The guides led them there, the grass unsealing and sealing again. They watched all the figures working at their husbandry. A farmland, out here where there was nothing. Most of the party was mute. Judah smiled without ceasing, and muttered Long live. Men and women came along the paths, by sod huts that fringed the railroad, all the topography of normality, an everyday farmstead village, passed through by a train.

Judah watched the locals, and when they came close enough he would laugh and shout Long live, and they would nod in response.

"Hello, hello, hello," Judah said as a very young child neared, its father half-watching from where he sharpened a scythe. Judah squatted. "Hello, hello, little comrade, little sister, little chaver," he said. He made a benediction with his hand. "What’s it like, hey?"

And then he stepped back and simply sounded in happiness. The noise he made had been without syllables or shape, was nude delight, as he heard metal wincing and saw clouds of soot spoor, and as the train, the Iron Council, came through the grass. As the towering and shaking iron wood rope and found-sculpture wheeled town rolled out of the grasses and came at them.

They dropped what they carried. "Iron Council."

"Iron Council." Each of them said it as the tusked train came.

It came, repeating its few-miles, as it had for so long, neither sedentary nor nomadic, describing its home. It was stopping.

"I’m Judah Low," he shouted. He went toward it as if it were drawing in to a station. "I’m Judah Low." Someone had stepped from the engine cab, and Cutter had heard a shout, a greeting whose words he could not pick apart but that had made Judah run and scream and scream a name. "Ann-Hari!"

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Eighteen

There had been marshland. Camouflaged fens where what seemed earth and crabgrass became suddenly only a layer of plant on thick water. The Iron Councillors laid down rock fragments, pontoons, sunk pillars quickly cut from woods. They saw copses of stumps weathered by more than two decades and interspersed with neonate trees, where they had taken timber on their way out. The Iron Council moved slowly on rails just above or just below the water. The train became a sedate creature of the shallows. Below it, around it, came noises of bolotnyi and bog-things.

Pomeroy laid tracks. Elsie went with the foragers. Qurabin came at night to the travellers and told them things she or he had found in the hills and swamps. Secret things. In the monk’s slow surrender to the cost of revelations, Cutter sensed a sadness, a coward’s eagerness to die. Qurabin had lost everything and was dissolving into the world with pointless worship.

Drogon the whispersmith was a guard. One of the gunmen who watched the Council in its gushing steaming progress. Cutter was with Judah-he would not let him go. They put down tracks together.