– I’ll be your bard. I’ll tell them. Stay still. The powderflash goes and each of the gathered blinks.

In so alien a place, with the foreboding of the Torque, with the unnatural sky and the alterity of the cacotopic zone, even with the smokestone behind them there are some leaving the council.

– Some’ll make it, Judah says. -Go fReemade-they won’t go back to New Crobuzon, not Remade like that.

– You will, you’ll get through, sisters. He looks at them without even uncertainty. -Take it, he says. His voxiterator. They are quizzical. -Here. This is how you make it keep what you say. They watch him load the wax and take what spare cylinders he has. -One every year, he says slowly. -Send me one back. Wherever you are. By boat, horse, foot, whatever. We’ll see if they get through. I want to hear your voices. He looks at Ann-Hari. -I want to hear your voices.

One by one he holds them. He grips each of his comrades very hard, even those whose names he does not know. -Long live iron council, he says to each of them in turn. -Long live, long live.

With sudden mischievous love Judah tongues Uzman, and the Remade jerks and is about to pull away and then does not. Judah does not kiss him for long. -Be gentle to the Chainday-night boys, he says in the Remade’s ear, and Uzman smiles.

And Judah holds Ann-Hari and she kisses him as she did when first they were lovers, and he pulls her close by the hips and she holds his face for seconds. -Long live, he whispers into her mouth. -Long live.

He has forgotten how much faster it is to travel alone. It is not a day before he is returned to the smokestone. The hand of the trapped man, egressing the rock, has been gnawed down to red bone.

Judah walks across the tops of the swells as if over the sea. He sees detritus from the fight and a scattering of corpses. At noon he feels shadows, and over him is a school of airships, moving toward the perpetual train. Judah shields his eyes and leans against his staff.

He supposes that perhaps he should be afraid for his comrades, but he is not. He reads the changing formations of the dirigibles. He smiles, alone on the ground, as they pass like slow barracuda. They seem to hesitate. He sits, his back to a granitic coil, and watches.

Judah can see the smoke of the train. One midsize warflot edges nervously into the air of the cacotopic zone. From here, the landscape seems utterly quotidian, but Judah can feel something baneful welling below the world’s skin.

The airship lets its bombs fall as it approaches the perpetual train. Judah sees little explosion-flowers over the hills. Even now he is not afraid.

In the distance the sky convulses. A bolus of something moves, a coilsome organic thing-not a cloud but an aspect of the sky itself become palpable and squidish across the land not quite seen. Sound is strange. Judah does not breathe. There is a stutter. The dirigible falters and comes clear again and then it is different-it is a splinter different, it is lower in the sky-and it turns, it removes itself with a speed that Judah would swear was panicked.

The train continues, into the stain, into the cacotopic zone that has beaten New Crobuzon back.

Judah walks for months. His life becomes a fugue of walking. Over creeks, quagmire, over rockland, through forests of vitreous trees, through forests that he thinks are fossil trees then sees are great skeletons. He walks a bonescape, an ossein ecology with its own undergrowth and scavengers.

He passes lakes that bubble with the fighting of vodyanoi tribes. He sees chimneys extruded from mountainsides where there are troglodyte villages. Judah is the guest of neglected priest-tribes. He is robbed by fReemade. He joins a fReemade band.

His body becomes a traveller’s body again. The startling muscles of his arms and chest subside and he is once again a thin mannequin tempered by travel. Garuda come to feed him, dropping from the sky with wordless charity. He checks his just-adequate maps, his compass. He does not retrace his steps the long route he has gone but goes directly east.

Judah passes through a storm, in a basalt place hundreds of miles from New Crobuzon, by blitzbaums, miles-high lightning trees. Bolts held still by cryptic forces, forking into boughs, a magnesium-bright forest.

The low rust skyline of a time-eaten iron town. And a swamp of thaumaturgically jinxed mud that degenerates his boots into worms. And a barrow and a buried church, and fields of wild berries, and beautiful hills. Five times he fights animals and three times he fights sentients. Judah runs or kills.

He is a quieter man. He moves with effortless expertise. It has been many weeks since he made a grass golem to walk with him, for him to talk to until the wind picks it apart. Judah passes cattle that were once domestic and are now feral. The ruins of fences, deserted pastures, miles by miles.

And then at last Judah comes down from the sudden hills and stands quiet like an idiot. At last he comes forward and now he stumbles. Judah goes to his knees. It is cold. What seasons have passed? Judah crawls forward and touches the rails.

It seems impossible that he can touch this metal, these iron sashes that wind around the weather and geography, that for all the blood and salt he spilled on them, the bones of all the men and women they press upon, are nothing, are a nothing, are made nothing by time and dust.

They are scavenged. Imperfect. Sections are gone. The tracks look out from the dirt and hide again. It has been a time since any train came this way.

Judah looks north along the cut. He remembers the carving of the roadbed. He is a long way north of the swamp.

When he goes back Judah will learn why the rails are still. How the money at last choked up in its sluices and died when the malfeasances grew so great that to ignore them would have shamed the state too far. That the money faltered when degraded news of the revolt, of the iron council, reached the railway’s backers. And how after panicked attempts to salvage the TRT through raised wages and a merciless expansion of Remaking the capital flight was so great that Transcontinental Railroad Trust was punctured, and the tracks became bones.

Soon, when he reaches the city again, Judah will learn that. For now he only smiles. He picks up his fallen pack, and as he stoops he strokes a rail as if it were a cat. He strokes it with affection, even with a melancholy.

He steps up and walks on over the dead rails. Around him the angles of the banks enclose him. He cannot see the wider land. This road tunnels his vision and leads him back to New Crobuzon. It has been waiting for him.

– New Crobuzon, he says, he whispers. It is the first time he has spoken for days. -New Crobuzon, I’ll always come back to you.

Not a lover’s promise, not a challenge, not resignation or pugnacity. Something of all of them.

He walks on. Helios of the iron council are in his pack. The truth, escape, a new life, a rolling democracy, Remade arcadia. -I’ll make you legend, he says and the birds listen, -and it will be true.

Judah walks on the iron road, back, to the city, back to the towers of New Crobuzon.