Fly By Night

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!’

The chairmen obediently set off at a jog. Caveat was just settling back in his seat when there was a thump from ahead, and the front of the sedan swayed and dipped.

‘What? What was that?’ Caveat was almost sure the foremost of the two chairmen had called out something.

A series of thuds and crashes came from behind, and a muffled ‘Oh!’, as if someone had just remembered something very important. The rear of the sedan dropped sharply and bounced on the cobbles, so that Caveat fell backwards, his wig down over his nose and his feet skywards.

Before he could remonstrate, the sedan was lifted smoothly and, as if nothing had happened, the unseen chairmen set off at their obedient jog. A moment later this accelerated to a disobedient canter, and then to a downright rebellious gallop.

While he tried to right himself, his phantom carriers took a left, a right, a left, a left, a right. Caveat could hear more than two pairs of feet clattering on the cobbles, and the echoes spoke of dank, empty alleys and high walls.

Then the echoes were gone, and there was the slap of flat soles on wet wood. Wind’s laughter, a fanfare of gulls. The mad gallop halted. The entire sedan swung giddily sideways, then plunged. Caveat struggled himself upright and leaned out of the window, just in time to see the caramel-coloured surface of the river rising to meet him.

A throaty splash. Cloudy water surged in from the cracks around the doors. Caveat lurched for one door, and the sedan tilted, shipping water through the open window. In terror he flung his weight the other way and righted it, not a moment too soon.

As he sat rigidly in the very centre of his seat, feeling the rising water tickle his calves with cold, he heard a loud banging-scrabbling sound not far from his head. Looking up, he saw a black iron claw had hooked itself under the upper frame of one window. Three more bangs and scrabbles, and grappling hooks had secured the remaining windows. The sedan ceased its whirligig, and with a long, dragging gush rose into the air.

After a few minutes of hushed paralysis, Caveat pushed up the lid-like roof of the sedan, and stood. The sedan hung, dripping, from four sturdy ropes in the shadow of a narrow footbridge, the battered boards of which leaked sky through seam and knothole. Inches below his feet, the Slye chewed the city’s flotsam like stale tobacco. On the dismal jetty nearby, three men in gloves stood watching.

‘Funny sort of a fish,’ said one. He had a rippled scar like mackerel markings down his left cheek. ‘But you never know what you’re likely to hook at Whickerback Point. All kinds of brackle washes up here.’

‘You’re very lucky we was passing by, Mr Stationer,’ his taller companion called, scratching the corn stubble at the corner of his grin. The third said nothing, but blew pipe smoke out through his teeth.

‘Perhaps,’ halted Caveat. ‘You might fetch the. Beadle to help me if so there’ll be a. Shiny. Shilling. For you.’ The men on the bank could not have seen his guildsman’s insignia, and yet they knew who he was. Despite their rough apparel, all three wore gloves of good quality.

‘Wouldn’t like to leave you a-dangle, sir,’ called the tall man. ‘What if you was to fall? Notorious for accidents, this place.’

‘Acca- acksi- acc-’ Caveat’s broken sentences disintegrated completely.

Locksmith ‘accidents’ were infamous. Everyone knew of the sneak thief who had bowsed himself silly on brown ale, boasted of breaking a Locksmith lock, and been found the next day with his skull cloven by the gilded arrow of a fallen weathercock. Then there was the story of the Roaring Bladdiman brothers, two rakes who had kicked in a Locksmith’s door to have a conversation with his pretty daughter. The following night at their favourite tavern a stack of barrels had collapsed on to them, rolling them flat like pastry beneath a pin.

‘You know what, my dubbers,’ said the mackerelcheeked man, ‘I think we’d best try to swing him to shore with a one-two-three.’

‘Yeah, and maybe fetch the good cull a nope on the costard and make him easy,’ murmured the pipe-smoker. ‘Get the nizey to bird us the brittles first.’

Caveat blinked. He knew every dictionary better than his parents’ faces, but this was thieves’ cant, and he could not tell whether the smiling men on the shore were praising his cravat or plotting to cut his throat.

‘If you tumble in the bubble while we’re swinging you to shore, we can haul you out, sir,’ shouted the tallest man. ‘But first you’d best throw us anything you wouldn’t want lost in the dunk.’

‘No. Need I will be. Fine in fact I was just. Waiting here for a friend.’ Caveat’s fingertips performed a quick patrol of his pockets, as if he thought the watchers could pluck purses with a glance.

‘Right now the best friends you got in the world is those four ropes,’ said the mackerel-cheeked man, ‘and wise men don’t wear out their friends’ patience. Else the ropes might wonder why they’re bothering with a man who can’t look to his own good, and they’ll break and give you to the Slye to buss.’ There was no mistaking the threat in his voice.

If, as Caveat suspected, these were Locksmith Thieftakers, he had little doubt that they would dare to bring an ‘accident’ upon a Stationer guildsman. He thought of icy water creeping into his nose and mouth as he fought the current. He imagined his wig soaked and bedraggled on a shoreside, a tug of war toy for gulls.

‘Hoi!’

Caveat turned his head and gave a faint twitter of relief as he saw a little rowing boat approaching. A young man with a crooked nose lowered his sculls and stared at the suspended Stationer.

‘You all right, mister? You need a lift to shore?’

‘Yes! Oh yes! The, ah. Far shore.’

The three men on the jetty watched stony-faced as the little rowing boat glided up to nudge the hanging sedan. The sculler stood up and put out his hands to steady Caveat, who opened a door and gingerly lowered one foot into the boat. Then, without warning, the young man gave the Stationer a vigorous push in the chest. As Caveat fell sprawling backwards into the sedan, the oarsman pushed away with his paddle.

‘Sorry, old love.’ The youth waved a farewell with the rolled-up papers that his long, gloved fingers had tweaked from Caveat’s pocket. ‘Can’t take passengers, can I? Watermen’s rules.’ He tossed the papers and Caveat’s purse to the men waiting on the bank, grabbed his sculls and plied them. The laughter of the four men faded with their footsteps, and Caveat was left rocking in darkness amid the laughter of the wind, his face in his hands.

Eponymous Clent’s report gave a detailed, florid and in some instances even accurate account of Mosca’s discovery of the Floating School, and her attempts to follow Pertellis. Aramai Goshawk, the new leader of the Mandelion Locksmiths, read and reread it, turning the pages carefully with his tiny, perfect hands.

Goshawk’s ‘offices’ were never in the same place twice, and today he was holding court in the domain of the gulls. The cathedral roof offered a splendid view of the city, unequalled even by the spires. The great pitted dome shielded his desk and chair from the worst of the wind, and all around him the gulls eddied and perched, angelwing-white in the sun. He was pleased by their cruel raucousness, their symphony of selfishness.

The man who stood before Goshawk twisting his cap seemed less happy. His knees trembled with the height, and he flinched from the gape of the gulls’ beaks.

‘So -’ Goshawk raised colourless eyes to look at him – ‘which part of the city does your gang control? Point it out to me.’

‘Over there, between the river and Cockle Street.’ The young thief’s face furrowed as he realized how small his territory looked from Goshawk’s vantage.

As far as Goshawk was concerned, people were greedy, frightened or both, and that was all you needed to know about them. He preferred them frightened. Greed had probably brought this young criminal to Goshawk to offer his gang’s services, but fear would later prevent him changing allegiance. In time, fear would bring a parade of thieves, swindlers, blackmailers, fences, nook-gazers, murderers, magistrates and courtiers, all desperate to make terms with the Locksmiths. Secretly, Goshawk thanked the Birdcatchers for filling the Realm with broken, frightened people. The old anthems to freedom were dead. Nowadays everybody wanted safety, and the Locksmiths offered safety – for a price.

In Scurrey, Goshawk’s tactics had been effective surprisingly swiftly. The turning point in his fight for the city had taken place just after he had seized control of the Mawkins gang. Openly attending the funeral of Willet Mawkins in his customary sombre black clothes, he had heard a whisper of fear among the ‘mourners’ that caused his pitted cheeks to pucker in an almost-smile. The other criminal gangs had decided that Goshawk’s victory was inevitable… and from that moment it was. They fell over one another in their hurry to join his organization. And now Scurrey was docile, a city of empty, fearful streets and shuttered windows, where everybody paid their tithes to the Locksmiths…

The thief before him was by now deeply regretting the mission that had forced him to approach Aramai Goshawk.

‘We’ve a man in the pound,’ he was explaining, ‘our best sly-in-the-night. His trial’s due for the first day of the Assizes, four days from now…’

‘… and you want me to send a pair of plumpers to give him an alibi?’ The Locksmiths employed many ‘plumpers’, men who would perjure themselves for money. ‘I can do this. But first… I would like to see some evidence of your loyalty to us.’

A plan was forming in Goshawk’s mind. His eye slid over Clent’s report. In spite of his guild’s attempts to intimidate them, the Stationers had not halted their efforts to investigate the Locksmiths. Their interference did not frighten him – but it was an annoying distraction. Goshawk needed all his resources for a battle of wits that he was waging with a very different and more powerful enemy.

For months he had been fighting the Duke’s sister, Lady Tamarind, for control of Mandelion. Influencing the Duke was like trying to grab a fistful of maddened bees, but he was sure that he would have succeeded by now, were it not for Tamarind whispering in the Duke’s ear. Her network of spies seemed the equal of Goshawk’s own. The agents he sent to break into her apartments in search of her correspondence were almost invariably mauled by her monstrous pet collection. Worse still, their battle of wits seemed to have become tavern gossip, and crooks that should have flocked to join him hung back leerily, waiting to see who would win. Goshawk frowned. He could ill afford to let the underworld suspect that he was dancing daggers with the Stationers as well.

‘The Stationers need to be frightened, that is all, and they will back down,’ he muttered under his breath. ‘They are too afraid of an open guild war to risk a confrontation with us. Let us see. Their investigation has led them to this Pertellis, on whom they seem to place great value…’

He looked up at the waiting thief.

‘Let us see how skilled your men are. By dusk I want to you to find a man of letters named Pertellis.’

Meanwhile, blithely unaware how famous he had become in two short days, the young lawyer Hopewood Pertellis spent the afternoon at the Mandelion prison, speaking with a farmer he was due to defend at the upcoming Assizes for non-payment of the Duke’s harsh new taxes. He thought of nothing but the case as he walked home, and as he absently munched through the potage that his patient housekeeper left by his elbow.

The rooms of Pertellis’s house were unusually dark. In Mandelion, as in most cities, a tax was paid for every window, and only the well-off opted to pay for their daylight. Pertellis worked hard, but the clients he chose were seldom rich, and over the years he had boarded up most of his windows. The cheap candles he used gave off a smoky, sulky light and smelt like a mutton joint that had been left out in the rain. Nonetheless, like many quiet men, Pertellis had a stubborn streak wider than the Slye, and that night found him working late on the farmer’s case, squinting painfully in the dim light.

At the moment when his study door opened, he had just taken off his glasses to rest his aching eyes. So it was that, when he raised his head to discover the source of a furtive wooden creak, he saw only five or so dark shapes which were born from the shadow of the doorway and moved towards him without a sound.

At midnight a young linkboy, patrolling the darker docks of Whickerback Point with his lantern in search of someone who might need guiding home, chanced to hear a sneeze. By the light of his lantern he discovered the hanging sedan, and within it the shivering Caveat.

A helpful beadle brought Caveat back to the Telling Word. Thus Toke learned of Caveat’s ordeal, and the contents of Clent’s report concerning Pertellis and the Floating School.

He quickly roused three Stationers in the Telling Word from their coffee-haunted dreams, waving aside their reluctance to go chasing teachers in the middle of the night.

‘Stop mewling, and find your coats,’ Toke snapped. ‘Many of the Birdcatchers were teachers too, never forget that. Teachers to the sons of important men, secretly twisting their infant minds. The boys grew up and became powerful, with the seeds of Birdcatchery lodged in their heads, and nobody knew, until it was too late, how many of them there were. No, children must be taught by Stationers or not at all, or we shall have the same problem again in twenty years. When a head is too full of the wrong ideas, there is no option but to remove it – far better to stop the ideas getting there in the first place.’

Once ashore, Toke woke the high constable, who recognized Pertellis’s name. The young lawyer had been arrested twice on suspicion of sedition, but acquitted for lack of evidence. His address was included in the records of the trials.

An hour later, accompanied by his three Stationers and two petty constables, Toke stood before the door to Pertellis’s house and knew instantly that he was too late.

The locks of front door, back door, closet and writing desk had been picked without leaving so much as a scratch. The housekeeper was found, trussed and gagged, in the metal bath, her muslin cap pulled down over her face. Pertellis was gone. The whole thing had been managed without waking the neighbours, or even the dog that slept in the hallway.

In the pantry Toke found several hollowed bread loaves, with a different forbidden book hidden in each one. The Stationers now had evidence against Pertellis, but no Pertellis.

Mabwick Toke knew a Locksmith break-in when he saw one. But why had they taken Hopewood Pertellis? If Toke was correct, the Locksmiths themselves were responsible for printing the pamphlets vilifying the Duke. But if the Duke believed that radicals were running the secret printing press – perhaps the Locksmiths meant to present Pertellis to the Duke in chains as the radicals’ leader, and so win his trust and gratitude. Or could it be that the Locksmiths themselves had been using Pertellis as a cat’s-paw to run the printing press, and were afraid that he might talk if the Stationers caught him?

‘In any case,’ Toke muttered to himself, ‘if the Locksmiths think him worth grabbing, he must be important. And I shall snatch him back, Mr Goshawk, just you see if I don’t. I’ve never sought a war with you, but I won’t flinch from one either. I fought the Birdcatchers when they held the country in the palm of their hand, and if they couldn’t frighten me, Aramai Goshawk, then you shan’t.’

He looked around at the pale, sleep-starved countenances of the other Stationers.

‘Gape any wider, and you will yawn your faces inside out. All of you, go into the streets and shout out for a linkboy. Bring back as many as you can find!’

Within a short time there were half a dozen linkboys in Pertellis’s front hall. Surveying their sly and spotted faces, Toke thought it no wonder that they should welcome the veil of darkness in their nightly work.

Using a little sharp questioning and careful bribery, he soon learned that the youngest linkboy had seen five gentlemen ‘helping a friend home’. The boy had offered his lantern, but had been told to ‘sling his hook’.

‘Followed ’em as far as the Drimps in case they changed their mind,’ the boy added, then gave a gap-toothed grin as Toke put a coin in his hand.

On the narrow street known as the Drimps lived a blind tallow-maker who always slept with his shutters open. When Toke visited him the next morning, he was able to recall that, a little after second bell, he had heard half a dozen men moving with haste along the Drimps, and down Strangeway.

Hearing this, Toke’s eyes glittered. Strangeway was a crooked, covered alley which led all the way to the city wall, and emerged opposite a tavern called the Grey Mastiff.

The Grey Mastiff was famed throughout Mandelion for the quality of the ‘beast fights’ held within its walls every fortnight. For some time, however, Mabwick Toke had suspected that the Grey Mastiff was also used secretly as a Locksmith meeting place and safe house. Several known Locksmiths had been seen to congregate there every time a beast fight was held, and Aramai Goshawk’s supercilious silhouette had been glimpsed at one of the upper windows.

‘They’re not taking him to the Duke, after all. Not straight away anyway. This man Pertellis is hidden there, I’d stake my wig on it,’ Toke muttered to himself as a sedan took him back to the Telling Word. ‘But how to tweak him out?’

Toke had no men who could pick a lock or scale a wall the way Goshawk’s underlings could. But did he need them? He had enough evidence to draw up a warrant for Pertellis’s arrest. Could he not send his men into the Grey Mastiff with the warrant and have them boldly arrest the man and walk out with him?

Toke’s eyes became sharp and hard as a further idea occurred to him.

‘The Duke wants to believe in a radical conspiracy against him, does he?’ he murmured speculatively. ‘Well, let him! I shall make this Pertellis out to be the leader of the conspiracy, the owner of this demon printing press and chief enemy of the Twin Queens, whether he is or isn’t. Then I shall have my men march in and arrest him on the night of the next beast fight, when the Locksmiths have their meeting in the Grey Mastiff. I’ll make sure my men bring a constable with them, so he’ll see the “radical leader” ringed around with Locksmiths. Let’s see how much the Duke trusts Mr Goshawk once he hears reports that the Locksmiths have been discovered hiding the leader of the radicals from the forces of justice…’

The Locksmiths would be disgraced but, importantly, they would not be arrested. None of them would be placed in danger, and so nobody could accuse Toke of breaking the guildsmen’s Rules.

‘I shall have to send in Clent and his bold-eyed girl to spy out the place before we act,’ Toke resolved. If Goshawk had read Clent’s report, he would know the poet’s name, but would probably not recognize his face. In any case, it was better to risk an irrelevant rogue than one of the Stationers’ valued guildsmen. ‘Casualties of war,’ Toke growled, as he picked up a pen to write out Clent’s new orders.

That evening, Toke’s letter lay on the dinner table in front of Clent, liberally smeared with gravy. Toke had given a sparse account of the night’s events, naturally omitting all mention of Clent’s intercepted report. Somehow, as Clent repeated this account to Mosca, it became a tale of breakneck chases and exchanged pistol fire.

Mosca listened, wide-eyed. ‘So… the Locksmiths got Mr Pertellis in this Grey Mastiff, then?’

‘Yes – and in three nights’ time, the Stationers plan to march into the Grey Mastiff and snatch this radical teacher from Goshawk’s very own gloved fingers. Word will reach the Duke that when this firebrand Pertellis was arrested, he was caught in a conspiratorial tableau with the Locksmiths… and the Duke will smite his noble brow with grief at his own blindness, and throw off his Locksmith flatterers. Our task is to spy out the tavern beforehand, and make sure that Hopewood Pertellis is within. A simple matter for two fox-witted souls like ourselves.’

The fox-witted souls bickered cheerfully over the last helping of broth, unaware that in another part of the city Aramai Goshawk was rereading Clent’s report and peering at the names of Eponymous Clent and Mosca Mye.