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 nonpayment 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 had 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 smelled 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 toward 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.”