Van's therapeutic prescription for a crosslander with three weeks of missing memory was rockcrust, administered via clean straw, followed by fried smelt, rooter trotters, skewerwing and venomtooth. He described the alternative — thinking too hard about where you'd been — as "grizzler smelt thinkin'," which I have found, in the time since, to be one of the more useful phrases the Dark Peak dialect has contributed to my personal vocabulary.

Hexikid were engineered by the nascenti as street cleaners, road clearers, and heavy-duty dray vehicles for virtually any purpose requiring massive force and bulk — a brief that they execute at the size of a bin lorry. They are, the files note, an intelligent species with access to the hive mind, though their remit involves little need for creative thought, which is a sentence I have also seen applied to several middle managers.

Scraith Rawson's pitch to the Moors for a unified nether-human resistance against the nascenti was, at its core, a proposal to build a superweapon capable of targeting the lakes at Damflask and Ladybower from the kitchen of a safe house in Hellsborough. He demonstrated its feasibility by producing a circuit board — charred, bruised, clearly pilfered from something that still needed it — and asking Scarp Southey what he thought. Southey thought it was the drains.

Cryptobites — heavy dray animals originally bred from Mentiloth, now self-sustaining — occupy a specific niche in xin society: transport between communities, and silk production for clothing, bedding, and the construction of xin yurts. It is one of those arrangements that sounds practical until you remember that the founding stock of the species was the notoriously unstable and venomous Mentiloth, at which point the silk blankets become slightly less inviting.