Twilight Robbery aka Fly Trap

never seen her face before.

‘Mr Appleton,’ she said, and watched recognition, realization, surprise and eagerness canter across his features. Usually it made Mosca feel safer when she met somebody whose expression she could read so easily, but somehow with Appleton it was different. The very helplessness with which his emotions escaped him made her feel uneasy. He was open, like a lion-cage door. He was unguarded, like a pistol at full cock.

‘Sit down,’ he said, and winced as the spread of his smile reopened a cut on his lower lip. ‘I thought you sounded young.’ He looked her strange ‘Seisian’ regalia up and down, and suspicion came out on a black hobby horse to join the caper of other emotions. ‘So… you say you’re from Mandelion?’

‘Not from.’ Mosca scrambled up on a tall stool that left her clogs dangling. ‘I said I been there. The ship I was on had to land somewhere, didn’t it?’ Mandelion was the area’s biggest port, and it seemed the best explanation for the presence of a mysterious foreigner in the town.

‘Ship from where?’ Suspicion’s canter seemed to have slowed to a trot, but Appleton’s brows were still furrowed.

Mosca wet her lips, tempted for a second to fling open the sluice gates of her invention and flood Appleton with tales of an exotic eastern past. But she was not Eponymous Clent, so she gave a mental grimace and pushed the images away.

‘Not somewhere I’ll ever be returning,’ she muttered sourly. ‘Not somewhere I’m in a hurry to think about neither. So don’t go dwelling on that. Mandelion is all you need to know about.’ A grim little mystery was better than a tall tale. Less likely to fall on its face, anyway.

She could read Appleton’s countenance like an open diary. He had been ready to bargain with some urchin who knew Mandelion, but strange green foreignness had confused everything. He was comparing her outlandish dress with her commonplace accent. He was wondering whether she was an impostor. And the possibility that she might actually be a heathen from the distant east had sent his small-town mind hunkering down in its kennel and growling suspiciously.

Mosca chewed her cheek, testing the edge of the situation with her mind, and then took a gamble. She let herself down from her stool.

‘I see how it is,’ she snapped. ‘You’re no different from all the others. One glimpse of a green face, and you’re climbing up the curtains like there’s a tiger in the room. Well, worry not, the tiger is leaving. You can stew in your own juice, Mr Not-so-radical Appleton.’

She made a small and hopefully Seisian-looking gesture with the entwined middle fingers of her right hand and then strode sulkily towards the door. Push something in someone’s face, and they will shove it away reflexively. Threaten to snatch it away from them, and sometimes they become convinced that it is what they want.

But Appleton had not called her back. She reached the door. Her fingers brushed the handle.

‘Er, no – wait! Wait!’

Without turning, the mysterious foreigner allowed herself a small green smile.

‘Come back – come, sit down. No more questions about your homeland. I promise.’

Mosca had to wrestle the grin off her face before she could turn round. In the end she managed this by reminding herself that, yes, she had persuaded the fish to bite down on the hook, but that she was armed with a small and fragile rod, and faced by a large, dangerous and unpredictable catch. With a grudging air she trailed back to the table and seated herself with all the regality of a shrunken empress.

‘So, you want to know how to be a radical.’

‘Yes, and I wanted to know – what did you mean about walking on the grass?’

‘I meant…’ Mosca took a moment to think of all the radicals she had met. ‘The heart of being a radical isn’t knowing all the right books, it isn’t about kings over the sea or the Parliament over in the Capital. It’s… looking at the world around you, and seeing the things that make you sick to the stomach with anger. The things there’s no point making a fuss about because that’s just the way the world is, and always was and always will be. And then it means getting good and angry about it anyway, and kickin’ up a hurricane. Because nothing is writ across the sky to say the world must be this way. A tree can grow two hundred year, and look like it’ll last a thousand more – but when the lightning strikes at last, it burns, Mr Appleton.’

Brand Appleton’s gaze was unblinkingly intense, and he seemed to be memorizing her every word.

‘Toll,’ he said under his breath. ‘A thousand injustices, bound up in one set of town walls…’

‘A rotten, stinking gin-trap of a town,’ agreed Mosca. ‘I can teach you all about seeing things the radical way. It will take lessons though.’

‘Yes, yes!’ Brand Appleton entwined both his hands into a giant fist and bounced it off the surface of the table. ‘I have given this thought. A good deal of lessons. So it is best if you teach me on the way.’

Mosca suddenly had the feeling that her great fish had just jerked at her line. She had formed plans for Brand Appleton’s lessons, and the words ‘on the way’ had not been involved.

‘On the… On the way to where?’

‘Mandelion.’ Brand Appleton glanced up at her, surprised and a bit impatient. Perhaps he expected her to have kept up with his unspoken thought processes. ‘Mandelion, obviously. You are clearly a traveller – you cannot be too fond of Toll-by-Night, surely? I will need you to come with me when I leave tomorrow night, that is very plain. I need a guide who knows the best way to Mandelion. Someone to explain radicalism en route. Somebody to make introductions when I get there. You need money. You must need money, or you would not be here.’

Beneath her thinly painted nationality, Mosca went pale. Brand Appleton was planning to leave the very next night – immediately after the hours of Saint Yacobray. He must already have a buyer for the jewel. Just as Sir Feldroll had suspected, Appleton would seize the ransom, sell it and leave with his captive ‘fiancee’ before anybody could act. And now he wanted to take Mosca with him, back through the county she had tried so hard to escape, maybe in company with Skellow and his minions, to a town she had been forbidden from re-entering.

‘How much money?’ she croaked.

The sum he named was large enough that Mosca’s hands crept down to the stool top to steady herself. ‘Not all at once though. I’ll pay your way out of Toll first. The rest when we reach Mandelion.’

Mosca’s plan was either going really really well, or really really badly. She could not quite work out which. The fish was still hooked, but it appeared to be pulling her tiny row-boat out to sea.

‘All right, Mr Appleton. Tomorrow, then. Tomorrow night. When and where?’

‘Two of the clock in Chaff’s Dryppe.’

For the second time, Mosca let herself down from the stool. She could only hope that her shivering would be blamed upon the bitter cold.

‘Wait.’ She tensed, but turned to find that Appleton was smiling. ‘I forgot to ask your name. This nightbound hellhole has destroyed my manners.’

It was a question that Mosca should have anticipated, the one question she could not answer falsely and could not afford to answer truthfully, for ‘Mosca’ was hardly likely to be mistaken for a Seisian name. But there are always ways of not answering a question at all.

‘You better call me Teacher. I got a real name but -’ Mosca remembered the Beadle in the white pavilion – ‘but in this country nobody’s tongues are pointy enough to say it properly. Till tomorrow, Mr Appleton.’ And a mysterious green stranger walked out of the gin-shop, hoping that she could come up with a very cunning plan in the twenty- four hours before their next meeting.

Goodman Clutterpick, Lord of the Jumble

Mortal terror, like most things, is relative. Mosca was right in thinking that the majority of people in Toll-by- Night lived in fear, but some lived with more of it than others. And at that moment one man was living with about as much of it as a person could stand without shaking themselves into pieces.

A short while ago this unfortunate individual had been the leader of half a dozen men sent by Sir Feldroll to find