Railsea

BURROWING OWL

(Athene cunicularia trux)

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

Credit: China Miéville (illustration credit 5.1)

FIFTY-EIGHT

INVESTIGATE A MAP. LOOK FOR THE LEAST-CHARTED, least-visited, wildest, most strange, most dangerous, all-around particularly problematical parts of the railsea.

A fringe of unknownness spreads from a point at the northwestern edge of the world. There are patches of troublesome sparsely sketched-out rails eastward of that mountain & highland & monster-bounded place. The darkest polar iceholes of the south have their terrible aspects. & so on. At these wild parts the rails seems drunk on rarities. The rails misbehave. Switches do not do as they are bid, ground is not so strong & stable as it appears, there are chicanes & trouble, the iron itself has been made to mess with trains. A most scandalous wrongness.

Here, deities tinkered with each other’s rails, warring sisters & brothers, to ruin each other’s plans. Such stretches have been there as long as there has been a railsea, & will remain as long as it remains.

It would be foolish to say any such place was impassable. History is long, there are, have been & will be many trains. Most things eventually happen. Less controversial, however, not even controversial at all, is the assertion that such stretches are at least horribly difficult.

FIFTY-NINE

SALVORS SALVAGED—ONE IN PARTICULAR. PIRATES PIRATED. Naval trains hunted & claimed islands for Manihiki. & animals?

Talpa ferox. Never the most predictable mole. Its rapacity & power made it subterrestrial king. & now?

There was no remaining doubt that Mocker-Jack, the captain’s philosophy, had changed its behaviour. Was tunnelling more quickly, zigging less & zagging not quite so much as it had once done, straight-lining more. You might almost have called what it was doing “fleeing.”

The captain’s thing for the moldywarpe had infected her crew. Enthusiasm is a virus, as is curiosity, as is obsession. Some are immune: a few spat disgustedly as they raced, their gob disappearing into the dirt; some lobbied the officers as subtly as they could to encourage a turnaround, a more traditional hunt. Vurinam was troubled. But they were the minority.

Naphi’s officers took turns reading the little scanner, & the train did not stop, no matter if it was night. They roared on past isolated communities, clots of lights like firebugs, past rocks. Mocker-Jack went north. Veering from the usual haunts.

“You’d have liked this,” whispered Dr. Fremlo, on the deck, watching the nothing of night, watching the train’s narrow lights unzip the darkness & zip it up again. “I hope life as a salvor’s treating you well.”

ON A REEF of salvage were remnants of rust-ruined trains, scattered bones of trainsfolk. The windblown carapace segments of great boring bugs, beetles, recoiled centipedes many people long. Birds avoided that sparsely railed place, but circling it right then at least one thing was flying.

The rubbishy earth churned. Something rose. With a whine, a fussing, a spray of dust & the shards of refuse, up came a metal-flanged spinning spire, a machine a carriage long that reared up out of the below & slapped down skew-whiff across the rails. A subterrain of sleek intimidating design. The dust of its passage sank around it, its hatch opened, a head poked out. The subterrainer scanned her surrounds. She lowered her eyepiece from a face so filthy it looked more oil & grease than skin.

“Alright then,” she muttered to herself. “We’re clear.” She clicked her fingers. With serial clanks & gusts like sulky breaths, the digger’s chassis began to unfold into many-segmented arms, mechanical grabs. Travisande Sirocco looked out on the rubbishscape with professional detachment. En route to where rumours had a merchant train newly smashed to scavenge. Sirocco pursed her lips. You might have thought that she was estimating prices of what junk she saw & you would have been right.

Something dived & yawed above her. Agitated in the air.

“Hello,” Sirocco said. Up went her goggles, a whir & click of zooms. “Hello indeed,” she said. “You’re not from around here.” She pursed her lips again, & this time it had nothing to do with money.

“Some meat,” she said. “& a rope. Looks like I’m going sky-baiting. I have a guest.”

SIXTY

SHAM HID. FOR HOURS, THAT WAS MORE OR LESS ALL HE did. He did it hard, he did it with all his energy.

After that crazy leap to rock-strewn freedom, there he was, exploded pirate train behind him, scattered & slid across the rails, the Manihiki navy powering in, survivors shrieking, the sounds of the last bits of battle, the snarls of predators. The haul of prisoners.

Sham had slid down the scree, into a steep slope hidden from the wind. Into the shadow of stones, shivering as the cold of that isolated islet hit him. Sham scootched into a hollow & hugged his knees. & waited. Both the fighting forces wanted him, & he wanted neither of them.

What was he supposed to do?

The noises didn’t last very long. He heard the last of the pirates wait until the last of the navy had investigated the last of the audible sounds. Hunting, among other things, for him. He heard the great train go back the way it had come. He heard the jollycarts, that in some patrician mercy the Manihiki forces used to pick up the pirate wounded, putter away.

Sham tried not to think about the fact that he could not stay like this forever. He closed his eyes, & tried to stop the image looping in his head, the sight of Robalson gusted away in smoke & fire.

In the second or third hour after the last skirmish, long after there were no more sounds, he listened to the absolute trainlessness of the island. He heard railgulls, wind, dust sandpapering stone. He searched his pockets as carefully as any explorer on the wrong bit of a map ever did. Found some nuts & the stump of a block of tacky. Ate a miserable meal.

& then it was dark. How & when did it go dark?

& then he slept.

Without much else to do, stripped of options, exhausted, fearful, hungry, thoroughly & utterly alone, Sham retreated out of wakefulness &, surprised that he even could, slept.

HE WOKE VERY EARLY with flinty cold going through him & the sky light but not bright. He was stiff like a miserable puppet, like a bundle of damp twigs. Sham hugged himself a while & listened to the wolflike snuffling of his stomach. Eventually what got him up was that he was bored of being terrified.

That day he explored. On the railsea off the coast he saw the remains of the pirate train. & here & there the grisly remains of those pirates dead & not taken.

His island was perhaps a couple of miles round. Its sides were absurdly steep, shagged in ivy & vines of various scrubby kinds, from some of which hung little nodules of fruit or something. Gingerly he nibbled at them. Horrible, bitter, sappy grossness he spat out. His stomach yowled. There was water, though. It dribbled down from some on-high aquifer. Sham put his lips into the streamlet & slurped, not even minding the cold & mineral bite of it.

The island was full of noises. The rustlings of birds, the chatterings of other things, that went silent when he approached only to sound off again behind Sham’s back. He climbed as far as he safely could & stared at the upper reaches where, maybe, the peak prodded into the upsky. He descended to the pebbled shore, where the island met the dark & ancient rails.

A few scrips & scraps of stuff lay near the shoreline. Stuff he could maybe even get hold of if he went for it with a stick. Things lost from pirate pockets, the debris of trainsplosions. Stuff too small for salvors, too drab for glint-loving birds.

Thinking of salvors made Sham think of the Shroakes. Though they were not salvors, of course. Perhaps that’s why he had thought of them. Minds, he thought, can be funny that way. Sham considered Caldera, only a little younger than he, commanding her impossibly advanced train. She would not stop for sloughed-off junk like this.

There were many words for what she had. Oomph, verve, drive, élan. Caldera & Dero seemed full of all of them. It was as if there was none left for anyone else. Sham sat on the shore. Sort of fell onto it, cross-legged. He picked up a bit of wood. He picked at it with his nail.

This must be a notorious clutch of train-wrecking islands. He could see others, out to railsea, beyond the shells of carriages & engines. The mashed-up Tarralesh was just the latest. Even so close to maps’ edges, salvors had come, cleared out the worst or best of the ruination. But there was plenty of unreclaimable junk out there.

Sham looked down. He realised that he had been using his thumbnail to give the old wood he carried a face.

The nearest island to his, he saw, was lusher, lower, flatter. Covered with trees. Maybe they grew fruit. Sham licked his lips. Between this beach & that one were perhaps two miles of rails. Between each of those rails were stretches of rumbustious earth. & motion. Animal motion. Sham shivered.

A spine of stony offshoot islands trailed from the shore, on each of them weeds & squabbling birds. Stones bent up broken-tooth-style between ties to send trainsfolk to the ground. Sham could see remnants from cargo holds spilled & mummified or rotted; a rust-clogged handcart; a cairn of ruined engine parts; a crushed caboose.

His stomach muttered, impatient little animal. What do you want from me? he asked it, & tried to keep his panic under control. A wodge of birds came at him, & for a moment he imagined it might be Daybe at their head, come to snap affectionately at his face. It wasn’t. It was just some anonymous, ill-tempered, guano-bombing gull.

That other island looked increasingly delicious. I’m not a kid anymore, Sham thought. Shouldn’t take anything for granted. A big bird cawed as he thought that, & Sham took it as applause. All my life, he thought, they’ve told me about the dangers of the earth. Maybe it’s true. But … He kept his eyes on the foody island across the narrow railsea strait. But maybe it’s also useful for them if everyone believes it. If people are too scared to just go.

Without giving himself time to think, Sham set out walking.

He stuck out his chest, kept his stare ahead. He marched off the edge of the rock shore. Stepped over the closest rail, put his foot between ties & iron & continued.

I’m walking, he thought. I’m on the earth. He kept going, crossing rail after rail. He laughed. He sped up. He whooped. He tripped. He sprawled. He thumped the ties. The earth jiggled.

Oh. Yes, the earth definitely moved. Sham rose, no longer laughing. There he was, stopped, looking back at the shore. Which looked an awfully long way away.

It wasn’t a jiggle anymore, what was going on in the ground, it was a full-blown shudder. Again. He watched aghast as a ridge came up. Something moved underground. It was coming towards him. Experiment fail, Sham thought, turned & ran.

He ran, & behind him there was a boom, a crash, the grind of the ground. Muck showered Sham as whatever that was coming burst the earth from below. It closed on him, clattering.

Sham wailed & accelerated. With two last huge leaps he made it back to the baked, rocky earth, almost blown by a howl from his pursuer, something like a kettle screaming & an electrical short, all at once. He stumbled, rolled, turned to see.

Shiny segmented shell, scissoring pincer on its rear, bum-jaws. It wriggled down again out of the light. He just glimpsed it. An earwig. Oh Stonefaces. Sham was lucky. In a different mood it might have come up onto the shore after him.

He picked up a big rock, chucked it onto the disturbed earth of the earwig’s wake. Another rumbling, & he saw the head of a meat-eating worm. A flurry of fur & metal-hard claws as a vicious digging shrew came just up enough to yank it down.

Everywhere Sham looked, the ground between ties, the dirt around rails, the muck shoring up stays, seethed. He yelled at the excited birds, as the little ones laughed at him & the bigger urged him to get farther back. “Albloodyright,” he yelled at them. “The earth is dangerous!”

SIXTY-ONE

AT THIS POINT, THE INTENTION HAD BEEN TO SAY that it was such slippery western terrain as few trainsfolk ever see, such strange wrong rails, that the Shroakes, by then, had reached, & in which & on which they travelled. But the time is not yet right.

The instant it is feasible, the Shroakes will be found. It’s Caldera & Dero, after all: as if they could be ignored.

There are monsters under the earth, & in the trees above it, & swinging from those trees to the rooftop decks of trains, & there are creatures that can barely be called animals watching from the upsky, & any of them might find, might sniff for, might zero in on the Shroakes. It would be wrong to leave them forever. But though the rails themselves are everywhere in profusion, fanned out & proliferating in all directions, we can ride only one at a time.

This is the story of a bloodstained boy. The Shroakes deserve their own telling, & will get it. Though their things & Sham’s are plaited together now, inextricable.

SIXTY-TWO

COULD IT BE? OH, THEY THOUGHT IT COULD. THEY began to believe that they, the crew of the Medes, would make it into the Museum of Completion.

Once again, as the Medes continued across the railsea, zeroing in on Mocker-Jack, they talked of Shedni ap Yes, who’d caught an elusive meerkat commensurate with playful pointlessness. Hoomy’s prey, the desert tortoise known as Boshevel, a dome-shelled symbol of tenacity. Guya & Sammov, who had sought & found a termite queen (doubt) & a bull-sized bandicoot (prejudice).

It was common to insist that the worst thing that could happen to a person was to get the wisdom for which they strove. “Feh,” said Dr. Fremlo. “Believe me, most people really do want what they want. Downsides there may be to getting it, but they’re heftily outweighed by the up, & by the downs of not doing so.”

There was no pretence any more that this was any kind of regular hunt. Whether out of fidelity to Naphi, excitement at what they might achieve, or the suddenly-less-unthinkable possibility of riches that a finishing train would accrue, most of the crew were content to ignore other moldywarpes & follow the transceiver. Into scrappy corners of the railsea where great southern moldywarpes had no business burrowing, that should have been too warm, with ground too hard or too soft, too marbled by too many salvage seams, like fat in a steak.

In a tiny townlet the Medes was gouged by diesel-merchants who correctly gauged that they were in too great a hurry to barter. They surprised the burghers of Marquessa by waving at the gravelly shore but not stopping. Beyond all but the most speculative maps they went. Into badrail. Wild shores where trees shook with the movements of animals of the interior. A nameless atoll from where the train was shot at by small-arms fire. The bullets only ricocheted with dramatic pings, but it was a scare.

“Not long now,” they reassured each other. But all of them feared the malevolent cunning that Mocker-Jack, great & terrible but dumb beast, should not possess. But seemed to. It led them to where the rails were stained dark.

“Been a while since anyone came this way,” Dramin said.

& across an empty reach of sky came a roar, a bass boom like the declaration of a storm. It shook the hair on the crew’s heads, made the train vibrate, gusted them with wind & dust. The silence in its aftermath was silenter than any silence had been for a long time. Yashkan tried to snigger, but nerves meant it did not take.

“What in the Stonefaces’ name …” Vurinam started to say, as if it was a mystery. The captain herself answered him.

“Mocker-Jack.”

She leaned over the rails. “Mocker-Jack,” she shouted. “Mocker-Jack, Mocker-Jack.” She turned at last & bellowed at no one in particular & at everyone, “Make—this—train—go—faster.”

The train accelerated towards the sound, into dangerous railsea strewn with rubble. The unseen moldywarpe called again.

“Blimey,” someone whispered. The way ahead was blocked by huge rock pillars. To port was an enormous declivity. A hole in the fabric of the earth, miles across, hundreds of stomach-dropping yards deep. Lines reached its edges & jutted & were broken. The sinkhole was scattered with ties & ruined rails. It hurt to see it. Rails beyond the reach of angel or salvor. There were the ruins of trains down there.

Mocker-Jack called a third time. It was near. The Medes headed for a passage between a gnarled-up spire & the great canyon.

“Switchers,” Mbenday shouted. “Ready.” They lined up with remote controls & switchhooks. “Come now, gentlemen & ladies. Let us show this beast how molers move.” Ebba Shappy threw her lever, & the junction ahead clicked smoothly into place as the Medes approached.

But then, audibly & terribly, with their front wheels scant feet from it, it switched again, reverted, unbidden, & the Medes passed over it & veered to port, heading straight for the gorge.

SIXTY-THREE

PANDEMONIUM. THE VOID WAS CLOSE. THE CAPTAIN was yelling, & with the quickest of quick thinking, the most vigorous button-pushing & lever-smacking on the part of the most heroic switchers, another gauge turned them from immediate disaster. Jens Thorn was leaning out, prodding buttons to take them star’d. “They won’t stay, Captain,” he yelled. The switches were switching back, junctions conspiring to tip them into the pit.

The switchers strained with the mechanisms, defeated the junctions straining one by terrifying one to send them port. They veered star’d towards the rock pillar, fighting to keep going. “A godsquabble booby-trap,” Mbenday shouted.

“Captain?” said Vurinam. “Is everything alright?”

“No,” Naphi said. “It’s something …” She stared at the shaft near which they had to pass, that cast an immensely long shadow across the world. They were in that shadow. The captain lifted her microphone & said, “To arms.” For seconds, the crew did not understand. “To arms!” she said again. Then came screams.

Uncoiling from where they had lain disguised with stone-grey skins, emerging suddenly from cave-holes in the stiletto-island’s sides, came snakelike things.

“What,” Vurinam whispered, “in the name of That Apt Ohm …?”

There were three, there were five, there were seven of the things. Swaying, flailing, eyeless but not mouthless—on each was a circle rimmed with oozing gums & chitinous teeth.

“Weapons!” Someone was shouting. Someone was firing. Molers raced to get guns. “Weapons now!” The wavering things drew themselves up. Their pulsing mouths drooled, then spat, leaving gluey spittle where they struck. The trainsfolk shot, & the attackers were harried by bullets like frenetic flies. The tentacular things drew back, then, whip-quick, struck.

One closed with a terrible sucking noise on Yorkaj Teodoso’s chest. He screamed. It tugged him from the traintop deck, dangled him, reeled him in to the island they passed. “Fire! Fire!” Captain Naphi shouted. Trainsfolk were screaming Teodoso’s name. Where shots hit the attacking things’ skins they sprayed dark blood. They recoiled, but not far, not for long; they came down blindly grubbing, their mouths moistly smacking.

They launched themselves at the crew. Yashkan howled. Fired the pistol he held blindly behind him as he ran. He almost hit Lind. Mbenday ducked under one of the looping coils, leapt another, smacked at a third with a machete. The slippery thing spasmed & oozed great slopping dollops of slime.

“Fire & drive!” the captain shouted. “Accelerate! On, will you?” Down came the coils again, & again found prey. One grabbed Cecilie Klimy by her left arm, one by her right. Her crewmates howled her name. They ran for her, they grabbed for her, Lind & Mbenday & even gibbering Yashkan pawing to try to get hold of her, but with awful collaboration the two mouth-things moved in concert, hauled her shrieking off as the train moved. The crew were firing now with purpose, were slashing with something other than utter panic. “Klimy!” they shouted. “Teodoso!”

Their colleagues were gone. Pulled out of sight, into the rock. Tendril-beast after tendril-beast tried to grip the train as it went, suckering onto the grinding wheels, the splintering deck.

“You will not!” It was Naphi herself shouting. Not standing back, right there, shooting with a weapon in one hand, swivelling through a succession of spikes & blades in her left limb until she fixed on a nastily serrated edge & slashed at a coiling enemy.

“We have to go back!” Vurinam shouted, but the train kept moving, accelerating, as the creatures tried again. “We have to go back for them!” Benightly roared & fired a big rapid gun & the monsters shuddered. A ripple corkscrewed around & went the height of the island.

“Oh my god!” said Fremlo. “It’s all one thing!”

On the stone the necks conjoined into a single thick ropy body that wound into the upsky. At the landform’s very top, at the level of the toxic clouds, was the creature’s diffuse gas-filled body. It was like the canopy of a great tree all fruited with watching eyes.

The mountainside shook, the shoreline curved away. The Medes reached a safe distance from the hole on one side & from the monster on the other. It stopped in the sunlight. The bewildered & battered crew gathered. Some were crying.

“What in the name of holy bloody hell?” someone said.

“Siller,” Fremlo said. The doctor looked at the captain. At the thing behind them. They couldn’t see its tendrils any more. They’d retreated & lay still. “It’s called a siller. Breathes up there, dips its feeding toes down here. & that …” The doctor pointed at the canyon. “That’s the Kribbis Hole. That’s why that siller hunts here. Because to stay out of the hole, you have to get close to it.”

“Those rails!” Vurinam shouted. “That shunt you into the damn hole! Why don’t the angels fix them?”

“They aren’t broken,” said Dr. Fremlo. “In this place, that’s how the rails are supposed to be. This place is an old, old, old trap.”

“Captain,” Vurinam said. “We have to go back.” Captain Naphi was examining her tracker. She didn’t speak. “I thought this place was a bloody legend,” Vurinam gabbled. He stared at Naphi & abruptly stood straighter. “You knew,” he said.

There was silence. Naphi raised her head to meet his eyes. She did not look cowed. She put the scanner down. Spread her artificial fingers.

“Don’t shilly-shally, Mr. Vurinam,” she said. “Make your accusation.”

“You knew where we were,” he breathed. “But because your damned moldywarpe’s nearby, you said nothing. Couldn’t be bothered to have us go the long way round.” He choked up & stopped. The crew were all open-eyed & staring.

“Anyone else?” Naphi said at last. “Anyone similar accusations? Speak freely.” Nothing. “Very well. I’ve heard of this place, as have you. & it is true that when Mr. Mbenday said the switches were misbehaving, a possibility occurred to me. So if you arraign me before your court accused of having halfheld notions, fleeting recollections, then I plead guilty.

“If, however, you claim I deliberately allowed my crew to steer themselves into danger, then sir how dare you?” She walked towards Vurinam. “I did not hear you complaining about our route nor our objective. I haven’t heard you declining your share of whatever comes should we be successful in this endeavour.”

Vurinam wriggled under her gaze. “You still keep checking that scanner,” he said. “You still want to know where that bloody mole is, more’n anything.”

“Yes,” Naphi shouted. She raised her hand. Her louder, clattering one. She shook it. “I do. That’s what we hunt. That’s what we’re doing here. If anything’s going to provide for Klimy’s family now, to keep alive her memory & that of Teodoso, to ensure that this terrible moment has a purpose, it is bringing the beast down. Snaring the philosophy. So, yes, Mr. Vurinam. I want Mocker-Jack.”

The captain still clenched her fist at him. Its lights winked, it rattled. But—wait. “Your arm,” Vurinam said. “Captain. That thing hurt you, you’re—bleeding?”

Her constructed limb had cracked. &, what made no sense, the split was oozing blood.

“How can she …?”

“Where’s it …?”

The captain herself stared, as fascinated by the red drips as anyone else. Fremlo was there in a moment, prodding & squinting at the damaged limb. Naphi seemed to wake, tried to shake herself free, but the doctor was having none of it, kept on with the examination.

“You’re cut rather badly, Captain,” Fremlo announced at last. With scorn, the doctor released the arm as if it was hot, turned to face the crew, & continued. “Your arm, Captain. The one that appears to have been encased in metal & molebone, all this time. That is in fact not missing at all, only hidden. Your still-present left arm is injured, Captain.”

Silence spread like a slick. Naphi drew herself calmly up. Not an instant of embarrassment crossed her face. Slowly, with ostentation, refusing to flinch from her crew’s gazes, she held up the bleeding limb.

“Indeed,” she said at last. “I will require you to take care of this for me.”

“All this time,” Vurinam whispered. Mbenday was staring at Naphi, back at his friend Vurinam, back & forth. “You were lying!” Vurinam said. “It was like some game! Oh, I get it. It was so they’d take you serious.” Vurinam shimmied pugnaciously in his dusty coat, his eyes wide. “So you didn’t get left out.”

It had been a badge of intensity, of honour, that pretended lack. Had Naphi feared that fully in possession of her original body, she would not possess some requisite rigour? Certainly it looked that way.

She drew herself up. “There are those,” she said. She was using her most splendid voice. “Whose faith. In their philosophies. Follows from something being taken from them. Who need that terrible bite & rupture to spur their fascination. Their revenge.

“It is weak of them,” she said. “I would not so wait. Nor, however, would I fail to know what it is to suffer those agonies for a philosophy. & so. & hence.” She raised her mechanical limb-glove. “I fail to see your point. My rigour, Mr. Vurinam, is such that I have both made & refused to make a sacrifice.”

It was a good line. One by one, the crew looked back at Vurinam. He stamped in frustration.

“That don’t even bloody mean anything!” he despaired. “It’s complete bloody gibberish!”

“Something occurs to me,” said Dr. Fremlo. “Arguably, right now it ain’t where Mocker-Jack is that should concern us. Forget for a moment our captain’s skin, bones & circuitry.” There was a noise, an engine grind, from somewhere. “Let’s focus on what’s important. We’ve just lost two friends.” The doctor let that sit with them a moment. “The issue is not so much where the moldywarpe is, as what it’s doing.”

Fremlo pointed at the pass through which they’d come. “Do you think it lay just so, sounded off like it did, just at this point, when we were where we were, by chance? It wanted us to go through there. It was sending us into the trap.”

“Don’t be crazy,” someone started to say.

“It’s leading us into danger,” Fremlo interrupted. “The mole is trying to kill us.”

Only the wind spoke, for a long while. It seemed as if Mocker-Jack might laugh, as if they might hear a booming moldywarpe snigger, but no.

“Oh, Stonefaces help us,” said Zhed the Yimmer at last. Captain Naphi moved her fingers like horse’s hooves. “What do we do?” Zhed said. “Things couldn’t get any weirder.”

It would have been simply rude for reality not to respond to a challenge like that. As that last word came out of Zhed’s mouth, there came the whistling noise of something plummeting, & a small, firm, heavy body fell out of the air into Vurinam’s hands.

Everyone yelled. Vurinam yelled, he staggered back, but what had landed held him tight, & Vurinam saw its jabbering little face. Sham’s bat. Daybe, the transmitter still winking on its leg.

SIXTY-FOUR

TIME FOR THE SHROAKES?

Not yet.

SIXTY-FIVE

SHAM ROLLED UP HIS SLEEVES, WENT TO THE SHORELINE, & looked out at the ruined trains.

With care, effort & bravery, he was able to brace himself on the iron, the ties, the various bits of natural & wrecky business he could reach. He even walked the earth where he had to, dragging a makeshift cart. Sham made it at last to the ruin of some once-grand cargo train, stripped it of fittings. He dug into the ground & hauled out debris.

Dangerous work, but he got on with it. He dumped his finds on the shore. Gathered junk. A few more trips out to the wreck & Sham had a yard-load of nu-salvage. As night fell he began to cobble it together. When the sun came up he was standing, proudly, in a hut.

He made it into the old train’s hold where he discovered that, by happy chance, it had been carrying seeds. These he planted. He continued building until he had made a small township of corrugated iron. His crop grew. Sham collected rainwater & wove flax. He tamed local animals & got more stuff from the train. Sham made bread.

In the second year he got a bit lonely & then luckily he found the footprints of another human being on the island. He followed them & met a native, who was astonished but impressed by him & became his happy servant. Together they continued building, & after a few more years Sham managed to build an actual train, & he left the new country that he had founded with the handy discards of his old, & he set out on a journey back to Streggeye, the wind in his hair.

That didn’t happen.

Sham sat, cold, frightened, starving, on the beach. Staring at nothing. His fantasy hadn’t made him feel any better. It hadn’t been convincing at all.

He chewed at the … well, it was a sort of leaf that he had found.

“Mmmm,” he said. Out loud. “Piney. You’re the first ingredient for a new drink I’m going to make.” He grimaced & swallowed. “I’m going to call you fizzboont.”

He had, in fact, built a shelter out of rubbish, but he would hesitate to say he had “salvaged” it: it was only trash lying at shoreside. & he would hesitate to say he had “built” it: he had really sort of leaned it up one bit against another. & he would hesitate to call it a “shelter.” It was more of a pile.

“Troose,” he said. He sniffed. “Voam.” Their hopes for him—were they so foolish? Did their ultimate aim, that he might at least abut a philosophy, seem quite so terrible now?

The wind blew on him, & it felt like it was mocking him. Like it was saying Pfffft, disdainfully, at this almighty castaway failure. Whatever, the wind said, smacking him on the head. He could have cried. He did, a bit. Just a little bit in the corners of his eyes. It was just because he was staring into blown grit, but then again it wasn’t just that really.

Sham did spend a lot of time looking out at the salvage, like in his daydream. He was very hungry. It had been two days. He was very hungry. He spent his time looking at ruined trains, at spread-eagled bonelike stubs of cranes, at scattered carts, bruising & bloodying his thumb by using it like a crude chisel or awl on his slowly enfiguring stick. He wondered what would happen to him.

Scattered carts. Some were bust up, some upside down. One, half-hidden in a thicket a few score yards offshore, right-way-up, was on its wheels.

On its wheels. On the rails.

Sham got slowly up & walked to where the rails started. It wasn’t even a jollycart. No motor. It didn’t even have sides. It was an ancient, tiny, flat handcart. A tabletop, basically, with a crank like a seesaw, for two operators to pump up & down, to make the wheels turn.

A two-person pump that, in a pinch, one person could use.

Actually—

Actually, thought Sham, enough.

Looking straight into the wind that rushed across the railsea, blinking from its gust-borne dust, & in the flurry of his own resolve, too, Sham felt something catch inside him. Long-stalled wheels strained for purchase. Straining to pull himself together.

Sham swallowed. Like the crew-member he was, with the skills into which he had been trained, he traced a rail-route to the cart with his eyes. He threw his unfinished nail-carved figure away.

SHOULDN’T YOU JUST STAY?

Sham heard that voice in him more than once. As he gathered his useless stuff, a few odds & ends of rubbish on the shore. As he stretched & psyched himself up. A fearful bit of his head asked him if he was quite sure he wouldn’t rather wait a bit? That, you never knew, someone might turn up.

Enough. He shut it up. He surprised himself, battening down that little whine as if it were something troublesome rolling on a deck in a gale. No I should not wait, he thought. Will not.

He had to go. Sham didn’t stop to think about what the stakes were—he simply knew he would not stay & wait. He wanted food, he wanted revenge, he wanted to find his old crew. & he was worried for the Shroakes. Their enemies still hunted.

He stood on the beach & swung his arms. Sham stripped to the waist. He’d lost weight. He threw a handful of rocks, in diversion. Another. Then while his missiles still settled, he jumped onto the nearest tie. He walked the rail. Balanced on the iron, jumped from plank to plank. Threw another bunch of distracting stones. He veered at a junction, & jumped across a couple of yards of unbroken earth, & onto another rail.

Sham rolled, Sham staggered, Sham threw more stones. He was walking on the rails! He was in the railsea! The only thing worse would be if he was on the actual earth.

Hush, don’t think about that. He ran fast, & ever faster, his heart hammering, taking the route he had planned until with an almighty jump & a gasp of triumph he leapt, & landed on the handcart. He lay still.

“How about that, Daybe, eh?” he gasped. “What d’you say, Caldera?”

He wasn’t losing his mind. He knew the bat was elsewhere, that the older Shroake was countless miles away. He just wished that wasn’t so. He remembered the colours in the former’s pretty pelt, the latter’s frank stare, the one that flustered him. He rose. Standing there on his new perch, Sham was overwhelmingly bored of feeling overwhelmed. The more he worked, he realised, the quicker he worked.

OF COURSE THE HANDLE was solid with rust, but he worked at it, hitting it with a stone. Tried to spread what grease remained on the mechanism around. Again & again & again. Hit, smear.

His percussion went on so long the railsea, the railsea animals, began to ignore it. Slowly, the fauna emerged, as Sham continued his cack-handed engineering. The twitching-nosed face of a moldywarpe broke ground nearby, a specimen about his size. It sniffed & made dry-throated noises & he paid it no mind. A shoal of arm-sized earthworms churned amid the ties. There was the plastic-on-plastic rattle of scute: a buried bug, a glimpse of its mandibles telling him it was a good thing he was on the platform. Bang, smear, clang, smear. & now it was evening, & Sham was still banging & smearing.

& 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.

HE 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.

SIXTY-SIX

IT 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.

WHEN DAYBE 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 …’ ”

WHEN 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.”

SIXTY-SEVEN

TACKING, 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.

So far as he could tell, Sham’s fervent campaign of begging had persuaded the Bajjer to make that city a stop on their unending journey slightly sooner than it might otherwise have been. Dangerous as it undoubtedly would be, it was his best chance of finding a way to get home, or to follow the Shroakes. All he could do meanwhile was console himself with two facts: one, that he was travelling much faster than he would have done alone; & two, that he was not dead.

Sham tried to learn to sail. He could not stop worrying about Caldera & Dero. The navy would be hunting for them. He consoled himself with the knowledge that if there was ever, anywhere in any of the railsea, a pair better suited to escaping even so total an enemy, it was Caldera & Dero Shroake. That put a smile on his face.

It was those thoughts, of that family, that reminded him of something. Sham had told his rescuers what little he could of his story. They had not seemed entirely surprised. Which in turn surprised him. Maybe they were forever rescuing castaways & playing host to fascinated travellers, he thought.

& a memory stirred in him then. Something Caldera had said in her salvage-cluttered kitchen, about her parents’ preparations, their researches. They were railseaologists. They had got ready for their journey assiduously. They had, Sham abruptly recalled, sought out & investigated the particular expertises among the railsea nomads.

“Shroakes,” he demanded. “Know them? Shroakes? In a train?” Shrood? the Bajjer muttered to each other. Shott? Shraht? “Shroake!” Ah. One or two remembered that name.

“Years gone,” one said. “Learn rails.”

“What did they ask you?” Sham said. Another round of muttering.

“Heaven,” they said. Heaven? “Stories. Of the …” Mutter mutter mutter, the Bajjer debated the best word. “Shun it,” someone said. “Angry angels.” Right, Sham thought uneasily. Shunning again. “Weeping,” the Bajjer said. “Weeping forever.” Yes, he’d heard that before. Shun the weeping. No matter how you interpreted it, Sham thought, it does not sound much like Heaven.

SIXTY-EIGHT

MOST EVENINGS THE BAJJER OF THIS TROUPE would find a place where the rails gathered & circle their rolling stock as best they could, build a fire on the ground of the railsea itself. Cook & debate things. Let the semi-wild dogs that hunted alongside them into the light & heat.

As a guest—initially honoured, now, he feared, becoming a bit of a bore—Sham was given decent cuts. Another time, he would have been fascinated by the specifics of this lifestyle: he would have learnt to rod-cast, to net fleeing bugs, to sing the songs, to play the dice games, call the calls that summoned the hunting birds. It was just very not the right time. Every morning he woke early, looked to the horizon, past molehills & termite mounds, straight across & ignoring the occasional grots of salvage.

When Sham’s Bajjer crew saw the sails of another group they veered off to meet them. He could have wept as they took their time, collected carts together over convivial suppers, exchanged news & gossip, which various enthusiasts would whisper-translate into Sham’s ear.

“Oh—they say this person die, was eatted by antlion.” A pause, a moment’s mourning. “This other group found, um, hunt place … is good, they say we should go.” Oh bloody hell please not, Sham thought. “They want to know who is you. How we finds you.” The Bajjer told that story, of Shroakes & pirates & Sham & the navy.

That night there was more jumping from cart to cart than usual. Sham was flushed & startled by the frank attentions of a Bajjer girl about his age. After deeply flustered hesitation, he avoided her & fled to bed, where he thoroughly unsuccessfully attempted sleep. Another time, he thought again, oh were it only another time.

The next morning the groups parted with ceremonial valedictories, & Sham realised that they had swapped a few members. The whole convivial, he supposed, had only cost a half-day or so. But a couple of days after that he saw more rapidly approaching sails, & Sham thought he might cry in frustration.

This time, though, there was to be no relaxation, no nattering or supper. The newcomers were blowing alarm trumpets & waving flags. When they came close enough, he saw they wore expressions of misery & rage. They were waving flags & pointing. They were pointing right at Sham.

HIS RESCUERS STRUGGLED to explain. Somewhere, something the Bajjer treasured had been attacked. In a place they went to hunt & harvest. It was not an accident. & it was something to do Sham.

“What are they talking about?” Sham said.

They were not accusing him, though they stared in suspicion & anger. It was more tenuous than responsibility. Nothing was certain; these travellers had seen nothing at first hand, were passing on garbled information as it had been passed to them. But even as details faded farther from the source, the whispers that raced along rails & among traveller bands linked whatever it was that had been perpetrated—some abomination, committed by ferocious pirates, the slaughter of some band & the poisoning of their runs—to the story of Sham’s grub-trap rescue.

The few survivors of the onslaught said their onslaughterers had been looking for someone, demanding information to stop what they were doing. A lost boy. A Streggeye boy lost & got away from pirates.

“We go.” Everyone readied their carts & weapons. “See. All the Bajjer go.” East. Towards wherever it was that had happened had happened. Away from Manihiki, & from any direction the Shroakes might have taken.

“But …” Sham half-wanted to beg. “We can’t lose any more time.” But how could he? These were their people. How could they not go?

NOTHING PREPARED THEM. Three days into their eastward trek, the two bands sailing together, they reached the outskirts of the tract where the attack had happened. Where Sham had thought they might find injured escapees, perhaps dead remains, a battered sail-cart band.

There was a stink in the air. Chemicals, worse than any factories Sham had ever sniffed. They rolled towards smoke. “Look.” Sham pointed. A stench came up from below. Sham’s eyes widened. Oil & effluent, on the ground between the rails, on the roots of trees, dripping from the branches, on the rails themselves. The trainsfolk switched, swung, steered, their faces grim.

A grieving silence descended. Even the wheels seemed muted, as they reached splintered & scattered remnants of Bajjer craft. At the limits of his vision Sham saw a tower, a huge engine, of the type that dotted the railsea, drawing energy from deep below the flatearth. It was motionless, burning off no excess.

“Is it a spill?” Sham said. “Have they had a blowout? Is that what happened here?”

Other sails were approaching. Bands were converging as word spread. With signals, with coloured flags, they swapped what little they knew, going farther, slowly, in more disgust & misery, into a zone that seemed almost to be dissolving, sopping & destroyed with industrial slop, defoliant & toxin.

“This ain’t no broken rig,” Sham said. This was thuggery, a carnage of landscape. Someone was sending the Bajjer a message. No wild crops would grow here now. There was nothing to hunt, & would not be for years. The earth was motionless, animals all rotting in their holes.

Among the vehicles approaching, Sham saw one much larger than the rattling wooden crafts. All around him, the Bajjer stared at this act of oily war. Sham narrowed his eyes. The big train came out of the distance, venting diesel fumes.

Despite the depredation around him, the despondency & anger of his companions, Sham’s whole body lurched with shock, because the train approaching through the trashed-up hunt-grounds, escorted by scudding Bajjer-carts, cutting through the newly ruined railsea, was the Medes.

Even as the Bajjer gazed helplessly at the catastrophe, Sham let out a whoop of joy. & then another as, like a nuzzling thunderbolt, streaking out of the sky into a heavy sniffing kiss in his arms, came Daybe, the bat.