In these damp wilds they were not the only people. There were homesteads, little wood houses built on hills, one every few days. A few acres of sloped and stony ground raked beyond the dark underhangs of hills. Orchards, root vegetables, paddocks of dirt-coloured sheep. The hill farmers and families of loners would come out as the Council took its hours to pass them. They stared, skin milky with inbreeding, in the deepest incomprehension at the great presence. Sometimes they would bring goods to barter.

There must be some tradetowns but the Council did not pass any. The news of them-of the rogue train appearing from the west, escorted by an army of fReemade and their children, all of them proud-crossed the wet country by rumour’s byways.

Word’ll reach New Crobuzon. Maybe they’ll come for us soon.

"Did you hear?" one toothless farmer woman asked them. She offered them applewood-cured ham, for what money they had (arcane westland doubloons) and a memento of the train (they gave her a greased cog that she took as reverential as if it were a holy book). "I heard of you. Did you hear?" She gave them proud passage through her paltry lands, insisting they carve their road through the middle of her field. "You’ll be ploughing for me," she said. "Did you hear? They say that there’s trouble in New Crobuzon."

Could mean the Collective’s done. Could mean it’s winning. Could mean anything.

There was more word of that trouble the farther east they went. "The war’s over," a man told them. His shieling had become a station, his porch a platform. His nearest neighbours had travelled miles from their lowland holdings to be with him when the Iron Council came through. His fields were a sidings yard full of men and women. The farmers and the wilds people watched with stern pleasure.

"The war’s done. They told me. They warred with Tesh, ain’t it? Well it’s over, and we won." We? You never set foot in New Crobuzon, man. You never been a hundred miles from it. "They did something and they beat them and now the Tesh want peace. Do I know what? The what? What’s a Collective?"

New Crobuzon had done something. The story came back again. A secret mission, some said, an assassination. Something had been halted and life had changed, the Teshi had been restrained, forced into negotiation or surrender. Something stopped Tesh’s plans? Cutter thought wryly. Fancy. And that triumph, it seemed, had bolstered Parliament and the mayor, had bled support from the Collective. That he could not be wry about. That he could not think about.

"The strikers? They’re finished. The government sorted them out."