They turned the final corner of the alley. He should have expected something like this, he supposed. No varied raft of smells like that would come from a few vagrants sleeping rough beneath the skins of stolen furbats. But it still came as a shock when he saw the hundreds of people, the alley widening into a street, the chaos of a town that seemed so different from the one he had just left. Back there Pavisse was a rough place built well, a once-proud town turned sour after the Cataclysmic War had robbed it of magic. Here . . . it was newer, Rafe knew, but a place such as this did not thrive on hope. It lived off bitterness and crime, desperation and hate. It had been formed after the Cataclysmic War and was a product of it.

The street curved into the distance, passing beyond view maybe five hundred steps away. Some of the buildings may have been the rear facades of those he had just passed in Pavisse’s main street, but back here they were deformed, half-collapsed, mutated by the additions and changes wrought by their strange inhabitants. A heavy machine formed part of one building, its use long since forgotten but its exposed innards curving up toward the sun, making room for a few tall, thin fledgers to lie back and chew their drug. The machine was rusted where it was metal, smoothed by time where it was stone, and there were bones too, the flesh of its biological parts long since rotted away and added back to the ground. The building had seemingly grown around it, and Rafe wondered what had been here first: machine or construction. Perhaps one had been to support the other, although Rafe could not now guess at which way this could have worked.