Fly trap the sequel to f.., p.41
Fly Trap: The Sequel to Fly by Night, page 41
He reached the castle courtyard to find the mayor in the middle of a stand-up row with a number of subordinates, and in no temper to talk to ambassadors.
“Tearing the faces off the houses? Well, stop them! We cannot have nightlings running around the streets! There is no danger of anyone burning to death! The Luck will protect the town. Tell everybody to go back to their homes and behave in a civilized fashion!” Tiny furry fragments of ash chased through the grass at his feet.
Seated by the door with her sketchbook was Beamabeth, who flinched very slightly when she saw Clent and then gave him her usual sweet smile, but there was something flat about the expression in her eyes, something appraising. He made haste to her side.
“Miss Marlebourne, what luck!” He thought she winced almost perceptibly at the word “luck.” “I was afraid I might miss you.”
“Mr. Clent! I thought you had left town.”
“Without bidding farewell to Toll’s most precious jewel? Unthinkable. We owe you at least that much.”
Clent had the satisfaction of seeing a glimmer of unease and uncertainty pass through Beamabeth Marlebourne’s eyes.
She was confused by his return, he guessed. She was gauging him, trying to work out what cards he had up his sleeve. For now he might be able to keep her off-balance by smiling meaningfully and dropping hints, delaying the moment in which she realized that she held all the cards, and that his well-brushed sleeves held nothing but his arms.
“Wait—this door has been broken in already. Have the people left?”
Brand, who had lolled back onto his mattress in a state of helpless torpor, fought to open his eyes and look toward the voice. He could just make out two dark and fuzzy silhouettes against the door. Perhaps they would not see him.
“Look, over on the bed! An invalid! We cannot leave him here—the wind is so changeable. Let us take him to the doctor.”
The one time Brand needed daylighters to be callous, here they were rescuing him from the dark safety of his stop hole and dragging him into the daylight where he could be recognized. He tried to protest when strong arms lifted him and his mattress, but his voice and limbs were too weak to prevent them from bearing him outside.
He flinched as a shaft of daylight fell across his face. There was a gasp from one of his mattress bearers.
“Wait—I have seen him before—this is Appleton! The radical! The man who kidnapped Miss Beamabeth!”
The mattress was set down roughly on the cobbles, and Brand opened his eyes to find himself confronted by the uncomfortable ends of a hook, a rake, a cleaver, and a chisel. The terror in his enemies’ faces suddenly tickled him unbearably, and despite the pain in his side he started to laugh, so breathlessly and helplessly that the other four took a step back, evidently fearing madness.
“Yes,” he choked. “The radical. The terrible radical.” The absurdity was too much for him. “Bravo! You have captured the great Brand Appleton, the king of the radicals! The mayor will be very proud of you. Ow.” He clasped his hand to his side as his laughter threatened to reopen his wound. The very hopelessness of his position made him feel free and giddy all of a sudden. He was at death’s door, but his captors were the ones who seemed terrified.
“We should take him to the mayor,” whispered the hook wielder.
“Yes, to the mayor and his saintly daughter.” Brand gave them a bruised and crazed grin. “What are you waiting for? Take me to them—do you think I will tell anyone but the mayor about my crimes? All these flames—that was me too, did you not know?”
“What? You . . . you cur!”
“Blame my birth.” Brand winced as he was roughly dragged to his feet, his arms slung over two sets of shoulders so that he could be carried. “Blame Sparkentress, the wicked minx. Blame the mayor for sending me to Toll-by-Night, where I could mix freely with others of my seditious kind, plotting his overthrow and the destruction of Toll!”
Ah, so it ends, he thought as he was dragged along the streets by his captors. And it seems I will be visiting the mayor and his daughter again, after all.
He would see Beamabeth one last time. And yet, when he thought of her, he could only remember a set of golden ringlets and a warm glow, with no actual face. Instead he found himself thinking of a surly, crop-headed figure with a cut lip, and thanking the Beloved that Laylow had not been caught up in his arrest.
Let us hope Laylow and Mosca find the Luck. I am all out of luck, it seems. But perhaps I can help them . . . by forcing the Locksmiths’ hand. If I can persuade everybody that the town catching fire is a sign that the Luck is dead—then the Locksmiths will probably have to bring him out of his hiding place to prove he is still alive. That might give Mosca and Laylow their chance . . .
“You are all closer to death than I!” he declaimed, in a carrying and manic tone. “I have already doomed you all! There is nothing to stop the flames now, nothing! Last night I slew the Luck myself!”
Let us see the Locksmiths ignore that.
The reaction to his pronouncement was all he could have hoped for, and more.
Toll-by-Day was blinding, and Laylow could barely keep her eyes open. As far as she was concerned, the whole world might just as well have been aflame. The colors burned, from the murky green of the yews to the red cloaks of respectable housewives. Even her good friends the roofs had developed leeringly bright patterns of moss and scratch tracery. The sky was an ache, and the sun a searing, shapeless hole, so different from the gleaming penny of the moon. The air smelled different as well, and not just because of the smoke.
Her own hands, as she found holds on ledges and chimneys, looked strange to her, the calluses yellow, the scars snail white. She felt exposed, as if everyone must be able to see her every instant. In actual fact, however, most people were too busy with thoughts of the fire to wonder whether a claw-gloved girl might be running along the rooftops.
There was a lot more noise in the streets than she was used to in the night town, but some fragments floated up to her.
“. . . says the Luck is gone! Flames spreading because the Luck is gone!”
“. . . captured Appleton and he says he cut the Luck into pieces and threw them over different walls . . .”
Laylow stiffened, and her claw tips made squeaky sounds as they etched tiny white marks into a roof tile. Brand had been captured. He was a prisoner and had come up with exactly the sort of mad defiant lie that would see him torn apart by a hysterical crowd. Did he want to die?
For a little while she could not breathe and thought about running to the jail to find him. But what good could she do against armed guards and a tower of stone? None.
What now? Would rescuing the Luck help her save Brand? It was so hard to think in this blazing, clattering daylight. If she was lucky, it would help somehow. She pushed on toward what she prayed was Blithers Yard.
Looking down, she saw two men stop dead and exchange glances as they overheard the report of the murder of the Luck. Both were wearing gloves. They conversed hurriedly, then broke into a run. Face puckering in concentration, Laylow set off along the rooftops, keeping pace with them.
She had to hope that these men were going to check on the Luck, make sure that he was still alive and well, and to report the rumors circulating. She almost knew where she was now. Laylow knew the Jinglers’ favorite shortcuts to most places, having conned them by rote when planning her chocolate delivery routes.
In an alley, the two men met with two more, also in gloves, and Laylow craned to hear something of their furtive conversation.
“. . . says we should move him . . . breaking into all the houses down there . . . move him farther from the fire . . .”
And on they went, now as a foursome. Jingle-jing, jingle-jing, the faintest silvery sound of hidden keys chiming as they ran.
No doors had been beaten in yet in Pritter’s Lane, but the house tearers were only a street away. Casting quick glances up and down the lane, the gloved men fumbled quickly with the locks on a house facing and slid it aside to show a small red door. This was opened, and after more conference two figures came out, a large and burly man and a boy in his teens. Laylow could not tell how closely he matched Mosca’s description of the Luck because there was a thick cloth draped over his head, as if to protect him from smoke.
If she did not act, they would lead him to another part of the town, pull him in through another door, fasten it, and vanish. But there were five of them and only one Laylow. What could she do?
Only one thing.
The five Locksmiths were on the alert. Two kept an eye up and down Pritter’s Lane. One was casually keeping watch at the corner, another attending to locking the door behind them, the last making sure the hooded boy did not run or do anything sudden. None, however, were looking up, and so none were ready when a grim and wiry figure dropped down in their very midst, yanked the Luck backward by his collar, and placed the tips of three sharp iron claws to his throat.
“Get back!” hissed Laylow. “Or it’s an unlucky day for all of us! Step away!”
During the following long pause, the Locksmiths glanced at one another and sent furious messages using eyebrow semaphore, but there was nothing that any of them could actually do without endangering the Luck. Carefully, but with an air of barely reined menace, they moved backward away from her.
The boy whose collar she was gripping was trembling. His feet were turned inward, and his hands were big and clumsy. He was taller than she, but he was making tiny, squeezed, sobbing noises under his face cloth, like a little child crying under its pillow.
“Soot girl sent me,” Laylow whispered, and the crying noises stopped. “She says you want to be free. That true?” The clothy head shape nodded. “Me too. Stick with me and we will be.” She reached up and tugged off the cloth, and the Luck blinked at the world around him, jaw hanging open. “I will not hurt you. But we must hoodwink these people so they think I will. Trust me.”
Paragon nodded again. “Hah,” he gasped. Pale sunbeams sat on his lashes for the first time since he was three, and his world was full of floating angel halos.
Chapter 32
GOODMAN HOOKWIDE, CHAMPION OF THE TURNING WORM
By the time Brand Appleton reached the castle grounds, he had acquired a significant crowd. Never in the history of Toll had one man needed so many people to arrest him. The mayor looked up to find a quarter of the town surging out into the castle courtyard before his house, the grinning “radical” lolling in their midst.
There was a tumult of noise, declarations of Brand’s crimes, and suggestions for immediate punishments, most of which seemed to involve a length of good stout rope and the nearest tree.
“No! NO!” The mayor stalked forward. “We are not animals! He shall be arrested, questioned, tried, and executed according to the law! There will be no lynching on my lawn!” He drew closer, and his features took on a granitelike angularity as he started to decipher some of the shouts from the crowd.
He rounded on Brand. “Is this true? Have you dared to harm the Luck of Toll?”
The crowd hushed, all eyes on Brand. His gaze flitted over the pale, downcast features of Beamabeth, the gray stone face of the mayor’s house. I was invited to supper here not so long ago, he thought. She played the spinet.
“Yes,” he said.
“This is a lie,” declared one of the mayor’s new Locksmith advisers, a graying, distinguished-looking gentleman who wore his chatelaine visibly. “The Luck is safe and well—”
“Prove it,” demanded Brand. “You cannot. The Luck is dead.”
“I do not believe you!” stormed the mayor. “No? Perhaps I killed the wrong person then. About so tall, dark hair, fifteen years old, brows meeting in the middle? Green velvet frock coat too small for him? Gangly, clumsy ways of moving? Does that sound like your Luck?” Brand saw the mayor go waxen with horror. The Locksmith adviser looked somewhat uncertain as well. Neither could know that Brand was using Mosca’s hasty description of Paragon.
“It is true. Beloved above—it is true!” The mayor turned on his Locksmith adviser. “You lied to me! You all lied to me!” He stared wildly about him, seeing his panic reflected in every face, and then turned his head slowly to regard his daughter. A strange mixture of emotions fought across his features—conflict, regret, pride, relief, anguish, and resolution.
“Silence!” The mayor’s cry hushed the crowd, which had started to seethe with hysterical and panicky murmurings. “Listen, everybody! All is not lost. A cruel and terrible blasphemy has been committed, but there is still a Luck within Toll. This radical cur is just trying to stir us into unthinking panic, with his talk of flames unchecked. But you all know as well as I do that the Luck is the person with the best and most virtuous name in Toll—and when one Luck dies, the person with the next finest name succeeds them as Luck. Only taking the Luck outside the town bounds removes its protection. Behold! The new Luck! My own daughter . . . Beamabeth!”
Beamabeth’s eyes were wide dinner plates of blue terror. All the color had blanched from her face, and the little freckles at the corners of her eyes started from her skin with unusual vividness. Like a trapped animal she gazed around her for rescue, and saw only rapt faces basking in her presence as if she was the newly risen sun. Usually she used the adoration of others to escape her problems, but here their adoration was the problem.
Clent, however, suppressed any sense of pity without the slightest difficulty. His brain was busy with the icy clockwork of calculation. If only this young woman’s fears were justified! Beamabeth Marlebourne would be unlikely to threaten anybody, locked away inside the Luck’s cell for the rest of her life. Such a fate had a tempting poetry to it too, given that she really was the Luck of Toll, and had been all her life.
However, if Mosca was to be believed, Brand was lying. He had been prone in a fever since before the Luck was kidnapped, and would have had no chance to kill anyone. Clent was not certain why Brand had told an untruth that would set everybody against him. He could only assume that the young man had decided that, since a noose was awaiting his neck anyway, he might as well cause as much panic and chaos as he could in the meanwhile. In any case, Brand’s claims would be shown as false as soon as the Locksmiths could haul forth Paragon Collymoddle, and Beamabeth would be safe again. But perhaps something could be achieved before this happened.
“Ah . . . actually, my lord mayor, I am rather afraid that you are mistaken about the identity of the Luck.”
Everybody stared at Clent—Beamabeth with the stunned hope and terror of a drowning swimmer who finds herself being rescued by a shark.
“I fear I have a peculiar story to tell, but Miss Beamabeth . . . if I may still call her that . . . will be able to verify it. I have of late become acquainted with a certain midwife, who confessed to me that on one occasion she took pity on a small and sickly child, and pretended that it had been born at a slightly different time so as to give it a daylight name . . .” And so he told the tale of Paragon’s birth, choosing his words very carefully so as not to mention the name or the sex of the baby.
“Miss Beamabeth,” he said at the end, “you have known this story for a while. Why do you not tell everyone the identity of that little child?”
The mayor’s daughter gaped at him, hardly believing that he was offering her an escape route, a lie that would save her from the cell of the Luck. But Clent had not actually crossed the line between truth and falsehood; he had simply opened the door for her to do so and made it plain that he would back her up.
“I . . . yes.” A trapped animal will always scrabble for the chink of light. “Yes—it was myself. I . . . was not really born under Goodman Boniface.”
A murmur of surprise and consternation swept through the crowd.
“So you must have been born under . . . ?” Clent prompted helpfully.
Beamabeth’s kitten face furrowed as she tried to remember which Beloved followed Boniface in the calendar, and she could not suppress a shudder of distaste as she remembered.
“Palpitattle,” she whispered.
Perhaps she really believed that such news would not affect her standing among the people of Toll. Perhaps she thought her charm was such that nobody could think the less of her, nobody could imagine sending her away to the night town. If that was her belief, then a moment’s glance around the listening crowd would have been enough to disabuse her of this delusion.
A slow ripple of recoil was passing through the crowd as the townspeople seemed to awaken from a dream and regarded Beamabeth with newly sharpened and hostile eyes. She was no longer sacred to them. She was a fly child, and so everything about her must smack of trickery and lies.
A shocked silence like this was far too good to waste.
“Well,” Clent rubbed his hands, “since we are telling stories, I think I might tell another. It is a curious tale of a kidnapping—or should I say an elopement—or should I say a betrayal . . . You shall make up your own minds, gentle friends. Really Mr. Brand Appleton should be telling it, since he has been the most cruelly abused in this affair, but I suspect that he is gagged by chivalry. I, however, appear to have woken in a lamentably unchivalrous mood this morning, so . . .”
By the time a messenger panted his way into the castle courtyard to inform the mayor that Paragon Collymoddle was alive, well, and being held at claw point on the Toll bridge, Clent had finished telling the story of Beamabeth’s villainy, and several score of the Toll folk were staring at the mayor’s adopted daughter as if they had seen her bite a kitten in two.
Laylow and Paragon had reached the bridge before they found themselves stalemated. At first the growing crowd around them was content to give them a wide berth, fearful eyes upon the metal claws so close to Paragon’s throat. When they stepped out onto the bridge, however, their escort realized that this strange clawed girl really did intend to take their precious Luck out of the town.
