"I remember my mother," Qurabin said quietly. "I remember what she whispered to me. But I don’t know what it means." There was no horror in the voice. Only a passionless assent. "One thing is lost, another found. I know where to go."

They went uncanny routes. The sky’s colour fluxed.

It was a Chainday when the plain fell away and they realised they had been rising a long time; the ground had angled and they walked a hackberried butte in thin air. Before them was a basin in red laterite, a canyon that widened into land too vast to be a valley, where the continent had shrugged itself apart. From behind one long stone fin, black smoke was spoiling the air.

Judah stood at the edge of the cliff and looked down at the fumes that did not come from grassfires and howled. A noise of such pure feral joy it was as if he was thrown back through history, as if no human, no sentient thing, should feel such absolute emotion. Judah bayed.

He did not slow. He descended fast and did not wait for his companions but headed off along faint foot-lines in the prairie. Cutter caught him up but did not try to speak. Thick light like syrup went across the sierra.

Someone shouted at them and they were taunted by echoes. A query, a command in several different languages, in rapid change. And then their own. Ragamoll, nearly two thousand miles from home. Cutter gasped. Three figures stood from some hide.

"Hold it, hold it," one shouted. "Speak Ragamoll?"

Cutter showed he was not holding his weapons. He nodded his head in strange delight. The young man spoke with a hybrid accent, something else shaping his phonemes beside the familiar snarl of the south city, of Dog Fenn, of backstreet New Crobuzon.

Judah was running toward the three: a woman, and a man, and a gnarled cactus. The sun was going down behind them, so they were shadowed, and Cutter could see them only as cutouts. Stumbling toward them his arms upraised, Judah must be drenched in late-day light as they saw him, awash with it, creasing his face against it, ambered. Judah was laughing and shouting.

"Yes, yes, yes, we speak Ragamoll!" he said. "Yes, we’re of your party! Sisters! Sisters!" He gave that cry again and was so clearly no threat, so obviously in a delirium of warmth and relief that the human guards stepped forward and opened their arms to him, to receive him as a guest. "Sisters!" he said. "I’m back, I’m home, it’s me. Long live Iron Council! Gods and Jabber and, and, and in Uzman’s name…" They started at that. Judah embraced them one by one, and then he turned, his eyes streaming, and smiled without mediation, without face, a smile Cutter had never seen him wear.

"We’re here," Judah said. "Long live, long live. We’re here."