Twilight Robbery aka Fly Trap

ugly, unpleasant… and possible.

Grimacing, she raised one knee, found a toehold in the stonework with her bare foot and began to climb.

Soot, Mosca decided after she had climbed three yards, was powdered evil. She could not look up without it falling into her eyes and making them burn. She had no hands free to wipe her eyes, and chafing her face against her shoulder just made things worse. Soot was on every ledge, ermine soft, tickling and trickling into her sleeves and collar and ears and mouth, catching her throat and making her cough great soot storms into life.

But while well-born children might have been brought up with improving fables and histories, Mosca had gobbled every gallows chapbook and crime chronicle she could find. So when panic threatened to set her mind on a rat-scamper, she gritted her teeth and thought of every daring jailbreak she had ever read, of Drag Minkem descending from a roof on a rope of blankets, and ‘Swift’ Swathe Ferren swaggering into his favourite tavern still wearing his manacles.

Why is it that every time someone is needed to squeeze up somewhere or under somewhere or into somewhere it ends up being me? Just as well I’m half starved, or I’d stick like a pick.

Each time she moved, loose soot and fragments of hardened tar hissed down the chute and rattled in the hearth below. As Mosca climbed, the hiss took longer and the rattle became more indistinct. Mosca braced her elbows and feet against the encroaching walls, knees tucked close to her chest, all too aware that a missed footing could send her plummeting down in exactly the same way.

You’re on your own. Blackness, narrowness, walls closing in, no sky. Mosca felt her child-heart calling out to the Beloved, begging for their company in the darkness. But instead she bit her lip almost to bleeding and stifled the prayers in her mind.

Then, just as she thought the flue would narrow and narrow until she was wedged like a cork in a bottle, it kinked slightly to climb at an angle. After a yard or so of this, her questing fingers discovered that a foot above her head the right-hand wall disappeared. She ascended by inches until her head was level with the gap.

A dim light was falling from above, and Mosca could see that her flue had joined another to form a larger square chute leading upwards. Hauling herself up to sit on the brick ledge at the top of the division, she could see a little square of dark silver sky above, criss-crossed by stark black. Mistress Bessel had been right, then. The two flues both fed into one chimney, which was blocked off with a grille so that no prisoners could escape that way.

Mosca felt her stomach sink, and realized that she had been hoping at the back of her mind that she might be able to make it out on to the roof. No, it seemed she would be playing things Mistress Bessel’s way, like it or no.

The descent of the other flue was far more difficult than the ascent of the first. A faint haze of smoke still hung within, making Mosca gag and sneeze in spite of her terror of being heard. The bricks held a strange animal warmth, and there were sparks and feathers of hot ash lurking in ambush.

Not far now. Then grab the Luck and go. What would it be? What had Clent said?

Often a glass chalice, or an ancestral skull, or a collection of breeding peacocks…

‘Well, I hope it’s not peacocks,’ Mosca muttered under her breath. ‘Don’t fancy climbing a red-hot chimney with half a dozen squawking birds under one arm.’

Even as she gave words to this thought, her bare sole settled on a ledge that turned out to be harbouring a family of ember-hot cinders. She swore and jerked her foot away, then dragged desperately at the sooty walls with hooked fingers as her other foot lost its grip. She tumbled down the rest of the flue, buffeted by the back wall, the air filling with soot clouds, and then a stone floor struck her in the bottom, bringing her to a halt with an agonizing jolt. For a few seconds she could only lie there, winded and mewling in pain, her legs in the air. Then she opened her eyes again, and froze.

She was in a room twice as large as the one she had just left, the walls draped with rich but faded tapestries. The floor was choked with dusty russet-coloured rugs and cluttered with wooden images of the Beloved, some of whom had been arranged in lines like troops. In a corner stood a small four-poster with a chipped chamber pot beside it. A cluster of candlesticks was glued to the top of a low table by their own wax, one candle still lit and casting a slanted radiance over the whole room.

Standing directly over Mosca herself was a youth of about fifteen years, his jaw slack, his eyes popping with surprise.

His pallor reminded Mosca of the bluish wanness of the inhabitants of Toll-by-Night. His clothes, on the other hand, were lavish, although apparently designed for someone a few years younger. The sleeves of his green velvet frock coat ended several inches short of his bony wrists. His waistcoat was elaborately embroidered, but many threads had been pulled loose. No effort had been made to tie back his long dark hair. Fuzzy dark brows met over his nose.

For a moment or two Mosca was paralysed. The stranger, however, did not call for help or move to the door, but seemed if anything more flabbergasted and terrified by her sudden apparition than she was.

Mosca put her finger to lips and gave an intimidating hiss, that turned into more of an intimidating splutter as soot caught in her throat. She struggled to her feet, soot-stained and inexplicable.

‘Who…?’ The boy’s voice was a squeak.

‘I am a… a Figure of Calamity!’ hissed Mosca. ‘Sent by the Beloved to… to punish them that… do not pray enough.’

There was a short pause in which the stranger’s pale gaze wavered down Mosca’s scraped and blackened form and back to her face again.

‘What kind of calamity?’ he whispered.

‘Fire,’ answered Mosca promptly, her heart beating a tattoo. ‘And… hunger. And crime. And really bad moods. Now, keep your ugly trap shut, or I’ll blight you.’

The youth stared at her, then extended one trembling hand towards Mosca’s face, and with great care and deliberation poked her in the eye.

She gave a short yelp and slapped his hand away. He spent a few moments staring at his sooty fingertip, and then broke into a long loud laugh. It was an embarrassing laugh, the sort of unformed, yodelling noise that Mosca would have expected to hear from a toddler or a village simpleton. Mosca crouched back towards the fireplace and glanced nervously at the door, but the braying laughter summoned nobody.

‘You are not a calamity,’ he said. ‘Your cheek is squashy.’

There was something odd about his speech, at once childlike and formal. It reminded Mosca of a very small child reading lines for a play. He had other infantile tricks of manner too, the way he let his jaw hang open, and breathed loudly through it, the way he fumbled at his own buttons, and scratched himself in ways most people didn’t when anyone was watching.

So. Someone had been left to watch the Luck. The idiot son of some high-ranking daylighter, to judge by appearances. And if he was an idiot… then perhaps all was not lost. Perhaps he would be too addle-pated to give a good account of her, if she crept back up the chimney to her own cell. Perhaps he would not even notice her scooping up the Luck…

Heart pounding, Mosca willed herself to think. Where was the Luck? Was it that silver plate heaped with dried raisins? That glass decanter with purple tidemarks left by wine? That ivory-handled candle snuffer?

The stranger was examining her again with a new, keen interest, looking in wonderment at her breeches and chemise.

‘Where is your badge?’

Mosca clutched reflexively at the place where it had been, before remembering that it had been pinned to the dress she had left in her cell.

‘I…’ She swallowed. ‘I must have dropped it somewhere – don’t look at me like that!’

‘But – everybody has to have a badge! Having no badge is against -’ The boy broke off suddenly, and for the first time looked alarmed and cast a glance towards the door. But instead of running to it to summon help, he turned back to Mosca and put a clumsy hand over her mouth.

‘Talk quietly,’ he said, ‘or they will take you away.’

He took her by the arm, led her to the dark wall furthest from the door and sat down on the rug in a jumble of angular limbs. Mosca dropped into a crouch a yard from him, all the while keeping her feet under her, in case she