“You better go now,” she said when she’d finished, not wanting to look at Kohlrabi’s face in case he started hating her as well.

“I brought you something,” Kohlrabi answered, as if he had not heard her. Out of his pocket he drew a long briar pipe. “It’s a little large for you, but I think you’ll grow into it. It’s been used, so it has the scent of tobacco. But you . . . you’ll have to come down for it. I don’t want to throw it and risk breaking it. You are planning to come down sometime, aren’t you? Or are you just hoping to live off food offerings in the shrines?”

“I don’t think I can come down.”

“Mosca, the world is not as bleak as it seems right now—”

“No . . . I mean, I’m not sure I can find my way down again. I can’t really turn round easily neither, without falling off the ledge.”

When Kohlrabi extended his arms, Mosca dropped from her shrine hideaway, and managed not to crush his hat. He caught her under the armpits and set her on her feet, then squeezed her by the shoulders.

“Well done, Mosca. Well done.” Mosca got the impression that he was not talking just about her jump. He polished the pipe with his sleeve and presented it to her. It was a little singed about the bowl, but the wood was glossy and honey-colored. Mosca chewed at the stem experimentally, and found that another set of teeth had left a little groove into which her own fitted.

“It’s a different sort of smell from my father’s tobacco, but it’s . . .” Mosca suddenly realized that she was going to cry and there was nothing she could do about it. She clenched her teeth on the pipe stem, but the world became misty.

“Is it all right? Can you think with it?”

Mosca nodded, but couldn’t speak.

“Come on, I’ll take you home.”

Mosca could only shake her head.

“All right . . . not to the marriage house, then.” There was a pause, and Kohlrabi let out a long breath. “You’d better come with me.”

Saracen had decided he liked being a god, and was coaxed out of the warren with some difficulty and several bread crusts. Before leaving the cathedral, Kohlrabi wrapped the Cakes’s blanket around Mosca so that she would not be recognized, but when they reached the street there was no sign of the Floating School children. The crowds outside were still tense and unquiet, but calm pooled around Kohlrabi like a cloak. He smiled and whistled under his breath, as if he were carrying a secret; and after a while Mosca felt calmer, as if she knew it as well. They walked into a wigmaker’s which seemed to have been squeezed thinly between two larger shops.