Fly By Night

‘Over there, between the river and Cockle Street.’ The young thief’s face furrowed as he realized how small his territory looked from Goshawk’s vantage.

As far as Goshawk was concerned, people were greedy, frightened or both, and that was all you needed to know about them. He preferred them frightened. Greed had probably brought this young criminal to Goshawk to offer his gang’s services, but fear would later prevent him changing allegiance. In time, fear would bring a parade of thieves, swindlers, blackmailers, fences, nook-gazers, murderers, magistrates and courtiers, all desperate to make terms with the Locksmiths. Secretly, Goshawk thanked the Birdcatchers for filling the Realm with broken, frightened people. The old anthems to freedom were dead. Nowadays everybody wanted safety, and the Locksmiths offered safety – for a price.

In Scurrey, Goshawk’s tactics had been effective surprisingly swiftly. The turning point in his fight for the city had taken place just after he had seized control of the Mawkins gang. Openly attending the funeral of Willet Mawkins in his customary sombre black clothes, he had heard a whisper of fear among the ‘mourners’ that caused his pitted cheeks to pucker in an almost-smile. The other criminal gangs had decided that Goshawk’s victory was inevitable… and from that moment it was. They fell over one another in their hurry to join his organization. And now Scurrey was docile, a city of empty, fearful streets and shuttered windows, where everybody paid their tithes to the Locksmiths…

The thief before him was by now deeply regretting the mission that had forced him to approach Aramai Goshawk.

‘We’ve a man in the pound,’ he was explaining, ‘our best sly-in-the-night. His trial’s due for the first day of the Assizes, four days from now…’

‘… and you want me to send a pair of plumpers to give him an alibi?’ The Locksmiths employed many ‘plumpers’, men who would perjure themselves for money. ‘I can do this. But first… I would like to see some evidence of your loyalty to us.’

A plan was forming in Goshawk’s mind. His eye slid over Clent’s report. In spite of his guild’s attempts to intimidate them, the Stationers had not halted their efforts to investigate the Locksmiths. Their interference did not frighten him – but it was an annoying distraction. Goshawk needed all his resources for a battle of wits that he was waging with a very different and more powerful enemy.

For months he had been fighting the Duke’s sister, Lady Tamarind, for control of Mandelion. Influencing the Duke was like trying to grab a fistful of maddened bees, but he was sure that he would have succeeded by now, were it not for Tamarind whispering in the Duke’s ear. Her network of spies seemed the equal of Goshawk’s own. The agents he sent to break into her apartments in search of her correspondence were almost invariably mauled by her monstrous pet collection. Worse still, their battle of wits seemed to have become tavern gossip, and crooks that should have flocked to join him hung back leerily, waiting to see who would win. Goshawk frowned. He could ill afford to let the underworld suspect that he was dancing daggers with the Stationers as well.

‘The Stationers need to be frightened, that is all, and they will back down,’ he muttered under his breath. ‘They are too afraid of an open guild war to risk a confrontation with us. Let us see. Their investigation has led them to this Pertellis, on whom they seem to place great value…’

He looked up at the waiting thief.

‘Let us see how skilled your men are. By dusk I want to you to find a man of letters named Pertellis.’

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 non-payment 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 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 smelt 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 towards 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.’

Once ashore, Toke woke the high constable, who recognized Pertellis’s name. The young lawyer had been arrested twice on suspicion of sedition, but acquitted for lack of evidence. His address was included in the records of the trials.

An hour later, accompanied by his three Stationers and two petty constables, Toke stood before the door to Pertellis’s house and knew instantly that he was too late.

The locks of front door, back door, closet and writing desk had been picked without leaving so much as a scratch. The housekeeper was found, trussed and gagged, in the metal bath, her muslin cap pulled down over her face. Pertellis was gone. The whole thing had been managed without waking the neighbours, or even the dog that slept in the hallway.

In the pantry Toke found several hollowed bread loaves, with a different forbidden book hidden in each one. The Stationers now had evidence against Pertellis, but no Pertellis.

Mabwick Toke knew a Locksmith break-in when he saw one. But why had they taken Hopewood Pertellis? If Toke was correct, the Locksmiths themselves were responsible for printing the pamphlets vilifying the Duke. But if the Duke believed that radicals were running the secret printing press – perhaps the Locksmiths meant to present Pertellis to the Duke in chains as the radicals’ leader, and so win his trust and gratitude. Or could it be that the Locksmiths themselves had been using Pertellis as a cat’s-paw to run the printing press, and were afraid that he might talk if the Stationers caught him?

‘In any case,’ Toke muttered to himself, ‘if the Locksmiths think him worth grabbing, he must be important. And I shall snatch him back, Mr Goshawk, just you see if I don’t. I’ve never sought a war with you, but I won’t flinch from one either. I fought the Birdcatchers when they held the country in the palm of their hand, and if they couldn’t frighten me, Aramai Goshawk, then you shan’t.’

He looked around at the pale, sleep-starved countenances of the other Stationers.

‘Gape any wider, and you will yawn your faces inside out. All of you, go into the streets and shout out for a linkboy. Bring back as many as you can find!’

Within a short time there were half a dozen linkboys in Pertellis’s front hall. Surveying their sly and spotted faces, Toke thought it no wonder that they should welcome the veil of darkness in their nightly work.

Using a little sharp questioning and careful bribery, he soon learned that the youngest linkboy had seen five gentlemen ‘helping a friend home’. The boy had offered his lantern, but had been told to ‘sling his hook’.

‘Followed ’em as far as the Drimps in case they changed their mind,’ the boy added, then gave a gap-toothed grin as Toke put a coin in his hand.

On the narrow street known as the Drimps lived a blind tallow-maker who always slept with his shutters open. When Toke visited him the next morning, he was able to recall that, a little after second bell, he had heard half a dozen men moving with haste along the Drimps, and down Strangeway.