What are you? Miles to the west, a moment’s distance in this great stretched landscape- Gods we’re in the middle lands, we’re out of all maps, we’re nowhere -here stony ground becomes something more rippled, something rilled as if the earth were poured wax, its parameters unclear as Judah tries to focus. The land dips away. Trees puncture the plain, but they change, they are less like trees, they flicker, is it? Like some dark flame, they flicker, they phase in their substance, or is it only the eye trying to see so far off, no, there is something about these trees or are they some other thing? There is a mountain but it may be a mirage, rippling as it does, it may be a barrow and much closer, it may be a fleck in Judah’s eye. Nothing is as it should be.

Things that are not birds fly like birds above, birds like rain. While the council gathers its lost Judah looks at the sky. It moves like a baby.

Drained and bleeding fighters climb for the train. -Get on, Uzman shouts. He is standing on a crest, looking down the splits in rock at the Councillors struggling to get home. -Come on come on, Uzman says, as more find their way through, but his voice tells Judah that time will not allow them all, as the militia regroup. It is already too late. Uzman is looking to the powder-men, to the geoempath. The perpetual train moves, the track-layers continue, it crawls on, away from the last smokestone.

-This is only the edge, Judah says, looks at the sky, -of the cacotopic stain. We’re only at the outskirts. But he can feel the ground; he feels its energy in a way he should not. He sees Uzman’s despair.

In their desperation to save the last of their comrades they delay bursting the seam so late the re-formed cadres of militia catch up with the stragglers of Remade. At last there is a stuttering of three explosions, and a huge squall of smokestone kecks up from porous earth and uncoils in a smog that expands fast to clog the channel the graders have made, and moves slower as it begins to set.

Uzman cries miserably out as it enfolds the slower Remade. He looks down at the gaseous rock expanding.

In the ropes of his gut Judah feels a newness, a constructed nonlife, a giant anthropoid wind come to him, as Ann-Hari releases his golem trap. Judah flexes inside, spits out an effort and grabs control of the thing, reaches up as if he would hold its hand and together Judah and his golem run for the unfolding stone. The golem walks into it, stretches out its air arms, pushes back wafts, tries ineffectually to clear a hollow.