‘So, you want to know how to be a radical.’
‘Yes, and I wanted to know – what did you mean about walking on the grass?’
‘I meant…’ Mosca took a moment to think of all the radicals she had met. ‘The heart of being a radical isn’t knowing all the right books, it isn’t about kings over the sea or the Parliament over in the Capital. It’s… looking at the world around you, and seeing the things that make you sick to the stomach with anger. The things there’s no point making a fuss about because that’s just the way the world is, and always was and always will be. And then it means getting good and angry about it anyway, and kickin’ up a hurricane. Because nothing is writ across the sky to say the world must be this way. A tree can grow two hundred year, and look like it’ll last a thousand more – but when the lightning strikes at last, it burns, Mr Appleton.’
Brand Appleton’s gaze was unblinkingly intense, and he seemed to be memorizing her every word.
‘Toll,’ he said under his breath. ‘A thousand injustices, bound up in one set of town walls…’
‘A rotten, stinking gin-trap of a town,’ agreed Mosca. ‘I can teach you all about seeing things the radical way. It will take lessons though.’
‘Yes, yes!’ Brand Appleton entwined both his hands into a giant fist and bounced it off the surface of the table. ‘I have given this thought. A good deal of lessons. So it is best if you teach me on the way.’
Mosca suddenly had the feeling that her great fish had just jerked at her line. She had formed plans for Brand Appleton’s lessons, and the words ‘on the way’ had not been involved.
‘On the… On the way to where?’
‘Mandelion.’ Brand Appleton glanced up at her, surprised and a bit impatient. Perhaps he expected her to have kept up with his unspoken thought processes. ‘Mandelion, obviously. You are clearly a traveller – you cannot be too fond of Toll-by-Night, surely? I will need you to come with me when I leave tomorrow night, that is very plain. I need a guide who knows the best way to Mandelion. Someone to explain radicalism en route. Somebody to make introductions when I get there. You need money. You must need money, or you would not be here.’
Beneath her thinly painted nationality, Mosca went pale. Brand Appleton was planning to leave the very next night – immediately after the hours of Saint Yacobray. He must already have a buyer for the jewel. Just as Sir Feldroll had suspected, Appleton would seize the ransom, sell it and leave with his captive ‘fiancée’ before anybody could act. And now he wanted to take Mosca with him, back through the county she had tried so hard to escape, maybe in company with Skellow and his minions, to a town she had been forbidden from re-entering.
‘How much money?’ she croaked.
The sum he named was large enough that Mosca’s hands crept down to the stool top to steady herself. ‘Not all at once though. I’ll pay your way out of Toll first. The rest when we reach Mandelion.’
Mosca’s plan was either going really really well, or really really badly. She could not quite work out which. The fish was still hooked, but it appeared to be pulling her tiny row-boat out to sea.
‘All right, Mr Appleton. Tomorrow, then. Tomorrow night. When and where?’
‘Two of the clock in Chaff’s Dryppe.’
For the second time, Mosca let herself down from the stool. She could only hope that her shivering would be blamed upon the bitter cold.
‘Wait.’ She tensed, but turned to find that Appleton was smiling. ‘I forgot to ask your name. This nightbound hellhole has destroyed my manners.’
It was a question that Mosca should have anticipated, the one question she could not answer falsely and could not afford to answer truthfully, for ‘Mosca’ was hardly likely to be mistaken for a Seisian name. But there are always ways of not answering a question at all.
‘You better call me Teacher. I got a real name but -’ Mosca remembered the Beadle in the white pavilion – ‘but in this country nobody’s tongues are pointy enough to say it properly. Till tomorrow, Mr Appleton.’ And a mysterious green stranger walked out of the gin-shop, hoping that she could come up with a very cunning plan in the twenty-four hours before their next meeting.
Goodman Clutterpick, Lord of the Jumble
Mortal terror, like most things, is relative. Mosca was right in thinking that the majority of people in Toll-by-Night lived in fear, but some lived with more of it than others. And at that moment one man was living with about as much of it as a person could stand without shaking themselves into pieces.
A short while ago this unfortunate individual had been the leader of half a dozen men sent by Sir Feldroll to find Beamabeth Marlebourne. Now he was just a terrified, two-legged jelly. His mind was full of the ferocity of the wind that buffeted and swayed him, and the prickle of sweat droplets as they traced a course along his back and neck, then out of his collar and up into his hair. Or, to put it more accurately, down into his hair, since that was currently the lowermost thing about him.
When ambushed and captured, he had prayed to the Beloved with all his might and main that he would live long enough to find himself outside the walls of Toll. Being dangled upside down from one of the coffin-chutes in the western wall above the precipitous Langfeather gorge had not been exactly what he had meant.
His knucklebone dice fell out of his pocket and bounced off the underside of his chin, and he could only watch as his
luck and the favour of his Beloved plunged towards the half-visible roar that was the Langfeather. Wind-bitten scraps of a conversation above him reached his ears.
‘What are you doing?’ A rasping voice like pumice that he had not heard before.
‘One of the spies, Master Guildsman.’ A matter-of-fact sparrow-chatter voice, belonging to the man who had fastened the rope about the captive’s ankles. ‘Weren’t too talkative, so I thought maybe something was stuck in his throat. If you turn ’em upside down and shake ’em, all sorts of things fall out.’
‘We have no time for this kind of game.’ The first voice again, impatient, cold. ‘One of his fellows has already told us more than enough of their mission. This man is an unnecessary waste of our time. You had better… let him go’.
The spirits of the suspended man soared skywards, and just as quickly yo-yoed back down again as it occurred to him that right now the last thing he wanted was for somebody to ‘let him go’. Worse still, he could feel hands busy with the ropes around his ankles, confirming his worst fears. This could be his last moment.
‘Wait! Stop! I can tell you more than the others! I was the one that received our orders from Sir Feldroll! Please! Stop!’
A short pause, and then the captive felt himself being hauled back up the chute an inch at a time. Tears of relief and humiliation flooded his eyes and ran up his forehead.
Ten minutes later Aramai Goshawk knew everything the terrified man could tell him. As a matter of fact he had known most of it already, since the other five captives had been subjected to exactly the same ordeal and offhand-sounding conversation and had cracked with equal speed.
When it became clear that there would be nothing more from this prisoner but sobbing and expressions of his wish to see his family again, Goshawk had him locked up. It was, after all, still just possible that a use might be found for him and his fellows. Goshawk was not surprised that he had broken – like most desperate men, he had leaped for the only chink of hope he could see. The important thing, Goshawk knew, was to make sure that there was a chink of hope. Men who despaired, who were truly desperate, became dangerous. The night of Saint Yacobray, for example, was a carefully judged exercise in fear. Most people would manage to pay the tithe, and only a tiny minority would fail – and these could serve as warnings to the others.