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.