But when they had discarded the flesh-husks of their meals to twitch and loll slack-mouthed on boards and shadowed cobbles, when their stabs of hunger had been assuaged and meals could be taken more slowly, for pleasure, the winged creatures became curious. They tasted the faint drippings of minds they had tasted before, and, like inquisitive, coldly intelligent hunting beasts, they pursued them.

Here was the tenuous mental thread of one of the guards, who had stood outside their cage in Bonetown and fantasized about his friend’s wife. His flavoursome imaginings wafted up to wrap around a twitching tongue. The creature that tasted that wheeled around in the sky, in the chaotic arc of a butterfly or a moth, and dived towards Echomire, following his prey’s scent.

Another of the great airborne shapes pulled up suddenly in a vast figure of eight, rolling over its own tracks, seeking out the familiar flavour that had flitted across its tastebuds. It was a nervous aroma that had permeated the cocoons of the pupating monsters. The great beast hovered over the city, saliva dissipating in various dimensions below it. The emissions were obscured, frustratingly tenuous, but the creature’s sense of taste was fine, and it bore down towards Mafaton, licking its way along the enticing trail of the scientist who had watched it grow, Magesta Barbile.

The twisted one, the malnourished runt that had liberated its fellows, found a taste-trail that it, too, remembered. Its mind was not so developed, its tastebuds less exact: it could not follow the flickering scent through the air. But, uncomfortably, it tried. The full taste of the mind was so familiar . . . it had surrounded the twisted creature during its flourishing into consciousness, during its pupation and self-creation in the silk shell . . . It lost and found the scent, lost it again, floundered.

The smallest and weakest of the night-hunters, stronger by far than any man, hungry and predatory, licked its way through the sky, trying to regain the trail of Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin.

Isaac, Derkhan and Lemuel Pigeon fidgeted on the streetcorner, in the smoky glare of the gaslight.

“Where the fuck’s your mate?” hissed Isaac.

“He’s late. Probably can’t find it. I told you, he’s stupid,” said Lemuel calmly. He took out a flick-knife and began to clean his nails.

“Why do we need him?”

“Don’t come the fucking innocent, Isaac. You’re good at waving enough brass at me to get me to do all sorts of jobs that go against my better judgement, but there are limits. I’m not getting involved in anything which irritates the damn government without protection. And Mr. X is that, in spades.”

Isaac swore silently, but he knew Lemuel was right.