Perdido Street itself was a long, narrow passageway that jutted perpendicularly from BilSantum Street and wound sinuously east towards Gidd. No one knew why it had once been important enough to give the station its name. It was cobbled, and its houses were not squalid, though they were in ill-repair. It might once have described the station’s northern boundary, but it had long been overtaken. The storeys and rooms of the station had spread out and rapidly breached the little street.

They had leapt it effortlessly and spread like mould into the roofscape beyond, transforming the terrace at the north of BilSantum Street. In some places Perdido Street was open to the air: elsewhere it was covered for long stretches, with vaulted bricks festooned with gargoyles or lattices of wood and iron. There in the shade from the station’s underbelly, Perdido Street was gaslit all the time.

Perdido Street was still residential. Families rose every day beneath that dark architecture sky, walked its winding length to work, passing in and out of shadow.

The tramp of heavy boots often sounded from above. The front of the station, and much of its roofscape, was guarded. Private security, foreign soldiers and the militia, some in uniform and some in disguise, patrolled the façade and the mountainous landscape of slate and clay, protecting the banks and stores, the embassies and the government offices that filled the various floors within. They would tread like explorers along carefully plotted routes through the spires and spiral iron staircases, past dormer windows and through hidden rooftop courtyards, journeying across the lower layers of the station roof, looking down over the plaza and the secret places and the enormous city.

But further to the east, towards the rear of the station, spotted with a hundred trade entrances and minor establishments, the security lapsed and became more haphazard. The towering construction was darker here. When the sun set, it cast its great shadow across a huge swathe of The Crow.

Some way out from the main mass of the building, between Perdido Street and Gidd Stations, the Dexter Line passed through a tangle of old offices that long ago had been ruined by a minor fire.

It had not damaged the structure, but it had been enough to bankrupt the company that had traded within. The charred rooms had long been empty of all but vagrants unperturbed by the smell of carbon, still tenacious after nearly a decade.

After more than two hours of torturously slow motion, Isaac and Yagharek had arrived at this burned shell, and collapsed thankfully within. They released Andrej, retied his hands and feet and gagged him before he woke. Then they ate what little food they had, and sat quietly, and waited.

Although the sky was light, their shelter was in the darkness shed by the station. In a little over an hour twilight would come, with night just behind it.