Railsea

GREAT SOUTHERN MOLDYWARPE

(Talpa ferox rex)

Reproduced with permission from the archives of the Streggeye Molers’ Benevolent Society.

Credit: China Miéville (illustration credit 1.1)

PROLOGUE

THIS IS THE STORY OF A BLOODSTAINED BOY.

There he stands, swaying as utterly as any windblown sapling. He is quite, quite red. If only that were paint! Around each of his feet the red puddles; his clothes, whatever colour they were once, are now a thickening scarlet; his hair is stiff & drenched.

Only his eyes stand out. The white of each almost glows against the gore, lightbulbs in a dark room. He stares with great fervour at nothing.

The situation is not as macabre as it sounds. The boy isn’t the only bloody person there: he’s surrounded by others as red & sodden as he. & they are cheerfully singing.

The boy is lost. Nothing has been solved. He thought it might be. He had hoped that this moment might bring clarity. Yet his head is still full of nothing, or he knows not what.

We’re here too soon. Of course we can start anywhere: that’s the beauty of the tangle, that’s its very point. But where we do & don’t begin has its ramifications, & this right now is not best chosen. Into reverse: let this engine go back. Just to before the boy was bloodied, there to pause & go forward again to see how we got here, to red, to music, to chaos, to a big question mark in a young man’s head.

ONE

A MEAT ISLAND!

No. Back a bit.

A looming carcase?

Bit more.

Here. Weeks out, back when it was colder. The last several days spent fruitlessly pootling through rock passes & in the blue shadows of ice cliffs, late afternoon under a flinty sky. The boy, not yet bloodstained, was watching penguins. He stared at little rock islands furred in huddled birds plumping their oily feathers & shuffling together for comfort & warmth. He’d been giving them his attention for hours. When at last there came a sound from the speakers above, it made him start. It was the alarm for which he & the rest of the crew of the Medes had been waiting. A crackling blare. Then from the intercom came the exclamation: “There she blows!”

An instant frantic readiness. Mops were abandoned, spanners dropped, letters half-written & carvings half-whittled were thrust into pockets, never mind their wet ink, their saw-dusty unfinishedness. To windows, to guardrails! Everyone leaned into the whipping air.

The crew squinted into the frigid wind, stared past big slate teeth. They swayed with the Medes’s motion. Birds gusted nearby in hope, but no one was throwing scraps now.

Way off where perspective made the line of old rails meet, soil seethed. Rocks jostled. The ground violently rearranged. From beneath came a dust-muffled howl.

Amid strange landforms & stubs of antique plastic, black earth coned into a sudden hill. & up something clawed. Such a great & dark beast.

Soaring from its burrow in a clod-cloud & explosion it came. A monster. It roared, it soared, into the air. It hung a crazy moment at the apex of its leap. As if surveying. As if to draw attention to its very size. Crashed at last back down through the topsoil & disappeared into the below.

The moldywarpe had breached.

OF ALL THE GAPERS on the Medes none gaped harder than Sham. Shamus Yes ap Soorap. Big lumpy young man. Thickset, not always unclumsy, his brown hair kept short & out of trouble. Gripping a porthole, penguins forgotten, face like a light-hungry sunflower poking out of the cabin. In the distance the mole was racing through shallow earth, a yard below the surface. Sham watched the buckle in the tundra, his heart clattering like wheels on tracks.

No, this was not the first moldywarpe he’d seen. Labours, as their playful groups were called, of dog-sized specimens constantly dug in Streggeye Bay. The earth between the iron & ties of the harbour was always studded with their mounds & backs. He’d seen pups of bigger species, too, miserable in earthtanks, brought back by hunters for Stonefacemas Eve; baby bottletop moldywarpes & moonpanther moldywarpes & wriggly tarfoot moldywarpes. But the great, really great, the greatest animals, Sham ap Soorap had seen only in pictures, during Hunt Studies.

He had been made to memorise a poemlike list of the moldywarpe’s other names—underminer, talpa, muldvarp, mole. Had seen ill-exposed flatographs & etchings of the grandest animals. Stick-figure humans were drawn to scale cowering by the killer, the star-nosed, the ridged moldywarpe. & on one last much-fingered page, a page that concertinaed out to make its point about size, had been a leviathan, dwarfing the specklike person-scribble by it. The great southern moldywarpe, Talpa ferox rex. That was the ploughing animal ahead. Sham shivered.

The ground & rails were grey as the sky. Near the horizon, a nose bigger than him broke earth again. It made its molehill by what for a moment Sham thought a dead tree, then realised was some rust-furred metal strut toppled in long-gone ages, up-poking like the leg of a dead beetle god. Even so deep in the chill & wastes, there was salvage.

Trainspeople hung from the Medes’s caboose, swayed between carriages & from viewing platforms, tamping out footstep urgency over Sham’s head. “Yes yes yes, Captain …”: the voice of Sunder Nabby, lookout, blurted from the speakers. Captain must have walkie-talkied a question & Nabby must have forgotten to switch to private. He broadcast his answer to the train, through chattering teeth & a thick Pittman accent. “Big boar, Captain. Lots of meat, fat, fur. Look at the speed on him …”

The track angled, the Medes veered, the wind fed Sham a mouthful of diesely air. He spat into railside scrub. “Eh? Well … it’s black, Captain,” Nabby said in answer to some unheard query. “Of course. Good dark moldywarpe black.”

A pause. The whole train seemed embarrassed. Then: “Right.” That was a new voice. Captain Abacat Naphi had patched in. “Attention. Moldywarpe. You’ve seen it. Brakers, switchers: to stations. Harpoonists: ready. Stand by to launch carts. Increase speed.”

The Medes accelerated. Sham tried to listen through his feet, as he’d been taught. A shift, he decided, from shrashshaa to drag’ndragun. He was learning the clatternames.

“How goes treatment?”

Sham spun. Dr. Lish Fremlo stared at him from the cabin threshold. Thin, ageing, energetic, gnarled as the windblown rocks, the doctor watched Sham from beneath a shag of gun-coloured hair. Oh Stonefaces preserve me, Sham thought, how bleeding long have you been there? Fremlo eyed a spread of wooden-&-cloth innards that Sham had lifted from the hollow belly of a manikin, that he should by now certainly have labelled & replaced, & that were still all over the floor.

“I’m doing it, Doctor,” Sham said. “I got a little … there was …” He stuffed bits back within the model.

“Oh.” Fremlo winced at the fresh cuts Sham had doodled with his penknife in the model’s skin. “What unholy condition are you giving that poor thing, Sham ap Soorap? I should perhaps intervene.” The doctor put up a peremptory finger. Spoke not unkindly, in that distinct sonorous voice. “Student life is not scintillating, I know. Two things you’d best learn. One is to”—Fremlo made a gentle motion—“to calm down. & another is what you can get away with. This is the first great southern of this trip, & that means your first ever. No one, including me, gives a trainmonkey’s gonads if you’re practicing right now.”

Sham’s heart accelerated.

“Go,” the doctor said. “Just stay out of the way.”

SHAM GASPED AT THE COLD. Most of the crew wore furs. Even Rye Shossunder, passing him with a peremptory glance, had a decent rabbitskin jerkin. Rye was younger &, as cabin boy, technically even lower in the Medes order than Sham, but he had been at rail once before, which in the rugged meritocracy of the moletrain gave him the edge. Sham huddled in his cheap wombatskin jacket.

Crews scrambled on walkways & all the carriagetop decks, worked windlasses, sharpened things, oiled the wheels of jollycarts in harnesses. Way above, Nabby bobbed in his basket below the crow’s-nest balloon.

Boyza Go Mbenday, first mate, stood on the viewing dais of the rearmost cartop. He was scrawny & dark & nervily energetic, his red hair flattened by the gusts of their passage. He traced their progress on charts, & muttered to the woman beside him. Captain Naphi.

Naphi watched the moldywarpe through a huge telescope. She held it quite steadily to her eye, despite its bulk & despite the fact that she hefted it one-handed in a strong right arm. She was not tall but she drew the eyes. Her legs were braced in what might have been a fighting stance. Her long grey hair was ribboned back. She stood quite still while her age-mottled brown overcoat wind-shimmied around her. Lights winked in her bulky, composite left arm. Its metal & ivory clicked & twitched.

The Medes rattled through snow-flecked plainland. It sped out of drag’ndragun into another rhythm. By rock, crack & shallow chasm, past scuffed patches of arcane salvage.

Sham was awed at the light. He looked up into the two or more miles of good air, through it into the ugly moiling border of bad cloud that marked the upsky. Bushes stubby & black as iron tore past, & bits of real iron jagging from buried antique times did, too. Atangle across the whole vista, to & past the horizon in all directions, were endless, countless rails.

The railsea.

Long straights, tight curves; metal runs on wooden ties; overlapping, spiralling, crossing at metalwork junctions; splitting off temporary sidings that abutted & rejoined main lines. Here the train tracks spread out to leave yards of unbroken earth between them; there they came close enough together that Sham could have jumped from one to the next, though that idea shivered him worse than the cold. Where they cleaved, at twenty thousand angles of track-meets-track, were mechanisms, points of every kind: wye switches; interlaced turnouts; stubs; crossovers; single & double slips. & on the approaches to them all were signals, switches, receivers, or ground frames.

The mole dove under the dense soil or stone on which sat those rails, & the ridge of its passage disappeared till it rose again to kink the ground between metal. Its earthwork wake was a broken line.

The captain raised a mic & gave crackling instructions. “Switchers; stations.” Sham got another whiff of diesel & liked it this time. The switchers leaned from the walkway that sided the front engine, from the platforms of the second & fourth cars, brandishing controllers & switchhooks.

“Star’d,” broadcast the captain, watching the mole alter course, & a lead switcher aimed his remote at an incoming transponder. Points snapped sideways; the signal changed. The Medes reached the juncture & swerved onto the new line, back on the trail.

“Star’d … port … second port …” Amplified instructions lurched the Medes deep into Arctic wastes, tacking zigzag across wood-&-metal from rail to railsea rail, rattling over connections, closing on the mole’s fast-moving turbulent earth.

“Port,” came an order & a switchwoman obliged. But Mbenday yelled, “Belay that!” The captain shouted, “Star’d!” The switcher thumbed her button again but too late; the signal rushed past gleefully, it seemed to Sham, as if it knew it would cause havoc & relished the fact. Sham couldn’t breathe. His fingers tightened on the handrail. The Medes hurtled on for the points now sending them to whatever it was that had Mbenday frantic—

—& here, Zaro Gunst, riding the coupling between fifth & sixth cars, leaned out with a switchhook & with swagger & a jouster’s precision swiped the lever as it went by.

The impact sent his pole shattered & clattering across the railsea but the points slammed sideways as they disappeared below the figurehead, & the Medes’s front wheels hit the junction. The train continued, back on a safe line.

“Well done, that man,” said the captain. “It was an ill-marked change of gauge.”

Sham exhaled. With a few hours, industrial lifting & no choice you might change a vehicle’s wheel-width. But hit a transition full on? They’d have been wrecked.

“So,” Captain Naphi said. “He’s a tricksy one. Leading us into trouble. Well grubbed, old mole.”

The crew applauded. A traditional response to that traditional praise for such quarry cunning.

Into dense railsea.

The moldywarpe slowed. The Medes switched & circled, braked, kept a distance as the buried predator sniff-hunted for huge tundra earthworms, wary of pursuers. It wasn’t only trainsfolk who could read vehicles in their vibrations. Some beasts could feel the drum & pulse of train motion from miles off. Cautiously, the traintop cranes lowered jollycarts onto nearby lines.

The cart-crews gunned their little engines, switched points gently. They closed slowly in.

“Off he goes.”

Sham looked up, startled. Next to him, Hob Vurinam, the young trainswain, leaned out enthusiastically. He snapped up the collar of his battered finery with practised cockiness, his third- or fourth-hand coat. “The old velvet gent can hear them.”

A molehill rose. Whiskers, a prow of dark head emerged. It was big. The snout went side to side & sprayed dust & spittle. Its mouth opened, very full of teeth. The talpa had good ears but the double switch-rattling confused it. It growled dustily.

With sudden violent percussion, a missile slammed down next to it. Kiragabo Luck—Sham’s compatriot, Streggeye native, truculent harpoonist—had shot, & she had missed.

Instantly the moldywarpe upended. It dug at speed. Cart Two’s harpoonist, Danjamin Benightly, moon-grey yellow-haired hulk from the woods of Gulflask, yelled in his barbarous accent, & his crew accelerated through the scattering soil. Benightly pulled the trigger.

Nothing. The harpoon gun was jammed.

“Damn!” said Vurinam. He hissed like a spectator at a puntball match. “Lost it!”

But Benightly the big forestman had learned javelin hunting dangling upside down from vines. He had proved himself adult by spearing a meerkat at fifty feet & reeling it in so quick its family had not noticed. Benightly grabbed the harpoon from its housing. Lifted it heavy as it was, his muscles bunched like bricks under his skin, as the cart rolled closer to the digging behemoth. Leaned back, waited—then hurled the missile right into the mole.

The moldywarpe reared, the moldywarpe roared. The spear juddered. The harpoon rope whip-unwound as the animal thrashed, blood on the soil. Rails buckled & the cart careered, tugged behind the animal. Quick—they knotted a soil-anchor to the line & threw it overboard.

The other cart was back in the game, & Kiragabo didn’t miss twice. Now more anchors scraped the ground behind a bellowing hole & furious earth. The Medes juddered to a start & followed the molecarts.

The drags kept the burrower from going deep. It was half-in half-out of the ground. Carrion birds circled. Bolshy ones flew in to peck & the moldywarpe shook its shag.

Until at last in a lagoon of stony steppe, a dirt space in the infinite rails, it stopped. It quivered, then settled. When next the greedy railgulls landed on the furred knoll of its body, it did not dislodge them.

The world silenced. A last exhalation. Twilight was coming. The crew of the moletrain Medes readied knives. The devout thanked the Stonefaces or Mary Ann or the Squabbling Gods or Lizard or That Apt Ohm or whatever they believed in. Freethinkers had their own awe.

The great southern moldywarpe was dead.

TWO

A MEAT ISLAND! THE CARCASE LOOMED.

Molecarters snared the ropes in its skin & traintop winches hauled tons of moleflesh & a precious pelt across the ground on which no one would step. Scavenger birds at last flew home, replaced in the sky by Arctic darkbats. In waning light the moldywarpe undertook a last, posthumous journey to the butchery wagon. & no illustrations; no flatographs; no salvaged thriddies, paintings, saltprints or liquid-crystal renditions; & certainly not the arse-achingly dull molers’ reminiscences Sham had heard too many times could have prepared him for what extraordinary stinking work followed.

The mole was opened. The flatbed truck filled with its spilling remains. Sham breathed shallow at the sight. Hollow-chested. As if he was at prayer.

The crew hacked, unfolded, peeled, sawed. They grunted & sang shanties. “What Shall We Do with the Drunken Brakesman?” they sang, & “A Life on the Open Rails.” Overhead, Sunder Nabby conducted their concert with his view-scope. Sham stared & stared.

“Nothing to do?” It was Vurinam, broken off from flensing, a gory knife in his hands. “Feeling soft-hearted?”

“Nah,” Sham said. Vurinam was shirtless in the tight radius of heat around the cutting & the fires, skinny & muscled & sweating mere inches from where the air would freeze him. He grinned a little crazily. Sham could suddenly believe there were only a few years between them.

No one needed first aid, but Sham knew Dr. Fremlo would not forebear lending him to the wider crew on a night like this. Vurinam’s gaze went side to side as he hunted for, & found, inspiration. “Oy!” he shouted to everyone wetly unmaking what had been a mole. “Anyone thirsty?” A big tired cheer. He inclined his head & looked meaningfully in Sham’s direction. “Well, you heard that.”

Really? Sham said. He even liked Vurinam, well enough, but really? I’m not even saying an apprentice doctor is my favourite thing to be in the world, he said, but hauling liquor? Don’t you have a cabin boy? No disrespect, it’s an honourable profession, but is it really my job to lug grog? To grog-lug? To grug? Sham said all that but only in his head. Outside of his head, what he said was, “Yes sir.”

& abruptly, Sham Yes ap Soorap was right in the middle of that moment. Quickly bloodstained. So started the longest hardest night he had ever worked. From butchery car to mess & back, again & again, running the length of the train. With drinks, with food to keep the strength up, to Fremlo’s cabin where the doctor loaded him with bandages & unguents & astringents & analgesic chews for rope-burns & sliced-up palms, back again to apply them.

What reward Sham got lay in the fact that the ribaldry & jokes & excoriations of his laziness with which he was greeted by the crew unmoling the mole was more often good-humoured than not. He even, he realised, felt a bit of relief in knowing just what he was to do, the precise nature of his task, in those moments.

He snatched seconds when he could to sway in stupefied tiredness. Cutting or not, there was no avoiding the blood in that butchery wagon. So Sham became the gore-stained boy, swaying like a young tree, quite red. Not knowing what to turn his mind to. He’d been waiting for this, like all the crew, & now here he was, awed but still not knowing what it was he thought. Still lost.

He didn’t ruminate on hunting. Nor on the medicine he was supposed to be learning. Nor beyond wordless aghast wonder at the scale of the mole’s bones. He just endured.

Sham diluted booze—“More water than that! Not as much as that! More molasses! Don’t spill it!”—snuck a couple of swigs himself. He held cups of it to the lips of those whose hands were too entrail-slippery to grip. Shossunder the cabin boy carried cups, too, with poise, glancing at Sham with a nod of rare, imperious solidarity. Sham lit fires, heated metal, stoked blazes to keep trypots hot while railers took skin & fur to be tanned & cleaned, meat to be salted, strips & slabs of fat to be rendered.

The universe stank of moldywarpe: blood, pee, musk & muck. In the moonlight everything looked splashed with tar: in the train lights that black turned to the red of the blood it was. Red, black, redblack, & as if he drifted off like a paper-scrap out to railsea & looked back, Sham envisioned the Medes as a little line of lights & fires, heard the music of its tools & train songs swallowed in the enormous southern space of ice & freezing rails. Everything spread out from the centre of the universe that at that moment was the moldywarpe face. The set snarl, the dark-furred leer, as if even in its death the great predator did not lose its contempt for those who had, outrageously, snagged it.

“Ahoy.”

Dr. Fremlo nudged him & Sham lurched. He’d been asleep & dreaming where he stood.

“Alright then, Doctor,” he stuttered, “I’ll …” He tried to work out what it was he would.

“Go put your head down,” Fremlo said.

“I think Mr. Vurinam wants …”

“& when did Mr. Vurinam pass his medical licence? Am I a doctor? & your boss? I prescribe sleep. Take one, once nightly. Now.”

Sham didn’t argue. Just then, for once, he knew precisely what it was he wanted: to sleep, indeed. He shuffled out of the heat, away from the empty rib-room that had been mole, into the swaying corridors. Towards his little nook. One shelf-bed among many. Through snores & farts of those who’d come off shift already. The songs of the butchers behind him were Sham’s ragged lullaby.

THREE

MARVELLOUS!” HAD SAID VOAM, WHEN HE GOT Sham the job on the Medes. “It’s marvellous! You’re not a child anymore, you’re quite old enough for work, & there’s nothing better than a doctor. & where else are you going to learn as fast & deep as with a moletrain doctor, eh?”

What logic is that? Sham had wanted to shout, but how could he? Enthusiastic, hairy, barrel-shaped Voam yn Soorap, Sham’s cousin or something, relative on his mother’s side by a thread of unsnarlable connections, one of the two who had raised Sham, was not a trainsman. Voam kept house for a captain. The only people, however, he held in higher regard than molers were doctors. Which was not surprising, given how much of his time Sham’s other cousinish surrogate parent—stooped, nervy, angular Troose yn Verba—spent with them. & they were mostly kind, too, to the boisterous old hypochondriac.

Sham could no more turn down the work Troose & Voam had arranged for him than he could have trod dog muck & railsea earth into the old men’s clothes. It wasn’t as if he had anything else to suggest, wrack his brains though he did. He’d been fretfully kicking his heels long enough since ending school. His time at which had also been spent, if more youthfully, kicking his heels.

Sham felt sure there was something he fervently wanted to do & to which he was excellently suited. Which made the more frustrating that he could not say what it was. Too vague about his interests for further study; too cautious in company, perhaps a little bruised by less-than-stellar school days, to thrive in sales or service; too young & sluggish to excel at heavy work: Sham’s tryings-out of various candidate activities left him het up. Voam & Troose were patient but concerned.

“Maybe,” he had tried to venture, more than once, “I mean, what about …” But the two men would always catch & interrupt his drift on that topic, in uncharacteristic accord.

“Absolutely not,” said Voam.

“No way,” said Troose. “Even if there was someone you could train with—& you know there ain’t, this is Streggeye!—it’s dangerous & dubious. You know how many beggars there are tried & failed to make that a living? You have to have a certain …” He had eyed Sham gently.

“You’re much too …” Voam said.

Too what? thought Sham. He tried for fury at Voam’s hesitation, but only got as far as gloom. Too wet? Is that it?

“… Too nice a lad,” Troose had concluded, & beamed. “To try his hand at salvage.”

Eager to give him a gently caring shove, to be an adult bird nudging a fledgling into squawking terrified first flight, Voam had pulled a favour & secured moletrain-based apprenticeship with Fremlo for his ward.

“Life of the mind, teamwork & a sure trade, too,” Voam had said. “& it’ll get you out of this place. See the world!” When he told Sham, beaming, Voam had blown a kiss at the little clicking portrait of Sham’s mother & father. It cycled on a three-second exposure, an endless loop. “You’ll love it!”

SO FAR, love of the life had been evasive. But to his own surprise, when he woke after that night of butchery, though the first noise out of him was a yelp & the second a whimper, so stiff & bone-battered was Sham, & though he staggered out of the cabin as if in rusted-up armour, when out he came & saw the grey sun through the upsky clouds & the swirling railgulls & his comrades taking hacksaws to the hosed-down pillars of the moldywarpe skeleton, even still feeling like an imposter at he knew not even what, Sham was lifted.

A kill so big, the mood aboard was good. Dramin served breakfast molemeat. Even he, ash-coloured & cadaverous, a cook who looked like a scrawny dead man & had never liked Sham at all, slopped broth into Sham’s bowl with something almost like a grin.

The crew whistled as they wound rope & oiled machinery. Played quoits & back-gammony on the cartop decks, swaying expertly with the train. Sham hesitated, hankering, but blushed to remember his previous participation in the hoop-throwing. He felt fortunate the crew had let slide what had looked likely to become his permanent nickname, Captain Rubbish-Aim.

He went back to watching penguins. He took flatographs of them with his cheap little camera. The flightless charmers bickered & clattered their beaks on the islets they jostlingly inhabited. Hunting, they would dive into the inter-line ground, the earth of the railsea between the metal, & with their big shovel-shaped bills, their adapted clawfeet & muscled wings, they would tunnel aggressively for yards, burst squawking up again with some subterrestrial grub wriggling in their beaks. They might be prey in turn, chased by a fanged meerkat, a badger, predatory chipmunk packs, flurrying hunters at which Sham would stare, & which some of his trainmates strained with nets to snare.

THE MEDES’S JOURNEY was winding. Sham stared wistfully at each jag of salvage the switchers steered them past. As if one of them—that wire-wrapped stub of wheel, this dust-scoured refrigerator door, the glowing thing like a segment-missing grapefruit embedded in the shale of a shore—might wake up & do something. Could happen. Sometimes did. He thought his attentions were sneaky till he noticed the first mate & doctor watching him. Mbenday laughed at Sham’s blush; Fremlo did not.

“Young man.” The doctor looked patient. “Is this the sort of thing, then”—with a gesture at whatever ancient discarded object it was they left behind them in the dust—“for which you pine?”

Sham could only shrug.

They interrupted a group of person-sized star-nosed moles. The Medes snared two before the labour got away. Sham was bewildered that the sight of those kills, the squeals of those animals, made him wince more than the enormous slaughter of the bellowing southern moldywarpe. Still, it was more meat & fur. Sham snuck by the diesel car to see how full their holds were, to gauge how soon they would have to dock.

Fremlo gave him more doll-things to take apart & label & put back together again, to learn how the body worked. The doctor would examine the results of these macabre surgeries in horror. Fremlo put diagrams in front of him, at which Sham stared as if studying. Fremlo tested him on beginner medicine, at which Sham performed so consistently badly the doctor was almost more impressed than irritated.

Sham sat on deck, his legs dangling over the rushing dirt. He waited for epiphany. He had known soon after the journey started that medicine & he were not to be close friends. So he had auditioned fascinations. Tried scrimshaw, journal-keeping, caricature. Tried to pick up the languages of foreign crewmates. Hovered by card games to learn gamblers’ skills. These efforts at interest did not take.

Northish, & the frost grew less severe, plants less cowed. People stopped singing & started arguing again. The most robust of these altercations blossomed into fights. More than once Sham had to scurry out of the path of roaring men & women knocking bells & leather out of each other at the most minimal provocations.

I know what we need, Sham thought, as ill-tempered officers ordered the perpetrators to clean the heads. He’d overheard second-hand train-lore about what to do when tensions got great. We need some R&R. It was not long ago he had not known what those Rs might stand for. Perhaps bored women & men, he thought, needed Rice & Remembrance. Rollers & Restitution. Rhyme & Reason.

One drab afternoon under sweaty clouds, Sham joined a circle of off-duty trainsfolk hallooing on a cartop. They gathered around a rope-coil arena in which two grumpy insects lumbered at each other. They were tank beetles, heavy iridescent hand-sized things, solitary by nature & pugnacious when that nature was denied, so perfect for this nasty sport. They hesitated, seemingly disinclined to engage. Their handlers prodded them with hot sticks until they grudgingly charged, shells clattering like angry plastic.

It was interesting, Sham supposed, but their owners’ relentless provocation of their insects wasn’t pleasant to watch. In cages in his colleagues’ hands, he saw a burrowing lizard with anxious reptile sneer. A meerkat, & a spike-furred digging rat. The beetles were only the warm-up fight.

Sham shook his head. It wasn’t as if the beetles were any less press-ganged or unwilling than rats or rockrabbits, but even annoyed at the one-sidedness of his own mammalian solidarity, Sham couldn’t help feeling it. He backed away—& retreated right into Yashkan Worli. Sham staggered & careened into other onlookers, leaving a trail of annoyed growls.

“Where you going?” Yashkan shouted. “Too soft to watch?”

No, thought Sham. Just not in the mood.

“Come here! Soft belly & soft heart?” Yashkan catcalled, accompanied by Valtis Lind & a few others who could be bothered with the casual cruelties. A patter of slang name-calling, reminding Sham unpleasantly of school. He flushed beacon-bright.

“It’s only a joke, Sham!” Vurinam shouted. “Grow up! Get back here.”

But Sham left, thinking of the insults & those beetles pointlessly crippling each other & the scared animals waiting their turn.

THEY PASSED ANOTHER moler, diesel-powered like the Medes, its flags announcing it from Rockvane. The crews waved at each other. “Wouldn’t know how to mole if a suicidal moldywarpe talked them through it,” the Medes crew muttered through their smiles. Rockvane this & that, they went on, creative imprecations about their southern neighbour.

The rails here precluded an easy gam, a social meet-up, exchange of news & letters. So it was with surprise that Sham saw Gansiffer Brownall, the glum & intricately tattooed second mate, unroll a hunt-kite of the type they flew in Clarion, her austere far-off home.

What’s she doing? he thought. The captain attached a letter to the kite. Brownall sent it coiling like a live thing through the air, under the roiling shadowy smear of the upsky. Two, three swoops, & she dive-bombed it into the Rockvane train.

Within minutes, the Rockvaners threw up a final pennant. Sham stared as they receded. He was still learning the language of flags, but this one he knew. In response to the captain’s question, it said, Sorry, no.

FOUR

IT WAS COLD BUT NOTHING LIKE THE MERCILESS FRIGIDITY of deep Arctic. Sham watched the rumbustious ecosystems of burrows. Peeled-looking loops of worms broke earth. Head-sized beetles. Foxes & bandicoots hurried between clots of treeroots & the perforated metal & glass of up-thrust salvage. Fog closed in, obscuring rail after rail.

“Soorap,” Vurinam said. The trainswain was concentrating, experimenting with a new hat. New to him, that was. Vurinam shoved his black hair beneath it, cocked it variously with & against the wind.

“Did you not hear me at the betting?” Vurinam said. “Didn’t you want to watch?”

“Sort of,” Sham said. “But that ain’t reason enough, sometimes.”

“You’re going to have a hard time of it in this line of work,” Vurinam said. “If a bit of animal argy-bargy upsets you.”

“It ain’t the same,” Sham said. “That ain’t it. For one, we don’t go for moldywarpes for the laugh of it. & for two, they’ve got a good chance of getting us back.”

“Allowable,” Vurinam decided. “So it’s about size? If Yashkan was put up against a couple of mole rats, or a thing his own scale, you’d have no objections?”

“I’d lay a bet myself,” Sham muttered.

“Next time you should stick it out,” Hob said.

“Vurinam.” Sham made himself go on. “What was it the captain asked the Bagsaft? & when we caught the big one, why did she ask what colour it was?”

“Ah.” Vurinam stopped tweaking his headgear’s brim & turned to look at Sham. “Well.”

Sham said, “It’s her philosophy, ain’t it?”

“What would you know about that?” said Hob Vurinam after a moment.

“Nothing,” Sham mumbled. “I just sort of supposed she’s looking for something. Of a certain colour. So she must have one. She was asking if they’d seen it. What colour is it?”

“So very slow at back-gammony,” Vurinam said. Glanced at the crow’s nest & back at Sham. “So ill-suited to climbing.” Sham shifted, uncomfortable in Vurinam’s gaze. “Wistful at the sight of antique trash. Ain’t much of a doctor. But that right there is a good deduction, Sham Soorap.”

He leaned in. “She calls it ivory,” Vurinam said quietly. “Or bone-hue sometimes. I heard her describe it once as tooth-like. Now me I’d not backchat or argue for a treble-share of the moleprice if that’s what she wants to call it but if it were me, what I’d say is that it’s yellow.” He straightened. “Her philosophy,” he said, speaking into the wind, “is yellow.”

“You seen it?”

“A flatograph is all.” Vurinam made a humpback motion with his hand. “Big,” he said. “Really … big.” He whispered, “Big & yellow.”

Philosophies. Time was Sham’d wondered if that was what he wanted in his life, to surrender to a philosophy, hunt it implacably. But as he learnt more about the moletrains, it turned out they raised in him a queasiness, philosophies. A sort of nervous irritation. I might have known, he thought.

SHAM WAS RARELY TEMPTED to do anything at night but sleep. But after that conversation, he was too jittery to surrender to his dull dreams. He sat, so far as the bed-cubby would allow. Listened to the grind & snort of wind & metal of the resting moletrain. Thought things through. At last got up.

He crept shivering through the cabin & its sleepers. Not easy in a space so intricate & equipment-cramped. Every step a negotiation of bundled rope & rags, clattery iron, tin tools, the tchotchkes by which sentimental trainsfolk made rolling stock homely. From low ceilings dangled all sorts of things on which a head could bash. But days at rail had changed him. Sham was no longer a landlubber.

Up. Night-shifts moved on other roofdecks, but Sham kept low. Into the middle of the huge cold railsea dark where nightlights swung in line, each queried by its own loyal moths. There were glints on iron lines alongside, racing shadows on the ties. Sham saw no stars.

He wanted to make a way along the traintop, to the ropeladder, to the crow’s nest. Then he wanted to make a rude gesture towards where Vurinam slept & climb into the wind, to the platform where whichever poor soul on duty crouched by a two-bar heater & stared towards the unseen horizon.

Only the maddest captain would hunt, switch rail-to-rail, at night. The lookout was watching for lights, which might be other hunters, might at worst be pirates—or just very possibly might be current-running salvage. That, Sham told himself, was what he wanted to see.

Not merely—merely!—to spot one of the looming loops of concrete-scabbed girders or a broken black dome or rubbish or plaster-glass-&-circuitry artefacts that broke the railsea. But to find one powered, running by whatever occult source ran the rarest salvage. Emitting sound or light, obeying forgotten plans. He wanted that, not some captain’s stupid philosophy.

Sham looked at the dangling ladder. Swore. As if it weren’t too cold & he too scared. & if he did get up there & see anything, nothing would happen. Captain Naphi would mark it on a chart, to pass to others. The Medes would keep hunting moles.

I’d rather find nothing, Sham thought, as sulkily as a child. He crept his freezing way back to bed, refusing to feel ashamed of himself.

THE NEXT DAY when a lookout announcement made Sham’s heart surge, it wasn’t the call for a moldywarpe, but it wasn’t really salvage either. It was something he hadn’t even considered.

FIVE

THERE ARE TWO LAYERS TO THE SKY, & FOUR LAYERS to the world. No secrets there. Sham knew that, this book knows that, & you know that, too.

There’s the downsky, that stretches two, three miles & a biscuit from the railsea up. That high, the air suddenly goes dinge-coloured, & more often than not roils with toxic cloud. That is the border of the upsky, in which hunt oddities, ravenous alien flyers. Mostly unseen in the dirty mist, thank goodness, except when the cover clears & makes watchers shudder. Except when their limbs & bits reach down to grab some ill-advisedly ambitious bird flying above what’s sensible.

We’re not talking about that. We’re talking about the fourfold of the world.

There is the subterrestrial, where the digging beasts dig, where there are caverns, roots, ancient seams of salvage & maybe the iron & wood of long-forgotten or not-yet-seen lines of railsea.

The railsea, sitting on the flatearth; that is the second level. Tracks & ties, in the random meanders of geography & ages, in all directions. Extending forever.

The lands & the countries & the continents are level three. They jut above the rails. They rise on the grundnorm, the foundation of hard earth & stone too dense for the diggers of level one to hole. That makes them habitable. These are the countless archipelagos, solitary islands, the nations & questionable continents.

& over & above all that, where the peaks of the larger lands reach, protrude through the miles of breathable downsky into the upsky, above the borderline, are the cloggy, claggy highlands. On which poison-mist-&-dodgy-air-obscured levels creep, scurry & stagger the cousins of the upsky flyers, poison-breathing parvenu predators. Like them, troublesome biology, originating elsewhere.

Of those four zones there are two & a half where human life goes on. Inland, on the islands looking over iron & ties & savage dirt of the railsea, there are orchards & meadows. There are pools & quick streams. Fertile, gentle soil full of crops. This is where farmers farm, next to where towns town. That is where the landbound, the mass of humanity, lives. Above train travels & troubles.

Edging such places is the railseaside, called the littoral zone. Those are the shorelands. Port towns, from where transport, freight & hunting trains set out. Where lighthouses light ways past rubbish reefs breaking earth. “Give me the inland or give me the open rails,” say both the railsailor & the landlubber, “only spare me the littoral-minded.”

There are many such homilies among trainsfolk. They are particularly given to sayings & rules. Like: “Always do your best for those in peril on the railsea.”

SIX

AGAIN, THE CIRCLE OF OFF-DUTY TRAINSPEOPLE bickering over the odds of fighting animals. Again, the prodding & tweaking of the handlers.

The day was bright & cold & windy, & made Sham blink. He sidled up. Oh, sneck up, he thought, in unease he couldn’t explain to himself, when he saw on what the audience was betting.

They were birds. Not indigenous to these latitudes, either—pygmy fighting cockerels. They must have been kept & coddled just for this moment. Each was smaller than a sparrow. Their tiny wattles wobbled, their minuscule cockscombs throbbed, they clucked & cawed chest-out in miniature swagger, strutted in circles, taking each other’s measure. On their lower legs they wore wicked little spurs. As was traditional for the smallest fighting birds, theirs weren’t metal but hardened, polished bramble thorns.

Yes, Sham could see the careful expertise with which some in the crowd were appraising the belligerents. He could appreciate the ferocity & bravery of the sudden madly fluttering assault, as bird went for tiny bird. He heard the odds, the mathematics of savagery. But strive as he did to overcome distaste, to watch with enthusiasm, or even with calm interest, Sham could only wince, & could focus only on the fact that the birds were very small.

Over slow seconds, he leaned over the fighting grounds. What was all this, he thought? He spectated himself, as if his body was a puppet. What is Sham up to? Sham wondered.

Ah, there was his answer. It wasn’t only mammals for which he felt sorry, it turned out. Sham was tugging his sleeves over his fingers, while the rest of the trainsfolk watched with increasing bewilderment, not even interrupting him, so methodically did he move. Now he was reaching down into the flurry of dust & feather-fluff & blood where the two tiny cockerels struggled to slaughter each other. Then right hand, left hand, Sham picked them up.

The wind, the squawks, the huffs of the engine continued, but it still felt in that moment as if everything was silent. Ah. That sound was in his head. It was as if he could hear the half-approving, half-disapproving amusement of Troose & Voam at his action. & behind them—a surprise to him—a whisker of the same conflicted emotion from Sham’s long-gone mum & dad. Observing him.

Everyone on-deck stared at Sham. “What,” said Yashkan, “are you doing?”

I have no idea, he thought. He kept watching, to learn the answer. Ah, again. Having rescued the birds, now, it seemed, Sham was running away.

He snapped abruptly back into his own body as if his soul was catapulted by elastic. He came to himself running full-pelt, his breath heaving, his legs drumming as the train veered. He vaulted obstacles on the cartop deck. Behind him were outraged shouts.

A glance, & Sham saw chasing him, shaking their fists & yelling vengeance & punishment, not only Brank & Zaro, the big hauler & little switcher whose birds he carried; not only Yashkan & Lind, a bit behind them, eager to get hold of Sham for more vindictive reasons; but a great gathering of people who’d placed bets.

Sham was ungainly, but he jumped over chests, capstans & knee-high chimney stubs, ducked under the bars segmenting one deck-bit from another. Moved faster than he thought he could. Faster than his pursuers thought he could. & all without using his hands, each of which contained a carefully not-crushed fighting rooster. Sham ran from one end of the deck to the other, a trail of women & men behind him, shouting instructions to each other to head him off here & grab hold of him there. The birds pecked & scratched, & even tiny as they were & through the cloth wrapping his hands, they drew Sham’s blood. He beat his own reflex to fling them away. He was surrounded. He scuttled up a ladder, onto a storage bin.

Nowhere to go. Brank & Zaro approached. He swallowed at the sight of their fury. But as many of his pursuers were laughing as looked angry. Vurinam was applauding. Even Shossunder the cabin boy smiled. “Well run, boy!” Mbenday shouted. Sham held out his hands full of terrified birdlings as if they were weapons. As if he would throw them, thorns & all. What, he thought, am I doing?

Desperately, he considered hurling the birds straight up, to where the wind gusted. Their wings were clipped, but flapping them frantically, they could fall in controlled feathery motion right off the deck. At least that way they’d avoid the combat that appeared to be their lot. But when they landed they would, within instants, be something’s lunch. He hesitated.

There was no way he was getting out of this without a whack or two, he thought, as Brank & Zaro came at him. & then, just then as the triumphant Brank lifted his arms to pounce, there was a halloo from the crow’s nest. The train was approaching something.

A frozen moment. Then Mbenday shouted, “Stations!” The crew scattered. Brank, Zaro waited, till Sham, grudging & without a choice, handed back the birds.

“Finish this later,” Zaro whispered.

Whatever, thought Sham. At least the roosters had had a brief reprieve. He moved slowly again, all the energy that had hurtled him so uncharacteristically fast quite gone. Breathing heavily, Sham clambered off his little platform to find out what had been seen.

“WHAT IS IT?” Sham said. Trainsman Unkus Stone ignored him, & Mbenday tutted irritably.

They were in a stretch of atolls the size of houses. Woolly squirrels watched the Medes from where shoreline trees met the metal of the railsea. Across a sparsely railed stretch, Sham could see a line of much newer ruin. A crumpled silhouette.

He answered his own question. “A wreck.”

A small & shattered train. An engine, lying on its side in the dust. Completely off the rails.

“SO ATTENTION THEN,” the captain intercommed from her dais, in her usual mournful tones. “No flags, no activity. We’ve heard no maydays. No flares. We know zero. You know the protocols.” Salvage, the crew of a moler was not equipped to deal with. But a vehicle in distress? All legitimate trainsfolk would drop everything for a potential rescue. That was rail-code. The captain’s sigh, which she did not bother turning away from the microphone to disguise, suggested she obeyed this moral obligation without enthusiasm. “Get ready.” Any deviation from her own project, Sham thought—her fervour to follow, find, finesse her philosophy—she must resent.

Switchers took the train across the tracks, closer. It was tiny, that ruin, one car, one engine. It lay like a tipped cow.

Vehicles from moling nations across the railsea plied the bays of the Salaygo Mess archipelago, & of Streggeye Land his home. Sham had seen many train-shapes in his time, at harbour, & illustrations of more, in his studies. Even ruined as this one was by its damage, it looked utterly unfamiliar.

IT WAS EASIER than he’d thought it would be to insinuate himself onto the cart sent to investigate. Sham ran about on inventy errands as if by Fremlo’s instruction, &, still buoyed up by adrenaline from his foiled animal rescue, got behind Hob Vurinam lining up for duty & jumped into the swinging cart as if ordered. Muttered something about first aid.

Shossunder, still on the main deck, raised an eyebrow, but obviously thought it beneath him to complain. Thank the Stonefaces for the cabin boy’s pride, Sham thought. Second mate Gansiffer Brownall leaned from the cart as it puttered toward the wreck & yelled into a loudhailer. “Anyone there? Ahoy!”

Ain’t no one alive in that, Sham thought. That’s medical knowledge right there, he added to himself. That’s as mashed as if an angel’s had at it.

The sideways engine had no chimney: not steam-powered then. The first carriage bulged with machine remnants. It was scrunched up. Its portholes were blocked & broken. A thornbush had grown its sinewy way all the way through the carriage.

The crew was hushed. They creaked slowly closer through flat light. Ginger-pelted & multicoloured daybats rose in congregation from where they’d been fiddling in the ruin. They circled, complaining, swept out to the nearest island.

Technically, this might be salvage. No one living on the remains? Then anything the crew found & could carry was theirs. But glad as Sham was of all the drama, that would be nu-salvage. What floated his boat, what rung his bell, what he pined for, was the glamour of arche-salvage. The most incomprehensible & ancient remains.

Little animals bustled through the grass. The Medes loitered in the distance, the rest of the trainsfolk staring as the jollycart ghosted to a stop, nudging the dusty engine.

“Now,” said Brownall. “Volunteers.” The crew eyed her. She pursed tattooed lips & pointed. “Can get in from here. No one asks you to touch the ground.” They checked weapons. “Vurinam,” Brownall said. The trainswain bounced on his toes & took off his battered hat. “Teodoso. Thorn & Klimy, Unkus Stone, here with me. The rest of you, double-line. In you go. Top to bottom. Anyone, anything, let’s find it. Where you off to?” She said that last to Sham, as he stood with the others as if to board.

He was busy being staggered by his own uncharacteristic behaviour. “You … said we was going in …”

“Soorap, don’t bugger about,” she said in the melancholy accent of the island of Clarion. “Did I moan about you being on the cart? I don’t notice? Didn’t know you had the front, boy. Don’t push your luck. Aft.” She pointed. “& …” She put her fingers to her lips.

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.

Sham saw Brank. Sham started a moment, but Brank barely looked at him. There were more important matters than briefly pilfered cockerel on the big man’s mind. Even Yashkan was too distracted to glance at Sham with more than a moment’s malevolence. He thought for a moment that he had escaped anger. It came for him, though, & from an unexpected direction.

“Stonefaces!” Vurinam emerged from the surgery. “You had to fart around with whatever you were doing in there, didn’t you?” It took Sham a moment to realise it was him the trainswain was shouting at.

“Hold on a minute,” Sham said. “I never—”

“Had to prick up the ears of the bloody mole rats & was I not telling you to get out? Now look!” Vurinam stamped. He gesticulated towards where Unkus slept.

Sham tried to think of what to say.

“Steady, mate,” said someone. “Sham didn’t mean—”

“Well,” yelled Vurinam. “ ‘Didn’t mean’ never buttered no bloody parsnips, did it?”

“Attention,” the captain’s voice interrupted from the corridor speakers. “Unkus Stone,” she said, “needs a hospital. Dr. Fremlo assures me we don’t have the resources aboard. So.” You could hear a big sigh down the intercom. “Detour.” Another pause. “Switchers, brakers, engineers, stand by to set course,” she said. “Set course for Bollons.”

There were moments of silence. “Bollons?” Vurinam said.

“Stations!” the captain’s voice cracklingly demanded, & everyone moved.

“Unkus can’t be in a good way,” someone muttered.

“Why?” said Sham to the trainswoman’s retreating back. “How? How bad is it?”

“Bad enough,” Vurinam shouted back, “that we’re going where we’re going. Bad enough that we’re going to the nearest land, when it’s Bollons.”

He stamped away, leaving silence, a cold corridor, & Sham alone. Sham shivered. He wondered where to go. He lifted up the bat & stared into its confused animal eyes. Don’t be scared, he thought. You need my help.