It came down the eastern wall in three strides and then it was not on the wall anymore.
Wings opened — broad, dark, ragged along the trailing edges — and the noise of them arriving in a fifteen-metre stone corridor was enormous, a hard double clap that came back off both cliffs and doubled itself so that it seemed to be happening on all sides at once.
The body was a bird's. Deep-chested, filthy, feathered in dark grey-brown, with legs that ended in feet made for taking hold of things — four talons, long, curved, the back one as long as a finger.
The face on the front of it was a woman's.
Gaunt. Hollow under the cheekbones, hollow at the temples, with the skin drawn so tight over the skull that the shape of the teeth showed through the lips. Black hair came off the head in a matted mass and went back along the line of the shoulders into the feathers, so that there was no clean place where the woman stopped and the bird began.
It was starving. Everything about it was starving.
