Twilight Robbery aka Fly Trap

The Keeper whistled, and a pair of turnkeys came running. The vice-like hands on Mosca’s shoulders were traded in for other vice-like hands, and she was dragged to a nearby spiral stairway. As she had feared, she was led not up but down the darkened steps, her legs shaking with fear and the seeping chill of the old stones. She smelt her prison before she reached it, a reek of sickness and rotten straw and chamber-pot perfumes and a gagging aroma of broken meat. At the bottom of the stairs the Keeper opened a low arched door, and the smell became overwhelming.

There were several figures in the low-ceilinged cell beyond, but as the door opened they retreated from the light to the shadows of the walls in a way that reminded Mosca of rats, except that rats do not usually give off a metallic jangle as they move.

‘Since you’re new, I’ll run through the charges. There’s a fee for rent o’ course, but the Grovels down here is easy on the purse – you don’t pay till you leave. And as a newcomer you pay a “garnish” – that’s a bit of courtesy to the other guests.’ The Keeper nodded towards the other figures in the cell. ‘Just enough to buy ’em each a tipple so they can drink your health. You’ll be wanting to pay that. If you don’t, the worst of ’em will take what they’re owed out of your hide. And o’ course, all luxuries is extra.’

‘Luxuries?’ Mosca stared at him. ‘I don’t want any luxuries!’

‘Yes, you do. Luxuries being, you see, things like food. And drink. And blankets. And not being clapped in irons.’

‘But… I ’aven’t got any money!’

The Keeper stared at her, and something changed in his face, making his jaw heavier and his single eye hot and dull. Mosca noticed muscle meat in his arms, the cudgel at his belt, the scars around his hairline. Suddenly she felt like a doll of sticks.

‘Missy, I hear that every day.’ The Keeper grimaced and shook his head with long-suffering disgust. ‘And yet somehow people find they can come by the coin when their backs are up against the wall – and yours is against the wall, make no mistake. They beg, or borrow, or call on help from friends, or find things for me to sell. And those that can’t have no place coming here and trying to take advantage of a poor businessman.’

The other ‘guests’ were not slow to claim their ‘garnish’. They closed on Mosca almost as soon as the door shut behind the Keeper, turned her upside down and shook her to see what fell out. One grimy hand snatched at Mistress Bessel’s handkerchief, another slyly snatched the Little Goodkin bracelet from her wrist.

The woman who tried to grab at Mosca’s pipe, however, found herself with a fight on her hands. Another prisoner was sitting on Mosca’s legs so that she could not kick, but she scratched and bit and wrestled until the would-be thief gave up. The others retreated to survey their finds, leaving Mosca curled in a ball around the pipe, her ribs and ears bruised from blows.

Only when she was sure that her fellow ‘guests’ had lost interest in her did she dare to uncurl a little from her hedgehog pose. It was too dark for her to make out faces, but she could hear the murmur of thieves’ cant, the slang of the world’s underbelly. Nightowls, probably. As they talked, it became clear that most of them had once been visitors with ‘night names’, who had been arrested for one crime or another and had been languishing in the Grovels ever since.

Prisons swallowed men like cherry pips, she knew that much. They were arrested for this or that, and then somebody lost the papers and it never came to trial and meanwhile they starved or sickened from rotten meat or had their heads stove in by their jailers. Prison was a pit, and once you’d fallen in you had a devil of a time climbing out again, unless you had money, a good name or powerful friends. Mosca had none of these.

There’s Mr Clent.

Hah. He’s too fond of his own neck to stick it out for me.

For a while she buried her face in her apron and shook, until the muslin was damp and her breaths were ragged.

Oh, stop snivelling, she told herself at last. Saracen would come for you, if he was a man – he’d come with three brace of pistols at his belt. But he’s a goose, and that’s all there is to that. You’re on your own.

Mosca felt as if she was sharing a cave with a pack of wolves, all snarling at each other in the darkness. As runt of the pack, she guessed that her best chance of survival was to attract as little attention as possible. This, however, did not turn out to be easy.

‘Oi.’ Somebody poked her with a shackled foot. ‘You don’t want to lie there. You’re in Magpackin’s spot.’

Mosca rolled away, and pulled herself up into a tight little bundle with her back to a wall.

‘All right, all-bleedin’-right! Take your spot!’ she shrilled.

There was a roar of laughter.

‘Magpackin won’t be taking it back just yet,’ said the largest of the men. ‘He’s wormfood. But that was his lying-spot three good weeks before the Keeper took him away. No release fee paid for him, you see.’

Mosca shuddered, and her hands twitched to her shoulders and hair, eager to brush off any traces of the dead Magpackin, while the other prisoners laughed again at her discomfort.

It was during this hilarity that bolts scraped back and the door opened to show the Keeper’s Cyclops face, illuminated by the lantern in his hand.

‘Visitor for the new girl.’

Mosca’s heart leaped as the Keeper stepped aside. Clearly Clent the word-wizard had somehow waltzed into the stronghold in spite of the mayor’s instruction…

… or perhaps not. Not unless he had decided to infiltrate the prison by donning a white muslin dress, a lace cap and a pair of good kid gloves.

‘You poor child,’ declared Mistress Bessel in viper-blood tones, her sturdy figure filling most of the doorway. ‘I’ve come to bring you a little comfort.’

Goodman Asheneye, Protector of the Hearth

Mosca responded to these sweet sentiments with the short sharp scream of one who has just sat on a kettle.

‘Dear good sir,’ continued Mistress Bessel, holding Mosca’s gaze with a world of meaning in her ice-blue eyes, you see what a shrinking, timid little thing she is? Now you understand why I want a room where I can speak to her alone.’

The Keeper frowned, his patch-strap making diagonal creases across his brow

‘Well, mistress, we do have some private cells, but they are generally put aside for special visitors. Those who can pay for the privilege -’

‘Do it,’ Mistress Bessel interrupted crisply. ‘I’ll buy her a new cell – the one they call Hell’s Eyrie. And I want half an hour alone with her.’

The prospect of being locked up with an enraged Mistress Bessel scattered Mosca’s other fears like a housecat pouncing amidst a congregation of pigeons. However her second squeal of panic only seemed to convince the Keeper that the visitor was right about her shy and quivering nature. He smiled indulgently at Mistress Bessel, smiled indulgently at the coins she placed in his hand and then smiled indulgently at Mosca, somewhat to her confusion and alarm.

‘This way then, ladies.’ Somehow the Keeper’s tone had become that of an obliging host showing affluent guests to the better quarters of an inn. He loosed Mosca’s leg irons, and then led her from the room while the other Grovellers muttered and hissed resentfully.

The stairs coiled upwards past a series of other cells, each just visible through the hatch in the door, none quite as grim as the Grovels. They passed a crammed debtors’ cell where families huddled and lone figures moped and smoked, a female cell where drab-faced girls coughed into their aprons, and an all but lightless male cell full of fury and half-seen movement like a box of ferrets.

‘Here’s your chambers.’ The Keeper halted outside a small oak door, dulled by years to the colour of gunmetal. The stairs, Mosca noticed, had not ended, but continued upwards. The Keeper pulled