Railsea

  ELSEWHERE IN THE RAILSEA, THE TIES WERE STONE-HARD, the iron of the rails was a black no amount of train-wheel polishing could make shine, & the ground beneath & between them was very cold. Over such tracks came the Medes.

  Had it been observed by a sky-dwelling god with any knowledge of moling, such a watcher would have been struck by the vehicle’s speed. The Medes raced on the icy railroad in shekkachashek, a rhythm suited to hot pursuit, not to these conditions. No moldywarpe was visible: the train would, the imagined watcher might have presumed, been better suited to prowl at lower speeds & slippery wheelbeats.

  At the Medes’s prow, the captain, her tracer in her mechanical hand, looked up & down between screen & the horizon. The latter was all grey air & baleful clouds: the former a dancing dot of red, a complaining diode.

  “Mr. Mbenday,” Naphi said, “it’s taken a turn star’d. Switchers to switch.” Switch they did, curving through a sequence of points, until the scanner light was again nearly straight ahead.

  When she did not track on that relentless screen, the captain retired with books of philosophies. Reading memoirs & thoughts & speculations of the rare completers. She made notes in the margins. What happens when the evasive concepts you hunt, get found?

  Three times the devilish fast beast they followed dug too far, too fast, too deep to be followed, dragged its glimmer-self beyond the range of Captain Naphi’s reader. Each time, within a few days of roaming, scanner at maximum power, drawing on more traditional techniques of moleground deduction, she found the signal again.

  The second time they lost & found the blip that meant great talpa, they had seen, far, far off, a molehill born. An eruption of dust that silenced them with awe, & left a truly prodigious mound behind.

  “Wish the lad could see this,” Fremlo had muttered. “I heard it was him got her the scanner. He’d have liked this.” No one answered.

  There was still a chase; they were still molers, tracking & inferring & judging on their hunterly insights. But now Captain Naphi’s philosophy left an electrical spoor. Perhaps once or twice the captain looked like she was whispering, muttering something that might have including the word “thanks” as she fiddled with her receiver.

  Mocker-Jack did not travel like a moldywarpe should travel. “How does it know?” Vurinam demanded of the world. “How does it know we’re on its bloody tail? How come it keeps trying to get away?” That was how he interpreted the creature’s unusual evasive speed & motion.

  It’s always taunted the captain, some crewmates whispered back. That’s why it’s her philosophy.

  Hob Vurinam had another question. As they circled a stretch of ice, in the very bloody light of evening, as he turned his pockets inside out & right-way round again in fret, he said to Dr. Fremlo, “D’you ever feel like it might be cheating?”

  The doctor was watching groundhogs bicker by their holes. Fremlo said nothing.

  “If Naphi gets Mocker-Jack like this,” Vurinam said, “mightn’t it be cheating to complete your philosophy that way? Can you shortcut an insight-hunt, do you think?” Fremlo threw scrunched-up paper into a groundhog squabble as the train passed. “Wonder what Sham would think,” Vurinam said.

  “Not much,” Fremlo said. “It isn’t salvage, is it? It’s just a big mole.”

  The sun went down on the two of them talking about Sham, while the vehicle to which they owed temporary paid loyalty described raggedy spirals in intersecting rails, closing in on its captain’s obsession.

  FIFTY-FIVE

  THE FIRST FEW TIMES HE ENTICED IT FROM THE SKY, Sham just stroked Daybe & took heart from the presence of something that liked him & didn’t care if he could verify that a piece of railsea was a particular piece of pictured railsea. Those duties continued. He said yes to a petrified forest; a glacier creeping at them, its slowly incoming edge already eating railsea rails; a particular patch of distinctive hillocky ground. “Is that what you saw?”

  Each time Sham was out there to check, Daybe circled. Each time Sham said yes—until that last one, when, after a hesitation, he told the truth: no. & after another hesitation, Elfrish nodded & altered course.

  Daybe wouldn’t enter Sham’s dreary cell, but it perched on the rim of the tiny window. With outswept arms & exaggerated pointings Sham would encourage it out to local islands, to disrupt railgulls & to pick up snacks of grubs. With swoopy beckonings he’d entice it back. He saw it flit under the clouds & upsky, above a ragged reef of salvage.

  Where were they?

  Sham was at the mercy of a man he knew to be wholly ruthless. Of murderers who would throw him overboard or spit him on a trainhook for the laugh of it, if the thought appealed. But as long as he was alive & making himself useful, he was somewhere he had never been. Neither doctoring nor pining, but somewhere quite new, doing something new, & with that came—whatever the danger—excitement.

  Robalson visited him at all hours & would go on about nothing. Would start halfheartedly taunting Sham, until that was done & he’d just sit, uneasily. “There’s so many stories going round,” he said at last. “If whatever it is the Shroakes are after, that their family found, is even half as good as people think it might be, we’re going to be …” He made lip-smacking noises. “They say you can’t even imagine it. So we got to keep moving before anyone else gets smart. Course, they ain’t got your pictures, have they?”

  No, thought Sham, but they’ll be after the Shroakes. He bit his lip.

  A WHISTLE SOUNDED, & there came the heavy beat of running. The train accelerated, skewed away from the direction it had been going. This was skilled switching. The swift manoeuvres continued, these sudden changes of direction, abrupt speedings-up & slowings-down. Robalson leapt up.

  “What is it?” Sham shouted. His jailer took a moment to shoot him a very nervous grin, then was gone & turning the key. Sham stared from the little window & caught his breath. The Tarralesh was racing after another train. Some small merchant vehicle, plying goods between railsea islands, now gusting at the limit of its steam strength. “Get out of here!” he shouted across the miles, & as if it heard him, the littler train tried.

  There was a booming. A fusillade of missiles arced with dreadful laziness from the pirate train, over the rails, to rainbow down in a succession of withering explosions that sent ripped-up rail shreds & ties in all directions. One of the flying bombs hit the rear of their quarry.

  Sham moaned. The caboose exploded, sent flames & metal & wood in a big splash, as well as, oh my Stonefaces, little pinwheeling figures. They landed scattered. & near those who still moved, now fitfully, injured, the earth erupted, as carnivorous burrowers smelled person-meat.

  Another flurry of shots, & the train was immobilised. Over horrible minutes, the Tarralesh came closer. Sham could hear the crew catcalling & arming themselves. On the deck of the immobilized train the men & women waited with swords, guns & terrified expressions. They may not have been soldiers or pirates, but they would fight.

  NOT THAT IT DID them overmuch good. The Tarralesh bombed them some more, spilt defenders like spillikins onto the awful ground. Elfrish’s vehicle came alongside, to an adjacent rail, & snagged the crippled merchant with grappling hooks. Hallooing to some aggressive pirate god, the fighting crew of the Tarralesh swept aboard, & the hand-to-hand melee began.

  Sham couldn’t see much. A blessing. He could see enough. He saw women & men shoot each other at close hand, send wounded & dead flying off the train. Some fell near enough that he could hear their cries, see them crawling on broken bones, clutching at wounds, scrabbling to get back aboard.

  The sandy soil began to churn. To swirl & sink. A circle slid down into a cone. A man slid down, too, crying out. From the base of that pit scissored two great chitin mandibles, beetle-coloured scythes. Compound eyes.

  Sham looked away before the antlion’s jaws closed on its meal & a scream abruptly ended. He flattened himself against the wall below his porthole. He felt as if his heartbeat was fast & hard enough to shake the train.
When he looked again, the predators were fighting between themselves, & the ground churned not only with men & women but with the squabbles of giant insects & mole rats, shrews & moles. While in the ruined train, pirates took control.

  Those pirates overboard & still living were rescued. The merchants on the earth were left to scrabble their own way back to their wreck, around antlion pits, the loose earth of hungry badgers.

  Elfrish’s crew hauled goods out of the holds, craned & grappling-hooked & pulleyed them across to the Tarralesh. Watching them under armed guard were the last dejected & sobbing merchants. Sham couldn’t hear what Elfrish was saying, but he saw two or three of the defeated crew pulled out—the best dressed, it looked like, the captain & officers. They were dragged onto the pirate train, out of his sight. Sham could hear scuffs above him. A groan of horror from the other merchants, all staring at whatever was occurring above Sham’s head.

  When at last the Tarralesh pulled away, it left behind it an empty & immobile train, a big chunk of nu-salvage for someone to pick clean. On its roof the last of its crew, allowed by laziness to live, mourning, cold, marooned.

  “What a day, eh?” Robalson said.

  “What’ll happen to them?” Sham could not turn to look at him.

  “Someone’ll probably come for them, maybe, when they don’t turn up where they’re expected,” Robalson said. He shrugged. He wouldn’t meet Sham’s eye. “Don’t look at me like that,” Robalson muttered. Sulkily put down a bowl.

  “What did you do to those last ones?” Sham said. “I could hear …”

  “Plank,” Robalson said. He made walking-finger motions. “They was the officers. I said don’t look at me like that. You know we lost six people? If they’d just surrendered we wouldn’t have had to do any of that.”

  “Right,” said Sham, & turned back to the window. He felt like crying. He shivered. “What was under the plank? Where’d you do it?” When there was no answer, he said, “It was more antlions, weren’t it? Centipedes?” Robalson was already gone.

  Sham hunted for paper as carefully as once his crew had hunted moldywarpes. Found a scrap of drawer-liner. Kept looking. Found at last a discarded pencil stub. Had to chew-sharpen it. He wrote:

  “Please! I am a captive in the train Tarralesh. It is pirates. They have guns. They are a pirate train. They are making me show them the way to a secret if I don’t do it they will drop me into the railsea & maybe an antlion trap or something. My name is S. a. Soorap training under Capt. Naphi of the Medes. Please can you help me. Please also tell Troose yn Verba & Voam yn Soorap of Streggeye that I have not run away & that I will come back! The Tarralesh wants to Do Harm to two young Manihiki travellers & also to me please help!! West & North is all I know where we are going. Thank you.”

  Sham leaned into the dark, chattered, beckoned until Daybe came in. Sham twisted up the paper very tight & tucked it into the tracer still secured to the daybat’s leg.

  “Listen,” he said. “I know this is going to be hard. You came to find me. & you don’t know how much that meant. But you know what I need you to do now?” He swept out his arm, hard, in the direction they had come. “I need you to go back. Fly back. Find someone. Find anyone.”

  The bat stared at him. Intimidated by the night. It huddled, licked him, met Sham’s eyes. His heart breaking, Sham started the long process of persuading it, intimidating it, frightening it if he had to, into flying away.

  FIFTY-SIX

  ANOTHER CARRIAGE WAS GONE, TAKEN SKYWARD IN vengeful & tremendous owl claws. Caldera had pressed the release, as the owl had flown. Just in time but at the right time, restraining herself until those strigine talons were directly over the track on which the Shroakes’ engine had still raced, the last to be dragged up, gunning it so the train lurched forward as the carriages fell & with sparks & terrifying bangs slammed wheels-down back onto the rails. One more moment, they’d have been too high, or too far to one side or the other, & the whole vehicle would have been lost.

  The Shroakes, gasping & owl-eyed themselves, had watched the metal tons of what had been their rearmost carriage hauled off into skyborne silhouette, viciously pecked as it went, & shedding shredded metal. It looked like straw & gossamer as it fell, & landed with booms & made the earth shudder.

  At last they pushed on, under a huge night, in the deeps of which upsky predators made sounds. The Shroakes—

  —but wait. On reflection, now is not the time for Shroakes. There is at this instant too much occurring or about to occur to Sham ap Soorap.

  Look: Sham has just sent away his own, furred, little-winged friend. Once bloodstained, a poor tryer at medicine, an aspirer to salvage-hunting, & now a locked-away captive in a pirate train.

  This train, our story, will not, cannot, veer now from this track on which, though not by choice, Sham is dragged.

  Later, Shroakes. Sham is with pirates.

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH YOU?” ROBALSON WAS always shirty with Sham when Sham was sad. & the morning after Sham had finally persuaded Daybe off into the dark, he was very sad.

  They were in wildlands now, oddlands, & the railsea was punctuated with anomalies. Hillocks of bridges, rotators to swivel an engine amid a starburst of rails, a multiply-holed island. Salvage. & not all old arche-salvage. Wrecks. Ranging in size from tiny scout carts to large, now-skeletal vehicles. Overgrown, weather-stripped, rusted, cold. A train boneyard.

  “Someone’ll probably come for them,” Robalson had said about those stranded merchants. Sham wondered. You never knew. That night, alone, he watched the birds, none of which would come to him when he waved. He had a bit of a sniff because his heart hurt that Daybe had gone, & now he had not a single friend on this train.

  & then the next morning, he looked out again & gasped. Sham held his breath, he bit his lip so that he wouldn’t scream in delight. Because at the horizon, like a miracle, as if he had conjured it, called for it, which perhaps his beautiful bat friend had, he saw a Manihiki ferronavy train.

  It moved hard, fast & well. These were some railsailors. It was perhaps three miles off. Approaching on interception course. It ran up pendants, that Sham, a trainsman now, could read. Prepare, they said, for Inspection.

  AMONG THE FLURRY of feet & anxious preparations, Robalson stuck his head around the door.

  “You,” he said. “Shtum. Not a word. I’m right outside. You make a sound …” He shook his head. “The captain’s waiting for an excuse. So you make a sound &—all sorts of stuff’ll happen.” He made a close-your-mouth motion & went.

  “Attention Tarralesh.” An amplified voice boomed from the Manihiki train. “Prepare to receive visitors.” Sham watched it draw near on close rails, set down a cart of splendid speed & modern appearance, full of uniformed officers. He leaned, he waved, he yelled, out of the window.

  Had they seen him? What cock-&-bull story was the captain offering? Had they swept away all the appurtenances of the pirate’s life? Sham heard stamping on the deck above. He did not know when he would be safe to yell. Someone was approaching down the corridor. He hesitated. He could hear a roaring argument. Sham could not make out anything, until the shouters stopped outside his cabin & his heart went into his throat & abruptly the door flew open & a tall officer in the Manihiki navy, a captain in smart black uniform, brocaded & gilded & polished-buttoned, was standing before him, yelling back at Elfrish & Robalson. The officer pointed at Sham & yelled, “That boy, that’s who I’m talking about. So bring him out. You have a lot of explaining to do.”

  “THEY BEEN KEEPING ME PRISONER!” Sham shouted as he ran after the officer. “Don’t be fooled, sir, they’re pirates! Sir! Thank you for rescuing me!” Elfrish struggled to shut him up, to put a hand over his mouth, but Sham was moving too fast. “They want me to lead them to a secret, sir, & I don’t even really know what it is or where, but they think I recognise things & they’ve had me here for days & they’re breaking the law—”

  They were outside, in creepier ra
ilscape still than Sham had seen. Ahead, the rails wove between scrubby rock hills, & into them, into brief dark tunnels overlooked by leafless trees. There were other Manihiki officers on the deck. “Captain Reeth,” they barked as Sham’s rescuer appeared.

  Reeth made some imperious gesture. He was tall & looked down at everyone. He gestured for Sham to come closer. Sham breathed out, shuddering, in relief.

  “You really shouldn’t listen to this idiot boy, sir,” Elfrish said, & cuffed at him. “He’s our cabin boy.”

  “You said this was your cabin boy.” Reeth pointed at Robalson.

  “They both are. Never have too many cabin boys. Except this one, this Sham. He’s been trouble since he joined us.”

  “So you can have too many.” The officer put his hand on Sham’s shoulder.

  “Certainly you can, Captain Reeth. We had him in the brig for, for thieving, sir. He stole food.”

  “They’re lying!” In confused but exhaustive detail, interspersed with expostulations of ostentatious disbelief from Elfrish, Sham jabbered his story. “You got to arrest them all!” he said. “They done all killings & robbings & they’re going to kill me! He killed the Shroakes! Smashed their train ages ago. You heard of them?”

  “He’s a fantasist,” sneered Elfrish.

  “He may be,” said Reeth. “But unfortunately for you we know it’s perfectly true that two young Manihikians called Shroake have departed the city. We’ve heard word that the remains of their long-disappeared family were in fact found. & these youngsters have left in a train that we are eager to find. This we also know. Now, Captain. Do you think, do you really think, we’ve heard nothing of the young man whose visit spurred a new generation of Shroakes to their annoying aspirations?”

  He must have made some flickering signal with his eyes. His subordinates raised their weapons, simultaneously. Sham held his breath.

  “If I were to check your hold, Captain Elfrish,” Reeth said, “what goods would I find?”