The perpetual train went through the smokelands. The winds had gusted great roils, rock cumulonimbus on the anvil-tops of which they laid tracks quickly, nervous that they might revert. "Somewhere down there’s where we came in," Judah said. The split path they had made had long been effaced in scudding stone.

Judah, Cutter and Thick Shanks walked in the lee of the solid cloud, by the edge of the cacotopos.

"Some of us are afraid," Thick Shanks said. "Things have run away from us. Feels like we ain’t got a choice of what we’re doing." His voice was thin in the warm wind.

"Sometimes there are no choices," Judah said. "Sometimes it’s history decides. Just have to hope history don’t get it wrong. Look, look, isn’t that it?"

They found what they were looking for: a vertical uncoil of rock drooled with ivy and on which shrubs were stubbled. There was something different about the ground, a remnant of gouging, long-ago explosive-ploughing. A path visible under two decades’ growth.

"This is where we came through," Judah said, "the first time."

He stood by the cloudlike wall and tugged at a rockplant, and Cutter saw it was not a rockplant but a bone come from the stone. A sere wristbone, time-bleached leather still ragging it.

Judah said: "Was too slow."

A man encased. Caught by a tide of smokestone. Cutter looked with wide eyes. Around the wristbone was a circle of air, a thin burrow, where the arm-meat had been, and had rotted. And inside, it must hollow in a body’s contours, emptied by grubs and bacteria. A flaw, an ossuary the shape of a man. Silted with bones and bonemeal.

"Councillor or militia. Can’t remember now, can you, Shanks? There’s others. Dotted through. Bodies in the rock." They clambered to the top of the range. The Iron Council moved, its hammers ringing, the wyrmen like windblown leaves above it through the gushing of its smoke. Cutter watched the train progress. He saw the strangeness of its contours, its brick and stone towers, the rope bridges that linked its carriages, its carriage-mounted gardens and the smoke of its chimneys, echoes of the smokestacks at its head and tail.

A way east, long-rusted barrels of militia ordnance protruded from the stone.

In the land beyond, the land that extended to New Crobuzon itself, it was a prairie autumn. The Councillors looked carefully at the water and the woods and hills and at their charts. They could not believe where they were.