Twilight Robbery aka Fly Trap

like knobs of scar tissue to show where the Realm had been sliced asunder. To judge by its lightless windows, this bastle house had been abandoned.

For the first time, her captors’ voices settled into a contented and relieved murmur.

‘I’m frozen. Let’s get in and light the fire.’

‘Some food wouldn’t kill me either.’

‘What do we do with the girl?’

Silence. Mosca’s black eyes flitted from face to face as the men exchanged glances.

‘Keep her in the vaults for now,’ answered Skellow.

The sturdy ground-floor door was heaved open, and with a snick and hishh of tinder a lantern was lit. Mosca found herself looking at a dungeon-like space broken up into long, vaulted tunnels with iron rings hammered here and there into the walls. Only the crusted grey discs of long-dry cowpats showed that this space had been set aside to defend livestock, not to hold prisoners.

Mosca was taken by the shoulder and guided into the nearest ‘vault’, hearing the antique cowpats give under her feet with a papery rustle. The loose ends of the cord tying her wrist were knotted around one of the iron rings set in the wall, with just enough slack so that she could sit on the ground if she chose. Mosca, who had slumped against the rugged wall with every sign of meek exhaustion, furtively watched from under wet and spiky lashes as Skellow tugged at the cord.

Only when Skellow left the vault, taking the lantern with him, did Mosca’s posture become less limp, less meek. Instead she bristled with attention, taking in every tiny sound from outside. The shunk of a bar being lowered across the door. The heavy grinding of an elderly key turning. Voices. The creak of footsteps on wooden rungs as Skellow and his friends climbed the ladder to the first floor. The shuddering slam of another door.

Mosca blinked hard, willing her eyes to make something of the darkness. It was not absolute, for even on this level there were arrow-slit windows, showing frayed ribbons of dull night sky.

Footsteps above, the scrape of a shifted chair. A wordless drone of voices. And then, at the far end of the vaulted tunnel, part of the ceiling opened with a clack, spilling candlelight on to the rutted floor. As Mosca watched a soft plume of grey ash puffed its way downwards, accompanied by a pattering of charcoal chips. Someone on the floor above had opened a hatch to sweep the debris from the fireplace into it.

Unbidden, there came into Mosca’s mind a long-forgotten image of her aunt peeling potatoes, the long spiral curling down and down from the tuber and then dropping into the waiting bucket of throwings and leavings. The thought that she had been casually cast down like a piece of rubbish filled Mosca with a wild surge of un-potato-like rage.

Now that the hatch was open, the voices above were much clearer.

‘Do you think maybe one of us should go down with some bread for that girl?’ It sounded like the man named ‘Ben’.

‘What’s the point?’ Skellow’s voice.

The distant amber aperture vanished with a slam, leaving Mosca in darkness once more.

What’s the point? Those three words had told Mosca everything she needed to know. There was no point in feeding her because they did not need to keep her alive – did not mean to keep her alive. In Skellow’s head she was dead already, and wasting bread on her would be like pushing food into the mouth of a stuffed deer head mounted on a wall.

Mosca could guess what had passed through Skellow’s mind. How much had she seen and heard of his business? Too much for Skellow’s liking and too little for her own. Perhaps he had never intended to let her walk away. He had, after all, asked her carefully chosen questions before concluding that she would never be missed, and that no hue and cry would come after him if one night the moors swallowed her like a grape pip.

Worst of all, Mosca reflected, he was probably right.

Goodlady Whenyouleast, Mistress of Reunions and Remebered Faces

Mosca had heard old stories of captives who were kept in oubliettes, cellars designed for prisoners that one intended to forget. These had no doors, and the prisoner was thrown down through a hatch in the high ceiling. There was no stairway or ladder leading back to the hatch, because it would never be needed.

Even though she had seen her prison, Mosca’s imagination started to crowd the darkness with the relics of such a dungeon. Perhaps she was not the first prisoner to be murdered there. Perhaps she had silent company, lying unseen in the shadows of the arches. Skulls yellow as piecrust under limp bonnets, stick-shins jutting into slack boots, tattered tunics over dulcimer ribcages…

Nah. I’d be able to smell ’em.

In the room above her, voices droned for a time, fire crackled, wood scraped on pewter and someone even scratched out a few ditties on a fiddle. Later there was the hiss of a doused fire, the shuffle of feet on flagstones, and then quiet.

Quiet, and more quiet. The rain slackened and stilled. Silence, but for the chill quavering of owls, and guttering drips hitting earth outside.

Mosca let out a slow breath. Stealthily her long, quick fingers and recently threatened thumbs twisted to pick at the

cords around her wrist. A painful process, for there seemed to be countless knots to bite into her every time she strained against the bonds. Only after five minutes of silently mouthed swear words did she realize that a particularly vicious knot caught between her wrists was in fact the small wooden head of one of the little skeletons attached to her bracelet.

Perhaps the Little Goodkin could be of some service to Mosca after all.

With painful care she managed to squirm the little wooden figure out from between her wrists. Now there was a tiny amount of slack in the bonds, just enough for two lean and eager hands to writhe free.

In the silence Mosca shook her hands like dishcloths until the blood prickled back into them. She had heard the key turn in the lock of the door, and the arrow slits were clearly too narrow for her to squeeze through, so she crept to the end of the vault, where ash heaped with greying chicken bones, and stared up at the ceiling. The light from the arrow slits was just strong enough for her to make out the dark square of the trapdoor, inches from the end wall.

Mosca kicked off her remaining clog. She had been thrown down and forgotten, but she was not in an oubliette. This was a stronghold of sorts, but it was meant to keep people out and cattle in. And cattle, unlike Mosca, could not climb.

The rough-hewn face of the wall was Mosca’s friend, even though the jagged edges were not kind to her cold fingers and bit into her knees and elbows at every opportunity. There were footholds and handholds aplenty, but they had to be groped for in the dark, and Mosca could feel her wet feet slithering against their perches. She tried not to look down or up, even to satisfy the nagging need to know how high she was. High enough to hurt if I fall, whispered the tingle in her bones. And then, after a while, High enough to break my ankle. And finally, High enough to smash me like an egg.

At last the wood of the hatch met her fingers. She locked her face in a wince and pushed at the trapdoor, praying that nobody had bolted it. It lifted.

The trapdoor opened a crack, letting in the light of a dulling fire and an orchestra of snores. A bubbling snore like a bee dying in treacle. A rasping, lizard-hiss snore. A rhythmic grindstone rumble.

Hardly daring to breathe, Mosca eased the trapdoor back so that it was resting on the stone flagstones and looked about her. A cooling soot-bellied kettle hung over the glum red embers that lurked in the fireplace, furred with ash. A pack of Pincaster playing cards laid out on the floor for a game of Duchy’s Favour. A row of dominoes set up on their ends along the floor. Two figures stretched beneath their own cloaks beside their muddy boots, an ear poking out here, a company of toes there.

Mosca pulled herself halfway out of the hatch on to her belly and wriggled her way forward until she could bring her legs up on to level floor. She rose to her hands and knees, and froze.