Railsea (30 page)

& then the handle moved. It moved, & Sham whooped & leaned on it with all his weight, his feet dangling, & over the crunch & gristly grumbling of surrendering corrosion, it slowly sank, & screaming their own complaint, the cart’s wheels began to turn.

It was a vehicle made for two. Having to haul up as well as to shove down was exhausting. Very quickly, Sham’s arms & shoulders hurt. Soon they were hurting a lot. But the cart was rolling, & with each foot it moved, it moved faster, its old cogs remembering their roles, its scabs of oxide falling away.

Sham, giddy, sang shanties & pumped his way into—lord, it was late—the railsea twilight.

H
E HAD NO LIGHT
but he could see. There were not many clouds, & the moon did its best, all the way through the upsky. Sham couldn’t go fast. He stopped & started, rested his poor limbs. He slowed at junctions. Mostly he stuck with his existing trajectory: only occasionally, according to whims he did not question, would he effortfully smack or kick old switches until they changed, & veer off on a new siding.

Sham had no idea where he was going. But though he was cold & moving at a punishing slow pace, he was peaceful. Not tired, though Stonefaces knew he should have been, but calm. He listened to burrowers lowing, the call of nocturnal hunters. He saw brief bioluminescence from a predator in the upsky, something that looked like a colour-winking thread of nerves or lace. Up close it must, he knew, be the most monstrous thing, that tangling beast, but that didn’t stop it being wind-gusted silk just then, & beautiful.

Perhaps he slept. He opened his eyes & it was washed-out daylight & he was still pumping. The creak & creak & whine had become the sound of his life. Hours of pumping & stopping & starting again, & there was another shoal. Grubs, the size of his feet, surfacing & tunnelling & moving en masse & as fast as he was on his old cart.

What now? A scrap of hook protruding from the jaw of one of the grumbling beasts. Someone had tried to catch that one, once. He followed them. Sham watched his own long shadow lurch up & down pumping its own long-shadow handcart. He made for churning earth beyond a copse where the bugs were playing.

Were they? Why had they stopped? The animals were corralled. Tangled in fine mesh nets. Sham was waking up. The panicked grubs wriggled, thrashed & sprayed dust.
It really wouldn’t be so hard to catch one now
, Sham thought, & almost fainted with stored-up hunger.

He wondered what he would do to snare one, how he might cook it, whether he could bear to eat it raw, & as the shifting of his stomach told him, yes, he rather thought he could, Sham heard sounds other than the scratch of the disturbed earth.

Looked up. Billows were coming his way. Sham stared. Licked dry lips with a dry tongue. At last let out a quavering cracked halloo.

Those were not mirages. These were sails. They were approaching.

I
T RAINED & MADE THE RAILSEA MUD & SLICK METAL
, the ties slippy. The venting clouds obscured the upsky. The
Medes
seemed to hunker in the pouring wet.

Beside it, not hunkering, thrusting rather from the muck, was the subterranean digger, the
Pinschon
. Captain Naphi stood with her officers around her, the crew around them & beside her in the middle of the circle on the rooftop
Medes
deck, was Travisande Sirocco, the salvor.

W
HEN
D
AYBE HAD DROPPED
onto the deck, the crew had done a quick recce of the surrounds, & seen a pipe jutting from the ground in the middle distance. Swivelling to watch them, dragging through earth. A periscope. The ground had upfolded & fallen away, & “Ahoy!” a voice had boomed from the speakers of the tunnelling machine. “Sorry to interrupt you. There’s something you ought to know.”

“Look at that,” Sirocco said when she came aboard the
Medes
, & stared at the monster-rooted siller in the distance.
“Haven’t seen one of them for, oh. & that’s the Kribbis pit, ain’t it? Would that I could get down there. All that salvage. But the rock’s too hard, & there are ticks down there you wouldn’t believe. Anyway, I’m one for arche-salvage myself.”

Sirocco had put up her hand. Various of the trash nubbins on her protective suit had raised as if in echo. “Let me explain why I’m here. I met your young man in Manihiki. We had a chat. He seemed a good lad.”

“He’s with you, ain’t he?” someone shouted. She rolled her eyes.

“You know what I told him?” she said. “When he was going on about salvors this & salvage that & such the other?
I
told him to stay with his crew. Which is why it raised my eyebrows to hear word a bit later that he was with me. Because he ain’t.”

So she’d been heading in a certain direction, she said with some vague evasion, to strip what—she’d got word back in Manihiki—might be a new ruin after the intervention of a particular train. A train that might even have something to do with their missing young man. So there she’d been, heading, when this peculiar little bugger had dropped from the sky.

“There was a message,” she said. “I
thought
I remembered Sham saying something about a bat. It had a message on it that I thought you’d want to see. So I’ve been asking around. You leave a trail, you know. A moler in the wrong part of the world. A moler going for the biggest game, a long way from where it should be.” She smiled. “I’ve been trying to find you. Then suddenly, in the last couple of days, this one”—she indicated Daybe—“went nuts. Went zooming off. As if it heard something. I’ve been following it.”

How could the bat have known where the
Medes
was? Sirocco shrugged. “Do you think I’d follow it across the railsea for the good of my health? I’m in business, & my business is salvage. I’ve no call to gallivant off on wild-bat chases.”

“So?” said Captain Naphi. “Why did you?”

Sirocco held up a message written in Sham’s hand. Naphi snatched for it, but Sirocco stepped back & read it aloud, herself, to the listening crew. “ ‘Please!’ ” she began. “ ‘I am a captive in the train
Tarralesh …
’ ”

W
HEN SHE HAD FINISHED
there was another long quiet. The crew, the salvor, the bat & the captain stood sodden on the
Medes
deck, ignoring the rain & watching each other. Everyone was staring. At Sirocco, at each other, at the captain.

“Oh my Stonefaces,” someone said.

“This is absurd,” the captain said. She grabbed the sheet. Despite the blood, her artificial arm seemed to be working as well as ever. The pencil marks on the paper were softening in the rain. “It’s impossible even to tell what this says,” she said. “Let alone who wrote it. This is very possibly some elaborate trick being played for I do not know what reason.”

“Really?” It was Dr. Fremlo. “Does anyone here seriously want to pretend we think Sham would have let go of Daybe by choice? This is the very salvor with whom he’s supposed to have gone. Yet here she is, Shamless to her core. & there his beloved aerial vermin, to which we know out of whatever misplaced sentimentality he was devoted, & which reciprocates that affection, is here, frantically eager for us to follow it
somewhere. Wherever our trainmate is, he is there not of his own choice.”

“This, makes, no, sense,” Naphi said through her teeth. “I don’t know why someone wants to keep me from—” She glanced in the direction of Mocker-Jack, then stared at Sirocco. “What is your agenda? You’re asking us—”

“I’m not asking you anything,” Sirocco said. “I’m just delivering a bat’s message. & my job’s done.” She sauntered to the rail.

“I’ve no idea how this animal happens to be here,” the captain said. “For all we know it could have escaped, lost Sham. Not one part of this story makes any sense.”

The crew stared. Captain Naphi closed her eyes. “As we told him, once,” Naphi said, “sentiment & moletrains don’t mix.”

“There is nowhere,” Fremlo said, “more sentimental than a moletrain. Thankfully.”

Vurinam looked from one side of the deck to the other with sudden cocky urgency, met as many eyes as he could. He cleared his throat. Sham. Worst assistant train doctor ever. Couldn’t play quoits. The crew stared.

“I wish him the best,” said Yashkan suddenly, “but we can’t—”

“The best?” Vurinam said. “You?”

“The reputation of salvors precedes them,” Naphi said. She looked at Sirocco. “We have no idea why she is here. For what she’s searching. What is her agenda. Mr. Mbenday. Set course.” She pulled out the scanner. She waved it for a signal, shook it twice. The proximity of Daybe’s leg transmitter appeared to be interfering with it. Daybe squeaked & shuddered.
There was a fingertip drumming of rain. Nobody went anywhere. The crew were looking in every direction.

“Mr. Mbenday,” the captain said. “You will plot us a course. We are scant miles from the greatest moldywarpe you or I or any of us have ever seen.” The captain reached quickly & grabbed Daybe with her uncovered flesh hand. It fluttered, & Sirocco hissed & caught its other outstretched wing. They stretched the bat between them. It squeaked. “A beast,” Naphi said, “that I’ve been hunting since I was little more than a girl. A beast desperate for us to catch it.” Her voice was rising. “We are a harpoon’s throw from a
philosophy
. I am your captain.”

The trainsfolk watched Captain Naphi pull & the salvor pull back. They spread Daybe’s wings. It made frightened sounds.

Vurinam muttered, “Sham,” looked as if he would say more, but at that moment Dramin coughed. Everyone looked at him. The cook held up a finger, seemed to be thinking.

“The boy is,” he said at last, audibly surprised at his own words, “in trouble.”

“What?” said Yashkan, but even as he spoke, Lind, his companion on more than one Sham-baiting escapade, put her finger to Yashkan’s lips.

“Mr. Mbenday,” Vurinam said. “May I suggest we set about & encourage this daybat to fly? Bet it’ll go back to him. Maybe we can ask this salvor where she arrived from?”

“Good idea,” Mbenday said. “I think that’s a
fine suggestion
.” He looked at Naphi. “Captain? Will you issue the order?”

Captain Naphi looked from one face to another. Some looked longingly in the direction of the
Talpa ferox
. Some
looked stricken. You could all but hear flapping wings as the money they had imagined into their pockets from their imaginarily successful hunting of Mocker-Jack took imaginary flight. But more—the captain visibly, carefully tallied—did not. Beyond Mbenday’s courteous request lay mutiny.

The captain looked down. From deep inside her came a sound. An exhalation. She raised her head, started to keen, looking up & up until she stared right into the tipping-down sky, & was howling. A long, loud wail. A moment of lament for a moment lost. The crew gave her that. She was, for all of it, a good captain.

She finished. Looked down. Released the bat into Sirocco’s arms.

“Mr. Mbenday,” she said. Her voice was perfectly calm. “Find us a junction. Switchers, ready. Ms., Lady, Sirocco, salvor, person.” She didn’t pause. “The bat, we think, remembers the direction it came from. & it trusts you, now?”

The salvor shrugged. If Sirocco smiled, it was so subtle as to be hard to see. “I’ll stick around,” she said. “There’s bound to be some salvage on the way.”

“Stations,” the captain shouted. The train shuddered as engines fired. “Find us a way around this sinkhole. We hunt one young trainsmate, name of Sham ap Soorap.”

T
ACKING, SWITCHING EXPERTLY WITH & AGAINST THE
wind, sliding from rail to rail with quick touches of the points, came the travellers. A community of trainsfolk in single-carriage vehicles. Each was light, made of fire-hardened wood. None encumbered with an engine, they gusted, were masted, complexly patchworked with triangular sails. Their canvas boomed as the wind yanked. The wind-powered trains hauled a zigzag way across the railsea. Standing at the prow of the front-running vehicle was Sham.

He still marvelled at the quiet running. (Even as he was willing them to get a bloody move on.) His vocabulary of clatternames was unhelpful for these nomads: their very wheels were wood, & the vibrations they sent his feet were softer & more whispered than any he had known. He would have to introduce new words when he made it back to Streggeye. The
hrahoom
of a skilfully executed line shift, the
thehthehtheh
of a long straight.

His rescuers, the Bajjer, followed a labour of moldywarpes: red-furred horse-sized moles, fast-moving, cantankerous
by nature & made more so by the dive-bombing of the Bajjer’s domesticated hawks & the snaps of the dogs that ran with them trackside, by the harassment of the hunters who harried them with javelins to wear them down. The carts weaved across the animals’ paths, moving in concert, their sails swinging.

This hunt was opportunistic, chances taken en route to & from the net traps where the Bajjer gathered most of their meat. It was at one such that they had found Sham, hallucinating with hunger & exhaustion.

Over the last few days, he had grown used to the spices with which his rescuers cooked & the air-dried gamey molemeat with which they had coaxed him back to health. He wore what of his old clothes he could save & that were not so big they fell off him, together with the fur & skin vestments of the Bajjer.

A man only a little older than Sham came up behind him. What was his name again, Stoffer or something? He was one of those who spoke a few words of Railcreole, & he was keen to learn more. With several of the Bajjer, Sham was able to make halting conversation in simple mixed-up tongue.

Sham knew his urgency was beginning to annoy them. “So …” he said. “When? When Manihiki?” The young man shrugged. Sham did not even know for certain that that was where they were going.

The Bajjer had undoubtedly saved his life. Sham knew he had little right or reason to expect them to disrupt the rhythms of their own lives, too. But he was desperate & impatient & he could not stop asking. The rail-nomads’ travels took them, he understood, to trade points, every so often, where they might drop him. Mostly these were tiny market
villages & isolated hunting communities in the railsea. Pirate towns, maybe, too. Well, that would be interesting. Whatever. Sometimes, though, they’d take their business to one of the larger hubs—very occasionally Manihiki.