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Chapters (48)
  1. Prologue
  2. Part One: Trappings
  3. Chapter One
  4. Chapter Two
  5. Chapter Three
  6. Chapter Four
  7. Chapter Five
  8. Part Two: Returns
  9. Chapter Six
  10. Chapter Seven
  11. Chapter Eight
  12. Chapter Nine
  13. Part Three: Wine Land
  14. Chapter Ten
  15. Chapter Eleven
  16. Chapter Twelve
  17. Chapter Thirteen
  18. Anamnesis: The Perpetual Train
  19. Part Four: The Hainting
  20. Chapter Fourteen
  21. Chapter Fifteen
  22. Chapter Sixteen
  23. Part Five: Retread
  24. Chapter Seventeen
  25. Chapter Eighteen
  26. Chapter Nineteen
  27. Part Six: The Causus Race
  28. Chapter Twenty
  29. Chapter Twenty-One
  30. Chapter Twenty-Two
  31. Part Seven: Stain
  32. Chapter Twenty-Three
  33. Chapter Twenty-Four
  34. Part Eight: The Remarking
  35. Chapter Twenty-Five
  36. Chapter Twenty-Six
  37. Chapter Twenty-Seven
  38. Chapter Twenty-Eight
  39. Chapter Twenty-Nine
  40. Chapter Thirty
  41. Part Nine: Sound and Light
  42. Chapter Thirty-One
  43. Chapter Thirty-Two
  44. Chapter Thirty-Three
  45. Part Ten: The Monument
  46. Chapter Thirty-Four
  47. Chapter Thirty-Five
  48. RUNAGATE RAMPANT. LUNUARY 1806.

The perpetual train, even with its new rolling stock in the strange materia of the wide lands, its rough wood and mineral cars, could not contain all the Councillors. There were hundreds who would be, again, camp followers, nomads in the train’s trail. A few would not come. Some went for the hills, or insisted they would stay as farmers in the settled land, surrounded by remnants of the torn-up iron road.

"You’ll die," Judah told them, "when they come." And they responded with bluff and bravado. It would come to nothing, Cutter thought, when the New Crobuzon Militia appeared, its most powerful and well-armed squads, to where they thought they would find their quarry and instead met fifty aging farmers. He watched them, knowing they were dead. May they kill you quick.

Cutter did not know if Ann-Hari and Judah were lovers, but they loved one another in a deep and simple way. He was jealous, yes, but no more than of the other people Judah loved. Cutter was used to this thing so unrequited.

Judah was with Ann-Hari the night before the Iron Council left its grassland sanctuary. Cutter was alone, holding himself and remembering the night he had tussled with the muscular young man.

The next day they gathered: there was Cutter in the outskirt land where wild grass was crushed by the train and by the farmers. And there brawny Pomeroy swinging his weapon playfully, like a scythe, and Elsie her arm around her man’s waist, and Drogon in his brimmed hat leading the mount he had persuaded the horse-husbanders of the Iron Council to give him, his lips moving and Cutter not sure to whom he spoke, and there the grass fluttered as Qurabin moved along secret ways revealed by his or her strange godling, and out ahead arm-in-arm walked Ann-Hari and Judah Low, investigated by the insects of the morning.

Behind them the Iron Council came. They would fall into line soon, would help lay tracks, help break the stone and wind through the sarsen blocks of the lowlands, but for now they walked ahead. The ellipse of iron was unwinding, the Councillors were track-layers again. And scouts and water dowsers, hunters and graders, but above all layers of track, who uncoiled the edge of their town and put it down again in a straight line, back along land that bore still the faint trace of their arrival.

Way to their west came predatory militia, soldiers wanting only to destroy them. The Iron Council shuddered, and went on, went east, headed for New Crobuzon, home.

That was how it had been. And then to this edge, this most literal badland.

"Here. This is it, here. The edge of it. The edge of the cacotopic stain."

Part Six: The Causus Race

Part Six: The Causus Race

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Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty

The Monstrous Without-and Within. New Crobuzon’s Twin Enemies: The Watcher and the Treacherous. Night of Shame.