Railsea (7 page)

A
MOLETRAIN ON THE HUNT BEATS OUT ONE KIND OF
rhythm. It is insistent, not too fast, stop-starting as it backs & forwards onto sidings, changes lines, trailing its prey, crews alert for give-away earthmounds.

One
kind
of rhythm: not one rhythm. The wheelbreath of hunts takes many shapes, but all instil in a moler a certainty, a calm energy, a controlled rush. They are all the default blood-quickening beats of the predator train. When old hunters hang up their trainboard gear, retire to a cottage on a crag to get up with the sun, it is one of those hunting rhythms to which their feet, unbidden & unnoticed, will move. Even in their coffins, some say, those are what the heels of a dead captain drum.

Very different is a train moving under emergency. Its rhythm is quite other. The
Medes
raced.

T
HE WHEELS SPOKE MOSTLY
RADAGADAN
, AT SPEED
. One, two, three days after Unkus’s injury, the train ground north as fast as it safely could on such wild rails. Sham brought the sick man food. He held the bowls of hot water while the doctor changed the dressings. He could see the worsening state of the wounds, the creep of necrosis. Unkus’s legs suppurated.

These dusty barren stretches of plain-&-rails were near the edges of the world, & maps were contradictory. Captain Naphi & her officers annotated those they had. Kept the log up to date. The captain pored over her rumourbook. Sham would have loved a look at that.

The
Medes
headed north, but the eccentricities of rails & junctions took them briefly west, too. Enough that late one day, at the limits of vision, like a smoke wall at the horizon, loomed the slopes of Cambellia. A wild continent, a legend & a bad one, it rose from the railsea.

That would have been enough to get most of the crew out & staring at the horizon, but veering a little nearer it was
clear that what might have been a line of bushes, some peculiarities of rock, was the fallen corpse of an upsky beast. Well
that
brought them all out. Muttering, pointing, taking flatographs.

It happened sometimes that those alien things fighting their obscure fights in the poisonous high air would kill each other, send each other’s strange carcases plummeting to the railsea. It wasn’t unprecedented for trains to have to grind slowly past or even through them, pushing impossible meat out of the way with their front-plows, their figureheads getting sticky with odd rot. “No flies on that, eh,” said Vurinam.

Upsky things tended to decay according to their own schedules & whatever grubs they carried in them. Most made earth maggots fastidious.

This, the first upsky corpse Sham had seen, was not very comprehensible. Long, stringy, knotted strands emerging out of ooze, bits of beak, bits of claw, splayed tendrils like ropes, if they weren’t bits of innard. No eyes he could see, but least two mouths, one like a leech’s, one like a buzz saw. Perhaps it was beautiful & delicate on the world on which its ancestors were born, where they had infested the ballast of some otherworldly vehicle during a brief stopoff, later to be sluiced off here on another, epochs ago.

Sham & Vurinam stood at the barrier of the forecastle, behind the howling engine. They looked away from the receding monster corpse to port at that miles-off country Cambellia. They glanced at each other. One at a time. Each only for a moment, when the other had looked away. The train’s figurehead, a traditional bespectacled man, jutted over the rails, staring woodenly away from their awkwardness.

They were not so far from Bollons. From whispers, the
mutterings of the crew, Sham had ascertained that it was a soulless place, too close to poisonous upland, that in Bollons they would sell everything, including secrets & their mothers, without honour or hesitation.

Every railsea nation other than Streggeye, if it was discussed by many of the Streggeye-born trainsfolk, was, Sham noted, traduced. It was too big or small, too lax or strict, too mean, too gaudy, too plain, too foolishly munificent. Lands of all dimensions & governments met with disapproval. The scholarocracy of Rockvane was snootily intellectual. Cabigo, that quarrelsome federation of weak monarchies, was quarrelsomely monarchist. The warlords who ran Kammy Hammy were too brutish. Clarion was governed by priests whose piety was too much, while far-off Mornington needed a dose of religion. Manihiki, far the most powerful city-state in the railsea, brashly threw its weight around with wartrains, the grumbles went. & the democracy of which it crowed so loud was a sham, they added, in hoc to money.

& on & on. Similarity to its detractors’ home was no defence. Streggeye was one of several islands in the Salaygo Mess archipelago, in the railsea’s east, run by a council of elders & advised by eminent captains & philosophers, but it was, those xenophobes sniffed, the only one that didn’t do it
wrong
.

Sham nuzzled his recuperating daybat. It still not infrequently tried to bite him, but the force & frequency of the snaps was decreasing. Sometimes, like now, when he swaddled it, the animal buzzed with what Sham had learned was purring. Bat happiness.

“You ever been?” said Sham.

“Cambellia?” Vurinam pursed his lips. “Why would a person go there?”

“Exploring,”
Sham said. He had no notion what governments there were on Cambellia to get things wrong & not be Streggeye. He stared towards it in fascination.

“When you’ve been trainsfolk as long as I have …” Vurinam began. Sham rolled his eyes. The trainswain was barely older than him. “I’m sure you must’ve heard stuff. Bad people, wild people,” Vurinam said. “Crazy things out there!”

“Sometimes,” Sham said, “it seems like every country in the railsea’s full of wild things & bad places & terrible animals. That’s all you ever hear.”

“Well,” Vurinam said. “What if they are? The thing is with a place like Cambellia, it’s the size of it. Miles & miles. Get me more than a day from the railsea lines, I get very twitchy. What I need to know’s that any moment, if things gets tricky, I can run to harbour, show my papers, get on a train, hightail away. A life on the open rails.” He breathed deep. Sham rolled his eyes again. “If you head northwest in Cambellia, you know where you get eventually?”

Remnants of geography lessons, remembered images from class ordinators, went through Sham’s head. “The Nuzland,” he said.

“The Nuzland.” Vurinam raised eyebrows. “Bloody hell, eh?”

The highest reaches of Cambellia climbed past where atmosphere shifted, up higher than where the carved gods, the Stonefaces, lived on Streggeye, into the upsky. The Nuzland wasn’t a pinnacle or a ridge. It was bigger by many times than Streggeye or Manihiki. Yes, Sham knew the stories, that
somewhere there were whole bad plateau worlds in the upsky. Cities of the dead. Curdled high hells. Like the Nuzland, which was right over there. Sham could see its edge.

Vurinam muttered.

“What?” said Sham.

“Said
sorry
,” Vurinam said. He was staring out to railsea. “Said I’m sorry for what I said to you. It weren’t your fault, what happened to Stone. Might as well say it was my fault for hitting him when I jumped in the cart.”
The thought
, Sham said to himself,
had occurred
. “Or Unkus’s fault for being in my way. Or for not holding on hard enough. Or that captain’s fault for wrecking the train leaving it for us to see. Whatever. I shouldn’t have shouted at you.”

Sham blinked. “ ‘S’alright,” he said.

“Not really it ain’t,” Vurinam insisted. “When I’m upset I rage around. I was like a mole on the hooks.” He looked at Sham at last. “I hope you’ll accept my sorry.” Pleasingly formal, he stuck out his hand.

Sham blushed. Fumbled & juggled with his bat. Freed up his own right hand & shook.

“You’re a gent, Sham ap Soorap,” Vurinam said. “What’s it called?”

“Eh?”

“Your daybat.”

“Oh.” Sham looked at it. He spread its wings. It chittered in annoyance but let him. He’d wracked his brains for memories of Fremlo’s lessons, consulted the doctor’s medical textbooks with extremely uncharacteristic rigour. Fingertip gentle, he’d found the spot in the wing where bone ground against bone, & set the fracture in the multicoloured wings with a tiny makeshift splint.

“It’s called … Day … Be,” he said. “Daybe.” The name was plucked from nowhere, in panic at the question, & he almost groaned to hear it. It was out now. Too late to take it back.

“Daybe.” Vurinam blinked. “Daybe the daybat.” He scratched his head. “I make no judgments. Daybe it is. It’s on the mend, I hope.”

“It’s getting better.”

“& Unkus?”

“Depends,” Sham said. “Dr. Fremlo says that depends how fast we get to Bollons.”

“Best get there fast then.”

They were caning through diesel. Doubly desperate to get to the island now, for fuel from the town’s plants, as well as for the sake of poor feverish Unkus, shivering & singing again, now, but not pleasingly. Caterwauling in delirium in the doctor’s hold.

O
N A DRIZZLY DAY THE CREW SAW TRAINS AT THE
rain-veiled horizon. Two, three, six, amid rocklets & islets & crowning nubs a few yards across, maybe topped with scrappy treelife & halos of birds. They saw dot-dot-dot sky punctuation of steam-train exhaust. A flat-topped cold volcano, a craggy irregular mountain, on its slopes the craggy irregular town of Bollons.

The western side of the island, facing Cambellia, that farthest shore, was mostly bare but for telescopy arrays. On its eastern side were the precarious-looking concrete & wood neighbourhoods of Bollons itself. As if the town didn’t want to look at the edge of the world. Houses & warehouses ran down the slope to the shore where the metal & wood & stone of the lines began, where diesel & steam trains puttered gently in the railsea bay. Sham saw the old halls his crewmates said were the guildbuildings of spies & ne’er-do-wells, where rumourmarkets were held.

“A few coppers’ll get you a questionable assertion from someone drunk & past it.” So Fremlo said. “A handful of dollars,
something said with a straight face by one whose information has panned out more than once in the past. More than that, you’re into the realm of the tempting secret.

“You won’t get it from the source, I mean. The rumour-mongers sell them on.” They’d vouch for none of them, of course—that was the point. But if it were
them
, they’d tell their customers, they’d set more store by this story than that one—hence the higher price tag. & tell you what: buy this one, they’d throw in another—almost certainly the ravings of a feverish fantasist—free.

The
Medes
ran up flags telling any watchers who they were, & a bone-sign & red exclamation, to say there was an injury aboard. “Slow.” Captain Naphi’s voice on the intercom was more terse even than usual. She must be frustrated not to be pursuing her philosophy, Sham thought. They rounded harbour-edge rocks on which railgulls raucously announced themselves.

Railsailors watched them from other trains on the fanning-out rails of the inlet, each vehicle surrounded by carts, to ferry crews to land. A smokestacked steamer snorted a soot-cloud exactly as if in disdain. The
Medes
switched, backed & switch-backed towards the railfront. Veered close enough to another vehicle that it looked as if the figureheads were leaning in to kiss, short-sighted paramours. A diesel molar like the
Medes
. It was mostly moletrains there.

What were these other vehicles, though? Sham had no clue. They were smaller & stubbier than the hunters. The equipment he could see being oiled & readied was nothing he could name. It wasn’t salvage, he was almost certain. On a diesel train of strange design two men vigorously hand-cranked a chugging engine on caterpillar treads, from which
protruded a long coiled tube, a glass-fronted helmet & brown bodysuit, in which someone performed ponderous gymnastics.

“What the Stonefaces is that?” Sham said. The pumpers had the brick-coloured skin & distinctive electronically tinkered & doohickey-enhanced goggle-glasses of Kammy Hammy, that secretive many-island nation of, supposedly, warlords.

“That?” Sham had been talking to himself, but Yehat Borr heard him, paused as he hand-scurried up a nearby ropeladder. He swung & spun & controlled his descent, stopping in front of Sham hanging upside down. “That,” Borr said, “is explorers.”

Of course. It was hardly as if it was just distant-ranging molers, fuel-hungry or desperate for something to eat other than old salted burrowmeat & weevily biscuits, who stopped at the town. Bollons was the nearest port to Cambellia. To Bollons came those brave brigands, pioneers & pillagers, to buy the whispers & the stories that surrounded such continents. Stories about the terrible engined angels, monstrous cousins to the protectors & repairers of the tracks, that guarded the edge of the world. Fables of how, one day, you might get past them, out of time & history. To epochs’ worth of dead & unborn riches. To all the prodigious treasures of Heaven.

Sham sniffed with what might have been desire, might have been something. In those explorers’ carriages would be rations, weapons, hiking gear. Maybe an overland carriage, monitors, trade goods for the peoples of the inland. Perhaps even mountaineering gear, for the most ambitious, like that
woman now taking off the helmet & gesticulating thumbs-up at the pumpers.

An updiver. She wasn’t just going into Cambellia: she was going to climb. Beyond the border, roaming into uplands, to the limits of her cable, while the support crews waited below at the edge & pumped & kept her alive, or at least kept her breathing, till something other than the bad air, some bad-air beast or ghost of poisoned high ground, did for her instead.

A
BUREAUCRAT TOOK MILD PITY.
T
HE
M
EDES
GOT A
dockside mooring, shunting into place by the harbourmaster’s offices. En route it passed a navy train all the way from Manihiki: like many of the less muscular island nations, Bollons subcontracted its defence—& attack—to that great ferronaval power. Bored-looking officers in grey uniforms wandered up & down the rooftop decks, eyed the
Medes
, oiled their guns.