inside it using walls an’ guns an’ fear is wrong to its roots. And if a town needs to lock up some lad just to feel safe, then maybe it don’t deserve to feel safe.

‘Right now, dayfolk are pulling the Locksmiths’ walls down. You know what that means? Just for once nobody’s surprised to see nightfolk running about the streets. You can slip out of this house, maybe head to the gate, and as long as nobody recognizes Mr Appleton people will jus’ think you were let out because your street was burning.