Twilight Robbery aka Fly Trap

‘We’re in your hands, Mye.’ Mosca thought it was probably Sir Feldroll’s man speaking. ‘Where now?’

‘The Chutes,’ whispered Mosca. ‘Undertaker district. Stay close, and keep your steps soft.’

In your hands. The hands in question were shaking, and not just with the cold. Fear of the Locksmiths and Skellow’s thumb-cutting knife flooded Mosca but did not fill her. Somehow there was room in her core for an angry little knot of excitement, tight and fierce as a pike’s grin.

Being a Locksmith meant never having to kick down a door. A flick, a click, and there you were in the hallway.

Sometimes there were screams, but usually the breath people drew in to bellow at you leaked out in little whimpers once they realized what you were. Sometimes the truth hit them like a fist to the belly, and they literally crumpled to the floor. Something had brought the Locksmiths to their door, and they would do anything, say anything, sell anyone to make them go away again.

‘Yes, Laylow does stay here sometimes – but she has not been here this last week! Here – let me show you the room she uses! And this is where she hides her packages, under the floorboard! Yes, I can give you the names of her friends…’

Search the room, picking up her few belongings. Gather up the chocolate-scented, muslin-wrapped packages from their hole in the wainscot. Snatch up a chicken leg from the landlady’s table on the way out.

Being a Locksmith meant never having to say sorry.

‘Nobody told me you were a foreigner.’ Sir Feldroll’s ex-soldier sounded disgruntled and suspicious. The little rescue party’s steps had taken them now into more open streets, and when they crossed a patch of moonlight Mosca’s outlandish garb and greenish skin had become visible.

‘Well, nobody told me you were a slack-bellied noddy with a busy jaw,’ Mosca retorted sharply. ‘I guess we both got cause to complain.’

‘Just show us the Chutes, you peppery little minx!’ the other snapped.

It was not just the fact that she was green, Mosca suspected, that was causing her new comrade’s sudden hostility. Perhaps he had not realized until now how young she was. Perhaps now he felt absurd at having placed himself under her captaincy. The giddy, terrifying sense that she was in control of a unit of men started to slip away from her, like a giant’s boot falling absurdly off her narrow foot.

‘How would you like a new grin for a necktie?’ came a sudden snarl from behind Mosca. She turned to find that one of the ex-prisoners from the Grovels was glaring at the soldier hot-eyed. His face seemed to have been used as a whetstone, and a mesh of scars folded his forehead and left his eyebrows as dotted lines. ‘Leave the little mort be, or I’ll tie your tongue to the railings!’

The threat, implausible as it was, served to silence the other man. Perhaps he reflected that even a failed attempt to execute it was likely to be very, very painful. Or perhaps he had noticed the way in which the other two ex-convicts had moved supportively to Mosca’s side.

‘Pratin’ popinjay,’ one of them whispered in her ear. ‘Bold enough in the street, ain’t he? But if he was dropped into the spring-ankle warehouse, he’d be keening like a kitten.’

Mosca understood, and turned her head to give the speaker a nasty little grin of agreement, which he answered with a wink. ‘Spring-ankle warehouse’ was a cant term for prison. Somehow, in spite of her disguise, the Grovellers had recognized her as their former cell-mate – perhaps because they had met her in darkness and known her only through her voice and temper. In the Grovels she had been their prey, but now they were part of the same fraternity – at least while there was a chance to gang up on somebody who had never known leg irons. Belatedly, it seemed, Mosca was getting her garnish-worth.

‘Any more gabble? No? Then come this way.’ She hoped she was sounding confident. The rescue party’s odds were poor enough without them fighting among themselves.

‘Laylow? Yes, came in here for a dram o’ gin two nights ago with that young radical cove, the firebrand with the mad eyes. No, I never listen in, but the Beloved put ears on our heads, and mine pull in sound something fearsome. So… I hear him asking her for help, saying he don’t trust some folks… something about a horse…

‘No, I do not know where she lays her head. Perhaps you ask her radical friend? What? No, not as such, but I have often seen him a-walkin’ off towards the Chutes…’

It was in the Chutes, of course, that the plans became shaky, for Mosca had never even been in this district before. There were a few wrong turns in the glistening streets, and Mosca’s hairs rose at the thought of her ‘followers’ losing confidence in her. On either side of the streets were ominous stacks of person-size boxes. Some were cracked and battered wood, and she slipped past them as fast as she could, fearful of glimpsing a dead eye or pallid hand through a crevice. Here and there in tiny shrines models of Goodman Postrophe stood sentinel, ready to squirt mellowberry juice into the eyes of any dead who decided to climb out of their boxes. His presence was only slightly reassuring.

There were sounds as well, from deep in the icy, intestinal tangle of streets. A stutter of wood being dragged across cobbles. A shriek of a metal winch. A clatter of hatches. A weightless handful of silent seconds, then a smash far below, softened by echo, so that it was little more than a cough in the Langfeather’s throat.

‘There.’ It was exactly as Brand Appleton had described, a cooper’s shop opposite an abandoned alehouse with a broken door. It stood on the corner, a small cask swaying from a chain over the door. It was a mean, narrow little shop with one small shuttered window at the front, and two floors above it.

‘How many inside?’ asked the soldier.

‘Five,’ answered Mosca. ‘Maybe six. And the lady.’

‘Then we’ll have to move fast – knock down anyone in the shop, then run upstairs, kick in the door and cover all within with our pistols before they can hurt the lady…’ The soldier trailed off, realizing that nobody was actually listening to him. Mosca and the other ex-Grovellers had formed a huddle and gone into muffled conference.

‘… milled a ken like this when I was nine,’ one was saying. ‘No point in puffing our way up the stairs and expecting to catch ’em winking – these old wooden steps ring out underfoot like a regiment of drums.’

‘Roof, maybe?’ Another ex-convict leaned back. ‘Boggarts take it, I can see no holes. Pity we cannot whip in at a glaze – and the chimney looks too narrow, even for Mye-’

‘No – the trick is to sneak up there, or bring those bullies down the stairs, one at a time,’ interrupted the first again, the man with the whetstone face. ‘We need a lay to hook ’em in.’

‘Well, however we gull ’em, it had better be sweet and swift,’ whispered Mosca. ‘Or we shall have the Jinglers snappin’ at our heels!’

She glanced up at Sir Feldroll’s man, and felt a bittersweet flush of malicious satisfaction. Perhaps she felt out of place in Toll-by-Night, but it was plain that this was nothing compared to the plight of the soldier. His eyes looked fearful, dazzled by the unfamiliar mosaic of murk and moonlight. The thieves’ cant terms that were starting to roll off her tongue so glibly bounced off his ears like pebbles.

Mosca was a fast learner, and after three nights she was starting to think and speak as a nightling. She was learning to see in the dark. At another time, this might have worried her.

A tall Locksmith came out of a gin-shop’s back room, pulling off his gloves. He tucked them in a pocket and replaced them with clean ones.

‘The cooper in the Chutes,’ was all he said to his companions. Without another word they rose and followed him out through the front-door. They left it ajar, letting the wind play over the broken furniture within.

The cooper looked up from the splayed staves of a half-fashioned firkin when the door of his shop swung open. Two men had entered, both of them strangers, rolling in a heavy-looking hogshead barrel over three feet high.

‘Hey, cooper!’ called one of them. ‘We’ve a barrel that’s split and starting to spill – can you take a look and tell us if you can mend the crack without taking out all the grain? We’re in a hurry.’

‘Not likely.’ Whistling under his breath, the cooper strolled towards his customers, a hammer dangling from one strong, calloused hand. ‘But let us have a look at it.’ He prised away the lid of the cask, and froze.

Holding her breath inside the barrel, Mosca saw the rounded roof of her cramped world tugged away abruptly and replaced by the face of a startled young man. He was not handsome, having a bunched sort of nose that wanted to be a fist. His lumpy, good-humoured mouth was pursed with whistling, but as he saw the pistol gripped tightly in her hands the whistle died and was replaced by a breathy little thread of sound.

Mosca could hardly breathe. Her knees were tucked tight against her chest. The metal of the pistol was very cold, and her two fingers tucked around the trigger shook uncontrollably. The cooper had wide, light-coloured eyes. She thought they might be green.

‘Keep whistling,’ whispered the Groveller with the whetstone face, ‘and put down your hammer.’