Darkness gathered. Judah’s mechanism sucked the dark. It shifted, a tenebrous plasma; it was dragged in a slow resentful mass, the shadows become a cloud of unlight, and like water coiling down a plughole they wound into the cone, condensing, becoming darker as they went. The bricks it left were a catastrophe of physics, utterly abnatural. No light fell on them, but with their darkness gone they were clearly visible, as if harshly illuminated, but without colour, a perfect-edged grey. The cul-de-sac had become impossible: unglowing, unlit, uncoloured visibility in the absolute dark.

Shadows emerged from the funnel’s spigot to congeal in a shape between a body and a puddle of oil, a presence of dark, unsolid but profoundly there, a human shape of blackness. Gods, is that what you got from your study? Cutter thought. He had seen Judah animate hundreds of golems, but never one so uncorporeal. Judah raised his hands. The darkness golem stood. Eight feet of silhouette. It stepped into the night and became half-visible, a darkness on the dark that moved like a man.

Judah gathered his equipment and whispered, "Go!" He ran, and his companions, dumbed by what they had seen, let him pass before they found their energy again. Beside him with utterly silent steps was the golem, like a gorilla made of shade.

Left, left. Into alleys overlooked by the upreach of dark brown masonry, windows without doors, doorless brick-and-mortar cliffs that seemed a glimpse on something unfinished, the land behind the facades.

There was Toro ahead, one horn on fire and vibrating. He called to them, but his voice was drowned by the shuddering of the helmet, the unpeeling, the splitting of his horns. Screaming and with the metal itself spitting on fire, Ori scrabbled to undo the straps. He fought the helmet free and straightened, his face rivered with sweat. "There!" He pointed.

An old man at the far end of the street watched them, holding a paintbrush poised and dripping. He turned and shuffled with an incompetent run toward where the street curved away. Spiral Jacobs.

"Keep him in your sights!" Ori shouted, and ran, leaving his helmet to be eaten by blue fire. Cutter saw the thaumaturged glass eyes crack, the strange colours of fire and sparks as the heat ate arcana in the metal. It did not look like a statue’s head anymore but a skull, a bovine skull on fire.

They tried to catch Ori, who ran as if Toro’s strength were still in him. "Keep up, keep on him," he shouted.