People gave her fruit, cakes of spiced game she shared among her entourage, a patrol of women, some seventy, some in their teens. Cutter saw the strange love in which she was held. She took Judah’s arm. They were a stately couple. The Iron Councillors would cheer and tell Judah how welcome he was, give the others food and drink, kiss their cheeks. They shouted in strange accents: New Crobuzon gone skewwhiff.

The perpetual train was town hall, church and temple. It was the keep. It whistled as it went, prowling the perimeter of its land of peasants, hunters, surgeons, teachers, drivers of the train. There were cactus-men and a very few cactus-women, and a handful of vodyanoi, the dowsers and diviners and their children. The sky was full of scudding wyrmen. The oldest of them had forgotten New Crobuzon; the youngest had never seen it.

Other races were there in little clutches: though New Crobuzon Ragamoll was the main tongue, there were those who cough-talked in arcane tonal systems. Immigrants to this track-layers’ land. The young were whole, of course, born without Remaking, but of those humans in their forties and above, most were Remade. They were the first Councillors. Those who had made the Council.

The spectre of the roadbed climbed slopes. Look, there. Veins through the stone. Ain’t this where we lost Marimon? On the crag yonder? It went up too fast and- They paused, respectful, where topography reminded them of the long-dead.

Most hill animals fled the Council, but there were those airborne and rock-running predators who picked off stray travellers-mouthed things the size of bears that stalked sheer walls on pads or adhesive pulvilli, skin-winged tentacular masses on goat legs. Cactacae, with no meat smell to goad carnivores, were the best guards.

Where they could they retraced the Council’s path. Sometimes they had to cut new paths. With powders synthesised in their made laboratories they broke through the matter of mountains. There were crag-ends and cliffs where the bridges they had made years before remained. Councillors would clamber out to test them, their footsteps echoed by crepitus as boards moved against each other. Many were fallen. Split wood lay weathered, mulched by insects, while above plank girders stubbed from hills.

They moved on quickly thrown-down tracks, on tracks already waiting scrubbed of rust. Where they reached cliff walls, they might see the scar of the old roadbed meander miles out of the way, while before them was a tunnel, crude but tall enough to take them. Over the years of the Council, battalions of tunnellers had come, in shifts, to cut passages, in case a quick return might one day be needed.