‘Aaag! Ged de blarmuggin bird off by nose!’
‘Saracen!’
There is an ideal time and a place for everything, particularly the discovery of unexpected homicidal geese. This moment of necessary stealth was not that time, and the confines of a fake horse not that place.
Clacket-a-clack. The sheep-skull’s jaw snap-snapped as it turned to gaze sightlessly towards their hiding place.
‘It’s heard us!’ commented Mosca, proving it was possible to screech under one’s breath. The next moment she was nearly knocked from her feet. Mistress Leap had taken to her heels down the alley, hauling the rest of the horse with her. They took a high speed left, bouncing slightly off the corner as they went, and then another.
‘Is it chasin’ us, Mr Leap?’
Gargling noises behind her suggested that Welter was still suffering from a goose-related speech impediment. Mosca could feel the rasp of busy wing feathers against the back of her neck. It was virtually impossible to see out now, the eyeholes jogging up and down too much to be useful. As they slowed for a second corner, Mosca pushed the entrance flap open a slit and dared a glance down the alley behind them. It was empty.
‘Mistress Leap, I don’t think it’s – aaarghh!’
In speaking to the midwife, she had turned her head to face forward again. Thus, when they turned the corner, she had an immediate eyeful of the solitary figure waiting ahead of them. It was the very monster they had just fled, standing squarely in their path, dark ribbons a-flutter. Mosca’s shrill shriek of surprise was matched by that of Mistress Leap, who brought the deer-head Clatterhorse to a jarring halt.
‘Back! Back!’ Mistress Leap yanked her end of the frame widdershins, so that the whole deer-horse was dragged head-about-tail to face the other way, and set off at an impressive gallop. Just as the entrance flap fell back into place and cut off her view of the street, Mosca had the strange impression that the other horse was also whirling around to depart in the opposite direction. Perhaps it was playing with them, slipping away to head them off again until they ran themselves into exhaustion.
Running, however, still seemed an excellent idea. After sprinting down several streets without pursuit, it became clear that Mistress Leap, true to her horsey role, had panicked, lost her wits and bolted, taking the rest of them with her.
‘They saw us,’ was all she would say when Mosca finally calmed her and persuaded her to slow. ‘Theysawusthey-sawustheysawus…’ Even Mistress Leap, who would dare murderer-infested streets every moonlit night, could apparently be reduced to twittering helplessness by fear of the Locksmiths.
‘We got unlucky.’ Mosca stifled the superstitious whispers in her own mind, and was glad that nobody could see her face in the darkness. ‘We rolled black dice, mistress, that’s all – but no matter, we got to roll those dice again. We got to go back for that gem. If we don’t grab it, somebody else will – maybe Skellow’s boys, maybe the Locksmiths, maybe both if they’re hand in glove. We got to race them all to that ransom, or we can say goodbye to Beamabeth Marlebourne and our own escape.’
By day, the mayor’s counting house was in a broad and fresh-faced street, favoured for promenades despite its steepness. By night it turned treacherous, bristling with sudden alleys, its slope snared with unseen ice.
A head gingerly emerged from one such alley and tilted to peer uphill towards the counting house. It was a smudgily painted deer’s head with no horns.
‘The radish is still there!’ came the word from Mistress Leap. ‘I can see it hanging from the lintel of the counting house!’
Mosca felt her spirits rocket. ‘Quick! Let’s grab it and -’
Clacket-a-clacket-a-clack.
Without warning, a shaggy shape barrelled up the street past their alleyway hiding place, paying them not the slightest notice. There was no mistaking the spindly neck, the sheep’s skull rattling at its crest. The other Clatterhorse was making a beeline for the counting house and its precious radish, ignoring all the other vegetables arrayed to tempt it.
‘Oh, frogspawn!’
‘What do we do?’
There was no time to do anything, or even to answer the question. It was scarcely out of Mistress Leap’s mouth before they heard another sound, this time from the uphill end of the street beyond the counting house.
Click. Clickclickclick. Clickclick.
Near the top of the street, something black had stepped out of the shadows with macabre grace. Something with the figure of a man, its arms and legs of spidery slenderness. Rising above its shoulders gleamed a ghastly hobby-horse head, its eye sockets hollow and its grimace charnel-white. From its shoulders hung a mantle of willow sticks, which dangled like finger bones and clicked against each other as it moved. It stirred every nightmare of beast-headed men who ate the hearts of children. It was a third Clatterhorse, and this one carried two long knives in its hands.
This did not, however, daunt the sheep-skull-headed horse, who continued its uphill charge towards the counting house even when the shadowy two-legged horse broke into a sprint to meet it. Sheep-Skull reached the counting house first, and Mosca saw its skeletal jaw close about the radish, biting clean through the string. Instead of making its own snatch at the prize, however, the shadowy Horse-Man flung itself at the main body of the Sheep-Skull horse. Its clenched fists plunged deep into the Sheep-Skull’s ragged coat, driving in its daggers with all the force of its charge.
There was a rough, tearing cry of pain and surprise. The Sheep-Skull kept its feet, but reeled. Its skeletal jaw fell open, spilling the radish on to the street. The Horse-Man aimed a snatch at the falling vegetable, but it rebounded off his knuckles and skipped away down the sloping street, slave to every quirk of the cobbles.
The occupants of the deer-headed Clatterhorse watched open-mouthed as the radish danced past their hiding place, then without need for discussion set off in pursuit.
The radish liked the central kennel ditch. Then it jolted off a boundary stone and found it liked the nearby breakneck flight of steps even better. Down and away it bounced, dwindling into darkness, its flourish of greenery trailing like a plume. After it scrambled the Deer-Horse, glass eyes a-goggle, then the Horse-Man, and finally the tottering Sheep-Skull.
Certainty of disaster filled Mosca’s head from the moment the ground gave out under her and she realized she was running down steps. She could barely see her own feet, and these steps had been worn into slapdash slopes by centuries of soles. It was too fast, then it was faster, and then the frame she was gripping lurched and tilted around her, throwing her off balance. Her falling foot caught a step edge and the next caught nothing. A wall clobbered her in the flank, then with a ghastly inevitability the Deer-Horse tipped headlong amid snapping and splintering, and the stone angles came up to bite.
Mosca lay in a heap of pain, smothered by the ‘horse hide’ blankets. Mistress Leap had broken part of her fall, but she had broken part of Welter’s fall, and her role as the filling in a Leap sandwich was crushing the breath out of her.
She wriggled her head and torso free and shook the blankets from her face so that she could breathe. The first thing she saw was the Horse-Man leaping over her head, his boot-sole nearly grazing her nose, and landing on the cobbles beyond.
The second thing she saw, looking back up the steps, was the ragged mass of the Sheep-Skull tearing down towards her with a haste born of lost balance. She was too terrified even to scream, but fortunately the Sheep-Skull’s occupants seemed to be devoting a fair bit of lung-power to that themselves.
Then the Sheep-Skull was upon them, plunging them into darkness filled with the thunder of un-horse-like boots. Mosca took a kick to the shoulder and felt a foot fall not an inch from her head. Damp ribbons and greasy wool trailed across her face. A moment later she had the moonlight back and was gasping air into her lungs. She prodded and tugged at the blanket around her until a head-and-shoulder-shaped bulge rose up on either side of her. With whimpers and sobs of pain, the Deer-Horse staggered unsteadily to its feet again, its wooden ribs jutting and its head quizzically tilted.