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Chapters (48)
  1. Prologue
  2. Part One: Trappings
  3. Chapter One
  4. Chapter Two
  5. Chapter Three
  6. Chapter Four
  7. Chapter Five
  8. Part Two: Returns
  9. Chapter Six
  10. Chapter Seven
  11. Chapter Eight
  12. Chapter Nine
  13. Part Three: Wine Land
  14. Chapter Ten
  15. Chapter Eleven
  16. Chapter Twelve
  17. Chapter Thirteen
  18. Anamnesis: The Perpetual Train
  19. Part Four: The Hainting
  20. Chapter Fourteen
  21. Chapter Fifteen
  22. Chapter Sixteen
  23. Part Five: Retread
  24. Chapter Seventeen
  25. Chapter Eighteen
  26. Chapter Nineteen
  27. Part Six: The Causus Race
  28. Chapter Twenty
  29. Chapter Twenty-One
  30. Chapter Twenty-Two
  31. Part Seven: Stain
  32. Chapter Twenty-Three
  33. Chapter Twenty-Four
  34. Part Eight: The Remarking
  35. Chapter Twenty-Five
  36. Chapter Twenty-Six
  37. Chapter Twenty-Seven
  38. Chapter Twenty-Eight
  39. Chapter Twenty-Nine
  40. Chapter Thirty
  41. Part Nine: Sound and Light
  42. Chapter Thirty-One
  43. Chapter Thirty-Two
  44. Chapter Thirty-Three
  45. Part Ten: The Monument
  46. Chapter Thirty-Four
  47. Chapter Thirty-Five
  48. RUNAGATE RAMPANT. LUNUARY 1806.

"What do you want me to tell?" Ann-Hari said. "You want me to tell them how someone we never knew or trusted brought another man we don’t know here to tell us that the thing we always knew might be true is true, but gave no proof? You want that?"

Cutter felt a rise of something, some tremulous despair. "Oh my gods," he said. "You don’t care."

She met his stare.

Even if, she was saying, even if you are right-even if that was Drogon, and that was Weather Wrightby, even if there are ten thousand militia ranged ready-this is where we are, this is what we are. This is where we have to be. Was this her madness?

"We are the Iron Council," she said. "We do not turn ever again."

Cutter thought of running into the night and shouting the truth at these dissidents he had come to care for-his comrades, his chaverim, his sisters-and having them turn, begging them to turn, telling them what was waiting, what he knew, what Ann-Hari knew. He said nothing. He did not shout. He was not sure it was not a failure in him-he was not sure it was not a weakness-but he could not announce the truth. Because he knew that it would make no difference, that none of them would turn away.

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Three

The train went slow on the old rails, the crews running ahead constantly to shore up a collapsing bank of stone, to sweep away detritus for a clear run. They welded split metal, rehammered spikes in bursts of rust. But it was not the ruin on the rails that kept them slow so much as disbelief, the theatre of where they were, what they were doing. At ten, fifteen miles an hour the perpetual train, Iron Council, went north, surrounded by cut, fangs of traprock, for New Crobuzon.

Every window was spiked with guns. The flatcars, the little grassed cemetery, the towers, the tent-towns on the rooftops were full of armed Councillors. They squatted, they sang war songs. "Tell us about New Crobuzon," the young ones said, those born to whores while the Council was still a work-train, or to free women in Bas-Lag’s inner country, or to Iron Councillors.

Behind the train came the Councillors who could not fight. The children, the pregnant, those whose Remakings made them ill-suited. The old. They stretched a long way on the tracks, singing their own songs.

Wyrmen went overhead, went and came back screeching what they saw. Over the hours the roadbed rose, until the train was on a ridge ordering the granite-stubbled ground into this side and this side. Trees rose as they passed stumps of forest, and the things that lived in them shrieked in the canopies. Many miles west the miasma of trees became Rudewood.