What will you do, golemist? he asks himself. What will you do to stop them? You ain’t going to stop them; you’re going to die. To die with his council. You’re too broken to do anything now. Look at the blood come from you. But he does not think he will die. Judah would not go if he thought he would die.
There are men in the sky, militia swinging under taut spheres. He sees the smoke of the perpetual train and he can hear explosions. The aeronauts seep bombs, breaking apart the scud-sculptures of the smokestone in a line of craters, drawing a gully toward the council.
What will you do, golemist? Judah asks himself. He will do something. The thing in him, the oddity, the good in him flexes.
People are scrambling away. Refugees again: men, the old, the terrified and wounded, newcomers without loyalty to keep them, women carrying their children, running over the ridges of hard cloud. Judah and Shaun career past them by the tracks. They ride into the battle.
There is the train, firing from its riveted-together guntower. Militia and the Councillors who outnumber but are outfought by them. The sky ahead is unnatural, a matted pewter, stained with colours that should not be there.
Out ahead, protected by cactus and Remade guards, is a track-laying team. They move frenetic, in a sped-up mumming of their usual work, over a rubble of nimbostratus stone. They are picked off by militia targeteers, falling wounded or killed over the rails, and their comrades push them aside and continue their urgent work.
Judah comes in fighting.
The militia will not stop the train: they will kill many but there are only yards left, and even with the cull of track-layers (another man down with a blood-blossom) the train will go through. It is the oncoming aerostats that make Judah afraid. There is the sound of rain in the west, but no rain appears.
Shaun relaxes. Judah feels him lean backward and puts his arm around him and feels his front slick, too wet for sweat, and Judah knows his friend is dead. The horse stumbles and stops and Judah dismounts, dragging Shaun with him, his sternum all ruptured. Judah hauls him until volleys disturb him and he must let his dead friend go and run through the lines of his comrades and along the train, staying low, grabbing a bow from a pile as he goes. A rivebow it is-he curses its weight, its limited range, but he tries to level it as he runs the length of the battered cars, toward the steaming chimney where his golem trap is set.
He fires a scalpel-edged chakri; he hunkers by Remade and edges toward the cowcatcher. There are thaumaturges among the militia, and darts of baleful energy spit at the Councillors and do arcane damage. The wyrmen perform brave and dangerous raids on the militia, and the militia begin to withdraw.
– We make them run! We make them run! screams a wyrman, hysterical with pride, but she is wrong. The militia are leaving because airships are coming.
– Move! There is a shout. -We’re through! And the segmented edifice lurches and trembles and crawls through the stone mist and up, looking as if it will derail any second, on smokestone shards. The scree moves uneasy but holds, and the carriages progress, bullets typing on their iron skin. The train pauses at the apex of the shard hill, descends. The train finds a pothole-a track cracks, carriages list, but somehow the rutted wheels keep traction and shuddering like something wounded the train rolls into the land beyond.
– Keep going! Judah shouts, as hundreds of the Councillors run to rejoin the train. -Come on. The sky and the land are not as they should be. There is a sound like something hollow being struck, way off, before the sun.
The geoempath stands by a chasm in the rocks, by the powdermonkeys cutting fuses. She is smeared with the earth’s filth and her eyes retain something of the degradation of her hex, but she looks at Judah and nods before he can ask, points into the ground. -There, she says. -I think.
The train gushes steam and hisses impatient. -Get on, get on get on get on, Ann-Hari shouts from the cab. Wyrmen race across the reefs of stone to where the last Councillors hold out at the crevice. The Remade run. They are such little things. Can no one see it? Judah looks west and up. Can no one see the sky? The land?
A panorama like and unlike everything they have passed.
What are you? Miles to the west, a moment’s distance in this great stretched landscape- Gods we’re in the middle lands, we’re out of all maps, we’re nowhere -here stony ground becomes something more rippled, something rilled as if the earth were poured wax, its parameters unclear as Judah tries to focus. The land dips away. Trees puncture the plain, but they change, they are less like trees, they flicker, is it? Like some dark flame, they flicker, they phase in their substance, or is it only the eye trying to see so far off, no, there is something about these trees or are they some other thing? There is a mountain but it may be a mirage, rippling as it does, it may be a barrow and much closer, it may be a fleck in Judah’s eye. Nothing is as it should be.
Things that are not birds fly like birds above, birds like rain. While the council gathers its lost Judah looks at the sky. It moves like a baby.
Drained and bleeding fighters climb for the train. -Get on, Uzman shouts. He is standing on a crest, looking down the splits in rock at the Councillors struggling to get home. -Come on come on, Uzman says, as more find their way through, but his voice tells Judah that time will not allow them all, as the militia regroup. It is already too late. Uzman is looking to the powder-men, to the geoempath. The perpetual train moves, the track-layers continue, it crawls on, away from the last smokestone.
– This is only the edge, Judah says, looks at the sky, -of the cacotopic stain. We’re only at the outskirts. But he can feel the ground; he feels its energy in a way he should not. He sees Uzman’s despair.
In their desperation to save the last of their comrades they delay bursting the seam so late the re-formed cadres of militia catch up with the stragglers of Remade. At last there is a stuttering of three explosions, and a huge squall of smokestone kecks up from porous earth and uncoils in a smog that expands fast to clog the channel the graders have made, and moves slower as it begins to set.
Uzman cries miserably out as it enfolds the slower Remade. He looks down at the gaseous rock expanding.
In the ropes of his gut Judah feels a newness, a constructed nonlife, a giant anthropoid wind come to him, as Ann-Hari releases his golem trap. Judah flexes inside, spits out an effort and grabs control of the thing, reaches up as if he would hold its hand and together Judah and his golem run for the unfolding stone. The golem walks into it, stretches out its air arms, pushes back wafts, tries ineffectually to clear a hollow.
Judah is scores of yards from the now sluggish vapor, which is smothering as it indurates. From within its setting stone Judah hears choked calls. In resentful unfolding gusts the cloud pushes its innards out and Judah sees movement inside, not wind-driven or random, and arms, supplicant, emerge from the obscurity and a man comes out, greyed by wisps that cling to him and become silicon chitin, crusting him as he falls, and behind is another belching of mist and another figure pushes through smokestone visibly harder now, wading through dough, scabbed with it, labouring under matter.
Judah reaches them. The first man through is militia, they see through a ragged epidermis of stone, but it is impossible to feel hate or anger for him as he shivers and fights to breathe through a mouth thick with mineral curd. The other is council. There is no saving him. His comrades try to break the boulder that has settled over his face but by the time they do their efforts have cracked his skull.