Savino coughed. He knew the sorts of rules there were for Ministry Unspeakables – he would not have dared to bring it up, he thought, if the gentleman had not mentioned it first – and he did not expect to gain any real insight by asking, happy as he was to try.

“Oh, I have great interest,” Savino said, perfectly candidly, because the fact that this fellow was a Seer spoke volumes to him: he was absolutely certain Prewett must have done some investigation of this in the depths of his department, if only because that was exactly what he had and would have done, himself. He lowered his tone a little, grimacing at the inconvenience of this next – if not as entirely ashamed of it as he ought to be, when speaking to a Ministry man. “But I actually worked in that area in the Italian Ministry, for a while,” he murmured. “And my superiors and I did not always... see eye to eye. So my formal work – did not end well,” he admitted, by which he meant he had been sacked, and did not foresee being rehired anywhere similar.

But if there was the remotest possibility Mr. Prewett was interested in involving him in any less formal, entirely unrelated, secret research into divination and prophecy, well... Savino would leap at the chance.

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