No-one was very sure why the witches of Erlsley had chosen to congregate their shopfronts and offices at the top of the steep, clambering curve of Victorian tenement architecture known as Crawgate, out on the northern edge of town. There was a theory going around – that the street name had once been pronounced Crowgate, referencing, back in some period or other of medieval gloom, the hordes of querulous black birds that would gather to pick at the rotting bodies of criminals left on gibbets ...