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.