Twilight Robbery aka Fly Trap

A long, long second of silence.

‘You know the right words to the Solace for the Thousands?’

‘No, but those weren’t them. I been to Mandelion. I know radicals. They make a load more sense than that.’

Her words seemed to poke Appleton into alertness, and his posture noticeably straightened.

‘When I got here, I heard you were this terrible radical, so I come to find you.’ Mosca took a deep breath, then threw what was left of her caution to the winds like so much chaff. ‘And you know what? You’re more than terrible. You’re bleedin’ useless. Don’t turn round!’ This last was delivered in an urgent hiss since Appleton seemed in some danger of twisting about to remonstrate with the steps. She had gone too far. She must have gone too far.

‘Funnily enough,’ Appleton answered through clenched teeth, ‘my childhood tutors failed to ground me properly in the basics of revolutionary thought. And when I reached manhood I wasted my time studying books of anatomy in the mistaken impression that I would become a physician as planned. Back then, nobody told me I was a radical!’

‘Well, you don’t sound like much of one,’ muttered Mosca.

‘The Committee of the Hours are never wrong,’ intoned Appleton. The words rang hollowly as if he had recited them to himself too many times and worn the heart out of them. ‘If they say I am… then I am. I can… I can face that. But-’

‘But nobody told you how to be one – am I right?’ Above all, Mosca had to keep Appleton interested, inquisitive. ‘Could help you there, maybe. Might have some radical teachings off by heart. And words right from the mouths of the real radicals, in Mandelion.’

Brand Appleton sat motionless, his head at a considering tilt. Mosca stared at the back of his neck and tried to guess his expression. A ‘brand’ was a fiery torch. She hoped that she was holding it by the right end. Either way, she was certainly playing with fire.

‘These teachings – are they wild and subversive?’ he whispered at last.

‘Frothing,’ Mosca reassured him quickly. ‘Mad as a melon cannon.’

‘And… you come from Mandelion? You know the place well? The people in power?’ He had the hesitant tone of one tiptoeing around a new plan for fear of smudging it.

Somewhere the Tower Clock struck a tinny chime, and Appleton’s head twitched.

‘I have to go. Listen, whoever you are – meet me at Harass and Quail’s tomorrow night at two of the clock. It’s in Cooper’s Dark – do you know it? Opposite the old stone trough.’

‘I’ll find it,’ hissed Mosca, marvelling at the success of her strange gambit, ‘and I’ll be there. Bring a notebook. We’ll have you lopping kings’ ’eads off before you can say fraternity.’

At long last Appleton ventured a swift glance behind him, and then twitched his narrow head about, looking for his interlocutor. Mosca pulled back so the moonlight would not fall on her face.

‘Hey – are you under there? On the grass? ’

‘Just between you and me,’ Mosca whispered, ‘radicalism is all about walkin’ on the grass.’

Goodlady Adwein, Wielder of the Pestle of Fate

Watch him. He’s standing up. Walking away… after him! Now!

Mosca had made an appointment with Appleton for the morrow, but there might still be some small chance of following him. She clambered out from under the scaffolding, as unobtrusively as anybody with a basket on their head possibly could, and hastily climbed up on to one of the plank walkways so that nobody would know she had been on the grass. Unfortunately, much as she had suspected, Brand Appleton was gone by the time she had extricated herself.

When she felt a light touch on her shoulder, she jumped a foot in the air and would have fallen off the walkway if Mistress Leap had not grabbed her arm.

‘Did you see him, Mistress Leap? Did you see where he went?’

But the midwife had not witnessed Brand Appleton’s departure. The streets of Toll-by-Night had swallowed him once more.

‘My dear, we really should be heading home soon.’ Mistress Leap’s voice was muted but urgent. ‘There is a frost falling. Have you noticed?’ It was true, Mosca realized. The chill of the night was becoming more bitter, and there was a subdued sparkle to the cobbles. ‘It is getting cold, and from now on the night can only get… colder.’

Mosca understood. Cold meant fewer people. It meant the people who were still on the streets had either nowhere to go or the wrong sort of reason to be out. Besides, this was not her last chance to track Appleton down. He had promised to meet her the following night.

‘All right, Mistress Leap. But before we go back to your house, I got one more place to go. I got a letter to write.’

The route to the location where Mosca had agreed to leave letters for her daylight allies took Mosca and Mistress Leap past the bridge tower. Looking up at the clock, Mosca could see that the wooden Beloved sentry above the clock face had changed again. Paragon had clearly done his duty, and now it was Goodlady Adwein gazing forgivingly out across the town, her pestle and mortar in her hands.

All this will pass, she seemed to say. Everything that seems so large and inescapable now I will grind down in my pestle, and in a century it will be a fine powder that nobody will notice. There is no crime you have committed, no pain you have felt, that I cannot grind to nothing so that the world forgets it, in the fullness of time.

This was no comfort to Mosca at all. In fact, she reflected, she didn’t much like the idea of a fine, powdery world where nothing really mattered in the long run. She preferred her world painful, and lumpy, and full of chaff.

One such human piece of chaff was clearly on clock-mending duty. A basket was suspended from the crane on the tower roof, and a man in overalls could be seen standing precariously inside it. The clock face had been levered open, and he was leaning over with some long-handled tool to tweak reverently at its metal innards. All the while Goodlady Adwein smiled and smiled, caring nothing for him.

Mosca scuttled past the tower to the agreed place in the town wall. Out of her pocket she drew a letter written hastily by moonlight, dropped a single eyelash in among the folds and squeezed it into a crevice between two bricks as arranged. This was her lifeline, the only rope that might stop her plummeting to disaster. She had no choice but to cling to it, even if the other end was held by Eponymous Clent.

After Mosca Mye had returned to the house of the Leaps, the night air took on a more determined chill.

Eventually the sky paled, and nature began its own changing of the guard, the owls retreating to their crofts and rafters to huddle like tufted urns. Those rooks and crows who had not been grabbed overnight by hungry boys with catapults and bags took to the air, knowing by some instinct that a generous breakfast previously known as Havoc Gray was making his way towards the sea on the back of the Langfeather.

And below them, Toll-by-Night set about folding itself away, like a stilt-legged monster into a closet. It inhabitants crept back into the unwanted places, the crannies and cellars and forgotten attics, and locked themselves in.

A bugle blew. A silver jingling swept through the town, sealing away all bad reputations and bitter-tasting names.

Another bugle sounded. And Day swept in like a landlord, not knowing that it was only a guest in Night’s town.

Being locked away at night with the dayfolk had been claustrophobic, but at least there had been something familiar about it. After all, who had not seen an innkeeper drop a heavy bolt against the predations of the night?

It was a very different matter sitting in the Leaps’ strange narrow room, lit only by a few rushlights, and hearing the dawn chorus offering tentative chips of sound outside. In spite of the darkness and chill of the room,