The cooper wet his lips and managed a husky warbled note. He stooped and obediently laid down his hammer.
‘Clever lad,’ murmured Whetstone-face approvingly. ‘Keep your wits this way, and you’ll live long enough to bounce grandchildren on your knees.’
While one of the Grovellers took up the cooper’s whistle, mimicking the tune perfectly, the cooper obeyed the orders muttered by Whetstone-face. He sat down on a barrel, and let his hands be tied behind his back. He answered questions about the rooms upstairs, the number of people, the stations of the guards. Mosca listened, her stomach curdling. Everything was going according to plan, but somehow she did not feel like a rescuer any more. She felt like a robber. It was the fearful eye-whites of the cooper, and the fierce, oily smell of the pistol.
‘Come on, Mye,’ said one of her comrades, tipping her barrel so that she tumbled out of it and dropped her gun with a clatter.
One Groveller listened at the door behind the counter, then very carefully turned a key from the cooper’s belt in its lock and opened it. The cooper was bound and gagged, and left in the care of the increasingly perplexed and disdainful ex-soldier. Two of the Grovellers slipped through the door and on to the stairway beyond, Mosca and the third Groveller just a few paces behind. The man in front of Mosca took the greatest care to step along the edges of the stairs so they did not creak, and Mosca copied him.
They had just reached the door at the top of the stairs when there was a crash from the shop below, and a hoarse cry. Instantly the door before them was flung open and two men hurled themselves out of it. To judge by their expressions, they only realized mid-hurl that they were flying past four flabbergasted strangers who had just flattened themselves against the wall to let them pass. With remarkable presence of mind, Whetstone-face stuck out a leg to hook the ankle of the foremost, and the pair went tumbling down the stairs, using their bellies and faces as toboggans.
Still pressed back against the wall, Mosca saw the Grovellers bound through the door into the open room. She wondered whether she was supposed to be holding the fallen men prisoner with her little pistol. But she could not bring herself to point the pistol at them, for in her mind’s eye she could so easily imagine hiccuping with fear and sending a little bead of death through somebody’s forehead. In any case, they did not seem ready to get up yet.
From the room into which the Grovellers had rushed there came two pistol cracks, then a lot of crashes, oaths, moans, scuffles and floorboard creaks. Then, quite suddenly, about four people shouting at once.
‘Easy, easy -’
‘Halt – put your pistol -’
‘Get back! Back, or I’ll…’
Mosca entered the room and found it in a state of stalemate. Two men lay motionless on the floor, and she could not tell if they were alive or dead. One she recognized as one of Skellow’s men from the bastle house. Another lay amid the wreckage of a broken table and had a thin, pocked face that also looked faintly familiar. All three of the Grovellers had weapons drawn, though one had a hand clasped to his side. All were currently bow- tense, their attention focused upon a tall, angular sickle-faced figure. It was Rabilan Skellow, and he had a pistol held to the head of Beamabeth Marlebourne.
Skellow was backing slowly away with his captive, his breath coming raggedly through his teeth. His eye flickered over Mosca and lodged there, and she could see him grappling with frayed shreds of recognition.
‘
For a moment Mosca was afraid he would turn the pistol on her instead, but he kept it against Beamabeth’s temple and reached behind him with his free hand to open a door. He backed slowly through it, dragging the mayor’s daughter along with him. Her eyes were kitten-wide, her face pale and wondering, and one of her satin shoes was missing. Her hands were tied behind her back.
A few seconds later the Grovellers forced their way through the same door, Mosca just behind them, and found themselves in an apparently empty room. Just as they were spinning this way and that looking for the vanished pair, there was an ear-splitting shriek.
It appeared to come from behind the wall. Whetstone-face kicked at the plaster, which tore before his boot, proving to be no more than a dingy canvas panel concealing a passage beyond. One good yank slid the panel aside, and beyond could be seen a narrow corridor, illuminated by a side window. In the middle of the passage Beamabeth was kneeling, Skellow standing over her with a knife in his hand, the blade almost touching her limp ringlets. He looked up as the canvas tore, and it seemed to Mosca that he stared directly at her, his teeth bared in a parody of his horrible smile. Then there was a deafening crack, and Skellow gave a sort of backwards nod, drew himself unsteadily up on tiptoe and then collapsed.
Something seemed to jump in Mosca’s chest, and her nose filled with the smell of the old wine cellar where Havoc Gray had met his end. For a moment she wondered wildly whether it was her gun that had fired. But hers was cold and still in her hand. Smoke was drifting from Whetstone-face’s pistol.
Beamabeth still sat quivering, but quivering was better than no motion at all. She raised her head, and blue eyes peered out at Mosca without recognition or much in the way of wits. Whetstone-face strode forward and pulled her to her feet.
‘All right, lass. We’re here to take you home to your father.’ It was said kindly enough. Apparently Beamabeth’s magic was working even here.
From behind there came the thunderous noise of many boots on the stairs. A sound as loud as a battle-drum, just as the Grovellers had said. One pair of boots might have been their comrade the ex-soldier. A whole gang of boots could only mean trouble.
There was no going back the way they had come. They could only go forward, down the corridor which Skellow had hoped would provide him with escape. Whetstone-face scooped up Beamabeth.
‘Come on!’ he rasped, then turned and ran down the passage. The others followed.
In spite of the thunder of her own blood, Mosca could not help wavering an instant as she passed the fallen body of Skellow, the man she had come to Toll to undo. There was a spreading darkness on his chest. She knew that he must be dead. And then he spoke.
‘Little witch,’ was all he said before his lizard-hiss breath stilled. His long fingers released the knife in his hand. Mosca felt as though she had killed him, and she was filled with too many emotions at once to know whether it made her happy or not.
‘Quickly!’ A Groveller grabbed her arm and dragged her away. One corridor, two doors and a rope ladder later, they were out on the open streets.
Mistress Leap coped very well with the sudden and unannounced arrival of Mosca, Beamabeth Marlebourne and three of the most disreputable, gibbet-worthy strangers she had ever seen. She remained upright, indeed rigidly so, though for couple of minutes could manage nothing but a string of broken vowels.
‘Sorry, Mistress Leap! I had no chance to tell you the new plan! This is Beamabeth Marlebourne. I think she might have had the sense scared out of her -’
‘You poor little violet!’ Mistress Leap recovered her voice, and enfolded Beamabeth in a motherly embrace which seemed to rumple the mayor’s daughter even more. ‘You
In Beamabeth’s cornflower-blue eyes, realization appeared amid confusion, like a butterfly reeling out of a dust-cloud.
‘You are… the midwife lady? The one that sent me the letter?’
‘Yes! Oh, you read it! Then you know… it must have been a shock, of course, but I am sure you always knew you were special. Ah, how I wish I could introduce you to your real parents, but they passed away of influenza ten years ago, the poor dears…’
Mosca had snatched off her basket-hat and was halfway out of her Seisian regalia.
‘Mistress Leap, we got to hurry because the Locksmiths are huntin’ Miss Beamabeth! I think we shook them all off, but we got to get her disguised. And then we need your help! We need you to take us to the Committee of the Hours.’
‘But their doors will be shut!’ protested Mistress Leap. ‘The only part still open will be… oh.’
Mosca nodded grimly as she splashed water on to her face from a bowl and began rubbing the greenishness from her skin. ‘The hatch where you put in the babies born with daylight names, along with their papers. The committee members are waiting there to pull us through the chute. Then they’ll drop down money for you – and for
