In the sprawling, soot-choked city of New Crobuzon, three lives converge toward a single, desperate goal: the Iron Council, a train that has become a moving sanctuary for those the city's industrial machine has discarded. Judah Low, a brilliant and obsessive scholar of golemetry, has spent years mastering the art of animating inanimate matter into golems — a power that could have saved the Stiltspear, a race of beings unlike anything the city's engineers ever imagined. Now, he seeks to use that power to protect the Iron Council from the encroaching forces of the New Crobuzon authorities. Cutter, a former member of the Council, leads a group of Judah's former students across the desert in search of the train, while Ann-Hari, a prostitute and a woman of fierce intelligence, joins them, her own past tied to the city's underbelly. As the three narratives converge, the true cost of golemetry, the nature of the Iron Council's mission, and the fate of New Crobuzon's ambition are laid bare in a world where technology, magic, and politics collide in spectacular, unsettling ways.