Ori made his jacket a kind of satchel for the helmet, he pocketed his pistol, and stumbled out toward the Bonetown Ribs.

The air seemed sultry, wire-tight. What’s happening? He could not believe word had spread so fast, in fact he did not believe it. With a gust his excitement turned bad, and foreboding filled him. What has happened?

There was no one on the streets, or freakishly few, and those who there were went heads down. Past tarred houses by the Ribs, he kept the bricks of the raised railway to his left, went south, stumbling through Sunter, ready to turn on Rust Bridge to Murkside and from there to Syriac, but he saw the lights of fires and heard drumming, bugles. Nothing should be so loud at these predawn hours.

They grew louder; he felt himself going into shock, shaking hard, the weight of the helmet dragging him. South down High Chypre Hill, a street of florists and trinketeers by whose roofs the trains should come. There was a fork in the lines, where the tributary of the Dexter Line went down to Kelltree and veered east over the river to Dog Fenn. There, something was blocking his way.

Blinking till he teared in exhaustion, Ori saw in the glimmer of fires a rough barrier. He could not make sense of it. Its silhouette in that warm light was like something wild, something geographical in the city. People were moving at its top.

“Stop,” someone shouted. Ori kept walking, did not understand that the word could be meant for him.

It was a barricade of paving slabs and rubble, carts, chimneys, old doors, the overturned remnants of stalls. Tons of urban detritus had gone to make a little mountain ridge, a ten-foot-high debris cordon planted with flags. The marbled arm of a statue jutted from its flank.

“ Stop, fucker.” A shot, a shard of concrete sounded with the ricochet. “Where you going, friend?”

Ori put his hands up high. He approached, waving.

“What’s happened? What’s going on?” he shouted, and there were jeers from the blockage. What is he some fucker from Mafaton back from holiday? “No papers, no kiosks, no criers where you been then, mate?” the sentry shouted. He was a man-shape in black, backlit. “Piss off home.”

“This is my home. Syriac. What’s happened? Godsdammit, how long was I between… This is about her, ain’t it? You’ve heard? The Mayor?” And all his excitement was back again. So much that he could hardly speak. I might’ve been days, he thought. What’s happened while I’ve been gone? Did we do it? It happened. It woke them. The inspiration. Gods. “Dammit, chaverim, let me in! Tell me what’s gone on.” He forgot cold and tiredness and stood up straight in the licking yellow light of the fires. “It’s all happened… How long ago did she die?”

“Who?”

“The Mayor. ” Ori creased his brow. There were more calls, more shouting. She dead? The bitch is gone? Who’s this fool, he’s a madman, I wouldn’t set your store…

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, mate. I think you should go now.” He heard the sound of gun-preparation.

“But what…”

“Listen, friend, someone can vouch for you? Because without that there’s no in, no out. You’re in no-man’s-land, and that ain’t a safe place to be. You’d best bugger off back to the Old Town, unless you give me a name. Give me a name, and we’ll check you out.” More heads were rising now; the man was being joined. An armed band, humans and other races, weapons hefted below snapping flags.

“Because you’re on the threshold now, mate, and you’re either on one side or the other. It ain’t like we just got here. Been two powers in the city for days, boy. You’ve had days to make up your mind. You’re either north”-and there were pantomime boos-“back in the old days and old ways: or you’re in here, Kelltree and Echomire and Dog fucking Fenn, in the future, which is now.

“Walk toward me slow, and keep your hands like that. Let’s have a look at you, you gormless fool.” It was almost kindly. A bottle smashed. “Come a bit closer. Welcome to the Free Territories, mate. Welcome to the New Crobuzon Collective.”

Part Seven. STAIN

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

“I hate that we run from them.”

“You heard, though. You heard how it was. We have to play safe. They’re armed to take us out.”

“But if we have to run from them, why by gods are we heading back to the city? It’ll be way worse.”

“It doesn’t work like that, though, does it? That’s not the idea. We send out word. By coming back, we change things. By the time we get back, it won’t be them waiting for us. It’ll be a different city.”

Cutter and the man lounged against a wall after another dance, in a cab reconfigured. It was a punitive journey, and night after night the Iron Councillors kicked against the darkness to improvised rhythms.

There had been deaths, of course, to footholds lost, to viruses and bacteria of the hinterland, and to the depredations of the inland predators, animals that unfolded in claws, teeth, cirri, and killed. Drogon went hunting with the Council’s forces, came back with the heads of strange predators, with new wounds and stories. That one phases, so we trapped it when it went icy and I took it through the heart. That one sees with its teeth.

Cutter saw some of the new thaumaturgy the Iron Council had learned. It would not have saved them from the militia. The Council tried to make things hard for their pursuers, blowing up bridges behind them, filling trenches with rubble. Judah laid golem traps behind the Iron Council, set to be triggered only by a company of men. He laid as many as he could-each one ate at his energy. Cutter imagined the earth buckling and unbuckling become a rock figure, a figure made of fallen trees, the water of the stream, wherever Judah had laid the trap. Its one instruction indelible and simple in place of a brain: fight. The substance of the inlands themselves gone not feral but organized, interceding and pounding down the militia with its blows.

If the militia reached that far, which Cutter thought they would. Some of them would die, but most would likely not. When they made landfall, found the Council’s trail, even the power of Judah’s great golems could not stop them coming. The militia would close on the stragglers of the Iron Council, those left behind by the train. Iron Council relied on the cacotopic zone. That was what would hide them.

“Didn’t think I’d see this again,” Judah said. They were on a crag peering over the tracks, the long dotted-out spread of men and women, riding pack mules or walking hard and fast, surrounding and joining the graders.

What if the Council changes its policy on the way? Cutter thought. What if we get halfway across and enough people disagree and want to go back?

There. The sun moved behind them. Its vividness seemed to green slowly as it sank, as if it were verdigrising. In the ill-seeming light they looked north and east into the cacotopic stain. They had come hundreds of miles, in weeks, and here they were, at the edge.

Cutter went white to see it. “Qurabin,” he said, “tell us a secret. What is it? What’s happening there?” Something sounded in the air like scuttling.

The monk’s voice came: “Some secrets I don’t want to know.”

There, a Torque landscape. Mussed by that ineffable bad energy, the explosion of shaping, a terrible fecundity. Vistas. We ain’t seeing what this really is, Cutter thought. This is just one idea. One way of it being.

Even there in the outskirts of the cacotopos land was liminal, half-worldly geography, half some bad-dream set. It was merciless, stone horns and trees that looked like stone horns, forests of head-high mushrooms and ferns that dwarfed runt pines and, a way off, the flat of some delta where the sky seemed to push in between too-tall extrusions. Cutter could see nothing moving. That unplace extended to the horizon. It was many miles to pass through.