‘Friend of yours?’ one of the guards asked Clent in an undertone.
‘Er… not precisely.’ Clent took a few surprisingly nimble steps clear of the portcullis. ‘Ha… this lady is, ah, a very sad case… fell into a melancholia and lost her wits after her shop burned down and incinerated her husband…’
‘… And now when she’s in her fits she thinks Mr Clent here is her husband so she follows him everywhere…’ Mosca shrilled helpfully.
In the face of this assertion, Mistress Bessel went the most radiant shade of fuschia-pink, and proved incapable of anything more than throttled frog-noises in the depths of her throat.
‘… And she will make up any lies to be near me,’ huffed Clent.
‘… Even landed him in prison before now, so she could bring him flowers and poetry each day…’ added Mosca.
‘You… scampergrabs!’ Mistress Bessel appeared to have lost the ability to breathe. ‘You… scale-tongued… maggoty…’
‘You see how it is.’ Clent kept his demeanour solemn and compassionate despite executing a high-speed backwards caper. ‘Mad as a mushroom minuet. Alas. A tragic figure.’
The guard peered out at Mistress Bessel. There was little in her stocky figure to suggest melancholy or wilting devotion, but at present there was plenty to indicate insane rage, and the guard also took a step or two away from the grille around which Mistress Bessel’s plump fingers were now gripped.
‘All right, I’ll make sure the boys outside the gate know about her. And don’t worry – unless she’s got the money to pay admission, she won’t be troubling you.’
‘I’ll find you out, my honeybumbles!’ Mosca could hear Mistress Bessel shouting as the gatehouse door swung open before them. ‘I’ll reach you, my dumplings!’
‘Follow me,’ muttered the guard. ‘I’ll take you across the bridge so the Committee of the Hours can talk to you.’
As she followed Clent and the guard further into the gatehouse, Mosca could not quite resist pausing in the doorway to wave adieu to Mistress Bessel with one of her own handkerchiefs.
They found themselves in a short, unlit corridor, with a large number of pikes and halberds propped in racks against the walls. Emerging at the far end through an open arch, they found themselves staring down the length of the bridge.
The bridge itself was an impressive effort in timber some twenty feet long, its planked walkway flanked by hundreds of Beloved carved from black wood, their faces ravaged by weather-cracks. But it was not the bridge itself that took Mosca’s breath away. Without warning, the ground had run out.
Where the bridge began, the earth dropped away into sheer, giddying cliff face. On the other side of the abyss rose another cliff, interrupted here and there with the chalky streaks of waterfalls, and a few small trees that had decided to make the best of things and grow sideways out of the sheer face. Between them lay a plummeting gorge, at the base of which a seething white river hurtled, twisted, fizzed and roared through a maze of warped, slick black rock. Somehow over centuries it had carved, scooped and polished the rock bed into weird shapes and valleys and tunnels. The gorge itself was gauzed over with the mist and spray that drifted up from the churn of water. Here and there the chill winter sun painted the vapour with faint swathes of rainbow. Occasionally a white gull or coal-grey jackdaw sliced through the mist below.
Mosca had heard a hundred times that the Langfeather was unswimmable, unnavigable and all but unbridgeable. Now she started to understand why.
It was also said that the city of Toll had not been captured, razed or successfully besieged throughout the whole of the Civil War. Raising her eyes to gaze upon the town on the opposite bank, Mosca could readily believe this too.
At the far end of the bridge stood a full-blown tower, flags flying from its zenith. The town beyond it was ringed about with a great wall, its fortifications peppered with arrow slits and chutes, great dark weep-stains marking the brick beneath them where generations of inhabitants had used them to throw out their waste. The town had been built on the tilt, and had the unnerving appearance of having slid off the ridge down to its current location, stopping just on the lip of the precipice that would have sent it tumbling into the Lang-feather. Beyond the wall, Mosca could just make out clusters of dark-tiled roofs, jostling like rook wings. On the northern side of the town the wall suddenly became grey and ragged, and Mosca could see that it had been built into the remains of some ancient castle.
There had been other attempts to build bridges across the Langfeather, not only in these uplands across the roaring gorge, but also in the lowlands where the river was broad and muscular. None had survived, some burned during the Civil War or the Purges, some quickly losing their supports to the force of the water, others betrayed by the crumbling of the treacherous ground. Only the Toll bridge remained through some freak of luck and craftsmanship, defended by Toll’s walls.
‘It’s all right.’ The guard who had followed them through the keep smiled, misreading Mosca’s awe-stricken expression. ‘Don’t be scared to walk across. You can trust to the Luck.’
Mosca’s clogged foot hesitated above the first plank of the bridge. A moment before she had had no reason to doubt the bridge. But ‘trusting to luck’ didn’t sound particularly safe.
‘ To… luck?’
‘Not just luck. The Luck. The Luck of Toll. As long as the Luck stays within our town, we’re all safe as sunrise.’
‘Ah… I believe I have heard of such things!’ Clent sounded genuinely intrigued. ‘Certainly I know that some mansions and castles have a “Luck”, an object which it is said must remain inside its walls to guarantee prosperity. Often a glass chalice, or an ancestral skull, or a collection of breeding peacocks. So, what form does your Luck take?’
‘Oh no, sir.’ The guard touched the side of his nose. ‘We don’t talk of the Luck in case we rub the luck off it.’ Mosca wondered if he even knew the answer to the question. In his place she would certainly have wanted to know.
‘Now, if it weren’t for the Luck,’ continued the guard, ‘that cliff over there would be crumbling away like good cheese, and the city would be tumbling off its ledge like a pie off a window sill. And as for this old bridge, why, weather and time would have broke it apart like a breadcrust. It’d be falling in flinders into the Langfeather, and us along with it. But thanks to the Luck they’re all sturdy as steel -’
‘Wonderful,’ murmured Clent, whose knees had started to shake. ‘Admirable. Er… is there any chance that you could stop reassuring us now?’
The guard was happy to do so, evidently feeling that his work was done, and with new trepidation Mosca and Clent ventured out on to the bridge. The planks showed no particular inclination to give way underfoot, though some gave a slightly tuneful xylophone thunk when you stepped on them, and Mosca could not help noticing discolorations here and there that made her think nervously of rot. The air was cold and mint-crisp, scoured clean by the white river below.
Mosca was rather relieved when they reached the tower at the far side without the bridge having crumbled away. As she passed through the arch, again she found herself blinking in sudden sunlessness, then was ushered through a side door into a dim, high-vaulted, stone-walled room draped with long, fading banners. At a desk in front of them sat a squat little man with a straw-yellow wig and a face so knobbed and purplish that he immediately put Mosca in mind of a raspberry.
‘Names!’ barked the Raspberry. ‘Ah, greetings, if you will permit me to take upon myself the introductions for our party, I am Eponymous Clent, whose poems and ballads may even have reached this noble town, and this is my secretary, Miss Mosca Mye-’