-Keep going! Judah shouts, as hundreds of the Councillors run to rejoin the train. -Come on. The sky and the land are not as they should be. There is a sound like something hollow being struck, way off, before the sun.

The geoempath stands by a chasm in the rocks, by the powdermonkeys cutting fuses. She is smeared with the earth’s filth and her eyes retain something of the degradation of her hex, but she looks at Judah and nods before he can ask, points into the ground. -There, she says. -I think.

The train gushes steam and hisses impatient. -Get on, get on get on get on, Ann-Hari shouts from the cab. Wyrmen race across the reefs of stone to where the last Councillors hold out at the crevice. The Remade run. They are such little things. Can no one see it? Judah looks west and up. Can no one see the sky? The land?

A panorama like and unlike everything they have passed.

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.