‘Madam! In what way is our situation improved by setting your homicidal familiar on members of the mayor’s household?’
‘Well, it made me feel a dozen yards better!’ Mosca was aware that she was drawing stares from others in the castle-courtyard marketplace, but did not care. ‘Did you see that prancing, lug-eared ninny of a footman? Whey-faced, sick as a pig and smelling of the parsley he’s been chewing to make himself feel better. I know that look. I’ll bet my last button he was up all hours drinking last night – which is why he’s as queasy as a shoe full of eels today. You saw him! Can you imagine him leapin’ out of bed before dawn, or riding full gallop to Lower Pambrick without losing his breakfast or falling off his horse? I can’t. Do you know what I think? I think him and his friends staggered out of bed too late to make it to Lower Pambrick in time… but they all pretended they had so they wouldn’t get into trouble. No wonder he couldn’t look me in the eye!’
‘Ah.’ Clent appeared to reflect, then inclined his head in acknowledgement. ‘You might have the right of it, child.’
‘And if I try to tell them, nobody will believe me! Not against Gravelip, with his Goodman Juniperry name!’ Mosca stamped and fumed like a muslin kettle.
‘Be it even so, now is the time for calm calculation… and not for sending your web-footed apocalypse on a one-goose rampage through the house of the mayor. Mosca, rein in that viperish temperament of yours, and we shall yet have the reward. It will simply take longer than we thought.’
‘It’s all right for you,’ snapped Mosca. ‘You can wait around for that reward long as you like. I got three days.’ Until yesterday Mosca had been trapped between two rivers, desperate to get out before winter arrived. Toll had looked like her only means of escape. Now, however, she wondered if she had traded one prison for another, a smaller prison with high walls. If she was not out of it before her allotted time as a visitor ended, then the mysterious night town with its twilight cacophony would claim her.
‘Have no fear – we will be out in three days, child,’ Clent murmured. ‘By hook or by crook.’
Probably by crook, thought Mosca, noting Clent’s narrowed gaze.
‘Something extremely peculiar is happening in this town,’ continued Clent, ‘and since we have a duty to call in at the Committee of the Hours in any case, let us begin our enquiries there. And… Mosca? I have a suggestion. Carry your demonfowl in your arms. It will cover your badge as we pass through the streets.’
As it turned out, this strategy was only partly successful. Wearing a dark wood badge earned one suspicious and hostile glares, but so did carrying around oversized, cantankerous waterfowl with a penchant for cheerfully pecking people in the eye. With Saracen in her arms, however, Mosca did find the crowd more likely to part before her, and thus she was able to look around and observe more of the town. Once again she was struck by the way Toll’s brightly painted wood and plaster contrasted with the grim, flint-ribbed cottages of the villages in the county she had just left.
Mosca was already disposed to regard Toll bitterly, and everywhere she looked she found reasons to compare it unfavourably with Mandelion. With her endless thirst for reading she looked for posters and found almost none. Bet nobody here can read without mouthing the words, she thought.
‘Interesting,’ Clent said after they had been walking for a little while. In answer to Mosca’s questioning look, he flicked a glance to the nearest hanging sign, which showed a row of painted candles. ‘A town is like a tapestry, Mosca, a story to be read from pictures. Look at the shop signs, and tell me what they tell you.’
They walked on in silence for a little longer, and Mosca obeyed, staring at the signs that swung over doors and along walkways. Some were tavern signs, some bore symbols of the various guilds of the Realm. The Stationers, the Wig-makers, the Playing-card Makers, the Watchmakers, the Goldsmiths – the powerful guilds that kept the splintered Realm from collapsing into anarchy, and who nonetheless spent their time circling one another, wary as winter wolves.
‘Well?’ Clent asked at last.
‘Pawnbrokers.’ For the sixth time, Mosca had caught sight of the triple hanging bauble of the Pawnbrokers’ Guild. ‘There’s lots of pawnbrokers.’
‘Indeed. No doubt many pay their way into Toll in the hope of earning or begging enough money to pay their way out again, and end up pawning everything they own. What else do you notice? What is missing?’
Mosca chewed her cheek for a moment, then inspiration struck her.
‘Coffeehouses! There are no coffeehouses!’
Back in Mandelion there had been half a dozen of them.
‘No coffeehouses,’ agreed Clent. ‘No chocolate houses either. No tobacco-sellers. None that are in business, anyway.’ He paused, dusted a grimy pane with his sleeve and looked in through a window into an abandoned shop where pipe racks were still visible under a fine fur of dust. ‘And look at the stalls – can you see any silks, any Laemark lace, any loaves of sugar, any spices?’
Mosca realized that she could not.
‘All the big cities and towns in the Realm, including Toll, have agreed that they will not trade with Mandelion,’ Clent murmured, ‘in the hope of starving her out. What none of them seems to have noticed is that Mandelion is a port. If she needs anything, she can send out ships and trade with other countries. Mandelion does not suffer greatly from the ban – but Toll does.
‘Mandelion is the only major port on this part of the coast. Toll needed Mandelion, needed the traders who came to and fro through this town, paying in silver and loaves of Salamand sugar, gold and Grenardile port.’
‘So… that’s why they put the tolls up, then? They’re running out of money here too?’
‘You have the beginnings of perspicacity. Now… what is not visible in these streets? What is there here that we cannot see?’
Mosca made a number of guesses. ‘A way out of town’ was apparently not the right answer. Neither was ‘any sign of that chirfugging reward’.
‘Think.’ Clent’s impatience was evidently being held at bay only by his pleasure in revealing his own cleverness an inch at a time. ‘What do you remember about these streets last night, just before we found sanctuary?’
‘You mean apart from all the doors fastened against us, and the great, big bolts, and the giant latches on the shutters, and the great, big shiny locks on the… oh.’
A penny descended with an inaudible plink. Mosca stood back and looked up and down the street. Nowhere did she see a sign with silver keys crossed on a black background.
‘There should be ’undreds of ’em,’ she muttered, instinctively lowering her voice. ‘Toll locks itself up like a chest every night – there must be guineas’ worth o’ good locks in every street.’
‘Indeed.’ Clent cast a nervous glance over each shoulder, despite the fact that neither had spoken the word that was in both minds.
Locksmiths.
‘So,’ whispered Mosca, ‘where are they? Why aren’t they here?’
‘Oh, they are here.’ Clent’s words slipped out through barely open lips. ‘We cannot see them, but they are here in Toll. Mark my words.’
They reached the Committee of the Hours just in time to avoid Clamouring Hour. All over the Realm, for one hour every other day, it was traditional for bells to be rung in worship of each and every Beloved, not only in the churches but in every house and public place. In towns and cities the sound was usually deafening, and it was a good idea to be indoors when it happened.