The revolt of the Iron Council, the renegacy of the perpetual train, had been the last part of the crisis of corruption, incompetence and overproduction that had destroyed Wrightby’s Transcontinental Railroad Trust. The thrown-up towns and hamlets of the plains, and the herds of beef and crossbred meat-beasts, the gunfighters and mercenaries, the trappers, the populace of that mongrel of money and wild, had evaporated, in months. They left their houses like snakeskin casts behind. The waddies were gone, the horse-gangsters, the whores.

The Iron Council would be accelerating. It would eat the distance, even as each moment of track-laying seemed arduous and slow. Cutter had realised the Council must be in the open land. And the militia who tracked it, who had traced over the whole world to find it, must still be following, all the way back toward their home, gaining daily. The most absurdly roundabout trip, across the continent and back again, by a terrible route.

As the light began to glower and go out, the sense of the room buckled and ripped at two points, and from nothing, horns emerged. Toro shoved through adrip with the energies that were reality’s blood, carrying Judah, wrapped together like lovers.

Judah stumbled free and the colours dripped upward from him to sputter out of existence before they hit the ceiling. He was carrying a full sack.

"Got what you needed, then?" Cutter said. Judah looked at him and the last of the worldblood evanesced.

"Everything to finish this," he said. "We’ll be ready."

The fact that there were Iron Councillors in the Collective had leaked. Even through the terror and the unhappiness of those bleak days, it was huge news.

Excited mobs ran through the byways by the Dog Fenn post office, looking for their guests. When at last they found Maribet and Rahul, the barricade they had joined became a kind of fighting shrine.

There were queues of Collectivists waiting while militia bullets went overhead. They trooped past the Councillors and asked questions-an unspoken politeness limited each person to three. "When will the Council come?"

"Have you come to save us?"

"Will you take me away with you?" Solidarity and fear and millennial absurdity, in turn. The line became a street meeting, with old arguments between factions rehearsed again while bombs fell.

At the end of the street, on the other side of the barricades, lookouts saw through their periscopes the approach of war constructs. Soldier-machines in brass and iron, glass-eyed, weapons welded to them, came walking. More constructs in one place than had been seen for years.

They stamped and their caterpillar treads ground on the rubble and glass-strewn street toward the barrier. At their head a great earthmover, fronted by a cuneal plough that would push the matter of the barricade apart.