More than ten years ago they had met. Cutter had emerged from his back room to see Judah looking at the esoterica crammed on darkwood shelves: notebooks, metaclockwork, vegetable secrets. A tall thin man with dry, uncut hair, much Cutter’s senior, his face weathered, his eyes always open wide at whatever he saw. It was shortly after the war in the dumps, after Cutter had been made to surrender his cleaning construct. He was washing his own floors, and was in a bad mood. He had been rude.

The next time Judah came, Cutter tried to apologise, and the older man just stared at him. When Judah came back a third time-stocking up on alkalids and the best, most dense clay-Cutter asked his name.

"And should I say Judah or Jude or Dr. Low?" Cutter had said, and Judah had smiled.

Cutter had never felt so connected, so understood, as at that smile. His motives were uncovered without effort or cynicism. He knew then that this was not a man distracted like so many of the scholarly, but someone beatific. Cutter had come very quickly to love him.

They were shy with each other. Not only Cutter and Judah, but Judah and Pomeroy, Judah and Elsie. He asked them again and again for the stories of Drey’s death, and Ihona’s and Fejh's. When they had told him who had been lost, he had been aghast. He had crumpled.

He had them tell the deaths as stories. Ihona in her column of water; Drey’s cruciform fall. Fejhechrillen’s dissolution under the iron barrage was harder to sanctify with narrative.

They tried to make him tell them what he had done. He shook his head as if there was nothing.

"I rode," he said to them. "On my golem. I took him south through the forest and on the ties and lines. I bought passage across the Meagre Sea. I rode him west, through the cactus villages. They helped me. I came through the cleft. I knew I was followed. I set a trap. Thank Jabber you realised, Cutter." A brief terrible look went over him.

He looked tired. Cutter did not know what Judah had had to face, what had taxed him. He was scabbed: the evidence of stories he would not tell. It did not take much from him to keep this golem alive, but it was one drain among the many of his escape.

Cutter put a hand on the creation’s grey flanks. "Let it go, Judah," he said. The older man looked at him with his perpetual surprise. Smiled slowly.

"Rest," Judah said. He touched the golem on its basic face. The clay man did not move, but something left it. Some orgone. It settled imperceptibly, and dust came off it, and its cracks looked suddenly drier. It stood where it had stood, and it would not move again. It would fall slowly away, and its hollows would be homes for birds and vermin. It would be a feature of the land and then would be gone.