“Oh, pig on a spit! Left a bit! No, left! Here—this way!” The dread Clatterhorse was guided out into the brilliantly moonlit street through tugs to the muzzle. Then its green stable girl locked the front door behind it and crept back inside its belly.

  Even somebody watching the Clatterhorse’s jolting progress would not have guessed at the full extent of the confusion inside it. Welter had had the foresight to cut eyeholes in the cloth covering, but they were scattered at odd heights and let in very little light. Mistress Leap was foremost, holding up the front of the horse’s body frame, while her husband supported the back, so that the whole thing was raised from the ground and could be carried around. Mosca, in the middle, was on clattering duty. She turned a wooden handle that somehow created a clicketing noise not completely unlike the galloping of bone hooves. Mistress Leap quickly proved a somewhat skittish horse head, given to stopping or veering sideways without warning. In short, they were all trapped in a darkness full of trodden toes, sudden elbows, squawks, whispers, and the smell of moldy blanket.

  Clicket-a-clicket-a-clicket. The rattle dinted the icy, motionless air. At the sound, householders who had stepped outside to tie up their tithe vegetables scurried back inside again. Doors were slammed and shutters fastened by the time the Clatterhorse jogged unsteadily into view, deer head gently bobbing, its glass goggle eyes little mirrors of the perfect moon overhead.

  It came to an uneasy halt just in front of a pawnbroker’s shop. Two small green hands emerged from a slit in its side just long enough to yank a hanging turnip from its string. The horse then wheeled about and lurched off back the way it came.

  “Here it is . . . stop . . . Ow! Stop!” The horse halted by committee, and the green hands emerged again, this time to tie the turnip outside the Leaps’ front door. “Now—the counting house!”

  Clicket-a-clicket-a-clicket. Every street was aglitter, sugared with frost as if some master chef had fashioned an entire candied town for the Clatterhorse’s snapping jaws. From the porticoes and icicle-fanged eaves hung beets and potatoes, cabbages and carrots. The Clatterhorse was evidently in two minds about these juicy trophies, and kept veering toward them, only to lurch away from them again.

  Within the dread beast’s flanks, an ardent but whispered argument was taking place.

  “No!” The horse’s head was adamant. “We cannot steal our neighbors’ vegetables! It would be no better than murder!”

  “I think we can,” murmured the animal’s rear. “I am almost certain it would be quite possible.”

  “Hush!” hissed the horse’s stomach. “Listen! You hear that?” She halted her handle cranking, and for the first time the sound that had been drowned by their own clattering and whispering became audible to all of them.

  Clacket-a-clack. Clacket-a-clack. A sound like Death drumming his fingers.

  “Oh no,” breathed Mistress Leap. “It’s the real Clatterhorse! The Locksmiths!”

  “Quick!” growled Welter. “Down that alley!” The deer-headed Clatterhorse hoisted its skirts and sprinted. It reached the darkness of the alley with mere seconds to spare before another apparition turned the corner.

  A shape lurched and twisted into view, its motion grotesquely playful despite its bulk. Moonlight creamed over the sheep’s skull at the crest of its long willow-pole neck. The red ribbons that fluttered from its eye sockets gave it a festive ghastliness. The body was a shaggy mass of fluttering rags, patches, and ribbons that trailed right down to the ground.

  The skull turned this way and that on its stick neck, as if the horse was eyelessly scanning the icy street for prey. A slender rod tugged at its jaw so that it snapped with a clacket-a-clack, and Mosca had the uncomfortable feeling that it was tasting the air and would catch the flavor of their fear.

  Everybody in the deer horse held their breath. And then, just as it seemed they would escape detection, Welter released his breath in a wordless cry of anguish. Mosca turned and found that a spectral green-white something, curved like the spine of a harp, had risen out of the tool sack at the back of the horse, in which it had presumably been sleeping, and had seized Welter by the nose.

  “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 toward 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 aflutter. 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. “They-sawustheysawustheysawus . . .” 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 good-bye to Beamabeth Marlebourne and our own escape.”

  By day, the mayor’s counting house was in a broad and fresh-faced street, favored 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 toward 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 barreled 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, frog spawn!”

  “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 hobbyhorse 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 one another as it moved. It stirred up 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, which continued its uphill charge toward 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 man horse 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 horse kept its feet but reeled. Its skeletal jaw fell open, spilling the radish onto the street. The man horse 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 openmouthed as the radish danced past their hiding place, then, without need for discussion, set off in pursuit.

  The radish liked the central drainage 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 agoggle, then the man horse, 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 “horsehide” 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 man horse 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 toward 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 unhorselike 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.

  The radish, the radish! Nothing mattered but the radish.

  The man horse 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 play, carnival games with a deer’s head and a child’s hobbyhorse and a sheep skull found by the roadside.

  The clatter hushed for an instant as if somewhere a black theater curtain was being drawn back, and then the real Clatterhorse rode into view, flames burning in the depths of its bone-rimmed eyes.

  Chapter 24

  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 armor, but there was no knight and the armor was bone. Frills, and 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 man horse 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 phantomlike sheep-skull horse, with its bloodred 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 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 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 toward 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 scraped, 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 by 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.