He was, from long ago, a Dog Fenn Remade. His hands were gone, the left a mess of bird’s feet congealed in talon-mass, the right a snake’s thick tail. He was a scald, an Iron Council balladeer, and the apparent halting of his delivery was a game: he told in a complex, arresting syncopation mimicking novicehood. His story was a kind of lay for those dead by the inchmen.

"We lost so many. They went to glass and then was just gone, on a hill that was a bone and then a pile of bones and then a hill again. We learnt ways of passing through this in-between." There was no scientist in the world of Bas-Lag who knew more about Torque, about the cacotopos, than the Iron Council.

"Now we come back, the land’s shucked and the Torque’s done what it’s done. Some of the rails we hid is gone, some’s corkscrewed, some are holes the shape of rails, some are lizards made of stone. But there are enough to get us out again. To come out on the other side, with only the plains between us and New Crobuzon. Hundreds of miles, weeks maybe months, but not the years it would once have taken."

Many miles west, the New Crobuzon Militia tracked them.

Inchmen came again. This time they attacked the train itself, and were repelled but at cost. They drag-crawled and with their wavering spanworm walk stomped toward the train and even touched it and gnawed at it, marked it with stone-hard teeth and caustic spit. Councillors died pushing them away. There were other creatures: shadows shaped like dogs, simians with hyaena voices pelted with grass and leaves.

The ground defied the Council. It changed in sped-up corrasion, in the buckling of tectonics at some psychotic rate as if time was untethered from its rules. The ground crawled. There were patches of sudden and extreme cold where frost-heave buckled rails, and then temperate places where the rockwalls came closer and creeping hills stalked them.

They laid tracks on ground just smooth enough for their passage, on ties just strong enough, just close enough together. It was a just-railroad, existing in the moment for the train to pass, then gone again. Hauled by the Remade and by young Councillors who had never seen their parents’ former home. Over a spread-out swamp, a quag that ate the tracks.

Cutter would look up, time to time, from his hammering or earth-laying, and see the glowering of the cacotopic stain in the near-distance: the snarl of sky and scene, a baby’s face, an explosion of leaves, an animal in the uncertainty in the air and the hills. We don’t even see it no more, he thought, amazed, and shook his head. The sky was clear, but a serein drizzled onto them. You can get used to the most monstrous absurdity, he thought.