Railsea (24 page)

“So,” said Elfrish. “You said you found pictures. That would be these.” He held up scraps—the greasy, now-torn & well-worn images that Sham had scribbled for himself, the remembrances of what he had seen on screen. “& culminating in this.” Sham’s cheap little camera. On its screen that single line. Even so small & ill-focused, it hushed the room.

“Know where this leads?” Elfrish whispered. “No. Neither do I. But I am, as you know by now, very much of a one for stories. & such intimations as there are for people to hunt the let-me-stress-it legendary, mythical, obviously-not-at-all-real places beyond, revolve around money. A lot of it. You see my point.

“Oh, people’ll go after those Shroakes. It’s hardly just me. With their train, that won’t go well, I suspect. But followed as they know they are, they’ll wind their route. What I want to do is
head them off
. Which means knowing where they’re going.

“Now, your well-being is up to you, Sham ap Soorap. These—” He shook the images. “—may make sense to you. To me, not so helpful. To me they are scrawls. So, the things you saw?

“Describe them.”

The man called Juddamore lowered his sharp point to the paper. It was a pencil. He began to draw.

H
E TRANSLATED
S
HAM’S
gabbled descriptions into images. Juddamore was talented. Even in his wash of fear & relief, Sham was impressed to watch the pictures emerge from scrawled grey lines as tangled as the railsea.

Someone’ll run come save me
, he thought, & described his pictures & memories, in case they did not, in fact. In the days & weeks that he had prepared his trip to Manihiki, formulating his plan, Sham had gone over those images in his mind, leafed through his scrappy redrawings, more than once. They were vivid in his mind.

“& then in the third one there’s, yeah, that one …”

“What is that?” some deep-voiced pirate muttered, staring at Sham’s original. “Is that a bird?”

Sham. Never an artist.

“No, it’s, it’s like, a sort of, a sort of overhang, like, like …” & with frantic hand-motions Sham described the rock angle, & so on. To stay alive. Juddamore drew what he described, & Sham would pass comment & correct him like some lunatically agitated critic. “Not like that, the little forest was a bit more, lower trees, like …”

Each of these scenes had originally been chosen & frozen because it was a sight, after all. Each of them had some quality, some feature, something to distinguish it from the everyday railsea, to make it worth recording. For hours, Juddamore drew pictures of descriptions of memories of glimpses of digital images of sights once long ago seen. The pirate officers looked, heads cocked, rubbing their chins. Debated what they saw.

“& this is the order?”

“Look. That bit there sounds like the corner off the coast of Norwest Peace.”

“There’s rumours about rail shenanigans up Kammy Hammy way, & couldn’t that be the cut in the mountains that gets you up by its western islands?”

They traced a route. With maps beside them, they ruminated. Over a long time, guessing where they had to, putting to one side controversies, the best brains of the pirate train reconstructed a dead explorers’ route. Until, astoundingly, they had decided they knew—more or less, roughly, in broad sweeps—where they were going.

This is not what I ever had in mind
, Sham thought.
I ain’t even a pirate. I’m a pirate-abetter
.

B
UT WAIT
. S
TUDENTS OF THE RAILSEA, OF COURSE YOU
have questions. You are likely to narrow in on uncertain & mysterious questions of iron-rail theology.

You wish to know which is the oldest civilisation in the railsea, which island state’s records go back furthest, using which calendar? What do they tell us about the history of the world, the Lunchtime Ages, prehistory, the times before the scattered debris from offhand offworld picnicking visitors was added to aeons of salvage? Is it true the upsky used to be full of the same birds as now fly the down? & if so, what was the point of that?

What of the decline & fall of empires? Human empires & godly ones? & what
about
those gods—That Apt Ohm, Mary Ann the Digger, Railhater Beeching, all that brood? What, above all, about
wood
?

That is the key mystery. Wood makes trees trees. Wood is also what makes ties—those bars crosswise between railsea rails—ties. A thing can have only one essence. How can this, then, be?

Of all the philosophers’ answers, three stand out as least unlikely.

—Wood & wood are, in fact, appearances notwithstanding, different things.

—Trees are creations of a devil that delights in confusing us.

—Trees are the ghosts of ties, their gnarled & twisted & dreamlike echoes born when parts of the railsea are damaged & destroyed. Transubstantiated matter.

All other suggestions are deeply eccentric. One of these three is most likely true. Which you believe is up to you.

We have pirates to return to.

G
ENERALLY IT WAS
R
OBALSON WHO BROUGHT
S
HAM
his food. It was Robalson who waited around after Elfrish left, on his brief visits to double-check on picture descriptions, that left Sham quivering. “Yeah,” Robalson would say, as if agreeing with whatever terror Elfrish had instilled. He’d twist his face into a sneer, undermined only somewhat by his visible discomfort at Sham’s fear.

One time he came alone, & led Sham upstairs constrained, with his wrists shackled to a belt itself attached to a pole that Robalson held. It was a modern train. Diesel. They were moving faster than the
Medes
could have. They were on a strip of pondside rail star’d, with quicksand to port, from which muckworms poked bleached eyeless faces.

Sham took stock. You never knew. Seven, no, eight carriages. Two double-decker. Crew everywhere. A conning tower. Not as high as the crow’s nests he was used to, but the telescope jutting from its viewing slit looked powerful. The
Tarralesh
was not in pursuit, did not fly the notorious skull-&-spanners flag. But it bristled with barrels. From specialised
portholes & little holes poked cannons & machine guns. & there was Elfrish. Sham shivered.

“Well?” Elfrish shouted. The captain pointed. Dead ahead a scrappy forest gave way to sand, brick-coloured in the odd light. “Was that what you saw?”

This was why they’d brought him out—not for his comfort, but to verify the landscape. Elfrish & his officers were gathered around Juddamore’s pictures.

Should Sham lie? Tell them to go to airy hell? Tell them this was not the place when—he looked, & oh, it was. He caught his breath. This was the first image he had seen over Captain Naphi’s shoulder. He should lie. Tell them no, you should be somewhere very else. Get them off the Shroakes’ tails?

A rumour & a picture?
Sham thought. What kind of crazy person was Elfrish, that that was enough to send him halfway across the railsea, into unknown stretches, on the off chance of who knew what? Evil & cold & terrifying & all that he might be, but Elfrish never seemed crazy—

& he wasn’t. It hit Sham abruptly. The captain talking about missing something previously. The certainty in his voice when refuting Sham about the wreck’s contents. The sense, in all his talk of the Shroakes, not only of greed, but of work unfinished.

It was him
, thought Sham.
It was him took them before. It was this train wrecked the Shroakes
.

Oh, Caldera
, Sham thought.
Dero, Caldera
. He imagined the
Tarralesh
bearing down on what must have been a severely battered Shroake train. Grappling hooks fired across cold rails. The boarding, attackers sweeping through the tiny vehicle, swinging cutlasses, firing guns.
Oh, Caldera
.

A chance encounter on the Shroakes’ carefully roundabout voyage home? Elfrish must’ve found hints of the journey. Evidence of the astonishing feats of engineering & salvage. & realizing these were not just any nomads, remembered stories of the heaven the evasive coded logs hinted they’d approached, full of endless riches, the ghosts of money born & died & not yet made.

How the pirates must’ve hunted for hints as to the route. Stripped & ripped & wrecked the wreckage. Brutally demanded answers, if any Shroake then still breathed. Neglecting that frantically dug hole. No wonder Elfrish was obsessed. All possible rewards aside, those pictures were a rebuke to him. Evidence of his piracy fail.

Sham shivered at the sight of the captain. He should, he decided grimly, looking out to Railsea, he definitely should lie.

“Let me tell you why you definitely shouldn’t lie,” Elfrish said. “Because what’s keeping you alive is your directions. It’s like a checklist. You get one mark for each picture. We have a rough idea where we’re going, but we need to double-check with you. Twelve checks & you win, we get to the end. But if it’s too long between one mark to another, you don’t win, & then you stop. Dead … Stop.” Sham swallowed. “So. If this is not where we need to be, you better tell us, so we can rethink & get where we’re going fast, because you
need
your first checkmark.

“I just know,” Elfrish said, “you don’t want to die, do you?”

Really not. Even so, there was a part of Sham that wanted to simply tell some ludicrous untruth, have them roar off in thoroughly the wrong direction as long as he could sustain it. Would that be a glorious death?

“I can see you thinking it over,” Elfrish said kindly. “I’ll give you a minute or two. I quite understand. This is a big decision.”

“Come on,” muttered Robalson. He jerked Sham’s chain. “Don’t be stupid.”

Sham came close. Had given up hope, & why not, why not mess with them? He came close. But at that moment he looked into the little storm of railgulls arcing around the train & saw the silhouette of quite unavian wings.

Daybe! Lurching with a frantic bat flap, a careering pell-mell motion nothing like birds’. Sham kept himself still, did not show his excitement.

The bat had definitely seen him. Sham’s chest swelled. How far had Daybe come? How long been following? It was that, the sudden not-being-alone-ness, the presence of even an animal friend, that changed Sham’s mind. For reasons he couldn’t have put very clearly into words it was abruptly important to him that he keep himself alive, which at the moment meant useful, as long as possible. Because look, there was Daybe.

“Yeah,” he said. “That’s what was in the picture.”

“Good,” said Elfrish. “There really wasn’t very much else that first picture you described could be. If you’d told us no, I’d probably have had to chuck you off. Good decision. Welcome to staying alive.”

As he turned, Sham glimpsed Robalson’s face. To his shock, the pirate boy was staring at the bat in the air. He knew! He’d seen it! But Robalson looked at him, & said nothing.

He led Sham back to the cell, checked they were alone,
then eagerly winked. “No harm in having a friendly face around,” he whispered, & gave Sham an uneasy smile.

What?
thought Sham.
You want to be
friends
?

But he would not risk his daybat’s freedom or life. Swallowing distaste, Sham smiled back.

He waited until the sound of his young jailer’s footsteps had disappeared, then quickly Sham opened the tiny window of his cell & shoved his arm out into the gusts, as far as it would go. The angle was awkward, the pain in his limb not inconsiderable, the flying specks as random-looking & momentary as soot in a storm. Sham waved & whispered & made noises that must have been snatched by the wind & track-clatter, but he made them anyway. & after mere moments of this he let out a cry of triumph, because swooping down, landing heavy & warm & shaggy on his arm, was Daybe, snickering in greeting.

T
HEM ANGELS CAN’T HAVE DONE MUCH OF A JOB ON
that bridgeknot,” Dero said.

“Celestial intervention,” said Caldera. “It ain’t what it used to be.”

“Look!” Dero pointed. Smoke. In the distance. Dirty smudgy smoke—the breath of a steam engine burning something not clean—that tickled the underside of the upsky, which was roiling & hazy that day.

“What is it?” Caldera said. Dero checked & rechecked, gazed through far-seeing scopes & persuaded his on-train ordinators to extrapolate & best-guess.

“I dunno,” he said. “It’s too far. But I think—I
think …
” He turned to his sister. “I think it’s pirates.”

Caldera looked up. “What?” she shouted. “Again?”

A
GAIN
. T
HEIR SUBTERFUGE
had lasted as long as it had lasted, the Shroakes’ misleading rumour-mongering about their intended journey. But now everyone in Manihiki who cared
must know they’d gone, & that meant stories & grapevines, & that was why they had started, as the days went on, glimpsing pirate trains.

These were not undangerous railsea stretches. There were a plethora of islets, here, & ill-charted woodlands & chasms in which a skilful captain might hide. It was no surprise buccaneers favoured them. They had not, though, expected quite how many would be looking for them.