They talked quietly. Andrej woke and began to make his noises again, casting piteous looks around the room, begging for freedom, but Isaac looked at him with eyes too exhausted and miserable for guilt.

At seven o’clock there was a fumbling noise at the heatblistered door. It was instantly audible above the rattling street sounds of The Crow. Isaac drew his flintlock and motioned Yagharek to silence.

It was Derkhan, exhausted and very dirty, her face smeared with dust and grease. She held her breath as she passed through the door and closed it behind her, releasing a sobbing exhalation as she slumped against it. She moved over and gripped Isaac’s hand, then Yagharek’s. They murmured greetings.

“I think there’s someone watching this place,” Derkhan said urgently. “He’s standing under the tobacconist’s awning opposite, in a green cloak. Can’t see his face.”

Isaac and Yagharek tensed. The garuda slid under the boarded-up window and raised his avian eye quietly to a knothole. He scanned the street across from the ruin.

“There is no one there,” he said flatly. Derkhan came over and stared through the hole.

“Maybe he wasn’t doing anything,” she said eventually. “But I’d feel safer a floor or two up, in case we hear someone come in.”

It was much easier to move, now that Isaac could force the crying Andrej at gunpoint without fear of being seen. They made their way up the stairs, leaving footprints in the charcoal surface.

On the top floor the window frames were empty of glass or wood, and they could look out across the short trek of slates at the staggered monolith of the station. They waited while the sky grew darker. Eventually, in the dim flicker of the orange gasjets, Yagharek clambered from the window and dropped lightly onto the moss-cushioned wall beyond. He stalked the five feet to the unbroken spine of roofs that connected the clutch of buildings to the Dexter Line and to Perdido Street Station. It sat weighty and huge in the west, spotted with irregular clusters of light like an earthbound constellation.

Yagharek was a dim figure in the skyline. He scanned the landscape of chimneys and slanting clay. He was not watched. He turned towards the dark window, indicated the others to follow him.

Andrej was old and stiff, and found it hard to walk along the narrow walkways they forged. He could not jump the five-foot drops that were necessary. Isaac and Derkhan helped him, supporting him or holding him fast with a gentle, macabre assistance, while the other trained their flintlock at his brain.

They had untied his limbs so he could walk and climb, but they had left the gag in place to stifle his wails and sobs.

Andrej stumbled confused and miserable like some soul in the outlands of Hell, shuffling nearer and nearer his ineluctable end with agonizing steps.