Railsea

  One by one the cautious hunt descended through a window-turned-trapdoor. “You’re lucky you’re not walking back,” Brownall said to Sham. He gnawed his lip. She wouldn’t. The very idea, though, that thought of one foot after the other, careful on the dusty ties, avoiding the terrible earth, all the way back to the train, made him swallow.

  So he waited. Stared out to railsea & back at the ruin. Jens Thorn threw rusty screws at a distant signal box. Cecilie Klimy took bearings for the Stonefaces knew what reason with an intricate sextant. Unkus Stone sang to himself & carved at scrap. His voice was lovely: even Brownall didn’t tell him to shut up. Stone sang an old song about falling on the dirt & being rescued by an underground prince.

  The daybats settled. A couple of shaggy rabbits watched the crew, & Sham raised his little camera, the best that Voam & Troose could afford, that they’d presented to him with a delighted tadah!

  “Ahoy!” Hob Vurinam’s head poked from a horizontal porthole. He shook his head & dust rose from his hair.

  “& so?” shouted Brownall. “Situation?”

  “Well,” Vurinam said. He spat over the edge of the train. “Nothing. Been here like a million years. Engine’s already been gone through. More than once.”

  Brownall nodded. “& the last carriage?”

  “Well,” Vurinam said. “About that. You know you was saying Sham Soorap had to stay put?” Vurinam grinned. “Might want to rethink.”

  SEVEN

  SHAM STRUGGLED THROUGH A ROOM ASKEW. HIS FLOOR had once been a wall. He picked a cramped way past his comrades.

  “See the problem?” Vurinam said. There was a door, now by the ceiling, flapping a few inches on its hinges. “It’s wedged,” Vurinam said. “& we’re all a bit big.”

  It didn’t seem right. Most of the time the crew kept on about Sham being big for his age, & he was. He wasn’t the youngest on the Medes, nor the smallest, nor lightest crew-member. Yehat Borr was three foot something, muscled & bear-strong. Could do handstand press-ups. Throw harpoons almost as far as Benightly. Turn upside down dangling from a rope. But what Sham was was the smallest & lightest who happened to be right there, right then.

  “I ain’t even supposed to be here.” Sham hated how his own voice suddenly quavered to his own hearing. But he was here, wasn’t he? Snuck on in a sudden pining for excitement, & the universe had called his bluff. His job was to apply bandages & brew tea, thanks very much, not to haul arse into sealed-off wrecks.

  Oh Stonefaces, he thought. He didn’t want to go into the cabin—but how he wanted to want to.

  “I told you,” someone mumbled. “Leave it, he ain’t going to …”

  “Come on,” said Vurinam. “You like salvage, don’t you?” He met Sham’s gaze. “What do you say?”

  All his crewmates were looking at him. Was it shame or bravery that made Sham say yes? Ah, well. Either way.

  HE GRIPPED, HE HAULED. He kicked. Just like exploring deserted buildings in Streggeye, he told himself. He’d done that. Not that he was brilliant at it, but he was better than you might think. He was shoved at, feet & bum, wriggled, held his breath, scraped through the gap.

  Beyond the door it was dark. The windows in what was now the car’s ceiling were shuttered. Rods of dusty light extended from holes, picked out patches of ground, mildew, paperscraps, cloth.

  “Can’t see much,” Sham said. He scrabbled, bolder, was over & in & down with a thud. Well, he thought cautiously, wiping his hands. This ain’t so bad.

  “Here we go,” he reported. “What’s here?”

  Not much. The back of the carriage was crushed, rammed from outside, long ago. Sham’s eyes adjusted. The paper litter was still speckled with stubs of writing, too small to make sense. There were ash-piles.

  “It’s all rubbish,” he said. The windows at his feet were open to the ground. He shivered to be so close to earth.

  No surprise, of course, that this made Sham wonder about his father. Thoughts trundled as slow as an old goods vehicle through his skull. Was this how it had looked when his father’s train went down? There had been no survivors & no word. Sham had imagined the train many times—an elongated, wheeled crypt. He had not, however, envisaged it on its side, like this. A failure of his imagination he now rectified. He sniffed.

  Sham shuffled through junk. When he was a kid, he’d played salvors many times. & here was, in the most trashed sense, salvage. The ruins of a chair. Shards of an ordinator. The splayed rods of a mangled typewriter. He swished his feet through debris.

  Something thunked & rolled out of rags. A skull.

  “What is it?” Vurinam shouted at Sham’s yell.

  “I’m alright,” Sham called back. “Just a shock. Ain’t nothing.”

  Sham looked at the skull, & its eyeholes watched him back. It watched him, too, from a third eye, neat hole bang centre of its forehead. He kicked the rag-shreds away. There were other bones. Though not enough, Sham thought with his new, very slight, insight, for a whole body.

  “I think I found the captain,” Sham said quietly. “& I think the captain don’t want much rescuing.”

  An arm bone poked up from the bare dirt in a windowframe. It went deep. Near it was a broken cup, its jag filthy. As if it had been used to dig.

  Sham was no baby. He knew, of course, how superstitions worked, that the earth wasn’t literal poison. It had been many years since he’d thought it really would kill him just to touch it. But it certainly was for real dangerous. His whole life he’d been trained to avoid it, & not without reasons.

  He squatted, now, though. Slowly, he reached out. Tentatively, he prodded the soil in the window, snatched his hand right back as if from a stove. It reminded him of being by the shore back in Streggeye, clustered with classmates at the island’s edge, by the loamy earth of railsea where tracks tangled. Everyone goading each other to pat it.

  Sham wrinkled his face, wrapped his hand in his sleeve. He tugged the arm bone from the ground & threw it from him. He steeled himself. He reached slowly into the hole, to find what the dead person had been taking out, or putting in.

  He grit his teeth. It was cold & dry within. He groped. Stretched. Felt something. He fiddled, fingertip-gripped, slowly extracted it from the earth. A plastic wafer, like the one in his camera. A picture card. He put it in his pocket, lay flat & put his hand back in the hole.

  “Sham!” Vurinam said. Sham pressed his cheek to the earth. Outside the cabin, he heard wings like ruffled pages, screams of returning daybats. “Sham, get out!”

  “Hold on a minute,” Sham said, & stretched again.

  Something bit him.

  UP SHAM SPRANG like a spring-loaded toy, yelling in terror & trailing blood. Vurinam shouted, bats screamed & from the earth came a chattering.

  Sham knew where the captain’s other bones had gone. He knew what had shredded all the clothes. He grabbed for the sideways door but, hurt, his hand couldn’t take his weight. In the window-frames, the dirt bulged. A dreadful bony sound sounded. Sham stared into the hole. From its deeps two eyes stared back.

  The thing rose. It burst from its tunnel. Chewing its way out. A thing of pale, wrinkled corpsy skin, appalling scissoring teeth.

  The naked mole rat launched itself out of the earth.

  EIGHT

  AS LONG AS HUMANITY HAS ROLLED ON THE RAILSEA, the rigours & vigours & bloody triggers of the underground have been legendary. There are predators on the islands, too, of course, above the grundnorm. Hill cats, wolves, monitor lizards, aggressive flightless birds & all manner of others bite & harass & kill the unwary. But they’re only one aspect of the hardland ecosystems, pinnacles on multiform animal pyramids. These systems contain vastly varied behaviours, including cooperations, symbioses & gentlenesses.

  Subterrestriality, by contrast, & life on the flatearth that is its top, is more straightforward & exacting. Almost everything wants to eat almost everything else.

  There are herbivores. Chewers on roots. But they are a small unhappy minority. You
might think the Squabbling Gods of the railsea, when their bickering made the world, put them there for a mean-spirited joke. Look under the tracks & ties: the beasts that make caverns, that tunnel, that steal their way into others’ networks, that rise & sink above & below the groundline, that squeeze through crevices in the fractured world, that coil around roots & stalactites, are overwhelmingly, & ferociously, predators. There is something about the compact materiality of that realm, naturalists speculate, that heightens the pressures of life. By comparison, the island ecosystems are oases of pacifism.

  This savage underground & flatearth does not preclude complexity. There are many ways—often ingenious—one ravenous animal can eat another, or a hapless woman or man. The beasts of the railsea give them all a try. For trainsfolk, this means a hierarchy of awfulness.

  Fast flatearth-runners are bad enough, they’ll tell you, of the animals that scurry with hungry intent on the surface, overleaping tracks, but what provokes the worst terror are the eruchthonous. That is a railsea word. It means that which digs up from underneath & emerges.

  & of those eruchthonous beasts, connoisseurs of animal aggression debate the worst. Size, voracity & the sharpness of claws, while important considerations, may not define the most frightful hunter. There are other, more uncanny things to consider. There are reasons a certain animal above all, one particular tunneller more than any other, has a uniquely horrible place in the rail traveller’s imagination.

  NINE

  WITH A SHOVE OF AWFUL NAILLESS HANDS THE mole rat flew at him. Sham stumbled. A lucky stumble. The animal flew over him, hit the wall & slid down, dazed.

  In Streggeye Terrarium Sham had seen such things. Runt, domesticated versions, chewing what scraps their keepers threw. Kept carefully apart from each other. Below him right now, the wild cousins of those prisoners used guillotine teeth to bite paths through dirt. They rose into sight. They came as a colony. Collective soldiers. Thinking with the hive mind their Streggeye keepers so assiduously kept them from attaining.

  The mole rats shook off earth. Like hairless, wrinkled mammal newborn, swollen to dog-size, snapping dreadful incisors. Eyes like raisins shoved in dough. They breathed throatily. The earth growled.

  Sham jumped for the door-top. He hung. The beasts gathered. Sham heard teeth.

  His fingers slipped.

  He fell.

  Was caught.

  Vurinam, just beyond the door, gripped his arm & groaned in effort. The animals leapt & bit at Sham’s feet. Vurinam hauled, Sham climbed, & together they got Sham out. He fell among the crew in the sideways cabin.

  “Go!” someone shouted. People jumped on what remnants of furniture there were, hammering at the earth with sticks & weapons, as it began to move. Hoe-toothed mole-rat faces boiled the grit in the window-frames.

  Clinging to walls, overleaping the snapping lurches of the colony, the trainsfolk got up & out. Sham heard shots. He ran along the skew-whiff traintop.

  Bats bustled & buffeted him. Sham leapt, he pitched, he landed heavily in the jollycart among the escapees, as Gansiffer Brownall & the others clubbed mole rats breaching all around them, & fired into the moiling ground. At the cart’s edge rose a flannelly animal face, all quivering whiskers & malevolent percussion. Sham grabbed for anything heavy & it was a kettle left for some dumb reason in the cart that his hand found & which he swung.

  Vurinam staggered as he landed, smacked heavily into Unkus Stone. Who himself staggered to the cart’s edge, tipped, toppled, fell out, between two sets of rails.

  Onto the ground.

  Stone floundered. He sank a clear inch into crumbling earth. Quite redundantly—everyone saw it—someone screamed: “Man overboard!”

  Mole rats looked up with a simultaneous motion, puppets on one string. The capsized carriage itself shuddered, as if something big & underneath it paid sudden attention. Synchronised, the mole rats dived, bite-burrowed towards Unkus. Moving towards the jollycart, a ridge was rising in the earth.

  “Grab hold!” Vurinam shouted, stretching out his hand. “Move!” Unkus crawled. Incompetent quadruped. Mole rats moved in with gusts of stygian dust. Ploughed massively from below, that big furrow still grew. Stone screamed.

  Vurinam grabbed him & pulled, & others grabbed Vurinam. Agitated bats swept in chaos around Sham, making him flail. The earth rampart rose & growled & cracked & within, Sham could see a huge hump of saggy skin, a mole-rat back twice the size of any other. The mole rats were a hive, & what was coming was the queen.

  There was an explosion of dirt, a great biting down, a glimpse of great mouthness. Sham cried out, Vurinam tugged, Unkus wailed & was pulled aboard. There was a rumbling as the queen descended invisibly, preyless, frustrated. The earth settled. But Unkus still screamed. A mole rat was dangling by clenched teeth from his bloody leg. “Hit the bloody thing!” Brownall shouted.

  It was Sham who did. Smacked it with his kettle harder than he’d smacked anything before. The beast somersaulted backwards into the accelerating cart’s dirt.

  There was one moment of exhilaration, one ragged cheer as the women & men of the Medes left the marauding colony. Then it was over & they saw the state of Unkus.

  TEN

  THE CREW OF THE MEDES CROWDED THE EDGES OF the cartops, in agonies at the attack they had seen but could not reach. Unkus moaned.

  Sham heard a faint, pathetic beating & saw a flutter of colour. In the corner of the cart was an injured daybat. It flipped & fiddled, pitiful on damaged wings. He must have hit it when he swung. It foamed weakly from its mouth.

  Vurinam went to tip it out. “No,” Sham said. He lifted it gently. It snapped at him, groggily enough that those teeth were easy to avoid. When his turn came to cross the walkway between the Medes & the cart, Sham had the daybat wrapped in his shirt.

  The doctor was waiting for him. Took hold of him brusquely, checked he was not hurt, patted his shoulder & told him to get ready. Behind him, Unkus Stone was being carried aboard.

  “HOW’S HE DOING, DOC?” The questions kept coming from the corridor. “Can we talk to him?” The doctor took off the bloody apron, caught Sham’s eye & nodded. Sham, still swallowing at the sight of the procedure, opened the surgery door to the crew.

  “Alright,” Fremlo said with the abruptness of exhaustion. “Come in. You’ll not get much off him. Drugged him to the gills. & do not touch his leg.”

  “Which leg?”

  “Either bloody leg.”

  Sham got out to give them room. He listened to them whisper.

  “What did you find, Sham ap Soorap?” someone said.

  He looked up. It was the captain.

  Abacat Naphi. Her prosthetic arm was raised, barring his way. He stared into her dark blue eyes. They were about the same height, & he was heavier, but he felt as if he was craning back his neck to meet her gaze. Sham stammered. She had not spoken to him before, except for sentences like, “Move,” “Put it over there,” & “Get out.” He was astonished that she knew his name.

  “Answer,” Fremlo growled.

  Sham wondered: Where’d the doctor come from?

  “Captain, I …” Sham said. His bat—no hiding it now—squeaked.

  “Attention,” Captain Naphi said. “Later we’ll consider whether you can keep your vermin, ap Soorap. Now we answer questions. What was in the wreck?”

  “Nothing, Ma’am Captain,” Sham stuttered. “A skeleton I mean is all. That was it. That & only else also just rubbish.”

  “Is that so?” Naphi said. She closed her eyes & lowered her artificial arm, leaving a thread of exhaust & the murmur of motors. Sham watched the intricacy of its workings, the lines of its black wood.

  “Nothing, Ma’am Captain, not a thing.” Are you insane? Sham thought. Why you lying? & even as he thought about the little scrap of salvage he’d found that was his by finder’s right, he heard himself saying, “Oh except only this,” as he fished out the card from his pocket & gave it to her.

  “If I might, Captain?” Fremlo was
beckoning for her to follow—who else on the train could do that? Naphi looked once more, thoughtfully, at Sham.

  “Thank you for the memory,” she said. She took it & followed Fremlo. Sham watched them go. Stood unmoving but for grinding jaw. Inside he was raging, demanding his tiny salvage back.

  A STORM WAS COMING. Sham watched through portholes while clouds lowered, descending below the upsky & changing their nature, drawing rain across the landscape, turning the world to mud & replenishing pools & puddles between rails, speeding up the streams gushing from islands. The slick trainlines shone. The injured daybat stuck its head up from Sham’s shirt, as if it, too, wanted to watch the sky. He stroked it.

  “Soorap,” Dr. Fremlo had said to him when they started work on Stone. “We know this is not your favourite activity. I ask only that you stay out of the way, do as I tell you when I tell you. You may not like it, you may not be very good at it—you are not, in fact, very good at it, & if I can tell that, that means you are very not very good at it—but you are probably somewhat better than nothing. So if I say bandage, you know what to do. & so forth. His leg’s at risk. Let’s do what we can.”

  After the whispered exchange with Naphi, Fremlo had found him again. “You do know,” the doctor had said, “that you don’t have to obey orders?”

  “I thought that was the whole point of orders!”

  “Oh yes, but no.” Fremlo’s voice had dropped. “I mean you are obligated to, formally, yes, but it’s not uncommon to not. You really wanted that card, did you not?”

  Sham, vivid red, could not tell if this was a rebuke, advice, or what.

  “Good,” he heard someone say, looking at the storm. “Drown the bloody things.” A fine curse & worthy anger, though it wouldn’t happen. Like all tellurian animals of the railsea, mole rats had strategies to avoid that fate when it rained. Airlocks, water traps, complicated tunnel shafts.