‘If nothing is sacred, then we are all left to crawl through the mud, and there is no meaning to anything. Since the Heart of Consequence was ripped out of the churches, even the stars shine crooked in the skies. Everyone goes to church to gossip and envy each other’s hats, but the
The phantom Quillam Mye had paused, pen poised, but she could not tell whether he was re-reading his own words or waiting for hers. The wind shifted, and carried Mosca a whiff of remembered pipesmoke.
‘And yes, amid this poison smog of the soul that is trying to choke out the light of sun, moon and stars, we are trying to rekindle a light. It is a harsh light that will dazzle some and burn others, but it will take the world out of this terrible darkness of Disbelief.’ So this was Kohlrabi’s true face, pale and strange, older than his years, as if his father and countless others were speaking through him. ‘I am content to be hated, and bloody, and outnumbered. For in this sickened world, it is better to believe in something too fiercely than to believe in nothing.’
Words, words, wonderful words. But lies too.
‘No, it isn’t!’ shouted Mosca the Housefly, Quillam Mye’s daughter. ‘Not if what you’re believin’ isn’t blinkin’ well True! You shouldn’t just go believin’ things for no reason, pertickly if you got a sword in your hand! Sacred just means something you’re not meant to think about properly, an’ you should never stop thinking! Show me something I can kick, and hit with rocks, and set fire to, and leave out in the rain, and
Mosca’s voice had become fierce and loud, and the low hills passed her words to and fro, marvelling at them. Kohlrabi’s face softened and took on the gentle, rueful smile with which he had always wished her farewell. The tricorn dropped from his left hand, and Mosca threw herself forward, bruising her chest against the iron mooring ring. Kohlrabi’s smile vanished behind a wreath of smoke. She felt a wind stroke her cheek, as if an invisible dog had licked her face with a long, cold tongue.
The pistol shot shocked Mosca’s ears into white, whistling deafness. Her trembling fingers forced the rough cords of the mooring rope to loosen. On the shore Kohlrabi would be advancing, testing his ground with a careful foot…
But there were other figures on the bank now, sprinting along the paths with swords drawn, calling words that made no sound. Kohlrabi drew his rapier and stepped forward. The foremost of his opponents slithered to a stop too slowly, and took a wicked kick to the kneecap. He staggered and fell to one knee, and the Birdcatcher aimed a vicious cut down towards his face. The stricken man flung up a parry too late, and fell back with a scream.
As Kohlrabi turned and ran, one of his attackers raised and levelled a pistol. Smoke gasped silently out of the gun, and then wind sucked it up greedily and swallowed it. Kohlrabi spun as if to face his pursuers, but somehow the motion did not end, and he kept on spinning right around, toppling sideways at the same time. Mosca saw him break the moon-gilded mirror of the river without making a sound, and then the current took pity on her and drew the ragman’s raft away.
Mosca was sure that the men on the bank would be calling to her, but she huddled herself in a nest of rags, and shivered in silence. It was only after she had drifted for an hour that the ringing faded from her ears. A low, soft booming seemed to sound from the hills like gunfire, but she could not be sure if it existed inside her head or out. At last she raised her head to look at the imagined figure of her father, whose desk was now perched up on the rag- mountain.
‘You weren’t much help,’ she murmured bitterly. ‘Why didn’t you tell me anything about all this?’
‘If you want someone to tell you what to think,’ the phantom answered briskly, without looking up, ‘you will never be short of people willing to do so.’ There. She had it at long last, his voice and manner exactly. Quillam Mye paused to polish his pince-nez, and then squinted at his daughter through them for a long while, as if mildly surprised that she had grown up so much while his attention was elsewhere. ‘Come now,’ he said at last, ‘you can hardly claim that I have left you ignorant. I taught you to read, did I not?’
V is for Verdict
As Mosca found out later, the distant booming she had heard reverberating between the hills was not a buzzing in her stricken eardrums. It was cannonfire.
On receiving Toke’s warning, the Watermen had sent all available boats downstream in two flotillas, one made of swift-skimming vessels, the other of larger, slower vessels, to intercept the ship carrying Lady Tamarind’s troops.
In the short term this meant that a boatload of highly disgruntled Locksmith troops, who had been trying to act upon the orders of their guildmaster in Mandelion to reach the city with all speed, were finally able to sail on without being stopped at every bend in the river by good-natured Watermen who insisted on ‘searching the boat for Captain Blythe’. They reached Mandelion, and found the city in a state of celebratory riot. Disembarking, they were mistaken for reinforcements of Duke’s men, were overwhelmed by the jubilant crowd, and stripped of their weapons and clothes.
The fast Watermen flotilla, meanwhile, reached Fainbless before the moon rose. There was barely time to put men ashore on the bank and a mid-river island before a solitary ship was spied, a three-masted lugger with eight cannon. She flew no colours.
From a tower in Fainbless, the Watermen hailed the unknown ship, waving brands to signal her to shore. Their only answer was an echo, and the crack of gunfire.
Three Watermen were lost as the tower collapsed, and their comrades were not slow to touch off their cannon. The crew of the strange ship knew nothing of the Watermen hidden on the island until a flaming ‘carcass’ arc’d from among the trees and landed mid-deck.
The little Watermen boats flitted and slipped around the great ship like dogs at a baiting, but her muskets and riflemen were too numerous to risk a close approach. Even at long range her cannon ripped their sails.
Just as it seemed that nothing could be done to stop her passing out of range of the Fainbless cannon, the second Watermen flotilla arrived. In desperation a boat was fired and the flaming vessel sent towards the lugger, which steered wildly from its path and grounded itself in unsuspected shallows.
Pelted with carcasses, the lugger slowly burned to the waterline. There was no call for aid from on board, however. No boats were lowered, no survivors were fished out of the water. A superstitious fear settled, and some whispered that the the unknown ship might as well have been crewed and captained by the dead.
It was during the journey back to Mandelion that a sharp-eyed sculler spotted a chilled and feverish Mosca Mye huddled on one bank in the middle of a nest of rags.
Two days later, in a secret antechamber of what had once been the Duke’s Western Spire, Mosca and Clent found themselves standing before a group of quietly insistent men in very clean but well-worn overalls. Some of them wore pince-nez and ink-spattered cravats, and had thick pen-callouses on their third fingers. Some wore gloves and chatelaines of keys, and their colourless eyes watched the world narrowly, like oysters peeping from their shells. Some were tanned brown as conkers, and wore sashes bearing the design of a silver pond-skater against a black background.
‘What amazes me,’ declared Mabwick Toke in a wormwood tone, ‘is that two human beetles of this sort should have played such a large part in creating this diabolical mess.’
Mosca used her free hand to wipe her nose, which was still sore and runny after her recent cold. Her right arm was being held captive by Aramai Goshawk of the Locksmiths’ Guild, while he tried to make out the faint print on her skin.
‘How did this child come by so many bruises? I can hardly read the words.’
‘As I hear it, she has been clambering into, over and under anything that would permit it.’ Toke barked a laugh.
