There was a silence. The Tarralesh crew fingered their weapons. He’s got them! Sham thought.
Elfrish sighed. “Alright then,” he said. “Yes,” he said. “It’s sort of like he says.”
“You see?” Sham shouted. “Arrest them!”
“But,” Elfrish said. With reassuring this-is-not-a-weapon motions, he withdrew from his pocket a leather wallet, held it up open to a silver stamp. “My letter of marque. I’m licensed. Manihiki seal. All official.”
A—what? Sham thought.
“Why didn’t you just say this from the start?” Reeth said.
“Say what?” said Sham.
“Well …” Elfrish said. He grinned sheepishly.
“Tax?” Reeth said. “As a privateer, twenty percent of everything in your hold belongs to Manihiki. You’re a bloody tax avoider.”
“When you going to arrest him?” Sham shouted. Elfrish cuffed him, & Reeth did not stop him.
“See,” Reeth said, “here’s the thing. If his story’s true, he & you are going to the same place these young Shroakes are going. & I like the sound of the technique you’re using.” He considered.
“Arrest them,” said Sham. No one did a thing.
“I’m claiming him,” Reeth decided. “In lieu of your tax. See what I can get out of him.”
“What?” shouted Sham.
“What?” shouted Elfrish. “You can’t do that!”
“Certainly I can,” said Reeth.
This wasn’t between police & criminal, Sham realised. His insides felt like dust. The dead & robbed they’d left behind weren’t Manihiki merchants, after all, not the navy’s charges. Elfrish wasn’t freelance. He was a sanctioned pirate, under the purview of a government, a Manihiki agent as much as Reeth. This was an argument between colleagues. Departmental politics.
“You know,” Elfrish said, “what’s beyond the railsea? Neither do I. But you know & I know, Captain, that there’s an inverse correlation between proximity & pecuniary recompense, vis-à-vis treasure. To put it another way, the farther out the hoard, the bigger. So. What d’you suppose is beyond the railsea?”
“No such place as beyond,” Reeth said.
“Beg to differ.” Elfrish raised his gun, carefully, even as Reeth’s men eyed him, their weapons up. It was as if he moved so slowly they were somehow paralysed, watching. He pointed it at Reeth. Some of his crew raised theirs, too.
“The boy’s mine,” Elfrish said.
Reeth laughed. “Well done,” Reeth said. “You just lost your licence. So far I count obstruction of an officer, threatening behaviour & illegal piracy.”
“But,” Elfrish said, “I’m willing to bet—& look, so’s my crew—that what’s at the end of the world makes all that worth it.”
It was quiet under the sun. The birds circled. The wind pushed Sham’s hair around. Reeth, at last, said one word: “Fire.”
Whatever frozen moment had taken them, his officers were back in control. They were unafraid, & efficient. They fired.
The pirates fired back. Everyone fighting over Sham. Who dropped.
It went haywire on that deck. Shouting, shots, running feet. People scrambled for cover. There were screams. Reeth, still firing, dragged a wounded comrade across the deck, shouting a signal into his shoulder-mic. The wartrain’s huge-bore guns swivelled. Reeth & his fellow officers hunched & scrambled back for their own jollycart.
“Holy flaming hell,” Elfrish shouted. Even so weapon-bristling a train as the Tarralesh had little chance against a Manihiki wartrain. “Full power! Full power! Go go go go! Get away from them!”
They shot forward. The vehicle lurched, powering on into that merciful maze of hills & tunnels.
Sham had a plan. If you could call it that. He crawled; the chaos continued. He reached the base of the crow’s nest & quickly started to climb. The wartrain still approached. “Get him down,” Elfrish shouted. The Tarralesh powered towards a tunnel.
The naval train fired. Now that, that was an explosion. A whole mountain of boom grew out of nothing. The Tarralesh swayed, seemed to gust on a shockwave. Here came a wartrain.
Sham tried to work out trajectories. He could see, very calmly, suddenly, what was going to happen, where, when. “Get him!” Elfrish was yelling, waving his weapon in Sham’s direction, but his crew were scattering. Robalson was right below Sham, staring up at him with a look of miserable astonishment.
& the wartrain arrived, hard & fast, firing again, & an explosive came down, & the rear of the Tarralesh, accelerating without control, exploded.
A chorus of wails. Pirates flying through the air, scattering across the railsea. The bulk of the train itself shoved brutally forward by the impact, hurtling out of control towards & into that tunnel, that cut-out route through a rock hill ahead.
As Sham stared down, the explosion snatched Robalson away. Sham gasped.
The Tarralesh was shattering as it moved, Sham saw. Sham watched, aghast, as the train plunged into the dark, as the very crow’s nest he climbed slammed into the side of the island & tottered like a cut-down tree. He was prepared. He rode it. Down it came, slowly, it seemed, taking him clear of the snaggliest rock teeth. Falling down towards whatever isolated island this was that wrecked them.
Pirates were scattered & wailing in the dirt & the railsea. There was Elfrish, staring up at Sham from a dark hole in the earth, where he had fallen, all rage & hatred. Staring as up from below some unseen underground thing disturbed in the burrow rose, jostled, snarled, came up to take him. Elfrish did not take his eyes from Sham as it grabbed him. As it sucked him down.
Then Sham could see no more.
Down he came. Aiming for a bush he knew would hurt but less than the stones & a great slamming huff & crack of metal & he was right ow it did hurt, but he was rolling & on hardland now & breathing & shaking & lying very still, partly out of pain but partly because he couldn’t believe he’d done it, & because he knew he was still hunted.
Sham lay & listened to the wartrain approach, & the cries for help from the ruins of the Tarralesh & the terrified pirates in the predator-thronging ground.
THERE ON THE TOP of the hill, on an island in a vehicle graveyard in the wild reaches of the railsea, Sham lay.
BURROWING OWL
(Athene cunicularia trux)
Reproduced with permission from the archives of the Streggeye Molers’ Benevolent Society.
Credit: China Miéville (illustration credit 5.1)
FIFTY-EIGHT
INVESTIGATE A MAP. LOOK FOR THE LEAST-CHARTED, least-visited, wildest, most strange, most dangerous, all-around particularly problematical parts of the railsea.
A fringe of unknownness spreads from a point at the northwestern edge of the world. There are patches of troublesome sparsely sketched-out rails eastward of that mountain & highland & monster-bounded place. The darkest polar iceholes of the south have their terrible aspects. & so on. At these wild parts the rails seems drunk on rarities. The rails misbehave. Switches do not do as they are bid, ground is not so strong & stable as it appears, there are chicanes & trouble, the iron itself has been made to mess with trains. A most scandalous wrongness.
Here, deities tinkered with each other’s rails, warring sisters & brothers, to ruin each other’s plans. Such stretches have been there as long as there has been a railsea, & will remain as long as it remains.
It would be foolish to say any such place was impassable. History is long, there are, have been & will be many trains. Most things eventually happen. Less controversial, however, not even controversial at all, is the assertion that such stretches are at least horribly difficult.
FIFTY-NINE
SALVORS SALVAGED—ONE IN PARTICULAR. PIRATES PIRATED. Naval trains hunted & claimed islands for Manihiki. & animals?
Talpa ferox. Never the most predictable mole. Its rapacity & power made it subterrestrial king. & now?
There was no remaining doubt that Mocker-Jack, the captain’s philosophy, had changed its behaviour. Was
tunnelling more quickly, zigging less & zagging not quite so much as it had once done, straight-lining more. You might almost have called what it was doing “fleeing.”
The captain’s thing for the moldywarpe had infected her crew. Enthusiasm is a virus, as is curiosity, as is obsession. Some are immune: a few spat disgustedly as they raced, their gob disappearing into the dirt; some lobbied the officers as subtly as they could to encourage a turnaround, a more traditional hunt. Vurinam was troubled. But they were the minority.
Naphi’s officers took turns reading the little scanner, & the train did not stop, no matter if it was night. They roared on past isolated communities, clots of lights like firebugs, past rocks. Mocker-Jack went north. Veering from the usual haunts.
“You’d have liked this,” whispered Dr. Fremlo, on the deck, watching the nothing of night, watching the train’s narrow lights unzip the darkness & zip it up again. “I hope life as a salvor’s treating you well.”
ON A REEF of salvage were remnants of rust-ruined trains, scattered bones of trainsfolk. The windblown carapace segments of great boring bugs, beetles, recoiled centipedes many people long. Birds avoided that sparsely railed place, but circling it right then at least one thing was flying.
The rubbishy earth churned. Something rose. With a whine, a fussing, a spray of dust & the shards of refuse, up came a metal-flanged spinning spire, a machine a carriage long that reared up out of the below & slapped down skew-whiff across the rails. A subterrain of sleek intimidating design. The dust of its passage sank around it, its hatch opened, a head poked out. The subterrainer scanned her surrounds. She lowered her eyepiece from a face so filthy it looked more oil & grease than skin.
“Alright then,” she muttered to herself. “We’re clear.” She clicked her fingers. With serial clanks & gusts like sulky breaths, the digger’s chassis began to unfold into many-segmented arms, mechanical grabs. Travisande Sirocco looked out on the rubbishscape with professional detachment. En route to where rumours had a merchant train newly smashed to scavenge. Sirocco pursed her lips. You might have thought that she was estimating prices of what junk she saw & you would have been right.
Something dived & yawed above her. Agitated in the air.
“Hello,” Sirocco said. Up went her goggles, a whir & click of zooms. “Hello indeed,” she said. “You’re not from around here.” She pursed her lips again, & this time it had nothing to do with money.
“Some meat,” she said. “& a rope. Looks like I’m going sky-baiting. I have a guest.”
SIXTY
SHAM HID. FOR HOURS, THAT WAS MORE OR LESS ALL HE did. He did it hard, he did it with all his energy.
After that crazy leap to rock-strewn freedom, there he was, exploded pirate train behind him, scattered & slid across the rails, the Manihiki navy powering in, survivors shrieking, the sounds of the last bits of battle, the snarls of predators. The haul of prisoners.
Sham had slid down the scree, into a steep slope hidden from the wind. Into the shadow of stones, shivering as the cold of that isolated islet hit him. Sham scootched into a hollow & hugged his knees. & waited. Both the fighting forces wanted him, & he wanted neither of them.
What was he supposed to do?
The noises didn’t last very long. He heard the last of the pirates wait until the last of the navy had investigated the last of the audible sounds. Hunting, among other things, for him. He heard the great train go back the way it had come. He heard the jollycarts, that in some patrician mercy the Manihiki forces used to pick up the pirate wounded, putter away.
Sham tried not to think about the fact that he could not stay like this forever. He closed his eyes, & tried to stop the image looping in his head, the sight of Robalson gusted away in smoke & fire.
In the second or third hour after the last skirmish, long after there were no more sounds, he listened to the absolute trainlessness of the island. He heard railgulls, wind, dust sandpapering stone. He searched his pockets as carefully as any explorer on the wrong bit of a map ever did. Found some nuts & the stump of a block of tacky. Ate a miserable meal.
& then it was dark. How & when did it go dark?
& then he slept.
Without much else to do, stripped of options, exhausted, fearful, hungry, thoroughly & utterly alone, Sham retreated out of wakefulness &, surprised that he even could, slept.
HE WOKE VERY EARLY with flinty cold going through him & the sky light but not bright. He was stiff like a miserable puppet, like a bundle of damp twigs. Sham hugged himself a while & listened to the wolflike snuffling of his stomach. Eventually what got him up was that he was bored of being terrified.
That day he explored. On the railsea off the coast he saw the remains of the pirate train. & here & there the grisly remains of those pirates dead & not taken.
His island was perhaps a couple of miles round. Its sides were absurdly steep, shagged in ivy & vines of various scrubby kinds, from some of which hung little nodules of fruit or something. Gingerly he nibbled at them. Horrible, bitter, sappy grossness he spat out. His stomach yowled. There was water, though. It dribbled down from some on-high aquifer. Sham put his lips into the streamlet & slurped, not even minding the cold & mineral bite of it.
The island was full of noises. The rustlings of birds, the chatterings of other things, that went silent when he approached only to sound off again behind Sham’s back. He climbed as far as he safely could & stared at the upper reaches where, maybe, the peak prodded into the upsky. He descended to the pebbled shore, where the island met the dark & ancient rails.
A few scrips & scraps of stuff lay near the shoreline. Stuff he could maybe even get hold of if he went for it with a stick. Things lost from pirate pockets, the debris of trainsplosions. Stuff too small for salvors, too drab for glint-loving birds.
Thinking of salvors made Sham think of the Shroakes. Though they were not salvors, of course. Perhaps that’s why he had thought of them. Minds, he thought, can be funny that way. Sham considered Caldera, only a little younger than he, commanding her impossibly advanced train. She would not stop for sloughed-off junk like this.
There were many words for what she had. Oomph, verve, drive, élan. Caldera & Dero seemed full of all of them. It was as if there was none left for anyone else. Sham sat on the shore. Sort of fell onto it, cross-legged. He picked up a bit of wood. He picked at it with his nail.
This must be a notorious clutch of train-wrecking islands. He could see others, out to railsea, beyond the shells of carriages & engines. The mashed-up Tarralesh was just the latest. Even so close to maps’ edges, salvors had come, cleared out the worst or best of the ruination. But there was plenty of unreclaimable junk out there.
Sham looked down. He realised that he had been using his thumbnail to give the old wood he carried a face.
The nearest island to his, he saw, was lusher, lower, flatter. Covered with trees. Maybe they grew fruit. Sham licked his lips. Between this beach & that one were perhaps two miles of rails. Between each of those rails were stretches of rumbustious earth. & motion. Animal motion. Sham shivered.
A spine of stony offshoot islands trailed from the shore, on each of them weeds & squabbling birds. Stones bent up broken-tooth-style between ties to send trainsfolk to the ground. Sham could see remnants from cargo holds spilled & mummified or rotted; a rust-clogged handcart; a cairn of ruined engine parts; a crushed caboose.
His stomach muttered, impatient little animal. What do you want from me? he asked it, & tried to keep his panic under control. A wodge of birds came at him, & for a moment he imagined it might be Daybe at their head, come to snap affectionately at his face. It wasn’t. It was just some anonymous, ill-tempered, guano-bombing gull.
That other island looked increasingly delicious. I’m not a kid anymore, Sham thought. Shouldn’t take anything for granted. A big bird cawed as he thought that, & Sham took it as applause. All my life, he thought, they’ve told me about the dangers of the earth. Maybe it’s true. But … He kept his eyes on the foody
island across the narrow railsea strait. But maybe it’s also useful for them if everyone believes it. If people are too scared to just go.
Without giving himself time to think, Sham set out walking.
He stuck out his chest, kept his stare ahead. He marched off the edge of the rock shore. Stepped over the closest rail, put his foot between ties & iron & continued.
I’m walking, he thought. I’m on the earth. He kept going, crossing rail after rail. He laughed. He sped up. He whooped. He tripped. He sprawled. He thumped the ties. The earth jiggled.
Oh. Yes, the earth definitely moved. Sham rose, no longer laughing. There he was, stopped, looking back at the shore. Which looked an awfully long way away.
It wasn’t a jiggle anymore, what was going on in the ground, it was a full-blown shudder. Again. He watched aghast as a ridge came up. Something moved underground. It was coming towards him. Experiment fail, Sham thought, turned & ran.
He ran, & behind him there was a boom, a crash, the grind of the ground. Muck showered Sham as whatever that was coming burst the earth from below. It closed on him, clattering.
Sham wailed & accelerated. With two last huge leaps he made it back to the baked, rocky earth, almost blown by a howl from his pursuer, something like a kettle screaming & an electrical short, all at once. He stumbled, rolled, turned to see.
Shiny segmented shell, scissoring pincer on its rear, bum-jaws. It wriggled down again out of the light. He just glimpsed it. An earwig. Oh Stonefaces. Sham was lucky. In a different mood it might have come up onto the shore after him.
He picked up a big rock, chucked it onto the disturbed earth of the earwig’s wake. Another rumbling, & he saw the head of a meat-eating worm. A flurry of fur & metal-hard claws as a vicious digging shrew came just up enough to yank it down.
Everywhere Sham looked, the ground between ties, the dirt around rails, the muck shoring up stays, seethed. He yelled at the excited birds, as the little ones laughed at him & the bigger urged him to get farther back. “Albloodyright,” he yelled at them. “The earth is dangerous!”