“What in Jabber’s name is it?” Cutter asked Qurabin.

“Not in Jabber’s name anything. I don’t know. There are things I don’t want to trade myself for. And even if I did, there are secrets that have no meaning, questions without answers. It is what it is.”

A fortnight after they had left the cacotopic zone, they met their first eastlanders for twenty years. A little group of nomads emerging from the hills. A fReemade gang, twenty or thirty strong. They were a wild mix, including a rare vodyanoi-Remade among the men and women reshaped for industry or display.

They came with wary courtesy to the train. “We met your scouts,” their leader said. She was amended with organic whips. She stared and stared, and it took Cutter a long time to realise that what he saw in her eyes was awe. “They said you was coming.”

The Remade of the Council looked at her and her brigands. “It’s all change,” the fReemade said that night at a meagre feast. “Something’s going on in the city. It’s under some siege. Tesh, I think. And something else, going on inside.” But they were too far, had been too many years from the town that made them, to know details. New Crobuzon was almost the legend to them that it was to the Iron Councillors.

They did not go with the Council: they wished them their friendship and went on to their rootless robbing life in the hills, but the next fReemade the Council came to did join. They came to show respect, to worship (Cutter could see it) the self-made Remade town, and stayed as citizens, Councillors themselves. When the Iron Council came to the northern shores of the lake that would shield them from Cobsea, they were met by the first fReemade to have sought them out deliberately.

Word must be passing along the strange byways of the continent, the paths between communities and itinerants. Cutter imagined it an infection. Threads of rumour, a fibroma knotting Rohagi together. Iron Council is coming! Iron Council is back!

The Council was fracturing. Their momentum was such that they could not have turned away. The closer they came to the metropolis, the more anxious, hesitant the older Councillors were. “We know what it’s like,” they’d say. “We know what it is there.” And the more certain, messianic, their children became. Those who had never seen the city were eager to visit on it something: what was it, a retribution? An anger? Justice, it might have been.

They would lead the track-laying, young men who might not have the enhanced strength of their parents but who swung their hammers with energy and hunger. The Remade put down tracks with them, but the older Councillors were the followers now.

Ann-Hari was different. She gloried. She was insistent, demanding they go faster. She would stand on outcrops, clamber with crude grace up overhanging hillocks and gnarls and gesture the perpetual train on as if she controlled it, conductor of a steam symphony.

It was so fast, suddenly: they carved on, scouts warning of this small gorge, that stream. Work-crews built hybrid forms of New Crobuzon traditions and oddities from the west-trellis bridges anchored with thick greenery, supports not of stone but of solid colour, that could only be crossed when light shone on them.

“There’s war!” a fReemade told them. “Tesh says it’s stopped its attacks, and then it hasn’t. They say there’s two envoys from New Crobuzon, asking different terms. New Crobuzon don’t speak with one voice no more.”

If the fReemade out here know we’re coming, Cutter thought, there’s no way them in New Crobuzon don’t. Word gets out. When will we face them?

Every few days Judah would spasm as the militia following them triggered his traps. With each, a few more of the soldiers might be taken, but a few days later another of the traps would go and prove they were coming. Judah tracked their progress in his own moments of weakness.

“They’re there,” he said finally. “I recognise that one. They’re definitely in the cacotopos. I can’t believe they followed us there. They must be desperate to get us.” What would a golem be, made of Torqued materia? With ablife channelled through that bleak matrix?

The stretched-out crew of graders and track-layers went north and east, and though they took their rails and crossties with them they left a land permanently tainted by their passage: a litter of metal parts, scars of railroad. The sky became colder, and through the darkness of the air massif became visible, leagues north. Dark drizzle came.

Here, perhaps three hundred miles west of the stub of the New Crobuzon railway, they were met by refugees. Not fReemade but recent citizens, come in a huddled rainwet congress out of the mist to run the last mile toward the growling engine, abasing before it like pilgrims. It was they who told Ann-Hari and Judah and the Iron Councillors what had happened in New Crobuzon, what was still happening, the story of the Collective.

“Oh my good gods,” said Elsie. “We did it. It’s happened. It’s happened. Oh my gods.” She was rapt. Judah’s face was open.

“It rose in Dog Fenn,” a refugee said. “Came up out of nowhere.”

“That ain’t the case,” another said. “We knew you was coming-the Council. We had to get ready for you, some said.”

They were terribly cowed before the Iron Council. These runaways were speaking to the figures they had seen so many times, for years, in the famous heliotype. They had to be cajoled into talking.

“So there’s no wages: people are hungry. There’s the war, and ex-militia telling what it’s really like, and there are Tesh attacks. We feel like we ain’t safe at all and the city ain’t keeping us… And we hear that someone’s gone to find the Iron Council.” Judah’s face moved to hear it.

“There are Tesh attacks?” Cutter said. The man nodded.

“Yes. Manifestations. And you know, the government’s saying it’s going to sort out the Tesh, going to end the war, but it’s chaos, and no one knows if they’re doing what they say. There’s another demonstration to Parliament to demand protection, and there’s them in the crowd yelling for more than that, giving out their leaflets. Caucus people, I think. But out come the men-o’-war, and the shunn, and the militia come down on us.

“And someone starts saying there’s a handlinger at the front. And people started fighting.

“I wasn’t there-I heard about it, is all. There was dead all over the streets. And when people got the militia on the run… All over the city come up barricades. Time for us to do what we needed, on our own. We didn’t need the militia. Keep them out.

“It was after that we heard the Mayor was dead.”

Delegates from all the districts had gathered in a collective, called and recalled in excitement and panic as the downtowners realised there was no suffrage lottery, that each of them had direct power. After some days the anti-Parliament had curtailed that rude democracy; but only, they swore, because they were in a double war. Most in the Collective were eager to negotiate with Tesh, not caring who controlled what in the seas south.

“Why are you here?” the Councillors asked.

The New Crobuzoners looked down and up again and said that the fierceness of the fighting had driven them away, that there were many exiles. They had been walking for weeks, trying to find the Iron Council.

They were not Caucusers nor collectivists, Cutter thought, only people who had found they were part of a dissident town-within-a-town and under fire, who had run with their possessions in their barrows. They had sought the Council not with a theory or politics, but with the awe of religious petitioners. Cutter disdained them. But Judah was all joy.

“It’s happened, it’s happening,” Judah said. His voice was thick. “The rising, the second Contumancy, we’ve done it. Because of what we did. The Iron Council… it was an inspiration… When they heard we were coming…”