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.