That night they ate unripe fruit they found unspoiled on a dead vinhog and made forlorn jokes about what a good vintage it was. Their second day on the vintners’ land they found wreckage of the marauders. The New Crobuzon militia had not had it all their way. It was the remains of a nashorn, a rhino ironclad and Remade into a veldt tank. Two storeys high, a raised arse-end gunnery, a piston-strengthened neck. Its horn was corkscrewed, a huge drillbit. The nashorn was burst and savaged with peasant weapons. Its gears and innards lay about it.

There were six militia dead. Cutter stared at the familiar uniforms in this unlikely place. The officers were killed with blades. There were wineherds’ sickles on the ground.

The land was full of scavengers. Dead-eating fox-things dug at the earth. That night Drogon woke the travellers with a shot. "Ghul," he whispered to each in turn. They did not believe him, but in the morning its corpse was there: grave-pale and simian, its toothy mouth wide, blood drying on its eyeless forehead.

There was the start of a cooling as they went north, but only the very start. In the heat, among the ghuls and the dead and the dizzying smell of rotting fruit and the smoke, in a land become a torn-up memory of itself, Cutter felt as if he were walking in the outskirts of some hell.

In days through rugged transverse rises, a haze of forested hills became just visible to the north, and Judah was elated. "We’ve to go through that," he said. "It’s the end of the veldt; it’s the far edge of Galaggi."

Behind them the earth was broken by the tracks of militia. They had passed out of that crushed zone of husbandry and feral wine, those few score of miles once worth something. This was a wetter reach of hills all summered, copper and slick. It rained warm rain-virga that did not reach the ground.

They were in places only antique sages and adventurers had been. They had heard about these strange reaches-patches of ice in deep summer, the hives of dog-sized termites, clouds that fossilised into granite. On a Dustday, new smoke and a smell reached them. They climbed slopes of scree and breccia to see the scrubland all the miles to the forest, and something burning before them. One by one they let out sounds.