Air, fire, flesh ran and turned in animal excitement. A line of militia drew whips occult-tempered, and cracked them, sending the elementals rearing in fear, delight and challenge. The whips snapped like heavy leather and elyctricity, like shadows. When they cracked the noise made dark light.

The elementarii cajoled their charges forward. Air and fire and flesh came. Councillors screamed. They fired and their shells burst among the elementals. Without strategy, pushed by panic, they triggered Judah’s golem traps.

With automaton motion golems unfolded out of the earth and the metal and wood debris of the railroad. There were not so many as there were elementals, and each of them drew on Judah’s powers. Wherever he was, he must have felt a burst of sudden draining. And soon he’ll feel more, Cutter thought, and tried to focus the mirror.

A bomb exploded in the path of the yags, and they disappeared amid its copse of high flames, and their cries were uncanny cries of pleasure. When the bomb settled, there were the fire elementals still running, bigger, through the smoke. A line of earth golems faced them.

Cutter felt the murmur of clockwork in the mirror, gears uncoiling in discombobulant dimensions. He felt the mirror moving as if it were a baby.

"Unlock your engine," he shouted, and when Thick Shanks did Cutter felt another tugging. He held his mirror hard and saw Thick Shanks doing the same. The recombinant light their reflections made was waxing.

It was curling, growing around itself. It was something in itself, something real, with dimensions, something that moved. Cutter saw the fishlike swimming presence, a thing roaming out of nothing and made of the hard light, shining like a sun. He felt his strength haemorrhage from him. "We’ve got it," he shouted. "Take it to them."

Thick Shanks and he kept their mirrors angled at each other and moved them in time, and the presence of glutinous light followed, dragged over the ground as they turned to face the elementarii. Something terrible was happening. The militia whipmen had come forward, cajoling the elementals at the ends of their lashes, and though the outer lines of the Councillors were laying down fire with everything they had, the proasmae were coming.

Missiles tore into the creatures of slabbed-together muscle, burrowing into them so they refolded and spat out the nuggets of lead and the honed flint or iron blades. The proasmae, the flesh elementals, called up out of the stuff of the horses, reached the earthwork barrier.

They rolled up it, they were amoeboid, they were urchinlike, studded with bones they made limbs, they made themselves suddenly humanoid or like some unskinned and baying wildebeests, and they scrambled the height of the rise and paused at its top, then hurled down onto the screaming men, and Cutter saw what they did.