Railsea

ANTLION

(Myrmeleon deinos)

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

Credit: China Miéville (illustration credit 4.1)

FORTY-TWO

WHAT CAN WE GET ON WITH WHILE OUR CONSCIOUSNESS rests? A researcher into the mind, a psychonomer, a thought-mapper, might claim this is a meaningless question: that we are nothing without our consciousness. When it rests, so do we.

Conversely, others might see this as a kind of paradox that gives rise to critical thought, to mental innovation. Provocations do not have to be sensible to help our minds rise to an occasion. What if ridiculous questions are an indispensable philosophical tool?

Our minds we salvage from history’s rubbish, & they are machines to make chaos into story. This is the story of a bloodstained boy. It is his mind that renders it down. But in such rendering we might defy paradox, perform the cheeky escapology of narrative, & thus the resting of that crucial particular consciousness might not detain us. Asked: What should the story do when the primary window through which we view it is shuttered? we might say: It should look through another window.

That is to say, follow other rails, see through other eyes.

FORTY-THREE

LATE EVENING, INTO THE GLOAMING, THROUGH ITS DESCENT into night & that night itself, the Shroakes’ train went. It went untroubled by the darkest of the darkness.

The Shroakes checked expensive maps, used their fine & cutting-edge sensors, which surrounded the vehicle in a fringe of sensitivity. In those lines close enough to shore that Manihiki’s government claimed them as their own, the Shroake train, as much as any train could ever be said to, crept. It whispered along unlit.

The Shroakes wore their best clothes. Though the day was a secret, & though they had packed almost nothing but rugged, ugly items chosen for practicalities, each had made one outfit’s worth of an exception. A few miles beyond the shoreline of Manihiki, where their journey could be said to have started for real, they had changed.

Dero wore a fancy lapelled suit in blue cotton, only very slightly too small for him, & had parted his disobedient hair in the middle. Caldera wore loose burgundy trousers & a froufrou shirt that made her brother raise his eyebrows, & that she was not wildly fond of herself, but that was without question her smartest thing. She & Dero stared at each other with their identically brown eyes.

“There,” Dero said. It was a formal occasion, this, they had decided.

In the distance, the lighthouse of the main harbour shone, its beam rotating, a sweep of glimmering across the miles as the illumination touched thousands of rails in its passing. The train’s engines & equipment, its charts & intentions, were matters of interest, its passengers knew, to the government. So they rode darkly, days before they had claimed, to escape attention.

Eventually, beyond their nation’s immediate purview, they kicked up the levels of their strange engine, accelerated & turned on their lamps. From its front the locomotive was a light-cyclops, its blasting ivory beam flooding the iron tangle before it, sending startled burrowing beasts out of its way. The train went east, north, east, north, north, north. Whole generations, whole civilisations of moths hurtled at this luminously exciting thing &—so cruel a fixation!—were swiftly splatted on the light they loved.

If any had made it past that unforgiving glow, entered, what would they have seen? The foremost carriage shared something of the character of the Shroake House. More compact & cleaner, but its bunks, chairs, table, desk, discreet commode were, too, hemmed in by paperwork, books, tools & salvage.

In the uppermost bunk slept Dero, swaying with the vehicle’s motion. He woke occasionally & abruptly—such had been the shape of his sleep a long time, since two-thirds of his parents had disappeared. When woke he did, he would sit up & stare, as if through the metal ceiling, as if he were the train’s eyes. His gaze was the same as the one his mother had had when she grew tired of salvage, of piecing together & making things, & had looked, instead, beyond. Dero was too young to remember his inherited expression on she who had bequeathed it to him, but when his sister saw it on his face, she gasped, because she was not.

Caldera, tired but wired, watched the screens her mother & fathers had taught her to read. Prodded the controls they had taught her to control. She sat in the middle of a nest of avant-garde tech & salvage combined. A tweak of a mechanism & her chair went roofward, so she could peer through a high ribbon of window; then she took it back down to pore over various camera-feeds on screens around her.

Over the raskaba of the wheels & the whooshing of the fusion engine, Caldera hummed. Did she stare with the same hankering for distance & something-or-other as did her brother & as had her mother? Perhaps. Something like that.

She thought about Sham, with gratitude for his information, for the picture that he had shown them. She tapped keys on Dad Byro’s ordinator. Extracted information. Collated it with their other information, including Sham’s descriptions. Began to build a route.

With distant affection Caldera regretted that Sham had not come. She took bites from a sandwich, sung.

An alarm bleated, glowed red. She checked her clattering information. A change of gauge was coming.

She prodded buttons. How much would this particular technology have excited the burghers, the salvors, the privateers of Manihiki! she thought.

Raskaba-tak, the train slowed but not by very much—a tug or two of levers, a switch set & the engine shuddered exactly like a troubled animal; braces emerged from its underside, took its weight as it rolled, raised it an instant, mechanisms wound, the wheels on the momentarily suspended vehicle slipping closer together to return & to land snikt into these new narrower rails.

There were no hours of complicated rail-&-wheel-side shenanigans, only seconds with the gauge-slip. Caldera inserted words of salutation & praise for her family into her song.

She did not wake Dero when she passed a hunk of metal that she suddenly suspected was one of her parents’ carriages. Discarded by them so early in their trip, for reasons unknown. She said nothing.

When she had to sleep she stopped the train & armed its defences. The ordinator would probably have been able to continue the journey unwatched, but she would rather avoid any risk. It would soon be five, & Dero’s turn.

& on the day that followed, & for days after that, the Shroakes continued their single-minded drive through hostile country. They traced creative routes through the railsea towards its most arcane & neglected places, following their family’s secret route, looking for whatever it was their mother & father had found.

FORTY-FOUR

WITHOUT QUESTION, THE MOST IMPORTANT SCIENCE is ferroviaoceanology, the study of the railsea’s iron lines themselves. This is boss, nexus of investigations. Done right, it extends, rail-&-tie-like, across ruminations of all fields. To study the rails means not only the metallurgy of their substance, but the applied theology of their maintenance, sustained, cleaned & fixed as they are by the secretive ministrations of the locomotive-angels. It means the study of biology, to hypothesise the relationship between the lairs of all the burrowers, those eruchthonous & those eternally underground, & the tangled lines above them.

It means the study of symbology. Ever since the godsquabble, since the rest of the world was brought into shape & existence to serve the aesthetic & symbolic needs of the railsea, we—cities, continents, towns, trains & you & me—have been functions of rails.

Travel far enough, a trainswoman will find worshippers of gods of all sizes & shapes, all powers, persuasions & proclivities. & not only gods—uplifted mortals, ancestor spirits, abstract principles. In North Pittman is a particularly striking theology. There, one church memorably teaches that if all the trains were to be still, together, for one moment, if there were no wheels percussing the iron road, all human life would wink instantly out. Because such noises are the snoring, the sleep-breathing of a railsea world, & it is the rails that dream us. We do not dream the rails.

FORTY-FIVE

IN VERY OTHER PARTS OF THE RAILSEA, A MUCH OLDER, much more traditional train, ground south. Its passage was less strange than the Shroakes’, its route on one gauge only, but it travelled with no less urgency.

Thus the Medes. Chased again by an eager coterie, a squabbling comet’s tail of railgulls chowing on the scraps the trainsfolk threw. A day was all it took, a day’s quick determined driving, & Manihiki, its outliers, a hundred rocklets prodding out between the ties, were gone. Wide-open rails, & southward ho. With perhaps a certain melancholy.

On the Medes’s last day in Manihiki, several people, of course, had been late to arrive back on-deck. One by one they returned, & one by one were punished. Nothing too severe—this was typical minor transgression.

& ap Soorap?

Sham ap Soorap?

Where was Sham ap Soorap?

He didn’t answer any calls. He did not return.

The captain herself even asked where he was. Preparations continued. The captain herself paced & asked again if there was word of the doctor’s assistant.

Until at last the harbourmasters arrived, bearing a letter to Fremlo, which the doctor read, swore at & read to the captain, leaving the door open a crack. The doctor was too experienced for that to be an accident. It was the technique known as trainboard telegraph. Minutes later the whole crew knew the message’s contents.

To Dr. Fremlo & Captain Naphi & the officers & all my friends on the train Medes. I am sorry to be not there but I cannot do this job any more I have a new crew they are salvors with T Sirocco. They will teach me to be a salvor I was never a person who wanted to be a molehunter nor a doctor so I will go with them. Please tell my family thank you & sorry. I am sorry for this but I have always wanted to be someone who finds salvage & this is my chance good luck & thank you.

Yr obedient servant Sham ap Soorap.

THEY RACED INTO WINDS that whipped with less & less mercy. The heads, the bodies, of animals that broke subterranean cover grew larger as the Medes came to wilder, colder lands. Older hands marked the change in wheelcalls & clatternames as the iron cooled.

On the fourth day they rolled in the shadow of an old pumping rig crowning above a copse, still extracting oil though near its life’s end. A labour of moldywarpes, grey beasts of moderate size & quality, surfaced near them, playing & puffing dust. Three were swiftly skewered, roped, dragged to the butchery wagons, reduced to components.

“Hey, d’you remember,” Vurinam said abruptly to no one in particular, “how that Sham ap Soorap brought the grog when he had to?” He cleared his throat. “Couldn’t work out if he liked doing it more or less than his usual doctoring, weren’t that so, Fremlo?”

There were a few laughs. Were they happy or sad that Vurinam had mentioned their runaway? Yes. They were happy or sad.

“Shut up, Vurinam,” Yashkan said. “Nobody cares.” But his heart wasn’t in it.

“Didn’t know he had it in him,” Fremlo muttered to Mbenday when they drank bad smoky tea late that night. “He was hopeless, though you couldn’t but like the lad, but I’d never have thought he’d have the oomph to go be a salvor, no matter how mooningly he stared at them.”

The Medes passed a slave-powered train from Rockvane, which the captain would not hail. Shossunder & Dramin the cook stared out to railsea, as in their wake a big old bull armadillo, like a grunting armoured cart, groped up into the air, sniffed for prey, & ground below again.

“He was funny with his food,” Dramin said.

“Odd having him not around,” the cabin boy said.

They reached a huge & clanking wartrain from one of the Cabigo monarchies. They approached the double-decked wheeled fortress, porcupine-spined with guns, howling sooty smoke, on its manoeuvres & reconnaissance.

Admiral Shiverjay received Naphi, & after niceties & a cup of cactus tea, after paying sufficient polite attention to his ill-tempered train-cat, in the halting combination of languages with which they could get by, she asked him if he had any news of a large, pale moldywarpe.

& he only bloody had.

MANY TRAINS KEPT RECORDS of overhearings like sightings of megabeasts, of any talk of sports & monsters they encountered, knowing molers they met might be searching. Shiverjay ran a finger down a rumour-list, past tales of the largest badger, albino antlions, aardvarks of prodigious size. Some had the names of captains marked alongside. Some had more than one: oh, those were awkward occasions, clashes of hunt. What to do when more than one philosopher sought the same symbol? It was notoriously embarrassing.

“Ah now,” Shiverjay said. “Here’s a thing.” He had a superb stock of stories. “You know where the Bajjer roll?” Naphi nodded a vague nod. The sail-nomads gathered & hunted across great swathes of the railsea. “A deep-railsea spearhunter, back from their grounds, she told me something that she’d heard from a furrier who’d been trading with a salvor crew—”

The lineage, the genealogy by which the story was delivered at last into Captain Naphi’s ears, was convoluted & not important. What mattered was this: “A solo trainsman saw our quarry,” Naphi said, back on her own vehicle. She controlled herself, stiff & upright & careful, but she was all-but bass-string vibrating at the news. “He ain’t too far. Switchers, south-southwest.”

& still there was that sniff of loss about the Medes.

A PECULIARITY OF GEOGRAPHY HAD the railsea dipping into a sheltered declivity that thronged with rabbit. There a light steam train all the way from Gulflask passed on stories they, too, like the wartrain, had heard about the jaundiced-looking Talpa rex. They directed the Medes west, to where the earthworms were huge & sluggish & the largest moldywarpes fed.

Three days, following earth-trails of ever-increasing sizes, & the Medes saw two great southern moldywarpes. One sleek young male too far to chase; the second, a grizzled sow, they might have been able to run down. But Naphi told the harpoonists no.

As the sun dropped & the cold went vicious, they reached a dangerous intricate knot of rails, of manifold gauges. It would need charting for passage. The captain was untouched by any tiredness. She stared rapt & intently through her telescope, into the last of the light.

Abruptly she volunteered Mbenday, Brownall, Benightly & Borr to go with her. The crewmembers were like inflated people, so bundled were they in fleece & fur. The captain herself wore only a moderately quilted jacket.

“She don’t need no furs, she’s warmed by her crazy,” Borr whispered to Benightly as they took the jollycart slowly forward. They mapped & took careful notes, prepared switches for the Medes that would follow. They glanced longingly at the receding warmth & light of the train.

Slowly they rounded a patch of bushes metal-coloured in the twilight … steered between trees thin & gnarled as pained skeletons … knocked stones from the rails with their trainhooks … They moved at a creeping pace in thickets of tough vegetation, in a range of dense rails, broken by spare patches of ground & the curve of a hill towards which they steered.

“Stop here,” Naphi said, her voice trembling. She stood, ready to disembark. “Let’s see what we can see from the top.” They rolled closer to the pale hill. The shaggy bone-coloured hill.

The hill covered not in pale freeze-bleached grass but in hair.

The yellow hill rumbled. It shuddered.

The hill growled.

A twitch, a switch & stubs & tufted nubs on the hill moved. Moved as a chewing sound sounded, as there came from all around them a slam of teeth & a throaty animal exhalation.

The hill opened wicked eyes.

“Oh my good gods!” someone screamed. “It’s him!”

& with violence & suddenness the earth shook & birds were calling as loud as the crew & the hill was not a hill, was the colossal humped flank & back of Mocker-Jack the pale mole. & there was throating & a snarl of tree-sized slaver-spattering tusks & a plunging with appalling motion so enormous that the world itself, time itself, seemed to buckle, & countless tons of meat & malevolent muscle & dead-hued fur moved. & with a red stare near-sightless but quite terrible the beast rose an instant then plunged straight, straight down, leaving ruination, buckled rails, splintered ties, a quivering-edged pit.

A gun fired, a flash in the dark. The earth shuddered again. Benightly, Brownall, Borr were falling & clinging to the cart’s sides as the world pitched. Someone braked hard to stop them following the beast into the below. From which came a dust-choked roar.

Oh, so appalling a timbre.

ONE BY ONE THE CREW on the cart opened their eyes. They coughed in the clouds left by Mocker-Jack’s passing. Checked their cuts & bruises & that they were not dead.

They looked up one by dizzy one. To see, standing, unruffled, indeed exultant, the captain. She held a rifle against her hip. Smoke from its muzzle fingered the air.

Naphi was leaning towards the new hole, peering into the new shadow. In her artificial hand was the mechanism she had bought. Lights flashed upon it. She shook the gun, the electric box & smiled. It was a chilling smile. “Now,” she said. “We will just see.”

“Lizards,” Mbenday whispered at last, a curse to the strange iguana gods of Mendana, his home. “You knew what it was. But you knew we wouldn’t come if we knew. You saw it. This was the plan. Phase one. Is that not it, Captain?” There was as much admiration as anger in his voice.

The captain said nothing. She pressed a button on the box she held, & read the lights. The scanner in her hand traced the sub-dirt passage of her nemesis. It sent back information from the tracer she had shot into the giant mole’s flesh.

FORTY-SIX

THESE WERE THE RAILSEA’S MIDDLE REACHES: NOT yet the deepest open rail, far from hardland, nor the bays & heavily patrolled inlets & railrivers of territorial stretches. The lines & the train upon them wound through stunted hardy forests.

“Ooh ooh,” said Dero. He steered the Shroake train a good decent distance from the barricaded buildings of some tiny rock-perching hamlet, peered again through his lever-side windows at the community of small simians that watched him from the trees. He tried, once more, to imitate them. “Eeh eeh,” he said. He jumped up & down.

The monkey family watched the train go, prim & glum. The older female sniffed & peed. The others wandered off, on their branches, hand over hand.

“Tchah,” said Dero. “Stupid animals,” he said. “Ain’t they?”

“Whatever you say,” Caldera said. She was writing in the Shroake train journal & log.

“Come on, Cal. This is supposed to be fun.”

“Fun?” she said slowly. She put the book down. “Fun? You know where we’re heading? Course you don’t. Neither do I. That’s the whole point. But you know this ain’t going to be a joke. This is a promise we’re making, that’s what. For them. So let me ask you again—you think it’s supposed to be fun?”

She stared at her brother. He met her gaze. He was littler than her, by a good ways, but he stuck out his chin & furrowed his brow & said, “Yeah. A bit.”

& after a second, Caldera slumped & sighed, & said, “Yeah. I suppose it should be a bit. Tell you what.” She glanced in the direction of the copse they had left. “Next one we pass, we’ll throw fruit at the monkeys.”

ANOTHER CHARACTERISTIC of these inner-outer stretches—given the reefs of rock, fields of scattered salvage disproportionately jagged with metal, the trees & narrow straits between hardland islands—was that they were dangerous. Look to your charts, drivers. & it was so much more dangerous if you were determined to roll at night.

The Shroakes were determined to roll at night. Their instruments on, they sat in a winking cave of diodes as their train progressed. It was dimmer even than usual that starless evening, but for the soundless sweeps of far-off white beams from another light-tower ahead.

“Careful here,” Caldera muttered to herself, checked the chart that warned of dangerous proximity of the rails to rockfalls & quicksand.

“Drattit,” she murmured, slowing & backing up. “I’m taking us that way,” she said. “That must be the Safehouse Good Beacon.” She checked her chart again. “So if we go this route …”

She worked her remote control on switches & picked them slowly towards the lighthouse. The wheels whispered on the iron. The light fluttered with tiny shadows, as night-birds & darkbats bickered in its beam for hunting rights.

“Where is it we are?” Dero said. Caldera pointed at the map. Dero frowned. “Really?” he said.

“I know what you’re going to say,” Caldera said. She gritted her teeth & wrestled with the controls. “I know, I know, from the direction of the line, you’d have thought we were closer north a bit, right? Well.” They rumbled over unsteady ground. “Well, these aren’t the most up-to-date charts. They must be wrong.”

“If you say so,” Dero said doubtfully. “I mean …” He squinted into the night.

“Well, there’s not much else it can be, is there?” Caldera said. She adjusted, switched. “I mean look at the lighthouse. They ain’t going to have built a new one, are they?”

But of course by the time that last word was out of her mouth, Caldera had answered her own question in her head. Dero was staring at her, uncomprehending but horrified by her look. Glinting outside took his attention. Glinting much too close. “There’s something,” he said, “on that beach.”

“Stop!” Caldera shouted. Hauled hard, hard on the brake, & the train’s wheels screamed in resentment as it grudgingly halted. Dero staggered & fell. “Back back back!” Caldera shouted.

“What are you …?”

“Check the rear!” Above them the light beam went by. The train slowly began to move again, backed up, away from one bit of darkness among many.

“What am I looking for?” Dero said.

“Anything behind us.”

“There ain’t nothing.”

“Perfect then!” Caldera said, & accelerated in reverse. “Keep watching! We’ll turn around when we can.”

& with a lurch of the retreating train, the vivid glare of its headlamp swung a few yards, & Caldera saw how close to either side of the route they’d been taking were rises of flint. She had been a breath away from steering her train into a pass. On the edges of which, overlooking them, poised with great rocks ready to roll in to derail her, silent figures watched.

She caught her breath. She bit her lip. Another light swing showed the pale faces of the ambushers. They stared at her retreating vehicle, stared right through the glass, through the cameras & at her.

Calm-faced men & women. Armed. Carrying tools, the equipment with which to take an errant train apart. They lay where they had been hiding, their expressions betraying no shame nor any aggression: only mild disappointment as their prey escaped.

“Of course someone built a new lighthouse,” Caldera whispered.

“What’s that?” Dero said. “I can’t hear you. What is going on, anyway?”

What was going on? People had smashed the lights of the real & automated tower, that must, Caldera thought, be standing to useless dark attention on a nearby beach, not at all where she thought she had seen it. Locals had by careful reference to railsea charts lit a fake beacon at a place chosen to appeal as a reference in the darkest nights, that would lure the unlucky in to a terrible impassable part of the rails, where the crews who had built that false light would be waiting, to do what was necessary to travellers, to scavenge the scrap their intervention left behind. The cruellest kind of salvage. Train-ghouls, derailers & thieves.

“Wreckers,” Caldera whispered.

FORTY-SEVEN

A RED SIGNAL AT THIS JUNCTION OF THE STORY-TRAIN’S route.

Generations of thinkers have stood with notebooks open on coastlines, the endless spread of ties-&-iron before them—countless junctions, switches, possibilities in all directions—& insisted that what characterises rails is that they have no terminus. No schedule, no end, no direction. This has become common sense. This is a cliché.

Every rail demands consideration of every other, & all the branches onto which that other rail might switch. There are those who would issue orders, & would control the passage of all such narratives. They may, from time to time, even be able to assert authority. They will not, however, always be successful. One could consider history an unending brawl between such planners, & others who take vehicles down byways.

So, now. The signal demands the story stop. With diesel wheeze & wheel complaint, our train reverses. With a whack of trainhooks a story-switch is thrown, & our text proceeds again from days ago, from where it had got to. To answer a question bellowed, we might imagine, by moldywarpe critics as we took routes where the Siblings Shroake drove & the Medes hunted. Curious & impatient mole listeners raised heads from earth & shouted across the flatlands of untold things. Demanding attentions elsewhere.

FORTY-EIGHT

SHAM THEN.

What happened miles, days ago, was that Sham wobbled slowly up from the deeps of unconsciousness until he popped right into his own head. & into a headache. & winced & opened his eyes.

A room. A tiny train cabin. A cold line of light from a porthole. Boxes & papers wedged into shelves. Footsteps above him. The light wavered & swayed & dragged across the wall as the train changed direction. Sham could feel the shuddering now, through his back. He could feel that he was travelling fast.

He could not sit up. Was trussed on a bunk. He could just about see his own hands clutching at nothing. He tried to shout & discovered that a gag was in the way. Sham thrashed, but it was no good. He panicked. The panic was no good either. It gave up at last & left. He stretched each muscle that he could.

Vurinam? he thought. Fremlo? Captain Naphi? He tried to say the names out loud, & made muffled noises. Caldera? Where was he? Where was everyone else? An image of the Shroake train took him. Could he be on the Shroake train? Minutes, or hours, or seconds, passed. The door at last opened. Sham strained, turned his head, croaking. Robalson stood in the doorway.

“Ah ha,” Robalson said. “At last. We didn’t give you that much. I thought you’d wake up ages ago.” He grinned. “I’m going to untie your hands & mouth, let you sit up,” he said. “Your end of the deal is you’re not going to be a pain in my arse.”

He put down a bowl of food & loosened Sham’s bonds, & Sham began to shout even as the dirty cloth left his mouth. “What the hell are you doing my captain’s going to find me you’re going to pay for this you crazy pig,” & so on. Sham had hoped it would sound like a bellow. It came out more like a loud whine. Robalson sighed & tugged the gag back on.

“Now is that being not a pain in my arse?” he said. “Goat porridge for non-arse-painery. That’s the deal. There’s worse things I can do than put a gag on.”

This time when Robalson relaxed the mouthpiece Sham said nothing. Just stared at him in cold fury.

He also stared at the porridge. He really was hungry.

“WHAT THE BLOODY HELL do you call this?” Sham said through a mouthful of the delicious stuff.

Robalson rubbed his nose. “A kidnapping, I suppose. What do you call it?”

“It ain’t funny!”

“It is a bit.”

“You … You’re a pirate!”

Robalson shook his head as if at imbecility. “I told you I was,” he said.

“Where are we going?”

“That depends.”

“Where’s my bat?” Sham said.

“Flew off when we took you.”

“Why are we going so fast?”

“Because we want to get there quickly, & because we’re pirates. We ain’t the only ones heard things. Salvors’ve been asking after you. & what with us up & suddenly buggering off like that, you can bet a bunch of other people are curious & looking our way.”

“What do you want with me?”

“What we want,” said a new voice, “Sham ap Soorap, is information.” In from the corridor came a man.

He wore an engineer’s boiler suit. His hair was short & greased. He held his hands together gently, he spoke quietly, & his bloodshot eyes fixed on Sham’s with intelligence. “I’m Captain Elfrish,” he said gently. “You are, I haven’t decided yet.”

“I’m Sham ap Soorap!”

“I haven’t decided what you are, yet.”

The captain of the pirate train did not wear a greatcoat in which lived polecats & weasels. He did not have a beard woven with smouldering twists of gunpowder to surround himself with a stench & demonic aura. He did not cock a tricorn hat or have handprints in blood on his shirt. He did not dangle a necklace of bones & flesh-scraps. All these were things of which Sham had heard, ways in which railsea pirates spread the terror on which they relied.

This man wore large glasses. He had what Sham would, had circumstances been otherwise, have said was a kind face. He couldn’t help thinking it, & then he couldn’t help a miserable little laugh.

The man folded his arms. “Your situation amuses you?” he said. He sounded like an office manager asking someone to clarify a row of figures.

“No,” Sham said. It was, to his own surprise & grim pleasure, anger more than fear that swept him. “You’re in so much trouble, don’t you even know? My captain’s going to come for you. She’s going to—”

“She’s going to nothing,” said the captain. He cleaned his glasses. “She got your message. The one about wanting to be a salvor? The one about rolling off with them? Full of details only you’d know? Wishing her good luck & goodbye? Telling her you were seeking your fortune? She got it.”

He put his spectacles back on. “Everyone knows you’ve been with those Shroakes. It’s not as if your aspirations come out of the blue. Your captain knows you’ve gone, are following your dream. She’s not coming for you, boy.”

All those things, Sham thought. All those stories, those secrets, those desires, the sense of adventure, the pining after the vividly dressed salvors, that he had harboured, that he had confessed to Robalson—used against him.

“What do you want?” he croaked. “I ain’t got no money.”

“No indeed,” Elfrish said. “& our train’s short of space. If you’ve no purpose, there’s no point keeping you, you see? So it might be worth your while to think about what you can offer instead of coin. To be indispensable.”

“What do you want?” Sham was whispering now.

“Oh, I don’t know.” Elfrish said. “What might one want? My decks are swabbed. We have cooks, we have crew, we have everything we could need. Oh, but wait a minute.” He looked thoughtful. “There is one thing, though. That’s a thought. How about you show us on a map where you found the wreck. Of which none of your crew were supposed to speak. While you’re at it, you tell me what you found on it. Stories have been after you since, ooh, Bollons. About where poor old Captains Shroake ended up. How about you tell me everything, & I do mean everything, that you brought with you to give those Shroakes.

“We on this train have a little bit of a vested interest. These are names not wholly unknown to us. Names I wasn’t expecting to deal with again, though of course one keeps a little ear out for what the oh-so-clever second generation Shroakes are up to. Plenty of people do, of course, but some of us have more investment than others.

“Experiments don’t interest me. Journeys, however, especially journeys in response to secret posthumous messages, journeys after absolutely unique treasures, now they do. Apart from anything, it makes a person think they missed something, & that’s never a good feeling, now, is it?”

“What?” said Sham. “Missed what?” But Elfrish did not answer. Instead, from his pocket, he pulled Sham’s little camera.

“There’s a picture on this I’m particularly interested in,” he said. “Par, tick, you, lairly. & I don’t mean your penguins. See, I had no idea they’d be leaving yet, those Shroakelets. Or we’d have gone after them our own selves. Caught us on the hop. But we know you’ve been chatting to them.

“& if,” he said, & his voice was suddenly chill & bony & metal & like the scuttling of a very bad insect, “you’d like not to be cut open & dangled over the side of this train & dragged along with your legs on the ground spilling blood everything under the flatearth can smell while we go slow enough for long, long miles that they can rise & eat you from the toes up & from the inside out, you know what you could do for me, Sham?

“Tell me where the Shroakes are going.”

FORTY-NINE

SO WHAT DO THEY DO?” SINCE THEIR CLOSE ESCAPE from the light-deploying wreckers Dero had become obsessed with them, with whatever the Siblings Shroake had just avoided.

“I told you, I don’t know,” Caldera said. “Release some of that pressure—we’ve got a buildup in the port engines. They lure stuff in, smash them up, & take them apart, I suppose.”

The train arced over a rise—here, the flatearth was not quite, well, flat. They passed little streams & ponds, shaggy trees sprouting right between the rails. Sometimes there would be a rattling as branches knocked the side of the vehicle, as if something was asking for entrance.

“That’s what they do to trains,” said Dero. “What about people? In the trains? What about if they’d got us?”

“What’s that?” Caldera said. The iron rails ahead looked as if they were spreading out from something. Specifically, from a hill, it looked like, a stub island of the railsea. But you shouldn’t be able to see through an island. It should not have a silhouette like filigree, an island should not glint.

“It’s a bridgeknot,” Dero said.

The rails thicketed together, clumped, clotted, weaving over & under each other on girders & supports, on buttresses & poles in an absurdly tight snarl. It could have been the iron skeleton of a quite impossible behemoth. Within it at various heights, the Shroakes could see two, three old trains. Cold, deserted, of old design. Lifeless as husks & long abandoned.

“Go round it,” Dero said.

“It ain’t as simple as that,” Caldera said. She switched, line to line. “The rails everywhere round here are coming off it. Like wax off a candle. It’s going to take hours ‘n’ hours to plot a route around it. We want to be right on the other side.” She pointed.

“So?”

“We go through it.”

THE NOISE OF THEIR PASSAGE changed on the footrails. Suspended suddenly on rickety rattling rises, the percussion went from heartbeat to performance, tinnier & more resonant. Raised rails made temporary little skies. The Shroakes passed into shadows, & through the patterings of moisture dripping from the lines’ undersides.

Rails below, rails above. They were six, seven yards up, shaking the strut maze, switching switches, pushing through the heart of it all. They looked uneasily at each other as the tracks wobbled.

“Is this thing safe?” Dero whispered.

“Angels will’ve kept it alright,” Caldera said.

“We hope,” Dero said.

“We hope.”

Sunlight dappled them through the old lines. The Shroake train was speckled as if they were deep in a hedge.

“Who gets wrecked in the middle of a thing like this?” Dero said, looking at the deserted vehicles embedded in the structure. One was close. They were approaching it.

“Careless people,” Caldera said. “Unlucky people.” She looked at the antique outlines of the train. “They weren’t wrecked, anyway. They were … becalmed.” The vehicle was heavy & huge & designed according to outmoded aesthetics. It had no chimney nor any exhaust: from its back jutted a huge lever. Clockwork.

“Maybe that’s why,” Caldera said. “I think that’s from Kammy Hammy. They got halfway up, wheels ran out. That bar you wind it up with—you can’t twist that in here, there’s no space to turn the key.”

It loomed over them on a steep side rail, as if watching as they passed. From every one of its windows billowed clouds of ivy & wiry bramble. In which, from the front-most window at least, they could see tangled-up tools, rain-ruined helmets & bones. The exuberant flora hogged the space, crowding out the dead.

“A few more switches,” Caldera said, “& we’ll be coming through to the other side.” Through the mossed & windblown palimpsest of crossbars ahead she could see the open railsea.

“We’ve got an amazing view,” Dero said. They pitched. Their passage shook the lines. The railknot swayed. Caldera grit her teeth. Behind her there was a resonant crack. The sound of metal snapping under strain. A groan. & the trembling of the rails grew.

“What,” said Caldera, “was that?” She checked her mirrors. “Oh,” she said.

That old train was not used to this shaking. Bolts had shaken, strained & sheared. Old brakes were long atrophied. Once-taut metal wheel-locks had given abruptly up under the vibrations. Blocks & chocks crumbled & the clockwork train was slipping from its position, & was rolling onto their track, following them. Accelerating.

“Oh … my …” said Dero.

“Quick now,” Caldera muttered. “Quick, quick, chop chop, on we go.” She yanked her controls, sped the Shroake train up. Their cold accidental pursuer accidentally pursued.

A working train versus one long ruined unto scrap? Quite foregone which would be faster, no? But Caldera had a grave disadvantage. She was alive. & she wanted to keep it that way. She had, then, to exercise care. The fossil that pursued them had no such restraint. Where she slowed at branches, it did not. Where she sought the best route out of the girderweb, it did not care. Where she strove to ensure that she did not send her brother & herself hurtling to their doom, doom had long ago claimed their hunters, who strove deadly for nothing but speed.

The old train was accelerating. Following them junction for junction, switch for switch, shaking the whole railknot & making the Shroakes scream. It roared after them, carried by gravity, gathering momentum, sending struts & supports of the strange structure scattered like spillikins behind it.

“Go faster!” Dero shouted.

“Oh, thank you!” shouted Caldera. “I hadn’t thought of that! Here I was going half speed!” They rolled towards the light, a dead crew close behind them. Only yards now to the flatearth where they could veer out of the path, but the clockwork was too close, too fast, was seconds from shunting them violently off the line.

“Purge!” shouted Caldera. Dero hesitated only one instant, then obeyed.

He stabbed at keys. Caldera listed what they would lose. I left my jumper in that carriage, she thought giddily, I left my second best pen, there’s all the liquorice, but no time for regrets, as with a last yank, Dero shouted “Purging!” & the rearmost carriage on the Shroake train was decoupled & blown backwards with percussive bolts, to slide right in the path of what came for them.

The dead train slammed into the retreating carriage. There was no way the discarded Shroake cabin could stop that hefty skeleton, but it did not need to. All it needed to do, & what it did, with a scream of wheels, was momentarily slow it. Long enough, those few seconds, that Caldera & Dero & their little train, lighter & faster now, hauled away & out & were back at railsea again, whooping with the whole being-alive-ness of it.

They switched, & were a way away on sidelines of the route they had been taking, rushing to the windows to watch. As it howled out into the bright sun, the carriage slowing it, the pursuing engine shook with the percussion of the bridgeknot. Which creaked, which swayed, until with thunderous clatter & the rush of air, the whole precarious rusted mass of the structure began to collapse.

As if staggering, the clockwork train-tomb flipped, sending the brake that had until moments ago been the Shroakes’ sleeping cabin screeching off the line into the wilderness. The old engine somersaulted horribly & mightily, coming apart as it flew, spreading debris & disgruntled ivy & the bones of dead explorers far across the rails.

FOR A LONG TIME dust kept pluming. The cacophony of falling bridgeknot continued. Piece by agonized piece it fell, until at last it was still, its broken silhouette emerging from dirt clouds. Bits of shattered train rolled across the railsea.

Long after the awful sound, at very last, rodent curiosity got the better of rodent caution, & the burrowing beasts of the railsea peered up from scrubby grass. A breeze pushed Caldera’s & Dero’s hair this way & that. They leaned out of their window, gaping at all the collapse, at the second death of the clockwork train.

“& that,” said Caldera, “is why we never leave anything essential in the last carriage.”

FIFTY

I DON’T KNOW! I DON’T KNOW! THAT’S THE WHOLE POINT! I don’t know where they’ve gone!”

Elfrish had not even touched him, had just put his face very close to Sham’s, stared at him with eyes that no longer looked mild. That looked like poison & ice. Behind his captain, Robalson looked uncomfortable.

“I swear,” Sham babbled, “I don’t know nothing, I just saw the pictures & thought they should know …”

“Pictures,” said Elfrish. “As in …” He shook the camera.

“Pictures! From a camera! They were in the wreck!”

“You’re lying, boy.” Elfrish’s voice was frosty & certain. “They were not.”

“They was! Only in the ground! In a hole!”

The captain cocked his head. “A hole?” he said.

“One of the Shroakes dug it! Where the window used to be. Shoved it inside.”

Elfrish gazed thoughtfully roofward, scrunched up his eyes in thought or memory. “A hole,” he breathed. “A hole.” He looked at Sham. “If there were pictures,” he said, “perhaps someone might use them to reconstruct just where the Shroakes had been. They were always assiduous about not disclosing their itineraries. Whatever the encouragement.”

“Yeah!” said Robalson. “We should totally do that!” He nodded nervously at his captain.

“But,” whispered Elfrish to Sham, “you don’t have those pictures anymore.”

& though he wanted more than anything to say, “Yes I do,” Sham, after he had stalled as long as he dared, had to whisper, “No I don’t.”

With a bellow like an animal, Captain Elfrish dragged Sham abruptly out of the room & into the corridor. Down the hallways, past pirates at their tasks. They looked like other trainsfolk. Only the furnishings were more random, their clothes more varied, & every one of them was armed.

Into a room where scarred officers were waiting. Sham saw through the windows that they were racing through lush lands, overbent by mottled boughs & climbing flowers & trees that seemed to scream, so full of bright birds & startled marmosets were they. Sham could feel the train judder over junctions, pass signal boxes & switches, as lines veered from their own.

So they were heading north, then. Someone was holding Sham down in a chair. He shook & yelled but could not break free. On the table in front of him, someone laid out thick paper. As if to protect the table from spills. Sham yelled again. An officer was slowly unrolling a leather pack containing glittering sharp things.

“I don’t know nothing!” Sham shouted. What ghastly instruments were these? “I told him!”

“Juddamore,” Elfrish said. “Begin.”

The big man took a wicked grey spike from the pack. Licked his thumb & pressed it to the point. Winced his appreciation. Sham screeched. The man lowered it until it pointed at Sham’s face.

“So,” said Elfrish. “You said you found pictures. That would be these.” He held up scraps—the greasy, now-torn & well-worn images that Sham had scribbled for himself, the remembrances of what he had seen on screen. “& culminating in this.” Sham’s cheap little camera. On its screen that single line. Even so small & ill-focused, it hushed the room.

“Know where this leads?” Elfrish whispered. “No. Neither do I. But I am, as you know by now, very much of a one for stories. & such intimations as there are for people to hunt the let-me-stress-it legendary, mythical, obviously-not-at-all-real places beyond, revolve around money. A lot of it. You see my point.

“Oh, people’ll go after those Shroakes. It’s hardly just me. With their train, that won’t go well, I suspect. But followed as they know they are, they’ll wind their route. What I want to do is head them off. Which means knowing where they’re going.

“Now, your well-being is up to you, Sham ap Soorap. These—” He shook the images. “—may make sense to you. To me, not so helpful. To me they are scrawls. So, the things you saw?

“Describe them.”

The man called Juddamore lowered his sharp point to the paper. It was a pencil. He began to draw.

HE TRANSLATED SHAM’S gabbled descriptions into images. Juddamore was talented. Even in his wash of fear & relief, Sham was impressed to watch the pictures emerge from scrawled grey lines as tangled as the railsea.

Someone’ll run come save me, he thought, & described his pictures & memories, in case they did not, in fact. In the days & weeks that he had prepared his trip to Manihiki, formulating his plan, Sham had gone over those images in his mind, leafed through his scrappy redrawings, more than once. They were vivid in his mind.

“& then in the third one there’s, yeah, that one …”

“What is that?” some deep-voiced pirate muttered, staring at Sham’s original. “Is that a bird?”

Sham. Never an artist.

“No, it’s, it’s like, a sort of, a sort of overhang, like, like …” & with frantic hand-motions Sham described the rock angle, & so on. To stay alive. Juddamore drew what he described, & Sham would pass comment & correct him like some lunatically agitated critic. “Not like that, the little forest was a bit more, lower trees, like …”

Each of these scenes had originally been chosen & frozen because it was a sight, after all. Each of them had some quality, some feature, something to distinguish it from the everyday railsea, to make it worth recording. For hours, Juddamore drew pictures of descriptions of memories of glimpses of digital images of sights once long ago seen. The pirate officers looked, heads cocked, rubbing their chins. Debated what they saw.

“& this is the order?”

“Look. That bit there sounds like the corner off the coast of Norwest Peace.”

“There’s rumours about rail shenanigans up Kammy Hammy way, & couldn’t that be the cut in the mountains that gets you up by its western islands?”

They traced a route. With maps beside them, they ruminated. Over a long time, guessing where they had to, putting to one side controversies, the best brains of the pirate train reconstructed a dead explorers’ route. Until, astoundingly, they had decided they knew—more or less, roughly, in broad sweeps—where they were going.

This is not what I ever had in mind, Sham thought. I ain’t even a pirate. I’m a pirate-abetter.

FIFTY-ONE

BUT WAIT. STUDENTS OF THE RAILSEA, OF COURSE YOU have questions. You are likely to narrow in on uncertain & mysterious questions of iron-rail theology.

You wish to know which is the oldest civilisation in the railsea, which island state’s records go back furthest, using which calendar? What do they tell us about the history of the world, the Lunchtime Ages, prehistory, the times before the scattered debris from offhand offworld picnicking visitors was added to aeons of salvage? Is it true the upsky used to be full of the same birds as now fly the down? & if so, what was the point of that?

What of the decline & fall of empires? Human empires & godly ones? & what about those gods—That Apt Ohm, Mary Ann the Digger, Railhater Beeching, all that brood? What, above all, about wood?

That is the key mystery. Wood makes trees trees. Wood is also what makes ties—those bars crosswise between railsea rails—ties. A thing can have only one essence. How can this, then, be?

Of all the philosophers’ answers, three stand out as least unlikely.

—Wood & wood are, in fact, appearances notwithstanding, different things.

—Trees are creations of a devil that delights in confusing us.

—Trees are the ghosts of ties, their gnarled & twisted & dreamlike echoes born when parts of the railsea are damaged & destroyed. Transubstantiated matter.

All other suggestions are deeply eccentric. One of these three is most likely true. Which you believe is up to you.

We have pirates to return to.

FIFTY-TWO

GENERALLY IT WAS ROBALSON WHO BROUGHT SHAM his food. It was Robalson who waited around after Elfrish left, on his brief visits to double-check on picture descriptions, that left Sham quivering. “Yeah,” Robalson would say, as if agreeing with whatever terror Elfrish had instilled. He’d twist his face into a sneer, undermined only somewhat by his visible discomfort at Sham’s fear.

One time he came alone, & led Sham upstairs constrained, with his wrists shackled to a belt itself attached to a pole that Robalson held. It was a modern train. Diesel. They were moving faster than the Medes could have. They were on a strip of pondside rail star’d, with quicksand to port, from which muckworms poked bleached eyeless faces.

Sham took stock. You never knew. Seven, no, eight carriages. Two double-decker. Crew everywhere. A conning tower. Not as high as the crow’s nests he was used to, but the telescope jutting from its viewing slit looked powerful. The Tarralesh was not in pursuit, did not fly the notorious skull-&-spanners flag. But it bristled with barrels. From specialised portholes & little holes poked cannons & machine guns. & there was Elfrish. Sham shivered.

“Well?” Elfrish shouted. The captain pointed. Dead ahead a scrappy forest gave way to sand, brick-coloured in the odd light. “Was that what you saw?”

This was why they’d brought him out—not for his comfort, but to verify the landscape. Elfrish & his officers were gathered around Juddamore’s pictures.

Should Sham lie? Tell them to go to airy hell? Tell them this was not the place when—he looked, & oh, it was. He caught his breath. This was the first image he had seen over Captain Naphi’s shoulder. He should lie. Tell them no, you should be somewhere very else. Get them off the Shroakes’ tails?

A rumour & a picture? Sham thought. What kind of crazy person was Elfrish, that that was enough to send him halfway across the railsea, into unknown stretches, on the off chance of who knew what? Evil & cold & terrifying & all that he might be, but Elfrish never seemed crazy—

& he wasn’t. It hit Sham abruptly. The captain talking about missing something previously. The certainty in his voice when refuting Sham about the wreck’s contents. The sense, in all his talk of the Shroakes, not only of greed, but of work unfinished.

It was him, thought Sham. It was him took them before. It was this train wrecked the Shroakes.

Oh, Caldera, Sham thought. Dero, Caldera. He imagined the Tarralesh bearing down on what must have been a severely battered Shroake train. Grappling hooks fired across cold rails. The boarding, attackers sweeping through the tiny vehicle, swinging cutlasses, firing guns. Oh, Caldera.

A chance encounter on the Shroakes’ carefully roundabout voyage home? Elfrish must’ve found hints of the journey. Evidence of the astonishing feats of engineering & salvage. & realizing these were not just any nomads, remembered stories of the heaven the evasive coded logs hinted they’d approached, full of endless riches, the ghosts of money born & died & not yet made.

How the pirates must’ve hunted for hints as to the route. Stripped & ripped & wrecked the wreckage. Brutally demanded answers, if any Shroake then still breathed. Neglecting that frantically dug hole. No wonder Elfrish was obsessed. All possible rewards aside, those pictures were a rebuke to him. Evidence of his piracy fail.

Sham shivered at the sight of the captain. He should, he decided grimly, looking out to Railsea, he definitely should lie.

“Let me tell you why you definitely shouldn’t lie,” Elfrish said. “Because what’s keeping you alive is your directions. It’s like a checklist. You get one mark for each picture. We have a rough idea where we’re going, but we need to double-check with you. Twelve checks & you win, we get to the end. But if it’s too long between one mark to another, you don’t win, & then you stop. Dead … Stop.” Sham swallowed. “So. If this is not where we need to be, you better tell us, so we can rethink & get where we’re going fast, because you need your first checkmark.

“I just know,” Elfrish said, “you don’t want to die, do you?”

Really not. Even so, there was a part of Sham that wanted to simply tell some ludicrous untruth, have them roar off in thoroughly the wrong direction as long as he could sustain it. Would that be a glorious death?

“I can see you thinking it over,” Elfrish said kindly. “I’ll give you a minute or two. I quite understand. This is a big decision.”

“Come on,” muttered Robalson. He jerked Sham’s chain. “Don’t be stupid.”

Sham came close. Had given up hope, & why not, why not mess with them? He came close. But at that moment he looked into the little storm of railgulls arcing around the train & saw the silhouette of quite unavian wings.

Daybe! Lurching with a frantic bat flap, a careering pell-mell motion nothing like birds’. Sham kept himself still, did not show his excitement.

The bat had definitely seen him. Sham’s chest swelled. How far had Daybe come? How long been following? It was that, the sudden not-being-alone-ness, the presence of even an animal friend, that changed Sham’s mind. For reasons he couldn’t have put very clearly into words it was abruptly important to him that he keep himself alive, which at the moment meant useful, as long as possible. Because look, there was Daybe.

“Yeah,” he said. “That’s what was in the picture.”

“Good,” said Elfrish. “There really wasn’t very much else that first picture you described could be. If you’d told us no, I’d probably have had to chuck you off. Good decision. Welcome to staying alive.”

As he turned, Sham glimpsed Robalson’s face. To his shock, the pirate boy was staring at the bat in the air. He knew! He’d seen it! But Robalson looked at him, & said nothing.

He led Sham back to the cell, checked they were alone, then eagerly winked. “No harm in having a friendly face around,” he whispered, & gave Sham an uneasy smile.

What? thought Sham. You want to be friends?

But he would not risk his daybat’s freedom or life. Swallowing distaste, Sham smiled back.

He waited until the sound of his young jailer’s footsteps had disappeared, then quickly Sham opened the tiny window of his cell & shoved his arm out into the gusts, as far as it would go. The angle was awkward, the pain in his limb not inconsiderable, the flying specks as random-looking & momentary as soot in a storm. Sham waved & whispered & made noises that must have been snatched by the wind & track-clatter, but he made them anyway. & after mere moments of this he let out a cry of triumph, because swooping down, landing heavy & warm & shaggy on his arm, was Daybe, snickering in greeting.

FIFTY-THREE

THEM ANGELS CAN’T HAVE DONE MUCH OF A JOB ON that bridgeknot,” Dero said.

“Celestial intervention,” said Caldera. “It ain’t what it used to be.”

“Look!” Dero pointed. Smoke. In the distance. Dirty smudgy smoke—the breath of a steam engine burning something not clean—that tickled the underside of the upsky, which was roiling & hazy that day.

“What is it?” Caldera said. Dero checked & rechecked, gazed through far-seeing scopes & persuaded his on-train ordinators to extrapolate & best-guess.

“I dunno,” he said. “It’s too far. But I think—I think …” He turned to his sister. “I think it’s pirates.”

Caldera looked up. “What?” she shouted. “Again?”

AGAIN. THEIR SUBTERFUGE had lasted as long as it had lasted, the Shroakes’ misleading rumour-mongering about their intended journey. But now everyone in Manihiki who cared must know they’d gone, & that meant stories & grapevines, & that was why they had started, as the days went on, glimpsing pirate trains.

These were not undangerous railsea stretches. There were a plethora of islets, here, & ill-charted woodlands & chasms in which a skilful captain might hide. It was no surprise buccaneers favoured them. They had not, though, expected quite how many would be looking for them.

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

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

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

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

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

“Why?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It’s still coming,” said Dero.

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

“It’s still coming!” Dero shouted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A colossal noise above, a thunderclap of wings.

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

FIFTY-FOUR

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FIFTY-FIVE

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

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

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

Where were they?

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

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

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

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

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

There was a booming. A fusillade of missiles arced with dreadful laziness from the pirate train, over the rails, to rainbow down in a succession of withering explosions that sent ripped-up rail shreds & ties in all directions. One of the flying bombs hit the rear of their quarry.

Sham moaned. The caboose exploded, sent flames & metal & wood in a big splash, as well as, oh my Stonefaces, little pinwheeling figures. They landed scattered. & near those who still moved, now fitfully, injured, the earth erupted, as carnivorous burrowers smelled person-meat.

Another flurry of shots, & the train was immobilised. Over horrible minutes, the Tarralesh came closer. Sham could hear the crew catcalling & arming themselves. On the deck of the immobilized train the men & women waited with swords, guns & terrified expressions. They may not have been soldiers or pirates, but they would fight.

NOT THAT IT DID them overmuch good. The Tarralesh bombed them some more, spilt defenders like spillikins onto the awful ground. Elfrish’s vehicle came alongside, to an adjacent rail, & snagged the crippled merchant with grappling hooks. Hallooing to some aggressive pirate god, the fighting crew of the Tarralesh swept aboard, & the hand-to-hand melee began.

Sham couldn’t see much. A blessing. He could see enough. He saw women & men shoot each other at close hand, send wounded & dead flying off the train. Some fell near enough that he could hear their cries, see them crawling on broken bones, clutching at wounds, scrabbling to get back aboard.

The sandy soil began to churn. To swirl & sink. A circle slid down into a cone. A man slid down, too, crying out. From the base of that pit scissored two great chitin mandibles, beetle-coloured scythes. Compound eyes.

Sham looked away before the antlion’s jaws closed on its meal & a scream abruptly ended. He flattened himself against the wall below his porthole. He felt as if his heartbeat was fast & hard enough to shake the train. When he looked again, the predators were fighting between themselves, & the ground churned not only with men & women but with the squabbles of giant insects & mole rats, shrews & moles. While in the ruined train, pirates took control.

Those pirates overboard & still living were rescued. The merchants on the earth were left to scrabble their own way back to their wreck, around antlion pits, the loose earth of hungry badgers.

Elfrish’s crew hauled goods out of the holds, craned & grappling-hooked & pulleyed them across to the Tarralesh. Watching them under armed guard were the last dejected & sobbing merchants. Sham couldn’t hear what Elfrish was saying, but he saw two or three of the defeated crew pulled out—the best dressed, it looked like, the captain & officers. They were dragged onto the pirate train, out of his sight. Sham could hear scuffs above him. A groan of horror from the other merchants, all staring at whatever was occurring above Sham’s head.

When at last the Tarralesh pulled away, it left behind it an empty & immobile train, a big chunk of nu-salvage for someone to pick clean. On its roof the last of its crew, allowed by laziness to live, mourning, cold, marooned.

“What a day, eh?” Robalson said.

“What’ll happen to them?” Sham could not turn to look at him.

“Someone’ll probably come for them, maybe, when they don’t turn up where they’re expected,” Robalson said. He shrugged. He wouldn’t meet Sham’s eye. “Don’t look at me like that,” Robalson muttered. Sulkily put down a bowl.

“What did you do to those last ones?” Sham said. “I could hear …”

“Plank,” Robalson said. He made walking-finger motions. “They was the officers. I said don’t look at me like that. You know we lost six people? If they’d just surrendered we wouldn’t have had to do any of that.”

“Right,” said Sham, & turned back to the window. He felt like crying. He shivered. “What was under the plank? Where’d you do it?” When there was no answer, he said, “It was more antlions, weren’t it? Centipedes?” Robalson was already gone.

Sham hunted for paper as carefully as once his crew had hunted moldywarpes. Found a scrap of drawer-liner. Kept looking. Found at last a discarded pencil stub. Had to chew-sharpen it. He wrote:

“Please! I am a captive in the train Tarralesh. It is pirates. They have guns. They are a pirate train. They are making me show them the way to a secret if I don’t do it they will drop me into the railsea & maybe an antlion trap or something. My name is S. a. Soorap training under Capt. Naphi of the Medes. Please can you help me. Please also tell Troose yn Verba & Voam yn Soorap of Streggeye that I have not run away & that I will come back! The Tarralesh wants to Do Harm to two young Manihiki travellers & also to me please help!! West & North is all I know where we are going. Thank you.”

Sham leaned into the dark, chattered, beckoned until Daybe came in. Sham twisted up the paper very tight & tucked it into the tracer still secured to the daybat’s leg.

“Listen,” he said. “I know this is going to be hard. You came to find me. & you don’t know how much that meant. But you know what I need you to do now?” He swept out his arm, hard, in the direction they had come. “I need you to go back. Fly back. Find someone. Find anyone.”

The bat stared at him. Intimidated by the night. It huddled, licked him, met Sham’s eyes. His heart breaking, Sham started the long process of persuading it, intimidating it, frightening it if he had to, into flying away.

FIFTY-SIX

ANOTHER CARRIAGE WAS GONE, TAKEN SKYWARD IN vengeful & tremendous owl claws. Caldera had pressed the release, as the owl had flown. Just in time but at the right time, restraining herself until those strigine talons were directly over the track on which the Shroakes’ engine had still raced, the last to be dragged up, gunning it so the train lurched forward as the carriages fell & with sparks & terrifying bangs slammed wheels-down back onto the rails. One more moment, they’d have been too high, or too far to one side or the other, & the whole vehicle would have been lost.

The Shroakes, gasping & owl-eyed themselves, had watched the metal tons of what had been their rearmost carriage hauled off into skyborne silhouette, viciously pecked as it went, & shedding shredded metal. It looked like straw & gossamer as it fell, & landed with booms & made the earth shudder.

At last they pushed on, under a huge night, in the deeps of which upsky predators made sounds. The Shroakes—

—but wait. On reflection, now is not the time for Shroakes. There is at this instant too much occurring or about to occur to Sham ap Soorap.

Look: Sham has just sent away his own, furred, little-winged friend. Once bloodstained, a poor tryer at medicine, an aspirer to salvage-hunting, & now a locked-away captive in a pirate train.

This train, our story, will not, cannot, veer now from this track on which, though not by choice, Sham is dragged.

Later, Shroakes. Sham is with pirates.

FIFTY-SEVEN

WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH YOU?” ROBALSON WAS always shirty with Sham when Sham was sad. & the morning after Sham had finally persuaded Daybe off into the dark, he was very sad.

They were in wildlands now, oddlands, & the railsea was punctuated with anomalies. Hillocks of bridges, rotators to swivel an engine amid a starburst of rails, a multiply-holed island. Salvage. & not all old arche-salvage. Wrecks. Ranging in size from tiny scout carts to large, now-skeletal vehicles. Overgrown, weather-stripped, rusted, cold. A train boneyard.

“Someone’ll probably come for them,” Robalson had said about those stranded merchants. Sham wondered. You never knew. That night, alone, he watched the birds, none of which would come to him when he waved. He had a bit of a sniff because his heart hurt that Daybe had gone, & now he had not a single friend on this train.

& then the next morning, he looked out again & gasped. Sham held his breath, he bit his lip so that he wouldn’t scream in delight. Because at the horizon, like a miracle, as if he had conjured it, called for it, which perhaps his beautiful bat friend had, he saw a Manihiki ferronavy train.

It moved hard, fast & well. These were some railsailors. It was perhaps three miles off. Approaching on interception course. It ran up pendants, that Sham, a trainsman now, could read. Prepare, they said, for Inspection.

AMONG THE FLURRY of feet & anxious preparations, Robalson stuck his head around the door.

“You,” he said. “Shtum. Not a word. I’m right outside. You make a sound …” He shook his head. “The captain’s waiting for an excuse. So you make a sound &—all sorts of stuff’ll happen.” He made a close-your-mouth motion & went.

“Attention Tarralesh.” An amplified voice boomed from the Manihiki train. “Prepare to receive visitors.” Sham watched it draw near on close rails, set down a cart of splendid speed & modern appearance, full of uniformed officers. He leaned, he waved, he yelled, out of the window.

Had they seen him? What cock-&-bull story was the captain offering? Had they swept away all the appurtenances of the pirate’s life? Sham heard stamping on the deck above. He did not know when he would be safe to yell. Someone was approaching down the corridor. He hesitated. He could hear a roaring argument. Sham could not make out anything, until the shouters stopped outside his cabin & his heart went into his throat & abruptly the door flew open & a tall officer in the Manihiki navy, a captain in smart black uniform, brocaded & gilded & polished-buttoned, was standing before him, yelling back at Elfrish & Robalson. The officer pointed at Sham & yelled, “That boy, that’s who I’m talking about. So bring him out. You have a lot of explaining to do.”

“THEY BEEN KEEPING ME PRISONER!” Sham shouted as he ran after the officer. “Don’t be fooled, sir, they’re pirates! Sir! Thank you for rescuing me!” Elfrish struggled to shut him up, to put a hand over his mouth, but Sham was moving too fast. “They want me to lead them to a secret, sir, & I don’t even really know what it is or where, but they think I recognise things & they’ve had me here for days & they’re breaking the law—”

They were outside, in creepier railscape still than Sham had seen. Ahead, the rails wove between scrubby rock hills, & into them, into brief dark tunnels overlooked by leafless trees. There were other Manihiki officers on the deck. “Captain Reeth,” they barked as Sham’s rescuer appeared.

Reeth made some imperious gesture. He was tall & looked down at everyone. He gestured for Sham to come closer. Sham breathed out, shuddering, in relief.

“You really shouldn’t listen to this idiot boy, sir,” Elfrish said, & cuffed at him. “He’s our cabin boy.”

“You said this was your cabin boy.” Reeth pointed at Robalson.

“They both are. Never have too many cabin boys. Except this one, this Sham. He’s been trouble since he joined us.”

“So you can have too many.” The officer put his hand on Sham’s shoulder.

“Certainly you can, Captain Reeth. We had him in the brig for, for thieving, sir. He stole food.”

“They’re lying!” In confused but exhaustive detail, interspersed with expostulations of ostentatious disbelief from Elfrish, Sham jabbered his story. “You got to arrest them all!” he said. “They done all killings & robbings & they’re going to kill me! He killed the Shroakes! Smashed their train ages ago. You heard of them?”

“He’s a fantasist,” sneered Elfrish.

“He may be,” said Reeth. “But unfortunately for you we know it’s perfectly true that two young Manihikians called Shroake have departed the city. We’ve heard word that the remains of their long-disappeared family were in fact found. & these youngsters have left in a train that we are eager to find. This we also know. Now, Captain. Do you think, do you really think, we’ve heard nothing of the young man whose visit spurred a new generation of Shroakes to their annoying aspirations?”

He must have made some flickering signal with his eyes. His subordinates raised their weapons, simultaneously. Sham held his breath.

“If I were to check your hold, Captain Elfrish,” Reeth said, “what goods would I find?”

There was a silence. The Tarralesh crew fingered their weapons. He’s got them! Sham thought.

Elfrish sighed. “Alright then,” he said. “Yes,” he said. “It’s sort of like he says.”

“You see?” Sham shouted. “Arrest them!”

“But,” Elfrish said. With reassuring this-is-not-a-weapon motions, he withdrew from his pocket a leather wallet, held it up open to a silver stamp. “My letter of marque. I’m licensed. Manihiki seal. All official.”

A—what? Sham thought.

“Why didn’t you just say this from the start?” Reeth said.

“Say what?” said Sham.

“Well …” Elfrish said. He grinned sheepishly.

“Tax?” Reeth said. “As a privateer, twenty percent of everything in your hold belongs to Manihiki. You’re a bloody tax avoider.”

“When you going to arrest him?” Sham shouted. Elfrish cuffed him, & Reeth did not stop him.

“See,” Reeth said, “here’s the thing. If his story’s true, he & you are going to the same place these young Shroakes are going. & I like the sound of the technique you’re using.” He considered.

“Arrest them,” said Sham. No one did a thing.

“I’m claiming him,” Reeth decided. “In lieu of your tax. See what I can get out of him.”

“What?” shouted Sham.

“What?” shouted Elfrish. “You can’t do that!”

“Certainly I can,” said Reeth.

This wasn’t between police & criminal, Sham realised. His insides felt like dust. The dead & robbed they’d left behind weren’t Manihiki merchants, after all, not the navy’s charges. Elfrish wasn’t freelance. He was a sanctioned pirate, under the purview of a government, a Manihiki agent as much as Reeth. This was an argument between colleagues. Departmental politics.

“You know,” Elfrish said, “what’s beyond the railsea? Neither do I. But you know & I know, Captain, that there’s an inverse correlation between proximity & pecuniary recompense, vis-à-vis treasure. To put it another way, the farther out the hoard, the bigger. So. What d’you suppose is beyond the railsea?”

“No such place as beyond,” Reeth said.

“Beg to differ.” Elfrish raised his gun, carefully, even as Reeth’s men eyed him, their weapons up. It was as if he moved so slowly they were somehow paralysed, watching. He pointed it at Reeth. Some of his crew raised theirs, too.

“The boy’s mine,” Elfrish said.

Reeth laughed. “Well done,” Reeth said. “You just lost your licence. So far I count obstruction of an officer, threatening behaviour & illegal piracy.”

“But,” Elfrish said, “I’m willing to bet—& look, so’s my crew—that what’s at the end of the world makes all that worth it.”

It was quiet under the sun. The birds circled. The wind pushed Sham’s hair around. Reeth, at last, said one word: “Fire.”

Whatever frozen moment had taken them, his officers were back in control. They were unafraid, & efficient. They fired.

The pirates fired back. Everyone fighting over Sham. Who dropped.

It went haywire on that deck. Shouting, shots, running feet. People scrambled for cover. There were screams. Reeth, still firing, dragged a wounded comrade across the deck, shouting a signal into his shoulder-mic. The wartrain’s huge-bore guns swivelled. Reeth & his fellow officers hunched & scrambled back for their own jollycart.

“Holy flaming hell,” Elfrish shouted. Even so weapon-bristling a train as the Tarralesh had little chance against a Manihiki wartrain. “Full power! Full power! Go go go go! Get away from them!”

They shot forward. The vehicle lurched, powering on into that merciful maze of hills & tunnels.

Sham had a plan. If you could call it that. He crawled; the chaos continued. He reached the base of the crow’s nest & quickly started to climb. The wartrain still approached. “Get him down,” Elfrish shouted. The Tarralesh powered towards a tunnel.

The naval train fired. Now that, that was an explosion. A whole mountain of boom grew out of nothing. The Tarralesh swayed, seemed to gust on a shockwave. Here came a wartrain.

Sham tried to work out trajectories. He could see, very calmly, suddenly, what was going to happen, where, when. “Get him!” Elfrish was yelling, waving his weapon in Sham’s direction, but his crew were scattering. Robalson was right below Sham, staring up at him with a look of miserable astonishment.

& the wartrain arrived, hard & fast, firing again, & an explosive came down, & the rear of the Tarralesh, accelerating without control, exploded.

A chorus of wails. Pirates flying through the air, scattering across the railsea. The bulk of the train itself shoved brutally forward by the impact, hurtling out of control towards & into that tunnel, that cut-out route through a rock hill ahead.

As Sham stared down, the explosion snatched Robalson away. Sham gasped.

The Tarralesh was shattering as it moved, Sham saw. Sham watched, aghast, as the train plunged into the dark, as the very crow’s nest he climbed slammed into the side of the island & tottered like a cut-down tree. He was prepared. He rode it. Down it came, slowly, it seemed, taking him clear of the snaggliest rock teeth. Falling down towards whatever isolated island this was that wrecked them.

Pirates were scattered & wailing in the dirt & the railsea. There was Elfrish, staring up at Sham from a dark hole in the earth, where he had fallen, all rage & hatred. Staring as up from below some unseen underground thing disturbed in the burrow rose, jostled, snarled, came up to take him. Elfrish did not take his eyes from Sham as it grabbed him. As it sucked him down.

Then Sham could see no more.

Down he came. Aiming for a bush he knew would hurt but less than the stones & a great slamming huff & crack of metal & he was right ow it did hurt, but he was rolling & on hardland now & breathing & shaking & lying very still, partly out of pain but partly because he couldn’t believe he’d done it, & because he knew he was still hunted.

Sham lay & listened to the wartrain approach, & the cries for help from the ruins of the Tarralesh & the terrified pirates in the predator-thronging ground.

THERE ON THE TOP of the hill, on an island in a vehicle graveyard in the wild reaches of the railsea, Sham lay.