Back in deep waterland among the stiltspear, Judah does not know what to say. The fronds gather behind him, a closure he knows is a lie.

The children try to make him learn their golems again. He has never affected the smallest glamour before, has thought himself without talent. A stiltspear elder approaches while he strains, and touches Judah’s chest. Judah opens his eyes, feels things move in him. Whether it is the touch, the air of the swamp, or the raw things he has been eating, he feels a facility he never has, and in astonishment he sees that just faintly he can make his mud model move. The stiltspear children give little hums of acclaim.

– There are some coming, he says at night. The stiltspear only stare politely. -There are men coming and they will fill your swamp. They will split your wetlands, and diminish them.

Judah recalls the map. A neat trisection. Ink that will come to be a changed land, millions of tons of displaced scree and a devastation of the trees.

– They will not stop for you. They will not move for you. You must go. You must go south to where the other clans hunt, deeper, farther away.

There is nothing for a long time. Then the monosyllables of stiltspear gently.

– It is where the other clans hunt. They do not want us.

– But you must. If you do not go you will see what the men will bring. The clans must come together and hide.

– We hide. When the men come we shall be trees.

– It will not be enough. The men will make the land dry. They will cover your village.

The stiltspear look at him.

– You must go.

They will not.

In the next days Judah chews his fingernails. He eats with the stiltspear and watches them and heliotypes their activities and notes them, but with a waxing sickness he feels now that it is for their remembrance.

– There have been fights, they tell him when he demands to know of their wars. -We fought another clan three years ago and many of us were killed.

Judah asks how many and the stiltspear holds up its hands-this one has seven fingers on each-opens and closes them and holds up one more finger. Fifteen.

Judah shakes his head. -Very many, very very many more will be killed if you do not go, he says, and the stiltspear shakes its head too-it has learnt the motion from him and uses it with pride.

– We will be trees, it says.

Judah can make his mudling dance. Each day he is stronger at it. Now he makes foot-tall figures from the clay and peat. He does not know what it is he makes happen or how the stiltspear children have taught him or what the adult put in him, but his new capabilities delight him. His little model can beat others now, at the golem circus they play.

It is his only pleasure, and he hates that it feels like an evasion. Once or twice more he begs the stiltspear to come with him to the deeper swamp. It degrades him that he cannot find the words to move them. It is their culture, he says to himself, it is their way, it is their nature. They-not he-are to blame. But he does not believe his own thought.

He feels pinioned by history. He can wriggle like a stuck butterfly but can go nowhere.

There are more reverberations and the explosions from hunters’ guns are audible throughout the days. Judah understands something. He watches the stiltspear corner a calf-thick amphibian, and together sing-breathe the uh uh uh uh uh rhythm and for half a second the newt-thing petrifies midflick, held in time made thick, and Judah realises the rhythm they have sung is an echo of the children’s mud-golem song. The same, made vastly more complex, given several parts.

He is obsessed with the chant. He wants to preserve the moments of its utterance, congeal the sounds, strip them down. He can only time them as closely as he can and write them to work out their relations.

Judah works fast. He feels a knot tying in him. His near-friend Red-eyes helps him. -We make shapes that move. All of us: young one way, hunters another. And Judah sees that the children’s chants are only mimicry; it is their hands that make their golems. The rhythm of the hunters does the work of the children’s pinching fingers. Both intercessions are of a kind.

There is a noise of industry, far off. A growled rhythm.

The first stiltspear to die is a young too confused to control its camouflage. It is shot by a hunter frightened by the rapid flickering between states of a four-footed animal thing and what seems a rotting tree. He does not know what he has killed and it is only chance and neophobia that he does not eat the child. The clan find the little body.

They’ve reached the lake, Judah thinks. He imagines uncountable wagonloads of nothing, of soil, stone and dirt bloating the swamp.

The time is now. To make his new clan go deep and disappear. There is no other time for this. He has been beaten down. Though every night he says again what he has said-you must go, it is not safe, more will die-he has given up. He is disengaging. An observer again.

The stiltspear debate quietly. Their food grows scarce. The fish and the food-animals are fleeing or being choked. There is venom in the swamp, the runoff of a thousand men and women, the slurry from latrines and cleaning crystals, from black powder, from make-do graves.

There is another death, a lone dam surprised. The roar of industry is always audible.

A party of stiltspear hunters return and try to say what they have seen. A drained core, something approaching. By now there are steam shovels, Judah knows, ever-growing gangs.

– One tried to hurt us, a stiltspear says, and it shows the company the gun it has taken. It is stained with human blood. They have killed, and Judah knows then it is over and done. The time is finished. They do not see it. The sun is dead for them. There is nothing left. He is frantic to learn, to preserve these people in his notes, to salute them.

After that kill the stiltspear become prey.

The red sires unwrap their coddled god and recarve him as a murder spirit. They revive a death-cult. Chosen dams and tan sires dip their spear-hands in poisons that will kill with a tiny cut and will seep through their skins over a day and a night and kill them too, so they have no choice but to be suicide berserkers, against the incoming company.

Judah sees the corpses of New Crobuzon men punctured by stiltspear hands, bloated with toxin, bobbing in cul-de-sacs of greenery. If he is found with the stiltspear he will be a race-traitor, a city-traitor, and will be put to a slow, unsanctioned but approved death. Stiltspear braves ambush the men of the roadway.

They kill humans and some cactacae in threes and fours. There is a reward on each pair of stiltspear hands. Within days there are newcomers in the swamp, bloodprice hunters. They dress in apocalypse rags in defiance of all societies, renegades of a hundred cultures. Judah sees them through the trees.

Bounty scum from Cobsea, and from Khadoh, and pirate cactacae from Dreer Samher. There are vodyanoi, the dregs of Gharcheltist and New Crobuzon. A woman seven feet tall fights with two flails and hauls off many stiltspear dead. There are rumours of a gessin in his armour. A witch from the Firewater Straits snares many pairs of hands, makes a grotesque bouquet of them, sleeping a hunt-sleep to conjure dreamdevils that prey upon the camp.

– Go deep, Judah says again, and those still alive in the township are listening.

They head south. Red-eyes tells Judah they will find shelter among the new mongrel tribe of runaways from all the stiltspear nations.

– I will go soon, Judah tells him. Red-eyes nods, another learned gesture.

There are no children left in the township to challenge with little golems. There are only adults whose grace is now martial, who count kills and set traps. The grinding of stone and gears is unending as the works approach.