A strange parade. A children’s play performed on a street- corner to an audience of parents and friends desperate and ostentatious with pride and enjoyment, as bomb sounds continued. Spirals on the walls. Complex, arcing and re-arcing. Qurabin, unseen, made a hiss, a yes sound.

Once there was a panic, someone as they walked past screaming and running from a patch of moving colour, crying "A haint! A haint!" But it was fresh graffiti, ink sliding down, that had shocked the woman. She laughed, embarrassed. A klaxon sounded and an aerostat had hauled piscine over the Collective and drizzled bombs with coughs of collapsing mortar; those on the streets started and looked wary but more resigned than afraid.

There were countless styles on the streets. A last flowering of impoverished dandyism.

What is this place? thought Cutter. I cannot believe I’m here. I cannot believe I’m back. We’re back.

He saw Judah. Judah was destroyed. His face was absolute with misery. Is this what we won? Cutter saw him wonder.

In the later days of their journey, close to the city, Iron Council’s emissaries had met scores of refugees, poor and not-poor, from downtown and uptown. Out in the open land, they were only the lost. "Too much terror," one had told them, not knowing who they were, assuming them explorers. "It ain’t the same," the Crobuzoners said.

"It was something in the first days," a woman said. She held a baby. "I’d have stayed. It weren’t easy, but it was something. Emptying the prisons and the punishment factories, hearing Tarmuth had gone, getting messages from its Collective, till it fell. The food run out and next thing we’re eating rat. Time to go."

A terrified shopkeeper from Sheck claimed the Collective had gathered all the rich from the south of Aspic when they had taken it, stolen their houses, shot the men, raped the women and shot them too, and were raising the children as slaves.

"I’m gone," he said. "What if they win? What if they kill Mayor Triesti like they did Stem-Fulcher? I’m gone for Cobsea. They appreciate an industrious man."

Through streets Cutter had once known now made strange by mortars, with neglected bunting in the colours of factions, with signs proclaiming idiot theories or new churches, new things, new ways of being, split and peeling. The raucousness and vigour were gone from the streets but still sensible in echo, in the buildings themselves: palimpsests of history, epochs, wars, other revolts embedded in their stones.

There were sixteen Caucusers in the delegate council. Five could be found. They stared. They hugged the newcomers. They wept.

"I can’t believe it, I can’t believe it."