Two hundred feet of backward-crawling is the formal greeting — palms warm on the corridor floor, guards either side, eyes forward, never turning. Hordrön's face runs like forge-heated treacle and hisses where it drips to the flagstones, burning the stone beneath his throne into a shallow bowl across uncounted years; he refers to himself in the third person. Those who look upon him are sentenced to one forge cycle, which, going by the turnover at the Woad temple at dunlockslyn, appears to run no longer than twelve months.

Cognitising, Boggy-Lomas told Sophie, had once made him loopy — past crazy, past coming back — until someone pulled him out of the deed and returned him to something adjacent to sanity. Sophie found this detail inspiring rather than cautionary, and laid out the plan regardless: cognitise the youth of Hellsborough into a nascenti army before the netherlanders got to them first. Boggy's expression, as she spoke, was the face of a man rehearsing an argument he already knew he would lose.

Van told me he had been inside the chambers of Onesimus when he overheard Pandora, Princess of Hathersage, pledge herself to Ocnus of Glossop — a political manoeuvre she delivered with the calm of someone who had been choosing her moment. He deserted his post immediately, blundered through corridors he described as "worse than t'Wisewood," and drew his whipo'wil on four royal guards before doing the arithmetic. He didn't get to her rooms; he doesn't like to dwell on this.

gabbleratchets are phantom human-headed barkers that fly through the murk at night, producing a noise old accounts compare to a great number of whelps howling simultaneously — heard always, seen rarely, and reliably preceding death or disaster in records from both sides of the crossroads. Those who hear the full din at close quarters are said to run the risk of losing their reason entirely, spending the rest of their lives wandering with outstretched arms and staring eyes, in grim imitation of the beasts themselves. Hellsborough residents tend to dismiss this last part, which is itself a symptom I have documented.