He left their company and shut the creaking door softly behind him. Returning down the path he came to the cross-roads and stopped in front of the burlap-wrapped figure swinging from the branch. Kruppe planted his fists on his hips and studied it. 'I know who you are,' he said jovially. 'The final aspect of Kruppe to complete this dream's array of those faces facing him which are Kruppe's own. Or so you would proclaim. You are Humility but, as everyone knows, Humility has no place in Kruppe's life, remember that. So here you will stay.' With that he moved his gaze to the great city lighting the eastern sky blue and green. 'Ah, this wondrous fiery gem that is Darujhistan is home to Kruppe. And that,' he added, as he began to walk, 'is as it should be.'

From the wharf sprawled along the shore of the lake, upward along the stepped tiers of the Gadrobi and Daru Districts, among the temple complexes and the Higher Estates, to the summit of Majesty Hill where gathers the city's Council, the rooftops of Darujhistan presented flat tops, arched gables, coned towers, belfries and platforms crowded in such chaotic profusion as to leave all but the major streets for ever hidden from the sun.

The torches marking the more frequented alleyways were hollow shafts that gripped pumice stones with fingers of blackened iron. Fed through ancient pitted copper pipes, gas hissed balls of flame around the porous stones, an uneven fire that cast a blue and green light. The gas was drawn from great caverns beneath the city and channelled by massive valves. Attending these works were the Greyfaces, silent men and women who moved like spectres beneath the city's cobbled streets.

For nine hundred years the breath of gas had fed at least one of the city's districts. Though pipes had been sundered by raging tenement fires and gouts of flame reached hundreds of feet into the sky, the Greyfaces had held on, twisting the shackles and driving their invisible dragon to its knees.

Beneath the rooftops was an underworld forever bathed in a blue glow. Such light marked the major avenues and the oft-frequented, narrow and crooked thoroughways of the markets. In the city, however, over twenty thousand alleys, barely wide enough for a two-wheeled cart, remained in shadow broken only by the occasional torch-bearing citizen or the globed lanterns of the City Watch.

By day the rooftops were bright and hot beneath the sun, crowded with the fluttering flags of domestic life drying in the lake wind. By night, the stars and moon illuminated a world webbed with empty clothes-lines and the chaotic shadows they cast.