‘Well, small surprise in that!’ she exploded. ‘Everybody who tries climbing this chimney ends up dead in the cinders! And you want me to climb up this chimney, down another . . . an’ all the way back again?’
‘Yes,’ said Mistress Bessel. And somehow, although there were a thousand protests Mosca could make, there was no real answer to that one stony word.
‘So – s’posing I even reached the other room, what if there’s a guard inside it, lookin’ after the Luck? If there’s smoke from the chimney, a fire must be lit for somebody.’
Mistress Bessel simply shrugged her motherly shoulders.
‘Then you had better hope that his sleep is heavy and your step is soft, my buttercup.’
‘But . . . what if I can’t work out what the Luck is? Or what if it’s locked away or chained to the wall?’
‘If you cannot use those long, thieving fingers of yours, use your eyes.’ Mistress Bessel stood, her empty basket in hand. ‘Tomorrow I will be back with more muffins and counsel for the poor wicked children who have fallen into sin and crime. If you have a Luck to give me, then that means coin for you and Eponymous, enough to pay your way out of Toll and see out the winter. If not . . . then you had better be able to tell me every inch of that other cell so I can come up with a better plan. Either way, if you’ve done your part, then you’ll walk out of prison with Jennifer Bessel.’
‘How?’ This still sounded too good to be true. ‘I got thrown in the Grovels on the mayor’s own orders. How you going to get me out when he’s brimmin’ with bile?’
‘Have a little faith. Jennifer is a name to conjure with in this town, and if I vouch for you the doors will fly back on their hinges so fast the breeze will leave you breathless. As for your mayor –’ a catlike smile crept across Mistress Bessel’s apple-broad face – ‘it will not be the first time I have talked a gentleman out of a temper.
‘But if I come back tomorrow, and you are sitting here with no word of the Luck . . . then there’s no more luck for you in this life, my little mulberry tree. Once you have given them your shoes and buttons to sell, the jailers here will watch you starve to death . . . and they won’t even carry out your corpse unless somebody pays them to do it.’
The little window was too narrow to let through much light or any hope of escape, but was just broad enough to allow in a dismal slither of a draught that chilled the whole cell. Mosca crouched and shivered on the wooden floor, wrapped in the Keeper’s scant blanket, warming her frozen nose tip in her apron.
If I am to do this, it had best be by night.
At night there was less likelihood of the Keeper dropping into Mosca’s cell to extort money from her. More hope that any guards around the Luck would be drowsy or asleep. A better chance that the ‘supper time’ fire in the upper room would have cooled so that she would not get burned or choke on the smoke.
Hours passed, and Mosca chewed her fingertips and thought of days passing and the Keeper becoming less courteous and the cudgel at his belt and nobody caring. Rat in a trap.
She heard the flues stealthily flute and boom with draughts, and smelt a faint trace of smoke.
She heard the bugle, and felt the taste of the air change as day became night.
She heard the second bugle.
And it was too big a decision to make, too terrifying a plan to consider. So while she was busy not considering it, Mosca carefully and silently slid off her clogs, pulled off her stockings and tied back her hair. Then she removed her dress to reveal her chemise and the wading breeches she still wore under her skirts, even though she had long since left the waterlogged village in which she had been brought up.
She crouched down in the hearth and very carefully straightened, with the upper part of her body inside the absolute darkness of the chimney. She felt panic tighten around her chest like a corset and reflexively ducked down again, banging her head. Then she made herself straighten once more and groped around with her hands, feeling the feathery tickle as her fingertips dislodged soot.
It was chokingly narrow, and if she braced herself badly she might stick at any moment. Climbing it would be ugly, unpleasant . . . and possible.
Grimacing, she raised one knee, found a toehold in the stonework with her bare foot and began to climb.
Soot, Mosca decided after she had climbed three yards, was powdered evil. She could not look up without it falling into her eyes and making them burn. She had no hands free to wipe her eyes, and chafing her face against her shoulder just made things worse. Soot was on every ledge, ermine soft, tickling and trickling into her sleeves and collar and ears and mouth, catching her throat and making her cough great soot storms into life.
But while well-born children might have been brought up with improving fables and histories, Mosca had gobbled every gallows chapbook and crime chronicle she could find. So when panic threatened to set her mind on a rat-scamper, she gritted her teeth and thought of every daring jailbreak she had ever read, of Drag Minkem descending from a roof on a rope of blankets, and ‘Swift’ Swathe Ferren swaggering into his favourite tavern still wearing his manacles.
Why is it that every time someone is needed to squeeze up somewhere or under somewhere or into somewhere it ends up being me? Just as well I’m half starved, or I’d stick like a pick.
Each time she moved, loose soot and fragments of hardened tar hissed down the chute and rattled in the hearth below. As Mosca climbed, the hiss took longer and the rattle became more indistinct. Mosca braced her elbows and feet against the encroaching walls, knees tucked close to her chest, all too aware that a missed footing could send her plummeting down in exactly the same way.
You’re on your own. Blackness, narrowness, walls closing in, no sky. Mosca felt her child-heart calling out to the Beloved, begging for their company in the darkness. But instead she bit her lip almost to bleeding and stifled the prayers in her mind.
Then, just as she thought the flue would narrow and narrow until she was wedged like a cork in a bottle, it kinked slightly to climb at an angle. After a yard or so of this, her questing fingers discovered that a foot above her head the right-hand wall disappeared. She ascended by inches until her head was level with the gap.
A dim light was falling from above, and Mosca could see that her flue had joined another to form a larger square chute leading upwards. Hauling herself up to sit on the brick ledge at the top of the division, she could see a little square of dark silver sky above, criss-crossed by stark black. Mistress Bessel had been right, then. The two flues both fed into one chimney, which was blocked off with a grille so that no prisoners could escape that way.
Mosca felt her stomach sink, and realized that she had been hoping at the back of her mind that she might be able to make it out on to the roof. No, it seemed she would be playing things Mistress Bessel’s way, like it or no.
The descent of the other flue was far more difficult than the ascent of the first. A faint haze of smoke still hung within, making Mosca gag and sneeze in spite of her terror of being heard. The bricks held a strange animal warmth, and there were sparks and feathers of hot ash lurking in ambush.
Not far now. Then grab the Luck and go. What would it be? What had Clent said?
Often a glass chalice, or an ancestral skull, or a collection of breeding peacocks . . .
‘Well, I hope it’s not peacocks,’ Mosca muttered under her breath. ‘Don’t fancy climbing a red-hot chimney with half a dozen squawking birds under one arm.’
Even as she gave words to this thought, her bare sole settled on a ledge that turned out to be harbouring a family of ember-hot cinders. She swore and jerked her foot away, then dragged desperately at the sooty walls with hooked fingers as her other foot lost its grip. She tumbled down the rest of the flue, buffeted by the back wall, the air filling with soot clouds, and then a stone floor struck her in the bottom, bringing her to a halt with an agonizing jolt. For a few seconds she could only lie there, winded and mewling in pain, her legs in the air. Then she opened her ey
es again, and froze.
She was in a room twice as large as the one she had just left, the walls draped with rich but faded tapestries. The floor was choked with dusty russet-coloured rugs and cluttered with wooden images of the Beloved, some of whom had been arranged in lines like troops. In a corner stood a small four-poster with a chipped chamber pot beside it. A cluster of candlesticks was glued to the top of a low table by their own wax, one candle still lit and casting a slanted radiance over the whole room.
Standing directly over Mosca herself was a youth of about fifteen years, his jaw slack, his eyes popping with surprise.
His pallor reminded Mosca of the bluish wanness of the inhabitants of Toll-by-Night. His clothes, on the other hand, were lavish, although apparently designed for someone a few years younger. The sleeves of his green velvet frock coat ended several inches short of his bony wrists. His waistcoat was elaborately embroidered, but many threads had been pulled loose. No effort had been made to tie back his long dark hair. Fuzzy dark brows met over his nose.
For a moment or two Mosca was paralysed. The stranger, however, did not call for help or move to the door, but seemed if anything more flabbergasted and terrified by her sudden apparition than she was.
Mosca put her finger to lips and gave an intimidating hiss, that turned into more of an intimidating splutter as soot caught in her throat. She struggled to her feet, soot-stained and inexplicable.
‘Who . . . ?’ The boy’s voice was a squeak.
‘I am a . . . a Figure of Calamity!’ hissed Mosca. ‘Sent by the Beloved to . . . to punish them that . . . do not pray enough.’
There was a short pause in which the stranger’s pale gaze wavered down Mosca’s scraped and blackened form and back to her face again.
‘What kind of calamity?’ he whispered.
‘Fire,’ answered Mosca promptly, her heart beating a tattoo. ‘And . . . hunger. And crime. And really bad moods. Now, keep your ugly trap shut, or I’ll blight you.’
The youth stared at her, then extended one trembling hand towards Mosca’s face, and with great care and deliberation poked her in the eye.
She gave a short yelp and slapped his hand away. He spent a few moments staring at his sooty fingertip, and then broke into a long loud laugh. It was an embarrassing laugh, the sort of unformed, yodelling noise that Mosca would have expected to hear from a toddler or a village simpleton. Mosca crouched back towards the fireplace and glanced nervously at the door, but the braying laughter summoned nobody.
‘You are not a calamity,’ he said. ‘Your cheek is squashy.’
There was something odd about his speech, at once childlike and formal. It reminded Mosca of a very small child reading lines for a play. He had other infantile tricks of manner too, the way he let his jaw hang open, and breathed loudly through it, the way he fumbled at his own buttons, and scratched himself in ways most people didn’t when anyone was watching.
So. Someone had been left to watch the Luck. The idiot son of some high-ranking daylighter, to judge by appearances. And if he was an idiot . . . then perhaps all was not lost. Perhaps he would be too addle-pated to give a good account of her, if she crept back up the chimney to her own cell. Perhaps he would not even notice her scooping up the Luck . . .
Heart pounding, Mosca willed herself to think. Where was the Luck? Was it that silver plate heaped with dried raisins? That glass decanter with purple tidemarks left by wine? That ivory-handled candle snuffer?
The stranger was examining her again with a new, keen interest, looking in wonderment at her breeches and chemise.
‘Where is your badge?’
Mosca clutched reflexively at the place where it had been, before remembering that it had been pinned to the dress she had left in her cell.
‘I . . .’ She swallowed. ‘I must have dropped it somewhere – don’t look at me like that!’
‘But – everybody has to have a badge! Having no badge is against –’ The boy broke off suddenly, and for the first time looked alarmed and cast a glance towards the door. But instead of running to it to summon help, he turned back to Mosca and put a clumsy hand over her mouth.
‘Talk quietly,’ he said, ‘or they will take you away.’
He took her by the arm, led her to the dark wall furthest from the door and sat down on the rug in a jumble of angular limbs. Mosca dropped into a crouch a yard from him, all the while keeping her feet under her, in case she needed to sprint for the chimney. If his wits were twisted, could he be dangerous?
‘So – what you doing up here?’ she asked, as quietly and steadily as she could.
‘Luck,’ he muttered in a distracted way. Mosca glanced at him sharply, hoping that he might betray himself with a glance towards the mysterious Luck. He did not. His angular, trembling hands were busy, shaking out a chequered rug and arranging some of the wooden Beloved upon it.
‘For Luck? Did your family put you in here because . . .’ Mosca hesitated.
. . . because you were broken-witted and they hoped the Luck would cure you . . .
‘Here.’ The boy pushed a heap of Beloved towards Mosca. ‘You play this now. You have night, I have day. I want to try the new rules.’
Only when her strange host started pointing out where on the rug she should place ‘her’ Beloved did Mosca understand what he was doing. He had divided the statues into the Beloved that gave daylight names and the ones linked to night-time names. Now he was laying them out like game pieces on the squares of the checked rug.
Playing games with Beloved icons? I fancy the priests would have a thing or two to say about that . . .
He explained the rules, gabbling some parts in his excitement. Mosca watched him narrowly, cupping Palpitattle in her hands, her wits snicking against each other like sharpening knives.
‘So this is a game?’ Mosca chewed her cheek. ‘Ought to be a prize really, then, shouldn’t there? Anything here worth using as a prize? What’s the most valuable thing here?’
Ah! There it was at last. A small telltale gesture. Her host’s hand crept up and came to rest near his own collarbone.
‘What is it?’ Mosca pursued her advantage. ‘Can I see it? Is it a locket?’
The youth shook his head, wide-eyed, then beamed and tapped at his own chest.
‘What? Where? What is it? Oh.’ Mosca slumped and wiped her face with both hands, leaving a cage-work of soot smudges across her brow. ‘Oh, beechnuts. It’s you, isn’t it? You’re the Luck.’
‘Protector-of-the-walls-guardian-against-disaster.’ The boy’s smile was beatific. ‘I was born under Goodman Lilyflay, He Who Makes Things Whole and Perfect – and so I have a name full of getting-things-right and just-as-it-should-be. The finest, brightest, luckiest name in Toll.’
‘Might ’ave guessed,’ sighed Mosca bitterly. ‘You couldn’t jus’ be a glass cup, could you?’ She sized up the bemused-looking Luck, peered appraisingly at the little hearth, then shook her head wearily. ‘I’d have had a better chance with a bunch of peacocks,’ she muttered. ‘So – what is this brilliant name of yours, Master Luck?’
‘Paragon,’ came the answer, laced with quiet pride.
The word was slightly familiar. ‘Is that like a hexagon?’
‘No!’ He looked angry, and very confused. ‘Paragon is a . . . an ideal example. It’s . . . perfect.’
Mosca sniffed at perfection. Perfection had no pulse and no heart.
‘Funny kind of a name.’
‘It is the best name in the town!’ The Luck looked aghast. ‘That is why I was chosen. My parents were night-dwellers, but I was born to higher things, born worthy of the brightest of noonday names. And . . . and now I stay here and keep the town safe, and hold off disease, and stop the bridge falling into the Langfeather.’ A look of feverish eagerness came into Paragon’s eyes. ‘You come from . . . out there, do you not? Have you seen my bridge? What do you think of it? Is it as grand and fine as they say?’
‘What? Have you not seen it yourself?’ Mosca stared w
ith new eyes at the little bed, the scraped crockery. ‘How long have you been in here?’
‘Since I was three years old, when the last Luck died. Twelve years and three months and two days.’
‘Twelve years! ’ Mosca briefly forgot to speak quietly, but fortunately the words choked in her throat.
‘Night moves first.’ The Luck had returned his attention to the game. ‘Your move, Soot-girl.’ He looked up at her, face flushed and animated, undisguised entreaty in his eyes. Still stunned, Mosca picked up Goodlady Jabick, moved her to an adjoining square as he had shown her and saw a look of utter bliss pass over her companion’s face.
Twelve years. Twelve years with nothing to do but chew the ends of his hair and invent games, elaborate games of gods with rules that Mosca could barely remember from one moment to the next but which the Luck knew as well as his own fingernails. As they played, his speech became faster and sharper, explaining the mistakes she had made and helping her to find better moves.
Before long, Mosca was facing a terrible truth. The Luck was not a simpleton or a madman. He was clever, and his mind was starving.
‘Do you never go out?’ she could not help asking.
‘No.’ His face drooped. ‘I am too precious. But . . . they send me tutors sometimes, or papers for me to make my mark on them. And when the clock is working I have charge of the Beloved images –’ he waved a hand at his game pieces – ‘and put the right ones in the wheel each day, for I have a wondrous memory and nobody else is fit to handle them.’
‘But . . .’ Mosca was still choking on the whole idea. ‘You never get to tread on grass, or see the sky, or . . . or run? This town is mad as moth soup! Nothing but a great big prison. Some of the cells are nicer than others, that’s all. Precious? You’re a prisoner, like everybody else here. Protect the town, do you? Save its people, do you? Then wave your wand, and magic us all somewhere better.’
The Luck had dropped his gaze and would not look at her, instead stroking at one of the Beloved game pieces as if it was a pet. She was shouting at the wrong person.