His soft hand had silenced the seething of the apprentices and he allowed his thick voice to drop out of his face. ‘Gallstones!’ and in the dimness he flung his arms apart so that the buttons of his tunic were torn away, one of them whizzing across the room and stunning a cockroach on the opposite wall. ‘Close your ranks and close your ranks and listen mosht attentivesome. Come closer then, my little sea of faces, come ever closer in, my little ones.’
