Warehouses big enough to hold ships, mountains of gravel, planks from stripcutting Rudewood. A mob of humans and cactacae; khepri, their scarab heads fidgetsome; vodyanoi in the canals that linked to the city, crewing open-bottomed barges; rarer races. A garden of different limbs. Cheap deals, contracts, assignations. The Remade were corralled, shovelled like meat animals onto barred trucks. And on into the empty land, skirting the edges of the forest through cuts blasted with blackpowder, went the railroad.

It was late spring. Dirigibles puttered overhead, sweep-

surveying the landscape, tracking the iron way. At the train window Judah watched the wilderness.

The train was full with recruits: labourers on wood benches, the prison-trucks of the Remade. Judah sat with other surveyors. He listened to the pistons. The squat, simple trains within New Crobuzon were always accelerating or slowing, only ever jerking between stations. There was no time for them to pick up pace, to maintain it and create this new sound, this utterly new beat of a speeding train.

They passed a village: an odd and ugly sight. Sidings slid toward it, and Judah could see the original wattle-and-daub dwellings alongside rapidly thrown-up wood houses. It must have trebled in size within a year.

– Frenzy, said one man. -Can’t last. They’ll be crying within two years. Every piece-of-shit town we pass gives the railroad money, or some syndicate from New Crobuzon comes down, takes it over, pays Wrightby’s railroad so’s they get the damn rails. They can’t all make it. Some towns are going to die.

– Or be killed, another said, and they laughed. -Before we even broke ground they started building. There’s a township to the west, Salve, built by men from Wrightby’s own Transcontinental Railroad Trust, if you please. They drew up the plans for this Myrshock-Cobsea route with Iron Wright hisself, got their town ready for him. From nothing. A halfway place before the swamp junction.

– Only there was some shenanigans, Jabber knows what, and Iron Wright isn’t talking to them. So now we’ll be skirting away and no iron road’s coming to Salve. The men laughed. -Still there. Still modern. Cold-dead empty. The youngest ghost-town in Rohagi.

Judah imagined music halls, a bathhouse, visited only by dust, eaten by creepers.

They stopped at a newly bloated township, and hawkers rushed for the train. They held up cheap food, cheap clothes, hand-printed gazetteers promising a bestiary and maps of the newly opening lands. They sold rail-end papers-Judah bought one, a roughly inked sheet The Wheelhouse, thick with errors in spelling and grammar. It was full of workers’ complaints, contumely about the failings of the Remade, scatology and hand-drawn pornography.

The rails angled southwest by churned mud and rubbish where a temporary town had been dismantled, on to rocks and grasslands. Once the train scaled a ravine on a new trestled bridge that swayed under them.

They switchbacked up inclines where they had to but mostly the train went straight-deviations were failures. Where stone reared it was split, become scree-edged furrows stained by smoke. To the west, mountains overlooked them. The Bezhek Peaks, girdled in shadow. When the train began to slow again, it was for the end of the line.

There were people in those wilds. Many women, in hill-dirted petticoats. Some carried children. Suddenly they were hundreds, in a tent city close to the bright rails. Streetwalkers bizarrely displaced to the desolate landscape.

The sun lowered and there were fires. Judah thought of the people left behind, the dead, diseased and killed, the children abandoned or smothered, buried by the line. They slowed past a herd of cattle, mongrel, stringy and subtly Remade, a grex breed. The box capra chew and live on what poor food there is, their cross-slit eyes betraying goat affinities. At last, ahead of the whoretown and the cattle, was the perpetual train.

Judah had walked its length, skirting the crews. It was a rolling-stock town, an industrial citylet that crawled. At the end of a no-man’s-land of empty rails, he saw the work. New Crobuzon reaching so far. The leviathan unfolding of metal, the greatest city in Bas-Lag rolling out its new iron tongue, licking at the cities across the plains.

Then there were days of trekking beyond the edge of iron. Judah’s party passed the carts of the tie-layers. Crews cut down copses, treated and shaped the slabs, piled them in mounds and hauled them. Beyond the ties, the roadbed was bare rock-shards. Walking the sleepers it had seemed a ladder across the earth: now it was a road. It furrowed through high land and rose above low. They were a long way behind the graders.

For five days they were alone but for birds. It was an uncanny, rangy interior of slopes and little rivers. The rocks that reared like stelae were wind-carved into unplanned bas-reliefs. The roadbed tracked like a huge ruin, like the remnants of a city wall. They heard noise, approached a mouth in rock.

Tunnel-cutters had ploughed a path through the talus. There was a camp of men by the hole, and more men emerged from stone’s innards, hauling carts of the hill’s litter. They were too far from New Crobuzon for any steam-excavators to reach them. And the rock was probably too hard, though it gave Judah pleasure to imagine one of the drill-nosed things, big as a carriage, emerging from the ground. The tunnellers were alone in the wilds with picks and blackpowder, digging routes for rails that would not reach them for months.

The Remade, with limbs become pistons and jackhammers, were deafened by their own labours. One was a man whose arms were replaced with the outsized splayed claws of a mole: there was no way he could scrape through this stone but the crews had made him a mascot, and he sat in the tunnel’s core and sang encouragement. TRT gendarmes guarded.

– Where you heading? said the superintendent.

– South. Cobsea, the plains.

– The swamps, said Judah’s survey partner.

– The swamps, the supervisor said. -Be a bloody laugh when the rails get there. What the bloody hell, eh?

Judah smiled. His partner laughed. Seven weeks after that he would succumb to a wasting quag disease and leave Judah alone. Judah had thought of the heliotypes and etchings he had seen of the wetlands, the creatures emerging from the groves, the sodden plants, imagined them all set in mud made concrete, paralysed in place.

Their road ran out. They came to the graders, who dug where the land reared up, and took its excess, and poured it in where the land dipped down.

They cut a hill into receding shelves of industry. The landmass became steps, acrawl with roustabouts and pack animals. Loess dust gusted. Over the hours of work, the steps sank to the grade. There would be a ravine where the hill had been.

There are crews strung out like worry beads, Judah thought, across the downland.

Now Judah has come back. The perpetual train has caught him. It has breached the marshland.

The darker of the swamps spreads like a slick, but now it is intruded. There is a line drawn into its interior, buttressed with stone. The rails shine on it. Judah sees a split in the trees, and the black smoke of the train.

Supply trains come, weighed with sleepers and salted beef, with black iron rails. Judah could ride home to New Crobuzon. But a calm has settled him. Things are unfinished. He does not want to go back.

The saturated ground has stalled production, and the gangs have caught each other up: the graders, tie-men and the spikers before the perpetual train itself. Wyrmen scavenge. The camp followers have conjoined. A tent town has come behind the perpetual train. Beerhall tents, dancehall tents, cathouse tents, prefabricated buildings in cheap wood, circuses for the workers’ breaks.