Before the city there were canals that wound between rock formations like silicate tusks, and patches of corn in the thin soil. And before the scrub there were days of glowering stone. Gnarled granite tumours that had sat heavy in the belly of the land since its birth, their thin earth-flesh stripped from them by air and water in a mere ten thousand years. They were ugly and terrifying as innards always are, those rock promontories, those crags.

I walked the path of the river. It was nameless between the hard ridged hills: in days it would become the Tar. I could see the freezing heights of real mountains miles to the west, colossi of rock and snow that reared as imperiously over the local jags of scree and lichen as those lower peaks reared over me.

Sometimes I thought the rocks shaped like looming figures, with claws and fangs and heads like clubs or hands. Petrified giants; unmoving stone gods; mistakes of the eye or the wind’s chance sculptures.

I was seen. Goats and sheep poured scorn on my stumbling. Screaming birds of prey shouted their contempt. Sometimes I passed shepherds who stared at me, suspicious and rude.

There were darker shapes at night. There were colder watchers under the water.

The rock teeth broke earth so slowly and slyly that I was walking that gouged valley for hours before I knew it. Before that were days and days of grass and scrub.

The earth was easier on my feet, and the massive sky easier on my eye. But I would not be fooled. I would not be seduced. It was not the desert sky. It was a pretender, a surrogate, that tried to lull me. Drying vegetation stroked me with every wash of wind, lusher by far than my home. In the distance was the forest that I knew extended north to the edge of New Crobuzon, east to the sea. In secret places among its thick trees jutted vast, obscure, forgotten machines, pistons and gears, iron trunks among the wood, rust their bark.

I did not approach them.

Behind me where the river forked were marshlands, a kind of aimless inland estuary that promised, vaguely, to dissolve into the sea. There I stayed in the raised longhuts of the stiltspear, that quiet, devout race. They fed me and sang me crooning lullabies. I hunted with them, spearing cayman and anacondas. It was in the wetlands that I lost my blade, breaking it off in the flesh of some rushing, sucking predator that loomed at me suddenly from out of the slime and sodden reeds. It reared and screamed like a kettle on a fire, disappeared into the muck. I do not know if it died.

Before the wetland and the river were days of drying grass and foothills, that I was warned were ravaged by gangs of bandit fReemade run from justice. I saw none.