Long before that the arc-flight of buzzards was disrupted. They scattered. The coy unfolding walk of a jaguar faltered and the cat erupted, was gone. Dust and black smoke sent animals away. Hundreds of years changed at the arrival of that crude loudness.

Through an opening-up of earth, like a bacillus, some little organic thread sullying blood, infecting landscape, came the Iron Council. A steaming and sniffing metal animal god. As once they did years before, figures before it laid down rails, and others cleared its tracks, and others recycled them, took the left-behind path and hauled it in the path of the sounding engine.

Wherever it went it was intruder. It was never part of the land. It was an incursion of history in stubby hillside woodland and the thicker tree-pelt of real forest, valleys between mountains, canyon-plains horned randomly with monadnocks. It intruded in uncanny places, dissident landscape, creeping hills, squalls of smokestone and fulgurite statues, frozen storms of lightning.

An apparition. A town of men and women hacked at the ground, rendered it just flat enough to lay tracks. They were invaders.

Like their ancestors the first Councillors, some of whom were their own younger selves, they were muscled, weathered, expert. Remade, whole, cactus, alien other, a consummate industry, the rail-carriers with their tongs, the dropping of sleepers, hammer-blows tight enough to dance to.

They wore skins; they wore smocks and trousers made from sacks resewn. They wore jewels made of railway metal, and sang mongrel songs, bastards of decades-old construction chanties, and new lays telling their own story.

West we came to find a place to Rest to go without a trace and Live our lives Remade and free to Give ourselves our liberty

In the centre of the swarm, hundreds of figures attending to its complex fussy needs, protected by guards, lookouts at the hills and treetops and in the air, came the cause of it all, the train. Marked by time. It was altered. The train had gone feral.

The abattoirs, the bunks, the guntower, the library, the mess hall, the work-cabs, all the old carriages were there, but changed. They were crenellated, baroque and topped with dovecots. Rope bridges joined new towers on different carriages and sagged and went tight at the slight curving of the Iron Council’s path. Siege engines were bolted to the roofs. New windows were cut into the carriages’ sides. Some were thickened with ivy and waxy vines, spilling from them as if they were old churches, winding the length of the guntower. Two of the flatbeds were filled with kitchen gardens full of herbs. Two others were also earth-filled, but only grass grew on them, between gravestones. A little pack of half-tame motion demons bit playfully at the Council’s wheels.