Buke managed a sickly grin. ‘Hood-damned? Oh yes, Mancy, we’re all that. Aren’t we just. Hood-damned, aye.’

A distant, terrible roar interrupted them, a sound that shivered through the city, swept in from all sides.

Emancipor paled. ‘The Tenescowri...’

But Buke’s attention had been drawn to the main building’s square tower, to the open shutters of the top, third floor’s room. Where two rooks now perched. ‘Oh yes,’ he muttered, baring his teeth, ‘I see you. You’re going after him, aren’t you? That first child of the Dead Seed. Anaster. You’re going after him.’

The rooks dropped from the ledge, wings spreading, swooped low over the compound, then, with heavy, audible flaps, lifted themselves clear of the compound wall. Flying southeast.

Buke pushed Reese away. ‘I can follow them! Oh yes. Keruli’s sweet gift...’ My own Soletaken form, the shape of wings, the air sliding over and beneath me. Gods, the freedom! What I will. . . finds form—He felt his body veering, sweet warmth filling his limbs, the spice of his skin’s breath as it assumed a cloak of feathers. His body dwindling, changing shape. Heavy bones thinning, becoming lighter.

Keruli’s sweet gift, more than he ever imagined. Flight! Away from what I was! From all that I had been! Burdens, vanishing! Oh, I can follow those two dread creatures, those winged night-mares. I can follow, and where they strain and lumber on the unseen currents in the sky, I twist, dart, race like lightning!

Standing in the courtyard, Emancipor Reese watched through watering eyes Buke’s transformation. A blurring of the man, a drawing inward, the air filling with pungent spice. He watched as the sparrowhawk that had been Buke shot upward in a cavorting climbing spiral.

‘Aye,’ he muttered. ‘You can fly circles around them. But, dear Buke, when they decide to swat you down, it won’t be a duel on the wing. It’ll be sorcery. Those plodding rooks have no need for speed, no need for agility – and those gifts will avail you nothing when the time comes. Buke ... you poor fool...’

High above Capustan, the sparrowhawk circled. The two rooks, Bauchelain and Korbal Broach, were far below yet perfectly visible to the raptor’s eyes. Flapping ponderously through wreaths of smoke, southeast, past the East Gate ...

The city still burned in places, thrusting columns of black smoke skyward. The sparrowhawk studied the siege from a point of view that the world’s generals would die for. Wheeling, circling, watching.

The Tenescowri ringed the city in a thick, seething band. A third of a million, maybe more. Such a mass of people as Buke had never seen before. And the band had begun to constrict. A strangely colourless, writhing noose, drawing ever closer to the city’s feeble, crumbled walls and what seemed but a handful of defenders.