Railsea (25 page)

A few days previously they had had the first of them. It could still have been a random encounter, they had thought. A jumped-up little beast-train had emerged from low trees remarkably close to them, & charged. The captain had cracked his enormous whip—it had been close enough with the wind going the right way for the Shroakes to hear—& goaded his snorting six-animal gang, three to each side of the rail, into massive gallops, while the small & vicious-looking pirate crew jeered & sneered on the ornate battledeck.

“Ooh look,” Dero had said. “Rhinos. Never thought I’d see rhinos.”

“Mmm-hm.” Caldera had given a contemptuous little kick, a little lick of speed, & they had left their pursuers coughing in their exhaust. The Shroake train, driven as it was by a hermetic engine, emitted no smoke: it did, though, have tanks of specially synthesised filthy fumes that could, with a button-push, be spurted out backwards to make a point.

“I liked them rhinos,” Dero said. “Did you? Caldera?” She said nothing. “Sometimes you wish I wasn’t with you, don’t you?” he muttered.

Caldera had rolled her eyes. “Don’t be absurd,” she’d said. Just occasionally it would have been nice to have someone
else around, was all. “Enjoy that rhino-sighting while you can, Dero, because you ain’t going to see any more.”

“Why?”

“There ain’t many places a beast-train can relax about what pulls it,” she said. “& there’s things here’ll take a rhino
no
problem. They ain’t going to last long. They’re a way from home. Must be looking for something.”

The siblings had glanced at each other when she said that, but had still not assumed they were the target of these pirate forays. Until two days later, when a gang of small vehicles, each armoured like a dark tortoise, nearly caught up to them in the night, with surprisingly skilful switching. As their alarms sounded & the Shroakes powered away, they heard the lead dieselpunk shouting, “That’s them!”

Since then they had sped up to get themselves beyond any danger of detection. “You know,” Caldera said, “there are trainsfolk down south who get called ‘pirate’ all the time, & all they do is look after their coasts, ’cause for years trains of all the other places just dump junk there. Mum told me that. Loads of the people we call pirates aren’t doing anything bad at all.”

“These ones ain’t them,” Dero said, watching the progress of their pursuers.

“No,” said Caldera. “These ones seem to be the other ones.”

Their way was plotted from a combination of what their parents had told them before they left, what they had been able to glean from the notes left behind & their remaining father’s confused reminiscences. Those & the ordinator files, & the descriptions Sham had given them, from that old screen.

They were approaching a river. “Bridge?” Caldera asked the world. She could not see any.

“Um.” Dero checked the chart. “I think if we go star’d for—well, for ages—we’ll get to one.” Caldera calculated time in her head. “Know what?” Dero said slowly. “We can be quicker. What about if we take a tunnel?”

“A
tunnel
?” Caldera said. “You think?”

Underground was never a preferred route. There seemed something unholy about the passing, on rails, below, like some deep-digger heading home. Tunnels made the devout grumble. Usually trains would switch out of the way of such stygiana. Usually.

“Save us time,” Dero said. He was excited.

“Hmmm,” Caldera said. There were, it did look like, routes directly under the water.

The rails took them down, past a fringe of tough shrub, a mouthlike ring of rocks, into a concrete shaft. Some such were even lit, Caldera had heard. This was not. They travelled behind the fierce glare of their own bulb, the tracks, the damp-mottled cement & riblike reinforced supports of the underground passage flitting in & out of pitch as they passed.

“It sounds
weird
,” said Dero, his eyes wide. They were cocooned by echoes, every snap & clatter up close & reverberating against the metal of the train. “How far, do you think?”

“Shouldn’t be far,” Caldera said. “So long as we keep going roughly in this direction.”

Out of the shadow loomed more, tunnels veering from their own, a submerged maze. At each they slowed, checked the switches. Went on.

They were shocked by a sudden unearthly sound. A quavering,
hooting shriek that made the tracks rattle, the ground around them shake. Caldera hit the brakes.

“What was that?” she said. Her own voice was strangulated. Dero stared & clutched her arm.

It came again. More aggressive this time, & closer. A coughing, swallowing, hollow screaming gasp. & now a faint clapping.

Staggering out of dark into the glare of the train lights, something came. It lurched. It staggered & flailed its limbs. Its great trembling throat glistened. A bird. A bird, its eyes sealed closed, covered in fluff, a bird taller than the tallest woman or man. It shook stubby wings, that could never have taken its weight, & tottered. Behind it came others, staggering into sight.

“Look at them!” shouted Dero. “What they
doing
here? They’re, they’re babies!” He smiled. “What are you doing, Cal?” His sister was scrabbling with the controls, checking the radar, moving fast & gritting her teeth. “Cal, they can’t get in.” The chicks could barely walk. They fell over as they came, trod on each other, eliciting squawks & pathetic little trills.

“That right there,” Caldera said, “is a nest. Those right there are the chicks of a burrowing owl that’s been too lazy to dig its own hole. Just moved in here. That noise they’re making …”

Dero gasped as realisation took hold. “… is an alarm call,” he said. He fell into his own seat, clicking through controls. They backed up. The newborns staggered after them, sounding piteously.

From behind the train came a much deeper, much louder
call. It sent frost down Caldera’s bones. They heard a grating step.

Swinging side to side, eyes like giant lanterns hypnotic with rage, recurved beak an evil hook, an owl parent stepped into their hindlights. Its claws were out & ready. It rushed in to protect its babies.

“I’d go the other way,” Dero said in a choked voice.

The owl was taller than their train, hunched & stooped to scratch its way through the tunnels, filling the shaft with its wings. Its eyes shone like the worst moon. It screamed. Those claws would rip the Shroake train apart. To get at the soft Shroake grubs within.

Switch, clickety split. Caldera was getting good at these abrupt & sudden line changes. Back past the junction while the chicks stumbled & the terrifying adult closed in, forward again down a sideline, accelerating out of that predator’s burrow.

“It’s still coming,” said Dero.

“I know,” Caldera said. Switch, forward, star’d, fast.

“It’s still coming!” Dero shouted.

“Wait!” Caldera shouted. “I think we’re—”

With a rush & the merciful dissipation of all the close-up noise, they burst out again, into the day. On the far side of the river. The raging owl stamped out after them, almost at their speed, opening wings & lurching on stilty legs, half flying, half running, fast, but not as fast as a fleeing Shroake train zipping through grass.

“& farewell to
you
, angry owl,” said Caldera triumphantly.

“No! More! Quick routes! Through weird things!” shouted Dero.

“Ah, hush. It was your idea. We made it, didn’t we?”

“Yeah, but now I’m just wondering …” said Dero.

“What?” Caldera said. “Don’t I even get any well-dones for having got us out?”

“It’s just … doesn’t it take two big owls to make little ones?” said Dero.

A colossal noise above, a thunderclap of wings.

In this case, they learnt, as a shadow blotted out the sun beyond the upsky, it took one big & one very, very big owl. Which, that latter, descended, with a bass hoot that made the Shroakes’ bones & their train vibrate. Which swooped down towards the rear of the rearmost carriage, clenched claws like dockyard machines that split & splintered the vehicle’s roof, &, wings hammering again, ascended. Still gripping. So that one by one, from the back of the train forward, the cars of the Shroakes’ train uncoupled from the rails, began to rise.

E
LSEWHERE IN THE RAILSEA, THE TIES WERE STONE-HARD
, the iron of the rails was a black no amount of train-wheel polishing could make shine, & the ground beneath & between them was very cold. Over such tracks came the
Medes
.

Had it been observed by a sky-dwelling god with any knowledge of moling, such a watcher would have been struck by the vehicle’s speed. The
Medes
raced on the icy railroad in
shekkachashek
, a rhythm suited to hot pursuit, not to these conditions. No moldywarpe was visible: the train would, the imagined watcher might have presumed, been better suited to prowl at lower speeds & slippery wheelbeats.

At the
Medes
’s prow, the captain, her tracer in her mechanical hand, looked up & down between screen & the horizon. The latter was all grey air & baleful clouds: the former a dancing dot of red, a complaining diode.

“Mr. Mbenday,” Naphi said, “it’s taken a turn star’d. Switchers to switch.” Switch they did, curving through a sequence
of points, until the scanner light was again nearly straight ahead.

When she did not track on that relentless screen, the captain retired with books of philosophies. Reading memoirs & thoughts & speculations of the rare completers. She made notes in the margins. What happens when the evasive concepts you hunt, get found?

Three times the devilish fast beast they followed dug too far, too fast, too deep to be followed, dragged its glimmer-self beyond the range of Captain Naphi’s reader. Each time, within a few days of roaming, scanner at maximum power, drawing on more traditional techniques of moleground deduction, she found the signal again.

The second time they lost & found the blip that meant great talpa, they had seen, far, far off, a molehill born. An eruption of dust that silenced them with awe, & left a truly prodigious mound behind.

“Wish the lad could see this,” Fremlo had muttered. “I heard it was him got her the scanner. He’d have liked this.” No one answered.

There was still a chase; they were still molers, tracking & inferring & judging on their hunterly insights. But now Captain Naphi’s philosophy left an electrical spoor. Perhaps once or twice the captain looked like she was whispering, muttering something that might have including the word “thanks” as she fiddled with her receiver.

Mocker-Jack did not travel like a moldywarpe should travel. “How does it know?” Vurinam demanded of the world. “How does it know we’re on its bloody tail? How come it keeps trying to get away?” That was how he interpreted the creature’s unusual evasive speed & motion.

It’s always taunted the captain, some crewmates whispered back. That’s why it’s her philosophy.

Hob Vurinam had another question. As they circled a stretch of ice, in the very bloody light of evening, as he turned his pockets inside out & right-way round again in fret, he said to Dr. Fremlo, “D’you ever feel like it might be cheating?”

The doctor was watching groundhogs bicker by their holes. Fremlo said nothing.

“If Naphi gets Mocker-Jack like this,” Vurinam said, “mightn’t it be cheating to complete your philosophy that way? Can you shortcut an insight-hunt, do you think?” Fremlo threw scrunched-up paper into a groundhog squabble as the train passed. “Wonder what Sham would think,” Vurinam said.

“Not much,” Fremlo said. “It isn’t salvage, is it? It’s just a big mole.”

The sun went down on the two of them talking about Sham, while the vehicle to which they owed temporary paid loyalty described raggedy spirals in intersecting rails, closing in on its captain’s obsession.

T
HE FIRST FEW TIMES HE ENTICED IT FROM THE SKY
, Sham just stroked Daybe & took heart from the presence of something that liked him & didn’t care if he could verify that a piece of railsea was a particular piece of pictured railsea. Those duties continued. He said yes to a petrified forest; a glacier creeping at them, its slowly incoming edge already eating railsea rails; a particular patch of distinctive hillocky ground. “Is that what you saw?”

Each time Sham was out there to check, Daybe circled. Each time Sham said yes—until that last one, when, after a hesitation, he told the truth: no. & after another hesitation, Elfrish nodded & altered course.

Daybe wouldn’t enter Sham’s dreary cell, but it perched on the rim of the tiny window. With outswept arms & exaggerated pointings Sham would encourage it out to local islands, to disrupt railgulls & to pick up snacks of grubs. With swoopy beckonings he’d entice it back. He saw it flit under the clouds & upsky, above a ragged reef of salvage.

Where were they?

Sham was at the mercy of a man he knew to be wholly ruthless. Of murderers who would throw him overboard or spit him on a trainhook for the laugh of it, if the thought appealed. But as long as he was alive & making himself useful, he was somewhere he had never been. Neither doctoring nor pining, but somewhere quite new, doing something new, & with that came—whatever the danger—excitement.

Robalson visited him at all hours & would go on about nothing. Would start halfheartedly taunting Sham, until that was done & he’d just sit, uneasily. “There’s so many stories going round,” he said at last. “If whatever it is the Shroakes are after, that their family found, is even half as good as people think it might be, we’re going to be …” He made lip-smacking noises. “They say you can’t even imagine it. So we got to keep moving before anyone else gets smart. Course, they ain’t got your pictures, have they?”

No, thought Sham, but they’ll be after the Shroakes. He bit his lip.

A
WHISTLE SOUNDED
, & there came the heavy beat of running. The train accelerated, skewed away from the direction it had been going. This was skilled switching. The swift manoeuvres continued, these sudden changes of direction, abrupt speedings-up & slowings-down. Robalson leapt up.

“What is it?” Sham shouted. His jailer took a moment to shoot him a very nervous grin, then was gone & turning the key. Sham stared from the little window & caught his breath. The
Tarralesh
was racing after another train. Some small merchant vehicle, plying goods between railsea islands, now gusting at the limit of its steam strength. “Get out of here!” he
shouted across the miles, & as if it heard him, the littler train tried.