"Sisters, Councillors, comrades. You’re about to be attacked. And there’ll be no quarter. They’re coming to destroy you. They can’t allow you to continue. You got away. And sisters… now more than ever they need to finish it."

It was hard for Judah to make the Councillors understand about the chaos in New Crobuzon. The older ones remembered their own strikes and the great shucking off in which they culminated, but New Crobuzon itself was an old old memory and thousands of miles away. Judah tried to make the troubles live to them. "There is something happening," he said.

"They have to bring you back in pieces. So they can say to the citizens, See what we done. See what we do to them as tries to rise. See what’s been done to your Council.

"They’re coming to destroy you. It’s time to move, to relay the tracks. You have to go. You could go north-I don’t know. Take it up to the tundra. An ice-train with the bear-riders. Up to the Cold Claws. I don’t know. Hide again. But you have to go. Because they’ve found you, they’re coming for you, and they won’t stop till you’re gone."

"Yeah, they could hide," Drogon said in Cutter’s ear, sudden and insistent. "Or there’s another possibility. They could come back. Tell them they have to come back. Tell them."

He did not whisper it as an instruction, but he spoke so urgently, with such sudden fervour, that Cutter obeyed him.

For days the Council was stunned enough that it could not plan. It had no sentimentality about its sedentary town. They had always insisted that the train was where they lived, that other buildings were only annexes, cabs without wheels. But the resources they had accrued over years, hard-won, would be missed.

"We should stay. We can take whatever comes," the younger Councillors declared, and their parents, the Remade, strove to tell their children what New Crobuzon was.

"This ain’t a band of striders," they said. "This ain’t horse-thieves. This is a different thing. Listen to Low."

"Yeah, but we’ve techniques now, that, no disrespect to Mr. Low, he don’t know about. Moss-magic, cirriomancy-does he know about them?" Thaumaturgy learnt from arcane natives. Their parents shook their heads.

"This is New Crobuzon. Forget that. It ain’t like that."

Judah unwrapped the braced mirror that Cutter had brought him. "There’s only one," he said. "The other’s broken and without it this isn’t a weapon. But even if we had another, it wouldn’t be enough. You have to go."

They had sent the cleverest of the wyrmen to watch the coast hundreds of miles off. A week passed. "Found nothing," the first said when it came back, and Judah had grown angry. "They’re coming," he said.