Frances Hardinge - Fly By Night

Unsteadily, half willingly, she turned her steps towards the church. If she was likely to be hanged for arson, then this was as good a time as any to scrub at her stained soul.

Until now she had visited only the parish church at Hummel, which was little more than a barn sheltering a cluster of shrines. Visitors from a large market town would not have given the Kempe Teetering church a second look, but to Mosca it might as well have been a cathedral.

Several centuries of gull droppings on the domed roof created a white tracery like an ivory fretwork. The great, carved-oak doors were a foot too tall for the entranceway, and leaned against the door frame, leaving a gap for visitors to squeeze between them. Although Mosca did not know it, they had been plundered during the civil war from the wreckage of another church further upstream.

Mosca slipped into a darkness as chill as a funeral morning, and found herself surrounded by the Beloved.

Each shutter was carved with the figures of saints, stiff and identical as playing-card kings. Painted Beloved elbowed for room in the rafter-high murals. Wooden Beloved peered from the pulpit and the altar screen. Stone Beloved bulged like pompous fruit from the trunks of the stone pillars. A goodman of straw had been pulled apart by rats, and a goodlady with a turnip body and potato head was rotting quietly in a corner.

Mosca stared about her, not sure where to offer her confession. She found Goodman Postrophe high on one rafter, but he seemed to be busy talking to Goodlady Prill, Protector of Pigs, so she felt that she would be interrupting. In addition, the carving of Postrophe made him look a little like her uncle Westerly, which gave her pause. Goodlady Prill was plumper than her aunt Briony, but had the same mean, short-sighted sort of stare.

‘I told you,’ Mosca imagined Prill saying in Aunt Briony’s voice. ‘I always told you the girl was a wasp in your pocket, and would sting you when she had the opportunity. Small wonder, though, with a father like that . The books spoilt her. I have never known such a knowing child.’ Her tone made it plain that ‘knowing’ was something that no self-respecting child had any business doing. Mosca’s fingernails dug into her palms.

She looked around for a carved face resembling that of Quillam Mye, but none of them wore pince-nez, or was bowed over a book. It would have driven him to distraction, she thought suddenly, being trapped on a carving where the Beloved crawled over one another like bees, droning about meal and chaff, when to pick apples, saving candle ends, and mending chicken coops.

Palpitattle? Ah, there he was, carved into a shutter. The fly-saint grinned like a mantrap, and his great eyes bored right through the wood and were flooded with sky.

‘’S like this,’ he rasped in the voice that Mosca always gave him. ‘That Mr Clent’s got you by the scruff, now he knows ’bout the mill. You got to get the dirty on ’im. Somink big . What ’bout those papers he hid from Mistress Bessel? Hid ’em in the shrine before, din’t he? Don’t want ’em seen, do he? Printed, ain’t they? Maybehaps they ain’t got the seal from the Company of Stationers. That’d be enough to buy him a rope cravat.’

If books were feared, the Stationers were feared more. They had started out as simply a guild of printers and bookbinders but they had become much more. By now they were masters of the printed word, with the right to decree any book safe to be read, or damn it to the flames like a plague carcass. The law gave them full licence to crush anyone who trespassed on their rights by printing books, and they exercised this right ruthlessly.

In Chough it was said that the Stationers had special spectacles which let them read books without harm and decide which were safe for other eyes. In Chough it was said that if the Stationers caught you with a book that had not been made legal by a Stationer seal, they took you away and drowned you in ink. In Chough, the only person who never talked about the Stationers had been Quillam Mye, despite the fact that in Mandelion he had once been a Stationer himself.

In Chough there had always been rumours that Mye had been expelled from the Stationers. Within a day of his death, in fear of that ruthless Guild, the villagers had ransacked his shelves and made a bonfire of his books and manuscripts. In Chough it was said that as the books burned, twisted letters were seen fleeing the blaze, like spiders scrambling out of burning logs.

This memory filled Mosca with a bitterness beyond bearing. Most of her father’s books she had never read. He had always promised that she could look through them when she was ten, ‘when her brain was no longer soft enough to take a careless thumbprint’. They should have been her legacy. Instead, all her father had left her was an inauspicious first name, the ability to read and an all-consuming hunger for words.

Nonetheless, despite their fear of the Stationers, most people regarded them as a necessary evil. Better the devil we know , they thought, than the devil we have known …

The devil we have known. Mosca tipped her head back, one hand holding her bonnet in place. A heartshaped gape of sky stared back at her.

The Heart had been the reason for the bloodiest ten years the nation had ever known.

It was said that there had always been many religions, one for each Beloved. But one day, according to legend, a glowing heart had appeared in the chest of every Beloved shrine icon and beaten three times. From that day, all the little religions became one, and everyone believed in a strange, faceless spirit that joined the Beloved together, and which they called the Consequence.

Every church was built with a hole high on one wall, into which was fitted a heart-shaped birdcage, a-flutter with newly captured wild birds. The throb of their wings gave the Heart a beat, to remind the people of the Consequence. The priests who captured these birds daily were known as the Birdcatchers. In time they became custodians of all sacred texts and devoted their lives to staring into the White Heart of the Consequence in order to understand it.

Afterwards it was hard to be sure exactly when the sublime light had dazzled their minds and driven them mad, since they went insane with such calm and dignity that nobody noticed. However, among themselves they secretly started to tell a different version of the story of the coming of the Consequence. They said that those with true vision had seen the Heart glow and beat, then blossom into flame and consume the old Beloved icons completely, so that only the Heart remained. In time, they said, everything should return to the Heart and become a part of its searing light. The highest destiny of any worldly thing was to burn. The highest duty of any person was to become like flame.

On one side of the nave Mosca noticed a narrow arch across which a metal grille had been nailed. Behind the grille, stone steps spiralled steeply into darkness, and she guessed that they had once led to a Birdcatcher library.

Aside from the Stationers, the Birdcatchers alone held the right to print. Later, their extraordinary books became a matter of whispered legend. Words printed in a spiral, like a whirlpool that drew in the reader’s mind and never let it escape. Incantations in strange languages which, if read, opened boxes in the mind and let out the imps of madness. Phrases so beautiful that they broke your heart like an egg.

The Birdcatchers’ rise to power had been insidious. Amid the turmoil of thirty years of civil war and rocky Parliament rule, nobody had really noticed how many of the powerful men had been taught in Birdcatcher schools, or how many had been converted by the clever Birdcatcher books. At last, when the Realm was thrashing around like a feverish invalid, the Birdcatchers had stepped forward like doctors to lay a cool hand on its brow and calm it. Mosca had seen old men weep when they remembered the day the Birdcatcher priests took power. Ah , they whispered, how joyful we were! We knew they would bring us peace , they would unite the people and the Beloved in happiness , they would put a bit in the mouth of the Realm and rein it tame …