Cutter said: "Militia followed him?"

"On Remade horses. I heard."

On Remade horses with hammered metal hoofs, or with tiger’s claws or with a tail prehensile and coated in poison glands. With steam-pistons giving their legs ridiculous strength or with stamina from a boiler-excrescence behind the saddle. Made carnivorous and long-tusked. Wolf-horses or boar-horses, construct-horses.

"I didn’t see," said the hotchi. He mounted his cockerel. "Them went after the clay-man rider, south in Rudewood. You best go. Fast now." He turned his fight-bird and pointed a smoke-brown finger. "Stay careful. This is Rudewood. Go now."

He spurred his gallus into the undergrowth and dense trunks. "Go," he shouted, already invisible.

"Damn," said Cutter. "Come on." They gathered their little camp. Pomeroy took Drey’s pack as well as his own, and the six of them went up out of the cock-fighting pit and into the forest.

They went southwest by Cutter’s compass, along the path the hot-chi had taken. "He showed us the way," Cutter said. His comrades waited for him to guide them. They drove between rootmasses and blockages of flora, changing whatever they passed. Quickly Cutter’s tiredness was so profound it was an astonishing, alien sensation.

When they noticed darkness they fell where they were, in a pause between trees. They spoke in puny voices, affected by the undertones of the wood. It was too late to hunt: they could only pull biltong and bread from their packs and make weak jokes about what good food it was.

By their little fire Cutter could see that Fejh was drying. They did not know where there was any freshwater, and Fejh poured only a little of what they had on himself though his big tongue rolled for it. He was panting. "I’ll be all right, Cutter," he said, and the man patted his cheek.

Drey was paper-white and whispering to himself. Seeing how blood had stiffened his sling, Cutter could not imagine how he had kept going. Cutter murmured his fears to Pomeroy, but they could not turn back and Drey could not make the return on his own. He stained the ground below him.

While Drey slept, the others pulled around the fire and told quiet stories of the man they were following. Each of them had reasons for answering Cutter’s call.

For Ihona the man they sought had been the first person in the Caucus who had seemed distracted, who reminded her of herself. His unworldliness, the quality that some mistrusted, made her feel there was room for imperfection in the movement: that she could be part of it. She smiled beautifully to remember it. Fejh, in turn, had taught him as part of some investigation of vodyanoi shamanism, and had been moved by his fascination. Cutter knew they loved the man they followed. Of the hundreds of the Caucus, it was no surprise that six loved him.

Pomeroy said it aloud: "I love him. It ain’t why I’m here, though." He spoke in terse little bursts. "Times are too big for that. I’m here because of where he’s going, Cutter, because of what he’s after. And what’s coming after that. That’s why I’m here. Because of what was in your message. Not because he’s gone-because of where he’s gone, and why. That’s worth everything."