"Days gone," Drogon said in Cutter’s ear, even as Cutter kept his back to the investigation. "One of your’n. This is New Crobuzon issue. This is a militia blade."

It was militia bullets killed them, a militiaman or a militiawoman who ran the child through. Militia knives tore through their wagon; New Crobuzon hands had thrown their belongings down.

"I told you." Judah spoke very quietly.

Can’t we get out of here? Cutter thought. I don’t want to talk in front of them. He looked up, breathing fast, saw Pomeroy and Elsie holding each other.

"In my letter, Cutter. You remember?" Judah held his gaze. "I told you I was going because of this."

"We’re near the outskirts of Tesh lands," Cutter said. "This don’t mean the militia are onto the Iron Council."

"They’ve a base by the coast, from where they send these squads out. This… work… This is only half of what they do. They’re going north. They’re looking for the Council."

Beyond the dead was open country. They knew that the militia that had done this to these runaways might be close, and they moved carefully. Cutter saw those patient dead when he closed his eyes. Drogon took them on a path through the sagebrush. On the hills ahead were scraps of farmland, of a half-wild, scrubby kind, from where the smoke came.

It was a day to the depredation. The air was clogged with smouldering. They entered the first little field with their guns drawn.

Through ridges of turned-over earth into what had been a copse of olives. They trod over the spread claws of roots where the little trees had been torn down. Drying olives scattered like animal pellets. There were craters, where stumps were made carbon sculptures. There were bodies cooked down to skeletons.

There had been huts, and they were burnt. On a plain of scrub and drying creeks were mounds of black rubbish that smoked like slag. A rank, meat and sweet smell. Cutter hacked through dried summer boscage.

For seconds he could not make sense of what he saw. The mounds were heaped-up carcasses, a charnel mass-blacked remnants of snouted ungulates, tusked, big and heavy as buffalo. They were encased in ash and crisped leaves. Roots spread out in their pebbled flesh.

"Vinhogs," said Judah. "We’re in Galaggi. We’ve come so far." The wind moved and hilltop dust and the burnings of olives, vines and vineleaves hurt their eyes. The dead animals rustled.

Pomeroy found a trench, where scores of men and women rotted. The decay of days had not yet disguised their crosshatched tattoos. Their pumice-colour skins were death-besmirched, stone jewels piercing them.

They were the wineherds. The clans, the Houses, nomads of this hot northern steppe, custodians of the vinhog coveys. They tracked them, protected them and, at harvest time, leapt in dangerous brilliant husbandry between the horns of the aggressive herbivores to prune the fruit that plumped on their flanks.

Cutter swallowed. They all swallowed, staring at the dead ragged with gunfire. Judah said, "Maybe this is House Predicus. Maybe it’s Charium or Gneura." The vinhogs, the animal-hosts and their harvest, mouldered and burned away.