Ann-Hari was different. She gloried. She was insistent, demanding they go faster. She would stand on outcrops, clamber with crude grace up overhanging hillocks and gnarls and gesture the perpetual train on as if she controlled it, conductor of a steam symphony.

It was so fast, suddenly: they carved on, scouts warning of this small gorge, that stream. Work-crews built hybrid forms of New Crobuzon traditions and oddities from the west-trellis bridges anchored with thick greenery, supports not of stone but of solid colour, that could only be crossed when light shone on them.

"There’s war!" a fReemade told them. "Tesh says it’s stopped its attacks, and then it hasn’t. They say there’s two envoys from New Crobuzon, asking different terms. New Crobuzon don’t speak with one voice no more."

If the fReemade out here know we’re coming, Cutter thought, there’s no way them in New Crobuzon don’t. Word gets out. When will we face them?

Every few days Judah would spasm as the militia following them triggered his traps. With each, a few more of the soldiers might be taken, but a few days later another of the traps would go and prove they were coming. Judah tracked their progress in his own moments of weakness.

"They’re there," he said finally. "I recognise that one. They’re definitely in the cacotopos. I can’t believe they followed us there. They must be desperate to get us." What would a golem be, made of Torqued materia? With ablife channelled through that bleak matrix?

The stretched-out crew of graders and track-layers went north and east, and though they took their rails and crossties with them they left a land permanently tainted by their passage: a litter of metal parts, scars of railroad. The sky became colder, and through the darkness of the air massif became visible, leagues north. Dark drizzle came.

Here, perhaps three hundred miles west of the stub of the New Crobuzon railway, they were met by refugees. Not fReemade but recent citizens, come in a huddled rainwet congress out of the mist to run the last mile toward the growling engine, abasing before it like pilgrims. It was they who told Ann-Hari and Judah and the Iron Councillors what had happened in New Crobuzon, what was still happening, the story of the Collective.

"Oh my good gods," said Elsie. "We did it. It’s happened. It’s happened. Oh my gods." She was rapt. Judah’s face was open.

"It rose in Dog Fenn," a refugee said. "Came up out of nowhere."

"That ain’t the case," another said. "We knew you was coming-the Council. We had to get ready for you, some said."

They were terribly cowed before the Iron Council. These runaways were speaking to the figures they had seen so many times, for years, in the famous heliotype. They had to be cajoled into talking.