He had unwrapped the foetid bandages from his feet, and his talons had stretched out in a delightful reflex. He had scrambled up the initial patch of bare metal with Lemuel’s grappling rope, and then had climbed far faster and more confidently than the human had done.

He stopped every so often and stood swaying in the warm wind, his avian toes gripping the metal slats tightly and securely. He would lean alarmingly and peer into the hazy air, hold out his arms a little, feel the wind fill his spreadeagled body like a sail.

Yagharek pretended he was flying.

Swinging from his thin belt was the stiletto and the bullwhip he had stolen the previous day. The whip was a clumsy thing, not nearly so fine as the one he had cracked in the hot desert air, stinging and snaring, but it was a weapon his hand remembered.

He was fast and assured. The airships that were visible were all far away. He was unseen.

At the top of the Glasshouse, the city seemed to be a gift to him, laid out ready to be taken. Everywhere he looked, fingers and hands and fists and spines of architecture thrust rudely into the sky. The Ribs like ossified tentacles reaching always up; the Spike slammed into the city’s heart like a skewer; the complex mechanistic vortex of Parliament, glowing darkly; Yagharek mapped them with a cold, strategic eye. He glanced up and to the east, to where the skyrail connecting Flyside Tower and the Spike thrummed.

When he had reached the edge of the enormous glass globe at the dome’s tip, it took him only a moment to find the rent in the glass. A part of him was surprised that his eyes, the eyes of a bird of prey, could still perform for him as they used to.

Below him, a foot or two under the gently curving ladder, the glass of the dome was dry and scaled with bird and wyrmen droppings. He tried to peer through, but he could make out nothing beyond the shadowy suggestions of roofs and streets.

Yagharek struck out across the glass itself.

He moved tentatively, feeling with his talons, tapping the glass to test it, sliding as quickly as he could to a metal frame for his claws to grip. As he moved he realized how at ease he had become with climbing. All those weeks and weeks of night-time climbing, on the roof of Isaac’s workshop, up into deserted towers, seeking the city’s crags. He climbed easily and without fear. He was more ape than bird, it seemed.

He skittered nervously across the dirty panes, until he breached the final wall of girders that separated him from the split in the glass. And when he vaulted that, the fault was before him.