They dived into the men’s flesh. They dived and poured themselves through the Councillors’ skin, emptying into flesh-stuff, swimming in the innards while their victims, their new houses, looked suddenly stunned and grossly bloated, scrabbling for a brief second at their chests or necks or wherever the proasm had entered before exploding or infolding in a wet burp of blood and the flutter and flap of skin, and the proasm would run on again, its substance increased, built up with stolen flesh. They raced through the line, tugging the mens’ insides out of them and leaving gory skin rags, growing bigger and more bone-flecked as they came.

"Jabber preserve us," Cutter said.

He pulled at the speculum, and felt resistance. He and Thick Shanks pulled their mirrors at different speeds and the thing between them began to pull apart, to split resentfully, strings of light-matter stretching out between its parts like mucus. Cutter shouted, "Back, back your end, pull it back together!" They struggled to reaggregate the light golem.

The strikes of the militia’s gnoscourges reached much longer than it seemed they should. Yards up the luftgeists screeched and were galvanised into aggression as the elementarii corrected them. They swept down, invisible. They forced the Councillors who shot and slashed pointlessly to breathe them, shoved into their lungs and burst them.

A salvo of attacks, bombs, a rush of weak thaumaturgy, and the militia regrouped. One was hit; one only was killed. The yags faced the first of the golems, a huge figure of stone and the stumps of iron rails. Yags wrestled it, hugged it, and their fire corpi re-formed and enveloped the golem and began to bend its hard black metal with the intensity of their heat. It spilled into a pool, trying still to fight as its matter collapsed. It ran in rivulets, streams of molten golem.

The Councillors fought, but the elementals were racing through them with effortless carnage, scampering like dogs, like children. It was a terrible dangerous strategy to call the elementals, these animals, substances made predatory and playful flesh: they could not be domesticated. But the elementarii needed only to control them for this one quick attack. The yags and luftgeists were heading on, leaving footprints of fire and trails of ruined air, toward the perpetual train. The golems tried to face them-interventions, the manifestations of sentient control against the animalisation of raw forces. The elementals were winning.

But though the air elementals might blow apart the substance of earth golems in a spew of particles, they had to work harder against air golems. It was a strange, near-invisible fight. Almost the very last line of Judah’s defences. Sudden gusts of unnatural wind came up and met the luftgeists, and there was a vague storm where they fought. The made and the wild, the intervention and the barely controlled, squabbled and tore each other apart.