Lucky Gazid gazed up at him sightlessly, propped on one of Lin’s chairs, sitting at the table as if at a meal. His shape was outlined in what little light crept up from the square below. Gazid’s arms were flat on the table. His hands were tense and hard as bone. His mouth was open and stuffed with something that Isaac could not clearly see. Gazid’s front was utterly drenched with blood. Blood had slicked on the table, seeping deep into the grain of the wood. Gazid’s throat had been cut. In the summer heat it thronged with hungry little night insects.

There was a second when Isaac thought that it might be a nightmare, one of the sick dreams that afflicted the city, spewing out of his unconscious on a slick of slake-moth dung and spattering into the æther.

But Gazid did not disappear. Gazid was real, and really dead.

Isaac looked at him. He blenched at Gazid’s screaming face. He looked again at the clawed hands. Gazid had been held down at the table, cut and held down until he died. Then something had been shoved into his gaping mouth.

Isaac picked his way towards the corpse. He set his face and reached up, pulled from Gazid’s dry mouth a large envelope.

When he unrolled it, he saw that the name carefully written on the front was his own. He reached inside with a nauseous foreboding.

There was a moment, a tiny moment, when he did not recognize what he pulled out. Flimsy and almost weightless, it felt as he drew it out like crumbling parchment, like dead leaves. Then he held it in the faint grey light of the moonlit room and he saw it was a pair of khepri wings.

Isaac let out a sound, an exhalation of shocked misery. His eyes widened in horror.

“Oh no,” he said, hyperventilating. “Oh no oh no no no . . .”

The wings had been bent and rolled, and their delicate substance was shattered. They desquamated in great clots of translucent matter. Isaac’s fingers trembled as he tried to smooth them down. His fingertips brushed their battered surface. He was humming a single note, a tremulous keening. He fumbled with the envelope, brought out a single sheet of folded paper.

It was typewritten, with a chessboard or patchwork standard printed at its top. As he read it, Isaac began to cry out wordlessly.

Copy 1: Aspic Hole.
(Others to be delivered to Brock Marsh, Salacus Fields)

Mr. Dan der Grimnebulin,

Khepri cannot make sounds, but I judge by the chymicals she was exuding and the trembling of those bugger legs that Lin found the removal of these useless wings a deeply unpleasant experience. I don’t doubt that her lower body would also have been fighting us had we not strapped the bug-bitch in a chair.

Lucky Gazid can give you this message, as it is he I have to thank for your interference.