Railsea

  Ahead was the too-close horizon, the end of the world. The same distance in the other direction, the angel. Moving faster than the Medes. The math was simple: the situation was hopeless. It would reach them before they reached whatever was there.

  The captain did not move, & she did not, for all its monstrousness, appear to be looking at the angel, but rather through it. Sham looked at the receiver he held. He saw the glowing screen-blob. He had almost forgotten Mocker-Jack.

  “All is lost,” someone shouted.

  “We’re shafted,” shouted someone else.

  Sham felt Daybe strain as he fiddled with the machine. He remembered how the bat had lurched for the captain as she tinkered, & narrowed his eyes. “I’m his philosophy,” Naphi had said of the great moldywarpe.

  “Sirocco,” Sham said. He waved the mechanism. Daybe bobbed as it moved. “Can you make this thing’s signal get bigger?”

  She looked quizzical. “Might be possible. Need more power.”

  “So connect it to something.” He looked around, pointed at the Medes intercom. “That gets power from the engine. Come on, ain’t you a salvor? This is what you do.”

  She pulled tools from her belt, yanked wires from the speakers & stripped them. Unwound some things, wound others together. Hesitated a second before plunging her tools into the guts of the racing Medes. There was a great crack, & all the machines on the train went off for an instant & came on again.

  “Oh my head!” Sirocco shouted. They all felt it. The crew moaned at the rising, humming, trembling something, in the air, in the substance of the train. Even the captain staggered. Sham winced & grabbed Sirocco’s arm, took the receiver. It was wired now to the train’s insides.

  Daybe was screaming at him. Scrabbling & scratching for the machine. Sham stared. The screen was pouring with light. It was bleating like a sheep. & the glowing blob that was Mocker-Jack was moving faster than he’d ever seen before.

  “Oh my hammer & tongs,” whispered Vurinam. “What did you even do?”

  “Made it stronger,” Sirocco said.

  “What’s the point of that?” Mbenday shouted. “You sped up the mole?”

  “Much as I hate to undermine this technical achievement,” Fremlo said. The doctor looked pointedly behind them, at the roaring angel. The crew stared.

  “Mocker-Jack,” the captain said dreamily. “Mocker-Jack’s your philosophy now, too, & you belong to it. We’re going to have to face it.” If the angel concerned her at all, she did not show it. The captain smiled. She walked to her dais. The crew watched her.

  “She’s right,” Sham said.

  “What?” hissed Vurinam. “She’s lost her mind! Have you seen what’s about to get us?” He pointed at the terrible engine. “One thing it ain’t is a bloody mole!”

  “She’s right,” Sham insisted. “We’re molers. & it’s our moling skills we need now.”

  SEVENTY-EIGHT

  NO LINES TO EITHER SIDE: THEY COULDN’T RELEASE jollycarts. The explosive harpoon at the train’s front pointed uselessly in the wrong direction. Instead, they gathered at the Medes’s stern. Benightly went farther, jumped down onto the Pinschon that jostled behind them, right to its end. He stood silhouetted against the great angel scant yards behind. Its mouth-clamp opened. It roared.

  Light was waning. Below the rumbling of the rails there was another rumbling, of the ground. “What’s that?” Caldera said. In the plain behind the chase, the earth trembled. & erupted. Sham gasped as a molehill burst up to huge height. A furrow roared in their direction.

  “Stonefaces,” Sham whispered. Sirocco tugged at the wire-strewing transmitter & squeezed some impossible last drop of power from it. Miles off, through thick earth, Sham heard Mocker-Jack roar.

  The Medes ploughed through a split in the rock line, followed seconds later by the gaining angel.

  His crew watched Benightly. Even so big a man, even tensing all his bulk, he looked tiny in front of the onrushing visitation. He hefted his harpoon. Against the angel. It was laughable. But Benightly drew back his arm & waited & somehow did not look absurd. The angel grew closer.

  “What are you doing?” the captain shouted. “Mocker-Jack’s not even here yet.” Benightly said not a word. But the world itself answered.

  It shook. Rocks quivered. Behind them, at the entrance to the rock chasm, the ground rose. Broke. Bigger than a tidal wave. The dark dirt fell away from a surging yellow something that shook the stones & rails & sent rockfall hurtling down the inclines. As if the earth spat out a new, rearing, fur-clad mountain. With teeth. Impossible ivory talpa, the titan moldywarpe.

  Blood dropped out of Sham’s stomach. He staggered. Abacat Naphi howled a welcome.

  A pale & shaggy enormity, a glimpse of blind red eyes in a debris plume. The mole roared.

  & crashed back through into the dark beneath. Behind the implacable angel, the last line in the railsea shifted uneasily, rucked in segments as the mole burrowed faster than any train towards its summons.

  Sham blinked away tears of awe. The crew were open-mouthed, staggered, by the angel, & by what came behind it. There was no time for reflection. The echoes of their passage swept away & changed, & with a rush the Medes emerged from between rocks. The angel was closing. Sham turned to look ahead at what was coming, & gasped again.

  A bridge. Endless. A bridge into dark, jutting from the end of the world.

  They were at the rim of the railsea. Racing towards a final cliff. The world came to a stop. Into the nothing, the void beyond earth, their one true rail continued.

  They were hurtling way too fast to stop, & an angel was right behind them. Was grinding in engine triumph.

  “You,” Benightly said to it, “are close enough.”

  The angel’s metal maw gaped. Benightly sang a hunt-hymn. Sham held out his hand.

  Sirocco tugged the receiver free of the wire moorings that had boosted it. She handed it to Sham, stepped between him & the captain.

  “No!” shouted Naphi, but the salvor kept her back, while Sham ran forward, whispered a prayer & hurled the receiver towards the Pinschon. Towards Benightly.

  It arced. Too high! Too high oh what have I done?

  But Benightly leapt straight up. He plucked the charged-up receiver from the air with his fingertips. Landed already clipping it to his harpoon. Stood, his throwing arm ready, took aim & Captain Naphi shouted, & the angel opened its mouth-thing again onto gnashing flaming gears with a blast of scorching triumph, into the gusts of which Benightly threw.

  The spear flew. An immense throw. Benightly aimed not at the angel was but at where it would be. The spear slammed into its mouth. Which closed.

  With a rush of wind the Medes’s wheels rattled on suddenly raised rails, as it careened onto the bridge to nowhere & the land receded. Someone screamed. “Brakes!” someone shouted. To either side was abyss. Sham reeled & stared as the angel bore down.

  BEHIND IT SOMETHING CAME. A living earthquake. Shaking the edge of the world. Black earth parted, & animal enormity burst forth.

  Pale leviathan, shoved up from the under. It gnashed in epic rage. That mouth! A vast slavering, where steeple-fangs jostled. The mole howled. Haunches like overhangs, claws like towers, shoving into light.

  The vast harsh velvet beast breached.

  Mocker-Jack soared. Cloud-great & ravening.

  & twisted in the air, rolling as it came, so in its endless flanks & belly storming towards the angel, Sham saw the stubs of weapons. Snapped-off handles & hafts, a pelt-archaeology of failed hunts, stinging trophies accumulated over the centuries the colossal burrower had taunted & destroyed.

  Hunting that unseen salvaged force, the signal now blaring from the angel’s mouth, down the giant moldywarpe came. Onto the angel. Slab-teeth bared. With a scream of metal ruination, Mocker-Jack bit.

  The angel fired all its weapons. Fire gusted across the behemoth & scorched its yellow hair & it snarled but did not release its mouthgrip even as it smouldered. It ripped, it tore. The
crew gaped.

  The captain shouted to Mocker-Jack, a loud & wordless greeting, challenge, lamentation.

  The godlike mole tore the angel from the rails. The two great presences somersaulted in slow time, skidded, gouged across the last of the land. Mocker-Jack shook its prey apart, strewing heaven-trash & fire.

  At the brink of the precipice the angel poised for long seconds straight up, a tower, wheels spinning. As if undecided whether to topple back onto the flat land. Gripping it, Mocker-Jack, on fire, bled & gnawed through steel, stared at the Medes.

  Sham knew those blood-coloured orbs could barely discern more than light & darkness. Still, he would always swear the moldywarpe looked carefully in their direction. Stared & chewed & pushed. Pushed its quarry & itself out of that instant, & over the world’s end.

  The mole & the angel fell. The angel-train tumbled, & with it went the great southern moldywarpe, Talpa ferox rex, Mocker-Jack the great, the captain’s philosophy, into the abyss. & Sham would always swear on the lives of all the people he cared about that as it went, the mole looked with malice & satisfaction into the captain’s eyes.

  THE ANGEL DISINTEGRATED into shadows, became a shower of burning. The island-sized talpa glowed ghostly as it fell, until the dark that filled the trench beyond the railsea swallowed it, & the Medes was left above emptiness, waiting for the sound of impact, a sound that never came.

  “Well grubbed,” Sham whispered at last, into the silence.

  Vurinam repeated it. Fremlo copied him. Fremlo copied him, & Mbenday Fremlo. Then others, & more & more. Even Yashkan cleared his throat & muttered the words. & they carried & grew louder until everyone was shouting, “Well grubbed! Well grubbed, by gods, well grubbed!

  “Well grubbed, old mole!”

  TUNDRA WORM

  (Lumbricus frigidinculta)

  Reproduced with permission from the archives of the Streggeye Molers’ Benevolent Society.

  Credit: China Miéville (illustration credit 8.1)

  SEVENTY-NINE

  IT WAS THE NOISES THE CAPTAIN WAS MAKING THAT drew attention to her. They were not like any sounds Sham had ever heard any human make before. Naphi was not screaming or crying, she was not howling or complaining. She stood at the train’s edge, stared down into the deeps of the air where her philosophy had gone, uttered a succession of phonemes like those that might creep in between proper words. As if she spoke discards & language debris.

  “Ah,” she said. Her tone was calm. “Fff.”

  Sham was still dizzy with the abyssward descent he had just seen. He pulled his attention to the captain.

  “Asuh,” she said. “Mhuh. Enh.” Clockwork-stiff, she walked to the edge of the deck. Sham went after her. He watched her with widening eyes. As he passed Sirocco, he grabbed a sharp tool from her salvor’s belt.

  “Wait!” he said.

  Naphi turned, face set. One by one, the trainsfolk on the Medes looked at her. Sham sped up. Naphi gripped the railing with her left hand. She drew herself up smartly, & saluted her crew with her right, with the arm they had always known was flesh. She drew her knife, ready for close-quarters hunting, & turned to face the darkness.

  “No!” Sham shouted.

  Gripping the barrier with her disguised & enhanced limb, the captain braced on it, swung herself up, her legs up & around & over the edge right out into space. She turned, neat as a gymnast, & began to plummet, to follow the moldywarpe down.

  But Sham was there. Even as the captain let go the rail, he stabbed with Sirocco’s tool right down into the heavy workings of her fakely artificial arm.

  He had no time to aim. Just plunged the blade into pipe-work. There was an electrical crack, a phut of smoke & the metal glove the captain had worn so long short-circuited, spasmed, snapped shut. Held her still clinging to the side of the Medes.

  “Help me!” shouted Sham, leaning over. He stared at the captain, dangling over endless nothing, looking back up at him.

  “Ah now,” she said, in a strange mild voice. Her legs scrabbled & kicked against the train’s side. She prodded urgently at her own robotic casing with her dagger, tried to pry it off her, to release herself from her own inadvertent grip & follow her philosophy.

  “Help me!” Sham shouted again, as he grabbed for her & tried to avoid her weapon. & here came Sirocco, & Mbenday, & Benightly, who with a hunter’s precision batted the knife from her hand. It twirled out of sight. They grabbed her. Together they hauled the captain back up onto the deck.

  “Ah now,” she kept saying quietly. “I have something to catch.” She did not struggle much.

  “Secure her!” Mbenday shouted. They held the captain while Sirocco took pliers & screwdrivers to the snagging arm until with a click it released her. The crew cuffed Naphi’s hands behind her back.

  “Ah now,” she said again, & shook her head. She murmured. She muttered to herself & slumped. She did not fight or cry.

  “The bloody angel!” It was Sirocco shouting now. She stood on the Pinschon, hands on hips, staring down like the captain had. She stamped & shook her fists. “It’s gone! It went! This is a disaster!”

  Was it? Sham was too tired to argue or understand. He kept looking at the Shroakes. Dero looked down into the dark, holding his breath. Caldera looked like she would explode. She was wide-eyed, fast breathing, shaking with excitement.

  The bridge was brick & girders. It arced down to reach the vertical chasm-side, a buttress pushing into the flank of the railsea among suspended pebbles, hard-packed soils, the lines of salvage. The bridge, the track extended into the coming night. Looked endless. “There’s no way it should stay up,” Sham said.

  “It’s stuff,” Caldera said. Her voice shook. “Material we don’t know about.”

  “Sort of Heaven stuff?” Vurinam said.

  Caldera shrugged. “What do you think?” she said.

  We are here, Sham thought. On a bridge over nothing. We got by the guardian angel! We are on our way.

  To Heaven. On a single rail.

  “So …” Fremlo said. Daybe launched into the black, lurched right back, as if even the bat got vertigo. “So we’re here.” Fremlo said. “Now what?”

  The way they had come, the tracks were littered with debris where Mocker-Jack had wrestled the angel into the void. It would take hours to clear.

  “ ‘What now?’ ” Dero shouted. “Duh! Now we go on!”

  In the quiet that followed, they did not hear the beat of any wings.

  NO JOURNEY HAD EVER been like that one. The Medes’s lights were nothing: they shone a few silvered yards of rail in front, while on every other side was black. There were no junctions to negotiate, no points to throw. A single elevated night rail. Sham had no name for the percussion of a train moving over nothing, on brick arches, each arc miles long, each strut descending to whatever floor floored the universe.

  The gloom at last began to fade. The sky went as gentle & clear as it did on any other morning, & above that clarity was the must & swirl of the upsky. To their star’d, to their port, empty air. Behind & in front of them, only bridge. Below them cloud, as far below as above. & they on the line in that birdless sky puttered on.

  Now we see, thought Sham. Out beyond moles, beyond salvage, past the railsea itself. We’ll just see. He had made it out.

  There was life. They saw scuttling on the tracks. Lizards. & if there were such beasts, there must be bugs, to feed them. Vegetation in the mottles of the wood. A tiny ecosystem between rails, on the approach to Heaven.

  The captain did nothing but stare as Sirocco wielded trinkets & expertise & fixed Naphi’s left arm. The crew cuffed it to the rail, with heavy chains, for Naphi’s own protection.

  “What if it just goes on forever?” said Sham. “This line.”

  “If it goes on forever,” Caldera said, “then we’re in for a long journey.”

  ON THE EARLY MORNING of the second day, they saw something blocking their way. A lumpy presence. They stared as they approached, at its fly-eye bulbous
front, its spiked extrusions, its gnarled barrels, & Mbenday’s voice suddenly clicked on in panic from the intercom: “It’s another angel! It’s facing us! Coming for us! Full reverse!”

  Chaos! Everyone raced, running to their stations, hauling to turn the engine.

  “Wait!” someone shouted. It was, they realised to their shock, Captain Naphi. “Wait.” She spoke with enough authority that even unamplified her voice carried. “Look at it,” she said. “It is not coming. Look at it.”

  The angel’s joints, the cracks between its plates of armour, were verdigrised & overgrown. Built up with calcified exudations, runoff from within. On it & in it grew moss & lichen. The angel was furred with the stuff. Boughs & bushes of it, in frozen gushes.

  “It’s dead,” Dero said.

  It was. The angel was dead.

  The celestial cadaver was huge. It was on a double- or triple-decker scale. Even long-cold it made the watchers gape. It exuded antiquity. It was absurdly, ostentatiously ancient. Odd machine parts, sigils & script adorned it, like pictograms, like paintings found in caves.

  The Medes reached it & stopped. The crew regarded it a long time.

  Sham reached out with trembling fingers. “Careful, Sham,” Vurinam whispered. Sham hesitated. Prepared himself for physical contact with an emissary from beyond the world, in its endless sleep. Before he could touch it, however, a bolt sailed over his head & ricocheted off the front of the angel with a flat clang.

  “Are you bloody mad?” he screamed, turning. Caldera stood with her arm still poised from the throw. The crew stared at her.

  “What?” she said exuberantly. Before Sham could say anything Dero threw his own missile. Sham yelped, the object clanged & bounced over the side of the bridge, into the endless air.

  “Stop throwing rubbish at the dead angel!” Sham shouted.

  “What?” Caldera yelled. She was staring at the old engine with a strange expression. “Why?”