Glossy black feathers lie sleek across his head and shoulders, but the flight feathers of his folded wings are dulled at their tips by years of handling paper. His beak has a small, pale notch near the tip, like a flaw in polished horn. He moves in short, exact steps, head cocked as if measuring the room for echoes, then goes utterly still when someone says something useful. A thick stack of folded papers rides under his left wing, its corners rounded and grey from constant rubbing. Unexpectedly, he keeps a tiny packet of sugared fennel seeds tucked among his quills and offers them to nervous children with grave ceremony. People tend to remember the rustle of paper before they remember his face.

Tobiah is attentive enough to make people feel understood, yet he treats every confidence as a thing with weight and a possible price. In a busy shop he is brisk, playful, and generous with small comforts; when a conversation turns dangerous, he becomes clipped and hard to read. He admires honest courage but distrusts anyone who claims to be incapable of lying. Though he can imitate almost anyone, he is privately uncomfortable when people ask what his own unborrowed voice sounds like.

Tobiah grew up carrying messages between printers and dockside clerks, learning early that a copied phrase could open a door more safely than a lockpick. He began selling ink from a cramped stall after his old employer, Master Oru, went bankrupt in a paper shortage. Gossip came as a side effect: customers talked while comparing pigments, and Tobiah remembered their voices as carefully as their orders. His turning point came during the warehouse fire at the Silt Steps. He heard a foreman use a borrowed voice to call workers away from a blocked exit, then mimicked that same foreman's shout to guide a trapped child through smoke. He has since treated mimicry as a tool that can save as readily as deceive. He still supplies ink to the printers of Silt Steps and trades information with dock clerk Ketu, who thinks the arrangement is merely business. Tobiah's apprentice, Pali, wants to turn the shop into a respectable copying house, while Tobiah keeps feeding scraps of evidence to a magistrate investigating the arson that destroyed the old warehouse. The investigation is closing in on a customer who still buys ink from him.