-… 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.