Twilight Robbery Read Online Free PDF Page B

amount of slack in the bonds, just enough for two lean and eager hands to writhe free.
    In the silence Mosca shook her hands like dishcloths until the blood prickled back into them. She had heard the key turn in the lock of the door, and the arrow slits were clearly too narrow for her to squeeze through, so she crept to the end of the vault, where ash heaped with greying chicken bones, and stared up at the ceiling. The light from the arrow slits was just strong enough for her to make out the dark square of the trapdoor, inches from the end wall.
    Mosca kicked off her remaining clog. She had been thrown down and forgotten, but she was not in an oubliette. This was a stronghold of sorts, but it was meant to keep people out and cattle in . And cattle, unlike Mosca, could not climb.
    The rough-hewn face of the wall was Mosca’s friend, even though the jagged edges were not kind to her cold fingers and bit into her knees and elbows at every opportunity. There were footholds and handholds aplenty, but they had to be groped for in the dark, and Mosca could feel her wet feet slithering against their perches. She tried not to look down or up, even to satisfy the nagging need to know how high she was. High enough to hurt if I fall , whispered the tingle in her bones. And then, after a while, High enough to break my ankle. And finally, High enough to smash me like an egg.
    At last the wood of the hatch met her fingers. She locked her face in a wince and pushed at the trapdoor, praying that nobody had bolted it. It lifted.
    The trapdoor opened a crack, letting in the light of a dulling fire and an orchestra of snores. A bubbling snore like a bee dying in treacle. A rasping, lizard-hiss snore. A rhythmic grindstone rumble.
    Hardly daring to breathe, Mosca eased the trapdoor back so that it was resting on the stone flagstones and looked about her. A cooling soot-bellied kettle hung over the glum red embers that lurked in the fireplace, furred with ash. A pack of Pincaster playing cards laid out on the floor for a game of Duchy’s Favour. A row of dominoes set up on their ends along the floor. Two figures stretched beneath their own cloaks beside their muddy boots, an ear poking out here, a company of toes there.
    Mosca pulled herself halfway out of the hatch on to her belly and wriggled her way forward until she could bring her legs up on to level floor. She rose to her hands and knees, and froze.
    Against the door rested a time-ravaged basket chair, strands of its broken wicker splayed like spokes. In the chair lay Skellow, his mouth so wide open he seemed to be silently singing. From somewhere behind his cravat came the lizard-hiss snore.
    Although nowadays Mosca did her best to avoid praying to the Beloved, at least until they provided her with decent evidence of their existence, she still reserved the right to mutter silent imprecations against them when her path was scattered with more thorns than she considered reasonable.
    There was no escape through the door. Mosca picked her way carefully across the room, skirts hitched so that she would not knock over the line of yellow bone dominoes or set the wooden bowls rolling.
    There – a small shuttered window set high in one wall. Narrow, but wide enough to allow a Mosca through.
    She climbed gingerly on to a stool, worked the shutter bolt free and opened the shutters. Then she heaved the upper part of her body on to the windowsill and started wriggling through the gap, the night air rushing in past her so icily that it made her ears ache. There was sky ahead with stars drowned in it, black trees waving as if trying to mime a warning . . .
    Behind her there was a faint clack-clack-clack-clack like a skeleton impatiently drumming his fingers. In her mind’s eye, Mosca could almost see the first domino teetering in the breeze, then falling to trigger the others. The lizard-hiss snore stopped abruptly, and then there was a hoarse cry, enough to tell Mosca that Skellow had woken, looked