37

The city sprawls like corpses on a battlefield, without order or reason, in every direction. Everywhere, chimneys belch smoke into the air, staining the buildings black and filling every street with fog. The air is fresher here, which only lets you finally appreciate the stink of the place: rotting sewers, rotting food, and the endless smoke.

"Luna Din," Stralchus says. "London. But a London that never was, that never should have been." He grabs a blowing bit of trash paper and unfurls it. You recognize the woman it depicts: the self-proclaimed Queen of the North, who tried to murder the Empress with the help of her mad husband. Dressed in finery, she looks nothing like the howling woman Prince Zeno led to the gallows ten years ago.

"Victoria," Stralchus reads. "Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Empress of India. Euphrasia! Euphrasia, get me out of this hell!"

"Get to the adjoining building," the crackling voice says. "I've opened a rift there. That place is coterminous with the laboratory I have established back in Istanbul."

"What, in the twenty names of Artemis, is Istanb–?"

"Just hurry!"

You see the building, a decaying warehouse with broken or dirty windows through which you can see a faint distortion. You also see how to reach it: drop down onto a sloping tin roof nearby, then run across to one of the broken windows.

Then the Crowned Serpent steps between you and the warehouse.

"This all ends here," the Crowned Serpent says, and again you have the impression that something is speaking through the man. His tattoos ripple. They look diseased, and the disease looks to be spreading.

"We need to work together, Crowchar," Stralchus says. "The Ziggurat can wait. Our real enemy stands before us."

You hear the whistles of the constables below you.