SEVENTY-ONE
NOW. AT LAST. SURELY.
This must be the moment to return to the Shroakes & to their rail. Surely.
It is, in fact, yes, Shroake O’Clock.
THE STRANGE TRAIN MANAGED. How battered it was. How shortened, how patched where glass had broken, beasts had snatched, where the frustrated fire of pirates had worn down armour.
Where the gauges narrowed, their mechanism still—just—worked. Where the pitch of rising tracks would have been impassable to most vehicles, the Shroakes’—just—coped. Event after brutalising event.
Pirate biplanes, very far from home, breaking the prime rule of exploratory flying, which was “Don’t.” Blitzing them from the air till they hid under overhangs. Railtracks through rock, into darkness, swaddled in silk, tunnels made lairs by train-eating funnelwebs. Shedding more rear carriages, distractions, like a lizard sheds its tail. Once above a beach of cracked helmets they watched a tussle between two specklike upsky monsters, until one must have glanced their way, & showered them with caustic spittle as they raced away.
Caldera, as bruised & tired-looking as her train, read from what screens still operated.
“So,” said Dero.
“So what?” said Caldera. Her voice cracked.
“Wait. I’m thinking.”
“If this is another not-very-disguised one Mum & Dad brought back from the Bajjer that I remember from when we were little, you forfeit ten million points,” Caldera said.
“Shut up.”
“You’re already on minus seventeen million.”
“Shut up,” Dero said. “There was a mouse. Who lived in a hole.” Mostly it was Caldera who told stories as they drove, but not this time.
“Where?” said Caldera. “Between the rails?”
“Stupid. She’d get et up. A hole in a wall. & she could do magic.”
Caldera checked some notes. “What sort of magic?”
“Magic to do with sticks,” Dero decided. “She could make sticks come alive.”
Then the Shroakes gasped. The air outside the train was suddenly hammered by noise. In their nook, an alarm sounded, as if there weren’t enough cacophony already. Above them flew something nothing like a plane. An insecty thing that juddered & dangled from a patch of blurred air.
“What is that?” whispered Dero.
“What’s it doing?” said Caldera.
“Oh my lord,” whispered Caldera. “It’s an angel.”
Not one of the great & terrible driverless heavenly trains, wheeled angels shoring up foundations. A watcher. A getterbird. It scudded above them. Faced its bulbous dark sheen their way, regarded them flatly. They held their breath. It brought its own cloud with it. Venting filth. It was close enough that they could see its carapace. Scabbed with dirt & rust. Scratched & battered. The thing lurched in the air.
At last it turned & dipped its head with the hammering clattering &, faster than any bird or bat, was gone in a burst of soot.
“That,” said Caldera at last, “was a bit of an anticlimax.”
“You disappointed?” Dero said.
“Hardly. Just not used to seeing things that ain’t trying to kill me.”
“Oh,” Dero muttered. “Give it a minute.”
THE SHROAKES WERE DOWN to the last of their equipment. They lived crammed & cramped in the engine room. They took it in turns to sleep, one diagonalwise across the floor while the other drove the train.
Dero rubbed his eyes, drank water, ate a snack from their (dwindling—hush) supplies.
“Why we going so slow,” Dero said. He sniffed. “We smell,” he said.
“You smell,” Caldera said. “I’m like a flower.”
“We have to go quicker,” Dero said. “We must be nearly there.” He rocked back & forwards, as if he would lend his momentum to the train. He turned & looked from the rear window.
“I’m being careful,” Caldera said. “I thought I heard something. This is as fast as I think’s safe.”
“Well,” Dero said. He spoke very precisely. “Well, I think you should maybe consider that going a bit faster might be a bit safer than not going so quick. See, because there’s a train behind us.”
“What?” It was true. Their scanners must be on the fritz, but there it was, visible to the naked eye. “Where did they come from?” she breathed.
“Behind that little forest,” Dero said, “I think.”
“But there’s nothing there! Pirates again,” said Caldera, but then she gasped. It was getting closer. & it was not what she had thought. It was a Manihiki ferronaval train. Definitely. That was a whole other thing.
The Shroakes looked at each other. “They got us,” Dero whispered. “At last.”
“At last,” said Caldera. “Or maybe—maybe they been behind us for ages. Maybe they been following us all this time.” She swallowed. “They know the way, now. Maybe we showed them the way.”
“Cald,” Dero said firmly. “We still got a chance. Get us out of here. Top speed. Now!”
Caldera didn’t move.
“Now,” Dero said, “would be good.”
“Can’t.” Caldera bit her lip.
“Engine?”
“Engine.”
“Buggered again?”
“Again.”
He stared at her, she stared at him, the Manihiki officers got closer.
“You said you’d been going slow deliberately,” Dero said.
“I was lying.”
“I thought you was lying.”
They knew how to make the Shroake train go when it was in the mood to work, but not to tweak somethings wrong in the strange metal hearts & tubes their parents had built. The vehicle sputtered at pitiful speed.
“So what,” Dero said, “d’you propose we do?”
Caldera leaned out of the window. “You know,” she said at last, with rising excitement. “I don’t know that they’ve actually seen us. Look at how they’re switching. They know we’re round here somewhere, but …”
She steered with renewed energy. Took them over points that veered lines close to a looming cliff. Thickly, richly vegetational. Their long journey had already sprayed their train’s flanks with dirt & dust. “Right,” Caldera said. She slowed them yet slower, & stopped the train in the shadows. “Quick,” she said. Climbed out of the roof hatch, & with hook & hands snatched plant matter from the overhangs. Dero did the same, until they stood under a wodge of richly smelling sappy green stuff. They draped their vehicle in the creepers.
“This is a rubbish plan,” Dero said, as they crawled back inside.
“I await your improvements eagerly. & complaining is awesomely helpful.”
Up close, the Shroake train was an absurd, green-pelted, unconvincing thing. But perhaps, in the stark light contrasts of the railsea, over miles, at motion, their poor battered conveyance might pass for some ignorable viney nothing. Dero & Caldera waited. They watched the incoming train through dirty glass & now, too, from behind a green fringe.
“Always knew Mum & Dads had annoyed them,” Dero said. He & Caldera held hands. They waited. The naval train came closer. It approached, closer, closer, it was abreast of them, only a few rail-widths away.
It passed on again. At last, the Siblings Shroake breathed out.
“This thing is barely even going,” Dero said at last. He kicked the inside of the carriage. “What are we going to do?”
“They’re going to find us again, you know,” Caldera said. “I just don’t think we can get by them. They probably will.”
“Yeah,” said Dero. For just a sad & terrible second, he looked like he would cry. “So what we going to do?”
“What can we do?” Caldera said at last. “Keep trying. Do our best.”
She shrugged. After a minute, her brother shrugged, too.
SEVENTY-TWO
THE DETAILS ARE DISTINCT, THE SPECIFICS SPECIFIC, but the trend clear. Event, encounter, pushing on, the slow degradation of the Shroake train, an against-the-odds conti
nuation. That is what has been.
The train is such a battered shade of itself. But this is the railsea. A greater surprise is surely that the Shroakes are still here at all.
What Dero would admit to, who can say? But Caldera, certainly, is astonished.
“WELL YOU’VE DONE IT NOW!” Caldera didn’t even know who she was talking to anymore.
It was the purest & most undeserved luck that the Manihiki train had not wheeled round, come back & found them. Someone else, however, was after them.
The Shroake train, coaxed to a last life lease, was hauling rail to rail. There was no hiding now. Nothing in this outermost railsea—not landscape, fauna, flora, the rails themselves—behaved as it ought. They passed bridges from & to nowhere, that doubled back at the apex of their curves; lines that spiralled into sinkholes. Birds much bigger than they should be, perhaps a little too limb-encumbered, flew high enough to tickle the upsky.
“Maybe,” Dero whispered, “out here all the lines are blurry, & maybe birds in the sky & really bad things in the upsky are making babies.”
Caldera & Dero pored over charts & teased their dead parents fondly for their scrawls. They configured plans. They blinked too much & missed food. Dero snapped at Caldera & Caldera said less & less, sometimes nothing for hours.
Now here came a train, racing for them with clear intent. “You’ve done it now!” Caldera repeated. Local brigands, she thought, a ferocious compact battletrain from insular nearby islands full, myth had it, of monstrosities & prodigies, trains that ran backwards through time. & who, it seemed, had either heard of the Shroakes, or greeted all incomers in so pugnacious a fashion.
“You’ve been & gone & done it now!” Caldera shouted, & shoved forward the levers, which did nothing anymore.
Once they would have outrun such an enemy without bothering to break off from sandwiches & backgammon. Now their locomotive wheezed & lurched like a moribund mule. Dero switched & the pursuers gained. Their diesel growl grew louder.
A last push, another throttle. Caldera held her breath.
She heard a cannon fire. She closed her eyes. But nothing hit them. The train drummed under a rain of earth.
“Cal,” Dero said.
A fusillade of missiles was slamming into the attack-train on their tail. Rocks, arrows, small-arms fire. Nothing devastating, but enough to mess with, to confound & hurt the wildland attackers, who scrambled to turn their weapons towards this new threat.
Windblown carts! Switching & track-riding with skills a delight to see; tacking in gusts from line to line; firing catapults, slingshots, crossbows, pistols; in & out again. & here, bearing down by its sailing companions, on the brigand-train switching lines, came a moletrain. A moletrain, miles, miles & miles from any moldywarpe runs.
The sailing carriages scattered, firing as they went. The moler came in fast. Its harpoon guns were levelled. It faced the attacker, on the same track, heading straight for them. Caldera shook her head. “What are they doing?” she whispered. Even a moler in top shape was no match for these local warlords. Thanks very much for saving us, Caldera thought. I wish you weren’t about to die. She counted down seconds till impact. Ten, she thought. Nine. Eight.
But no: it was a well-judged challenge. The brigands flinched. A switch & they were slaloming out of the moler’s path. To where ground suddenly jumped like an animal provoked.
Up came a grinding machine. Breaching all manner of railsea taboos, a subterrain smashed through the ties themselves, buckled the rails & sent the pirate train into the air & crashing down.
The moler slowed. The trainsfolk watched. The pirates wailed. Dust was spraying. There was a silence. Then: “Come on, we got ’em!”
The Shroakes knew that voice. Caldera grabbed Dero’s arm. On the roof of the moler’s engine a young man stood.
“Wait now,” Dero said, “is it, you don’t know …” But Caldera was whooping. The figure hefted a clumsy pistol. He waved at her.
He stared through yards of air over yards of rails through the window of her own poor battered vehicle, right into Caldera Shroake’s poor tired eyes. With another whoop like a siren, like a train sounding triumph at a journey well done, at an arrival, Caldera leaned out & waved back. At the same moment, each on their own train, she & the newcomer, Sham ap Soorap, smiled.
BLOOD RABBIT
(Lepus cruentus)
Reproduced with permission from the archives of the Streggeye Molers’ Benevolent Society.
Credit: China Miéville (illustration credit 7.1)
SEVENTY-THREE
NONE OF YOU HAVE TO,” SHAM SAID. “I DON’T EVEN expect any of you to. I don’t deserve you to. But yeah, of course I’m going on.” He smiled. “With them.”
Caldera smiled, too. Thanks, she mouthed at him.
Of those Bajjer who had stuck the journey this far, most took their own leave after the Fight of the Rescue of the Siblings Shroake. Now the Shroakes were—temporarily at least—saved. A quest, for something that lay beyond pictures the Bajjer & their companions had never even seen, was the only reason to go on. Most of the Bajjer had little interest in quests. There were exceptions. & there were those insistent on revenge on the Manihiki navy train the Shroakes told them was close.
The crew of the Medes, that had once been a moletrain & was now who-knew-quite-what, having performed the rescue they had promised to Sham, were no more obliged to continue than the Bajjer. The captain, if such she still was, fiddled with her tracker.
“I’ll stick with you a bit, though, if you’ve no objection,” Sirocco said.
“Ah,” said Vurinam. “We’re so near now. Why not let’s just see what we find?”
He spoke for the bulk of the crew. Those for whom he did not joined the mass of Bajjer carts, complaining at the unorthodox conveyance, to start a slow way back east to the known world.
“Captain Naphi?” Sham said. She looked up, startled. She still prodded at her tracking mechanism, with a tool extruded from her arm. The one her crew now called her artificial artificial one.
“Should throw that bloody thing to Mocker-Jack,” Fremlo muttered.
“I stay with my train,” Naphi said at last, turned back to what she was doing. So there was that.
Those heading back & those going on separated with camaraderie & without rancour, waving as they parted. The flotilla of sailtrains scattered back towards distant mountains.
The investigators argued over their clue-map. “What’s this sound like?” someone would shout, & yellingly repeat the description Sham, with muttered help from the captain, had given. Then debates: that looks like such-&-such a place; no, you’re mad, that’s wossname; & wasn’t there a story about these or those hills? Bajjer scout-carts would beetle off in candidate directions, until forward motion was agreed, & the Medes, the remaining Bajjer vehicles & the Pinschon hauled on.
Dero & Caldera watched their own train disappear behind them. Their rolling-stock home for so long. “You had to,” Sham said quietly. “It was falling apart.” For a while, neither Shroake said a word.
“Thanks for letting us carry on,” Dero said at last. “For using your train.” Ain’t really mine, Sham thought. He left the Shroakes to their goodbye.
The captain, at the Medes’s rear, intent in her strange work, gave a hm of triumph. Daybe veered overhead. The air so far out seemed to confuse it. It arced, abruptly curved back towards the train. Heading not straight for Sham but for the last carriage. Circled Captain Naphi, standing staring back the way they had come, towards her lost philosophy, like some befuddled antifigurehead. No one bothered her. No one minded her in her backwards command. She fiddled with her machine while the bat circled.
There was salvage even here, & once or twice they saw the remnants of ruined trains. They made slow progress—there were days when they decided they’d taken a wrong move, & the whole group would reverse, or grind on to where junctions allowed them to turn. But they grew better at unpicking clues. Their false starts grew fewer.
They had, after all, a method for knowing when they’d gone right: with a hush & increasingly uncanny sense, Sham would find himself, with a sudden turn of the rails, staring at an exact scene he remembered from the screen. Only the sky would be different, the clouds & upsky coilings. They progressed through old pictures.
The farther they travelled beyond the trade routes of the railsea, filling in specifics on charts marked only with the vaguest rumours, the sparser the railsea, the larger the stretches of unbroken land, the fewer the rails. There was a winnowing of iron possibilities.
The other thing that made them certain they were en route to something hidden, at the edge of the railsea & therefore of the world, was that they were harassed by angels.
SEVENTY-FOUR
IT WAS NIGHT. STILL THEY TRAVELLED. A BAJJER SCOUT reported something in the distance. The explorers woke as the air shook.
“What …?”
“Is that …?”
They came on deck, rubbing their eyes & looking up at the lights low in the sky. In came a flock of flying angels.
“Oh my Stonefaces,” Sham whispered.
The crew watched the air-chopping investigators. They could not make much out: swaying lights, reflections on recurved shells, stars glimpsed through their shimmering. Fables! The watchers at the edge of the world. The heralds of the godsquabble. Getterbirds, utterers in air. They had as many names as most holy things do.
The crew cringed, kept weapons in their hands, whispered to switchers to get ready, anticipating attack. Which did not come. At last the whirling-winged things scattered. Some back the way they had come, back towards the world’s edge, others east, & south.
“Where they going?” said Caldera. “If only we had a plane to see.”
Sham looked at her thoughtfully. “That we don’t,” he said. “But we do have something.”
He scaled the crow’s nest. Remember when I couldn’t do this? he thought. Into the gloom & freezing air. Telescope in hand, Sham waited. He looked for flying lights & considered. If he tried to think full-on about where he was, what he was doing, how he had got there, it was all a great deal too much. So he simply didn’t. Sham just thought of stories about what was ahead. The end of the world, ghostly money, endless sorrow. Sham strained his eyes.