– They’ll come in airships. They’ll come over land. Think they’ll let us go to ground, some fucking fReemade arcadia? They’ll bring the train back wearing our heads. We can’t just find a little valley ten, thirty, a hundred miles from here. If we do this… we have to go.

– We have to be gone. Bring me a damn map. Do you realise what we’ve done here? What we are now?

A scattered mess of Remade. A town of Remade and their xenian and freeanole friends. These thieves and murderers, rapists, vagrants, embezzlers, liars. -You look carved, Uzman says with a wonder they can suddenly hear. -Bits of wood, man-sized, whittled by gods. They blink up at him in the shadow of the train they have stolen.

Only three days’ deviation from their plotted route, the iron council is beyond the details of maps. These are strange lands. These are the Middling Sweeps. The Rohagi wilds.

The more intelligent wyrmen are sent out over empty geographies that make them nervous, little urban things that they are. They are charged with finding the hunters still away, the water-

carriers in their carts, looking for springs. Those reconnoitring, who will return to find nothing but carnage where the tunnel once was. They will look over the moulding and sunburnt corpses of the gendarme train, and will say, -What happened here? The wyrmen are sent to gather the iron council’s own.

Systems grow. They find springs, and the water car is kept full, caulked where it bleeds. The guntower is welded and hammered into a seared approximation of its old shape. Remade are trained, hurriedly, by the scientists who have stayed, are shown how to draw charts.

– Where will we go?

At night the renegades play banjos and pipes, the train’s warning bell is struck, its boiler made a drum. Women and men lie together again. Some Chainday nights Judah goes to the wordless trackside man-meets for release, but Ann-Hari and he fuck one night and stroke each other with the most sincere, the most close affection.

The slowly stranging place delights Judah. On the sixth day of the iron council, as the mile-long track-stretch swallows its own tail and moves, as the train enters a dreamish landscape of bruised succulents and the summer comes down on them, a posse of gendarmes and bounty hunters arrives.

They underestimate the council by a gross degree. They are no more than thirty men and xenians, in cracked leather and spikes, their very clothes made weapons. They come out of the vein-coloured undergrowth under the standard of the TRT, creatures like scurrying mushrooms running from them.

The band fire, scream through their loudhailers. -Comply! Lawbreakers, surrender!

Do they think the iron council will be cowed? Judah watches in awe at their stupidity. Twelve of them are shot fast, and the others ride away.

– Get them, get them, get them, shouts Ann-Hari, and the fastest Remade take off with their weapons. -They know where we are!

They can only kill six more. The others escape. -We’re marked, Uzman says. It is less than a hundred miles since they have escaped. -They’ll come for us.

They leave traps. Barrels of blackpowder, complex batteries and fuses. They send the train between stone overhangs, and the geothaumaturges and what hedge-mancers there are cut diaglyphs into the mineral walls and lay down primed circuits so that the weight of a cart will make the rock deliquesce and pour down in cold magma to set again with the outriders of the gendarmes or militia drowned. That is the plan.

Judah sets golem traps. Batteries, somaturgic turbines of his design, so the fallen wood or the bone-heap or the earth or split discarded ties will stand and fight for iron council.

At night he walks the renegade railroad with Uzman and Ann-Hari, who are chary but need each other. Strategist and visionary. The perpetual train does not stop at night. The train is full of skills. Remade fix what flintlocks can be fixed, and make new weapons. In the furnaces they melt down older rails for cutters and armour. They are making their wheeled town a war-machine.

– It won’t be long, Uzman says. -Time’ll come we probably have to abandon the train, have to run.

– We can’t, Ann-Hari says. -Without it we have nothing.

A group of councillors in the clerk’s car lean over vague maps-sketchy composites of myths. The darkwood desks and inlaid walls are carved and graffitied from the first days, when the drunken rebels rendered savage art.

– Here. Uzman presses the map. -What’s this?

– Swamp.

Uzman moves his finger.

– Unknown.

– Salt flats.

– Scree.

– Unknown.

– Tar pits.

– Unknown.

– Smokestone. Smokestone gulleys.

Uzman chews his knuckle. He looks out of the window. Councillors haul the rails from one end of their stolen track-mile to the other.

– Do we have any meteoromancers?

– There’s a girl Toma. Someone shakes their head. -Can whistle up a gust dries her clothes but, you know, parlour hex really…

– We need someone can raise a gale-

– No. One of the researchers speaks. He is a young man who has grown his beard and wears the sweaty clothes of the workforce. He is shaking his head. -I know what you’re wanting. You’re thinking, through the smokestone? No. You saw what happened when Malke was caught in it? He nearly died. You saw what it was like.

– There must be ways to know when it’s coming…

The young man shrugs. -Pressure, he says. -Cracking. A few things. From geysers. He shrugs again. -We looked it up when it trapped us. It’s too many things.

– But there are ways of telling…

– Yes, but Uzman, you’re not thinking. These maps are best-guesses. We’re in the Middling Sweeps. And there’s one thing we do know that’s there. The man runs his finger up the map. The car sways. -See? What this is?

It is a crosshatched patch of land, inked in red. Two hundred miles from them, less than a month at this absurd pace. It abuts the smokestone, or where the old cartographers thought the smokestone might be.

– You know what that is?

Of course Uzman does. They all do. It is the cacotopic stain.

– You ain’t taking us to the stain, Uzman.

– I can’t take you anywhere. The council goes where it decides it will. But I’m telling you the only thing we can do. You decide if it’s what you want or not. And if not I’ll stay and fight, and we die.

– It’s the stain.

– No, no it ain’t the stain. It’s the edges. It’s the outskirts.

Uzman has a look on him. He stands and seems to glimmer. He sweats from the heat of his own pipes, eats coal. His lips are black.

– It ain’t the stain. We have to go through the smokestone flats-

– If they’re there.

– If they’re there. We have to go through the smokestone flats, and beyond that’s the outskirts of the cacotopos. Even if they got through the stone, no one’ll follow us there.

– And you know why, Uzman, right? For good damn reason.

– We got no choice. No, that ain’t so. We run. Leave the train to rot. Run be fReemade. Or we can keep it. All our sweat. The road. But if we keep it, we have to go do this. We have to make it out, far away, or we die. We have to go west. And west of here? He prods the waxed chart. -The cacotopic zone. Just the edges.

He sounds as if he is pleading.

– People’ve dipped in there before. We’ll be all right. We have to.

He pleads.

– Just the edges.

It opened a half millennium before, a rift through which spilt great masses of the feral cancerous force, Torque. A badland beyond understanding. Where men might become rat-things made of glass and rats devilish potentates or unnatural sounds and jaguars and trees might become moments that could not have happened, might become impossible angles. Where monsters go and are born. Where the land, and the air, and time are sick.