Fly By Night

who never talked about the Stationers had been Quillam Mye, despite the fact that in Mandelion he had once been a Stationer himself.

In Chough there had always been rumours that Mye had been expelled from the Stationers. Within a day of his death, in fear of that ruthless Guild, the villagers had ransacked his shelves and made a bonfire of his books and manuscripts. In Chough it was said that as the books burned, twisted letters were seen fleeing the blaze, like spiders scrambling out of burning logs.

This memory filled Mosca with a bitterness beyond bearing. Most of her father’s books she had never read. He had always promised that she could look through them when she was ten, ‘when her brain was no longer soft enough to take a careless thumbprint’. They should have been her legacy. Instead, all her father had left her was an inauspicious first name, the ability to read and an all-consuming hunger for words.

Nonetheless, despite their fear of the Stationers, most people regarded them as a necessary evil. Better the devil we know, they thought, than the devil we have known…

The devil we have known. Mosca tipped her head back, one hand holding her bonnet in place. A heartshaped gape of sky stared back at her.

The Heart had been the reason for the bloodiest ten years the nation had ever known.

It was said that there had always been many religions, one for each Beloved. But one day, according to legend, a glowing heart had appeared in the chest of every Beloved shrine icon and beaten three times. From that day, all the little religions became one, and everyone believed in a strange, faceless spirit that joined the Beloved together, and which they called the Consequence.

Every church was built with a hole high on one wall, into which was fitted a heart-shaped birdcage, a-flutter with newly captured wild birds. The throb of their wings gave the Heart a beat, to remind the people of the Consequence. The priests who captured these birds daily were known as the Birdcatchers. In time they became custodians of all sacred texts and devoted their lives to staring into the White Heart of the Consequence in order to understand it.

Afterwards it was hard to be sure exactly when the sublime light had dazzled their minds and driven them mad, since they went insane with such calm and dignity that nobody noticed. However, among themselves they secretly started to tell a different version of the story of the coming of the Consequence. They said that those with true vision had seen the Heart glow and beat, then blossom into flame and consume the old Beloved icons completely, so that only the Heart remained. In time, they said, everything should return to the Heart and become a part of its searing light. The highest destiny of any worldly thing was to burn. The highest duty of any person was to become like flame.

On one side of the nave Mosca noticed a narrow arch across which a metal grille had been nailed. Behind the grille, stone steps spiralled steeply into darkness, and she guessed that they had once led to a Birdcatcher library.

Aside from the Stationers, the Birdcatchers alone held the right to print. Later, their extraordinary books became a matter of whispered legend. Words printed in a spiral, like a whirlpool that drew in the reader’s mind and never let it escape. Incantations in strange languages which, if read, opened boxes in the mind and let out the imps of madness. Phrases so beautiful that they broke your heart like an egg.

The Birdcatchers’ rise to power had been insidious. Amid the turmoil of thirty years of civil war and rocky Parliament rule, nobody had really noticed how many of the powerful men had been taught in Birdcatcher schools, or how many had been converted by the clever Birdcatcher books. At last, when the Realm was thrashing around like a feverish invalid, the Birdcatchers had stepped forward like doctors to lay a cool hand on its brow and calm it. Mosca had seen old men weep when they remembered the day the Birdcatcher priests took power. Ah, they whispered, how joyful we were! We knew they would bring us peace, they would unite the people and the Beloved in happiness, they would put a bit in the mouth of the Realm and rein it tame…

Then the Birdcatchers began killing the Beloved.

First the new rulers had declared Goodman Criesinthedark a demon. Everybody had been very shocked to learn this, but Criesinthedark had very few worshippers, so there had been little outcry when they were whipped in the marketplace and the Goodman’s shrines burned. Ah, sighed the old men, how relieved we were that we had found out about Criesinthedark in time!

But the next month the shrines of Goodlady Jobble were in flames, and her worshippers were being branded above the eyebrow. A month after that, Goodman Haleweather was also declared a demon. His church icons vanished, never to be seen again… and so did his worshippers. That is the last of it, everybody had told each other. The Birdcatchers have saved us from these demons, but that is the last of it…

But the nightmare continued, and day after day the people were told that another of the Beloved was really a demon in disguise as they watched their neighbours being led away in chains. It took most of them years to face the fact that the Birdcatchers meant to stamp out belief in the Beloved altogether. The worst of it, said the old men, was the feeling that the gods themselves were helpless and frightened. The Birdcatchers had spies everywhere, and people grew afraid to pray, to speak, to think…

… and then, after ten years of terror, something changed in the hearts of the chidden population. The fearful murmurs of protest became a buzz like summer-maddened bees, and then a hurricane roar of outrage. Heedless of menaces and musketfire, the people of the Realm had risen up and driven the Birdcatchers into hiding, into the sea, into the prisons and execution yards.

After the fall of the Birdcatchers, the Stationers had made it clear how much of the madness had been spread by the Birdcatchers’ books, their terrible, poisonous books. These books had been burned, and the Heart had been ripped out of every church in the country, leaving an empty hole.

Perhaps the Heart would have given a sense of oneness and completeness that the rabble of reinstated Beloved did not provide. The Heart would have given one the chance to lose oneself in staring away and away into a brilliant nothingness. Perhaps that would have been something worth believing in, Mosca thought dangerously, giddy with her own treason.

A thin wind blew through the gap and chased straw in circles around the floor. Mosca gave a sharp wriggle of her shoulders, and shrugged off her unease. She pulled out the purse, felt it for weight, and then opened it. A moment later she was running from the church, banging her shoulder against the door in her hurry.

The purse contained only a farthing, two pieces of slate and a jumble of metal scraps and mellowberry pips. With the keen instincts of the unloved, Mosca knew that Clent had contrived this errand so that he could abandon her in Kempe Teetering.

C is for Contraband

Mistress Bessel looked up quickly as Mosca clattered into her shop, and did not seem surprised to see her agitated and out of breath. She peered down at the jumble of oddments in Mosca’s palm and tutted.

‘Well, that was a mean trick to play. I thought he would at least leave you with a little money in your pocket. Still -’ she sighed in a motherly way – ‘you’re not far from home, so I dare say you can make your way back to Chough having learned a lesson, and no harm done.’ Mistress Bessel’s shrewd blue eyes moved across Mosca’s face as if she was itching to ask whether any harm had been done.

Mosca clenched her mouth shut, biting back the words that were buzzing to be released.

‘There now,’ said Mistress Bessel, mistaking Mosca’s silent rage for distress. ‘Has he… taken something from you, blossom?’

Mosca gave her a dark, furtive glance, came to a quick decision and nodded.

‘Well, that is a little too bad of him, but you should have known better than to put your faith in a scapegrace like Eponymous Clent. Did you really mean to traipse all the way to Mandelion at his heels?’