The young man in the cloak pressed his lips firmly together, and stared intently at the ground. He nodded twice very slowly, as if this answer was just what he had expected.
‘Mm. I see.’ His tone was slightly tremulous, and Mosca realized that he was trying not to laugh. ‘Well, I dare say that if you had been setting out to deceive, you would have come up with a story that made rather more sense than that. So I think I must accept your words as the truth. And anyway, even if it is a lie, then I am sure it is a great improvement upon the facts.’
‘It’s true!’ It seemed too hard that on one of the few occasions when she was trying to be honest she should be doubted.
‘All right, my apologies. What’s your name?’
‘Mosca.’
‘Pleased to meet you.’ He held out a hand. ‘Linden Kohlrabi.’
She shook the offered hand, not sure whether she was being mocked.
‘You are not from Mandelion, are you? Your accent sounds familiar, but I cannot place it.’
‘I just come here with a poetic practitioner. I’m his secretary.’ Her declaration was proudly defiant. The corners of his mouth trembled with another suppressed smile. Suddenly she wanted to impress the man before her.
‘I’m only doin’ that for now,’ she added, ‘cos soon I’m going to work… over there.’ Above the sandstone wall and the mosaic of roofs she could see the pale needle of the Eastern Spire. ‘That’s where Lady Tamarind lives, and I’m goin’ to be workin’ for her.’ She grinned up at Kohlrabi, and was delighted to see that, yes, his eyes had now paled to a startled green. ‘I’m goin’ to get a place there, an’ read her poetry, an’ carry in her letters on a tray, and…’ She lost words as her mind drifted away to a serene cold place where nothing could jostle her and no one could lift her by the collar. ‘That’s where I’m goin’.’
‘What a coincidence,’ Kohlrabi answered smoothly, his expression deadpan. ‘I was thinking I might drop in there myself – call in upon Her Ladyship, admire the tapestries, and I hear there’s a rather fine view from the topmost room…’
Mosca looked at his muddy boots and sly smile, and laughed aloud.
‘You’re making fun,’ she said. ‘You don’t believe me. ’S all true, though. You’ll see!’ She gave the Eastern Spire a wave, and then turned and sprinted away along the alley.
Mosca’s good mood carried her halfway home before she remembered the back-alley school. Bitter thoughts stung her again and again, like a wasp in a clenched fist. I could’ve sat sentry for ’em up on the wall, she thought, I could’ve lifted pens for ’em from the Stationers. But then she remembered the clothier’s apprentice elbowing her off her feet, and felt the bruises to her limbs and her pride. She didn’t want to go that school, she’d never wanted to go to that school, it was rotten and radical and full of traitors.
But… who would pay to learn of an unlicensed school, teaching radical books? The Stationers would. They would give her money, and she would buy back Saracen. They would be pleased with her, and send her to school, the way Lady Tamarind wanted.
By the time Eponymous Clent came home, smelling of wine and wearing an orchid pinned to one lapel, Mosca’s mind was quite made up. He gave her a giddy, pink-nosed smile as he handed her his hat.
‘Ah, an admirable day. To have my poetry appreciated by persons of quality… and means…’
Mosca thought that for a Special Operative, Clent seemed rather easily distracted.
‘I hope you managed to occupy yourself today, my dear?’
Mosca grinned grimly.
‘Shuffle your thoughts snug, Mr Clent. You’ll need room in yer skull for everything I got to tell you.’
While Mosca was telling Clent all about her adventures with Partridge and the alley school, Linden Kohlrabi was preparing to make a report of his own. The strange young girl with her wild stories and excitable black eyes had provided an amusing and welcome distraction from this unpleasant duty, but now it could be avoided no longer.
The footmen at the gates to the Eastern Spire had been told to expect him, and he was shown in to meet Lady Tamarind immediately.
‘Your Ladyship. I regret to say that Eponymous Clent has evaded me. I traced him, I trailed him, I caught up with him and in a little village called Chough I lost him. He is still at large.’
‘I know,’ answered Tamarind. ‘He is in Mandelion.’
‘Already?’ Kohlrabi raised his eyebrows. ‘I suppose he took a boat downstream?’
‘He arrived by coach. My coach. We picked him up the roadside.’
There are a number of things one cannot say to the sister of a duke, and Kohlrabi spent several icy moments not saying them.
‘My lady,’ he burst out at last, ‘if he were not so diabolically dangerous…’
‘… then I would have risked throwing him out of my carriage as soon as I learned who he was,’ finished Tamarind. ‘But I have turned the accident to the best advantage possible. I have recruited an agent to watch Clent’s every move, so that we are forewarned if he intends any harm. I do not yet know how reliable this agent will prove, but she shows promise…’
J is for Judgement
The next morning, Caveat of the Stationers left the safety of the Telling Word, and travelled by sedan to call upon a bookbinder in Pellmell, where Eponymous Clent had been told to leave any reports.
‘We’ve sent two different apprentices to pick up the reports,’ Mabwick Toke had declared angrily that morning. ‘Neither of them got there. Tittle was jostled under a cart, and is still in the care of the barber-surgeon. We don’t even know what happened to Weft. No, this time we’ll send a full guildsman – the Locksmiths can’t harm him without breaking the Rules, and openly declaring guild war. Even Aramai Goshawk would not dare do that. Caveat! You’ll do.’ Toke opened the door of the coffeehouse. ‘The Clamouring Hour is nearly over, so go quickly while the streets are empty.’ The many sects of the many Beloved had very different ideas about how the bells should be rung for worship, and it had become customary to let them battle it out through the metal of their bells for an hour every other day. Every church, shrine and cathedral became a scene of cacophony as bells chimed and clanged and tolled and jingled in every pitch from baritone to baby-chick squeak. Worshippers of more obscure Beloved would sometimes buy bells and hang out of upper windows with cotton in their ears, adding their own music to the general chaos. Most people preferred to hide indoors until the Hour was over, with their windows firmly closed. Caveat sat hunched in the sedan with his fingers in his ears as discordant peals assaulted the morning air of Mandelion.
Mr Toke always. Knows what he is doing, Caveat told himself, as he ducked into the bookbinder’s shop. But how. Can we be sure that the. Locksmiths. Care about the Rules when we have not. Heard from anyone in Scurrey for so long anything. Might be going on in there.
Two minutes later Caveat emerged on to Pellmell, tucking Clent’s report into his waistcoat. Although he stop-started his way through spoken sentences, he could read faster than hummingbird flight, and he had taken in Clent’s three pages of curling prose in as many glances. His eyebrows, which had been dancing like frightened caterpillars, were now dancing like excited caterpillars.
‘The Telling Word!’ he called sharply to the chairmen, raising his voice to be heard through their cloth-rag earplugs. He clambered back into the waiting sedan. Short phrases were easier to shout all of a piece. ‘Be quick!’