Railsea

  The captain of the pirate train did not wear a greatcoat in which lived polecats & weasels. He did not have a beard woven with smouldering twists of gunpowder to surround himself with a stench & demonic aura. He did not cock a tricorn hat or have handprints in blood on his shirt. He did not dangle a necklace of bones & flesh-scraps. All these were things of which Sham had heard, ways in which railsea pirates spread the terror on which they relied.

  This man wore large glasses. He had what Sham would, had circumstances been otherwise, have said was a kind face. He couldn’t help thinking it, & then he couldn’t help a miserable little laugh.

  The man folded his arms. “Your situation amuses you?” he said. He sounded like an office manager asking someone to clarify a row of figures.

  “No,” Sham said. It was, to his own surprise & grim pleasure, anger more than fear that swept him. “You’re in so much trouble, don’t you even know? My captain’s going to come for you. She’s going to—”

  “She’s going to nothing,” said the captain. He cleaned his glasses. “She got your message. The one about wanting to be a salvor? The one about rolling off with them? Full of details only you’d know? Wishing her good luck & goodbye? Telling her you were seeking your fortune? She got it.”

  He put his spectacles back on. “Everyone knows you’ve been with those Shroakes. It’s not as if your aspirations come out of the blue. Your captain knows you’ve gone, are following your dream. She’s not coming for you, boy.”

  All those things, Sham thought. All those stories, those secrets, those desires, the sense of adventure, the pining after the vividly dressed salvors, that he had harboured, that he had confessed to Robalson—used against him.

  “What do you want?” he croaked. “I ain’t got no money.”

  “No indeed,” Elfrish said. “& our train’s short of space. If you’ve no purpose, there’s no point keeping you, you see? So it might be worth your while to think about what you can offer instead of coin. To be indispensable.”

  “What do you want?” Sham was whispering now.

  “Oh, I don’t know.” Elfrish said. “What might one want? My decks are swabbed. We have cooks, we have crew, we have everything we could need. Oh, but wait a minute.” He looked thoughtful. “There is one thing, though. That’s a thought. How about you show us on a map where you found the wreck. Of which none of your crew were supposed to speak. While you’re at it, you tell me what you found on it. Stories have been after you since, ooh, Bollons. About where poor old Captains Shroake ended up. How about you tell me everything, & I do mean everything, that you brought with you to give those Shroakes.

  “We on this train have a little bit of a vested interest. These are names not wholly unknown to us. Names I wasn’t expecting to deal with again, though of course one keeps a little ear out for what the oh-so-clever second generation Shroakes are up to. Plenty of people do, of course, but some of us have more investment than others.

  “Experiments don’t interest me. Journeys, however, especially journeys in response to secret posthumous messages, journeys after absolutely unique treasures, now they do. Apart from anything, it makes a person think they missed something, & that’s never a good feeling, now, is it?”

  “What?” said Sham. “Missed what?” But Elfrish did not answer. Instead, from his pocket, he pulled Sham’s little camera.

  “There’s a picture on this I’m particularly interested in,” he said. “Par, tick, you, lairly. & I don’t mean your penguins. See, I had no idea they’d be leaving yet, those Shroakelets. Or we’d have gone after them our own selves. Caught us on the hop. But we know you’ve been chatting to them.

  “& if,” he said, & his voice was suddenly chill & bony & metal & like the scuttling of a very bad insect, “you’d like not to be cut open & dangled over the side of this train & dragged along with your legs on the ground spilling blood everything under the flatearth can smell while we go slow enough for long, long miles that they can rise & eat you from the toes up & from the inside out, you know what you could do for me, Sham?

  “Tell me where the Shroakes are going.”

  FORTY-NINE

  SO WHAT DO THEY DO?” SINCE THEIR CLOSE ESCAPE from the light-deploying wreckers Dero had become obsessed with them, with whatever the Siblings Shroake had just avoided.

  “I told you, I don’t know,” Caldera said. “Release some of that pressure—we’ve got a buildup in the port engines. They lure stuff in, smash them up, & take them apart, I suppose.”

  The train arced over a rise—here, the flatearth was not quite, well, flat. They passed little streams & ponds, shaggy trees sprouting right between the rails. Sometimes there would be a rattling as branches knocked the side of the vehicle, as if something was asking for entrance.

  “That’s what they do to trains,” said Dero. “What about people? In the trains? What about if they’d got us?”

  “What’s that?” Caldera said. The iron rails ahead looked as if they were spreading out from something. Specifically, from a hill, it looked like, a stub island of the railsea. But you shouldn’t be able to see through an island. It should not have a silhouette like filigree, an island should not glint.

  “It’s a bridgeknot,” Dero said.

  The rails thicketed together, clumped, clotted, weaving over & under each other on girders & supports, on buttresses & poles in an absurdly tight snarl. It could have been the iron skeleton of a quite impossible behemoth. Within it at various heights, the Shroakes could see two, three old trains. Cold, deserted, of old design. Lifeless as husks & long abandoned.

  “Go round it,” Dero said.

  “It ain’t as simple as that,” Caldera said. She switched, line to line. “The rails everywhere round here are coming off it. Like wax off a candle. It’s going to take hours ‘n’ hours to plot a route around it. We want to be right on the other side.” She pointed.

  “So?”

  “We go through it.”

  THE NOISE OF THEIR PASSAGE changed on the footrails. Suspended suddenly on rickety rattling rises, the percussion went from heartbeat to performance, tinnier & more resonant. Raised rails made temporary little skies. The Shroakes passed into shadows, & through the patterings of moisture dripping from the lines’ undersides.

  Rails below, rails above. They were six, seven yards up, shaking the strut maze, switching switches, pushing through the heart of it all. They looked uneasily at each other as the tracks wobbled.

  “Is this thing safe?” Dero whispered.

  “Angels will’ve kept it alright,” Caldera said.

  “We hope,” Dero said.

  “We hope.”

  Sunlight dappled them through the old lines. The Shroake train was speckled as if they were deep in a hedge.

  “Who gets wrecked in the middle of a thing like this?” Dero said, looking at the deserted vehicles embedded in the structure. One was close. They were approaching it.

  “Careless people,” Caldera said. “Unlucky people.” She looked at the antique outlines of the train. “They weren’t wrecked, anyway. They were … becalmed.” The vehicle was heavy & huge & designed according to outmoded aesthetics. It had no chimney nor any exhaust: from its back jutted a huge lever. Clockwork.

  “Maybe that’s why,” Caldera said. “I think that’s from Kammy Hammy. They got halfway up, wheels ran out. That bar you wind it up with—you can’t twist that in here, there’s no space to turn the key.”

  It loomed over them on a steep side rail, as if watching as they passed. From every one of its windows billowed clouds of ivy & wiry bramble. In which, from the front-most window at least, they could see tangled-up tools, rain-ruined helmets & bones. The exuberant flora hogged the space, crowding out the dead.

  “A few more switches,” Caldera said, “& we’ll be coming through to the other side.” Through the mossed & windblown palimpsest of crossbars ahead she could see the open railsea.

  “We’ve got an amazing view,” Dero said. They pitched. Their passage shook t
he lines. The railknot swayed. Caldera grit her teeth. Behind her there was a resonant crack. The sound of metal snapping under strain. A groan. & the trembling of the rails grew.

  “What,” said Caldera, “was that?” She checked her mirrors. “Oh,” she said.

  That old train was not used to this shaking. Bolts had shaken, strained & sheared. Old brakes were long atrophied. Once-taut metal wheel-locks had given abruptly up under the vibrations. Blocks & chocks crumbled & the clockwork train was slipping from its position, & was rolling onto their track, following them. Accelerating.

  “Oh … my …” said Dero.

  “Quick now,” Caldera muttered. “Quick, quick, chop chop, on we go.” She yanked her controls, sped the Shroake train up. Their cold accidental pursuer accidentally pursued.

  A working train versus one long ruined unto scrap? Quite foregone which would be faster, no? But Caldera had a grave disadvantage. She was alive. & she wanted to keep it that way. She had, then, to exercise care. The fossil that pursued them had no such restraint. Where she slowed at branches, it did not. Where she sought the best route out of the girderweb, it did not care. Where she strove to ensure that she did not send her brother & herself hurtling to their doom, doom had long ago claimed their hunters, who strove deadly for nothing but speed.

  The old train was accelerating. Following them junction for junction, switch for switch, shaking the whole railknot & making the Shroakes scream. It roared after them, carried by gravity, gathering momentum, sending struts & supports of the strange structure scattered like spillikins behind it.

  “Go faster!” Dero shouted.

  “Oh, thank you!” shouted Caldera. “I hadn’t thought of that! Here I was going half speed!” They rolled towards the light, a dead crew close behind them. Only yards now to the flatearth where they could veer out of the path, but the clockwork was too close, too fast, was seconds from shunting them violently off the line.

  “Purge!” shouted Caldera. Dero hesitated only one instant, then obeyed.

  He stabbed at keys. Caldera listed what they would lose. I left my jumper in that carriage, she thought giddily, I left my second best pen, there’s all the liquorice, but no time for regrets, as with a last yank, Dero shouted “Purging!” & the rearmost carriage on the Shroake train was decoupled & blown backwards with percussive bolts, to slide right in the path of what came for them.

  The dead train slammed into the retreating carriage. There was no way the discarded Shroake cabin could stop that hefty skeleton, but it did not need to. All it needed to do, & what it did, with a scream of wheels, was momentarily slow it. Long enough, those few seconds, that Caldera & Dero & their little train, lighter & faster now, hauled away & out & were back at railsea again, whooping with the whole being-alive-ness of it.

  They switched, & were a way away on sidelines of the route they had been taking, rushing to the windows to watch. As it howled out into the bright sun, the carriage slowing it, the pursuing engine shook with the percussion of the bridgeknot. Which creaked, which swayed, until with thunderous clatter & the rush of air, the whole precarious rusted mass of the structure began to collapse.

  As if staggering, the clockwork train-tomb flipped, sending the brake that had until moments ago been the Shroakes’ sleeping cabin screeching off the line into the wilderness. The old engine somersaulted horribly & mightily, coming apart as it flew, spreading debris & disgruntled ivy & the bones of dead explorers far across the rails.

  FOR A LONG TIME dust kept pluming. The cacophony of falling bridgeknot continued. Piece by agonized piece it fell, until at last it was still, its broken silhouette emerging from dirt clouds. Bits of shattered train rolled across the railsea.

  Long after the awful sound, at very last, rodent curiosity got the better of rodent caution, & the burrowing beasts of the railsea peered up from scrubby grass. A breeze pushed Caldera’s & Dero’s hair this way & that. They leaned out of their window, gaping at all the collapse, at the second death of the clockwork train.

  “& that,” said Caldera, “is why we never leave anything essential in the last carriage.”

  FIFTY

  I DON’T KNOW! I DON’T KNOW! THAT’S THE WHOLE POINT! I don’t know where they’ve gone!”

  Elfrish had not even touched him, had just put his face very close to Sham’s, stared at him with eyes that no longer looked mild. That looked like poison & ice. Behind his captain, Robalson looked uncomfortable.

  “I swear,” Sham babbled, “I don’t know nothing, I just saw the pictures & thought they should know …”

  “Pictures,” said Elfrish. “As in …” He shook the camera.

  “Pictures! From a camera! They were in the wreck!”

  “You’re lying, boy.” Elfrish’s voice was frosty & certain. “They were not.”

  “They was! Only in the ground! In a hole!”

  The captain cocked his head. “A hole?” he said.

  “One of the Shroakes dug it! Where the window used to be. Shoved it inside.”

  Elfrish gazed thoughtfully roofward, scrunched up his eyes in thought or memory. “A hole,” he breathed. “A hole.” He looked at Sham. “If there were pictures,” he said, “perhaps someone might use them to reconstruct just where the Shroakes had been. They were always assiduous about not disclosing their itineraries. Whatever the encouragement.”

  “Yeah!” said Robalson. “We should totally do that!” He nodded nervously at his captain.

  “But,” whispered Elfrish to Sham, “you don’t have those pictures anymore.”

  & though he wanted more than anything to say, “Yes I do,” Sham, after he had stalled as long as he dared, had to whisper, “No I don’t.”

  With a bellow like an animal, Captain Elfrish dragged Sham abruptly out of the room & into the corridor. Down the hallways, past pirates at their tasks. They looked like other trainsfolk. Only the furnishings were more random, their clothes more varied, & every one of them was armed.

  Into a room where scarred officers were waiting. Sham saw through the windows that they were racing through lush lands, overbent by mottled boughs & climbing flowers & trees that seemed to scream, so full of bright birds & startled marmosets were they. Sham could feel the train judder over junctions, pass signal boxes & switches, as lines veered from their own.

  So they were heading north, then. Someone was holding Sham down in a chair. He shook & yelled but could not break free. On the table in front of him, someone laid out thick paper. As if to protect the table from spills. Sham yelled again. An officer was slowly unrolling a leather pack containing glittering sharp things.

  “I don’t know nothing!” Sham shouted. What ghastly instruments were these? “I told him!”

  “Juddamore,” Elfrish said. “Begin.”

  The big man took a wicked grey spike from the pack. Licked his thumb & pressed it to the point. Winced his appreciation. Sham screeched. The man lowered it until it pointed at Sham’s face.

  “So,” said Elfrish. “You said you found pictures. That would be these.” He held up scraps—the greasy, now-torn & well-worn images that Sham had scribbled for himself, the remembrances of what he had seen on screen. “& culminating in this.” Sham’s cheap little camera. On its screen that single line. Even so small & ill-focused, it hushed the room.

  “Know where this leads?” Elfrish whispered. “No. Neither do I. But I am, as you know by now, very much of a one for stories. & such intimations as there are for people to hunt the let-me-stress-it legendary, mythical, obviously-not-at-all-real places beyond, revolve around money. A lot of it. You see my point.

  “Oh, people’ll go after those Shroakes. It’s hardly just me. With their train, that won’t go well, I suspect. But followed as they know they are, they’ll wind their route. What I want to do is head them off. Which means knowing where they’re going.

  “Now, your well-being is up to you, Sham ap Soorap. These—” He shook the images. “—may make sense to you. To me, not so helpful. To me they are scrawls. So
, the things you saw?

  “Describe them.”

  The man called Juddamore lowered his sharp point to the paper. It was a pencil. He began to draw.

  HE TRANSLATED SHAM’S gabbled descriptions into images. Juddamore was talented. Even in his wash of fear & relief, Sham was impressed to watch the pictures emerge from scrawled grey lines as tangled as the railsea.

  Someone’ll run come save me, he thought, & described his pictures & memories, in case they did not, in fact. In the days & weeks that he had prepared his trip to Manihiki, formulating his plan, Sham had gone over those images in his mind, leafed through his scrappy redrawings, more than once. They were vivid in his mind.

  “& then in the third one there’s, yeah, that one …”

  “What is that?” some deep-voiced pirate muttered, staring at Sham’s original. “Is that a bird?”

  Sham. Never an artist.

  “No, it’s, it’s like, a sort of, a sort of overhang, like, like …” & with frantic hand-motions Sham described the rock angle, & so on. To stay alive. Juddamore drew what he described, & Sham would pass comment & correct him like some lunatically agitated critic. “Not like that, the little forest was a bit more, lower trees, like …”

  Each of these scenes had originally been chosen & frozen because it was a sight, after all. Each of them had some quality, some feature, something to distinguish it from the everyday railsea, to make it worth recording. For hours, Juddamore drew pictures of descriptions of memories of glimpses of digital images of sights once long ago seen. The pirate officers looked, heads cocked, rubbing their chins. Debated what they saw.

  “& this is the order?”

  “Look. That bit there sounds like the corner off the coast of Norwest Peace.”

  “There’s rumours about rail shenanigans up Kammy Hammy way, & couldn’t that be the cut in the mountains that gets you up by its western islands?”

  They traced a route. With maps beside them, they ruminated. Over a long time, guessing where they had to, putting to one side controversies, the best brains of the pirate train reconstructed a dead explorers’ route. Until, astoundingly, they had decided they knew—more or less, roughly, in broad sweeps—where they were going.