A flock of wyrmen tore back from New Crobuzon, scattered below the fast clouds and screeched at them. "They waiting! Thousands and thousands and thousands! Rows of ’em! No!"

Cutter and Rahul were racing on the eastern side of the tracks, eating the distance, so fast Cutter became hypnotised with it, until after a last turn of rocks the tracks converged at the end of suddenly bleak flatrock land, a stony pool and low marsh where there were wading birds as grey as the environs. At the end of the perfect perspective was a township of sidings, where the rails fanned. The smoke of workshops, the winter-dulled corrugate iron of train sheds, the sprawled terminus at the edge of New Crobuzon. Cutter sounded and heard Rahul sound too, become a single mass in the distance, one organism of pikes and cannon, clouded light reflected from thousands of masks, were the militia.

"Oh my gods." Judah, where are you?

The troops waited.

"Where’s Judah?" Ann-Hari said. She was staring at the waiting men, miles off, and Cutter saw, good gods, he saw a challenge in her, a fight-light in her eye. A smile.

"We must have missed him. Come on, I swear he’s here…"

"You know nothing, don’t you, you don’t know nothing…"

"Godsdammit, Ann-Hari, we can find him." Why are we looking? What will he do?

The train would come from the sheltering stone gulley out into that plateau with the New Crobuzon Militia waiting. Cutter saw the train. Come and come through, and the faces of all the Councillors pale when they saw what waited for them, but set with the knowledge that there was nothing else to be done. By the time they slowed the engine the militia would be on them. Nothing was possible except a last bravery, a tough pugnacious death. The knowledge would come over them, and the sweating and terrored faces of all the hundreds of Councillors on the train would toughen again, and the train would speed up. It would accelerate toward the enemy.

Come on, we taken the militia twice before, we can do it again, would come the shouts, lies that everyone would gratefully pretend to believe. Some would whisper to their gods or dead ancestors or lovers, kiss charms that would not protect them. They would shout, Iron Council! and For the Collective! and Remaking!

The Iron Council, the perpetual train, would howl, smoke streaming, the whistles of its cabin shrill, the sounds of its guns a tempest of bullets. The train would come into the zone of the New Crobuzon guns, and in bucking fire and the stretch and split of metal, in the agony shouts of burning dissidents, of fReemade, as hot death took them, Iron Council would end.

Gods, gods.