Twilight Robbery (39 page)

‘Nobody? What if we take a tithe from outside a pawnbroker’s?’ There was grit and venom in Mosca’s grin. ‘Locksmiths might not trip over ’emselves to attack another guild. And even if those pot-bellied, blood-sucking leeches
do
end up being chased up and down a few streets by a horse made of bone,
I
won’t be weeping out my heart’s juice.’

‘If anybody sees us . . .’ Mistress Leap had her hands pressed to her temples as if her thoughts were trying to fight their way out. ‘If the Locksmiths ever found out . . . If
anybody
ever finds out . . .’

‘The urchin is right,’ called Welter from his workshop, over a rasp of earnest sawing. ‘It is our only chance, Leveretia.’

‘And not just ours,’ added Mosca. ‘In a few hours the mayor will look for a letter to say his daughter has been rescued. If it is not there, then come dusk he will hang the ransom outside his counting house. Then Skellow and Appleton and those other fine boys will dance out and snatch it. And by dawn they’ll be out of Toll and halfway to Mandelion, with Miss Marlebourne slung over one shoulder like a rug.

‘And the only way we can stop them is to prevent them getting the ransom. Gallop there ahead of them. Steal it first.’

The sky paled relentlessly. From black to charcoal, to a greasy grey, to apple-flesh white. Then the Jinglers swept the town, and the nightfolk were sealed away, with nothing more they could do to prepare for the tithe except tear up floorboards and shake furniture in search of stray coins. The day-doors opened, the colours came out to play, and the people of Toll-by-Day emerged to complain about the cold and the price of pepper.

By mid-morning, unbeknown to the populace, a blazing row was taking place at the mayor’s house. Sir Feldroll was doing most of the blazing.

Until now he had taken a good deal of care to be polite and deferential in the mayor’s house. However he was growing increasingly tired of pretending that he was not the heir to a full-blown and powerful city, visiting the petty official of a self-important provincial town. Toll’s power was its position, and its position was starting to drive him steadily insane.

‘My lord mayor, listen to me! No message has been left by the men I sent into the night. None! And no word from Clent’s girl. Nothing! My men are gone, and the girl is probably dead too. They have failed. Are you still determined to leave out that ransom?’

‘Would you have me do otherwise?’ flared the mayor. ‘What is a jewel compared to my daughter?’ The mayor had a groggy, punch-drunk air, though the only blows he had received were loss of his daughter, lack of sleep and the incessant battering ram of his guest’s conversation.

‘Then the kidnappers will flee with both the jewel and Miss Marlebourne as soon as they can. My lord mayor, you
must
allow me to bring troops through Toll this very day, so that they can be waiting to catch them on the western side! Appleton is a radical – where would he flee but to Mandelion?’

‘If I do this, without charging toll for your troops, then Toll will be declaring war on Mandelion! Your army will march on and lay siege to her, do not deny it! We have always,
always
, remained neutral –’

‘My lord mayor, with the
greatest
of respect, neutrality is a luxury you can no longer afford! Mandelion must be crushed, or other radicals like Appleton will be inflamed and inspired! Radicals cannot be wiped out if they have a whole city to flee to whenever they wish to escape the consequences of their crimes!’

The mayor gazed out through his window towards the Clock Tower, now partly hidden by scaffolding for the repairs of the clock, and Sir Feldroll could guess all too well what was in his mind. It was the Luck, the infernal Luck of Toll. They all acted this way, the people of Toll, gazing like trusting children towards the Clock Tower where the Luck was held, knowing in their hearts that nothing
too
terrible could happen, because the Luck would not permit it.

Sir Feldroll had no faith in the Luck’s ability to hold up the bridge, protect Toll from attack or extract Beamabeth Marlebourne from the clutches of her captors. In fact he was starting to wonder if the Clock Tower would have to be burned to the ground before he could get a sensible conversation out of anybody.

‘Sir Feldroll, no troops will pass through the town this day. But if with the next dawn my daughter is not returned to me in exchange for the ransom . . . I shall give permission for your men to march through Toll without payment.’

An army of arguments massed in Sir Feldroll’s mind, but he held them back and bid them build camp until they were needed. The mayor’s promise would do. It would have to do.

‘Very well. I shall send orders for our troops to approach Toll, ready to pass through once we have your permission.’

The sun slid lazily downwards, ignoring all those who prayed for it to stay longer in the sky. The low moon brightened, and the town went through its dusk ritual of shudder, rattle and shift.

In the alcove below the clock face on the Clock Tower, the figure of a little Goodman receded joltily. With a mechanical clatter like tin hoofs a shape with a skeletal horse’s head replaced it. The Night of Saint Yacobray had arrived, and now nothing could prevent his deathly canter.

The sight of a Clatterhorse should chill one to the bone. Sure enough, when Mosca surveyed the result of Welter Leap’s day of manic construction, she was struck dumb with a sense of acute dread and foreboding. However, this was not because it was an image of Death-in-a-bridle.

‘You sure it’ll even hold together?’ Mistress Leap prodded it doubtfully. Its jaw promptly fell open and then off, just to prove a point. The stuffed stag head had been painted in flour paste and charcoal to give it a skeletal look and its horns had been sawn away, but this had not been enough. It needed a jaw to snap, or nobody would mistake it for a Clatterhorse. So Welter had cunningly crafted hinged jaws of wood which clapped to when you pulled a string. Sadly, despite all his skill, it looked very little like a skeletal horse, and more like a deer that had got its head stuck in a xylophone. The bulging glass bottle-top eyes might have been a mistake as well, with hindsight.

‘It’ll look better in the moonlight,’ declared Mosca with more certainty than she felt. Welter gave his wife a baleful glare as he set about nailing the jaw back into place.

The body of the horse was a series of curved frames over which was thrown a mass of coal-stained blankets sewn together by Mistress Leap and studded with dry chicken and mutton bones. There was just enough room for three people to hide inside the main section, in single file. The rearmost portion of the horse was a separate cavity, and within this a large sack hung from the frame, so that stolen goods and tools for hasty repairs could be carried in it.

‘And what if we meet the real . . . ?’ Mistress Leap could not muster the courage to complete the question.

‘We won’t.’ Mosca hoped she was right. ‘We’ll only be out on the streets a little while. B’sides, the Clatterhorse clatters as it goes, don’t it? We hear it coming, we skedaddle.’ The midwife seemed a good deal recovered but was still a little pale and fragile, so Mosca thought it best to sound as cheerful as possible.

As the first bugle sounded Mosca looked for Saracen to wish him farewell – a temporary farewell, she hoped. But during the night he had vanished into the furthest recesses of the room in search of new and inconvenient places to sleep, and despite a tug at her heart she knew there was no time to make a thorough search for him.

‘Hssst!’ Welter grimaced them all into silence. There came a silver jingle outside, then the slam and click of the false house facing being swung away and locked into its night-time position. All three of them held their breath, frozen into the hunch-shouldered, guilty posture reserved exclusively for those who are about to launch into forbidden streets with a fake spectral horse.

The jingling faded, and Mosca unlocked and unbolted the door, and opened it just enough to peer up and down the street.

Now!
she mouthed. Her accomplices ducked into the horse through special flaps in the cloth cover, and Mosca threw the door wide. The newborn Clatterhorse shuddered, lifted slightly, whispered to itself furiously, then wobbled forward two feet and headbutted the door jamb.

‘Oh, pig on a spit! Left a bit! No, left! Here – this way!’ The dread Clatterhorse was guided out into the brilliantly moonlit street through tugs to the muzzle, then its green stable girl locked the front door behind it and crept inside its belly.

Even somebody watching the Clatterhorse’s jolting progress would not have guessed at the full extent of the confusion inside it. Welter had had the foresight to cut eyeholes in the cloth covering, but they were scattered at odd heights and let in very little light. Mistress Leap was foremost, holding up the front of the horse’s body frame, while her husband supported the back, so that the whole thing was raised from the ground and could be carried around. Mosca, in the middle, was on ‘clattering’ duty. She turned a wooden handle that somehow created a clicketing noise not completely unlike the galloping of bone hoofs. Mistress Leap quickly proved a somewhat skittish horse head, given to stopping or veering sideways without warning. In short, they were all trapped in a darkness full of trodden toes, sudden elbows, squawks, whispers and the smell of mouldy blanket.

Clicket-a-clicket-a-clicket
. The rattle dinted the icy, motionless air. At the sound, householders who had stepped outside to tie up their tithe-vegetables scurried back inside again. Doors were slammed and shutters fastened by the time the Clatterhorse jogged unsteadily into view, deer head gently bobbing, glass goggle-eyes little mirrors of the perfect moon overhead.

It came to an uneasy halt just in front of a pawnbroker’s. Two small green hands emerged from a slit in its side just long enough to yank a hanging turnip from its string. The horse then wheeled about and lurched off back the way it came.

‘Here it is . . . stop . . . Ow! Stop!’ The horse halted by committee, and the green hands emerged again, this time to tie the turnip outside the Leaps’ front door. ‘Now – the counting house!’

Clicket-a-clicket-a-clicket
. Every street was aglitter, sugared with frost as if some master chef had fashioned an entire candied town for the Clatterhorse’s snapping jaws. From the porticoes and icicle-fanged eaves hung beets and potatoes, cabbages and carrots. The Clatterhorse was evidently in two minds about these juicy trophies, and kept veering towards them, only to lurch away again.

Within the dread beast’s flanks, an ardent but whispered argument was taking place

‘No!’ The horse’s head was adamant. ‘We cannot steal our neighbours’ vegetables! It would be no better than murder!’

‘I think we can,’ murmured the animal’s rear. ‘I am almost certain it would be quite possible.’

‘Hush!’ hissed the horse’s stomach. ‘Listen! You hear that?’ She halted her handle-cranking, and for the first time the sound that had been drowned by their own clattering and whispering became audible to all of them.

Clacket-a-clack. Clacket-a-clack
. A sound like Death drumming his fingers.

‘Oh no,’ breathed Mistress Leap. ‘It’s the
real
Clatterhorse! The Locksmiths!’

‘Quick!’ growled Welter. ‘Down that alley!’ The deer-headed Clatterhorse hoisted its skirts and sprinted. It reached the darkness of the alley with mere seconds to spare before another apparition turned the corner.

A shape lurched and twisted into view, its motion grotesquely playful despite its bulk. Moonlight creamed over the sheep’s skull at the crest of its long willow-pole neck. The red ribbons that fluttered from its eye sockets gave it a festive ghastliness. The body was a shaggy mass of fluttering rags, patches and ribbons that trailed right down to the ground.

The skull turned this way and that on its stick neck, as if the ‘horse’ was eyelessly scanning the icy street for prey. A slender rod tugged at its jaw so that it snapped with a
clacket-a-clack
, and Mosca had the uncomfortable feeling that it was tasting the air and would catch the flavour of their fear.

Everybody in the deer-horse held their breath. And then, just as it seemed they would escape detection, Welter released his breath in a wordless cry of anguish. Mosca turned and found that a spectral green-white something, curved like the spine of a harp, had risen out of the tool sack at the back of the horse, in which it had presumably been sleeping, and had seized Welter by the nose.

‘Aaag! Ged de blarmuggin bird off by nose!’

‘Saracen!’

There is an ideal time and a place for everything, particularly the discovery of unexpected homicidal geese. This moment of necessary stealth was not that time, and the confines of a fake horse not that place.

Clacket-a-clack
. The sheep-skull’s jaw snap-snapped as it turned to gaze sightlessly towards their hiding place.

‘It’s heard us!’ commented Mosca, proving it was possible to screech under one’s breath. The next moment she was nearly knocked from her feet. Mistress Leap had taken to her heels down the alley, hauling the rest of the horse with her. They took a high speed left, bouncing slightly off the corner as they went, and then another.