“It’s time for us to push through. Whatever happens. We have to come back now, you see?” That was all she would say.

The whispersmith’s friends, his fellow cavalry, disappeared on their horses Remade and whole, becoming dustclouds as they headed east, south. Drogon stayed. Cutter was not sure why.

“What do you want this lot to do? You been in the city… you know we’ll be killed if we go.”

“They’ll be killed maybe.” Drogon shrugged. “They know what’s happening. Who’m I to stop them? They can’t stop now. You set yourself on a rail and it comes to be what you do. They have to keep going.”

This ain’t about argument, Cutter thought. He was horrified by what seemed to him quiescence. If they tried to argue it, they’d lose… but even though they know that, they still go on… because in going against the facts, they change them. It was a methodology of decision utterly unlike his own, unlike how he could ever think. Was it rational? He could not tell.

The Iron Council progressed through a landscape made of mist. The scarps and hillocks, the layers of trees seemed momentary thickenings of water in the air, seemed to curdle out of the vapour as the perpetual train came, and dissipate again in its aftermath.

They moved through scenery that was abruptly familiar, that jogged old memories. This was New Crobuzon country. Siskins went between dripping haw-bushes. This was a New Crobuzon winter. They were a few weeks away.

“We had a man once, years and years ago,” Ann-Hari said to Cutter. “When the Weaver came to us, before we was Council, and told us secrets. The man went mad, so he could only talk about the spider. He was like a prophet. But then he was boring, and then not even boring, just nothing. We didn’t even hear him, you see? We heard nothing when he spoke.

“You’re like that. ‘Turn back, turn back.’ “ She smiled. “We don’t hear you no more, man.”

I’ve a mission, Cutter thought. I’ve failed. Knowing that his lover had expected it did nothing to stop his sadness.

He became a ghost. He was respected-one of the world-crossers, who had come to save Iron Council. His dissidence now, his insistence that the Council would die, was treated with polite uninterest. I’m a ghost.

Cutter could have left. He could have taken a horse from the township’s stables and ridden. He would have found the foothills, the deserted tracks, Rudewood, he would have come to New Crobuzon. He could not. I’m here now was all he could think. He would run only when he had to.

He had seen the maps. The Council would go on east leaving spike-holes and the debris of track-pressed shale, recycling the iron road, and would at last hit the remains of the railway scores of miles south of New Crobuzon. And there they would couple to what remained of the old tracks, and steam on, and within hours would approach the city.

Cutter would run when he had to. But not now.

“We are a hope,” Ann-Hari said.

Perhaps she’s right. The train will come, the last of the Collective will rise, and the government will fall.

In these damp wilds they were not the only people. There were homesteads, little wood houses built on hills, one every few days. A few acres of sloped and stony ground raked beyond the dark underhangs of hills. Orchards, root vegetables, paddocks of dirt-coloured sheep. The hill farmers and families of loners would come out as the Council took its hours to pass them. They stared, skin milky with inbreeding, in the deepest incomprehension at the great presence. Sometimes they would bring goods to barter.

There must be some tradetowns but the Council did not pass any. The news of them-of the rogue train appearing from the west, escorted by an army of fReemade and their children, all of them proud-crossed the wet country by rumour’s byways.

Word’ll reach New Crobuzon. Maybe they’ll come for us soon.

“Did you hear?” one toothless farmer woman asked them. She offered them applewood-cured ham, for what money they had (arcane westland doubloons) and a memento of the train (they gave her a greased cog that she took as reverential as if it were a holy book). “I heard of you. Did you hear?” She gave them proud passage through her paltry lands, insisting they carve their road through the middle of her field. “You’ll be ploughing for me,” she said. “Did you hear? They say that there’s trouble in New Crobuzon.”

Could mean the Collective’s done. Could mean it’s winning. Could mean anything.

There was more word of that trouble the farther east they went. “The war’s over,” a man told them. His shieling had become a station, his porch a platform. His nearest neighbours had travelled miles from their lowland holdings to be with him when the Iron Council came through. His fields were a sidings yard full of men and women. The farmers and the wilds people watched with stern pleasure.

“The war’s done. They told me. They warred with Tesh, ain’t it? Well it’s over, and we won.” We? You never set foot in New Crobuzon, man. You never been a hundred miles from it. “They did something and they beat them and now the Tesh want peace. Do I know what? The what? What’s a Collective?”

New Crobuzon had done something. The story came back again. A secret mission, some said, an assassination. Something had been halted and life had changed, the Teshi had been restrained, forced into negotiation or surrender. Something stopped Tesh’s plans? Cutter thought wryly. Fancy. And that triumph, it seemed, had bolstered Parliament and the mayor, had bled support from the Collective. That he could not be wry about. That he could not think about.

“The strikers? They’re finished. The government sorted them out.”

Through the rained-on downs came a spread of runaways from the city. They came and lived in the small towns by which the Iron Council was passing; they repopulated the deserted cow-towns they found, the residues of the old railway rush. The Council might come out of the low hills in an industrious multitude and lay down tracks along the preflattened paths, along the reclaimed main roads. New inhabitants would emerge from what had been the saloon, a church, a bawdyhouse, and stare as over hours (their progress faster daily) the crews put down the sleepers and rails on old horsetracks and passed where stagecoaches and drifters had been.

“Did you hear?” They heard the same stories scores of times. There must have been escapees from the Parliamentarian quarters too, but no one said so: everyone was a Collectivist, on the run from the militia. Sure you’re not some two-bit spiv? Cutter thought cynically. Sure you’re really an organiser like you claim?

“Did you hear?” That the war’s over, that we beat the Tesh, and that when we beat the Tesh the Mayor took control again, and everything was sorted, and the Collective went under?

Yes, we heard. Though it was disputed.

They were entertained in these revenant towns, with sex and New Crobuzon cooking. “What have you come for? Did you not hear? Did you hear? There ain’t no Collective no more. Only dregs, some terrorists in Dog Fenn, a few streets here or there.” “That ain’t what I heard, I heard it was there and still fighting.” “You’re coming to help, to fight for the Collective? I wouldn’t go back. It’s a damn war there.” “I’d go back. Can I come? Can I come with you?”

Some of those who had left to be wanderers in the waste-some of the young-joined the perpetual train, to return to New Crobuzon, only weeks after their escape. “Tell us about the Iron Council!” they insisted, and their new compatriots told all their stories.

There were rumours of new kithless, unique powers. “Did you hear,” Cutter heard, “about the golem-man Low?”