It dived. Its wings fluttered and trembled as it swooped towards the unlit alleys below it. It knew in its hunter’s heart to avoid the great scabs of light clotted at irregular spaces around the city, to seek out the darker places. It trailed its tongue in the air and found food, swept with chaotic aerobatics into the shadow of the bricks. It came down like a fallen angel in the gnarled cul-de-sac where a prostitute and her client fucked against a wall. Their desultory jerks faltered as they sensed the thing beside them.

Their screams were brief. They ceased quickly as the creature’s wings spread.

The thing fell on them with eager greed.

Afterwards it flew again, drunk with the taste.

It hovered, seeking the centre of the city, turning, drawn slowly to the enormous sprawl of Perdido Street Station. It beat its way west over Spit Hearth and the red-light zone, over the contradictory tangle of commerce and squalor that was The Crow. Behind it, snagging the air like a trap, was the dark edifice of Parliament, and the militia towers of Strack Island and Brock Marsh. The creature traced an uneven course over the path of the skyrail that linked those lower towers to the Spike that loomed at the westernmost shoulder of Perdido Street Station.

The flying thing started as pods streaked along that rail. It hovered momentarily, fascinated at the rattling passage of the trains that expanded outwards from the station, that monstrous architectural enormity.

Vibrations in a hundred registers and keys beckoned the thing, as forces and emotions and dreams spilt and were amplified in the brick chambers of the station and blasted outwards into the sky. A massive, invisible flavour trail.

The few night-birds swerved violently away from the weird thing that beat its heavy way towards the city’s dark heart. Wyrmen on errands saw its incomprehensible silhouette and wheeled off in other directions, shouting obscenities and oaths. Booms and drones vibrated as the dirigibles sounded to each other, sliding slowly between city and sky like fat pike. As they turned ponderously, the thing flapped past them, unseen except by an engineer who did not report his sighting, but made a religious sign and whispered to Solenton for protection.

Caught in the updraft, the wash of senses, from Perdido Street Station, the flying thing let itself be caught and swept up until it was way, way above the city. It turned slowly with a quiver from its wings, orienting itself to its new territory.

It noted the paths of the river. It felt the vents of different energies from the city’s different zones. It sensed the city in a flickering passage of different modes. Concentrations of food. Shelter.

The creature sought one more thing. Others of its kind.