Iron Council

CHAPTER TEN

The golem watched the sleeping travellers. It stood by the embers taller than a man or a cactus-man. Thickset, with arms too long that hung in front of it, vaguely simian. Its stance was buckled, its back hunched into a saddle. Its clay skin was sun-cracked.

With dawn the golem was blundered across by woken insects. It did not move. Burrs and spores blew over the sleepers in their hollow. Breezes prickled their flesh. They were north of the relentless heat.

Drogon rose first. When the others woke he was gone, scouting, and Pomeroy and Elsie went too, to leave Cutter alone with the golem’s master.

Cutter said, “You shouldn’t have left. Judah, you shouldn’t have gone.”

Judah said, “Did you get the money I left?”

“Of course I got the money, and I got your instructions too, but I fucking didn’t follow them, did I? And ain’t you glad? With what I brought you?” He slapped his pack. “They weren’t ready when you left.”

“And now one’s broken.” Judah smiled sadly. “One’s not enough.”

“Broken?” Cutter was stricken. He had dragged the equipment so far.

“You shouldn’t have gone, Judah, not without me.” Cutter breathed hard. “You should have waited for me.”

Cutter kissed him, with the urgency that always came when he did, a desperation. Judah responded as he always did-with something like affection and something like patience.

Even now, Cutter realised with wonder, Judah Low seemed not quite focused on what was before him. It had been that way as long as Cutter had known him. A typical distracted researcher in something or other, Cutter had thought at first. Cutter’s shop was in Brock Marsh, and scholars were his customers. He had been surprised when he traced the remains of some downtown accent in Judah’s voice.

More than ten years ago they had met. Cutter had emerged from his back room to see Judah looking at the esoterica crammed on darkwood shelves: notebooks, metaclockwork, vegetable secrets. A tall thin man with dry, uncut hair, much Cutter’s senior, his face weathered, his eyes always open wide at whatever he saw. It was shortly after the war in the dumps, after Cutter had been made to surrender his cleaning construct. He was washing his own floors, and was in a bad mood. He had been rude.

The next time Judah came, Cutter tried to apologise, and the older man just stared at him. When Judah came back a third time-stocking up on alkalids and the best, most dense clay-Cutter asked his name.

“And should I say Judah or Jude or Dr. Low?” Cutter had said, and Judah had smiled.

Cutter had never felt so connected, so understood, as at that smile. His motives were uncovered without effort or cynicism. He knew then that this was not a man distracted like so many of the scholarly, but someone beatific. Cutter had come very quickly to love him.

They were shy with each other. Not only Cutter and Judah, but Judah and Pomeroy, Judah and Elsie. He asked them again and again for the stories of Drey’s death, and Ihona’s and Fejh's. When they had told him who had been lost, he had been aghast. He had crumpled.

He had them tell the deaths as stories. Ihona in her column of water; Drey’s cruciform fall. Fejhechrillen’s dissolution under the iron barrage was harder to sanctify with narrative.

They tried to make him tell them what he had done. He shook his head as if there was nothing.

“I rode,” he said to them. “On my golem. I took him south through the forest and on the ties and lines. I bought passage across the Meagre Sea. I rode him west, through the cactus villages. They helped me. I came through the cleft. I knew I was followed. I set a trap. Thank Jabber you realised, Cutter.” A brief terrible look went over him.

He looked tired. Cutter did not know what Judah had had to face, what had taxed him. He was scabbed: the evidence of stories he would not tell. It did not take much from him to keep this golem alive, but it was one drain among the many of his escape.

Cutter put a hand on the creation’s grey flanks. “Let it go, Judah,” he said. The older man looked at him with his perpetual surprise. Smiled slowly.

“Rest,” Judah said. He touched the golem on its basic face. The clay man did not move, but something left it. Some orgone. It settled imperceptibly, and dust came off it, and its cracks looked suddenly drier. It stood where it had stood, and it would not move again. It would fall slowly away, and its hollows would be homes for birds and vermin. It would be a feature of the land and then would be gone.

Cutter felt an urge to push it over and watch it break apart, to save it from being stuck like that in time, but he let it stand.

“Who’s Drogon?” Judah asked. The susurrator looked lost without his horse. He was busying himself, letting them discuss him.

“He’d not be here if I’d my way,” Pomeroy said. “For a whispersmith he’s got a damn lot of power. And we don’t know where he’s from.”

“He’s a drifter,” said Cutter. “Ranch-hand, tracker, you know. Some horse tramp. He heard you’d gone-gods know what the rumours are now. He’s attached hisself to us because he wants to find the Iron Council. Out of sentiment, I think. He’s saved us more'n once.”

“He’s coming with us?” Judah said. They looked at him.

Carefully, Cutter said: “You know… you don’t have to go on. We could go back.” Judah looked oddly at him. “I know you think you burnt your bridges with the golem trap in your rooms, and it’s true they’ll be watching for you, but dammit, Judah, you could go underground. You know the Caucus would protect you.”

Judah looked at them and one by one they broke his gaze, ashamed. “You don’t think it’s still there,” he said. “Is that what this is? You’re here for me?”

“No,” said Pomeroy. “I always said I wasn’t just here for you.”

But Judah kept talking. “You think it’s gone?” He spoke with calm, almost priestly certainty. “It hasn’t. How can I go back, Cutter? Don’t you realise what I’m here for? They’re coming for the Council. When they find it, they’ll bring it down. They came for the Teshi, but now they found it they can’t let the Council be. I heard it from an old source. Told me they’d found it, and what they’ll do. I’ve to warn them. I know the Caucus won’t understand. Probably cursing me.”

“We sent them a message,” Cutter said. “From Myrshock. They know we’re after you.”

From his satchel Judah brought out papers and three wax cylinders.

“From the Council,” he said. “The oldest letter’s near seventeen years old. The first cylinder’s older'n that. Almost twenty years. The last ones arrived three years ago, and they were only two years old when they came. I know the Council’s there.”

The messages had travelled by unknown routes. Fellid Forest to the sea, by boats to the Firewater Straits, Shankell and Myrshock, to Iron Bay and New Crobuzon. Or through byways in the hills, or through woods by paths hundreds of miles into the swamps below Cobsea. To Cobsea itself in the great plains. Or by air, or thaumaturgy, somehow making their ways at last to Judah Low.

And could you write back, Judah? Cutter thought. You know they’re waiting. Do they know you’re coming? And how many of their messages were lost? He saw austere gullies strewn with fragments of wax. Gusts sending scraps of encoded paper like blossom across the grassland.

He was awed to see the paper, the grooved cylinders, sound fixed in time. Artefacts from a Caucus rumour, from the stories of travellers and dissidents.

What would he know? When first he had heard of Iron Council he was a boy, and it was a folktale like Jack Half-a-Prayer, and Toro, and the Contumancy. When he grew old enough to know that his Parliament might have lied to him-that there might have been no accident in the quagmires to the south-the Iron Council some said had been born there could never be found. Even those who said they had seen it could only point west.

Why did you never show me those, Judah? he thought. Through all their discussions, through all their growing closer. Judah had taken Cutter’s cynicism and tried to do something to it, tried to tell Cutter that it had clogged him. There were other ways of doubting everything that need not sullen him, Judah had said, and sometimes Cutter had tried.

A dozen years they had known each other, and Cutter had learnt many things from Judah, and taught him a few. It was Judah had brought Cutter to the fringes of the Caucus. Cutter thought of the debates in his shop and in his small rooms, in bed. And in all those political ruminations-Judah a most unworldly insurrectionist, Cutter never more than a suspicious fellow-traveller- Cutter had never seen these stocks from the Iron Council itself.

He did not feel betrayed, only bewildered. That was familiar.

“I know where the Council is,” Judah said. “I can find it. It’s wonderful that you came. Let’s go on.”

Judah spoke to the whispersmith. No one but Judah could hear Drogon’s replies, of course. At last Judah nodded, and they understood that Drogon was coming with them. Pomeroy glowered, despite all the susurrator had done.

Judah the somaturge did not seek leadership, did nothing but say he would continue and that they could come, but they became his followers, as they always did. It had been the same in New Crobuzon. He never ordered them, often seemed too preoccupied to notice they were with him, but when they were they attended him carefully.

They prepared. There must be weeks of travel. Miles of land, and more land, and rocks and more trees, and perhaps water, and perhaps chasms, and then perhaps the Iron Council. They slept early, and Cutter woke to the sound of Pomeroy and Elsie’s lovemaking. They could not help their little exhalations, nor the scuffing of their bodies. The noise aroused him. He listened to his friends’ sex with lust and an upswelling of affection. He reached for Judah, who turned to him sleepily and responded to his tonguing kiss, but gently turned away again.

Below his blanket Cutter masturbated silently onto the ground, watching Judah’s back.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

A week they went north and northwest into greening. It was exhausting. The plains buckled. Sloughs and cenotes in the landforms grew deeper, and hills flecked with chaparral and heat-stunted trees. They walked gulches. Three times the whispersmith showed them they had found their way unknowingly onto a trail, that they walked in the ghosts of footprints.

“Where do we go?”

“I know where it is,” Judah said. “In what part.” He checked maps, and conferred with Drogon, the plains-traveller. Judah rode with an implacable wilderness calm.

“Why are you here?” Judah said to Drogon. The susurrator answered straight into Judah’s ear. “Yes,” said Judah, “but that tells me nothing.”

“He ain’t doing it to you now,” Cutter said. “He can take you over with his bloody voice. At least twice that’s how he kept us alive.”

Cougars and githwings eyed them from the low hills or the air, and the party sounded their weapons. Copses of waxy plants like bladed succulents menaced them, moved not by breeze.

“See there.” Drogon’s whisper. He hauled the accoutrements of nomadism. He was a man of these ranges, anxious without a horse. He pointed to things they would not have seen. “A village was there,” he said; and yes, they learnt to see it in the ground, walls and foundations sketched in regolith, a landscape’s memory of architecture. “That ain’t no tree,” he said, and they realised that it was the barrel of some ancient gun or gunlike thing, swaddled in ivy and the scabs of weather.

One night while the others slept off their gamy supper, Cutter sat up hours before dawn and saw that Judah was gone. He rifled stupidly through Judah’s bedcloth as if he might find him there. The whispersmith looked up, his face soured to see Cutter needily gripping Judah’s wool.

Judah was off in the direction the wind was going, in a little hillside rincon. He had taken from his pack a cast-iron apparatus, so heavy a thing Cutter was astonished he had brought it. Judah motioned Cutter to sit by the voxiterator. One of his wax cylinders was inserted, and his hand was on the crank.

He smiled. He replaced the plectrum-needle at the top of the grooves.

“You may as well,” he said. “Seeing as you’re here. This keeps me going.” He turned the handle and in the sputter and random tuts from the trumpet, a man’s voice sounded. It was bled of bass, and it sped and slowed gently as the crank’s pace varied, so his inflection was hard to gauge. The wind took the voice as soon as it emerged.

“… don’t feel as if I hardly know you but they say you’re family sister so I thought you should hear this from family not wrote down fact is he’s dead Uzman’s dead and gone I’m sorry you’ve to hear it like this I’m sorry you’ve to hear it at all truth is weren’t a bad passing mind he was at peace we buried him ahead and now he’s in our tracks there was those said we should put him in the cemetery but I weren’t having that I said to them you know it ain’t what he wanted he told us do it right do it like it used to be done so I made them we’re mourning him he told us not to don’t mourn organise he said when we was fighting they told me and after the stain he told us don’t mourn celebrate but sister I can’t help it we’re allowed to mourn you mourn sister go on you mourn and I will too it’s me it’s Rahul I’ll say good-bye…”

The needle snapped stop. Judah was crying. Cutter could not bear it. He reached out, faltered when he saw that his touch would not be welcome. Judah did not sob. The wind sniffed them both like a dog. The moon was faint. It was cool. Cutter watched Judah weeping and he hurt, he was fervent to hold onto the grey-haired man, but he could do nothing but wait.

When Judah had finished and wiped himself dry he smiled at last at Cutter, who had to look away.

Cutter spoke carefully. “You knew him, the one he’s talking about. I see. Whose was that message? Whose brother was that?”

“It’s for me,” said Judah. “I’m the sister. I’m his sister, and he’s mine.”

Hills rose shallowly, pelted with flowers in regal colours. Dust stuck to Cutter’s sweat, and he breathed air thickened with pollen. The travellers stumbled through strange landscape, weighed down by dirt and the sun as if they had been dipped in tar.

They tasted carbon. Somewhere above the bluffs before them the sky was discoloured by more than summer. Lines of dark smoke were drawn up and dissipating. They seemed to retreat like a rainbow as the party approached, but the next day the smell of burn was much stronger.

There were paths. They were entering inhabited lands, and approaching the fires. “Look there!” said the whispersmith to each of them in turn. On downs miles off there was movement. Through Drogon’s telescope Cutter saw that it was people. Perhaps a hundred. Hauling carts, hurrying their meat-beasts: fat cow-sized birds, thick and quadruped, scrawny featherless wings stumping as forelegs.

The caravan was decrepit and desperate. “What’s happening here?” Cutter said.

At noon they came somewhere the earth had split, and they walked the bottom of arroyos much higher than houses. They saw something dun and battered, bound, like a giant brown-paper parcel in string. It was a wagon. Its wheels were broken and it leaned against the rock. It was split and burned.

There were men and women around it. Their heads were stove in or their chests opened up and emptied by bullets, the contents spilt down their clothes and shoes. They sat or lay in neat order where they had been killed, like a troop waiting instructions. A company of the dead. A child spitted on a broken sabre huddled at their front like a mascot.

They were not soldiers. Their clothes were peasants’ clothes. Their belongings littered the chine floor-irons, pots and kettles, all alien designs, cloth made rags.

Cutter and his companions stared with their hands at their lips. Drogon wrapped his kerchief around mouth and nose and went into the deads’ stench through the billows of insects that ate them. He took a wooden spoke and poked at the bodies so carefully he looked almost respectful. They were sunbaked, their skins cured. Cutter could see their bones in ridges.

The cart listed as Drogon leaned in. He squatted and looked at the wounds, probing them as the others watched and gave off sounds. When the whispersmith took gentle hold of the sabre that protruded from the child, Cutter turned away so he would not see the dead boy move.

“Days gone,” Drogon said in Cutter’s ear, even as Cutter kept his back to the investigation. “One of your’n. This is New Crobuzon issue. This is a militia blade.”

It was militia bullets killed them, a militiaman or a militiawoman who ran the child through. Militia knives tore through their wagon; New Crobuzon hands had thrown their belongings down.

“I told you.” Judah spoke very quietly.

Can’t we get out of here? Cutter thought. I don’t want to talk in front of them. He looked up, breathing fast, saw Pomeroy and Elsie holding each other.

“In my letter, Cutter. You remember?” Judah held his gaze. “I told you I was going because of this.”

“We’re near the outskirts of Tesh lands,” Cutter said. “This don’t mean the militia are onto the Iron Council.”

“They’ve a base by the coast, from where they send these squads out. This… work… This is only half of what they do. They’re going north. They’re looking for the Council.”

Beyond the dead was open country. They knew that the militia that had done this to these runaways might be close, and they moved carefully. Cutter saw those patient dead when he closed his eyes. Drogon took them on a path through the sagebrush. On the hills ahead were scraps of farmland, of a half-wild, scrubby kind, from where the smoke came.

It was a day to the depredation. The air was clogged with smouldering. They entered the first little field with their guns drawn.

Through ridges of turned-over earth into what had been a copse of olives. They trod over the spread claws of roots where the little trees had been torn down. Drying olives scattered like animal pellets. There were craters, where stumps were made carbon sculptures. There were bodies cooked down to skeletons.

There had been huts, and they were burnt. On a plain of scrub and drying creeks were mounds of black rubbish that smoked like slag. A rank, meat and sweet smell. Cutter hacked through dried summer boscage.

For seconds he could not make sense of what he saw. The mounds were heaped-up carcasses, a charnel mass-blacked remnants of snouted ungulates, tusked, big and heavy as buffalo. They were encased in ash and crisped leaves. Roots spread out in their pebbled flesh.

“Vinhogs,” said Judah. “We’re in Galaggi. We’ve come so far.” The wind moved and hilltop dust and the burnings of olives, vines and vineleaves hurt their eyes. The dead animals rustled.

Pomeroy found a trench, where scores of men and women rotted. The decay of days had not yet disguised their crosshatched tattoos. Their pumice-colour skins were death-besmirched, stone jewels piercing them.

They were the wineherds. The clans, the Houses, nomads of this hot northern steppe, custodians of the vinhog coveys. They tracked them, protected them and, at harvest time, leapt in dangerous brilliant husbandry between the horns of the aggressive herbivores to prune the fruit that plumped on their flanks.

Cutter swallowed. They all swallowed, staring at the dead ragged with gunfire. Judah said, “Maybe this is House Predicus. Maybe it’s Charium or Gneura.” The vinhogs, the animal-hosts and their harvest, mouldered and burned away.

All day they walked swells of ruined land, through olive groves ground to nothing, and despoiled crop-herds, and great numbers of scorched cadavers from the winemaker tribes. A corral of the huge meat-birds gone to maggots. The soft spit of embers and the knock of dead wood surrounded them. On some corpses the specifics of murder were still clear. A woman, her skirt rucked up and stiff red; a big wineherd man, his belly flyblown, stabbed in both eyes. Rot made Cutter gag.

They found one vinhog alive, fallen in a stone basin. It shook with hunger and infection. It limped in circles and tried to paw the ground. Its skin was ridged with rootwork and a leaf-pelt from its symbiotic vines. Its lichen-grapes were wizened. Cutter shot it in pity.

“This is why the cactacae fought, down south,” said Pomeroy after a long silent time. “This is what they heard about. They saw the militia, thought this was what they’d get too.”

“Why this? Why this?” said Elsie. She struggled. “Galaggi ain’t Tesh land, it’s wild. These ain’t Tesh tribes.”

“No, but it’s Tesh they’re hurting,” Judah said. “Galaggi wine and oil goes through it. They aren’t strong enough yet to hit the city, but do this and you hit Tesh in the coffers.”

They were way beyond their mapped world. Tesh was there, two or three hundred miles south and west on the coastal plain. Cutter thought of it, though he did not know what it was he should picture. How should he think it? Tesh, City of the Crawling Liquid. Its moats and glass cats, and the Catoblepas Plain and merchant trawlers and tramp diplomats and the Crying Prince.

Thousands of sea miles from Iron Bay to the remote coast, to the foothold that New Crobuzon had established north of Tesh. The militia had to go past Shankell, past seas thick with piasa and pirates, through the Firewater Straits where the Witchocracy backed their Tesh neighbours. There were no land-routes across Rohagi’s wild interiors, no shortcuts. It was a desperately hard war to wage. New Crobuzon had to send ships across months of hostile waters. Cutter was awed at the brute vigour.

That night they ate unripe fruit they found unspoiled on a dead vinhog and made forlorn jokes about what a good vintage it was. Their second day on the vintners’ land they found wreckage of the marauders. The New Crobuzon militia had not had it all their way. It was the remains of a nashorn, a rhino ironclad and Remade into a veldt tank. Two storeys high, a raised arse-end gunnery, a piston-strengthened neck. Its horn was corkscrewed, a huge drillbit. The nashorn was burst and savaged with peasant weapons. Its gears and innards lay about it.

There were six militia dead. Cutter stared at the familiar uniforms in this unlikely place. The officers were killed with blades. There were wineherds’ sickles on the ground.

The land was full of scavengers. Dead-eating fox-things dug at the earth. That night Drogon woke the travellers with a shot. “Ghul,” he whispered to each in turn. They did not believe him, but in the morning its corpse was there: grave-pale and simian, its toothy mouth wide, blood drying on its eyeless forehead.

There was the start of a cooling as they went north, but only the very start. In the heat, among the ghuls and the dead and the dizzying smell of rotting fruit and the smoke, in a land become a torn-up memory of itself, Cutter felt as if he were walking in the outskirts of some hell.

In days through rugged transverse rises, a haze of forested hills became just visible to the north, and Judah was elated. “We’ve to go through that,” he said. “It’s the end of the veldt; it’s the far edge of Galaggi.”

Behind them the earth was broken by the tracks of militia. They had passed out of that crushed zone of husbandry and feral wine, those few score of miles once worth something. This was a wetter reach of hills all summered, copper and slick. It rained warm rain-virga that did not reach the ground.

They were in places only antique sages and adventurers had been. They had heard about these strange reaches-patches of ice in deep summer, the hives of dog-sized termites, clouds that fossilised into granite. On a Dustday, new smoke and a smell reached them. They climbed slopes of scree and breccia to see the scrubland all the miles to the forest, and something burning before them. One by one they let out sounds.

A few miles off. A chelona. Its titan legs were splayed, its plastron flattened to the ground. Its sides rose vastly, and from halfway up were gnarls of carapace-matter coaxed over generations into overhangs and towers, the walls of a keratin village. The great tortoise was more than a hundred yards long, and over the centuries of its life it had accreted on its back a many-layered jag township. Brittle outgrowths of its scute had been grown and carved into blocks, ziggurats and spires, their planes and lines imperfect, cut with windows, belfries connected by rope bridges, coursed with horny streets and tunnels; everything made, paved and walled in the mottlesome tortoiseshell. The chelona was dead and on fire.

It reeked of burning hair. Smoke rose from the walls in a thionic gush. Muck and gore dripped from its cave mouth.

Milling at its base were fastnesses on wheels and tracks, mobile guns-a New Crobuzon force. Crews rode two nashorns, the captains in sunk seats behind the rhinos’ heads, gripping controls sutured directly to ganglia. The militia cannon must be more powerful than they appeared to have blasted such wounds.

Militia infantry were heading in the travellers’ direction. They followed a line of refugees fleeing the remains of their chelonatown.

Drogon and Judah led them on through scrub, until a sharp coughcoughcough sounded, and there was screaming, and the echoes of bullets. They lay where they had thrown themselves until it was obvious that they were not targets, continued, staying low, to the base of a hill where they bunkered behind a marl barricade. Above them, out of the tree-cover, was a line of broken-down families. Not all were human. Some were behind fallen trunks or in hollows; some were running. Their shouts of fear were like the sounds of scraping.

At the hilltop, a corps of militia took positions. They were just discernible. They kneeled before motorguns; there was a monsoon of noise and bullets and many of the refugees fell.

Cutter watched in rage. More bullets pressed down the earth, and the dying twitched and tried to crawl away. A chelonaman raised something to his lips, and there was a thin noise, and way above there were cries and some of the militia stumbled at some thaumaturgy in the trumpet.

Drogon was watching the hilltop through his telescope. Judah turned to him in response to a whisper, and said, “She’s unpacking what?”

From the hilltop unfolded a shape of wire and dark leather, taller than a man. It became in a stutter of extending metal. Like a music stand, it unfurled many times. A humming of thaumaturgy made the air thin as a militia officer made shapes on the thing, and there was crackling, and the wire-and-hide moved.

It threw back a head with glass eyes, and its skin wings beat twice and it was airborne and careering down the hill toward the Galaggiites. Its limbs were not legs or arms but knifed extensions, insectan and agleam. They slid together with the sound of sharpening.

The ugly sculpture flew toward those cowering. Judah’s eyes were wide, and when he spoke he was choked with rage and contempt. “A prefab,” he said. “You use a damned ready-made?” He stepped up and onto the shallow hill, and Cutter stayed with him and aimed.

The militia’s gliding assassin passed over the wailing wounded and reached the trumpeter. He blew another thin note, but the thing had no life for him to disrupt. It rived him with its bayonets, and he screamed and bled out quickly.

Judah was growling. Cutter fired up the hill to protect him. Judah howled and stared not at the wired monstrosity but at the officer controlling it. The thing rose from the meat mess of its victim and beat its built wings. Judah puffed his chest like a pugilist.

No one fired. They watched-even the Galaggiites, astonished by this bizarre figure-while the cutting leather bird swept down on Judah, wings spread. Cutter fired and could not even tell if his bullet hit.

Judah picked up stones and dust. His growl grew louder and became a shout as the shadow rolled over him.

“On me?” His voice was splendid. “You use a golem on me?”

Like a child he threw his handful of charged dirt into the thing’s path. There was a stunning detonation of energy. The golem dropped instantly. It fell straight out of the sky, the momentum of its flight dissipated.

Judah stood over the collapsed metal, all its little borrowed life gone. For seconds there was no sound. Rage made Judah shake. He pointed up the hill. “You use a golem on me?”

The motorgun swung toward him but there were rifle-shots and the gunman barked and died at Drogon’s hidden hand. Suddenly there were scores of bullets in the air, from the whispersmith, Pomeroy’s blunderbuss, Elsie and Cutter and the appalled militia.

Judah strode through the fusillade. He was bellowing but Cutter could no longer hear what he said, only ran to protect him. The New Crobuzon militia, yards off, were shouting and firing blindly down the hill. Judah Low reached a pile of Galaggi dead.

The somaturge shoved his hand among the cadavers and barked. There was a fermentation as the world’s energy was channelled, the moment bowed and swelled and spat out strangeness. And the corpse-pile stood in a new configuration, a golem of flesh still twitching as the nerves within it died.

It was a shambles of the recent dead, gory and dripping. It walked in the base shape of a human: five, six bodies pushed together without respect for their outlines. The golem’s legs were stiffening corpses, one inverted, its dead head become a foot, crushed and made more shapeless with every step; the trunk a coagulate of arms and bones; the arms more dead; the head more of the Galaggi dead; the whole aggregate stamping at terrible speed up the hill, leaving a trail of itself. Leaving screams from the vineyard workers who saw their lost lovers and children reanimated into this grotesquerie. It walked quickly with Judah behind it, energies spitting from him, connecting him to his monstrosity with an uncanny funiculus.

The militia were pinned by gunshot, and the charnel golem reached them. The thing shed matter as it crested the hill, and the New Crobuzon soldiers who emptied their rifles and motorguns into it bloodied and desecrated it further. But it lasted long enough to smother and punch them to death. It beat them down with blows from the dead men and women that made its fists.

When the hilltop was quiet and the last of the soldiers had fallen, the flesh golem collapsed. It was carcasses again by the time it hit the ground.

The militia dead wore ragged, guerrilla versions of their uniforms, adorned with ears and teeth and obscure symbols for how many dead they had taken. They still wore their masks, every one of them.

Two were still alive. One whom the trumpet had struck down was delirious, raging with occult fever the music weapon had given him; the other had taken Pomeroy’s shot through his hands, and he screamed at his fingerless red messes.

Drogon went through the corpses. It would not be long before the main force at the chelona sent scouts after this little death-squad.

Judah was tired. The golem he had made-so big, so quickly-had taken energy. He searched the dead captain-thaumaturge whose fold-up golem he had so easily deactivated. He took her accoutrements: batteries, chymical vials, and hexstones.

He would not meet Cutter’s eye. He’s shamefaced, Cutter thought. Because of his little display. Judah stalking up the hill like some vexed spirit, infecting the dead with a kind of life. Judah was a golemist of extraordinary puissance and expertise: since the Construct War had forced the rich to replace their steam-driven servants, his skills had made him wealthy. But Cutter had never seen Judah Low acknowledge his power or revel in it until that deadly walk behind the corpse-giant.

You use a golem on me? There had been an ease to his rage. Now Judah Low was trying to fade.

The refugees watched. There were people from the chelona, men and women with skins of varied colours and clothes of astonishing designs. There were beetles the height of a child, walking upright. They stared with iridescent eyes, and their antennae swung toward Cutter. Their dead were cracked open and smeared with their ichor.

Among the humans there were a few dressed in the natural colours of hunters. They were taller than the chelonans, their skin a stark grey.

“Wineherds,” Cutter said.

“Twice refugees,” Elsie said. “Must have run from the militia to the shelltown, and then run again.”

A wineherd spoke, and he and the travellers and the chelona renegades went through what languages they knew and found only a few cognates. There were trails of dust in the bush as refugees made for the warm forest while Drogon searched and Judah sat. Behind them, the surviving militiamen made sobby sounds.

“We have to move,” said Elsie.

They went on with the last chelonans, a few of the silent insect people, two exile wineherds. They walked into the forest. Behind them, the New Crobuzon militiaman spasmed and raved in his hexed sickness.

It was nothing like Rudewood. These selva trees were tougher, draped with vines and succulent leaves, hanging with dark foreign fruits. There were alien animal sounds.

The lost chelonans were cowed, and looked with open-eyed hopelessness at Judah. They tried to stick to the power they had seen save them. They walked, though, with a clumsiness Cutter and his companions had shed, and that now angered them.

They could not be delayed, and they left the refugees behind, simply by pacing with their lean, wood-hard muscles. Cutter knew the militia would follow them, and that those they left would not do well if they were found. He was too tired to feel much guilt.

Without ever speaking, the insect people found their own forest paths and went. When the warm night came, only the two wineherds had kept up. They moved with hunters’ stamina. Finally, far enough from the exhausted chelonans they had shed, the travellers stopped. They made an odd community, the wineherds and Cutter’s party staring at each other as they chewed, each grouplet counting the other’s oddities, companionable and unspeaking.

For the first two days they heard munitions behind them. For days after that they heard nothing, though they were convinced they were still followed, and they kept their pace quick, and tried to hide their trails.

The wineherds accompanied them. They were named Behellua and Susullil. They often became melancholy, weeping half ritually, lamenting the loss of their wine-beasts. In the evenings they would talk lengthily in singsong by the fire, untroubled by their companions’ lack of understanding. Judah could only translate snips.

“It’s something about the rain,” he would say, “or thunder maybe, and… there’s a snake and a moon and bread.”

Elsie had spirits: the wineherds got drunk. They told a story in dance. At one point they performed a complex little double slap and turned to their audience with new faces-clannish thaumaturgy made them playfully monstrous, splayed their teeth like uncouth tusks. They gurned and pulled out their ears into batwings while the charm lasted.

The wineherds asked where they were going. Judah spoke in pidgin and pantomimed, told Cutter he had said they were looking for friends, for a myth, for something missing, for something they had to save, that would one day save them, for the Iron Council. The wineherds stared. Cutter did not know why they stayed. In the evenings, the wineherds and the travellers learned and taught a little of each other’s languages. Cutter watched Susullil close, and saw Susullil notice him.

It rained warmly each morning, as if the jungle sweated with them. They cut through lianas and the chaparral, and batted off mosquitoes and vampiric butterflies. At night they fell where they dropped their packs, dirty and exhausted and flecked with blood. Pomeroy and Elsie would smoke, and use their cigarillos to burn off leeches.

Their elevation rose and the forest changed, cooled gently and became montane. The canopy lowered. Ibises and sunbirds watched them. The wineherds cooked tree crabs. Behellua was nearly killed by a pangolin rex that whipped at him with its poisoned tongue. Rarely, when one of them became very tired, Drogon would ask permission, which all but Pomeroy gave, and would whisper them, telling them walk so they had to obey.

“Do you know where we’re going, Judah?”

Judah nodded to Cutter, conferred with Drogon, nodded again; but Cutter saw anxiety in him. He checked his compass and dampening maps.

Cutter felt a sudden and very great weariness, as if New Crobuzon were shackled to him and wherever he went he dragged it after him. As if every new place he saw became infected by where he had been.

Pomeroy and Elsie renewed their lovemaking. Judah slept alone. Cutter listened, and saw Behellua and Susullil listening too, and then watched astonished as they chatted quietly in their wineland language and sitting up began offhandedly to masturbate in time, touching each other. They saw him watching and paused, and then he closed his eyes hurriedly as Susullil gestured to himself like someone offering a glass of wine.

In the morning Behellua was gone. Susullil tried to explain.

“Gone to tree town,” Judah said, after a long attempt. “There’s a township. Where those who’ve been displaced by the militia go. All the remnants from a clutch of villages, chelona, nomads from the bushveld. An outcast town in the forest. Where they found a god who can tell you anything you want to know. He says… Behellua’s gone, to tell them about… us.”

About you, Cutter thought. About what you done. To the militia. You’re coming to be a story. Even out here.

“So why’s he staying?” said Elsie.

“Judah done inspired him, didn’t he?” said Cutter quietly. “Inspires us all.” He did not speak unpleasantly.

Cutter was close behind Susullil. With night they came into a clearing, and had Susullil not pushed him aside, Cutter would have trudged into the fringe of mossy bones that telltaled a wake-tree. The tree’s willowy tendrils were feathered and bracken-thorned. He could not tell what animals had given their bones, but he could see that some were recent, without lichen.

A man-someone strayed from the deep forest-sat in the tree’s lower branches. His body and head disappeared into thicket. His legs dangled, swinging and kicking randomly from the attentions of the tree digesting him. Susullil stepped into the reach of the tree and Cutter wailed.

The wake-tree reached down with tentacle boughs that bloomed open with motion that might, almost, be nothing but the random waving of foliage. The wineherd rolled below the grab and flicked his sickle. He somersaulted and crawled back out of the anemone shadow. The legs of the caught woodsman shuddered.

“Oh that’s dis gus ting,” Elsie said. Susullil was holding up the fruit that he had cut. It was small and browning, lumpy skinned. It took the rough shape of a human head. Of all the prey-fruit on the tree, Susullil had taken one of the humans.

Another cultural difference, Cutter thought that night as they sat around the fire and Susullil ate what he had taken. Pomeroy and Elsie, even quiet Judah, made revolted sounds. They would no more eat prey-fruit than dogshit. It turned Cutter’s stomach to see Susullil swallow and lie back to dream the dregs of the dead man’s mind. Susullil looked at him once, carefully, before he closed his eyes.

Pomeroy and Elsie withdrew, and Judah and Cutter talked a little more. When, finally, he lay down, Cutter caught Judah’s appraising glance and was certain Judah knew what he would do. He felt a familiar mix of emotions.

He waited many minutes until everyone but he breathed steadily with sleep, and their camp was very moonlit. When he touched Susullil to wake him and kissed him deeply, he could still taste the dead man on the wineherd’s tongue.

CHAPTER TWELVE

And then sunlight came through the thick and ropy canopy. Elsie and Pomeroy saw Cutter, lying close to Susullil. They gathered the camp without speaking or meeting Cutter’s eye.

If Susullil was conscious of their embarrassment, he made no sign of it, nor did he show Cutter any affection now night was gone. While Cutter rolled the blanket that had been a pillow for him and Susullil, Judah came to him and gave a slow beatific smile. A benediction.

Cutter burned. He swallowed. He stopped to stow his kit. He leaned in close and said quietly just for the somaturge: “I don’t, not now, not ever, need your fucking blessing, Judah.”

It was like the times in New Crobuzon he had been taking men home and met Judah in the street. In Cypress Row, in Salom Square Casbah. Once Judah had come to Cutter’s rooms early on a Shunday, and the door had been opened by the black-haired boy Cutter had woken up with. Then, as always when he saw Cutter’s partners, Judah had smiled with peaceable pleasure, with approval, even when Cutter pushed the young man aside and stood before Judah, closing the door behind him.

When Cutter went looking he found himself glancing backward in case Judah was there to see him.

Cutter imagined being an artist or a musician, or a writer or libertine pamphleteer, one whose life was a scandal, a Salacus Fields man, but he was a shopkeeper. A Brock Marsh shopkeeper whose customers were scholars. Brock Marsh was a strange and quiet district; its excitements were not those of the artistic southern bank.

In Brock Marsh, renegade hexes might make doors where there should be no doors. Entities cultured in thaumaturged plasm might escape and make the streets deadly, and debates could go murderous as rival thinkers sent bleakly charged ab-ions at each other. Brock Marsh had history and a sort of glamour, but there were no places for Cutter to find men. When there were familiar Brock Marsh faces in the southside inns he would not acknowledge them nor they him.

Cutter despised the dollyboys in their petticoats and painted faces, the aesthete inverts draped in flowers in the Salacus Fields night. He would scowl and walk the canalsides of Sangwine past the she-men whores to whom he did not speak. He would not go into bawdy houses, would not rent some man’s arse. Not anymore. He only rarely visited the warrens by the docks where those sailors who did not just make do at sea, but preferred it that way, would tout for men.

Instead he might perhaps once in a rare while push past crowds into certain inns with half-hidden entrances, thin rooms, thin bars and lots of smoke, older men watching each newcomer eagerly, men in groups laughing raucous as hell and others sitting alone and not looking up, and what women were there were men, dollyboys, or were Remades who had once been men and whose in-between status was a peccadillo to some.

Cutter was careful. Those he chose would never be too handsome: who knew if they were militiamen on honey-trap duty offering a stint for Gross Depravity to any who approached them, or if their squad outside might indulge in an ad hoc punishment of beating and rape.

Neither ashamed nor indulgent, Cutter would simply wait, hating the place and feeling provincial for that, until someone like him came in.

It was twelve years since Cutter had met Judah Low. He had been twenty-four, angry much of the time. Judah was fifteen years his senior. Cutter had quickly loved him.

They hardly ever touched. No more than a few times each year, Cutter had been with Judah Low, every time because of his insistence, never quite begging. More often in the early days, until Judah had become harder and harder to persuade. It seemed, Cutter thought, less a waning of whatever desire was there in Judah than something more thoughtful, to which Cutter could not give words. Each time they were together Cutter felt very strongly that from Judah it was an indulgence. He hated it.

He knew Judah went with women too, and he supposed perhaps with other men, but from what he imagined and heard it was no more often, with no more or less enthusiasm than Judah had for their own encounters. I will make you cry out, Cutter thought as they sweated together. He went at it with passion bordering violence. I will make you feel this. Not with vindictiveness but a desperation to inspire more than kindness.

Judah had taught him, put money into his business, taken Cutter to Caucus meetings for the first time. When Cutter understood that their sex would only ever be an act of patrician friendship, profane and saintly generosity, would only ever be a gift from Judah, he tried to bring it to a close, but could not sustain the abstinence. As he grew he left behind some of his young man’s snarling, but there was anger he would not slough off. Some the Caucus directed at Parliament. Some, beside the fervent love he felt for him, would always be raised by Judah Low.

“Cutter, chaver,” Pomeroy had said to him once. “I don’t mean it badly, excuse me asking, but are you… omipalone?” Pomeroy said the slang inexpertly. It was not a bad term and it was meant almost kindly-a playground nomenclature. Cutter wanted to correct him- No, I’m an arsefucker Pomeroy -but it would have been cruel and a complex affectation.

All the chaverim had known for a long time and studiously did not judge Cutter, but only, he had twice been told, because good insurrectionists did not blame victims for being distorted by a sick society. He did not bring it up but nor would he by Jabber apologise or hide.

They knew Judah lay with him, but to his anger there were no careful hesitations around the older man, even on the day they came to a meeting wearing each other’s clothes.

“It’s Judah. ”

When Judah did it, sex was not sex any more than anger was anger or cooking was cooking. His actions were never what they were, but were mediated always through otherworldly righteousness. Cutter was an invert but Judah was Judah Low.

Elsie and Pomeroy were shy with Cutter, now. Travel did not allow awkwardness: soon they were gripping hands with him and hauling him and being hauled down loose and rooted banks.

The encounter had little effect on Susullil. He seemed neither to regret it nor to court a repeat. Cutter was self-deprecating enough to find humour in that. Three nights on, Cutter went to him again. It was an awkward coupling. Cutter had to learn his partner’s proclivities. Susullil liked to kiss, and did it with a novice’s enthusiasm. But he would only use his hands. He reacted to Cutter’s insistent tonguing descent with distaste. Cutter tried to present his arse, and when the nomad finally understood he laughed with sincere hilarity, waking the others, who pretended to sleep.

They became inured to strange fauna. Things like limbed fungus that made sluggish progress half-climbing half-growing on bark. Chaotic simians that Pomeroy called “Hell’s monkeys,” clutches of gibbon limbs exploding from conjoined cores, in varying numbers, that brachiated at insane speed.

“You know where we are, yes?” Cutter said to Judah and to Drogon.

The woodland density was lessening. Rain kept coming, and it was cooler. The air was less like steam, more like mist. “We’re still on the paths,” Drogon said. Do you know where we’re going? Cutter thought.

When they heard something approach they held up their guns; but there was shouting, no attempt to hide, and Susullil answered excited and accelerated. When the others reached him he was slapping hands with Behellua, and behind him were two cowed-looking men in forest camouflage who nodded careful greeting.

The returned man smiled at the travellers. The wineherds talked.

When at last Susullil turned he spoke carefully to Judah, though they all understood some now. “He’s come from the forest town,” Judah said. “They want help. Something’s coming for them… wiping them out. Behellua told them about us, what we did for them. They think we’ve powers. They’re offering something. If we help them…” He listened again.

“If we help them their god will help us. Will give us what we need. They say their god’ll tell us the way to the Iron Council.”

Hiddentown was huts in a clearing. Cutter had visioned an arboreal metropolis, with raised walkways between boughs and children spiralling down vines from the leaf sky.

At the edges of the village were attempts at stockades. Hiddentowners in forest-coloured clothes stared at the travellers. Much of the village was tents tarred or painted with gutta-percha. There were some warped wood huts, damp fires, a midden pit. Most of the inhabitants were human, but several of the child-high insects scuttled through the mud trails.

They were making quarters of their own in the corners of the town. They were chitin gardeners. They herded millions of insects, arachnids and arthropods, nurturing them through quick generations till they had colossal numbers of pinhead-sized ants, foot-long millipedes, and crawling wasps of countless species. With strange techniques they turned their flocks into walls, pressing them gently together, merging them and smoothing them, squeezing the still-living, conjoined mass of chitin-stuff into a kind of plaster. They made bungalows and burrows of their living mortar, feeding it carefully, so the tiny lives that made it did not die, but wriggled, embedded and melted with others, become architecture, a ghetto of living houses.

The human Hiddentowners spoke Galaggi in various forms, and here and there Tesh, and made a mongrel language. The chief was a thuggish man: nervous, Cutter saw, because he knew he was a mediocrity become by kink of history a ruler.

Cutter supposed those refugees who could look after themselves would not waste time with this settlement. Hiddentown was a convocation of the hopeless. No wonder they were desperate. No wonder they were such simple meat-stuff for some beast.

Jabbered at and bowed to with cursory politesse, the travellers were hustled to a long-hut with a tower of stakes, a rude minaret in split wood. It was a church, symbols cut and stained in the walls. There were tables with blades of mirror on them, papyrus. A robe of fine black wool. The chief left them.

For some seconds there was silence. “What are we fucking doing here?” Cutter said.

There were echoes; shadows moved that should not have been there. Cutter saw Elsie shiver. They moved into a circle, back-to-back.

“There’s something,” Elsie whispered. “Something’s here…”

“I am here.” The voice was throaty and snarled. They dropped with bushrangers’ speed. They waited.

“What are you?” Judah said.

“I’m here.” It was accented, glutinous as if words were congealing in a throat. There was a movement they could not follow. “They brought you here for my blessing, I think. A minute. Yes, yes they did. And to tell you what to do. You’re here to hunt for them.”

Drogon pointed at the table. The woollen robe was gone.

“You speak our language,” said Cutter.

“I am a little god but still a god. You are champions. That’s the idea, you know. Did you reckon yourselves champions?” The voice seemed to bleed from the walls, seemed to be in several places.

“That’s what they have in mind, yes,” said Pomeroy. “What’s wrong with that?” He circled slowly, a pugnacious godless man in the presence of a god. Drogon was turning his head by little increments, his lips moving.

“Nowt,” the voice said. “At all. Only… a waste of your efforts, really. You, mmm, you, you have a little daughter, by a whore in a place called Tarmuth. You should go. This town’s doomed. Save them from this, there’ll be another thing to get them.”

Pomeroy’s mouth worked. Elsie watched him. She kept her face motionless.

“So why are you here?” said Cutter.

“Because this is my town I had them build for me. They want me. Mmm, you, you aren’t sure of your Caucus, are you, shopkeeper?”

Cutter was stricken. The others looked at him. Drogon’s head jerked forward. He made a motion like spitting. The disembodied voice gave a hard gasp. There was a commotion, something fell and there was puking, the substance of things jerked and then, shaking with effort, someone cowled rose from behind the table. A thin and jaundiced face, deep lines and shaven head, mouth adrip with vomit, staring in horror.

She or he stood for moments, quivering as if in ice, then retched and ran across the room to a pillar, behind it and out of sight. Cutter followed, and Pomeroy went the other way; but they came to each other and found nothing. The figure had disappeared.

The voice returned, angry and afraid.

“You never do that to me again, ” it said. Drogon was speaking secretly into Cutter’s ear.

“Found it. Guessed where it was and whispered to it. Ordered it. ‘Don’t read us,’ I said. ‘Show yourself,’ I told it.”

“Wait, whispersmith,” Cutter said. “Fucking god, eh?” he said to the room. “What’s your name? How do you speak our tongue? What are you?”

There was silence for seconds. Cutter wondered if the figure had slipped out under thaumaturgic caul. When the voice come back it sounded defeated, but Cutter was sure there was relief there too.

“I speak Ragamoll because I learned to read it, for all the hidden things in your books. I’m here because… like everyone else who’s here, I ran. I’m a refugee.

“Your militia are steering clear of Tesh, yet, but they’ve come up close to the Catoblepas Plain. They’ve attacked our towns and outposts. Tesh monasteries. I’m a monk. For the Moment of Lost Things. Moment of the Hidden.”

The militia had rampaged in the shadow of Tesh. The city had closed its doors and refilled the moatlands. The monastery was beyond, in the briarpits. It should have been safe.

When they realised a New Crobuzon slave squad of Remade assassins was coming, the monks had waited for Tesh to send protection. It had been days before they had realised that no one was coming; they’d been deserted. They panicked up desultory plans. They were a temple consecrated to the Manifold Horizon, with cadres of monks dedicated to its various Moments, and each of these Moments became a brigade.

Some fought; some went seeking holy death. The monks of Cadmer, Moment of Calculation, knew they could not win and waited in the briarpits to receive the bullets. The monks of Zaori, Moment of Magic Wine, drank themselves to visionary death before a militiaman could touch them. But the Moment of Doves sent its birds to destroy themselves in the militia’s wheels and stop their engines; the Moment of Desiccation turned militia blood to ash; Pharru and Tekke Shesim, the Moments of Forgotten Snow and of Memory, came together and made ice storms.

But the militia thaumaturges were expert, the slave-officers relentless, and in the end the monastery could not hold out. And when it fell, it was only the monks of Tekke Vogu, the Moment of the Hidden and Lost, who escaped.

Their neophytes were murdered, but the monks’ devotions hid them. They were lost to their attackers. They crept away-away from the burning ruins of their temple and from Tesh, City of the Crawling Liquid, which was closed to them, which had been ready to let them die. They had gone out into the land.

The monk told them everything. Was eager to, somehow, Cutter could tell. “We’re hidden. We know hidden things. They’re entrusted to us. We find lost things. I travel quick: I travel by hidden passages, lost ways. When I came here, I had them build this place. It’s easy to be a god here. Whoever comes I tell a little secret, something hidden. So they believe in me.”

“What’s your name, monk?” Cutter said.

“Qurabin. Eighth-ring red monk of Tekke Vogu.”

“Is that a man’s name?” There was a laugh.

“Our names don’t discriminate. Are you asking am I a man?” The voice was suddenly very close. “I don’t know.”

Every monk of Tekke Vogu was enfolded within the Moment, but it was a bargain. They would learn the hidden, and how to find the lost. But Vogu’s sacrament was sold, not given. The price for the Moment’s protection was something made lost, something hidden from the devotee, given to Vogu.

“I know monks who don’t know their names. Who had them hidden. Who lost their eyes. Their homes, or families. Me-when I submitted to Vogu it was my sex went hidden. I remember my childhood, but not if I was a boy or a girl. When I piss I look down but it’s hidden from me. My sex is lost.” Qurabin spoke without rancour.

“So you want us to clear out this thing that’s attacking?” Cutter said.

“Not me,” said Qurabin. “ They want you, they want champions. There’s no point protecting this hovel.”

The party looked at each other.

“As gods go, you ain’t much by way of a protector, are you?” Elsie said.

“I didn’t say I was, did I? It’s them-they built the stupid town around me, and they keep wanting things from me. I didn’t ask this. Where was my protector? What Tesh did to me, I can do. Let the town burn.”

“That ain’t what you said before,” Cutter said, but Judah interrupted him.

“And who are you to say?”

He stepped forward and stared at the makeshift altar as if he could know that was where Qurabin hid. “Who are you to say?” His voice rose. “They come here, make what they can of this place, running from those who’d kill them because they live close to Tesh; they try to build something, and they make one mistake. To look for a god, and find one in you.

“They promised us help-promised us a guide. So tell us. We’ll find whatever it is and help them. And you can find us what we’re looking for.”

The forest wetness drip-dripped in the makeshift church.

“Tell us where it is. I don’t damn well believe you don’t care. You care. You want to tell us. You want to look after them. You know it. So tell. We got your offer. They need us to kill this thing, and then you give us what you promised.”

“I won’t take anything out of Vogu’s house for you -”

“I don’t want to hear about your damn piety, when you’ll take snippets out of your god’s house to impress the damn natives. Tell us where the beast is, and we’ll fix it, and then you tell us where the Iron Council is.”

“I don’t betray,” said Qurabin. “I buy. Everything I learn, I lose something. And it hurts. Vogu don’t give it up free. I unhid your man’s whore and daughter it stings, and I lose something. Lost and hidden by the Moment. I’m naked in front of you. I unhide this? Iron Council? It’ll cost me.”

There was silence and the dripping again.

“The beast,” Judah said. “Where is it?” There was long quiet.

“Wait,” said the voice, and again there was relief under the resentment. Tired of being a god, thought Cutter. He looked at Judah, who stood trembling and splendid. Qurabin was lost, Cutter saw. Broken. Eager for something, deserted and newly eager, before righteous Judah.

“I try,” said the voice, and gave a glottal retching. When Qurabin sounded again, it was with pain, in the voice of one used to pain.

“Damnfire. Damn. It’s unhidden. The beast.”

“What did you lose?” said Cutter.

“Someone’s name.” Someone who mattered, Cutter could hear.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

It was dawn when they reached the dank place. Mud and dangerous paths, and stripped white trees. The marsh sweated. Trees rustled but barely.

They came, the New Crobuzon outcasts, Susullil and Behellua, a tiny number of brave Hiddentown men. Qurabin was with them, unseen.

Cutter was eager for sound. He wanted to sing or laugh. The landscape ignored him and he felt offended. He tried to think himself a presence, and could only be conscious of the parings of New Crobuzon left behind him. He befouled where he was with where he had been.

Judah walked in front. An enormous golem walked with him. Eight feet tall, of wood, and what blades Hiddentown could spare. Judah had hammered it together with hinged joints, a crude swivel neck. He could have manifested something with a touch on a woodpile, but with only thaumaturgy holding it it would have drained him quicker or fallen apart.

Judah had played the wax cylinder again. Don’t feel as if I hardly know you but they say you’re family, the voice said. He’s dead, Uzman’s dead. Cutter saw Judah’s sadness at the old message, and wondered what Uzman had been to him.

“D’you know why I became a golemist, Cutter? Years before the Construct War. There was no money in it when I started. It was the arcane end of golemetry that was a draw. Not even in matter. D’you know there’s such a thing as a sound golem? It’s hard, but you can make one. You’ve never seen a shadow golem, have you? This kind of golem-” He indicated the wood. “All this is really a by-product, for me. This isn’t what it’s all about.”

Perhaps. But still, the thing they had made was powerful and fine. It swung its head so the faint sun touched its cheap bead eyes. Rusted knives made its fingers.

“The beast’s close,” came Qurabin’s voice. There was pain in it: he had exchanged something for the knowledge.

Cutter prodded his toe at a lump of sickly colours, cussed in shock. It was animal remains. They came unstuck with an unrolling of stench. He tripped, and Pomeroy turned and was shouting as Elsie said something.

“Here!” Elsie said again. She stood over a body. Cutter saw the sheen of decomposition. Most of the chest was gone.

“Dear Jabber,” Cutter said. “We’re in its godsdamned parlour.”

“Quick!” said Judah. “Quick, here!” He was at the swamp’s edge, reaching out toward a young man who sat flecked with leeches. The boy was hideously thin. He did not look up, kept his eyes on the greying meat he gnawed.

Cutter broke off a cry. He saw an emaciated man, camouflaged by weeds and knubs of wood. The man was chewing. Beside him was a deep-jungle tapir. Its jaws moved.

“Judah,” Cutter said. “Judah, get back,” and Judah turned. There were bodies all around in the water, motionless but for chewing. Men and women, a shivering dog. Each was smeared with old matter around their mouths, and seemed to trail a vine.

Gases moiled, and what Cutter had thought a coagulate of muck began to rise. It blinked. What he had thought stones or holes were eyes. A tight studding of black eyes. It rose.

Those were not vines but the thing’s sucker-studded limbs. One stretched from each scrawny figure-each adult or child, each animal, tethered by the back of their necks. What they ate was rerouted into those grotesque intestinal leashes, passing peristaltically. They were made mindless conduits for food. And suspended at the centre of the arms, and shaggy with others whipping free, was the thing that ate through them.

Corpulent as an obese man, vaguely and horribly polyp. It did not hang deadweight but buoyed full of gas or thaumaturgy. Cutter saw a crablike nub of crustacean legs unfolded below, impossibly spindly and close together. It stood very tall as if on a handful of thin stalks. It dripped. It watched. Its tentacles twitched, and it unflexed bony talons.

The thing scuttled quick and grotesquely dainty on legs that should not support it. Its tendrils stretched: it moved without disturbing its idiot feeders.

The Hiddentowners ran, pursued by ghosts of warm fog and by the creature’s arms. It gripped trees with its bird claws and scobs of flesh budded from it like snails’ eyes. Cutter’s repeater felt tiny. He ran toward Judah. The creature’s appendages seemed to fill the air. Cutter saw little eyes at one limb’s end, a flexing orifice, concentric rasp-teeth like a lamprey’s.

Cutter fired at the flanged body, hit and did nothing but burst a little piece with milky bleeding. A snare of arms crawled over each other for him like bickering worms.

“Kill it!” Qurabin spoke from somewhere. There were more shots.

Cutter heard Judah-“Wait, wait”-and then wood and leather and he saw the golem. It cut across the plait of tentacles, severed some right through. Others wrapped around it, ground into the golem’s neck. The ropy limb twitched. It shuddered for several seconds, flexed glands, spurted enzymes into the wood. It paused as if confused.

The golem attacked in its simple way, beating down with its knives and great hexed strength. Gouts of matter and the thing’s blood burst up and it staggered, and every one of its tethered creatures stopped eating. Pomeroy ran up, jabbed his muzzle into its fat. The explosion was muted by flesh, but the fist of bullets punched into innards.

Even then it did not fall, only staggered with its prim little steps and reeled, but the golem was on it again. Cutter watched Judah move. The somaturge moved his own body, a little, and the wood-and-knife golem echoed him. Handful by handful the golem took the predator apart.

The creature’s victims were dead or comatose. They had long been only eating machines for the insatiable thing.

Susullil and Pomeroy were wounded. Susullil let Cutter clean his gashes. Two of the Hiddentowners had been killed. One had fallen near enough to the unnaturally famished men and women in the animal’s thrall that they had reached for him weakly, and bitten.

The Hiddentowners took organic trophies, rooting in the creature’s flesh for its beaks or talons. Cutter was disgusted. He wished that he had a camera. He imagined a heliotype: Susullil by Judah by Elsie by Pomeroy with his blunderbuss, and he Cutter at the end beside the golem, all of them with the set-faced pride of the hunter.

That night there was rude conviviality in a Hiddentown long-hut. Men and women who had been gatherer-hunters and the inhabitants of chelonas danced, drunk on poteen.

The room was crisscrossed with the little beetle-people. They never spoke; they did nothing to get in anyone’s way. They came, silently picking up discarded food, gently fingering the cloth of clothes, sawing their antennae together.

Susullil was with Behellua. Cutter watched them and knew that night they would have the friendly encounter he could not but think of as sex, though he doubted they did.

Around the table, people were telling stories. To the Hiddentowners, Qurabin was a god become suddenly interventionist and earthly. The monk moved unseen among the diners, translated for them.

Through Qurabin, Susullil the wineherd told a story of the best harvest House Predicus had ever seen, of the culling of the vinhog bull prime, to let bull secundus, whose fruit was drier and better, stud. He told of the struggle it had been, the sadness he had felt at the bull’s passing. When the story was done, the New Crobuzoners applauded with everyone.

It was their turn, and it fell to Cutter. The Hiddentowners chanted softly, in a drumbeat, so when he spoke it took their rhythm. He stalled, looked down and up again and-contrary and drunk, with a pleasure of bravado-he spoke.

“This is a love story,” Cutter said. “That shouldn’t ever have been. It lasted a night and a morning.

“Five years ago. I found a man. We was in a pub in the docks. I asked him home with me. That night we was on very-tea and shazbah, and we did what we all want to do, you know, and it was fine.” There were laughs from the wineherds as Qurabin translated. Elsie and Pomeroy were looking down. “And then later while he slept I turned him over and went to the pisspot, and I saw his clothes. And coming out of his pocket was some little tiny pistol. I’d never seen nothing so clever, and though it weren’t my business I pulled it out, and with it comes a little sigil.

“It’s militia. He’s a militiaman. I don’t know what to do. What duty’s he on? Is he a drugsman? Is he on Depravity watch? Either way he’s got me. I even think of shooting him, but that ain’t going to happen. So I’m thinking maybe I can get away early, and maybe I can plead him away on the way to the jail, and maybe this and maybe that. And in the end, I see there ain’t nothing I can do. So I go back to bed. And on the way I wake him up. So we do it all over again.” Again the cheers. “And then early in the morning we do it again. ” I’m drunk, thought Cutter. He did not mind.

“And I’m waiting, and I’ll beg him, or bribe him-because I know what he likes, don’t I, by now? And I get up, and I run out and think maybe I just won’t stop. I’ll get to the ships, I’ll change my name, I ain’t going to jail, I ain’t going to be Remade. But then I pass a baker’s, and then a greengrocer’s, and I just can’t up and lose everything. I can’t just disappear. So instead of doing a bunk, I do some shopping. And then I come back.

“I wake him up. And we have breakfast together, over my shop in Brock Marsh… and then he goes. Big kiss good-bye, and gone. Never seen him again. And I’m left to wonder. Maybe he was never going to do nothing. But the way I see it, the way I like to see it, what with what I done for him that night and what with the beautiful breakfast I made-grilled fish, spiced hash and creamed fruit, with a flower in the middle of the table as if we was married-I think he fell in true love with me for a few minutes that morning. No, I mean it. I fell in love with him too. I ain’t never loved nothing like I loved him when he kissed me and said good-bye. Because I’m sure, I’m sure he knew that I knew. It was his present to me, that leave-taking, that good-bye. Just like breakfast was my present to him. I ain’t never loved anyone like that before or since, except one man.”

When it was obvious he had finished there was barking from the wineherds, and other applause sounds from here and there among the audience. Elsie and Pomeroy clapped a bit, though Pomeroy did not look at him. Watching the big man beat his palms together Cutter felt a blossom of affection. Gods bless, he thought, and to crown it Elsie even gave him a quick smile.

And then he saw Judah, and the smile on the golemist’s face was different-there was no effort or connection to it, it was like the smile on an idol, and through his passion for the older man Cutter burned.

Cutter was uninterested in gods. There were a few from New Crobuzon’s pantheons he felt some small affinity for, usually for heretic reasons: like Crawfoot, whose antics seemed not inept clownery but tactical subversions. You’re insurrectionist, ain’t you? he had always thought, while the priests affected patient indulgence with the fool-god on Crawfootfete E’en. But he did not worship. Such prayers as he offered were cynical or time-serving. But he could see the power of Qurabin’s devotions.

The monk could find the hidden and the lost, though it cost. But in Qurabin’s voice Cutter no longer heard the arrogance of that power. He could hear that something had shifted. The monk’s giving up, Cutter thought.

“Galaggi, they say it is… sobrech or sobrechin lulsur. It’s pun.” Qurabin’s voice came and went as the monk unhid the information. “ Sobresh is ‘hateful,’ and sobr’chi, is ‘captain.’ In my language it has no name. In Tesh… we do not classify so much as you.” And Cutter heard the disgust, the rage in Qurabin’s voice when Tesh came up.

He was not surprised the next day, when Qurabin came to them as they rose and told them that they would not be travelling alone. That the monk would not tell them where Iron Council was but would show them.

He wants to rest, Cutter thought. And to be alone. With us. Plucking up courage. The monk’ll unhide more and more, no matter what the cost. What does it matter? What does he-she-have to live for? To be loyal to?

It rained but it was a different rain. The sun’s rays were frozen in each drop like insects in amber, so it seemed to rain light. The Hiddentowners waved them gone.

Susullil smiled at Cutter and nodded. “Never did understand each other, did we, boy?” Cutter said with true humour. Qurabin’s voice, the odd androgynous hooting, gusted good-bye. No one seemed distraught that their god was leaving.

Of course Cutter had no notion of what Qurabin was saying. “You are your own people now, you have no need of gods,” he thought. Or “Be true to my memory or I’ll come back to blind you with my rage,” or “I was never a god, I’m a bloke like you, got lost because of an idiot religion.”

The travellers went northwest and north. A day, and another, through the slowly cooling forest. The ground rose and the canopy fell.

Trees became more sparse. By pools creatures like spindly bears and serrated wasps the size of cats came to drink. Cutter thought he saw things; he thought they were watched.

In the unseen company of the monk, they moved very differently. It was Drogon who saw it first. “We’re travelling too fast,” he told Cutter. He pointed down, toward where an ancient Y-shaped tree poked clear of the surrounds. “Keep it in sight,” he whispered.

Cutter tried to watch his feet but it disoriented him; the terrain changed uncertainly as if the path were skittish. Ahead a half mile he saw the tree by a river; he heard Qurabin move and speak loudly and Cutter ducked below a thorny branch and when he released it he walked on two more steps then stopped while Drogon whispered, “I told you.”

The water was behind them. Cutter could see it through the growth, and there was the tree, black-barked, its boughs spread and thrusting skyward like supplicating arms. It was behind him too.

There had been no dislocation. He had only walked. His companions looked consternated, except Judah. “What does it cost you?” the golemist said to Qurabin. “To find these ways?”

“These are hidden ways, shortcuts-lost paths,” said the monk. “Sometimes the Moment’ll let me take them. Sometimes.” The monk sounded tired. “I said I’d take you.”

Why so fast, monk? Cutter thought. You don’t have to travel like this. What’s this costing you, all these secrets?

So they sped up though they walked, and shucked their packs and scrambled at the same pace they ever had. The everyday uncanny of the monk’s trails took them at increasing speeds. They passed pillars of rock in the middle of trees, and rounded them to emerge in dry plateau. The woods were threadbaring; it was as if they trod through an old and thinning tapestry.

“Through… here I think,” Qurabin would say, and their compass needles yawed haywire as they crossed leagues. They went faster than horses.

Qurabin’s efforts, Cutter understood, were apostate. Qurabin was wrenching things from the Moment’s domain of lost and hidden things. Every day Qurabin sounded lessened.

“You want to disappear.” Cutter spoke it in a tiny voice. The monk was displaced, renegade, renounced by history and home. You want to disappear. Every lost route you uncover, you lose something-something’s hidden from you. You’ve had enough. And this is how you’ll do it. To make it mean something. Their journey was Qurabin’s protracted suicide.

“You know what the monk’s doing,” Cutter said to Judah. “We better hope Qurabin don’t be all hidden or lost before we get where we’re going.”

“It’s close,” said Judah. He smiled then, a look of such joy that Cutter could not help but smile back.

The land was deep in grasses. Kettled glacial till, sloughs and dustbeds intermitted the low slopes. There had been so many weeks of journey. They saw mesquite copses and ruins. With the wind, the wild crops moved like sea. The monk grew weaker, more hidden, but cajoled and led them past water, past animal herds, python-sized centipedes wrapped around trees.

One day they saw things leave a trail of pollen and dust and shake the grasses like whales in shallows. Borinatch, strider, the ungulate plains nomads. A family clan, young at the front, the queen behind. The striders stood much taller than a man. They careered by with their tottering gallop, their legs unbending and swinging like crutches.

One of the sows turned a friendly bestial face and saw them, waved as she thundered past. Borinatch hands worked in strange ways. It looked as if her limb appeared and disappeared.

The travellers had become a tough crew. Their muscles were bunched; they were expert shots. Pomeroy’s cuts had stained inside, so he wore splendid dark scars. Elsie fastened a bandana about her wild hair. The men’s beards were long, their shag tied back with leather: only Drogon defied this, shaving dry every few days. They husbanded their dwindling bullets, carried fire-hard spears. They looked, Cutter thought, like adventurers, the continent’s merce-nary freebooters.

We ain’t though. There’s a damn reason for all our travels.

“It must be nearly Sinn, ain’t it?” he said. “Or is it already? I’ve lost track.” They tried to work through the weeks on their fingers.

One night Judah made four little figures from the earth, and with muttered cantrips he had them dance while his companions clapped to give them music. When they were done he had them bow; then they fell back into earth.

He said: “I want to tell you all that I’m grateful. I want you to know that.” They drank a toast in water. “I want to tell you… we’ve been going so long, it’s like the journeying’s what it’s for. But that’s not so.

“I don’t even know for sure if you believe in the Iron Council.” He smiled. “I think you do. But maybe for some of you it isn’t even about that anymore. I think you’re here because of the time in the claphouse, Elsie,” he said, and she met his eyes and nodded. “I know why you’re here,” he said to Cutter.

“Even you, maybe, Drogon… A stravager like you… Myths and hopes are your currency, right? That’s what you trade in; that’s what keeps horse-tramps moving. Are you here because you think Iron Council’s like the Marzipan Palace? Are you looking for a heaven?”

“It’s not why I’m here, Judah Low,” said Pomeroy. Judah smiled. “You mean the most to me, Judah, I’d die for you, but I’d not die now. Not with what’s happening in New Crobuzon. There’s too much at stake. I’m here because of what you say’s coming for the Council. And because I think you can stop it. That’s why I’m here.”

Judah nodded, and sighed. “That’s what I want to say. This is greater than any of us. Iron Council…” He was silent for very long. “It’s tough, because that’s how it’s had to be. But it’s the Council. It’s Iron Council. And the governors of New Crobuzon-I don’t know how-they’ve found it. My contact, my erstwhile friend, he had every reason not to tell me but he did, thank Jabber. They’ve found it, after all this time. Long enough that plenty of citizens aren’t sure it ever existed, and thousands more think it’s long gone.

“Chaverim… friends… We’re going to save Iron Council.”

The next day Qurabin had a long conversation with the Moment. The unfindable monk cried, supplicated, made a desolate sound.

At last Cutter spoke. “Monk,” he said. “Monk, what happened? Are you there? Are you gone?”

“It’s not hidden anymore,” Qurabin said in a voice that was deadened. “I know where to find it. But it cost… I lost my own language.”

Qurabin had been left only with Ragamoll, the brash infant tongue of the travellers.

“I remember my mother,” Qurabin said quietly. “I remember what she whispered to me. But I don’t know what it means.” There was no horror in the voice. Only a passionless assent. “One thing is lost, another found. I know where to go.”

They went uncanny routes. The sky’s colour fluxed.

It was a Chainday when the plain fell away and they realised they had been rising a long time; the ground had angled and they walked a hackberried butte in thin air. Before them was a basin in red laterite, a canyon that widened into land too vast to be a valley, where the continent had shrugged itself apart. From behind one long stone fin, black smoke was spoiling the air.

Judah stood at the edge of the cliff and looked down at the fumes that did not come from grassfires and howled. A noise of such pure feral joy it was as if he was thrown back through history, as if no human, no sentient thing, should feel such absolute emotion. Judah bayed.

He did not slow. He descended fast and did not wait for his companions but headed off along faint foot-lines in the prairie. Cutter caught him up but did not try to speak. Thick light like syrup went across the sierra.

Someone shouted at them and they were taunted by echoes. A query, a command in several different languages, in rapid change. And then their own. Ragamoll, nearly two thousand miles from home. Cutter gasped. Three figures stood from some hide.

“Hold it, hold it,” one shouted. “Speak Ragamoll?”

Cutter showed he was not holding his weapons. He nodded his head in strange delight. The young man spoke with a hybrid accent, something else shaping his phonemes beside the familiar snarl of the south city, of Dog Fenn, of backstreet New Crobuzon.

Judah was running toward the three: a woman, and a man, and a gnarled cactus. The sun was going down behind them, so they were shadowed, and Cutter could see them only as cutouts. Stumbling toward them his arms upraised, Judah must be drenched in late-day light as they saw him, awash with it, creasing his face against it, ambered. Judah was laughing and shouting.

“Yes, yes, yes, we speak Ragamoll!” he said. “Yes, we’re of your party! Sisters! Sisters!” He gave that cry again and was so clearly no threat, so obviously in a delirium of warmth and relief that the human guards stepped forward and opened their arms to him, to receive him as a guest. “Sisters!” he said. “I’m back, I’m home, it’s me. Long live Iron Council! Gods and Jabber and, and, and in Uzman’s name…” They started at that. Judah embraced them one by one, and then he turned, his eyes streaming, and smiled without mediation, without face, a smile Cutter had never seen him wear.

“We’re here,” Judah said. “Long live, long live. We’re here.”

Anamnesis

With each step water and the roots of waterweeds snag him. It is years ago and Judah Low is young and in the wetlands.

– Again, he says. That is all. There is no please and no need for it. This language is deep-structured with courtesy. To be rude takes effortful and irregular declensions.

– Again, he says and the stiltspear child shows him what it has made. Its eyebrows flex in what he knows to be a smile and it opens its hand and a stiltspear toy made of mud and waterlilies stands between its fingers. The child pinches it to shape and sings to it in a tiny wordless trilling, and makes it move. The figurine has only one motion, flexing and unflexing its stem legs. It does it several times before bursting.

They stand at the edges of wide space edged with gnarly treelife and intricately fronded byways, random canals. Boughs hide passages, and vegetation is so thick and so heavy, so saturated with the water of the swamp it is glutinous, it is like a viscid liquid dripping from the branches and briefly coagulates in the shape of leaves.

The swamp mimics all landscapes. It opens into meadows and it can be forest. There are places where mud solidifies enough to pile into swamp-mountains. Tunnels below the rootstuff, floored in water, pitch and labyrinth. There are dead places where bleached trees jut from rank water. Tribes of mosquito and blackfly come to Judah and bleed him terribly.

To Judah the fen air is not oppressive. It is like a caul. In the months he has lived there Judah has learnt to feel cosseted by it. For all his bites gone septic and his diarrhoea, he loves the swamp. He looks up through clouds thin as watered milk, to a late sun. He feels himself greened, mildewed and inhabited by infusoria, a host, a landscape as well as a life.

The child dips its hand with the grace of its species. Its fingers are radial from its little palm, a star. It clenches in its way: hinges its tapered digits like the petals of a closing flower, into a point. Nails concatenate, its hand become a spearhead.

The stiltspear young walks quadruped from Judah Low. It turns its head on a neck that is all sinews and wordlessly queries whether he will come, and he does, with the slushing clumsiness that the stiltspear indulge as if he is neonate.

When the child walks, its limbs precisely pierce the water. Judah Low seems to drag the swamp with him and scar it with a wide wake. He is lucky the dams and sires of this stiltspear piglet let him go with it, as every moment he walks he attracts attentions it would be better to avoid. The black caiman and constrictors must hear his passage as the thrashes of something wounded.

The stiltspear commune have tolerated and even welcomed him because of the time he saved two youngsters from some rearing glade predator. It came for him, he still believes, but veered for the little duo who when it rose hissing and slick with bog had frozen and whose camouflage glands had secreted thaumaturgons such that they might have been tree-stumps not silent children, but the creature had been too close to be dissuaded.

But Judah had shouted and banged together his specimen pot and cudgel, shockingly alien in the dim quiet of the bayou. He could not have frightened the thing-a towering amalgam of sea lion and jaguar and salamander with finned flanges that could have broken his skull-but he confused it. It had burrowed below the waterweed.

Since then, since the pair he saved had run home and sang the story in a quickly constructed cavatina to stress its truth, Judah has been tolerated.

The stiltspear do not often speak. Days can pass.

Their commune has no name. Its hutlets rise from the reeds and water and are conjoined with walkways and slung with hammocks, and other rooms are sunk in pits in the sodden ground. Insects the size of Judah’s fist amble through the air, purring like big stupid cats. The stiltspear will skewer and eat them.

Stiltspears’ coats of oily down bead with swamp muck. They move like wading birds. They are like birds, and like scrawny cats, with unmoving, near-unfeatured faces.

Sires sing worshipful lays if they are red sires and build tools and reed-houses and tend the mangrove farms if they are tan sires. The dams hunt, one leg at a time raising so slow they have dried by the time the spread-out claws emerge, so no drips trouble the surface as the asterisk of fingers come together into a stiletto that poises over its reflection. Until some fat fish or frog passes and everything is still and the hand lances back into the water and is instantly withdrawn, the fingers opened, the game spiked on the stiltspear’s wrist, a prey bracelet dripping blood.

Between houses, stiltspear young play with mud-made golems as children in New Crobuzon play marbles and shove-stiver. Judah makes notes, takes heliotypes. He is no xenologist. He does not know how to decide what is important. All these charms-the stiltspears’ instinct camouflage, their golems, their herbalist physic, their unsticking of moments-he wants to investigate.

He does not know the names of any or even if they have names, but there are those according to some faint specificity of physique he christens: Red-eyes and Oldster and The Horse. Judah asks Oldster about the mud figures. Toys, his informant says, or games: something like that. -So you’d no longer make them? Judah asks, and the stiltspear snorts and looks skyward in embarrassment. Judah no longer blushes at his gaffes. So far as he can tell it is a question of propriety not ability: it would be as inappropriate for an adult stiltspear to make the little figures as for a New Crobuzon adult to demand the lavatory like a toddler.

Judah accompanies the dams. They seem glazed with the daylight. They catch armfuls of shelled waterspider larger than Judah’s spread hands. They milk their silk, weaving webs between roots and submerged boughs, turning rivulets into fish-traps.

Judah sees something uncanny. A lithe musclefish jackknifes, lapis scales vivid. And then Judah hears a moment of song, a two- or three-layered stripped-down breath of rhythm, buh buh buh buh in quick intricate time, several dams together, and the musclefish is still. It is set in its coil, unmoving, frosted in place in the water, and a hunter spears it with her jag-hand and at the instant she stabs for it she and her companions cease singing and the musclefish twitches again but too late. Judah sees it happen again, days later, a little near-silent choir, a muttered hum that for a moment keeps prey still.

Freshwater dolphin pass in deeper channels. They are ugly, inbred-looking things. The snorts of a sarcosuchus spook them. The stiltspear young try to teach Judah to make a mud-figure of his own. They have decided he is a child like them. His models are desperately crude and make them breathe the sighs that are their laughs.

When they sing to their statuettes he tries good-humouredly to copy them, knowing he can only be a clown and, performing with good grace, -Shallaballoo, he says. -Callam callay cazah! And of course nothing happens, of course all the stiltspear children set their mud walking and his own folds sticky on itself and collapses.

It is the end of summer and the paludal air is stretched thin. Shots sound. With the distant percussion of the rifle every stiltspear freezes in camouflage and for seconds Judah is alone in a copse of sudden trees. With silence the swamplanders slowly return to their appearance. Every one of them looks at Judah.

There are hunters, draped in the little corpses of swamp mammals. They are exploring and collecting in the bogland.

Judah passes one within ten yards, but he has become local, so the man does not hear or see him, only hefts his rifle and looks stupidly past Judah to the watercourses. Another man is sharper. He aims directly at Judah’s chest in expert motion.

– Godsdamn blast, he says. -Came near to killing you. There is a cautious look to him as he makes out Judah’s clothes and his swamp-pallor. He thumbs a way north. -They out that way, ‘nother three four miles, be there by sundown, he says.

The bayou animals are quiet. There is not the chittering and faint scuttle and splash. Judah slows. This is a hinge moment and though there is none to blame for getting him here save himself, he must close his eyes and think on what will be and what has been. He will not let the moment finish: by ornery bastard will he hangs onto it, like a dog worrying a man, till time drags itself away bleeding and Judah is back and sadder.

– Oh now, he says. He is some misbegot thing in time. There is a shudder.

There is a lip of earth, a jetty. There is a clearing at the edge of a big muskeg, flat and detritus-studded acres of gently moving liquid. There is a new trail through dripping trees, to a huddle of tents and wagons, sod huts roofed in moss on the tamed ground. There are shots.

Judah carries a present in his pack and a posy of swampflowers. He sees a party of men in besmirched white shirts and thick trousers. They investigate charts and are squinting at obscure instruments. They boil kettles of food over fires that roll off oily smoke like squid-ink billows. They half-greet Judah. He must look like some mud-and-slurry spirit. The Remade pack-animals tread uneasily as he approaches.

The leader stands. An older man, still scrawny and tough as a dog. Judah looks only at him, follows him into his tarpaulined room.

Light grubs dimly through the canvas. There is simple darkwood furniture, a cabinet that will fold out to a bed, in the tight confines.

The old man smells the battered bouquet. Judah becomes confused-he has forgotten his city manners. Should he be giving flowers to this aging man? But the man responds with grace, smelling the still-beautiful blooms and putting them in water.

He is poised. His hair is white and gathered in a precise pigtail. He has very vivid blue eyes. Judah rummages in his bag (the bodyguards stiffen and raise pistols) and brings out a figurine.

– This is for you, he says. -From the stiltspear.

The man receives it with what seems very genuine pleasure.

– It’s a god, Judah says. -They don’t do so much by way of art or carvings. Only little simple things.

It is a rope-swathed ancestor spirit. This one Judah made himself. The man looks into its swaddled face.

– I want to ask you something, Judah says. -I didn’t know you’d be here yourself…

– Always, when we break new ground. This is holy work, son.

Judah nods as if he has been told something precious.

– There are people in the swamp, sir, he says. -I’m here for them, I guess.

– Do you think I don’t know that, son? Think I don’t know why you’re here? That’s why I’m telling you this is holy work we’re doing. I’m trying to save you sorrow.

– They aren’t as you’d think from Shac’s bestiary sir…

– Son I respect the Potentially Wise more than most but you don’t need to tell me. It’s a long time since I’ve thought it, ah, accurate shall we say. That’s not at issue.

– But sir. I need to know, what I want to know is how… is exactly where you think you might go because there are, these people, these stiltspear, they, they… I don’t know as they could face what you might bring here…

– I wouldn’t mean no harm but I by gods and by Jabber will not turn away now. There is nothing harsh to his voice but the fervour makes Judah cold. -Understand, son, what’s coming. I have no plans for yon stiltspear, but if their way intersects with mine then yes, my way will crush them down.

– Do you know what you see here? he says. -Every one of us here, and every one coming, the dustiest navvy, each clerk, each camp whore, each cook and horseman and each Remade, every one of us is a missionary of a new church and there is nothing that will stop holy work. I mean you no unkindness. Is that all you have to say to me?

Judah stares at him in terrible sadness. He works to speak.

– How long? he says at last. -What are the plans?

– I think you know the plans, son. The old man is calm. -And how long? You need to ask the downs. And then you need to ask the gods and spirits of yon fen how much good clean grit they can eat up.

He smiles. He touches Judah’s knee.

– You sure there’s nothing else you’d like to tell me? I had hope of hearing other things from you, but you’d have spoken them by now. I want to thank you for the god you gave me, and I’ll be obliged if you’ll go to your stiltspear people and tell them that they have my deepest most respectful gratitude. You know I’ll be seeing them soon, don’t you?

He points to the wall, to a map that shows all the land from New Crobuzon to Rudewood, to the swamps and on to the port of Myrshock, and some hundreds of miles into the continent, into the west. Details are vague: this is debated land. But Judah can see the crosshatched levelling in the heart of the swamp.

– I know what I see, the old man says and there is real kindness in his voice. -I have in my time seen enough men go native. It’s an affectation, son, whatever you think now. But I won’t lecture you. There’s no recrimination. I will only tell you that history is coming, and your new tribe best move from its path.

– But dammit, says Judah. -This isn’t empty land!

The old man looks bewildered. -What they have, what they’ve had lying there for centuries in that marsh, whatever it is, it’s welcome to face the history I bring, if it can.

Back in deep waterland among the stiltspear, Judah does not know what to say. The fronds gather behind him, a closure he knows is a lie.

The children try to make him learn their golems again. He has never affected the smallest glamour before, has thought himself without talent. A stiltspear elder approaches while he strains, and touches Judah’s chest. Judah opens his eyes, feels things move in him. Whether it is the touch, the air of the swamp, or the raw things he has been eating, he feels a facility he never has, and in astonishment he sees that just faintly he can make his mud model move. The stiltspear children give little hums of acclaim.

– There are some coming, he says at night. The stiltspear only stare politely. -There are men coming and they will fill your swamp. They will split your wetlands, and diminish them.

Judah recalls the map. A neat trisection. Ink that will come to be a changed land, millions of tons of displaced scree and a devastation of the trees.

– They will not stop for you. They will not move for you. You must go. You must go south to where the other clans hunt, deeper, farther away.

There is nothing for a long time. Then the monosyllables of stiltspear gently.

– It is where the other clans hunt. They do not want us.

– But you must. If you do not go you will see what the men will bring. The clans must come together and hide.

– We hide. When the men come we shall be trees.

– It will not be enough. The men will make the land dry. They will cover your village.

The stiltspear look at him.

– You must go.

They will not.

In the next days Judah chews his fingernails. He eats with the stiltspear and watches them and heliotypes their activities and notes them, but with a waxing sickness he feels now that it is for their remembrance.

– There have been fights, they tell him when he demands to know of their wars. -We fought another clan three years ago and many of us were killed.

Judah asks how many and the stiltspear holds up its hands-this one has seven fingers on each-opens and closes them and holds up one more finger. Fifteen.

Judah shakes his head. -Very many, very very many more will be killed if you do not go, he says, and the stiltspear shakes its head too-it has learnt the motion from him and uses it with pride.

– We will be trees, it says.

Judah can make his mudling dance. Each day he is stronger at it. Now he makes foot-tall figures from the clay and peat. He does not know what it is he makes happen or how the stiltspear children have taught him or what the adult put in him, but his new capabilities delight him. His little model can beat others now, at the golem circus they play.

It is his only pleasure, and he hates that it feels like an evasion. Once or twice more he begs the stiltspear to come with him to the deeper swamp. It degrades him that he cannot find the words to move them. It is their culture, he says to himself, it is their way, it is their nature. They-not he-are to blame. But he does not believe his own thought.

He feels pinioned by history. He can wriggle like a stuck butterfly but can go nowhere.

There are more reverberations and the explosions from hunters’ guns are audible throughout the days. Judah understands something. He watches the stiltspear corner a calf-thick amphibian, and together sing-breathe the uh uh uh uh uh rhythm and for half a second the newt-thing petrifies midflick, held in time made thick, and Judah realises the rhythm they have sung is an echo of the children’s mud-golem song. The same, made vastly more complex, given several parts.

He is obsessed with the chant. He wants to preserve the moments of its utterance, congeal the sounds, strip them down. He can only time them as closely as he can and write them to work out their relations.

Judah works fast. He feels a knot tying in him. His near-friend Red-eyes helps him. -We make shapes that move. All of us: young one way, hunters another. And Judah sees that the children’s chants are only mimicry; it is their hands that make their golems. The rhythm of the hunters does the work of the children’s pinching fingers. Both intercessions are of a kind.

There is a noise of industry, far off. A growled rhythm.

The first stiltspear to die is a young too confused to control its camouflage. It is shot by a hunter frightened by the rapid flickering between states of a four-footed animal thing and what seems a rotting tree. He does not know what he has killed and it is only chance and neophobia that he does not eat the child. The clan find the little body.

They’ve reached the lake, Judah thinks. He imagines uncountable wagonloads of nothing, of soil, stone and dirt bloating the swamp.

The time is now. To make his new clan go deep and disappear. There is no other time for this. He has been beaten down. Though every night he says again what he has said-you must go, it is not safe, more will die-he has given up. He is disengaging. An observer again.

The stiltspear debate quietly. Their food grows scarce. The fish and the food-animals are fleeing or being choked. There is venom in the swamp, the runoff of a thousand men and women, the slurry from latrines and cleaning crystals, from black powder, from make-do graves.

There is another death, a lone dam surprised. The roar of industry is always audible.

A party of stiltspear hunters return and try to say what they have seen. A drained core, something approaching. By now there are steam shovels, Judah knows, ever-growing gangs.

– One tried to hurt us, a stiltspear says, and it shows the company the gun it has taken. It is stained with human blood. They have killed, and Judah knows then it is over and done. The time is finished. They do not see it. The sun is dead for them. There is nothing left. He is frantic to learn, to preserve these people in his notes, to salute them.

After that kill the stiltspear become prey.

The red sires unwrap their coddled god and recarve him as a murder spirit. They revive a death-cult. Chosen dams and tan sires dip their spear-hands in poisons that will kill with a tiny cut and will seep through their skins over a day and a night and kill them too, so they have no choice but to be suicide berserkers, against the incoming company.

Judah sees the corpses of New Crobuzon men punctured by stiltspear hands, bloated with toxin, bobbing in cul-de-sacs of greenery. If he is found with the stiltspear he will be a race-traitor, a city-traitor, and will be put to a slow, unsanctioned but approved death. Stiltspear braves ambush the men of the roadway.

They kill humans and some cactacae in threes and fours. There is a reward on each pair of stiltspear hands. Within days there are newcomers in the swamp, bloodprice hunters. They dress in apocalypse rags in defiance of all societies, renegades of a hundred cultures. Judah sees them through the trees.

Bounty scum from Cobsea, and from Khadoh, and pirate cactacae from Dreer Samher. There are vodyanoi, the dregs of Gharcheltist and New Crobuzon. A woman seven feet tall fights with two flails and hauls off many stiltspear dead. There are rumours of a gessin in his armour. A witch from the Firewater Straits snares many pairs of hands, makes a grotesque bouquet of them, sleeping a hunt-sleep to conjure dreamdevils that prey upon the camp.

– Go deep, Judah says again, and those still alive in the township are listening.

They head south. Red-eyes tells Judah they will find shelter among the new mongrel tribe of runaways from all the stiltspear nations.

– I will go soon, Judah tells him. Red-eyes nods, another learned gesture.

There are no children left in the township to challenge with little golems. There are only adults whose grace is now martial, who count kills and set traps. The grinding of stone and gears is unending as the works approach.

One day Judah rises and gathers all he has-notes, specimens, heliotypes and drawings-and walks out of the village, through water maze to the new industrial zone. He is unstuck. The moment has passed him.

There is a foreman at the edge of a new clearing, shouting at his crews. Judah stares. They are crude and small and hubristic, but they are reshaping the land.

The foreman nods at Judah as he passes, and tells him, -This ain’t no fuckin’ godsdamned fuckin’ lake this piece of shit is a devil. He gobs into the black water. -Eats and eats every godspitting ton of shite we put in it. It don’t have no bottom.

Axemen and flagmen, chainmen, hunters, engineers cutting trenches; cactus-people, vodyanoi, men and Remade. They work with spades and saws, picks, barrows. The swamp is thinning.

Man after man, Remade, cactus, comes with cart full of gypsum and gravelled earth and tips it from the new quay. A steam shovel spastically drops its loads. Ballast is swallowed. Waterweed and the pelage of leaves and dust is gone, the muskeg’s camouflage is defeated, its water uncovered in a spreading ring. Barrow after barrow is sucked down with a throat noise.

– See? See? the foreman says. -This godsdamned thing’s deeper than a whore’s cunt.

This was quagmire once, where mud would wrestle you in as vigorous as the constrictors. Stone hauled from the foothills rises in blocks, lapped by the thick water. They are bulwarks that hold in gravel and earth. Dry land is cut out. A road of matter has been excised, a swath of tamaracks, mangroves, runt grasses and the de-bris of spatterdock. It is a ribbon of flattened earth a score of yards wide and endlessly long, sweeping backward through wet thickets, purged of trees, tended by haulers and hewers as far as Judah can see.

There is a stretched-out tent-town. Carts are carried by mules Remade to swamp things, amphibian. Judah walks the raised road. Stumps stubble the ground, and beyond them the fingers of the swamp move. Pumps howl and drain the waterways, make them mudflats, and then these mudflats become beds for new stones. There are gangs of cactus-people, their muscles moving hugely beneath spined skins.

And there are many Remade. They do not look at the whole men, free workers, the aristocracy of this labour.

The Remade are always various. All Judah’s life. Their bodies made impossible. On the roadbed there is a man whose front pullulates with scrawny arms, each from a corpse or an amputation. Chained to him a taller man, his face stoic, a fox stitched embedded in his chest from where it snarls and bites at him in permanent terror.

Here a crawling man spiral-shelled in iron and venting smoke. Here a woman working, because there are women among the Remade, a woman become a guttered pillar, her organic parts like afterthoughts. A man-or is it a woman?-whose flesh moves with tides, with eructations like an octopus. People with their faces relocated, bodies made of iron and rubber cables, and steam-engine arms, and animal arms, and arms that are body-length pistons on which the Remade walk, their legs replaced with monkey’s paws so they reach out from below their own waists.

The Remade haul, their overseers watching and sometimes whipping. The roadbed goes back forever through the trees.

– My stiltspear friend, the old man says. He welcomes Judah.

– My stiltspear friend, it’s good to see you. Are you come back to us? Judah nods. -I’m glad, son. It’s best. How are your clan?

Judah looks up coldly but he sees no crowing. The question is not a provocation. -Gone, Judah says. He feels his failure.

The man nods and purses his lips. -And will you show us their homestead? he says. -I want to take it down. It’ll be unacceptable if there’s a place for them to come back to. There’ll be a town here, you know. Yes there will. We sit on the subsoil of Junctiontown or Forktown or Palus Trifork, I’ve not yet decided. And I could make the stiltspear village a museum, so a half-day’s hike from the Plaza di Vapor visitors could go to see it. But I’m of a mind to raze it. So will you show me where it is?

If it is left there will be stiltspear who will want to return; children will try to find their old playgrounds.

– I’ll show you.

– Good lad. I understand and I admire you. You’ve come through something and I respect that. Did you find what you wanted? I remember when first we spoke. When I hired you, you remember. I wanted something from you but I always thought you wanted something from the swamp, or the stiltspear. Did you find it?

– Yes. I did.

The old man smiles and holds out his hand, and Judah gives him the sheafs of maps, of notations, of fen-lore. The old man does not say how late the information is. He flicks through it but does not say how poor it is, how inadequately Judah has kept his part of the wage-bargain. Another man comes in and speaks rapidly about a dispute, a failing deadline. The old man nods.

– We have so many problems, he says. -The foremen are angry with the city’s magisters. They have no sense of what we’re doing; they send us Remade with no capabilities. Our pilings are breaking. Our retaining walls buckle, our trestles collapse. He smiles. -None of this surprises me.

– Welcome back, he says. -Now, are you on my payroll? Will you go back to New Crobuzon? Or stay? We’ll speak. I have to go. We’ve been so long here, with the flat behind us, the rust-eaters have caught us up. They’ve reached the trees.

Yes, there they are. Only a short time along the roadbed, which is flatter and more finished the farther back Judah goes. It has a beauty, this trained land. An oddity, this road at which the swamp claws.

A corner and a new workforce is there. Cosseted by diminished trees, like the crew that flattens the fenland but moving with unique rhythm, a syncopation of construction.

A crowd unfolds toward him. There is a rapid thudding as sleepers are dropped and then a sound like something being sliced as girders unroll from a flatcar, crews Remade and whole picking them up with tongs, a baffling dainty motion, letting them down as sledge-wielding brawnies step in and timed as perfectly as an orchestra hammer the ties and rails. Behind them all something huge and noisy vents and watches their efforts, and edges constantly forward. A train, deep among the mangroves.

It was months earlier that he first met the old man. Weather Wrightby. Crazyweather, Iron Wright. In the offices of TRT, at the recruitment meetings, with all the other young men in starch and braces.

University boys, clerks’ sons, the adventurous rich and aspirational young men like Judah, Dog Fenn and Chimer apprentices bored by their work, fired by children’s stories and travelogues.

– I have wanted this for decades, Wrightby said. He was compelling. The recruits were respectful of this man nearly three times their age. His money did not diminish him. -Twice I went west finding routes. Twice, sadly, I had to come home. There’s a crossing that’s still to be done. That’s the big task. This that we do now is only a start. A little tinkering southerly.

A thousand miles of track. Through rottenstone, forests and bog. Judah was cowed by Wrightby’s fervour. This undertaking is so vast it could bankrupt even such a wealth as his.

Wrightby had felt him, sounded his chest like a doctor. Handed out commissions, put teams together. -You can report to us from the swamps, boy. It’ll be tough terrain. We need to know what to expect.

That is how Judah got here.

The first journey from New Crobuzon. A team: engineers, gendarmes, scholars and rugged scouts who had looked at long-haired Judah with friendly condescension. They started two, three miles west of New Crobuzon, under heavy guard. A flatbed town carved out of the land, a range of buffers, a fan of rails.

Warehouses big enough to hold ships, mountains of gravel, planks from stripcutting Rudewood. A mob of humans and cactacae; khepri, their scarab heads fidgetsome; vodyanoi in the canals that linked to the city, crewing open-bottomed barges; rarer races. A garden of different limbs. Cheap deals, contracts, assignations. The Remade were corralled, shovelled like meat animals onto barred trucks. And on into the empty land, skirting the edges of the forest through cuts blasted with blackpowder, went the railroad.

It was late spring. Dirigibles puttered overhead, sweep-

surveying the landscape, tracking the iron way. At the train window Judah watched the wilderness.

The train was full with recruits: labourers on wood benches, the prison-trucks of the Remade. Judah sat with other surveyors. He listened to the pistons. The squat, simple trains within New Crobuzon were always accelerating or slowing, only ever jerking between stations. There was no time for them to pick up pace, to maintain it and create this new sound, this utterly new beat of a speeding train.

They passed a village: an odd and ugly sight. Sidings slid toward it, and Judah could see the original wattle-and-daub dwellings alongside rapidly thrown-up wood houses. It must have trebled in size within a year.

– Frenzy, said one man. -Can’t last. They’ll be crying within two years. Every piece-of-shit town we pass gives the railroad money, or some syndicate from New Crobuzon comes down, takes it over, pays Wrightby’s railroad so’s they get the damn rails. They can’t all make it. Some towns are going to die.

– Or be killed, another said, and they laughed. -Before we even broke ground they started building. There’s a township to the west, Salve, built by men from Wrightby’s own Transcontinental Railroad Trust, if you please. They drew up the plans for this Myrshock-Cobsea route with Iron Wright hisself, got their town ready for him. From nothing. A halfway place before the swamp junction.

– Only there was some shenanigans, Jabber knows what, and Iron Wright isn’t talking to them. So now we’ll be skirting away and no iron road’s coming to Salve. The men laughed. -Still there. Still modern. Cold-dead empty. The youngest ghost-town in Rohagi.

Judah imagined music halls, a bathhouse, visited only by dust, eaten by creepers.

They stopped at a newly bloated township, and hawkers rushed for the train. They held up cheap food, cheap clothes, hand-printed gazetteers promising a bestiary and maps of the newly opening lands. They sold rail-end papers-Judah bought one, a roughly inked sheet The Wheelhouse, thick with errors in spelling and grammar. It was full of workers’ complaints, contumely about the failings of the Remade, scatology and hand-drawn pornography.

The rails angled southwest by churned mud and rubbish where a temporary town had been dismantled, on to rocks and grasslands. Once the train scaled a ravine on a new trestled bridge that swayed under them.

They switchbacked up inclines where they had to but mostly the train went straight-deviations were failures. Where stone reared it was split, become scree-edged furrows stained by smoke. To the west, mountains overlooked them. The Bezhek Peaks, girdled in shadow. When the train began to slow again, it was for the end of the line.

There were people in those wilds. Many women, in hill-dirted petticoats. Some carried children. Suddenly they were hundreds, in a tent city close to the bright rails. Streetwalkers bizarrely displaced to the desolate landscape.

The sun lowered and there were fires. Judah thought of the people left behind, the dead, diseased and killed, the children abandoned or smothered, buried by the line. They slowed past a herd of cattle, mongrel, stringy and subtly Remade, a grex breed. The box capra chew and live on what poor food there is, their cross-slit eyes betraying goat affinities. At last, ahead of the whoretown and the cattle, was the perpetual train.

Judah had walked its length, skirting the crews. It was a rolling-stock town, an industrial citylet that crawled. At the end of a no-man’s-land of empty rails, he saw the work. New Crobuzon reaching so far. The leviathan unfolding of metal, the greatest city in Bas-Lag rolling out its new iron tongue, licking at the cities across the plains.

Then there were days of trekking beyond the edge of iron. Judah’s party passed the carts of the tie-layers. Crews cut down copses, treated and shaped the slabs, piled them in mounds and hauled them. Beyond the ties, the roadbed was bare rock-shards. Walking the sleepers it had seemed a ladder across the earth: now it was a road. It furrowed through high land and rose above low. They were a long way behind the graders.

For five days they were alone but for birds. It was an uncanny, rangy interior of slopes and little rivers. The rocks that reared like stelae were wind-carved into unplanned bas-reliefs. The roadbed tracked like a huge ruin, like the remnants of a city wall. They heard noise, approached a mouth in rock.

Tunnel-cutters had ploughed a path through the talus. There was a camp of men by the hole, and more men emerged from stone’s innards, hauling carts of the hill’s litter. They were too far from New Crobuzon for any steam-excavators to reach them. And the rock was probably too hard, though it gave Judah pleasure to imagine one of the drill-nosed things, big as a carriage, emerging from the ground. The tunnellers were alone in the wilds with picks and blackpowder, digging routes for rails that would not reach them for months.

The Remade, with limbs become pistons and jackhammers, were deafened by their own labours. One was a man whose arms were replaced with the outsized splayed claws of a mole: there was no way he could scrape through this stone but the crews had made him a mascot, and he sat in the tunnel’s core and sang encouragement. TRT gendarmes guarded.

– Where you heading? said the superintendent.

– South. Cobsea, the plains.

– The swamps, said Judah’s survey partner.

– The swamps, the supervisor said. -Be a bloody laugh when the rails get there. What the bloody hell, eh?

Judah smiled. His partner laughed. Seven weeks after that he would succumb to a wasting quag disease and leave Judah alone. Judah had thought of the heliotypes and etchings he had seen of the wetlands, the creatures emerging from the groves, the sodden plants, imagined them all set in mud made concrete, paralysed in place.

Their road ran out. They came to the graders, who dug where the land reared up, and took its excess, and poured it in where the land dipped down.

They cut a hill into receding shelves of industry. The landmass became steps, acrawl with roustabouts and pack animals. Loess dust gusted. Over the hours of work, the steps sank to the grade. There would be a ravine where the hill had been.

There are crews strung out like worry beads, Judah thought, across the downland.

Now Judah has come back. The perpetual train has caught him. It has breached the marshland.

The darker of the swamps spreads like a slick, but now it is intruded. There is a line drawn into its interior, buttressed with stone. The rails shine on it. Judah sees a split in the trees, and the black smoke of the train.

Supply trains come, weighed with sleepers and salted beef, with black iron rails. Judah could ride home to New Crobuzon. But a calm has settled him. Things are unfinished. He does not want to go back.

The saturated ground has stalled production, and the gangs have caught each other up: the graders, tie-men and the spikers before the perpetual train itself. Wyrmen scavenge. The camp followers have conjoined. A tent town has come behind the perpetual train. Beerhall tents, dancehall tents, cathouse tents, prefabricated buildings in cheap wood, circuses for the workers’ breaks.

– I was in there, Judah says to himself, looking into the fen. He says to himself, -I should go home, but, but… It is difficult for him to say why he does not. He is drawn to the grandeur of this intervention.

He goes back to the deserted stiltspear encampment. It is being eaten by itself, giving in to mud. A part of him wants to go deep and find the stiltspear in the middle of their shrinking wetland. But he is human, and the stiltspear kill humans now. He effects some inadequate communion. He feels hollowed out.

Judah watches the graders’ progress. He is like a seagull, a carrion-eater in the train’s slow slow wake. It and its tracks might progress only a few score yards each day in this merciless swamp. Autumn is speeding up.

The tent-town and its shanties at the boundary of the fens are a hub of commerce and crude industry. They are full of country runaways, workers not working, prospectors, the pistolled horse- wanderers who are growing in numbers across the plains opened by the iron road. Cactacae, vodyanoi, llorgiss, khepri, and races more arcane: crustaceans walking on two legs and cowled like monks, figures with too many eyes. Mercenary glory-hunters; canaille of scores of cultures.

– How can I just go back, Judah says to one as they throw bone dice, -with that thing, that train, there? How can I?

He is a tramp wandering the steam-and-piston town of the rails. There are thousands of men and women, many without work. A pitiable reserve army trudges behind the perpetual train. They beg when the gendarmes are not watching.

Judah makes golems from the trodden-down mud of the track-end. He cannot leave the tracks.

The villages they pass become rich and murderously violent-decadent, liquor-swilling, whore-filled and lawless-for the few days or weeks of the railroad, and then die. The towns live mayfly lives.

Sex is as much part of the iron-road industry as spiking, grading, herding and paperwork. A tent city of prostitute refugees from New Crobuzon’s red-light districts follows the rails and the men that set them down. The men call it Fucktown.

The train comes and changes everything. For centuries there have been communities by the scrags of forests. Wars between subsistence farmers and hunters, hermits and trappers; trade and treaties between the natives and settlers from dissident sects hiding from New Crobuzon. The city’s runaway Remade have taken to these steppes and become fReemade. Now this native economy is cut open, and New Crobuzon hears its rumours.

There are small exoduses of prospectors from the metropolis trekking from the line to where they say rockmilk or jewels or the puissant charged bones of monstrosities can be mined. Criminals have new places to run, and bounty hunters new ways to follow them. All of these newcomers, explorers and the city’s dregs and the curious from across the continent, track into the new landscape. Like tributaries, like the thread-roots of ivy, their routes spread out from and to the railroad. Judah’s is one of them.

Roaming miles of track, Judah knows he is in some low-

level shock. Each night he dreams of stiltspear. He hears their staccato utterance, the chronopausal breath. In his dream they return to him bloodied and stripped of their hands.

Judah walks days, crosses a trestle bridge aswarm with workers and Remade brachiating from extending simian arms. At the end of a siding, a loop of track into a chert-rimmed dustbowl, is the town Such. It is renamed with pioneer verve: they call it Haggletown, Cardtown, the Old-Eye-In-The-Hole, and Hucksterville.

In the casinos track-laying men throw their money down alongside dandies with silver flintlocks and black silk hats: gamblers, cardsmen, aleatori. From New Crobuzon, Myrshock and Cobsea at the end of the proposed routes, and some from farther. The cactus-man from Shankell; a nameless vodyanoi said to come from Neovadan; Corosh, a shaman from the Wormseye Scrub who supplements his traditional turtle-shelled coat with slacks and spats.

Judah watches them greet each other and play.

– BarkNeck, Corosh says in unflawed Ragamoll. -Not seen you since Myrshock. Judah sees him unclip a Wormseye weapon from his belt, a gris-gris mace studded with whispersome cowries.

There are scores of styles of dice and cards. Dice with six, eight, twelve sides, lopsided dice with differing likelihoods of settling on various faces. Cards with seven suits, suits of wheels flames locks and black stars, decks of picture cards without suits at all.

There are women among the chancers: Frey with her tough and beautiful smile; the Rosa in the prettiest blood-coloured dresses, cooling herself with what is supposed to be a razored metal fan. In his second week in Such, Judah sees a Remade-no, with that bearing he is fReemade, an outlaw-acrawl on a lower body like a den of fighting snakes, pass the gendarmes, who pretend they do not see him. -Jaknest, the name is spoken quietly, -Jaknest the Free Stakesman. Jaknest leaves a trail into a back room, where there must be some high-roller game where anyone’s money is good, law be fucked.

Judah does not want to play. Instead he tries to steal. He makes a golem of sticks, has the little made man scurry beneath the table with the night’s biggest pot. It clambers up a chair’s crossbars to sit below Place How, a gambling man in black and silver who is amassing chips and promissory notes. The casino is full and loud, and no one sees the figurine save Judah.

It moves to his commands, trying to unpick Place How’s bag. There is a rushing, a red sulphur gash in the air, and the golem is smouldering carbon. A clot of smoke and dim flame crawls fast as a rat back up How’s coat, to circle his neck and disappear. Everyone rises but How pats the air to calm them.

Judah blinks. Of course a man of How’s wealth and profession goes protected. He does not rely on the casinos’ vodun to sniff out illicit augury. He has his own ward dæmon. When he has won all he wants How stands at the bar and buys drinks and tells stories of his games and the places he has been, and how the new railroad has brought him back to New Crobuzon. He is unwinding the road, Judah thinks. He’s counting it backward, telling its miles like he counts cards.

– Sir I’d like to come with you. And Place How laughs not unkind at this sullen bruised young man half his age. He does not take so much convincing: the thought of a butler appeals to his pretensions. He dresses Judah for the part, and teaches him to ride the mule he buys him. -Now you in hock to me a while, How says.

They go between trail-towns through sage and heather, sometimes overlooking the railroad and its crews. The landscape changes by the tracks: the animals are wary, the trees thin.

Judah does not golem except when he is alone. Between towns Place is loquacious and charming to him: when they reach a place where he can play he puts on a master’s face and has Judah wait behind him, bring him bonbons and kerchiefs. Judah is part of How’s uniform, as much as his velveteen jacket.

The same players recur, and Judah learns their styles. BarkNeck the cactus-man is surly and disliked, tolerated because he is not the cardsman he thinks. The Rosa is a delight to watch, to hear. And there is Jaqar Kazaan, and O’Kinghersdt, and the vodyanoi Shechester, and others, all with their preferred plays. How has his dæmon, and the others have their own protections: hexes, familiars, tamed air elementals gusting through their hair. Judah sees cheats and bad losers shot and harpooned.

Place How loses more money than Judah has ever owned, one night, and makes it up again, with more, two days later. Judah sees him play for shacks, for weapons, for embalmed oddities, for knowledge, and above all for money. Judah bleeds off a few coins when he can. He is sure that is expected.

In the wilds, Judah’s duties include the sexual. He does not mind: he feels no less or more than when he is with a woman. There is a nugget of compassion in him, and he feels it growing. He feels something inchoate, some beneficence.

A day’s ride from the railroad, they hear that Maru’ahm gamblers are coming. Everyone is excited.

– I ever was a gambling man, Place How says that night. -Ain’t a style or a way of play I ain’t come up against: I play the naturals, the numerologicians, and the graduates of academies made them gnostics of stake-raising. Won more’n I lost or I’d not be here. But Maru’ahm, oh. I been once years gone and I tell you if I’m good and say my prayers that’s where I go when I die.

Maru’ahm, the casino parliament.

– Sure it’s mostly for them as like roulette and half-a-hole snapjack and dice, but it’s not just the ally-ate-ors, they do for cardsmen too. Ten year gone, now, 1770. I was playing like La Dama Fortuna was wet for me. Staked my horse, my weapons, my life, and kept winning. And then there were stakes as they only have in Maru’ahm: I’m winning law after law, playing grandbridge and black sevens, till an all-night session of quincehand and I stake a big property law against one of the Queen’s cardsharp senators and I lose, but I seen him pull hidden cards from his sleeves to win the whole pot of legislation and I call him out, and I ain’t such a fighter but dammit I was sore, and there was a duel- ten paces and turn -hundreds of townsfolk watching and most of them cheering me, my law would be better for them. To this day I think it was one of them killed him, not me. I never was much with a gun. He smiles.

No one plays like the Maru’ahmers, and they bring their house rules with them. Gamblers congregate. In a little town where basin rivers meet, the iron road a day’s ride, the pilgrims converge. The townspeople are astonished at the rakes in their streets, well-dressed men and women carrying ornamented wicked weapons, filling taverns, bringing foreign wines, selling them to the landlords and buying them back, prostituting the local young.

Winter is in. There is snow. Judah hears that the track builders have stopped, are hunkered down, punished by the weather. He feels something eating at him. The road is a sentence written on the ground and he must parse it, and he is failing.

Something extraordinary comes out of the ice-flat sky. The Maru’ahm gamblers arrive in an outlandish biokiteship, a spindly, feathered, beetle-nacred thing. It lands and blinks its headlamp eyes, disgorges the gamblers. They wear jade- and opal-coated jumpsuits; they carry cards; their leader is a princess. In accented Ragamoll and with outrageous theatre, she raises her hand and shouts, -Let’s play!

The locals attempt country dances, a banausic and inappropriate entertainment. There are the rat-tats of dice, of shatarang discs. A syncopation like the clatter of wheels on rails. The softer shuffle of cards.

Place How faces one steadfast rebis, an androgyne cardsharp from Maru’ahm who wins unhurriedly at baccarat, at tooth bezique, at poker. How clicks his fingers for Judah to bring hot sherbert, but the swagger is merely vulgar. The he-she smiles.

They play a game Judah does not know with a deck of heptagonal cards. They turn them, discard some, concatenate others in an overlapping pattern on the tabletop. Other players come and go, raise bets by some opaque system, lose, while the pot grows, and only How and the hermaphrodite remain.

Each bet now causes How some physical pain. A crowd has gathered. With the turn of a card the Maru’ahm gambler wins the life of How’s ward dæmon, and the little presence manifests as a flaming marmoset that screams and clutches How’s lapels and makes them smoulder, but bursts and is gone in a fart of soot. How is afraid. He rallies and wins a handful of clockwork gems, but in the next round the he-she turns a triple-trick and Place How can only moan. He looks insubstantial. He is growing hard to make out as he loses.

How bets aggressively. He shouts his stake, -For my horse, a year of my thought, for my man yonder. He waves at Judah, who blinks and shakes his head- I ain’t no godsdamned stake -but it is too late, that is just what he is, and How has played and lost and Judah is forfeit. So Judah runs.

He heads back for the railroad on his harried mule, crossing trappers’ and hunters’ trails. He has money he has stolen.

Judah passes through emptied shells of towns that were tracks’-end carnivals months before. He follows freshets swollen with snowmelt. In the coils of hills he watches the railroad, the cavalier onrush of the trains, their flared stacks bellowing blackly, full of chancers for the halfway towns.

Within three days Judah discovers that the rebis who won him is on his trail. Rumours cross the distance. So south, close to the swamp again where the workforce crawl frozen on, Judah finds a gulch-town of gunmen. The plains are suddenly full of them, scapegrace bushrangers. The permanent dacoits of the region have been joined by newcomers made bandit by the iron road. It exerts.

In a tavern Judah buys the service of gun-layer Oil Bill, whose right hand had been a tool for the servicing of motors and is reconfigured by a gunsmith in brass with splayed barrel for a peppering of shot. He refuses to let Judah run, earns his protection money by letting the androgyne gambler catch them. There is a showdown in the freezing winter dust. As the townspeople of the punk village get out of range the gambler releases a brace of daggerpigeons that gust bladily at Oil Bill, but with a rate of fire Judah has never seen before (clockwork and coil mechanisms refilling his cannon-hand) the fReemade shreds them and fires through their feathers to send the Maru’ahmer sprawling wet and dead.

Judah runs with Oil Bill. He has neglected his golems, his stiltspear memories and the railroad itself. He sees in the brigand a hunger for the rails that reminds him of his own. The fReemade’s passion is less complex, and Judah wonders if it is a purer thing. Deep in himself, below the calm that has settled on him, he knows he must come to understand the rails.

They pay in some taverns, extort in others. Oil Bill sings songs of wandering renegades. Judah performs for him, makes golems-it is his only trick-out of the food they eat and has them dance across the table. He tries to breathe in time, to mimic the stiltspear.

Each dwelling makes its own rules and enforces them if it can. New Crobuzon does not claim the plains. It does not yet want them; it does not despatch militia here: it cedes the rights to policing and its spoils to the TRT, to Weather Wrightby and his monopoly railroad. The TRT gendarmes are the law here, but they are mercilessly liberal: their gunners guard only some mines and bartertowns.

Bill’s reputation means it is some time before anyone opposes him and Judah sees him kill again. When he does it is an act against someone foul, a snarling drunkard who threatens everyone he sees with his moving hexed tattoos, but still it is disproportionate. Judah stares at the corpse, stripped by the town’s gutterchildren.

The thing he has felt born within him, a creature of his congealed concern, flicks its tail. He does not like his companion.

Still he stays with Oil Bill, becomes a gunsman himself, in his duster, swaps his mule for a stolen horse. Because Oil Bill cannot leave the railroad alone. They tramp the winter hills. Bill brings them back to the rails endlessly.

– Look now, that there with them old trailers like that, them’s the work train’s supplies, goin’ all the way into the swamp. And them others we seen is for the sightseers from New Crobuzon come to see wild country, and that other’n with the guntowers ‘hind its engine… that’s the wages train. He smiles.

Judah is curious. There have been tries to rob the railroad before. Vivid and daring raids from horse riders and carriages and from fReemade shaped for speed with bevies of stolen legs, who keep up with the speeding engines and harass their firemen, boarding the train and disappearing again with snatched money.

Oil Bill’s plan might work. It is base, utterly without finesse, and it might work because Oil Bill is neither cowed nor awed by the iron road. Others have tried to shear off sections of a bridge to halt a train for ambush: Bill wants to blow the bridge while the train is on it. He wants to commit an act of war. Judah is so astonished by the plan’s imbecility that it is almost admiration.

– The trellis at Silvergut Gap, Oil Bill says, drawing in the dirt. -Fuckin’ bridge is hundreds of yards long. We wait below, light fuses and scarper when the fuckin’ train hits the bridge. That shoddy piece of shite can’t take that. It’s coming down.

And then the plan is that the iron train will unfold in air and shatter on the frozen flint a hundred feet below, and though yes there will be huge wastage as fire takes boxes of money, and carriages are sealed shut by crushed metal, and the blood of dead trainmen and passengers stains the notes, some ingots are bound to fall free. Some guineas are sure to gust out in the wind of the cut, and Oil Bill will simply pick spoils from the ground and the air.

Oil Bill’s genius is the limits of his ambition. A greater thief would insist on taking every stiver from the coffers, could not support this idly conceived carnage. Oil Bill though does not care if the bulk is left to ruin in the broken train, so long as he can reach some money, and in its blithe and vast violence his plan might work.

The grub in Judah, not conscience but some nebulous virtue, moves. He feels disassociate from it, but it gnaws him. He will not follow Bill’s plan, but he cannot outfight Oil Bill so he must pretend insouciance, even as they steal powder and ride back along the Silvergut Pass by winter cactuses and weathered black rock, to where the cat’s cradle of wood arcs overhead, to pack the explosive-Bill with lack of care that makes Judah blench-to struts in the cold-hard earth. It is only after that, while they wait for a train and Bill sleeps, that Judah can move against him.

He leaves his horse and climbs the steep rocks, cresting with fingers so insensate with cold he is afraid he will lose them. He runs for near a day until he comes to a railside hut, a siding and a mail-drop, and a TRT signalman.

– The gendarmes, Judah says, waving his empty hands. -I need to get them a message.

Judah returns within a day and a night, on a new animal a mile behind the TRT rangers. When he reaches the roots of the trestle two gendarmes are dead, Bill’s blackpowder scattered.

Bill is gone. The gendarmes station a guard. Judah watches them with contempt. They are motley; they do not have the presence of the New Crobuzon Militia. These are recruits hardly distinguished from drifters and chancers, given guns and sashes in the colours of the TRT. They have little idea of how to pursue Oil Bill, and less inclination. They put a price on him.

Judah is in danger while Oil Bill is free. He joins the bloodprice hunter.

First Judah thinks the bounty man is human, but he accepts his commission with a guttural alien chuckle, flexes his neck and closes his eyes in ways that mark him as abnatural. He rides something that is not a horse but a vague equine semblance, the impression of a horse, a horse burr under the skin of the real. He shoots with a matchlock pistol that spits and mutters and is sometimes a rifle and sometimes a crossbow. He will not tell Judah his name.

They run together on their horse and their horse-bruise through the plainlands in the ripples of the rails, lands not colonised but infected, as life once infected rockpools. Four days of tracking with ideograms of hexed dust and the bounty-man finds Oil Bill, confronts him in a quarry. The white stone is marked, crosshatched with chisel lines, which make a grid behind the bandit’s head.

– You, he shouts at Judah with the rage of the stupid betrayed, and the bondsman kills him and his weapons eat the corpse.

Perhaps I will be this, Judah thinks, and rides with the hunter. They go town to town on the trail of those the gendarmerie will not take. They stop at TRT trackside stations and sift through the wanted notices. The bounty hunter does not ask Judah to stay nor make him leave. He speaks in a sibilant whisper so quiet that Judah cannot tell if he speaks Ragamoll well or hardly at all.

He injures or kills his quarries with the spines from his weapons or with his living nets or with sudden throat-sounds, and drags the bodies back to the way stations for bounty, and asks nothing of Judah, nor provides him anything. The count of sheep-stealers and rapists and murderers goes up, money comes in. Those the unman kills are scum, but the presence in Judah is not at ease.

Three days’ ride across pale stone ways. Clots of rock like ag-gregates of grey air that burst into nothing under horseshoes. A stripmined hole, the bodies of sappers and gendarmes, and the entrances to tunnels where the marrow of some epochs-dead god-beast has become ore and in which a little tribe of trow live.

The Arrowhead Concerns will take what they can of the bone-load. The troglodytes have beaten off miners and made a stand, and the gendarmes want them gone. This is the commission.

Judah watches while his companion unpacks chymicals. He tries to feel equanimity. Nothing moves, not bird nor dust nor cloud. It is as if time is waiting. Judah turns and feels it start again sluggishly as the bounty hunter prepares a huge pot with distillates and oils and hoods it, over a fire, trails a leather tube to the entrance of the cave, anchors it in place with rubber and skin sealing off the air inside. It is the end of night. The fire and the brass cauldron cover them in moving tan light. The bounty-man mixes poisons.

In the mountain’s belly the trow must be waiting. They must be watching, Judah thinks. They must know that something is coming. He thinks, he cannot do otherwise, of the stiltspear and their hopeless unkenning resistance. He is cold, but inside him the worm of uncertainty, the oddity that is not a conscience but an awareness of wrong, a goodness, is uncoiling. He sighs. -Lie down, he tells it. -Lie down. But the oddity will not lie down.

It moves in him and secretes disgust and anger he is sure are not his, but that stain him, and whether they are his or not he feels them. They well up in him. He thinks of the stiltspear cubs, and the trow in the little mountain.

The chymicals are mixing and boiling, and the bounty hunter adds compounds till the red muddish mixture burps gas and a caustic oily smoke begins suddenly to pour from it and is funnelled into the mine. The hunter waits. Poison howls into the tunnels, the liquid boiling at enormous speed.

Judah’s rage takes him. He hesitates more seconds and will always be aware of the cubic yards of murderous gas he lets free in that time, then walks to the cauldron, staying upwind, and puts his left hand below the hood, above the rim, into the smoke. The bounty hunter is horrified and uncomprehending.

The gas is acid and hot and Judah screams as his skin splits, but he does not withdraw his hand, and he makes his scream into a chant, and he forces all the energies he has learnt and all the techniques he has stolen up from his innards and focuses them with the glass-pure nugget of hate and revenge he finds in him and channels and lets go with a cathexis purer and stronger than he has ever felt before, and thaumaturgic energies pour from him and make a golem.

A smoke golem, a gas golem, a golem of particles and poisoned air.

Judah falls back holding his ravaged hand. The smoke still spews from the pot but it does not vent into the tunnels, it collects and rolls in a bolus of pollution over the lip, and retreats back out of the hood and the pipe. The smoke crawls from the pot with evanescent limbs like monkeys’ or lions’ that retract again and emerge, and the cloud stands as a two- three- four- one- none-footed hulk of moiling and it steps or rolls or flies against the wind at the bounty hunter, following Judah’s agonised direction.

He has never created anything this size before. It is unwieldy and unstable, and the wind tugs grots of it away so it shrinks as it advances but not fast enough to be gone by the time it reaches the hunter, who is firing at it and uselessly through it, sending thin coils of it out with the paths of bullets like brief spines, not seeing Judah beyond, not seeing how he moves his hands and puppeteers the golem. The thing twitches a gas tail. It hugs the bounty hunter in a mindless surround so he cannot but breathe the golem’s substance, and his inhuman skin and the delicate membranes within him pustulate and break apart and he drowns on his liquescent lungs.

When the unman is dead, Judah has the diminishing golem leap high, and he releases it to the wind and it spasms and is gone. He bandages his hand and robs the bounty hunter’s corpse. It smells just very faintly of the gas.

Judah does not know how much of the trow town the smoke has envenomed. He knows this is only one day. He knows the Arrowhead Concerns will have the TRT send another bounty hunter to this boneyard and will find the detritus of this failed poisoning, this dead. Judah knows the trow will be eradicated and their homes lost to history, but he will not be party to it, and he has tried to stand in its way.

The trow will die. If he could leave something behind for them. If he could give these rocks a guardian shape and make it wait, to wake when it is needed. The bounty hunter’s unhorse runs from him and into rock, leaving an animal-shaped bruise of lichen.

I’m done here, thinks Judah. His hand trembles; he trembles. I’ve done in a man or something that looks like a man. He is exhausted with the effort of his somaturgy, of sustaining the thing’s shape, of killing. He shakes with fear and awe at what he has done, that he could do such a thing, that he could make a golem not from clay but from heavy air. I’m done out here in these wilding lands. They’re wilding because we’re here. He cannot believe what he has been able to do.

Judah scatters the pots and the guttering fire. He turns back for the iron road.

In something like a fugue he is taken by the wake of the trains. He meets the roadbed in some utterly lonely place. His horse is tired. It shivers in snow-dust. Judah goes to the hills, to a village overlooking the track labourers.

Though the men are provided for, though even so far from tracks’-end there is a tribe of prostitutes in their tent brothels, men from the grading teams and the rock-crushers come up sometimes to the tiny village of goatherds where Judah sits and watches. The local girls go with the New Crobuzon men, though their families impotently disapprove and fight and get beaten down. The villagers tend their wounded and weather these intrusions. -What can we do? they say. They are blighted by forbearance, by restraint.

A new calm has embedded in Judah since the line was cut into his swamps. He looks at the world through glass.

He becomes some kind of storyteller of the city to his goatherd hosts. They let him live in the wickiup encampments. They are grateful that he is not as brutish as the men of the perpetual train. They ask him questions in their barbarous Ragamoll.

– Is true the road make milk sour?

– Is true it kill young in the womb?

– Is true it make fish in river bad?

– What’s name of the road?

– I was at its end, Judah says. What is the name of the road? The question startles him.

He has found a young woman from the hillside peasants who lies with him. Her name is Ann-Hari. She is several years younger than he, farouche and pretty. He thinks of her as a girl though her enthusiasms and her stare sometimes seem to him more adult and calculating than ingenue.

Judah wants her with him. Ann-Hari is lost to her family and her village. There are several like her, some boys but mostly young women, utterly charged by the arrival of these tough roustabouts and the breathing pistons of the trains. Their families lament while they let their flocks run, or sell them for meat to railroaders for scrimshawed trinkets from the tool-rooms. The goatkeep young men join the grading teams and fill the rivers. The young women find other outlets.

Ann-Hari is not Judah’s; he cannot keep her. He first finds her when she is flushed by the road, and she takes him and discards her virginity with eagerness he knows has little to do with him. For the few days that she is only his he tries to make it as much as he can; he tries to give the arc of a life’s love. It is not an affectation but a role; he gives himself over. She is looking over his shoulder while she straddles him, for something else-not even something better, but else, more. She makes friends. She comes to him in the village smelling of other men’s sex.

Her clipped Downs Ragamoll is changing. She uses city slang, steals it from the hammermen. Judah can see the calm and ruthless intelligence under her giddiness, her voracious acquisition. He shows her the golems he can make, that still grow in strength and size. She is entertained but no more than by a thousand other things.

There is bad blood among the camp followers. The whores who have dutifully followed these men, splitting from the perpetual train to work with these mountain diggers, are affronted by their new rural rivals, these farmgirls who expect no pay. Some of the workers themselves are threatened by these newly voracious young women who do not sell or even give sex but take it. They know no rules. They have yet to learn taboos: some even try to go with the camp’s prisoners, the shackled Remade. The Remade are terrified by this, and go to their overseers.

One cold night Ann-Hari comes to Judah terrified, blackened, bloodied and welted. There has been a fight. A gang of prostitutes has gone from tent to tent. They have pulled apart any lovers they find, overwhelming the outraged men by numbers, holding them, checking the face and voice of each woman. Those that are locals taking no pay, they have hauled outside and decorated with engine oil and feathers. The gendarmes have sympathies with the working girls, and they let them carry on.

Ann-Hari was rutting a man at the edges of camp when the raucous whores’ justice caught her. She fought back. She punched with all her peasant strength. She knocked three of them down, jabbed out with a little gimlet that punctured an older woman’s stomach. Ann-Hari ran from her whitening victim.

Judah has never seen her so meek. He knows that this is only a small thing. No one has died, and likely will not-the blade is tiny. Now the locals know the rules, and no one will remember Ann-Hari who fought back. But the fear this sudden violence has left in her does not fade, and a part of Judah is glad, because now she is afraid to stay he can persuade her to come with him. He wants out of the wilderness; he wants to buckle the iron road closed behind him, go home; and he wants another’s eyes through which to see.

They go two days’ walk to a dying station, to the trains. They have third-class seats. Judah watches Ann-Hari watching the receding grass and buttes, the river they flank, the gashes, the darkness of tunnels. Hours in silence but for the complex rhythm of wheels, to the city he has not seen for many months, and that she has never seen.

He is back, and blinking like a countryman at New Crobuzon. Ann-Hari and he squat in a tent on a rooftop in Badside. They overlook the carcass of Grand Calibre Bridge, its pivoting section jammed, rusted immobile as it has long been, become only a breakwater.

All Ann-Hari’s fear went away with the miles, and there is nothing that will stop her learning New Crobuzon. Each day she comes back to him and tells him with excitement about the city.

She has never seen khepri before. -There are women here who’ve heads like bugs, she tells him. She visits the Ribs. -They’re bigger’n the biggest trees ever grew. They’re old and harder than stone, bones way up over the roofs, something dead and the whole city’s its grave.

Ann-Hari takes New Crobuzon’s trains, the five rails and their offshoots, from Abrogate Green in the east to Terminus, to Chimer’s End, to Fell Stop and the Downs. -There’s a shanty all falling down below a hill and the forest comes right up to it and the rails go on into the wood but the trains won’t go there.

There is a station in Rudewood on the useless tracks. It has › long been deserted. Judah knows of it, but has never seen it. Ann-Hari goes to the dangerous ghetto of Spatters, where the city’s few garuda live above the lowest of its subcitizens, and walks blithely through its stink and middened streets into the forest, and the overgrown remnants of the station, and comes back, taking the train to Dog Fenn to tell Judah. She is teaching him about New Crobuzon.

She tells him about the Fuchsia House, about BilSantum Plaza and the Gargoyle Park, the domed cactus ghetto, the zoological gardens, and many of these things he last visited in his youth if ever. She tells him all the races that she sees. She loves the markets.

Judah makes enough to eat, entertaining crowds with his hedge-magic golemetry. One day he makes a more sturdy figure from wood, with loose chain joints. He attaches strings to her limbs and now while his thaumaturgy makes her dance, he waggles a frame as if he is manipulating her. Judah makes noticeably more when punters think him a puppeteer than when they think he is animating matter.

In rooms by the Kelltree Docks, they are woken each morning by the sirens of factories and the slow stampede of the workforce. Ann-Hari meets dealers. She comes home with wide eyes and the acid smell of shazbah on her. She stays away some nights. When she is with Judah she sleeps with him and takes money from him.

She likes to walk. Judah walks miles with her, between onlooking houses, in the shadows of all the crossbred architecture. She asks him why things are built as they are, and he does not know the answers. Once he is with her as a khepri couple pass, their sashes plaited together, their headlegs rippling and sprays of bitter air emitted around them, their chymical whisperings. Judah feels Ann-Hari tense, and for the first time in his life he sees the strangeness of the khepri, hears the scissor-sounds their gnathic movements make. He sees the strangeness of everything.

It is boomtime. There is money, and there is competition for pavement change. Judah dances his puppets beside singers and instrumentalists, tumblers and artists in chalk.

It is winter but the city is freakishly warm. It is a languid season. In the red of tinted flares Judah’s golem performs for the students in Ludmead. The undergraduates are overwhelmingly young men, well-dressed uptown boys and a few studious clerks’ sons, but there are women among them, and even a few xenians. They walk by Judah’s high-stepping wooden dancer. He is only a little older than most of them.

Some give him stivers, marks and shekels: most give him nothing. One young man attuned to the figure’s movements and the flows of thaumaturgons stops and sees that the marionette is a fake.

– This is what I do, he says. -This is what we do here. I’m in the damned somaturgy programme. You got the face to come here and palm off your jury-rigged hexes?

– Match me then, Judah says.

Which is how the stiltspear sport of golem wrestling comes to New Crobuzon.

The little crowd of students watch while the arrogant boy squints over his glasses at Judah, who is all ruddy and sinewed-muscled scrawn, dressed in third- and fourth-hand rags. Though they bray support for their classmate Judah senses their ambivalence, and realises these moneyed sons would almost rather their fellow, a middling boy from a journeyman family, lose to him the utter outsider. Sheer class sympathy almost makes him walk away, but money is being counted and his own odds are good: he bets on himself.

He whispers to his golem, stutter-hisses at it like the stiltspear, and it takes the undergraduate’s earth-man apart. It is not a hard win.

Judah counts his money. The loser swallows several times and approaches him. He has grace and intelligence. -Good win, he says. He even smiles. -You’ve some techniques, and some power to you. I never seen anyone conjure a golem like that.

– I didn’t learn here.

– I see that.

– Try again? Another match?

– Yes! Yes! Again! It is one of the other students. -Come back tomorrow, puppetman, and we’ll do it again, and we’ll find a better damn ’turge than Pennyhaugh to take you on.

Neither Judah nor Pennyhaugh look at the interrupter. They only look at each other, and they smile together.

It will never challenge the glad’ circuses, the illegal blood-halls of Cadnebar’s and its imitators, where enthusiasts of real brawl sports can watch knife bouts, two-on-cactus hack matches and bite fights. But Pennyhaugh and Judah become partners and systematise the games, and their league gains attention, and golem wrestling becomes a fashion.

At first it is mostly students in the plasmic sciences come to the meets, then some of their professors. Then as word gets out autodidact somaturges and gutter hexers from the falling-down parts of town arrive. The sport is not particularly illegal but nor is it sanctioned, and like most such activities it is always on the point of being banned. It becomes a business very fast, and there are militia informers to pay off, and porters and university officials to keep happy. Pennyhaugh takes care of this.

They are unlikely heroes, the enthusiasts: intense, nervous and studious. They meet in venues of increasing size. They specialise, stud their creations in blades or slabs of tin armour, or give them bodkin legs and serrated dorsal ridges. These are golemachs, fighting constructions, matched against each other weight for weight.

Judah tops the rankings. He does not find it hard to win. His spare and coarse stiltspear techniques work. He loses a handful of times, but in that unforgiving laboratory he is quick to improve.

– You’ve a rare talent, Judah, says Pennyhaugh.

Pennyhaugh cannot beat Judah, but he can train him. He does not understand the alien stiltspear, but he can test them, and marry them to what he does know. He straps Judah to a thaumatograph, tests his cathexis, that concentrate furrowing of mind.

– You’re strong, he says to Judah.

Twice Ann-Hari comes to watch the bouts. She cheers for Judah and smiles when he wins, but the sport does not interest her. She is more for engines. She goes to the termini of the railway lines, to watch trains slow. She goes to those factories that will let her in and wanders among the workers, watching their machines.

Judah likes winning. His skill excites him. For a while he and Pennyhaugh try the most antiquated sting, pretending to lose until his odds rise, but Judah is notorious fast.

He is a star, Swamp-Taught Low. Another is Lothaniel Durayne, a professor of somaturgy who fights his feline tar-golems as Loth the Catman. They relish these stage names. There is the Dandler, a quiet woman Pennyhaugh says is likely a militia scientist. She gives her golemachs whipping chain tails. This troika exchange the top rank between them, but Judah keeps it most.

The stronger the somaturge, the greater the mass they can control. Soon they are setting upper limits to weight. Nothing heavier than a large dog can fight. Judah wonders how much he could control if he chose.

As organisers, bookie and top golemachist, Pennyhaugh and Judah amass good money. Golem wrestling is noticed by New Crobuzon’s press, and there are many newcomers. Judah is growing bored. He only fights Loth and the Dandler now. He watches how they animate their constructions. He listens to their hexes. He fights enough to make money, but mostly he fights to learn.

Every time his golems move, Judah feels his connection to the stiltspear. -I want to know everything about this, Judah says. Pennyhaugh brings him to the university library, and shows him relevant texts. He reads the titles: Theories of Somaturgy, The Limits of Plasmic Range, Beyond the Abvital Debate. - I want to know everything, he says.

It is a sweet winter. Judah takes Ann-Hari ice-skating. She likes the way he is recognised by some they pass. -Swamp-Taught! one says. It makes Judah less happy.

They walk in the frost-glazed shopping streets of The Crow, which are strung with ropes of lights and winter flowers. They drink hot chocolate mulled with rum. Ann-Hari is not looking at him. Her eyes pass over his and she smiles, and it is a real smile, but she is not looking at him.

Good-bye, Judah thinks, and smiles back.

When snow comes, for a few hours it effaces all the edges of architecture: the tight-coiled cornices of old churches, dark stone buttresses and all the countless poured and moulded concrete and brick terraces, and workers’ cottages too mean or crude to have any style at all. They become undulations below snow; then they are themselves again, as they sweat off sleet.

Judah dresses in the exaggerated clobber of a street-success. When he walks, the Dog Fenn children run after him, with a few skinny cactus youths and leaping vodyanoi, and beg him to make golemachs for them. Sometimes he animates a squeezed-together handful of coins and lets it totter toward them, for them to watch and pick apart.

Ann-Hari has no interest in learning to read, but when she discovers that he plumbs the newspapers for the progress of the Transcontinental Railroad Trust, she demands Judah read to her every day she is with him (there are more and more days that she does not come home).

– … a brutal winter, he reads from The Quarrel. - Those men still in the swamp spend much of their time acurse at the cold, but they have at least the advantage that the stiltspear, perfidious wetland savages, have retreated and no longer harry them. Messages from the south suggest construction crews from Myrshock are, despite less punitive weather, making poor progress…

– What is Myrshock? Ann-Hari says. Judah stares. She knows nothing of the railroad’s shape, or its future.

He makes her a map. -Three branches, he says, drawing the upside down and slanting Y. -New Crobuzon. Myrshock on the coast of the Meagre Sea. Cobsea in the plains. A track out from each, meeting in the swamps. Five hundred miles down from New Crobuzon, half as much again to each of the others.

Judah disguises his own fascination with the rails as indulging Ann-Hari’s. He thinks of the men all the time; he thinks of what he’s seen, that community of hammer-swingers, intervening in the land.

The road has not yet forked. Reports tell of brief and costly strikes. Some writers argue that the TRT gendarmerie is defunct, unable to control its workforce or subdue the little principalities it comes to. The Mayor must end the subleasing of authority, they say. It is time for New Crobuzon’s militia to police the tracks. No one thinks this will happen. The government is against it.

– The strikers complain of the weather, Judah reads. -They strike against the chill. What would they have the TRT do? Does not the whole of the workforce, the overseers, the Remade, Wrightby himself, feel the same cold?

– No, says Ann-Hari.

Judah looks at her. She is eating a sugared plum.

She shrugs. -No, they don’t.

Judah studies. With Pennyhaugh to guide him, he not only grows his capacities but begins to understand what he is doing. His approach remains gut and intuitive, but the laborious and esoteric texts make a kind of sense to him, and better his ability.

– … what we do is an intervention, Pennyhaugh lectures Judah from his notes, -a reorganisation. The living cannot be made a golem-because with the vitality of orgone, flesh and vegetable is matter interacting with its own mechanisms. The unalive, though, is inert because it happens to lie just so. We make it meaningful. We do not order it but point out the order that inheres unseen, always already there. This act of pointing is at least as much assertion and persuasion as observation. We see structure, and in pointing it out we see mechanisms and grasp them, and we twist. Because patterns are asserted not in stasis but in change. Golemetry is an interruption. It is a subordinating of the static is to the active AM.

Judah thinks of the stiltspear, and of the railroad. He still breathes his stiltspear whisper when he makes his golems move. Increasingly he understands this science. It obsesses him.

They fail to pay the right officer, and the golem-wrestling hall is raided. It is not hard for the masked militia to find among the crowd shazbah and very-tea, and even, they say, dreamshit. The organisers give money where they have to, and while Pennyhaugh keeps them in business, Judah thinks of other things.

Golemetry is interruption. Golemetry is matter made to view itself anew, given a command that organises it, a task. How to make the field in his absence? How to prepare and make it wait?

He buys batteries, switches and wires, he buys timers, he tries to think. The journals are reporting accounting wrongs at the TRT. Someone is insinuating scandal.

It is days since Judah has seen Ann-Hari. He realises suddenly that she has not merely found someone else to be with for some days but has gone. He knows where.

She has liked New Crobuzon, has looked on it with passion and interest, but for her all its mass and history-its accreted stones and struggle-could only ever be an adjunct to the iron road. It is the rails that are Ann-Hari’s home.

Ann-Hari has gone home to the rails and the perpetual train. She knows no prostitute militia will punish her. The X on Judah’s mirror in her lipstick is a kiss good-bye. She helped him see the city again and he is grateful for that. He discovers that she took a deal of money from him.

The golem fights bore him. Pennyhaugh is gone more and more, liaising with bureaucrats in Parliament, which protrudes like a verdigrised nail from the meeting of the rivers. And the fights slow, and stop, and Pennyhaugh is more distracted, and has more money, and one night he takes Judah to a restaurant more sumptuous than any he has ever entered before, a sedate place in Ludmead where Judah in his street-finery feels absurd, and Pennyhaugh says to him, -There’s another way, you know, there’s another, ah, market for your golem skills.

Judah knows his moment has gone, and that Pennyhaugh is a government man now. Judah is without work, without the library. He is quickly forgotten.

For some weeks Pennyhaugh sends him letters suggesting they meet. Judah declines in his ugly hand, just often enough not to be rude.

In the markets full of old and stolen books he asks for volumes on golems. He spends many shekels on useless crap and some on great works with which he struggles.

What is it I’ve done? he thinks. He does not understand his own skills at all. I made a golem from gas. Can I make a golem from even less solid things? Golemetry’s an argument, an intervention, so will I intervene and make a golem in darkness or in death, in elyctricity, in sound, in friction, in ideas or hopes?

Judah takes a few commissions. For the eccentric rich who disdain the clanking of constructs, he makes beautifully realised men and women in wire and sand-filled leather. He charges a great deal: they tire him.

He walks the city at the behest of the grub, the oddity in him that will not be still. He is tugged by it; he feels it seeing through him. It’s a strong goodness in me, he thinks without arrogance, but it’s an intruder. I don’t feel it as my own. Does that make me good? Does that make me better? Does it make me wicked?

Judah thinks of Ann-Hari and reads that progress at tracks’-end is picking up again. There are questions in Parliament. The TRT and Weather Wrightby are censured for strange dealings. Workers have died in some accident, a gradient has been levelled in a way the inspectors cannot explain, and the heat-ripples and the lifeless zone for yards to either side raise questions the TRT will not answer. No one will say sacrifice, no one will say dæmon, but there is a growing sense that Weather Wrightby is a visionary of money and engineering who will not let geography or climate or politics block him. His plans are embedded in his company’s name, and they are bigger by far than this road.

Judah, Judah, Judah. He thinks his name. Something will happen.

Products are created or remembered from the Full Years. In the arts there is a languid flux. New Crobuzon is full of building, its docks with ships. Shops carry novel commodities. Beside the poster-kiosks booths appear like wildflowers, in a spate of marketing, die-stamped signs of a man holding his hand to his mouth and shouting.

– What are these? Judah asks and enters. There is a chair, an engine, a range of lettered and numbered buttons, a tube and earpiece. He reads instructions, puts his coin into the slot. There is a list of titles.

THE MAYOR’S NEW YEAR SPEECH.

THE PITY IT’S A DITTY

TREBUSCHAND SYMPHONETTE

And others. He summons a music-hall song, “Rather the Poorhouse,” puts his ear to the trumpet and listens quite rapt to something that has been held back snapping into place, a potential energy unlocked, the unwrapping of sound with a thudding; and then he starts as a noise emerges and it is the song, some unknown chorus girl, the nuances of her voice imprisoned behind crackling but unmistakably a voice and unquestionably singing. Judah can hear all the words.

– And if it means the poorhouse dear that’s right the poor house do you hear that’s what I’ll do to stick with you to keep you near my deary dear. Judah can hear all of them trapped.

It is wax that makes sound physical. He is absolutely fevered by this. The wax can make sound wait and recur.

A new technology, the taming of time. They are using it for the endless, endless recursion of street songs. Judah wants it for another reason. He looks at the notes he made in the swamp. He is all breathless energy, and he feels New Crobuzon ebbing from him.

How many times have I missed the moment power spoke? He thinks of those who have died because he has seen a moment coming, has known that the bounty hunters or the militia or the rails or the gas will come, and has frozen before ineluctability. I am frightened of time.

But time’s heartbeat has been stopped by these entertainers. They have pickled these pasts. His parasite goodness stirs, his saintly innard thing.

Suddenly it is easy to kick New Crobuzon off; his months there become memories effortlessly.

He writes to his few clients. He writes to Pennyhaugh, thanking him for his efforts, wishing him luck, telling him they will see each other again when Judah returns, which he does not believe.

There is one more technique he is eager to achieve. In Kinken he talks to khepri in the workshops, spoken questions and their handwritten answers, has them tell him what they will of their metaclockwork. He buys thaumaturgic batteries and charges them exhaustingly from his own veins.

It takes him a few tries. He sets up a tripwire by the falling-down house where the street-children who love him live. The sky is just changing when the first of them wakes and goes to steal breakfast. Her dirty feet break the filament and with a hum and snap the circuit connects, and then, oh, from the rocks by the door a little figure comes dancing. The girl is quite still and watchful.

The little golem is the size of her hand, and it dances as Judah instructed it to dance when he set his hex, stored his energies, ready for the trigger. It dances toward her. It is made of money. It staggers and falls down and falls apart into coins and the little girl comes forward and picks the money up.

Judah watches her from a doorway. He has stored up a golem and its orders. Has made it wait, for the little snare. He does not know if anyone has done this before.

And he is in the swamps again. There is ice, and the rags of vine from the canopies are hardened, and the animals are sleeping and the swamp is quiet. Miles off is the work camp, and the work train.

The tracks have taken him past towns become corpses. Into lands not tamed but misshapen by the work and the workers, and on at last into the trees on constructed islands, isthmuses of displaced stone, into the fens. Judah goes deep, looking for those who were once his tribe.

He is laden: his new voxiterator and its cylinders, his camera, his guns. He is careful not to sound like a hunter, is careful to make noises as he walks. He sings the songs he has learnt from his stiltspear. He sings the song of the breakfast, the song of hello, the song of a good day. He walks with his hands showing.

When they come for him they are of tribes he does not know, and he sings the song of good neighbours and the song of may I come in? They surround him as trees and stiltspear in flickering and they display their teeth and their weapon-hands, and when he still does not run they hit him and when still he does not run they take him to their hidden village. Their clans and kith-groups have broken down: these are the last of their people.

Children come to stare at him. He looks at them and sees a final generation.

His goodness moves, but Judah knows they are a dead people and nothing will change that. They take him hunting-dams and sires together, no time for traditional divisions-and he hears their uh uh uh, their counterpointed breaths and patted rhythms. The water eddies then ceases to eddy.

He thrusts out the listening trumpet and captures their sound on wax. He listens to it; he winds his handle and hears their rhythm. Judah can see it. He can see its shape. He looks through a lens and is a geographer on the wax continent of the song, tracking chasms, the coiled valley, its peaks and arêtes. He winds slowly, hears the song in sluggish time.

To his shame Judah feels drab among the doomed people. He works as best he can in the horrible wet cold, noting all the layers of the stiltspear songs, every faint and ill-performed bark, but the environs oppress him. No bower in the woods, no green den, but a frosted huddle of mulch and constant war parties, stiltspear out to fight, haunted by the ghosts they will certainly become.

Judah will not watch them. His interior thing jackknifes. He has their soul in his wax. He leaves them, for the second time.

Back to the train. It has moved. He sees a thousand faces he has never seen before. The rails have forked. A town is growing. What a wonderful thing.

Tracks slick and train-polished. They coil into half-built sheds and empty sidings, into yards, past the warping wood of this half-built town they bifurcate. One line juts into the darkest part of the wetland and stops abruptly, hemmed by trees.

Another disappears westward. Men come out of their clearing and they carry dripping hammers, and they carry nails, and they are as stained and sweating as if they have been at war. With each breath they wear and shed momentary scarves of vapour.

As he enters the clearing where Junctiontown grows, Judah’s good thing kicks happy like a baby and he knows he will stay here, that he is back and will be part of what he sees, not a parasite in its trail. He came for the interventions, of which the song is one. And this, this buckling down of rails, is another.

He is a veteran of the railroads, but he has never worked them before. The thing in him cajoles him. It wants him to join this great effort.

Judah follows the rails out of wet trees into hills, and the iron is implacable. The yellow roadbed rises. There are people everywhere. Lines of horses, the smell of fires-grass, wood, lignite. Judah comes through tents, sees them pitched on the roofs of the perpetual train. Remade and cactacae drag ploughs of chain to flatten the ground. Gendarmes walk in crews.

The perpetual train creeps forward with tiny turns of its wheels. Pushed and pulled by four hulks, diamond-stacks splaying and venting from yards up. Vastly bigger than the engines that ride New Crobuzon’s elevated railways. These wilderness versions wear cowcatchers, their headlamps burn vividly, and insects touch like fingertips against the glass. Their bells are like churchbells.

There comes an armoured car with a swaying guntower. An office on wheels, closed wagons for supplies, what seems a parlour, one at least that is blood-fouled, a rolling abattoir, and beyond that a very tall and windowed wagon painted with pinchbeck gilt, slathered with symbols of the gods and Jabber. A church. Four, five enormous carts with tiny doors and rows of little windows, triple-decked bunkrooms thronged with men. Under their own great weight the sleep-coaches sag in the middle as if they have sows’ bellies. There are flat cars, open and covered. And beyond them the crews. The music of hammers.

They are on a flat through the brush. The track-layers are speeding, closing the gap with the graders.

Judah is only one man walking beside the train. There is nothing to mark him except the sense that he is waiting. Judah is lifted. But there is sourness. He sees men and cactus-men muttering and the fear of the Remade tethered near their stockades. The foremen go armed. They did not used to.

Many miles ahead surveyors map out the land according to charts drawn a score of years before by Weather Wrightby and his crews, when the old man was a scout himself. Behind them, in the unland between the train and the explorers, graders make their fat raised line. And behind them the bridge-monkeys push trestles across impassable land, and the tunnellers keep cutting through their rocks.

All this is ahead. Judah carries ties.

This is how the laying goes. Early morning the hundreds of men wake to bells and breakfast in the dining car on coffee and meat from bowls nailed to tables, or eat in vague congregations along the tracks. First are the whole: the hard human labourers; cactus-men from New Crobuzon’s Glasshouse, a few renegades from Shankell.

Behind them, cuffed to their meal by guards, the Remade eat what is left. There are a few women among them, Remade with steam-driven integuments, iron-and-rubber or animal bulk. Those prisoners with boilers hexed to them are issued enough culm and low-grade coke to work.

The trains hang back. Horses or pterabirds or Remade bullocks drag carts from huge piles of rails along the line, to the last of the track, and back. The crews move for each other, industrial dancing. They quickstep in and down, and the hammering, and more rails come, and the carts refill and rejoin the extending road. Ten feet, hundreds of pounds of iron at a time, the road continues.

Jabber, what are we bringing? Judah thinks to see the work of all those many hundreds. What are we doing? He is awed by its raucous and casual splendour.

He sings songs to himself as he works, and invisibly he makes each cold rectangle of wood a limbless golem that for the tiny interval of its ablife strives to cross from the horse-hauled carriage of sleepers to the dust of the bed. Judah feels the thoughtless tugging from each piece, and it helps him. He carries more than he should. When the waterboys come from the train out of sight behind them there is a scramble to drink first, before dust and spit fouls the water. The many Remade wait.

Judah’s tent-mates like him. They listen to his stories of the swamps and tell him of labour troubles.

– Fuckin’ Remade been causin’ trouble too. Over food and that. And the whores’ prices goin’ up and up. Somebody said the money’s dryin’ back home. You know anything about that? Somebody told me prices are fallin’, money’s runnin’ out.

Behind the sleeper-men are the rail-layers and spikers, and behind them the intricate bulk of the train comes swaying snarling closer, tended like some steam-animal god.

Judah sees Remade chastised with whips, and the presence inside him spasms each time so he nearly falls. Once there is a fight between free workers and a Remade man with the pugnacity of the newly changed. The other Remade pull him away very quickly and only huddle under the whole men’s blows. Remade women bring the sleeper-men chow. Judah smiles at them, but they react like stone.

On paydays or thereabout a train comes like a miracle through the thawing swamp. Mostly the free men give over their money in Fucktown and in the stills and hooch-tents. Judah does not go out those nights. He lies in his tent and listens to the echoes of gunshots, fighting, the gendarmes, screams. He takes out his voxiterator and plays the breathy stiltspear songs. He annotates his notebooks.

End o’the Line is a newspaper printed on the work train. It is ill-spelt and salacious, and vulgarly partisan for the TRT who sanction it. All the men read it and argue about its worst points. Twice Judah sees people reading other journals surreptitiously.

He drifts back toward the train. He takes his turn hauling rails.

Judah draws the line. The metal is mercilessly heavy. In the flat light of the sky he feels himself watched by rocks. Each rail almost a quarter of a ton, four hundred rails to the mile. He lives by numbers.

Crews work in cadres, all convict Remade or all freemen, no mixing. With tongs or their own metal limbs they slide the rails out, five men or three cactus or big Remade to each, and lay them down with midwife gentleness. Gaugemen space the irons out, and they in turn are gone, and the spikers move in.

Judah makes each rail momentarily an absurdly shaped golem. No others on his team feel the faint fishlike flutters of the metal as it tries to help him. He lays down angles in the random land. He grows strong. Once he sleeps on the roof of the train to know what it is like. Men have tethered goats up there and even make carefully corralled fires.

A tinker-showman works the length of the road, performing. Judah watches him make his own tiny dancing dirt figures, but they are not golems. They are only matter tugged as if by hand at a little distance, direct manipulations. They have no bounded reality, no ablife, no mindless mind to follow instruction, any more than puppets do.

Slogans are written on the train and the rocks. Each morning they appear, some nothing but crudities to shock the earth, some personal, some polemical, screw you wrightby. Twice when the bell brings Judah out of sleep into the dark morning posters are slathered to the train and to trees.

Some are very simple: FAIR PAY, UNIONS, FREEDOM FOR THE REMADE, and below a little doubled r. Others are a mass of tiny writing. Judah tries to read them while the foremen tear them down.

RUNAGATE RAMPANT.

TRACKS’-END SUPPLEMENT 3.

The death toll on the TRT Railroad continues to rise, as safety is spurned in the rush for money. The rails go down on the bones of workers, free and Remade…

– What in Jabber’s name these fuckers on about? one man says. -Who ain’t for fair pay? And if there are them as wants guilds I ain’t got no problem, but free Remade? They’re fucking criminals, or don’t these dozy fuckers know that?

Judah is beguiled by the bravery of the dissidents. They creep at night when the gendarmes patrol. If they were caught they would not walk away. They would be made part of the landscape.

Runagate Rampant s are left under tables, on rocks. It is poor distribution, but it is all they have. Judah takes copies, and reads when he is alone.

He is only just aware of the dramas of the line. He works, hardly looking up at a rain-patter of shots down the rail. Later he hears that a joint war party of fReemade and striders, a long way east of their supposed territory, attacked the crews in the rear. They were driven off, but the gendarmes are concerned that so proud a race as striders are allying with the punk fReemade against the trains.

With the weeks and the miles and tons comes spring and the slow lengthening of days. The land around the iron road becomes sparse. Judah huddles with his crew behind an overturned cart while a strider family hurls indistinct missiles. The guntower of the perpetual train swivels and lays down craters like flowers.

Judah reads Runagate Rampant.

The borinatch, striders, have reason to hate the TRT. Their land is being stolen by the businesses of New Crobuzon, and the state and militia will not be far behind. Who has not heard the stories of Nova Esperium and the carnage of the natives? Each dead railworker is a tragedy, but the blame lies not with the borinatch, whose revenge is misplaced but whose fears are real. The blame lies with Weather Wrightby, and the Mayor, and the moneyed classes of New Crobuzon suckling at the teat of corruption. We say: For a people’s railway, and peace with the natives!

Fucktown is close. Judah is not a customer there, preferring his own right hand or the guilty shut-eyed clutching of men on men in the hollows each Chainday night to the boredom of the whores.

Each week in the stockades where the Remade are kept there is a concession to conviviality, drunken parties where Remade women are given to Remade men and cheap drink is given to all under the aegis of the overseers. Judah watches the Remade women in the aftermath being bathed in the cold river, screaming at the temperature and drinking purgative to stop pregnancies. One guard oversees this. He is gentle with them. He dresses their bite marks and bruises, and punishes the Remade men who hurt too much or often. -It ain’t right how some of them women is used, he says.

It is common for the wages train to be delayed. A day or two and there are only grumbles, but sometimes as long as a week goes without money. Three times when this happens there is a strike. By some chaos of democracy the track-layers put down their tools and block the train until they have their shekels in their pockets. They are nonplussed by their own mass, by their numbers. Hundreds of muscled men, the tall green brawn of cactacae emerging from them. The prostitutes, the surgeons, clerks, scholars, off scouts, and hunters come to watch them.

Judah stands among them, ashudder with excitement. He is unlocked by this, and is briefly at one with the thing inside him. An intervention, he thinks. He is never among the first wave to put his tools down-like Thick Shanks the cactus spiker who Judah thinks is a Runagater, like Shaun Sullervan the pugnacious alltradesman-but he is always among the second.

In response to the picketing, the Remade are worked hard. The foremen assure the strikers once that every effort is being made to expedite the money, and then they turn to the Remade, who are made to make up for the strike. The chained and altered men rock from blows, from the hexes of thaumaturge-guards; they drip under the weight of their own limbs as well as the loads they carry.

– Fucking useless, one overseer screams and beats a fallen man who wears many delicate eyes on his hands. -What fucking point is there making more Remades if they’re peacocks like you? I tell ’em every godsdamned week we need Remade built for industry, not for their sodding whims. Get up and fucking haul.

The free men and cactus workers watch the punitive work, and cannot stop the road unrolling. They wince and watch.

– Stupid scab bastards, a cactus-man says.

They pity the Remade, but cannot forgive them breaking the strikes. The pay train always arrives in the end.

An absurd orgy of speculation, the financiers swimming like grease-whales in a slick of stolen and invented cash, prices for land and the stocks of the TRT soaring. It will not last. As returns slow, as the stench of TRT corruption and government collusion grows overpowering, the weakness at the base will show. When the rich grow afraid, they get nasty. We say: A government for need not greed!

The Remade draw a line. One of them is beaten by the guards and dies, and though he is not the first he was old enough and liked enough that many Remade refuse to work the next day, and carry the corpse in a raucous funeral. The unprecedented situation is digested; messages are expedited back and forth along the track.

The intransigent Remade are ranged alongside the train. The gendarmes take up positions. The guntower on the perpetual train turns.

Oh my gods, Judah thinks.

– Anyone willing to return to work now, raise your hand, a captain says. The Remade are confused. He does not wait more than five seconds before turning his back. He signals someone and the tower fires.

A shell arcs into the mid of the Remade. Later, Judah will realise its load must have been reduced, not to send burning shrapnel into the train itself. Now all he hears and sees is the fire and explosion, the circle of bloody clearance in the Remade.

A strong accomplished man drives a spike down in three strikes. Many men take four swings: cactacae and the most augmented steam-strong Remade two. There are three prodigious and respected cactus-men who can push a spike home in one blow. There is one Remade woman who can do this, too, but in her the ability is judged grotesque.

Judah is a free spiker. No one on the TRT line is higher. He makes each spike a golem, tasked to hide in the earth, so that with each blow it strives to embed itself.

He hears the metal slaps of his maul as the breaths of a stiltspear. Ah ah ah. Ah ah ah. It sends him back to his voxiterator, listening and teasing apart the elements of the sounds, the overlapping beats. Judah sees Thick Shanks talking to someone without looking at them, standing with his back to the Remade stockade, a refigured man behind the chains lounging as if by chance but Judah knows he is listening.

It is in the company of Thick Shanks that Judah finds Ann-Hari again.

Judah courts the friendship of the militant cactus-man. They talk of the railroad and the uncanny dust-rock landscape and the dry cold of this late winter, and of the rumours that creep down the tracks to them like boxcars. Myrshock’s crews striking again, Cobsea’s government falling again with its meaningless regularity.

They smoke and share drugs around the Fucktown fires, and some of the women join them. It is in the shaking fireside shadows that Judah sees Ann-Hari. She is dressed in the functional provocation of a whore; she sees him as he sees her, but where he stands and cries out and runs to her, she only smiles.

She lets Judah accompany her. Ann-Hari the prostitute has become a nurse, an organiser, a grassroots madame. She has become a counsellor, her strangeness-knowing and credulous in some pastoral combination-meaning the younger and newer girls speak to her for help. Ann-Hari speaks to Shaun and to Thick Shanks. Ann-Hari organises and intervenes.

Judah watches her at the chain stockade. She comes at night to a place where the guards are not watching, and does as Thick Shanks has done, her back to the fence, a Remade man behind her, pretending to be there by chance.

Another man is there, a boy, less than twenty years old. He is propelled to Ann-Hari by the panic that sometimes overtakes Remade. Judah comes forward. In these shocks of psychotic self-

revulsion they can hurt themselves or others, and the boy could reach Ann-Hari through the chain. But he hears what they are saying to each other, and he slows.

– I’ll die I’ll die, I can’t go on, I’m cold, look at me, the boy says. He scrabbles at the outsize insect arms that radiate from his neck like a ruff, that clutch and scratch at him. -I’ll run away.

– Where will you run? Ann-Hari says.

– I’ll follow the rails home.

Ann-Hari’s contact is watching. He has an integument of pipes and pistons emerging from his flesh, a steam-powered skeleton inside and outside.

– You’ll follow the rails.

– I’ll go home. I’ll join the fReemade.

– Go home to New Crobuzon? A Remade. You want to go there? Or you go fReemade? Scrabble like a bandit. They miles from here, they don’t come so close. You be killed by gendarmes within twenty mile.

The boy is quiet for a minute. -I go south. I go north. West.

– South is the sea. Hundreds of miles away. You know how to fish? North into an empty plain and to the mountains? West? Boy, west is the cacotopic zone. You choose that?

– No…

– No.

– But if I stay I die…

– Maybe. Ann-Hari turns and looks at the boy, and Judah can see her seeing him, and the thing in Judah uncoils. -Plenty of us going to die on this road. Maybe you die, be buried like a freeman under the iron. Maybe not. She reaches out and holds the chain so she is all but touching him. His insect neck-legs quiver. -You alive now. Stay alive for me.

Judah cannot speak. He does not think she has ever seen the boy before.

Ann-Hari does not lie with him, though she will kiss him, for long breathless moments, which she does not do with anyone else. But when he wants more she charges with a principled resolution that disturbs him.

– I ain’t a client, he tells her. She shrugs. He can see it is not venality that motivates her.

Spring again, and there is a strong smell of burning metal by the points. It has been slow going in the cold, but now as men shed clothes the pace improves and the railmen get closer to the graders.

They are in the great vegas that surround Cobsea. The perpetual train comes with the growing heat into a merciless flat region of alkali dust that sets in eyes and mouths like rheum, that stinks like embalming fluid. It seems to hold warmth so the crews go from winter cold and are pitched into a dry heat. The train-town is bedraggled. The herds of beef-animals develop sores. Their meat is foul. There is a constant caravan of water carts going miles to siphon off the streams and rivers they find.

The land is alive. It hollows beneath them, reveals the craw and feeders of huge dust-sucking predators. The land bucks. There is an earthstorm, disks of rock careering skyward, buffeting the train. -We’re in the badlands now. Everyone is saying it.

Research crews return from the desert of skin-soft dust, whipping their camel into spitty terror, and in their cart lies a man stiff with the muck that coats them all, no, he is a statue, no, he is covered with accretions, tumours of stone. They embed him, a man-shape whose lips are trembling.

– It came out of the ground…

– We thought it was mist…

– We thought it was smoke from a fire…

It is smokestone that has vented up and quickly set. They have to chisel him free. Flesh comes with the carapace.

Days later, the perpetual train comes to the residue of that drift. There are languid striae of smoke, utterly still. Stone in impossible spindly shapes, wafting, insinuate billows, coil and smog recoil. Harder than basalt, rock fumes.

It has drifted across the roadbed, and the biggest men take their mallets to the new formations. They grip fossilized moments of wind, and it looks as if they clamber the sides of a cloud. The smokestone comes away in tiny shards, and over the hours they clear a path just wide enough for the tracks. They split a passage through fog.

They are harried by fReemade who raid with what seems rampaging petulance. The fReemade are not the enemy! says a new spate of handwritten posters, but it is hard for the workers to hear that as they see the aftermaths of the attacks.

Judah cannot understand what the fReemade want. They die in the raids, too. Judah does not see it, but he hears that a litter of fReemade bodies and their nearly dead are laid across the line for the perpetual train to dismember. They steal odds of iron, machinery, a few cattle. Can it be worth it?

The ground kinks toward higher rocks and trees. The grading crews are nearby, slowed by the sudden gnarlings in the way; they have met tunnellers who have been rasping out a hollow in granite for two years, and who have not yet come through.

A tide approaches, a rill of brown. It is a forestful of insects fleeing the graders and the cutters.

Men swear and try to cover themselves. The insects buffet the crews, millions of tough bodies: their chitin cuts. They are big as cactus thumbs. Mindlessly they fight the train. They immolate themselves in the gears and beneath the wheels, and the tracks become slippery with oily carnage. Pipes vent sand for traction.

From behind the perpetual train comes a welling-up of shrieks as the insects reach the whores and few beggars who have come this far, the cattle, the economy stretched back on the rails.

Through the unhomely little forest. The graders are ensnarled with these skeletal trees. The earth has fought them and they have slowed. The graders meet the tunnellers and the bridgemen, the train and track-layers meet the graders, the whore and mendicant followers meet the train, and everything stops.

Land wrinkles into a lip of stone two hundred feet high, too steep for rails. The roadbed pushes into a gaping, almost-finished tunnel. Judah climbs the rise. On the other side it is sheer, edging a ravine. He can see the nearly finished bridge, girders emerging two hundred feet below him, marking where the tunnel will break through. There are men suspended in baskets, tamping charges into the holes they drill, hauled away as fuses spit.

There are Remade everywhere on the bridge. The scaffold reaches down to the crevasse bottom. The bridgemen wave up at the newcomers above. There is a great convivial joining.

Crews have worked months in the bone-coloured trees. They are like men made of the dust. The rust-eaters and the stokers on the huge engine are pied with the dirt of travel. Clerks and scientists lean from their cabs as the train stops; the wyrmen above wheel. The train’s semiferal cats highstep.

There is a huge celebration that night, the tunnellers and bridgemen delirious with new company. Judah drinks. He dances to the drone of the hurdy-gurdy with Ann-Hari, and she with him, and then with Shaun Sullervan, and with Thick Shanks. They smoke; they drink. Men are speechless from the cheap drugs and hexed moonshine they have concocted in stills.

There are differences in the crews. Judah sees how the tunnellers and the bridgemen who have been trapped so long in the badland that they have become part of it do not differentiate as his workmates do. That though the Remade here are billeted separately, and there is some effort made to segregate them, the punitive landscape here does not support divisions so strongly as among his own. It is as if the iron link to New Crobuzon conducts its prejudices. The iron-road Remade watch the local Remade. Judah sees them see, sees the gendarmes and the overseers see.

Judah and his team lay tracks into the tunnel, up to its clawed end. They move very slowly. The men who have lived like worms step aside into wax-smeared alcoves. They see by fires and lux hexes in the stone. Judah’s friends are cowed. They blink under the pale wide eyes of the diggers. The slap of their hammers is horrible and loud in that darkness.

There is nothing else for them to do. They clean the train, uselessly, scout the land a few miles, widen a well. But they cannot join the tunnellers, and they cannot build the bridge, and they can only wait, play cards, fuck and fight.

The graders can work. They can continue cutting beyond the ravine, toward Cobsea, still more than a hundred miles of hard wilderness away. But before they go, they want to be paid, and once again there is no money.

Very quickly, everyone knows there has been another clogging in the cash-pipes. The tunnellers are enraged. They have been working on promises, are owed months of backpay they thought the train would bring. The graders refuse to continue. It has been weeks since any trains from home have reached tracks’-end.

What is it? It is not a slowdown or confrontation; nothing is happening except an accretion of anger, looks held too long. The tunnel-headers gouge while the newcomers cut down dirty trees to make poor ties.

A tunnel-man is injured-an everyday terror in this blackpowder land, but he responds with an outrage as if it is the first time such a thing has happened. -Lookit, he says holding up his blooded hand. The red on the white dust that coats him is vivid. -They letting us fucking die here.

That night Judah goes to the hollow where the men who fuck men gather, and when he comes back Thick Shanks is waiting. -Meeting going on, he says. -Not us, them. He indicates the lights in the perpetual train’s guntower. -We got to think. They sending riders back along the line, telling Wrightby to send money now.

There is a fight the next day with sledgehammers, between two cactus-men so massive the overseers can only watch the vegetable men crush each other’s wood-fibre bones. -Something’s happening, says Ann-Hari to Judah. They sit on a blackened half-rock split by fire and cold water and the strikes of the biggest Remade man. -The girls are frightened.

A scattered few handwritten Runagate Rampant s are left at the mouth of the hill. Each day and night another fight or some petty act of anger, a headlight of the perpetual train shattered, obscenities carved into the paint.

Daily the graders gather and refuse to cross the ravine. Their foremen find other work for them. The graders are not striking, but are refusing to do what they are supposed to. They will sweep away the detritus of the tunnel, and carry tools, but if they cross that cut they will be in perhaps the last part of their digging; they will be dragging the roadbed the last hundred-some miles to Cobsea. And they will not, not yet, not now while the iron road withholds their money. That would be a surrender.

And then there is a night. The length of the train and at the black of the tunnel there are fires. The roamstars are bright, crawling by their sedentary cousins. Judah has made a golem from thistles.

– What’s that?

Judah looks up. People are staring, heading up the rock hill. They seem pulled; they move in little stuttering steps.

– What is it? Judah says, but the man he asks only shouts and points up the hill. -Look look! he says. -Come, it’s there.

There is a noise along the ridgeback of the slope as if the stones and the very bushes are resonant, are singing an aberrant hymn. People on the incline shout and begin to scramble back again, in a river of scree. Falling men careen into their friends. Judah grips roots and keeps his feet.

The tremulous song, the sound of the wilderness anxious, is loud. There is a spider above him. No no that is not, that is not a spider that great shape that cannot be, it is the size of a tree, a fat tree with branches splayed in perfect symmetry that cannot be but that is what it is, it is a spider, so much bigger than the biggest man.

– Weaver.

– Weaver.

They say it. Their voices are beyond fear, quite stripped by awe.

Weaver. The spiders that are not gods but are nearly, that are something so other, so much farther than men or xenian, than dæmon, than archon, that they are unthinkable, their power, their motives, their meanings as opaque as iron. Creatures who fight murder die and reconfigure everything for beauty, for the intricacy of the web that is the world they see, a concatenation of threads in impossible spiral symmetry.

Songs about Weavers fill Judah’s head. Nonsense-fears for children- He promised me her hand in mine, / then smothered her in all his twine, / the Weaver swine -absurdities and pantomime foolery. Looking up at this thing glowing unlight or is it light over the rock edge he knows the songs for the atoms, the infinitely tiny specks of stupidity they are.

The Weaver hangs in complex stillness. Body tarry black, a teardrop globe, a glintless head. Four long legs angled down to end in dagger-feet, four shorter up, as if in the centre of a web, hanging in the air. Ten, twelve feet long, and now, what, what is it, turning slowly, slightly, as if suspended, and the world seems snagged. Judah feels a tug as if the world is tethered by silks the Weaver is gathering as it turns.

Judah makes a debased throat sound. It is dragged out of him by this Weaver’s unseen threads. It is a kind of unbidden worship.

All along the slope the men and women of the railway stand seared by what they see, and some try to get away and some stupid few crawl closer as if to an altar but most, like Judah, only stand still and watch.

– Don’t touch it, don’t fucking go near it, it’s a godsdamned Weaver, someone is saying, someone a long way below. The spider-thing turns. The rocks continue to sing, and now the Weaver joins them.

Its voice comes out from under stones. Its voice is a shudder in dust.

… ONE AND ONE AND ONE AND TWO AND RED RED-BLACK RED-BLUE BLACK THROUGH HILLCUT WIRETRAWL AGASH AGASP AGAPE LEGATE AND CONSTRUCT MY TIES MY EYES CHILDER KINDER WHAT STONECUT AND DUSTDRUM YOU SOUND A SLOW ATRAP TRAPPING A RHYTHM IN TOOL AND STONE…

Its voice becomes a bark in time, a beating that makes the little rocklets dance on the slope.

…EAT MUSIC EAT SOUND PUSH THE PULSE PULSILOGUM THE MAGIC…

Thoughts and the textures of things are snared and pulled in to the Weaver.

…GRIND AND GROUND CARE AND UNCRUSH WHAT IS BEFORE UNCRUSH UNCRUSH YOUR NAME IS RAKAMADEVA ROCK MY DEVIL YOU FLINCH INCH ATWARD OF WHAT WILL BE YOU BUILD…

And the Weaver pulls in all its arms and drops lightly unreeled from its turning point in the air still sucking in what light there is and bloating on it as if it is the only real thing and Judah and the ground he stands upon and the threadbare trees he clutches are all old images, sun-bleached, on which a vivid spider walks.

The Weaver picks up its legs one by knifepoint one and treads at the edge of the ravine and it dances along it as the uncoloured women and men edge behind it and it turns its head in sly playful slide to stare at them with a constellation of eyes like black eggs. Each time it does the people who follow it freeze and haul back until it turns again and moves on and they follow it as if bound to.

It slips over the rim of the cliff and they run to see the arachnid thing pick dainty as a high-shoed girl down the sheer. It runs, it begins to run, until its huge absurd shape careers downward and it is by the roots to the bridge, the girders that spit out from the rock halfway to earth, and the Weaver leaps out and without passing through intervening space is on the half-done stump of construction, and small in the distance it begins to spin, to turn cartwheel, becomes a rimless wheel and skitters the girders where in the day the Remade bridge-monkeys hang and build.

…AND BREAK AND BREAK… The Weaver’s voice comes as loud as if it were next to Judah…PUSH BRUSH THEY AWAIT WITH BREATHBAIT AND ADRIP FOR YOUR INTERVENTION DEVILS OF THE MOTION ELATION CITATION CITE THE SITE TOWER SIGH NIGH VEER STAR AND CLEAR YOU ARE YOU ARE FINE IN TIME YON OF THE PLAINS STEAM-MAN… And the Weaver is gone and the weak night light bleeds back into Judah’s eyes. The Weaver is gone and it takes many seconds of staring at the spider-shaped absence on the bridge until the men and women of the railroad turn away. Someone begins to cry.

The next day a handful of men are dead. They stare up at their canvas or at the sky with eyes quite washed of all colour and with smiles as if of quiet pleasure.

There is an old man long gone mad who has come quietly with the railroad for miles, sitting while the hammermen swing and the whores sell relief, a man become a mascot, become a piece of luck. After the Weaver he stands above the tunnel mouth and declaims in glossolalia and then in words. He says he is a prophet of the spider, and though they do not obey the commands he gives them the workers of the iron road watch him with hesitant respect.

He walks among the forced idleness of the track-layers. He shouts at the tunnellers to put down their picks and go nude and run away north into the unknown places of the continent. He shouts at them to copulate with the spiders in the dust. They are all draped in threads from the Weaver’s spinnerets. They are knotted in a new configuration.

– We saw a Weaver, Judah says. -Most people never see that. We saw a Weaver.

The next day the women strike.

– No, they say to the men who come to their tents, and who stare at them uncomprehending. The women stand together in a militia, holding what weapons they have. A picket of rags and petticoats.

There are scores of them, determined and surprised by themselves. They turn away the hammermen, tunnel-men, gendarmes. The rebuffed gather. A counterdemonstration of surly lustful men. They mutter. Some go to masturbate behind rocks; some simply go. Many stay.

The dust of the two gatherings rises as they face each other. The gendarmes come-they do not quite know what to do; the women are doing nothing but refusing, the men are only waiting. -No pay, Ann-Hari says, -no lay. No pay no lay no pay no lay.

– We’ll not do it no more for promises, she says to Judah. -Since we come here and there ain’t no money, they been doing and doing it on credit. Our men, our gendarmes, now the new lads. And they ain’t had women here for a long time; they hurt us, Judah. They come and say put it on my tab girl and you can’t say no and you know they ain’t going to pay.

– Cyra lost her eye, she said. -Some tunnel-man comes, put it on my tab, she tells him no and he knocks her so hard it splits her eye. Belladona had her arm broke. No pay no lay, Judah. Money first from now.

The women defend Fucktown. They have patrols with sticks and stilettos; there is a frontline. They take turns to watch the children. There must be those among them who are not happy with the confrontation, but they are quietened into solidarity. Ann-Hari and the others swish their skirts and laugh while the men watch. Judah is not the only man who is a friend to these infuriated whores. He, Shaun Sullervan, Thick Shanks, a clutch of others watch together.

– Come on girls what’s this then, says a foreman. -What’s the story? What are you after? We need you, beauties. He smiles.

– Won’t be beat down anymore, John, Ann-Hari says. -Won’t take promises. You pay; until then no lay.

– We ain’t got the money Ann you know that sweetheart…

– Ain’t my problem. Have your man Wrightby pay his men, then… She jigs her hips.

That night a group of men try with something between lightheartedness and anger to push their way past the picket, but the women block them and beat them hard and the men retreat holding split heads and screaming in astonishment as much as pain. -Stupid fuckpig bitch, one man screams. -You stupid bitch, you smashed my fucking head, bitch.

They do not let the men touch them the next day and there is no longer novelty or near-humour to the situation. A man takes out his cock, shakes it at them. -Want payment? he shouts. -I’ll give you payment. Eat this you fucking dirty moneygrab sluts. There are those in the crowd of men who have enough affection for the women they have travelled with that they do not like that, and they hush him, but there are others who applaud.

– Get money, and come in, the women shout. -Don’t blame us, horny bastards.

There is another attempt on their camp. This time it is led by the tunnellers. It is a rape squad intent on punishment. But there is an alarm, a panic from Remade women sent to clean clothes near the Fucktown tents. They see the men creeping and yell, and the men are on them quickly and attacking to silence them. A squad of the prostitutes come running.

Men are stabbed, a woman’s face is broken, and when the prostitutes have overcome the intruders one of the Remade women is found concussed and leaking from her head. The whole women hesitate briefly before they carry her in to tend her.

In the morning the tunnel-men strike. They gather at the tunnel mouth. The foremen run to negotiate. The tunnellers have their spokesman: a thin man, a weak geothaumaturge, his hands stained basalt black by the stone he makes into slurry.

He says, -We go back in when them girls let us back in, too, and his men laugh. -We’ve got needs, he says.

The prostitutes and tunnellers have made demands. The graders will not work. The track-layers cannot, and only sit in the sun and play dice or fight. It is becoming violent like a prairie town. The perpetual train sits. The gendarmes and foremen confer. There is rain, but it is hot and unrefreshing.

– Mate with the spiders, the old man says. -It’s time to change.

Everything is still. Only the bridge is being built, and now in the evenings when the bridge crews come off their work, some cross the ravine to their sister encampment, because they want to see the trouble. They come-hotchi in spines, apes trained and constrained by Remaking, Remade men given simian bodies. They come to see the strikes. They tour from one to another.

The newspapermen on the perpetual train, who have been despatching their stories when there are messengers, suddenly have something new to cover. One takes a heliotype of the picket of women.

– I don’t know what I’ll say, he says to Judah. -They don’t want me talking about tarts in The Quarrel.

– Take all the plates you can, says Judah. -This is something you should remember. This is important, he says, and it is his oddity, his beatific innard that speaks. His breath leaves him a moment at the thought that he can hear its words.

– We are all spiders’ children, says the mad old man.

There are handwritten Runagate Rampant s on the rocks.

This is not three strikes, or two strikes and a half. This is one strike, against one enemy, with one goal. The women are not our opponents. The women are not to be blamed. No pay no lay they tell us, and that can be our slogan too. We will not lay another tie, another rail, until the money promised is ours. They say it, and we say it too. We say: No pay no lay!

When the overseers and gendarmes realise that the disparate groups are not tiring of the strike, will not exhaust themselves with recrimination, there is a change. Judah feels it when he rises and sees the foremen moving with new purpose.

It is already hot, he is already sweating, when unbreakfasted he goes to the tunnel mouth with others from the idle workforce. The tunnellers are arranged like a fighting unit, and they carry their picks. The foremen and gendarmes are before them, with a corps of tethered Remade.

– Come on now, says an overseer. Judah knows him. He is the man they bring in to do unpopular things. There is a delegation from the prostitutes, twelve women walking close together, headed by Ann-Hari. The tunnellers begin derisive calls. The women only watch. Behind them all the train wheezes like a bull.

The overseer stands before the Remade. He turns his back on the strikers and looks at the motley Remade in their integuments of foreign flesh and metal. Judah sees Ann-Hari whisper to Thick Shanks and another man, sees them nod without turning. They are staring at the Remade who have been gathered. One of them, a man with pipes that emerge from his body and enter it again, stares back at Thick Shanks and moves his head. He stands by a much younger man with chitined legs emerging from his neck.

– Pick up the picks, the foreman says to the Remade. -Go into the tunnel. Cut the rock. We’ll instruct you.

And there is a silence and no motion. The gendarmes have interposed between the strikers and the Remade.

– Take the picks. Go into the tunnel. Follow it to the end. Cut it.

There is silence again a while. The men of the perpetual train know how the Remade are being used, and some begin to shout scab, scab preemptively. But the shouts die because none of the Remade are moving.

– Take the picks.

When there is no movement still, the overseer strikes with his whip. It lands loudly and with the blossoming of a scream. A Remade drops, hands to his opened face. There are fear noises, and some of the Remade start and begin to move but one of them makes a low command and they shudder and hold, except one who breaks and runs for the tunnel and shouts, -I didn’t want to and I won’t, you can’t make me, it’s a stupid plan, it’s a stupid plan.

The others do not look at him and he goes into the dark. The young man with the insect-leg tumours is shaking. He is looking hard at the ground. Behind him, the piped man is saying something.

– Take the picks. The overseer moves closer to the Remade.

Something rises in Judah. There is muttering and an anger around him.

– Take the picks or I’ll have to intervene to stop troublemakers. Take the picks and go in or-

People are beginning to shout now but the overseer speaks over them.

– or I will have to take action against… He looks slow and ostentatious over the terrified Remade, one by one, pauses while he looks at the piped man, the only one who even momentarily meets his eyes, then grabs the trembling boy, who cries and stumbles. -Or I will have to take action against this ringleader, the overseer says.

There is a moment without speech or sound, and he motions two of the gendarmes, and as they move in the crowd begins to shout again, and the gendarmes beat the young man down.

And as if he were with the stiltspear singing, Judah sees in time gone thick. He watches the descent of the billy clubs, the fumbling of the boy who covers his head and his chitin embellishments. He has time to watch the moving of birds above them. He has time and a fascination for the faces of the crowd.

They are stricken and cannot look away. The piped Remade man who was the boy’s protector has his teeth set, the track-layers are opened up with pity, the tunnel-men stare in the shadow of the rockforms with bleak astonishment, discomfort, and everywhere Judah looks as the cuffs land and the gendarmes hold back the crowd he sees a hesitation. Everyone is hesitating and tensed and looking at each other and at the howling Remade boy and the batons and looking at each other again and even the gendarmes are hesitating, each blow taking a moment longer to land than the previous, and their colleagues raise their weapons in uncertainty and there is a swelling of voices.

Judah sees Ann-Hari, held back by her friends, scratching the air, and she looks as if she will die of rage. And people hover as if steeling to dive into something cold, look to each other still, wait, wait, and Judah feels the thing in him reach out, the oddness and the good in him reach out and push them, and it makes him smile even in this blooded heat, and they move.

It is not Judah who moves first-he never moves first-or the Remade with the pipes, nor Thick Shanks nor Shaun but someone quite unknown in the forefront of the tunnel-men. He steps out and raises his arm. It is as if he pushes through a tension that has settled on the world, breaks it and pours out into time like water breaching its meniscus and others come with him, and there is Ann-Hari running forward and the Remade intervening to hold back the nightsticks and whips of the gendarmes, and Judah himself is running now and wrapping his work-hardened arms around the throat of a uniformed man.

Judah’s ears are stopped with a hot tinnitus, and all that he can hear is the beat of his own rage. He turns and fights as he has learnt to fight in brawls along the sides of the rails. He does not hear but feels the firing of guns as shoves in the air. Energy boils in him in hexes, and when he grips a gendarme, in a moment of instinct he makes the man’s shirt a golem that wriggles on his body. Judah runs and fights, and what he touches that is lifeless he gives instants of ablife and makes obey his orders, to struggle.

The gendarmes have flintlocks and whips, but are outnumbered. They have thaumaturges, but they are not the militia: there are no spit gobbets of energy or transformations on the strikers, only base charms the railroaders can match and survive.

There are more cactus-men among the track-layers than there are cactus overseers. They run huge through the TRT guards and lay green fists on them, breaking them easily. They shield their friends; the gendarmes are not carrying rivebows that can slice them apart.

The piped Remade man drags the body of the insect-altered boy. The man pulls coal from his pocket and smears it into his mouth, leaving his lips black. He runs. The gendarmes who can still move are retreating. Others litter the ground, beside broken Remade and free men. It is so fast.

Judah is running. He drips. Gendarmes swing their weapons and are overcome by Remade out of shackles. They shoot and Remade fall. By the train, the gendarmes are regrouping.

– We have to-Judah shouts, and the piped Remade man is beside him and nodding and shouting too, and there are those who obey him: Remade and free whole men and women, there is Ann-Hari, there is Shaun, and they take their orders from this nondescript Remade man.

– You, he says to Judah. -With me.

They round the curve through dead trees and there is the perpetual train. It breathes its smoke and it spits steam as they come closer in mangy army. Its cowcatcher is splayed like ruined teeth. Its chimney flares, seems a funnel sucking up the energy of the sun. And all over figures jump from it and to it, from the bunks on its roof, from the trucks where the free men sleep, from all of it, staring as those who approach, gendarmes and strikers, shout. The two sides try to win them over as they run.

– they, they-

– get down, it’s the bastard Remade-

– they shot us down, they beat us-

– disperse you bastards or I’ll godsdamned shoot-

– stop them, Jabber, fuck stop them fuck’s sake-

The gendarmes fringe the train in raggedy formation, guns out, and the surge of the curious and the angry strikers-tunnellers, prostitutes, Remade-skitters to a stop. The gendarme retreat to their teetering guntower.

Now there is a long moment between a standoff and a confusion. Ann-Hari and the piped man approach. He looks emotionless. Ann-Hari does not. Behind them is a pitching army of Remade. They do not march, they shake their legs, some still ringed by the fringes of shackles opened with stones and stolen keys. They do not march, they almost fall with every step, and the sun makes them vivid in mongrel colours. The sun cuts sharp edges around the weapons they have made.

They raise slivers of the fence that has contained them. They swing the chains that tethered their feet. They grip shivs, pot shards embedded in wood. There are scores, and then hundreds of them.

– Jabber who let them out, what you done? someone shouts hysterically.

The thing in Judah swells up to see them. It bloats him; it moves like a baby in his belly. Judah shouts for them, a welcome, an alarum.

Men on all fours become bison-men, carrying men wrapped about with limbs, and women walking on elongated arms made of animals’ parts, and men stamping on piston legs like jackhammers come alive, and women all over whiskers, or with finger-thick tendrils feeling through their skin, and tusks stolen from boars and carved from marble, and mouths become interlocked gears, and switching tails of cats and dogs frilling waists like skirts and sweating in inks from Remade glands and astream with a rainbow mess, and this aggregate of criminals, this motley comes closer in freedom.

The gendarmes have withdrawn. They are in their armoured cab, in the guntower. Some have grabbed mules and horses from the tracks’-end corral and gone.

– No no no.

Many among the tunnellers and the track-layers are aghast at the freeing of the Remade. No one is sure who did it, how. Some stolen keys, a moment that went through the kraal of tethered criminals (though still there are a few who will not emerge, who cling to their irons).

– This ain’t what we’re here for. This ain’t what this was. A tunneller is shouting at Shaun Sullervan, disdaining to speak to Ann-Hari or the host of Remade stretching their limbs. -I didn’t want that boy to be beat, it ain’t nothing he’d done, but this is stupid. What are you going to fucking do? Eh? We have…

He looks at the blinking Remade, who stare at him. He twists a little.

– No offence, mates. He is speaking to the Remade now. -Look, it ain’t my fucking business. You seen we won’t let them beat you down no more. But, but, you can’t, you got to go back, this is… He indicates the guntower.

It is late. There is a siege and a strange siege calm.

– People have fucking died, the man says. -They’ve died.

The boy with the insect additions is dead. Other Remade were dropped by bullets. A cactus-man was split by a moment of flying wood. Gendarmes have been piled up, broken on mallets, on spikes, on the ersatz weapons of the railroad. There are dazed mourners by trench graves.

Hunters return. Prostitutes sit on rocks in that deserted middle of the world and watch the train. Its firemen and brakemen agitate as the giddy Remade fill the boiler and pull levers and those with boilers of their own steal the high-grade coke. People mill bewildered and ask each other what has happened. They look at the sun and the shifting tree corpses and wait for someone to come into control.

A strange angst because there is such calm here now and it cannot sustain. The gendarmes have taken the guntower and one other car: the Remade have the rest of the train. The iron tower cracks in the heat, and the weapon at its top swivels.

The free men want to treat Shaun and Thick Shanks as leaders of a Remade rabble, but Ann-Hari stands with them, and with the pipe-woven man, whose name Judah learns is Uzman, and with other Remade.

– Take your boys back in. What you think they’re doing in there? the free workers’ speaker says. He points at the tower. -Getting ready is what. To take you. Now, we made our point. If you go back now, they’ll pay us up, and there’ll be no, no penalties…

He speaks to Shaun, but it is Uzman answers.

– You’ll get your money, and you’re telling us to give this back? The train?

He laughs, and the craziness of what the free men are asking is very evident. They want these Remade to unfree themselves. Uzman laughs. -We ain’t decided yet what we do here, he says. -But we decide.

There are shouted arguments like street meetings, out of the guntower’s lines, between Remade with Remade, layers, rust-eaters together, the tunnel-men. From the guntower come noises of industry. The strikers watch from behind blockades. The moon is split near exactly in half. It is waning. In its light and the lanterns’ and the phosphor of lux hexes, the men and women of the perpetual train gather.

– We can’t just wait, says Thick Shanks. -People are running already. Gods know how many gendarmes got out-too many horses are gone. Hand-trucks. And it ain’t just the overseers leaving, Uzman. We have to make them give in.

– Give in what? Ann-Hari speaks. The thing in Judah moves. -Give in what? What do you want from them, chaver? They’ve nothing to give us. They’re still scared-that’s why they’re in that tower-but when they start having to throw their shit out over the parapets, they’ll come out gunning.

They raise their voices. The crowd turns to them, slowly.

– We make demands, Thick Shanks says. -They’ll bring reinforcements. We have to have demands ready.

Shaun says, -Like what? You want them to free the fucking Remade? Ain’t going to happen. Recognise the new guilds? What is it we want?

– We have to link it up, Thick Shanks says. -We send our own riders back to New Crobuzon, talk to the guilds there, make joint demands. If we can get them to back us-

– You’re dreaming. You think they’ll do that? For us?

– We have to take control of this. This is ours, now, says Uzman.

Someone jeers and makes a noise about the godsdamned Remade. Ann-Hari shouts, and in her agitation her arcane hill Ragamoll asserts itself.

– Shut up, she says to the heckler. -You curse the Remade, as if it make you better. Why we here? You fought. You-she gestures at the tunnellers-you struck. Against us. Her lieutenant prostitutes nod. -But why did you fight the gendarmes? Because they, they Remade, wouldn’t scab. They wouldn’t. They took beating for you. To not break your strike. And they did it for us. For me.

Ann-Hari reaches out and grips Uzman and pulls him to her, he acquiescing with surprise. She kisses him on his mouth. He is Remade: it is a vivid transgression. There are shocks and exhalations, but Ann-Hari roars.

– These Remade strike for us, so you won’t be broken. You strike against us and we against you, but these Remade are on both our damn sides. You know it. You fought for them. You scorn them now? They won you your damn strike, and ours too, even though we strike against each other. She kisses Uzman again. Among the prostitutes, some are aghast and others are cheering. -I tell you, Ann-Hari says, -if anyone deserves service on credit, it’s the damn Remade.

The prostitutes closest to Ann-Hari and most militant seek out Remade ostentatiously to touch.

– We have to link up, shouts Thick Shanks, but no one is listening to him. They are listening to his friend Ann-Hari. Judah makes a golem out of the dust.

It is deep night but very few are sleeping. Judah’s golem is taller than he, held together with oil and dirty water. The old man become the Weaver’s prophet stands behind Ann-Hari and shouts obscure praise to her while she and Thick Shanks argue.

A gendarme comes to them from the direction of the train. He waves a truce flag. -They want to talk, says a woman on chitin wheels.

– Wait, he shouts as he walks. -We want to end this. No recrimination. We’ll talk to the TRT, get the money through. Everyone wins. You, Remade, we can talk. End your peonage early, maybe. We can talk about everything. Everything’s open.

Ann-Hari’s face is a joy of anger. The man cowers from her and she passes him and runs in the direction of the train, followed by Remade, Thick Shanks and Uzman, and Judah, who slaps his golem on its arse as if it is a baby and shocks it, hexes it into motion. It astonishes those it passes.

Shanks is shouting to Ann-Hari, -Wait wait, what are you going to do? Wait. And Uzman is urging something too, but where the Remade besiegers hide behind their stockades she simply steps into view of the gendarmes in the tower. She takes a man’s flintlock.

Uzman and Shanks are shouting at her but she is walking on into the no-man’s-land by the train. Only Judah’s golem goes with her. The tower’s guns swivel toward her. Inexpertly she brings up the flintlock. She stands with the oily dirt man, the two of them alone.

– No deal with you bastards, she shouts, and pulls the trigger, though bullets cannot penetrate the cladding. As the shot sounds, Remade run forward to protect her and Judah hears the captain at the tower’s top screaming something at his own men and it could be hold or fire. Judah has his dirty golem step before Ann-Hari as first one and then a sudden percussion of the gendarmes’ guns sound.

Everyone drops but Ann-Hari and the golem, and there are screams and blood. The gunshots dwindle. Three people lie unmoving. Others, mostly Remade but whole too, are shouting for help. Ann-Hari is still. The golem is pitted where bullets have stopped in its dense substance.

– No no no, the captain is shouting. -I didn’t-but the Remade will not wait now. They roar. Someone pulls Ann-Hari back, and Judah sees her, and she is smiling, and he feels himself smiling too.

There is a little war. -What are you doing? Shanks screams at Ann-Hari but it is a pointless question now. Gendarmes, free workers, prostitutes and Remade skirmish, and two sides assert: the Remade and their friends; the gendarmes and those opposed to this exultant hysteria. Judah is afraid of it, but he never unwishes this violent child’s birth.

Remade attack the tower with guns, crude bombards and their swing-hammer limbs. They fire stone slabs and track-ends that make the tower ring. A man beside Judah, whose chin wears a fringe of crabs’ pincers, dies suddenly from gendarme shot. Judah has his golem move slowly around the belfry, disaggregating in bullet-slugs of its earth flesh.

He does not hear the shot from the heavy gun above. An overturned curricle is at one moment a cart with men and women leaning between its spokes and then is an eruption, a fire expansion of burnt knife-edged wood and blood uncoiling above a cavity bleeding smoke. Judah blinks. He sees detritus. He sees that the dark thing acrawl toward him leaving a mollusc trail is a woman, her skin blacked and redded, ink craquelure on meat. He wonders that she does not make a sound as her hair burns then knows he cannot hear. His ears sing. The barrel of the gun exhales like a languid smoker.

It turns. The rebel Remade, prostitutes, and those of the free who are with them run to escape its range.

Judah stands. Slow. Steps up, and makes his golem move. The gun motors with unoiled imprecision. The golem presses its filthy self against the freightcar. It reaches up, echoing and exaggerating Judah’s little motions, pulls itself up, leaving a smear of its corpus.

The towertop gun fires again. It stabs oily smoke, and the railroad cut and the people on it, yards away, bloom. The golem ascends the tower, stamping on buttresses, on gutters. It uses the very guns that gendarmes angle down at it as handles and steps. It disregards itself, as no sane or sentient thing could, sheds itself in scabs and diminishes as it rises, but it is near the top now, weakened with sticks and railway spikes protruding from its gravel-grease skin, its very legs falling from it to land formless as excrement. The gun swivels and Judah has the golem probe its arm deep into the barrel.

It reaches to its shoulder. The gun is blocked by hex-bound golem dirt. It fires and there is a strange motion, a shuddering backward. The barrel splays in strips, the golem is a rain of filth. Ignited air and smoke fill out, the tower rocks, its tip glows and is punched brutally open, its roof unclenches into metal fingers.

Rank billows plume in a great cough, and a dead man falls from the shatter. The corpse of the gun sways. Judah is spattered with his golem’s remnants. The rebels are cheering. He cannot hear them but he can see.

The renegades take the train. The gendarmes throw out their guns and come out bloody, eyes seared and dripping.

– No, no, no, Uzman shouts. He is eating coal, and his biceps are swelling. With Shanks and with Ann-Hari, and with other faces that Judah now knows, the Runagaters try to stop the beatings when they look like becoming killing. They take away knives. People shout but cede to them. The gendarmes are chained where the Remade were.

– What now? Everywhere Judah goes he hears it.

It is the Remades’ train. They make flags for their new sudden country and wave them from the burst guntower. No one sleeps that night. The tunnellers’ overseers disappear into the barrens, and many men go with them, and some prostitutes.

– Send word back for gods’ sake, Thick Shanks says. -We have to make links, he says, and Uzman nods. Around them are other leaders of the sudden mutiny. They make their points in untrained passionate language. They decide things.

Ann-Hari tells everyone, -Not backward, we don’t go back, we go out. And she points into the wilderness.

They choose messengers. Riders. A Remade sutured to steam-and-piston legs like spread-out fingers that run with tremendous shuddering up slopes of rock, his man-torso aflail like an unwilling passenger. Another, a muscled man made a strange six-limbed thing: he is joined below his abdomen to the neck of a great bipedal lizard, one of those the badland nomads half-tame to ride. He stands high on two back-bent legs before a stiff tail, clawed forearms just below his human skin. He has been a scout for months, ridden by a gendarme with a gun to his back.

– Go, says Uzman. -Stay by the tracks. Out of sight. Get to the towns. Get to the workcamps, get to Junctiontown. And Jabber and fuck, get to New Crobuzon. Tell them. Tell the new guilds. Tell them we need help. Have them come. If they support us, down tools for us, we can win this. Remade and free-bring them all.

– Uzman, they say and nod, as if his name itself is an affirmative.

The horse riders go in wheels of dust, the steam-insect man in an instant of scuttling speed. The gnarled and reptile-paced man accelerates over shreds of heather by the roadbed. Birds and other things that fly watch them. The ones that are not birds veer with the zigzag spasms of fish in the sea.

The prostitutes let some men come to them in strict conditions, unarmed, guard-women nearby. Since Uzman and Ann-Hari, some of them have even been with Remade.

– New Crobuzon’s full of it, Ann-Hari says. -Whole-and-

Remade fucking. What happens when someone gets the punishment factory, what, always his wife leave him?

– Supposed to. It ain’t decorum.

– They doing it all over the city, like they doing cross-sex, khepri, human, vods.

– True, Judah says. -But you ain’t supposed to admit it. These women… your women… they’re letting us see.

She looks to the moon. She lets the moon go over her. She watches its last light over the skeletal bridge. -City guilds can’t help us here, she says. -This is new.

Torches move on the girders below them. The bridge builders have returned to work, without overseers.

– What did you tell them? says Judah.

– The truth, says Ann-Hari. -Told them they can’t stop. Told them this is a Remaking.

Sunup, after three days, the steam-spider Remade returns. He sucks up water before he can speak.

– They’re coming, he says. -Gendarmes. Hundreds. In a new train. A commandeered passenger train, he tells them, emptied of the sightseers and chancers come to explore the continent’s interior.

Most of the freeandwhole have run. Some are members of this new town, resentful of the Remade suddenly their equals but held by a deep query, by What will happen? They are part of this train-assembly, a gathering. There are some as committed as the Remade, part of the sabotage crews who go back to tear up the tracks behind them. Those drivers, firemen and brakers left teach the Remade.

They reverse through landscape they have altered. It was never stable, afflicted with life in hex tides. They go over places where the ground, when they cut it, was stone and that is now dappled lizard’s skin, bleeding milklike blood where rails are spiked. There are places where the earth has become like the cover of a book, and shards of paper spurt from the spike-wounds. They dismantle the rails to block their pursuers.

A reversed industry. They turn their expertise to the road’s dismantling, levering up spikes, shouldering rails and ties piles, scattering the stones. They plough up the roadbed and return home.

But-They took the barricade down, the scouts soon come and tell them. -They brought rails and sleepers. They’re building the track again. Within three days the gendarmes will reach the camp.

There are lights in the tunnel; there is industry.

– What did you do? Judah says.

– We’re finishing the tunnel, says Ann-Hari. -And the bridge. We’re almost through.

Her influence is spreading. Ann-Hari is more and less than a leader, Judah thinks: she is a person, a nexus of desires, of want for change.

The last yards of rock are being ground through in the dark wet mountain. Judah looks down at the bridge. The new work is something laughable, a quick flimsy lattice of metal and wood thrown up beyond the stumps of proper construction. It is ersatz; it is only just bridge.

Judah is one of a conclave-it surprises him-struggling for strategy. They meet in the hills: Shaun, Uzman, Ann-Hari, Thick Shanks, Judah. But parallel to them, something raucous and collective is emerging.

Every night in the gaslamps the workers gather. First it was convivial-liquor, dice and liaisons-but as the gendarmes come closer, and as Uzman debates strategy in the overlooking ground, the parties change. The men of the train name each other brother.

Ann-Hari comes to the meeting and invades a man’s rambled contribution. A wedge of women push into the men. There are those who try to shout Ann-Hari down.

– You ain’t a worker on this road, a man says. -You ain’t nothing but a mountain whore. This ain’t your damn congress, it’s ours.

Ann-Hari speaks something base. She talks in ragged rhetoric of thrown-together exhortations-a speech that stops Judah. It seems as if it is the train that speaks. The fire holds still.

– not to speak. she says. -If I am not to speak who has the right?-What but on us? What but on the backs of me and mine have we built these rails? We are become history. There’s no backward now. No way back. You know what we have to do. Where we should go.

When she is done no one can speak for seconds, until someone mutters respect.

– Brothers, let’s vote.

Uzman tells them that whichever way they see it, whatever they claim to themselves, Ann-Hari is telling them to run. That’s not the answer. Are they afraid?

– Ain’t running, Ann-Hari says. -We’re done here. We’re something new.

– It’s running, he says. -Utopian.

– It’s something new. We’re something new, she says, and Uzman shakes his head.

– This is running, he says.

They unbolt the guntower and guide the train into the tunnel. They take up the tracks behind them. There is still blasting and scraping from inside the hill, and construction on the strange new bridge. The work is frantic.

In the heat of the morning the sound of other hammers and steam comes. The gendarmes’ train. They see smoke over the heat-dead trees.

The workers gather in the tunnel, among the cleavage of chiselled edges, minutely variant planes. The light makes shadows where vectors of stones meet.

Uzman, the grassroots general, gives orders they choose to obey. A hundreds-strong army of Remade and the freeanole now committed: those few clerks, scientists and bureaucrats who have not run; weak geoempaths; a few others-the camp followers, the mad and unemployable, and the prostitutes whose exhaustion started this. They come out into the night, ready. The train hides in the hole in the hill.

It is cool before dawn. The gendarmes come over ridges and around the bend. They come on foot, in plated carts pulled by Remade horses, in single-person aerostats, balloons above them and propellers on their back. They career through the air, and bear down on the track-layers’ hides.

They drop grenades. It is astounding. The train people are shrieking. They cannot believe that this is how it starts. They are deafened and bloodied. This is how it begins. A cascade of clay splinters and sooty fire.

Those with guns fire. One, two gendarmes snap and bleed out of the sky, haul their strange aircraft out of range, or loll in death in their harnesses, flying or coming down at random. But they keep coming. They roast the air with firethrowers.

– Crush them, Uzman urges, and his troops roll down logs and boulders as the gendarmes regroup and fire arbalests. Thaumaturges on either side make the air oscillate, make patches of grey swim up from nothing to stain the real, send arrows of energy spitting like water in fat that hit and do strange things. It is a chaos of fighting. A constant coughing of shot and screams, and gendarmes fall, but the strikers do in many greater numbers.

There are moments. A troupe of cactacae step forward and only wince as bullets break their skins. They terrorise the gendarmes, who run before the huge flora, but though the officers have no rivebows they have caustics that scorch the cactus skin.

– We’re rabble, Uzman says, and looks in despair. Ann-Hari says nothing. She looks beyond the gendarmes, beyond the tower of smoke where their train is coming.

Judah has made a golem. He sends it out toward the gendarmes. It is a thing made of the railway itself. It is made of handcars, the odds of rails and ties. Its hands are gears. It wears a grill for teeth. Its eyes are something of glass.

The golem walks out of the tunnel. It is impervious. It treads with the care of a man.

As it goes, the fighting seems to quiet. The ugly and incompetent warfare pauses. The golem passes the dead. Only the railway thing seems to move.

And then it stops walking, and Judah shudders in shock because he has not told it to. A new cart comes, carrying an older man and protectors. The man halloos them kindly. Weather Wrightby.

One man beside Weather wears charms. A thaumaturge. He stares at the golem and moves his hands.

Is it you who stopped it? Judah cannot tell.

Weather Wrightby stands amid the fighting. Of course he must be cosseted in hexes to turn bullets, but it is a powerful thing to see. He talks to the hills. The golem stands yards from him, as if facing him in a gunfight, and Weather Wrightby talks to it, too, as if he is talking to the railroad.

– Men, men, he shouts. He pats the air. Slowly his gendarmes lower guns. -What are you doing? he says. -We know what’s happening here. We don’t need all this. Who ordered firing on these men? Who ordered this?

– We must fix this, he says. -This mess. It’s money, they tell me. And it’s the harshness of the overseers. He lifts a sack from the cart. -Money, he says. -We have payment for those free and whole still here. It’s time you all were paid. It’s been too long, and I’m sorry for that. I can’t control the flows of cash, but I’ve done all I can to bring you what’s yours.

Judah says nothing. He makes the golem move its head, a little piece of theatre.

– And you Remade. Weather Wrightby smiles a sad smile. -I don’t know, he says. -I don’t know. You are indentured men. I don’t make laws. You have debts to the factories that made you. Your lives are not your own. Your money… you have no money. But understand. Understand that I don’t think ill of you or blame you for this. I understand that you are reasonable men. We will fix this.

– I cannot pay you: the law will not allow me. But I can put money aside. The TRT cares for its workforce. I will not have my good Remade men suffer the needless harshness of ignorant foremen. I blame myself for this predicament. I was not listening hard enough, and I apologise to you for that.

– We will put structures in hand. We will have an ombudsman to listen, who can punish overseers not worthy of the badge. We will fix this, understand?

– I will put aside money that you would earn if you were free, whole men, and there will be a place for you when this railroad is done. A retreat. In the city if they’ll have it but in these wild lands, near your road, if New Crobuzon is so damned deaf as not to hear what is needed. I will not have you worked to death. There’ll be a cabin for you, and baths, and good food, and you can see out your days there. Think I’m a liar? Think I lie to you?

– No more of this, now. The road’s stalled. Would you halt it? Men, men… You aren’t blasphemers I don’t believe, but this is an unholy thing you do though your reasons are understandable. I don’t blame you, but you’re holding back something the world deserves. Come now. An end to this.

Judah stands. He has his golem come nearer Weather Wrightby in its stuttering railway walk.

– Don’t be fools, comes Uzman’s voice from his hide. -Are you soft, you fucking soft? You think Wrightby gives a damn? But he is cut off by other shouts. Someone is shooting. Someone is screaming.

– We can’t win this, says Judah aloud, though no one is listening. He stands on the rocks and makes his traintrack golem run.

He makes it run like a steam man, with the metal chewing sound of its gear-thighs. It stamps through an increasing bullet-rain leaving huge footprints, and it runs and leaps, throws itself, falls in a punitive wood-and-metal mass, breaking the bones of the gendarmes. Judah cannot see Weather Wrightby, but he knows, as he watches the golem make its swimming motion and crush as it disaggregates, that Wrightby is alive.

– Fall back fall back, Shanks or Shaun or someone, some thrown-up general is calling, but fall back where? There is nowhere to go. The gendarmes scatter under the punishment of blackpowder, but their weapons are so much the stronger, they cannot be held off. It is a desperate, desultory standoff, the gendarmes moving in desert-fight formations, the Remade across the hills from rock to rock hiding place, half-ordered, half-routed.

But there is ruckus from around the curve. Something.

– What, what the, what is…? Judah says. The TRT men are pulling back toward their train, and now there is the sound of other fighting.

From the way they have come, from the history in the roadbed, come noises Judah has never heard before. Something is approaching in a staccato onrush, a drumming on the flattened stone. A cavalry of striders. The borinatch. Moving at a speed that awes, their legs taller than the tallest men, unhinging, stiff unguligrade motion of spasms and lurching, turning by pinpoint acrobatics, twisting on their hooves.

They lurch with inhuman grace closer, their faces masks between baboons and wood-carvings, and insectlike and haunting. They come among the gendarmes, dwarfing them and spinning and sending their bone-stiff legs among the axles, tottering but not falling as vehicles veer and crash. The borinatch grasp down, and their arms and hands manipulate in space and vectors other than those Judah can see.

They grope through dimensions, their limbs become unseen, reaching across gaps of space much too wide and grabbing gendarmes or punching them through their skin. The striders attack with weapons extant in whatever other plane it is they touch, that are visible for instants only as purple flowers or silver liquid faces, and where they strike the gendarmes are cut and crushed and diminished in complex ways and scream without sound and stumble over angles of earth that should never trouble them.

There are scores of the striders, a fighting band. Riding among them is the Remade scout on the lizard’s body, sent from the train and ordered to reach New Crobuzon.

The gendarmes are pulling back, killed and wounded in grotesque ways by the striders’ spectral maces. Judah cannot see Weather Wrightby. The Remade scout moves with the highstep of the plains lizard. The striders jostle him and mutter with their stringy mouths, and he laughs and slaps them and shouts, -Ann-Hari, I done it. They come with me. They done like you said they would. I found them.

When did she have time? Judah cannot imagine. When did she have time, when did she know, when did she go to those who might be chosen as scouts, when did she know she had another agenda, when did she suspect the gendarmes would attack, and send for reinforcements? How did she know where to send him?

The lizard-mount scout has not been on the mission he was given; he has been on a different task, on Ann-Hari’s instructions. He has saved the train.

– See, see? Ann-Hari is delighted. -I knew them strider hate the rails, the TRT.

– I told them like you said, the lizard-man says. -I told them what TRT was doing, begged help.

– You went against the council, Uzman says to her. She holds his look and waits until the silence is discomfiting, and then in her accented Ragamoll she says, -We go.

– You went against the council.

– Saved us.

People are gathering.

– This ain’t your queendom.

Ann-Hari blinks. She looks wonderingly at him, How stupid are you? her face says, but she waits a moment and speaks again slowly. -We, go, now.

– You went against the council.

Judah speaks. His own voice shocks him. Everyone looks at him. The legs of a golem in earth shift behind him and drum their unfinished heels in mild tantrum. -Uzman, he says. -You’re right, but listen.

– Without the council, what are we? Uzman says.

Judah nods. -Without it what are we? I know, I know. She shouldn’t have gone against it. But Uzman, you seen what they done. They ain’t going to hold back. They’ve come to end us, Uzman. What we going to do?

– We needed others, Uzman says. -We needed the city guilds. We could have had them…

– It’s too late now, Judah says. -We won’t know, will we? We won’t find out. We have to go. We can’t beat them now.

– You want us to go fReemade? Uzman says. He is loud. -I’m a fucking insurrectionist, Judah. You want me to run like a bandit? He is raging. Shooting still sounds. -You want us to take off into the damn hills like we’re afraid? That what you want? Fuck you, and you, Ann-Hari… Everything we have-

– We have nothing, says Judah.

– We have everything, says Ann-Hari.

They look at each other.

– We don’t give up what we have, says Ann-Hari. Judah’s golem’s legs shudder. -We give up nothing. All our blood and muscle. All the dead. Every hammer blow, the stone, every mouthful we eat. Every bullet from every gun. Each whipping. The sea of sweat that come from us. Every piece of coal in the Remade boilers and the boiler of the engine, each drop of come between my legs and my sisters’ legs, all of it, all of it is in that train.

She points into the darkness of the tunnel where the work continues. -All of it. We unrolled history. We made history. We cast history in iron and the train shat it out behind it. Now we’ve ploughed that up. We’ll go on, and we’ll take our history with us. Remake. It’s all our wealth, it’s everything, it’s all we have. We’ll take it.

The strikers of the iron council join her. Even Uzman can do nothing else.

Waving many-planed hands, the striders go. -Thank you thank you, Judah shouts.

In the mountain’s stomach, the train punches through the last veil of stone. The tunnel that has been so hadal dark is gusted full of light.

The train rolls on to the skeletal bridge that has been so quickly made to meet it. The train shudders and lists. The bridge moves. The train reels, drunkard. Judah does not breathe.

It moves firmer, continues across that so-spindly accretion of girders. The train passes high over the dreadful valley, breathing smoke above it, over the yards of swaying make-do bridge to the original structure, and the movement stops.

The train crosses. It is on the earth, on the other side of the mountain.

The rebels step over the awful trellis, children crying as their mothers hold them. With each wind the people are still, but they all of them come across, and no one falls.

They are the cactus-men, the freeanole humans, one two scarab-head khepri, camp followers and drifters, a flock of the wyrmen low in the sky staring with the enthusiasm of dogs, stranger races, renegade llorgiss and a mute hotchi, and hundreds and hundreds of the Remade, in every shape of flesh. They are firemen, engineers and brakemen, those who were clerks, the few overseers who changed sides early enough, the hunters, bridge-builders, the scouts and scientists who will not leave their laboratory, the prostitutes, tunnellers, plebeian magicians, verity-gaugers and low-grade hexers, the workless nomads who scavenge the tracks, now become something, and hundreds, hundreds of the track-layers.

Their wealth and history is embedded in the train. They are a town moving. It is their moment in iron and grease. They control it. Iron council. The motion of the council begins.

It is the same motion that has brought them so far. It is exactly the same. The carts full of rails and ties unload and the crews drop them in position and they are spaced and the rails are taken out and hauled and dropped and hammered with careful rhythm, one two three, down. Ahead race the grading crews; but this long flat land has only a few extrusions that are cleared easily, and they do not sweep away all the bric-a-brac of stones and nature that they would have done before.

It is just the same motion, and it is utterly new. The urgency is drunken. The pace faster by orders of magnitude. The ties are thrown down much farther apart, only just enough to hold the train. These rails will not last. They are not meant to. The roadbed they are building is only a sketch, a ghost in the land. The train creeps like a child.

As the rails come clear, ground clean by the weight of the train, the men and women take them up again. They are pulled by mules past the storage and workshop cars where hundreds more are stacked, past the railroad and the train itself, to the front, into the glare of the engine’s lamp eyes. And there they are unloaded. And the track-layers lay them down again.

Miles of track, reused, reused, it is the train’s future and its present, and it emerges a fraction more scarred as history and is hauled up again and becomes another future. The train carries its track with it, picking it up and laying it down: a sliver, a moment of railroad. No longer a line split through time, but contingent and fleeting, recurring beneath the train, leaving only its footprint.

They move at speeds that eclipse anything they have achieved. A mile a day has been their benchmark, and this is many times that. Now the huge Remade woman who was freakish and kept from the tracks before is welcomed with her one-blow hammering. The tracks lay down, come up, lay down, come up. They protrude hundreds of yards before and behind the train.

– The gendarmes are coming.

Judah goes back with the demolishers.

– I want to do this with a golem, he says. He touches the flimsy bridge, sends his power out conducted by the metal, makes it ab-live. No one is listening to him. -I want to make this rail a golem. I want to make the rails conductors for it.

He can hear the crack of unsettling metal as the tracks try to stretch and become a giant man. He shudders. He has not the strength for this. His companions climb the shaking bridge, cross into the darkness of the hole. It is not golem they prepare but it is an intervention.

Judah rejoins the train shunting on the flat, toward Cobsea. It is turning. Some popular committee, some delegated or loudly insistent group squatting on the weather-hood, directing the track- layers. They turn from the invisible line to where that fickle town waits. With taps from the mallets, with their expertise, the perpetual train veers. Judah helps the crews take up the final rails and return them to the front. The tracks are turning.

The perpetual train deviates, west-northwest. Into wilderness where there is nothing, a new unmapped place. The train is going feral. Judah cannot breathe.

(Much later he hears the crack and billow of explosions. He imagines the poorly built bridge folding and become spillikins. He imagines the gendarme’s train jackknifing to kiss its own tail, voiding men and ordnance, uncoiling to the chasm floor. He thinks of Oil Bill’s plan, and of the detritus that will scud across the dried-up river. The train and the skeleton of the bridge will settle, become wood-and-metal fossils.)

The perpetual train has gone wild. The iron council is renegade.

Spring is starting to sing summer, and the perpetual train is buzzed by insects Judah has never seen before, like folded paper lanterns, like tiny hooded monks. Their ichor is bloodred.

Judah hauls rails. He hauls them up, unbuckling the past. Behind him the army of camp followers are suddenly full of mission. They carry hoes and break up the earth where the tracks have been.

It is ineffective camouflage. They cannot pass without indelible marks. It will take years of earth shucking and rock rabbits and rock foxes crisscrossing ruts with their own paths, years of rain and winds before the scab left by the perpetual train is gone.

There is so much to do. It is not easy to run away.

Miles every day. Sharp turns of the reused and reused rails, and the snatch of railroad skirts impediments-pools, rock snarls. Crews of graders throw rubble into sinkholes. Behind the train is a track of dust. The train is in a sparse wood that has waited for the railroad to fill it, and the iron council meets.

– We got to get more planned. We need scouts, hunters, we need water. We have to track a route.

– Where we going then?

– Brothers, brothers…

– I ain’t your brother, a woman shouts.

– All right bloody hell sisters then, and everyone is laughing. -Sisters, sisters…

– They won’t stop, you know. It is Uzman. People quiet. -It ain’t a joke. It ain’t safe. Brothers… sisters… We crossed Weather Wrightby. He won’t forget. They’ll hunt us down.

Steam rises from his pipes. You never wanted us here, Judah thinks. This isn’t what you wanted. You wanted us to hold. Your pretty runagate dreams were of making a line to the guilds, as if they’d run come save us. Now you’re still trying. Though you’d not have chose it thus.

Uzman is a good man.

– It ain’t just the gendarmes. TRT’ll put a price on our head. We stole their train. We stole their railroad. Think they’ll let that go?

– Every bounty hunter in Rohagi’s coming for us. And godspit, you think the city ’ll let this go? It is quiet but for the snap of insects against the lantern. -It’s New Crobuzon’s railway too, and we took it. You think they’ll let Remade walk away, find a place in the wilds? The militia are coming for us now, too. The militia.

– They’ll come in airships. They’ll come over land. Think they’ll let us go to ground, some fucking fReemade arcadia? They’ll bring the train back wearing our heads. We can’t just find a little valley ten, thirty, a hundred miles from here. If we do this… we have to go.

– We have to be gone. Bring me a damn map. Do you realise what we’ve done here? What we are now?

A scattered mess of Remade. A town of Remade and their xenian and freeanole friends. These thieves and murderers, rapists, vagrants, embezzlers, liars. -You look carved, Uzman says with a wonder they can suddenly hear. -Bits of wood, man-sized, whittled by gods. They blink up at him in the shadow of the train they have stolen.

Only three days’ deviation from their plotted route, the iron council is beyond the details of maps. These are strange lands. These are the Middling Sweeps. The Rohagi wilds.

The more intelligent wyrmen are sent out over empty geographies that make them nervous, little urban things that they are. They are charged with finding the hunters still away, the water-

carriers in their carts, looking for springs. Those reconnoitring, who will return to find nothing but carnage where the tunnel once was. They will look over the moulding and sunburnt corpses of the gendarme train, and will say, -What happened here? The wyrmen are sent to gather the iron council’s own.

Systems grow. They find springs, and the water car is kept full, caulked where it bleeds. The guntower is welded and hammered into a seared approximation of its old shape. Remade are trained, hurriedly, by the scientists who have stayed, are shown how to draw charts.

– Where will we go?

At night the renegades play banjos and pipes, the train’s warning bell is struck, its boiler made a drum. Women and men lie together again. Some Chainday nights Judah goes to the wordless trackside man-meets for release, but Ann-Hari and he fuck one night and stroke each other with the most sincere, the most close affection.

The slowly stranging place delights Judah. On the sixth day of the iron council, as the mile-long track-stretch swallows its own tail and moves, as the train enters a dreamish landscape of bruised succulents and the summer comes down on them, a posse of gendarmes and bounty hunters arrives.

They underestimate the council by a gross degree. They are no more than thirty men and xenians, in cracked leather and spikes, their very clothes made weapons. They come out of the vein-coloured undergrowth under the standard of the TRT, creatures like scurrying mushrooms running from them.

The band fire, scream through their loudhailers. -Comply! Lawbreakers, surrender!

Do they think the iron council will be cowed? Judah watches in awe at their stupidity. Twelve of them are shot fast, and the others ride away.

– Get them, get them, get them, shouts Ann-Hari, and the fastest Remade take off with their weapons. -They know where we are!

They can only kill six more. The others escape. -We’re marked, Uzman says. It is less than a hundred miles since they have escaped. -They’ll come for us.

They leave traps. Barrels of blackpowder, complex batteries and fuses. They send the train between stone overhangs, and the geothaumaturges and what hedge-mancers there are cut diaglyphs into the mineral walls and lay down primed circuits so that the weight of a cart will make the rock deliquesce and pour down in cold magma to set again with the outriders of the gendarmes or militia drowned. That is the plan.

Judah sets golem traps. Batteries, somaturgic turbines of his design, so the fallen wood or the bone-heap or the earth or split discarded ties will stand and fight for iron council.

At night he walks the renegade railroad with Uzman and Ann-Hari, who are chary but need each other. Strategist and visionary. The perpetual train does not stop at night. The train is full of skills. Remade fix what flintlocks can be fixed, and make new weapons. In the furnaces they melt down older rails for cutters and armour. They are making their wheeled town a war-machine.

– It won’t be long, Uzman says. -Time’ll come we probably have to abandon the train, have to run.

– We can’t, Ann-Hari says. -Without it we have nothing.

A group of councillors in the clerk’s car lean over vague maps-sketchy composites of myths. The darkwood desks and inlaid walls are carved and graffitied from the first days, when the drunken rebels rendered savage art.

– Here. Uzman presses the map. -What’s this?

– Swamp.

Uzman moves his finger.

– Unknown.

– Salt flats.

– Scree.

– Unknown.

– Tar pits.

– Unknown.

– Smokestone. Smokestone gulleys.

Uzman chews his knuckle. He looks out of the window. Councillors haul the rails from one end of their stolen track-mile to the other.

– Do we have any meteoromancers?

– There’s a girl Toma. Someone shakes their head. -Can whistle up a gust dries her clothes but, you know, parlour hex really…

– We need someone can raise a gale-

– No. One of the researchers speaks. He is a young man who has grown his beard and wears the sweaty clothes of the workforce. He is shaking his head. -I know what you’re wanting. You’re thinking, through the smokestone? No. You saw what happened when Malke was caught in it? He nearly died. You saw what it was like.

– There must be ways to know when it’s coming…

The young man shrugs. -Pressure, he says. -Cracking. A few things. From geysers. He shrugs again. -We looked it up when it trapped us. It’s too many things.

– But there are ways of telling…

– Yes, but Uzman, you’re not thinking. These maps are best-guesses. We’re in the Middling Sweeps. And there’s one thing we do know that’s there. The man runs his finger up the map. The car sways. -See? What this is?

It is a crosshatched patch of land, inked in red. Two hundred miles from them, less than a month at this absurd pace. It abuts the smokestone, or where the old cartographers thought the smokestone might be.

– You know what that is?

Of course Uzman does. They all do. It is the cacotopic stain.

– You ain’t taking us to the stain, Uzman.

– I can’t take you anywhere. The council goes where it decides it will. But I’m telling you the only thing we can do. You decide if it’s what you want or not. And if not I’ll stay and fight, and we die.

– It’s the stain.

– No, no it ain’t the stain. It’s the edges. It’s the outskirts.

Uzman has a look on him. He stands and seems to glimmer. He sweats from the heat of his own pipes, eats coal. His lips are black.

– It ain’t the stain. We have to go through the smokestone flats-

– If they’re there.

– If they’re there. We have to go through the smokestone flats, and beyond that’s the outskirts of the cacotopos. Even if they got through the stone, no one’ll follow us there.

– And you know why, Uzman, right? For good damn reason.

– We got no choice. No, that ain’t so. We run. Leave the train to rot. Run be fReemade. Or we can keep it. All our sweat. The road. But if we keep it, we have to go do this. We have to make it out, far away, or we die. We have to go west. And west of here? He prods the waxed chart. -The cacotopic zone. Just the edges.

He sounds as if he is pleading.

– People’ve dipped in there before. We’ll be all right. We have to.

He pleads.

– Just the edges.

It opened a half millennium before, a rift through which spilt great masses of the feral cancerous force, Torque. A badland beyond understanding. Where men might become rat-things made of glass and rats devilish potentates or unnatural sounds and jaguars and trees might become moments that could not have happened, might become impossible angles. Where monsters go and are born. Where the land, and the air, and time are sick.

– It’s no matter, anyway, someone says. -We ain’t got no meteoromancers, and we ain’t got anyone can call up air elementals, and we ain’t going through smokestone without someone can push wind.

Judah leans on the table; his fringe dances before his eyes. He looks down at the ink landscape.

– Well, he says. -Well now.

Somaturgy, golemetry, is an intervention. Making servants from unlive matter is about persuasion, insinuation. A strategy of life-giving.

– Well now.

I can make a golem out of air, thinks Judah. A clutch of air in the air. Have it run with us. Air running through air. It will exhaust him. But he knows he can get them passage through the smoke.

Judah knows that they will go.

He walks with Uzman, and a golem walks with them. Shambling vegetable pulp. They are a strange troika: the Remade sending steam from the pipes that burrow him; Judah tall and bony, his beard like a furring of dirt; the golem putting down its shapeless feet. The train slips forward in tiny motions.

The moonlight is the colour of lipid fluid, as if the night has an unclosing wound. Behind them Judah sees the train and the train and the train farting smoke, clanging, like some lumpen orchestra of drums and bells. A half mile ahead are Remade laying track, and ahead of them the teams performing a cursory groundbreaking. Behind the railroad is disassembled, and there are hundreds of followers like pilgrims.

Judah sees everything as a city. New Crobuzon has taught him that. He watches the train skirt a curling crust of land and sees the curve and edge of river walls, the warehouse walls by the Tar. He sees a half-fallen tree and remembers a drunken New Crobuzon man leaning at the same angle.

We don’t choose what we remember, Judah thinks, what stays with us. He carries New Crobuzon with him, even now he is a citizen of this new vagrant sanctuary.

– Smokestone won’t do it, Uzman says. The perpetual train sighs. -The militia’ll break that down, fly over that. It ain’t about the smokestone, it’s the cacotopic stain. That’s what’ll hide us.

The next day a sortie of the gendarmes kills fifty of the council’s stragglers and are gone before any Remade can counterattack. Wyrmen scream that they were shot at. In their rough inventive grammar they say what they have seen, spread their wings to show bullet holes in their tough skin.

It is hot. They come into a stretch of space, an upland of good thick earth.

– What are they? There is a panic. -Something’s come for us!

Animals are keeping pace with the train, snapping at the wheels. No not animals or if animals ones that melt and re-form and emerge from the ground and through which light shines. Bullets go through them ignored.

Judah watches them with building pleasure once his fear goes. Each time the train moves on again the little length of its track, the things return.

Demons of motion. They are not attacking but playing. Delighting like porpoises, they dive out of the earth and roll around the turning wheels. They eat the rhythm, the ka ka ka of turning iron on iron. After millennia of snapping up only the quickstep of plains hunters and prey, the demons are drunk on the heavy beat. They evanesce out of colours in the near-shapes of foxes and rockrats, the only animals they have seen. They learn the newcomers, and as hours pass the motion demons mimic humans and cactacae inexpertly, to the track-layers’ delight.

– Look, lookit, it’s you, that’s your ugly bonce, that is.

The skittish things manifest and dive wheelward to eat more. If Councillors detrain, demons pullulate about their feet, eating the echoes of their steps. One woman dances, and the air goes alive with the rapture of motion-demons now-seen-now-unseen gorging on her tempo. Soon the perpetual train is girdled with shuffling figures: Remade, the freeanole women who were once whores, cactacae overcoming their grimness. They dance by the train, keeping pace in capers, in barley-mows and lilly-gins. Their feet are thronged by demons catching the light. It is a contest: the most complex, repeated, perfect rhythms are the best food.

The sunlight is the colour of the grass it dries. Judah smiles at the train and the dancers, and at the motion demons. It is a strange pastoral, a harvest procession it looks like, amid scruffs of pampas grass and the dead creeks, the big train shunting in spasms toward worshippers who lay down its way. As if the tracks are a leash, they haul it in like some tamed wilderness animal, and around the suddenly docile iron beast are hundreds of celebrants kicking up summer dust. The kinetophages tremble around their ankles like spume. Judah thinks of the energy they find in rhythm. Pulse-magic. What strange calories there are in repeated sounds.

Judah looks and loves the iron council. He unfolds a tripod. He is not a good heliotypist, but he knows as he frames the shamble of legs and iron and late sun that this one will come out clean. Movement-blurred and developed crudely in the tiny darkroom, but above what will be a ghost-mass of legs and demons he knows that the perpetual train and the smiles and bodies of the dancers will be clear. He has fixed them in sepia ink, frozen them like the stiltspear with their golem song.

An aerostat comes out of the east. It approaches with its sedate, predatory bobbing, makes its way fatly toward them.

The thuggish wyrmen yelp and blather obscenities as they fly. They become specks against the distended whale of leather; they buzz its gondola, make it sway a little. Judah hears flat sounds like paper bags bursting that must be gunshot, and the wyrmen scatter. They drop. They fall where they are, folding their wings and plummeting in unison, curving toward the train, and there is a crumbling sound, a huge clearing of the throat, and glass and black smoke gust out of the aerostat windows.

– Yes, Uzman says.

The dirigible rocks. Gunpowder smog swells from the underbelly. It will limp home to New Crobuzon, or to the base over the horizon, where attack squads of militia are waiting for directions. Where other airships are stationed. Bigger warflots with bombs to drop. With windows that clay-pot grenades won’t breach.

New Crobuzon has found them. That night there is a meeting, and it is beyond chaos. Ideas clamour with ideas. It is all shouting. The women who had been whores have delegated Ann-Hari to speak for them.

Others find them. Out of the grasslands come figures. The iron council is shedding word of its own self along songlines no one can see. It draws the dispossessed, the outlawed.

FReemade. A little tribe. Escapees from New Crobuzon, feral a long time. The leader is a man without arms, with useless ornamental beetle wings. There is a man with rubberised pincers, a man who wears a crocodile’s snout, a huge cur with the head of a pretty woman. The dog’s is a male body. By the skins they wear and the jewellery of holed stones on sinews, by their complexions like wood and tea, Judah knows they have been fReemade for years.

– We heard about you, one man says. He and his family are staring at the train. They are not looking at the guards, nor at Judah, nor at his golem made of the bones of meat-birds. -You’re going west, they say. You’re crossing the world.

– They say, he says, -you’re building a new life. Out of sight.

– We come to ask, he says, and pauses. -We come to ask… the man says.

And Judah, mandated by the council, nods: yes you can join us.

Nomads in numbers. Criminals and runaways. Plains races and outsiders-striders who wordlessly lope trainside, even a garuda easing out of the sky and made air marshal over the quarrelsome wyrmen. The iron council absorbs them.

They are surrounded by strange, unlikely truces between armed fReemade toughs and the borinatch braves who swing by the train with their unlikely grace. We are protected, Judah thinks. They’re here to give us gods-speed. To help us go.

The bounty hunters harry them three more times in quick, vicious raids. The gunmen ride away before there can be much retribution.

– This ain’t nothing, Uzman says to Judah. -We got more coming. He harangues the iron council at night in the headlights. Ann-Hari takes his side, and though the stokers and the engineers complain that they can see their stocks of coal dwindling, though the workers are exhausted, the council agrees to more speed. The tracks are laid all night and day, by men and women in an anaesthesia of tiredness, dreaming while they swing their hammers.

The iron road eats the miles. At night the train’s moving illumination makes the rockforms shift, as if they are trying to get away. Insects and things the size of insects perform a rhythm of their bodies on lantern glass, become flame-bursts where they find a way inside. The train is a line of dark light on the night plains.

The earth feels uneasy. The council tenses. Newcomers are targeted, are told they are spies. Judah helps an intervening crowd stop one terror-struck angry man beating a fReemade newcomer to death, and in their admonishments and the counter-beating they give him, neither Judah nor any other person acknowledges that the man might be right, that there are spies with them.

At the edge of the plain is the landform they want. A smokestone range. The unmoving brume shapes grow slowly clearer. A posse treks on to blast a path through the solid mist.

The perpetual train is a fortress. Its strange guntower is scabbed with new metal. All the councillors carry clubs, sharpen them into spears, splints of stone with rag handles. Crude and eccentric rifles. The council is waiting.

Inside Judah the thing shifts, and he knows that though it is not the time yet, he will leave.

They pass the outskirts of the smokestone hills. An abrupt change of landscape into something dreamish and unsettling, where wisp-shapes rise in basalt-hard congelation, clotted clouds on which the tough fauna of the smokestone run. There are plumes, fountainheads where geysers of smoke have poured and set near-instantly. The roadbed goes between them, through a solfatara of vented gases.

The iron council graders have blasted passage. The elegance of set smokestone is interrupted with the base simplicity of jag-edged holes.

Mostly the stonemass is caught as billows, but there are pillars that corkscrew faintly and become wisps at their peak, where leaks of smokestone have gusted in very still air. The train passes under arcs where currents have blown smokestone up from the ground and down again.

The roadbed is extended, the tracks laid through, taken up again. The uncanny landscape is beautiful and discomfiting. The ground could crack and gush at them, a mist that would set in their lungs and statue them in agony. There is no smoking, no cooking; the train moves only in sudden lurches, clearing its exhaust as fast as it can: there can be no smoke distractions. Judah waits ready to release an air golem. The stone around them might evanesce again, as smokestone sometimes does, after an hour or a thousand years of being rock.

Out of the horizon the army comes on Remade horses, camels, steaming jitneys that grind on many wheels. They come in formation into the smokestone. The wyrmen of the iron council track them, flying higher than smokestone might set.

The graders blast the capricious geography. They watch anxious and inexpert for any sign that they have split a smokestone seam.

Other crews lay huge charges in holes they carefully dig, directed by the crawling geoempath. She licks the dirt with animal sounds, in some crude ecstatic trance. Hers is not a strong or focused talent, and trying for such powerful prehension of the earth debases her to it.

Iron Councillors build barricades in a yardang between set faces of cloud. A mile off are the smoke and downlaid and uptaken rails of the perpetual train. Uzman and Ann-Hari are on board, while Judah and Thick Shanks and hundreds of others are ambushers.

They can see the army now. Judah is drained after his preparations. He is already so tired that his dreams are slipping into his thoughts. He must return to iron council as soon as he can. It needs his protection. He has built a golem trap on the cowcatcher, has told them how to trip it should the silicate mist appear, but a golem of air will not last without his shepherding.

– There must be other attacks, he says, as they have all said. This cannot be the only front New Crobuzon will open. But there is no time to think of that now as the attackers come close enough, and before their first guns sound to destroy the ramparts, the iron council attacks.

The wyrmen hammer the air with their thick wings, wheel through shots and drop their clay grenades. Bullets snatch them out of the air.

Bomblets drop, made of whatever the council has: gunpowder, the shrapnel of torn-up tools, vials of crude acids, unpleasant thaumaturgic compounds, oil. Naphtha, caustics, hot smoke unfold and the militia break a little, but they re-form fast, break again at a second sortie of wyrmen. The sun is bright but seems suddenly very cold to Judah.

– It ain’t far, he is muttering. He hears himself. -Ain’t got to do this long.

He leans out, field glasses to his eyes. Wyrmen defecate their contempt on the enemy as they let their missiles go. One bursts: Avvatry, a truculent bull Judah knows enough to greet, taken apart with fusillade so he reaches the ground more rags than animal.

The Councillors fire arbalests made in iron council’s foundries. They light fuses and send rockfall down on the invaders. Judah knows this is his fight to win or to lose.

Judah stands. He stands on the rampart. Wires trail from him, to batteries, to a transformer. He trembles with bravery.

The men and women with him in his hide-all with some vestige, some trace, of hex, all joined together-cut their hands and wrap wire tight around the wounds. It is a crude engine that links them, to require so vulgar and literal a bleeding, something battered together from found materials. -Give it me, Judah shouts, and Shaun shoves the leads home, and the gutter-motor moans, and those amassed all stagger as it siphons out their strength and funnels it into the clips that puncture Judah’s chest.

A sound comes from him that is impossible to describe. His skin tightens and moves as if someone is pressing their fingers to him. From the dust, men stand. They are in the army’s path. Judah sweats. It spews from him. He moves his hands. The men, the golems, walk in ponderous stride.

There are a score or more. Bigger than humans. Premade and waiting. They walk toward the New Crobuzon Militia. Judah shakes. The weaker of his comrades are passed out. Judah is sweating blood.

The black golems stalk on. One is kicked apart by militia horses. Its torso twitches and tries to claw itself on farther, and Judah quivers as if hit with stones. He hauls on the air, pulls something immaterial into place. The dirt men-things walk into the melee, and the mounts shy around them. Bounty hunters and uniformed militia veer as the golems reach for them. Some golems stand cruciform. Some wrap their arms around struggling quarries. Where he can see to direct them, Judah has them push with their abnatural strength through bodyguards to embrace officers. Crowds of the fighters surround each one, hacking the mineral bodies, levelling their pistols.

– Shoot dammit! Judah gasps. And though his enemies cannot hear him they obey. A bullet grinds into one of the figures. The golem is made of flint and gunpowder.

There is a tremendous bay of ignition and the golem disappears in a pillar of explosion. It is a man-thing then a wind of dirt-coloured fire, the stones that were embedded in it suddenly outrushing and laying down the bounty hunters in a circle; and its heat touches one of its fellows and it too goes up, and when the smoke they have become is gone Judah sees soot-stains where they were, and around them ripples of dead men, black and bloody, becoming more solid, becoming more like bodies farther out, and those at the circumference of each crater still move, still shriek.

– Shoot, Judah says again. Gunshots, flaming arrows from ballistae. The hot missiles come in and transform the made figures into vortices of combustion.

One by one they stumble into the attackers, hug them, bury them in blackpowder and then in fire. The gunpowder golems, shambling bombs, sear holes in the army. Judah stands and hears a rhythmic roar that is his heart. His comrades shout in his honour. Blood drips from his face. The last of the golems runs into the invaders, scattering soldiers with every ungainly step. It is gone in the flame from some marksman’s arrow, and dusty fire is unrolling.

There are still hundreds of bounty-men and militia but they are reeling, their commanders screaming, their mounts’ hooves slipping on the mulch of their dead. And the wyrmen come back, and the Councillors make more rockfalls, and the arbalestiers send their huge bolts.

– Low! the men shout. -Yes! And Judah Low roars back at them.

Iron council raiders descend, the hugest Remade, cactacae braves with picks and heavy hatchets. Judah is tugged back and kissed. His comrades are sallow, trembling and cold from the energy he borrowed, but they are stronger than he. Judah closes his eyes.

He passes out, manhandled to safety. He dreams of gunpowder golems, and the sun, and then he is suddenly awake.

– What, what? he says, lurches up. -What, what?

Thick Shanks and Shaun point east, up, into the air. -There are more of them. They’ve attacked the train.

Judah and Shaun ride on a horse reconfigured for speed. Judah is numb. The loud and random bounty-men-and-militia army was an unsubtle distraction.

What will you do, golemist? he asks himself. What will you do to stop them? You ain’t going to stop them; you’re going to die. To die with his council. You’re too broken to do anything now. Look at the blood come from you. But he does not think he will die. Judah would not go if he thought he would die.

There are men in the sky, militia swinging under taut spheres. He sees the smoke of the perpetual train and he can hear explosions. The aeronauts seep bombs, breaking apart the scud-sculptures of the smokestone in a line of craters, drawing a gully toward the council.

What will you do, golemist? Judah asks himself. He will do something. The thing in him, the oddity, the good in him flexes.

People are scrambling away. Refugees again: men, the old, the terrified and wounded, newcomers without loyalty to keep them, women carrying their children, running over the ridges of hard cloud. Judah and Shaun career past them by the tracks. They ride into the battle.

There is the train, firing from its riveted-together guntower. Militia and the Councillors who outnumber but are outfought by them. The sky ahead is unnatural, a matted pewter, stained with colours that should not be there.

Out ahead, protected by cactus and Remade guards, is a track-laying team. They move frenetic, in a sped-up mumming of their usual work, over a rubble of nimbostratus stone. They are picked off by militia targeteers, falling wounded or killed over the rails, and their comrades push them aside and continue their urgent work.

Judah comes in fighting.

The militia will not stop the train: they will kill many but there are only yards left, and even with the cull of track-layers (another man down with a blood-blossom) the train will go through. It is the oncoming aerostats that make Judah afraid. There is the sound of rain in the west, but no rain appears.

Shaun relaxes. Judah feels him lean backward and puts his arm around him and feels his front slick, too wet for sweat, and Judah knows his friend is dead. The horse stumbles and stops and Judah dismounts, dragging Shaun with him, his sternum all ruptured. Judah hauls him until volleys disturb him and he must let his dead friend go and run through the lines of his comrades and along the train, staying low, grabbing a bow from a pile as he goes. A rivebow it is-he curses its weight, its limited range, but he tries to level it as he runs the length of the battered cars, toward the steaming chimney where his golem trap is set.

He fires a scalpel-edged chakri; he hunkers by Remade and edges toward the cowcatcher. There are thaumaturges among the militia, and darts of baleful energy spit at the Councillors and do arcane damage. The wyrmen perform brave and dangerous raids on the militia, and the militia begin to withdraw.

– We make them run! We make them run! screams a wyrman, hysterical with pride, but she is wrong. The militia are leaving because airships are coming.

– Move! There is a shout. -We’re through! And the segmented edifice lurches and trembles and crawls through the stone mist and up, looking as if it will derail any second, on smokestone shards. The scree moves uneasy but holds, and the carriages progress, bullets typing on their iron skin. The train pauses at the apex of the shard hill, descends. The train finds a pothole-a track cracks, carriages list, but somehow the rutted wheels keep traction and shuddering like something wounded the train rolls into the land beyond.

– Keep going! Judah shouts, as hundreds of the Councillors run to rejoin the train. -Come on. The sky and the land are not as they should be. There is a sound like something hollow being struck, way off, before the sun.

The geoempath stands by a chasm in the rocks, by the powdermonkeys cutting fuses. She is smeared with the earth’s filth and her eyes retain something of the degradation of her hex, but she looks at Judah and nods before he can ask, points into the ground. -There, she says. -I think.

The train gushes steam and hisses impatient. -Get on, get on get on get on, Ann-Hari shouts from the cab. Wyrmen race across the reefs of stone to where the last Councillors hold out at the crevice. The Remade run. They are such little things. Can no one see it? Judah looks west and up. Can no one see the sky? The land?

A panorama like and unlike everything they have passed.

What are you? Miles to the west, a moment’s distance in this great stretched landscape- Gods we’re in the middle lands, we’re out of all maps, we’re nowhere -here stony ground becomes something more rippled, something rilled as if the earth were poured wax, its parameters unclear as Judah tries to focus. The land dips away. Trees puncture the plain, but they change, they are less like trees, they flicker, is it? Like some dark flame, they flicker, they phase in their substance, or is it only the eye trying to see so far off, no, there is something about these trees or are they some other thing? There is a mountain but it may be a mirage, rippling as it does, it may be a barrow and much closer, it may be a fleck in Judah’s eye. Nothing is as it should be.

Things that are not birds fly like birds above, birds like rain. While the council gathers its lost Judah looks at the sky. It moves like a baby.

Drained and bleeding fighters climb for the train. -Get on, Uzman shouts. He is standing on a crest, looking down the splits in rock at the Councillors struggling to get home. -Come on come on, Uzman says, as more find their way through, but his voice tells Judah that time will not allow them all, as the militia regroup. It is already too late. Uzman is looking to the powder-men, to the geoempath. The perpetual train moves, the track-layers continue, it crawls on, away from the last smokestone.

– This is only the edge, Judah says, looks at the sky, -of the cacotopic stain. We’re only at the outskirts. But he can feel the ground; he feels its energy in a way he should not. He sees Uzman’s despair.

In their desperation to save the last of their comrades they delay bursting the seam so late the re-formed cadres of militia catch up with the stragglers of Remade. At last there is a stuttering of three explosions, and a huge squall of smokestone kecks up from porous earth and uncoils in a smog that expands fast to clog the channel the graders have made, and moves slower as it begins to set.

Uzman cries miserably out as it enfolds the slower Remade. He looks down at the gaseous rock expanding.

In the ropes of his gut Judah feels a newness, a constructed nonlife, a giant anthropoid wind come to him, as Ann-Hari releases his golem trap. Judah flexes inside, spits out an effort and grabs control of the thing, reaches up as if he would hold its hand and together Judah and his golem run for the unfolding stone. The golem walks into it, stretches out its air arms, pushes back wafts, tries ineffectually to clear a hollow.

Judah is scores of yards from the now sluggish vapor, which is smothering as it indurates. From within its setting stone Judah hears choked calls. In resentful unfolding gusts the cloud pushes its innards out and Judah sees movement inside, not wind-driven or random, and arms, supplicant, emerge from the obscurity and a man comes out, greyed by wisps that cling to him and become silicon chitin, crusting him as he falls, and behind is another belching of mist and another figure pushes through smokestone visibly harder now, wading through dough, scabbed with it, labouring under matter.

Judah reaches them. The first man through is militia, they see through a ragged epidermis of stone, but it is impossible to feel hate or anger for him as he shivers and fights to breathe through a mouth thick with mineral curd. The other is council. There is no saving him. His comrades try to break the boulder that has settled over his face but by the time they do their efforts have cracked his skull.

– We have to go, Uzman shouts from above. He is stricken but controlled.

An enormous boiling of rock is where the train came through. The rails disappear into it, embedded forever or until it desolidifies again. Judah has his golem disaggregate, and the air currents around them change.

There is motion, and Judah’s face curls to see in the mid of the new rock geography a forearm protruding, jutted like some horizontal cliff plant, still clutching or trying to clutch as the nerves of the corpse within the smokestone die.

Though they shatter aspects of the train with their bombs the aeronauts are uncertain. The ballooners swivel to see the sudden blockage, rock all full of their colleagues. They are shot down by boldened Councillors. One falls as Judah watches, gas venting from his split globe.

In sudden formation the aeronauts hornet away over the new low hills. Uzman shouts instructions and Councillors run to strip the fallen ballooner of his equipment, to salvage the cloth of his dirigible. -We have to be scavengers, says Uzman. -We have to learn that, from now on. He looks up at the sky.

– There’ll be more, he says, before Judah can even feel relief.

But it comes, the relief, on the day and night of setting out into the uncovered wilderness. Relief and a desperate sadness and a mourning of the many lost.

– They didn’t all get trapped, says Uzman. Judah winces at his tone, the eagerness to find respite. -Some of them was still on the other side.

Where the militia were. It is no comfort. Judah imagines what it must have been for them, militia and council, to watch that thundercloud become rock and eat their friends.

Now as new inhabitants of that place the Councillors attend to their environs. In the torchlight they shudder as the geography shifts. They see other lights that move quite wrong in the distance, and hear shouts they do not recognise, or that they recognise as their own, echoes held captive for hours and released distorted.

The escapees gather. The tracks shift a little. North a shade, a whisper. Uzman is taking them into the cacotopic zone. They are at its very edges, but closer than anyone should ever come.

They have closed a hill door behind them, and with sunrise they see the new landscape for the first time. Miles of scrub in ordinary colours rich after the grey rock. The ground pitching, yawing, becoming wilder. Tremendous numbers of trees, and stone teeth to guard them, and vines fruited with flowers in gewgaw colours. And little lakes and other earthscapes, and in the direction the train and its tracks are heading, a tremendous alteration in the land. Judah can feel it. They all can. Through the wheels.

The shadows do not all lie in the same plane. -We’re only snipping in, Uzman says. -Only putting our toes in. The shadows are wrong, and Judah feels winds blowing in contradictory directions. When the ground is not watched it skews.

They have left so many of their dead behind them, unburied. Shaun is somewhere, lying like a sleeper.

One last day Judah hauls rails. He digs them up from by the new rock, under the mummying hand, and leads the mule carts to the front of the train to lay them down again. Two nubs of iron remain poking from the stone fog.

They are watched by animals, by plants with eyes. The second night Judah speaks to his friends around a fire that by some arcana burns white. Uzman, Ann-Hari, Thick Shanks and those others new elected, mandated by engineers, dowsers, brakemen, waterboys, the ex-whores and the followers.

– You’ve done it, Judah says. Uzman and Ann-Hari are unblinking at his praise. -Got us out. And now you’re in this strange place.

– It isn’t finished yet.

– No, it ain’t. But you’ll be all right. You will. You will. There must be a place beyond this. A place far enough. They won’t follow you. You’ll cross, right across the world. Where there’s fruit and meat. Where the train can stop. You can hunt, fish, rear cattle-I don’t know. You can read, and when you’ve read the books in the library car you should write others. You got to get there.

– But what’s here? What’ll come for us here?

– I don’t know. It’ll be hard, but you’ll get through. Judah does not know why he is speaking like a prophet. It is not him who speaks; it is his thing inside, his innard good. -They won’t follow you in. I’ll lay money.

They laughed at that. Money was ornament now. There were those who still hoarded it, but it was notepaper for the children. It was jewellery.

– And Uzman was right, even though he was wrong, Judah says. -We should have got word to New Crobuzon. Think on it. No one might know.

There is silence. -You might tell no one, just disappear, and all they’d say is that once, when they was building the railroad, the train just went. The Remade went fReemade and took the train with them. You want more than that. The Remade in the city, waiting, they deserve more.

– There’s those as know what happened…

– Yes but will they do it right? You’ll be rumour-that can’t be altered-but what kind of rumour? Do you want to be a rumour that won’t die? That matters? Do you want them to shout the council’s name when they strike?

Ann-Hari smiles.

Judah says, -I’ll go back. I’ll be your bard.

Some of them say at first that it is cowardice, that he is afraid to come with them across the little purlieu of the cacotopos, but none of them really believe him cowardly. They are sorry that he is leaving them.

– We need your golems, a woman says.

– How can you go? Don’t you care for the council, Judah?

Judah rounds at that.

– You ask me that? he says. -You ask me that? He shames them.

– I’ll be your bard. I’ll tell them. Stay still. The powderflash goes and each of the gathered blinks.

In so alien a place, with the foreboding of the Torque, with the unnatural sky and the alterity of the cacotopic zone, even with the smokestone behind them there are some leaving the council.

– Some’ll make it, Judah says. -Go fReemade-they won’t go back to New Crobuzon, not Remade like that.

– You will, you’ll get through, sisters. He looks at them without even uncertainty. -Take it, he says. His voxiterator. They are quizzical. -Here. This is how you make it keep what you say. They watch him load the wax and take what spare cylinders he has. -One every year, he says slowly. -Send me one back. Wherever you are. By boat, horse, foot, whatever. We’ll see if they get through. I want to hear your voices. He looks at Ann-Hari. -I want to hear your voices.

One by one he holds them. He grips each of his comrades very hard, even those whose names he does not know. -Long live iron council, he says to each of them in turn. -Long live, long live.

With sudden mischievous love Judah tongues Uzman, and the Remade jerks and is about to pull away and then does not. Judah does not kiss him for long. -Be gentle to the Chainday-night boys, he says in the Remade’s ear, and Uzman smiles.

And Judah holds Ann-Hari and she kisses him as she did when first they were lovers, and he pulls her close by the hips and she holds his face for seconds. -Long live, he whispers into her mouth. -Long live.

He has forgotten how much faster it is to travel alone. It is not a day before he is returned to the smokestone. The hand of the trapped man, egressing the rock, has been gnawed down to red bone.

Judah walks across the tops of the swells as if over the sea. He sees detritus from the fight and a scattering of corpses. At noon he feels shadows, and over him is a school of airships, moving toward the perpetual train. Judah shields his eyes and leans against his staff.

He supposes that perhaps he should be afraid for his comrades, but he is not. He reads the changing formations of the dirigibles. He smiles, alone on the ground, as they pass like slow barracuda. They seem to hesitate. He sits, his back to a granitic coil, and watches.

Judah can see the smoke of the train. One midsize warflot edges nervously into the air of the cacotopic zone. From here, the landscape seems utterly quotidian, but Judah can feel something baneful welling below the world’s skin.

The airship lets its bombs fall as it approaches the perpetual train. Judah sees little explosion-flowers over the hills. Even now he is not afraid.

In the distance the sky convulses. A bolus of something moves, a coilsome organic thing-not a cloud but an aspect of the sky itself become palpable and squidish across the land not quite seen. Sound is strange. Judah does not breathe. There is a stutter. The dirigible falters and comes clear again and then it is different-it is a splinter different, it is lower in the sky-and it turns, it removes itself with a speed that Judah would swear was panicked.

The train continues, into the stain, into the cacotopic zone that has beaten New Crobuzon back.

Judah walks for months. His life becomes a fugue of walking. Over creeks, quagmire, over rockland, through forests of vitreous trees, through forests that he thinks are fossil trees then sees are great skeletons. He walks a bonescape, an ossein ecology with its own undergrowth and scavengers.

He passes lakes that bubble with the fighting of vodyanoi tribes. He sees chimneys extruded from mountainsides where there are troglodyte villages. Judah is the guest of neglected priest-tribes. He is robbed by fReemade. He joins a fReemade band.

His body becomes a traveller’s body again. The startling muscles of his arms and chest subside and he is once again a thin mannequin tempered by travel. Garuda come to feed him, dropping from the sky with wordless charity. He checks his just-adequate maps, his compass. He does not retrace his steps the long route he has gone but goes directly east.

Judah passes through a storm, in a basalt place hundreds of miles from New Crobuzon, by blitzbaums, miles-high lightning trees. Bolts held still by cryptic forces, forking into boughs, a magnesium-bright forest.

The low rust skyline of a time-eaten iron town. And a swamp of thaumaturgically jinxed mud that degenerates his boots into worms. And a barrow and a buried church, and fields of wild berries, and beautiful hills. Five times he fights animals and three times he fights sentients. Judah runs or kills.

He is a quieter man. He moves with effortless expertise. It has been many weeks since he made a grass golem to walk with him, for him to talk to until the wind picks it apart. Judah passes cattle that were once domestic and are now feral. The ruins of fences, deserted pastures, miles by miles.

And then at last Judah comes down from the sudden hills and stands quiet like an idiot. At last he comes forward and now he stumbles. Judah goes to his knees. It is cold. What seasons have passed? Judah crawls forward and touches the rails.

It seems impossible that he can touch this metal, these iron sashes that wind around the weather and geography, that for all the blood and salt he spilled on them, the bones of all the men and women they press upon, are nothing, are a nothing, are made nothing by time and dust.

They are scavenged. Imperfect. Sections are gone. The tracks look out from the dirt and hide again. It has been a time since any train came this way.

Judah looks north along the cut. He remembers the carving of the roadbed. He is a long way north of the swamp.

When he goes back Judah will learn why the rails are still. How the money at last choked up in its sluices and died when the malfeasances grew so great that to ignore them would have shamed the state too far. That the money faltered when degraded news of the revolt, of the iron council, reached the railway’s backers. And how after panicked attempts to salvage the TRT through raised wages and a merciless expansion of Remaking the capital flight was so great that Transcontinental Railroad Trust was punctured, and the tracks became bones.

Soon, when he reaches the city again, Judah will learn that. For now he only smiles. He picks up his fallen pack, and as he stoops he strokes a rail as if it were a cat. He strokes it with affection, even with a melancholy.

He steps up and walks on over the dead rails. Around him the angles of the banks enclose him. He cannot see the wider land. This road tunnels his vision and leads him back to New Crobuzon. It has been waiting for him.

– New Crobuzon, he says, he whispers. It is the first time he has spoken for days. -New Crobuzon, I’ll always come back to you.

Not a lover’s promise, not a challenge, not resignation or pugnacity. Something of all of them.

He walks on. Helios of the iron council are in his pack. The truth, escape, a new life, a rolling democracy, Remade arcadia. -I’ll make you legend, he says and the birds listen, -and it will be true.

Judah walks on the iron road, back, to the city, back to the towers of New Crobuzon.