Even now, Cutter realised with wonder, Judah Low seemed not quite focused on what was before him. It had been that way as long as Cutter had known him. A typical distracted researcher in something or other, Cutter had thought at first. Cutter’s shop was in Brock Marsh, and scholars were his customers. He had been surprised when he traced the remains of some downtown accent in Judah’s voice.

More than ten years ago they had met. Cutter had emerged from his back room to see Judah looking at the esoterica crammed on darkwood shelves: notebooks, metaclockwork, vegetable secrets. A tall thin man with dry, uncut hair, much Cutter’s senior, his face weathered, his eyes always open wide at whatever he saw. It was shortly after the war in the dumps, after Cutter had been made to surrender his cleaning construct. He was washing his own floors, and was in a bad mood. He had been rude.

The next time Judah came, Cutter tried to apologise, and the older man just stared at him. When Judah came back a third time-stocking up on alkalids and the best, most dense clay-Cutter asked his name.

“And should I say Judah or Jude or Dr. Low?” Cutter had said, and Judah had smiled.

Cutter had never felt so connected, so understood, as at that smile. His motives were uncovered without effort or cynicism. He knew then that this was not a man distracted like so many of the scholarly, but someone beatific. Cutter had come very quickly to love him.

They were shy with each other. Not only Cutter and Judah, but Judah and Pomeroy, Judah and Elsie. He asked them again and again for the stories of Drey’s death, and Ihona’s and Fejh's. When they had told him who had been lost, he had been aghast. He had crumpled.

He had them tell the deaths as stories. Ihona in her column of water; Drey’s cruciform fall. Fejhechrillen’s dissolution under the iron barrage was harder to sanctify with narrative.

They tried to make him tell them what he had done. He shook his head as if there was nothing.

“I rode,” he said to them. “On my golem. I took him south through the forest and on the ties and lines. I bought passage across the Meagre Sea. I rode him west, through the cactus villages. They helped me. I came through the cleft. I knew I was followed. I set a trap. Thank Jabber you realised, Cutter.” A brief terrible look went over him.

He looked tired. Cutter did not know what Judah had had to face, what had taxed him. He was scabbed: the evidence of stories he would not tell. It did not take much from him to keep this golem alive, but it was one drain among the many of his escape.

Cutter put a hand on the creation’s grey flanks. “Let it go, Judah,” he said. The older man looked at him with his perpetual surprise. Smiled slowly.

“Rest,” Judah said. He touched the golem on its basic face. The clay man did not move, but something left it. Some orgone. It settled imperceptibly, and dust came off it, and its cracks looked suddenly drier. It stood where it had stood, and it would not move again. It would fall slowly away, and its hollows would be homes for birds and vermin. It would be a feature of the land and then would be gone.

Cutter felt an urge to push it over and watch it break apart, to save it from being stuck like that in time, but he let it stand.

“Who’s Drogon?” Judah asked. The susurrator looked lost without his horse. He was busying himself, letting them discuss him.

“He’d not be here if I’d my way,” Pomeroy said. “For a whispersmith he’s got a damn lot of power. And we don’t know where he’s from.”

“He’s a drifter,” said Cutter. “Ranch-hand, tracker, you know. Some horse tramp. He heard you’d gone-gods know what the rumours are now. He’s attached hisself to us because he wants to find the Iron Council. Out of sentiment, I think. He’s saved us more'n once.”

“He’s coming with us?” Judah said. They looked at him.

Carefully, Cutter said: “You know… you don’t have to go on. We could go back.” Judah looked oddly at him. “I know you think you burnt your bridges with the golem trap in your rooms, and it’s true they’ll be watching for you, but dammit, Judah, you could go underground. You know the Caucus would protect you.”

Judah looked at them and one by one they broke his gaze, ashamed. “You don’t think it’s still there,” he said. “Is that what this is? You’re here for me?”

“No,” said Pomeroy. “I always said I wasn’t just here for you.”

But Judah kept talking. “You think it’s gone?” He spoke with calm, almost priestly certainty. “It hasn’t. How can I go back, Cutter? Don’t you realise what I’m here for? They’re coming for the Council. When they find it, they’ll bring it down. They came for the Teshi, but now they found it they can’t let the Council be. I heard it from an old source. Told me they’d found it, and what they’ll do. I’ve to warn them. I know the Caucus won’t understand. Probably cursing me.”

“We sent them a message,” Cutter said. “From Myrshock. They know we’re after you.”

From his satchel Judah brought out papers and three wax cylinders.

“From the Council,” he said. “The oldest letter’s near seventeen years old. The first cylinder’s older'n that. Almost twenty years. The last ones arrived three years ago, and they were only two years old when they came. I know the Council’s there.”

The messages had travelled by unknown routes. Fellid Forest to the sea, by boats to the Firewater Straits, Shankell and Myrshock, to Iron Bay and New Crobuzon. Or through byways in the hills, or through woods by paths hundreds of miles into the swamps below Cobsea. To Cobsea itself in the great plains. Or by air, or thaumaturgy, somehow making their ways at last to Judah Low.

And could you write back, Judah? Cutter thought. You know they’re waiting. Do they know you’re coming? And how many of their messages were lost? He saw austere gullies strewn with fragments of wax. Gusts sending scraps of encoded paper like blossom across the grassland.

He was awed to see the paper, the grooved cylinders, sound fixed in time. Artefacts from a Caucus rumour, from the stories of travellers and dissidents.

What would he know? When first he had heard of Iron Council he was a boy, and it was a folktale like Jack Half-a-Prayer, and Toro, and the Contumancy. When he grew old enough to know that his Parliament might have lied to him-that there might have been no accident in the quagmires to the south-the Iron Council some said had been born there could never be found. Even those who said they had seen it could only point west.

Why did you never show me those, Judah? he thought. Through all their discussions, through all their growing closer. Judah had taken Cutter’s cynicism and tried to do something to it, tried to tell Cutter that it had clogged him. There were other ways of doubting everything that need not sullen him, Judah had said, and sometimes Cutter had tried.

A dozen years they had known each other, and Cutter had learnt many things from Judah, and taught him a few. It was Judah had brought Cutter to the fringes of the Caucus. Cutter thought of the debates in his shop and in his small rooms, in bed. And in all those political ruminations-Judah a most unworldly insurrectionist, Cutter never more than a suspicious fellow-traveller- Cutter had never seen these stocks from the Iron Council itself.

He did not feel betrayed, only bewildered. That was familiar.

“I know where the Council is,” Judah said. “I can find it. It’s wonderful that you came. Let’s go on.”

Judah spoke to the whispersmith. No one but Judah could hear Drogon’s replies, of course. At last Judah nodded, and they understood that Drogon was coming with them. Pomeroy glowered, despite all the susurrator had done.