The city might be savage, stray dogs might share the streets with grimy urchins whose blank eyes reflected the knowledge that they might soon be covered over, blinded forever, by the same two pennies just begged from some gentleman, and no one in all the fuming, fulminous boulevards of trade might know who actually ran Ambergris—or, if anyone ran it at all, but, like a renegade clock, it ran on and wound itself heedless, empowered by the insane weight of its own inertia, the weight of its own citizenry, stamping one, two, three hundred thousand strong; no matter this savagery in the midst of apparent civilization—still the woman in the window seemed to him more ruly, more disciplined and in control and thus, perversely, malleable to his desire, than anyone Dradin had yet met in Ambergris: this priceless part of the whale, this overbrimming stew of the sublime and the ridiculous.

It was then that his rescuer came: Dvorak, popping up from betwixt a yardstick of a butcher awaiting a hansom and a jowly furrier draped over with furs of auburn, gray, and white. Dvorak, indeed, dressed all in black, against which the red dots of his tattoo throbbed and, in his jacket pocket, a dove-white handkerchief stained red at the edges. A mysterious, feminine smile decorated his mutilated face.

“She’s not at the window,” Dradin said.

Dvorak’s laugh forced his mouth open wide and wider still, carnivorous in its red depths. “No. She is not at the window. But have no doubt: she is inside. She is a most devout employee.”

“You gave her the book?”

“I did, sir.” The laugh receded into a shallow smile. “She took it from me like a lady, with hesitation, and when I told her it came from a secret admirer, she blushed.”

“Blushed?” Dradin felt lighter, his blood yammering and his head a puff of smoke, a cloud, a spray of cotton candy.

“Blushed. Indeed, sir, a good sign.”

Dradin took the package from his pocket and, hands trembling, gave it to the dwarf. “Now you must go back in and find her, and when you find her, give her this. You must ask her to join me at the Drunken Boat at twilight. You know the place?”

Dvorak nodded, his hands clasped protectively around the package.

“Good. I will have a table next to the Festival parade route. Beg her if you must. Intrigue her and entreat her.”

“I will do so.”

“U-u-unless you think I should take this gift to her myself?”

Dvorak sneered. He shook his head so that the green of the jungle blurred before Dradin’s eyes. “Think, sir. Think hard. Would you have her see you first out of breath, unkempt, and, if I may be so bold, there is a slight smell of urine. No, sir. Meet her first at the tavern, and there you shall appear a man of means, at your ease, inviting her to the unraveling of further mysteries.”