“Do not think of leaving without your goose,” Toke said crisply, and his mouth set once more in its poisoned triangle as he left for the antechamber.

Mosca took the leash and, following Clent’s lead, hefted one of the bundles onto her shoulder. It seemed to be stuffed full of Clent’s coat and her borrowed blanket. An empty place in her heart swelled full as Saracen swaggered beside her, trying to match her pace.

“What’s it mean?” she hissed as she followed Clent to the door.

“It means that against all the odds we have a small but palpable chance of surviving this whole adventure, providing we leave the city now. Keep walking.” The guards at the gates to the spire opened them without looking at their faces.

A spirit of carnival had seized Mandelion. Clamoring Hour had broken its banks like a river after rain, and many people hung out of their windows to ring their god bells with gleeful abandon. Upon the railings that surrounded the Western Spire, turnips and beets had been impaled. They had crudely carved faces and wigs of straw, and Mosca guessed that they were meant to represent the Duke.

There were traces of past riot as well as present revelry. A couple of boys in battered, broad-brimmed hats dawdled by houses that were freckled by musket fire, and used clever little knives to pick out the shot when no one was looking. In the old marketplace a burned-out sedan chair tilted on a pile of blackened timbers, and Mosca’s heart lurched as she saw what seemed to be a charred human figure inside. As she passed, however, she saw that beneath an enormous, singed wig shaped like a wasp’s nest, the white face was chill and unmarred, except for the chin, which the flames had tiger-striped in bars of soot and sallow. It was a marble statue of the Duke that had been clumsily dressed and given to the pyre.

“Mr. Clent? We fixed everything an’ prevented a war an’ stopped the Birdcatchers, didn’t we? How come everything’s suddenly our fault?”

“The privilege of the weak, I fear. People must have someone to blame. If you live to be older and wiser, you will look back and wonder not that we were turned out of the city, but that we were allowed to walk away. Keep walking.”

Mosca thought about the sullen, heavy-wigged guildsmen fretting that their power had been taken away and given to a highwayman, and knew that she did not feel at all sorry. In fact, she felt fiercely pleased about it.

“Mr. Clent . . .” Mosca remembered the discussion in the antechamber. “Lady Tamarind had a pocket watch shaped like a pistol, didn’t she?”

“The same thought had occurred to me.”

“But you don’t think we should tell . . .”