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.