Mosca shook her head.

“The Locksmiths will assume that the Stationers have deliberately broken the Rules. There will be war. Stationers will be locked in their own closets to starve, or strangled with chatelaines. Locksmiths will be stabbed to death with steel pens, or crushed as thin as biscuits in paper mills. Then the Watermen will take the side of the Stationers, so the Hansoms’ Guild will back the Locksmiths, and all the other guilds will choose a side, right down to the Playing Card Makers and the Milliners. There will be murder and bloody mayhem on the highways and the waterways. The towns will starve, and soldiers turn to banditry. And all the kings and queens who have waited their chance for decades will see that there is anarchy, and they will arrive with their armies all at once. Does that sound good?”

Mosca’s mouth was dry. She was not sure which she found more alarming: the picture Clent had painted, or the startling intuition that for once he was actually speaking the truth.

“I didn’t know . . .”

“No, why would you?” Clent gave her a complicated look, half bitterness, half forgiveness. “How would you know?” He sighed. “The worst of it is that I do not think the Locksmiths even have the confounded printing press.”

“What?” Everything Mosca had been told about the Locksmiths did a neat somersault in her head.

“I was listening in while they tried to torture Hopewood Pertellis into telling them who was really running the printing press. Then they got sidetracked into talking about the difficulty of finding a docile crocodile on the black market, for some reason. Then they started interrogating the spy they had found behind their door.”

“They found a . . .” Mosca’s gaze met that of Clent. Oh, she mouthed silently.

“Naturally, when they pulled me in by my collar I told them that I had hunted them out because I had a burning desire to join the Locksmiths. I got no further. They knew who I was. They knew I was working for the Stationers. Before the Duke’s men arrived, it became very clear that they knew everything I had written in my last report to Mabwick Toke. Somehow, I know not how, they must have read it.”

Mosca blinked to clear her head, which seemed terribly crowded all of a sudden.

“Does that mean we’re working for the Locksmiths now?”

“No. It means that we are leaving. My name was in that report.” He sighed. “Your name was in it, Mosca.”

The rain seemed to creep into Mosca’s eyes as she ran to keep up, and it tingled at the back of her tongue with a taste that she knew was tears. She did not raise her head, for fear of seeing her beloved Eastern Spire fading before her eyes, stolen by tears and darkness.