The radish, the radish! Nothing mattered but the radish.
The Horse-Man was running up and down the alley at a stoop, scanning every gutter, its lean body quivering with agitation. The Sheep Skull was also stumbling about the lane, no longer capering, twisting this way and that in search. The radish was nowhere to be seen.
And then the arctic silence of that realization was broken by a clear, crisp sound, like a mirror shattered by a bone knife.
Clatter-clack. Clatter-clack. Clatter-clatter-clack.
A clean, loud, hard sound that might chip the walls as it echoed off them. A sound the very hills would hear, and pull their forests about them for comfort. Suddenly the ‘horses’ in the street became figures in a mummers’ play, carnival games with a deer’s head and a child’s hobby horse and a sheep skull found by the roadside.
The clatter hushed for an instant as if somewhere a black theatre curtain was being drawn back, and then the real Clatterhorse rode into view, flames burning in the depths of its bone-rimmed eyes.
Goodman Hobbleroot, Nurse of the Bitter Wound
There was a moment of utter paralysis, a cool droplet of moon-madness. Large as a real horse, the Clatterhorse stood in the street, white winter steam huffing from flank and muzzle. Like a knight‘s horse it wore armour, but there was no knight and the armour was bone. Frills, spikes and scales of bone, rough and sallow as old wood, and bone blades jutting from its black wheels.
The night could hold its breath no longer. A breeze rose, and the candle flames deep in the monster’s eye sockets flared. A chorus of whetstone swishes, and suddenly its flanks were bristling with swords. The Horse-Man took only half a second of quivering contemplation before spinning about and taking to his heels.
‘RUN!’ shrilled Mosca with all the power of her lungs. But her legs were tangled and unsteady, her companions still rising. Worse still, as she watched, the front half of the Sheep-Skull horse staggered and slumped, bringing the whole creation crashing down at the base of the steps to block Mosca’s own escape route.
However, terror is the most calming thing in the world. Nothing makes life simpler. Suddenly nothing mattered but escaping the Clatterhorse as it glided closer. Now the phantom-like Sheep-Skull horse with its blood-red
ribbons was just something in the way.
‘Run! Runrunrunrun!’
Everything was frenzy and yet had the numb, painful slowness of a dream chase. Still draped in their splintered horse, Mosca and the Leaps lurched to their feet and scrambled over the prone Sheep-Skull beast in a bid to reach the street. Blanket-cloaked limbs stirred and squirmed under the weight of Mosca’s knees and elbows. Without warning, a black gloved hand shot out of the Sheep-Skull’s ragged trappings, raking wildly at the Deer-Head’s blanket hide. Mosca glimpsed a gleam of metal, and felt the hooked fingers draw lines of cold across her knee.
A second later she was past the sprawl. Her clogs found the cobbles, and before she knew it she was running. Her spirits returned to her in a rush as she found the Leaps keeping pace, the little cloth horse galloping along around her. At the same time there was the warming, sickening, shameful relief that the Sheep-Skull had stumbled, that it would probably draw the attention of the Clatterhorse just long enough for Mosca and her friends to escape.
Mosca ran as if the Clatterhorse behind her was no beast of strings and stitchwork, as if there were no gloved and pitiless hands holding its dozen gleaming blades. At that moment it might as well have been the bone-scaled beast of legend with the invisible Yacobray straddling its back.
By the time the Deer-Head horse had holed up in the pleasure garden, panting with the force of six exhausted lungs, it became clear that Mosca and the Leaps had successfully shaken off all the monstrous and dangerous creatures besetting them. This included the real Clatterhorse, the Sheep-Skull Clatterhorse and the Horse-Man Clatterhorse. Unfortunately this also included Saracen.
Mosca was frantic, and might have run back to look for him if he had not suddenly appeared at the park entrance in all his cabbage-hued glory, swinging his paunch with particular self-importance. Scooping him up, Mosca spotted a few threads dangling from his beak, and had an uneasy feeling that some tithe vegetables had ended up as goose-dinner. There was nothing she could do about it, however, so she put it out of mind.
Three pairs of feet set a new record in their sprint for the Leaps’ house. Once inside, three pairs of hands made short work of driving home the bolts. Then at long last three intrepid Clatterhorsemen could fall into chairs and contemplate fully the events of the night.
There was a silence, punctuated by panting.
‘… Ah… hah… heugh?’ Mistress Leap asked eventually, pointing an unsteady finger towards the door, beyond which lay the incomprehensible horse-infested streets.
Mosca shook her head helplessly and managed a tiny breathy tittle of sound by way of explanation.
‘Graargh,’ creaked Welter Leap in agreement, and let his shoulders slump. For a little while there did not seem to be much else to say.
They were, however, all still alive. After a while they noticed this fact and began a quiet inventory of their limbs to make sure that none were missing. Everybody was bruised and grazed, Welter Leap had lost a tooth on the steps and Mosca had three shallow but sheer cuts across her knee that looked as if they had been scored by razors. However, their little league had survived the hours of Saint Yacobray. The true Clatterhorse had evidently taken the turnip tithe from their door and passed on peacefully.
But why had there been so many Clatterhorses on the streets? If the last arrival had been the real Locksmith Clatterhorse, then who had been inside the other two imposter horses? One explanation immediately sprang to mind, of course. Beamabeth’s kidnappers must have come up with just the same cunning plan as Mosca. They had realized that if they disguised themselves as a Clatterhorse they could romp through the streets, collect the mayor’s radish ransom and be gone before anybody knew any better.
But that only explained the presence of one of the other false Clatterhorses. Why had there been two of them, both ready to seize the ransom? Their terror at the arrival of the real Clatterhorse made one thing very plain – neither of them had been working with the Locksmiths.
So who had ended up with the world’s most valuable radish? With a feeling of deathly apprehension, Mosca realized she had one way of trying to find out.
One scant hour after the reign of Yacobray had ended and the people of Toll-by-Night dared to open their doors, a greenish foreigner with badly scratched stockings and a basket-like hat could be seen making her way to Chaff’s Dryppe, a low-eaved, ill-smelling alley on the edge of the Chutes district, where moss-dyed wools hung from hooks and stained the walls like lichen.
Mosca found a dark arch and pulled herself into it so that she could watch the street unseen. Brand Appleton had said that he would meet her there at two of the clock. She would risk talking to him if he came alone, but if he did not she would stay in hiding and then follow him back to his lair. It was her only plan. If Brand Appleton had seized the ransom jewel, then by now he probably had the money he needed to flee the town and disappear into the night. This might be Mosca’s last chance to find out where Beamabeth Marlebourne was being held prisoner.