Judah the somaturge did not seek leadership, did nothing but say he would continue and that they could come, but they became his followers, as they always did. It had been the same in New Crobuzon. He never ordered them, often seemed too preoccupied to notice they were with him, but when they were they attended him carefully.

They prepared. There must be weeks of travel. Miles of land, and more land, and rocks and more trees, and perhaps water, and perhaps chasms, and then perhaps the Iron Council. They slept early, and Cutter woke to the sound of Pomeroy and Elsie’s lovemaking. They could not help their little exhalations, nor the scuffing of their bodies. The noise aroused him. He listened to his friends’ sex with lust and an upswelling of affection. He reached for Judah, who turned to him sleepily and responded to his tonguing kiss, but gently turned away again.

Below his blanket Cutter masturbated silently onto the ground, watching Judah’s back.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

A week they went north and northwest into greening. It was exhausting. The plains buckled. Sloughs and cenotes in the landforms grew deeper, and hills flecked with chaparral and heat-stunted trees. They walked gulches. Three times the whispersmith showed them they had found their way unknowingly onto a trail, that they walked in the ghosts of footprints.

“Where do we go?”

“I know where it is,” Judah said. “In what part.” He checked maps, and conferred with Drogon, the plains-traveller. Judah rode with an implacable wilderness calm.

“Why are you here?” Judah said to Drogon. The susurrator answered straight into Judah’s ear. “Yes,” said Judah, “but that tells me nothing.”

“He ain’t doing it to you now,” Cutter said. “He can take you over with his bloody voice. At least twice that’s how he kept us alive.”

Cougars and githwings eyed them from the low hills or the air, and the party sounded their weapons. Copses of waxy plants like bladed succulents menaced them, moved not by breeze.

“See there.” Drogon’s whisper. He hauled the accoutrements of nomadism. He was a man of these ranges, anxious without a horse. He pointed to things they would not have seen. “A village was there,” he said; and yes, they learnt to see it in the ground, walls and foundations sketched in regolith, a landscape’s memory of architecture. “That ain’t no tree,” he said, and they realised that it was the barrel of some ancient gun or gunlike thing, swaddled in ivy and the scabs of weather.

One night while the others slept off their gamy supper, Cutter sat up hours before dawn and saw that Judah was gone. He rifled stupidly through Judah’s bedcloth as if he might find him there. The whispersmith looked up, his face soured to see Cutter needily gripping Judah’s wool.

Judah was off in the direction the wind was going, in a little hillside rincon. He had taken from his pack a cast-iron apparatus, so heavy a thing Cutter was astonished he had brought it. Judah motioned Cutter to sit by the voxiterator. One of his wax cylinders was inserted, and his hand was on the crank.

He smiled. He replaced the plectrum-needle at the top of the grooves.

“You may as well,” he said. “Seeing as you’re here. This keeps me going.” He turned the handle and in the sputter and random tuts from the trumpet, a man’s voice sounded. It was bled of bass, and it sped and slowed gently as the crank’s pace varied, so his inflection was hard to gauge. The wind took the voice as soon as it emerged.

“… don’t feel as if I hardly know you but they say you’re family sister so I thought you should hear this from family not wrote down fact is he’s dead Uzman’s dead and gone I’m sorry you’ve to hear it like this I’m sorry you’ve to hear it at all truth is weren’t a bad passing mind he was at peace we buried him ahead and now he’s in our tracks there was those said we should put him in the cemetery but I weren’t having that I said to them you know it ain’t what he wanted he told us do it right do it like it used to be done so I made them we’re mourning him he told us not to don’t mourn organise he said when we was fighting they told me and after the stain he told us don’t mourn celebrate but sister I can’t help it we’re allowed to mourn you mourn sister go on you mourn and I will too it’s me it’s Rahul I’ll say good-bye…”

The needle snapped stop. Judah was crying. Cutter could not bear it. He reached out, faltered when he saw that his touch would not be welcome. Judah did not sob. The wind sniffed them both like a dog. The moon was faint. It was cool. Cutter watched Judah weeping and he hurt, he was fervent to hold onto the grey-haired man, but he could do nothing but wait.

When Judah had finished and wiped himself dry he smiled at last at Cutter, who had to look away.

Cutter spoke carefully. “You knew him, the one he’s talking about. I see. Whose was that message? Whose brother was that?”

“It’s for me,” said Judah. “I’m the sister. I’m his sister, and he’s mine.”

Hills rose shallowly, pelted with flowers in regal colours. Dust stuck to Cutter’s sweat, and he breathed air thickened with pollen. The travellers stumbled through strange landscape, weighed down by dirt and the sun as if they had been dipped in tar.

They tasted carbon. Somewhere above the bluffs before them the sky was discoloured by more than summer. Lines of dark smoke were drawn up and dissipating. They seemed to retreat like a rainbow as the party approached, but the next day the smell of burn was much stronger.

There were paths. They were entering inhabited lands, and approaching the fires. “Look there!” said the whispersmith to each of them in turn. On downs miles off there was movement. Through Drogon’s telescope Cutter saw that it was people. Perhaps a hundred. Hauling carts, hurrying their meat-beasts: fat cow-sized birds, thick and quadruped, scrawny featherless wings stumping as forelegs.

The caravan was decrepit and desperate. “What’s happening here?” Cutter said.

At noon they came somewhere the earth had split, and they walked the bottom of arroyos much higher than houses. They saw something dun and battered, bound, like a giant brown-paper parcel in string. It was a wagon. Its wheels were broken and it leaned against the rock. It was split and burned.

There were men and women around it. Their heads were stove in or their chests opened up and emptied by bullets, the contents spilt down their clothes and shoes. They sat or lay in neat order where they had been killed, like a troop waiting instructions. A company of the dead. A child spitted on a broken sabre huddled at their front like a mascot.

They were not soldiers. Their clothes were peasants’ clothes. Their belongings littered the chine floor-irons, pots and kettles, all alien designs, cloth made rags.

Cutter and his companions stared with their hands at their lips. Drogon wrapped his kerchief around mouth and nose and went into the deads’ stench through the billows of insects that ate them. He took a wooden spoke and poked at the bodies so carefully he looked almost respectful. They were sunbaked, their skins cured. Cutter could see their bones in ridges.

The cart listed as Drogon leaned in. He squatted and looked at the wounds, probing them as the others watched and gave off sounds. When the whispersmith took gentle hold of the sabre that protruded from the child, Cutter turned away so he would not see the dead boy move.

“Days gone,” Drogon said in Cutter’s ear, even as Cutter kept his back to the investigation. “One of your’n. This is New Crobuzon issue. This is a militia blade.”

It was militia bullets killed them, a militiaman or a militiawoman who ran the child through. Militia knives tore through their wagon; New Crobuzon hands had thrown their belongings down.