Twilight Robbery aka Fly Trap

wildcat to come with him instead. And she don’t know what’s going on, but she thinks he was betrayed by his comrades, and that the parties what stabbed Mr Not-So-Radical Appleton took the money too. And she wants to get it back.

‘Did he mention any names?’ Mosca kept a sly watch on Laylow’s face. ‘Names of the folks in his gang he didn’t trust?’

Slow nod. ‘Said there was one fellow with a hang-gallows look and a snakish way about him. Name of Skellow.’

Had Brand been right? Had Skellow been waiting for a chance to double-cross him? Could Skellow have been the lean and capering Horse-Man who had stabbed Brand? He was tall and slight enough. Yes. It could have been him.

‘And now Brand wants to go back to his cronies, to their blasted lair!’ muttered Laylow, glancing across at Brand. ‘Cleft-pate gull! Walking in to let them finish their handiwork – that’s a plan and a half!’

‘He…’ Mosca hesitated, wondering if she dared go on. ‘He said something about a girl waiting there, one he had to protect-’

The effect was instantaneous and explosive.

‘Blight take her and every last ringlet! What right does she have – oh, that moping, cow-eyed, dunderheaded gull! I should throw him to the Jinglers! Like a bullock in love with the butcher’s knife! I will, I swear I will, that’ll be a lesson – I knew it, knew she was in Toll-by-Night somehow, knew it – kites and kettles, I’ll – why is the sun not enough for her? Well, plague on the pair of them! I do not care, do not need – but not even her scraps, her cast- offs – she never wanted – Why do you look at me like that.’

Mosca was goggling at her open-mouthed. ‘You’re in love with him!’ she exclaimed accusingly, as Laylow’s tirade ended. ‘You must be – you’ve stopped making any sense!’ Even thieves’ cant was more comprehensible than that.

‘Go kiss a cat,’ snarled Laylow. Which was not, Mosca reflected, exactly a ‘no’.

Mosca thought about trying to tell a hysterical, lovelorn, claw-handed renegade that her dear Brand had actually kidnapped another woman so as to force her to marry him, but she thought that might go down like a lead chaffinch.

‘I offered to go back there in his place – look to the lie of the land,’ Laylow went on. ‘But he would have none of it. Would not trust me. Or tell me where to find those blackguards’ stop-hole.’ She glared at Mosca with a sudden flare of suspicion. ‘So what did he want with you, if you’ve no medicine nor tricks to help him? What are you for?’

‘I – I’m a Teacher!’ squeaked Mosca quickly, eyes on her companion’s sharp claw tips. ‘Ask him yourself! Teaching him radical matters, telling him how to get to Mandelion -’

As soon as the words were out, she could have bitten her tongue. Laylow gasped as if the air had been knocked out of her.

‘Mandelion? He is… leaving? Never told me – never told me he was leaving…’

Brand Appleton was stirring again, but Laylow seemed too stunned to notice, and Mosca scrambled to his side unhindered, glad to be out of reach of the claws.

‘Teacher!’ He took hold of her wrist with furtive urgency. ‘Talk quietly, don’t let her hear us – she has a heart of flint, that one, won’t let me leave. I think she spikes the possets to keep me dizzy -’

‘That’s no spiked posset, Mr Appleton,’ Mosca whispered, feeling a reluctant sting of pity. ‘Look at you, you’re all leaked away, limp as an empty wine-bladder. I could help you till my face turned blue, but I would never get you on your feet – not with you like that.’

Appleton sagged with disappointment and frustration, then his grip on her wrist tightened again.

‘You could go! You could go and see how she is, tell her… tell her that I will make all right and she shall be sorry for none of this in the end. And tell the others that if they hurt her, if they frighten her, then I’ll… I’ll… make their hearts into… purses. Or tell them I’ll go to the Jinglers and turn evidence. Tell them I am well and strong and the knife missed me.’ His eyes drifted to Laylow. ‘That scratch-cat! You see how she is – I cannot send her – she would not understand – she hates… but you, you’ll go.’ Large, eager blue eyes met hers, open as summer, mad as hare hopscotch.

Mosca took three deep breaths one after the other, like a diver preparing to plunge.

‘Yeah,’ she whispered softly. ‘I will go for you. For three shilling extra. Paid when you got the rest of the money.’ She could not afford to seem too eager. She would let him think that her face was brightening at the thought of money. ‘So… where do I go?’

Mosca had to stoop to hear the kidnapper’s whispered words, and straightened with her eyes full of black mischief and wonder and suppressed excitement. She hardly dared meet Laylow’s gaze as she edged back towards her.

‘Your friend there – he has a notion that he will start to mend if he drinks a posset made of… whey and thistle wine. I told him I would find some, and it settled him down. For now, anyway.’

‘Whey and thistle wine.’ Laylow’s brow creased again. ‘Will that help him?’

‘Maybe. It cannot hurt.’ The door was six feet away. All Mosca had to do was talk her way outside it. ‘I can find you thistle wine for him, and honey, and… and blood sausage to help his strength, but I’ll want paying for it when you find that chink of yours.’

Laylow rubbed the back of her head, the callouses rasping against the wiry, cropped fuzz of her hair.

‘Well, then – go! Come back when you have them – and tell nobody what you seen or heard here.’

‘Of course not! I’m not a…’ Mosca remembered one of Laylow’s own choice words for idiot. ‘I’m not a doddypoll.’

A lock turned. A door opened. And then Mosca was out on the frozen streets again, quivering with the shock and disbelief of a fisherman who has trailed his rod for a particular large and dangerous fish, only to see it unexpectedly leap into the belly of his boat.

At long last she knew where Beamabeth Marlebourne was being held prisoner.

Goodlady Undlesoft, Dweller with Things Buried

Staring skywards, Mosca noticed some smudges of pallor to the east and heard the warbles of the first robins. The night was waning, and she gave a tsk of annoyance. She barely realized that she had already started to think of the night as the true day.

Mosca pulled out her pipe, gnawed on the stem and willed herself to think clearly.

Everything had changed. Brand Appleton, the so-called chief kidnapper, was desperate and pitiable and wrong-headed and possibly dying. She had felt scared of him… but she had felt sorry for him too. Beamabeth was no longer safe. Brand Appleton would do anything to protect her, but right now Brand Appleton was in no condition to protect even himself. The mayor’s daughter was at the mercy of Skellow, and Skellow was not well-supplied with mercy. Once he had the ransom or had to cover his tracks, Mosca would not give a bent pin for Beamabeth’s chances of survival. Mosca could only pray that neither of these circumstances had occurred yet, but it was only a matter of time.

Mosca needed reinforcements to rescue Beamabeth before the worst could happen. However if her dayside allies heard nothing from Mosca or Sir Feldroll’s men, they were hardly likely to send more. She needed to get word to Toll-by-Day.

But even her daylight allies could not be trusted. The more she chewed at her pipe and thought, the more it seemed that there must be two spies among them. One spy for the kidnappers, who had warned them about the ambush and helped them capture Beamabeth. One spy for the Locksmiths, who had betrayed the location of the letter drop and arrival of Sir Feldroll’s men. Of one thing Mosca was now fairly sure: the kidnappers and the Locksmiths were not working together.

No, Mosca needed to get word to the person in Toll that she knew best and trusted most, and the sorry truth was that that individual was Eponymous Clent. Contacting him in the ways they had arranged was impossible, but