The invitation came in a basket of oranges, which was how his mother knew straight away that it meant no good."Eleven," Edda said, when she had counted them a second time. "Nobody sends eleven. Either they send a dozen and the lad who carries it helps himself, or they send a dozen and want you to notice it's a dozen. Who's it from?"There was a card pushed down among the fruit. Pim had an orange open before anyone could tell her not to, and for a moment the kitchen on Tanner's Row smelled of some other country altogether, one with sun in it. Soot put his nose in the basket and took it out again, offended.Master Daal presents his compliments to Captain Ashlock, of the first letter, and begs an hour of him at the Fig House on Coopers' Quay, at the fourth bell after noon. A lady of his acquaintance is passing through the city and has expressed a wish.That was all. The wish was not described."He's the fruit man," said Ravel."He's no more a fruit man than I'm a duchess." His mother to

By noon the second leaf of the order was nailed to the Chartery door, and half of Greywater had come to have it read to them.Ravel stood at the back of the crowd with his hood up, which fooled nobody. People made room round him without seeming to, the way they would for a man carrying a full pail. A crier in the white of the Canonry read from the steps in a strong bored voice. The city's waters were taken into the Assize's hand for the length of the sitting, and no hull would pass a lock but by its leave. Every licence of the Graveweaver's craft within the walls was void from the stroke of noon. The holders would give up their tools and their beasts at the Tannery chantry by sundown. And every person who was unwritten, who had gone through a Reading and come away with a blank plate, was to present himself at the same place within three days, to be read again by the Church's own examiners."What's it want with the blanks?" said a carter near him. "My wife's sister's a blank. She does

There was a drain at the foot of the old fish stair, with a grating over it, and from below a man could see the whole length of the wall.Ravel had been lying in it since the fourth bell of the night. The water under him was a hand deep and smelled of lime, because the Vigil had slopped their whitewash about. He had left Odran three turnings back with orders not to come whatever he heard. He had brought no sword. What he had brought was in his breast pocket, wrapped in a rag so that it should not chink: nine of his father's toll-tallies, the brass ones stamped with a lock's number that a keeper hands a bargeman to show the due is paid.Nine was all there had been in the drawer. He hoped that he would not need them, and was ashamed of the hope, because he knew which way he meant it.Marta had asked him only one thing before he went. "Can you stop it?""No. There's sixty knights and her. If I show myself, she takes me, and then she's the Sluiceworks by noon.""Then what're you going for

The water went out of the Sluiceworks a little after sunrise, with a long sucking groan like a bath emptying, and for the first time in his life Ravel heard the gauge-tunnel go quiet.He had the whole of that day to plan in, and he used it.There was one way out that did not come up in a street. On the fifth floor, below the sump where the Brine Hag had lived, the old outfall ran east under the bed of the Reach and opened in the foot of the Ninth Lock's lower gate. Beyond that gate was the marsh. Pell had nine punts lying in the reeds there since dusk, at a price that had made even Pell go quiet, and a Tollman named Aske who swore he could have sixty people at a stilt village called Sedge End by morning."And between the outfall and the gate?" Marta asked."The lock chamber. Forty paces of open floor, with walls as high as a house." He drew it. "It's the only bit I can't hide. With the paddles chained there's no water in it. We cross it dry, in the dark, and we're through.""And so ca

It wore a cowl. That was the first thing he made out, forty feet down through water the colour of tea.The face inside the cowl was brown and seamed, like a pear left to dry on a shelf, and it had no eyes that he could see, only two folds where eyes had been. It held a candle upright before its chest in both hands. So much wax had run down over the fingers and set there that it seemed to be wearing white gauntlets. It stood at the glass with its head tipped back, and Ravel had the plain cold knowledge that it saw the punt, and him in it, and what he was.Then it turned from the window and moved on. Another light came into the place it had left, and passed, and another behind that. There was a whole line of them going by down there, evenly spaced, at a walk."They are singing," said Kheshi. She was crouched at the gunwale with her ears forward. "I can feel it in the boat. I cannot hear one of them breathe."The punt bumped the jetty.It was no more than six black posts and a few planks