In her or his faintly decomposing way, Qurabin was anxious. The monk was troubled by each spiral they passed, felt the incoming of whatever the thing was, the purveyor of the coming hecatomb: the massacre spirit, the massenmordist, the unswarm, Qurabin called it. It was coming soon, he said, he felt it. The urgency infected Cutter, and the fear.

A ring of small haints beset the city. On the way to Ori’s home Cutter passed a commotion a street away, and Qurabin suddenly dragged him toward it, gripping him with hidden hands and keening. When they got there they saw the last moments of an emission like a dog, tumbling in complex patterns, disappearing and seeming to gather the world’s colour and light to it as it went. The small crowd of Collectivists around it were screaming and pointing, but none of them had died.

Qurabin moaned. "That’s it that’s it," Qurabin said as the world blinked and the thing was gone. "It’s the endgame."

Cutter did not know if he believed that Ori had killed Mayor Stem-Fulcher. It was still incredible to him. To think of that poised, white-haired woman he had known from heliotypes, from posters, from brief glimpses at public events, who had taken so much of his hatred for so long, now gone, was hard. He did not know what to do with it. He sat in Ori’s rooms, and waited.

Judah was with Ori, with Ori as Toro. He was clinging to him, pushed through the world’s skin to his old workshop in Brock Marsh.

"What you got to go for anyway?" Cutter had said. "I’m going to get a mirror-we’ll have that for the Council-so what is it you want? They’ll have closed your workshop."

"Yes," Judah said, "they will have. And yes, the mirror’s what’s needed, but there are things I want. Things I might need. I have a plan."

The others were at the armouries. The Iron Council Remade were preparing to defend the Collective on the barricades. What must it be for them, this strange fight? Cutter thought.

He thought of the journey through the badlands and pampas, through the tumbledown rockscape, through hundreds of miles at a tremendous rate, directed by Drogon the horse-tramp who had explored these hinterlands before, until they had come to the city rising west of the estuary plain. They had come through ghost towns. Little empties, mean architecture desiccated by years of being left alone, inhabited only by squalls of dust.

"Yes," Judah had whispered. This was his past, these outposts, the remnants of fences, the little bough-marked graves. Less than three decades before these had been the boomtowns.