Corambis (27 page)

Our good fortune was that the servants of the train were professionally accustomed to people who had never ridden, or seen, a train before. We were handed from one polite gentleman in a crimson and gold uniform to another and ended up eventually in a second- class compartment despite having third- class tickets because the last of the polite gentlemen, alarmed by Mildmay’s increasingly grayish pallor, prevailed upon the occupants to share.

The compartment had been booked by two women, and they watched us with— at first— mistrustful gazes. They seemed reassured by Corbie edging into the compartment after me, and Mildmay was clearly not malingering, having gone a dreadful dead-fish- belly- white and needing my support simply to sit down without falling. He managed a nod at the two women, and then did not so much lean back as collapse into the corner, and shut his eyes. After a few minutes, when his breathing had evened out, he said, “I’m okay,” without opening his eyes and, as far as I could determine, fell instantly asleep.

I let my own breath out slowly and turned to smile at our audience, feeling Corbie’s anxiety beside me. The younger woman blushed and averted her eyes; the elder returned my smile and said, nodding at Mildmay, “Will he be all right?”

“He’s recovering from the, er, from pleuriny. He’ll be fine. I’m Felix Harrowgate. He’s my brother, Mildmay Foxe. And this is”— Corbie’s foot connected briskly with my ankle—“Miss Corbie.”

“Frances Leverick,” said the older woman. “And my traveling companion is Olive Bridger.”
The younger woman managed a mumble and a much weaker smile.
Miss Leverick I judged to be forty or so, Miss Bridger probably Mildmay’s age or a little younger. Both of them had the heavy- jawed squareness to their faces that I had observed to be typical of Corambins. Miss Bridger was remarkable only for her flax- pale hair, being otherwise indistinguishable from any other young Corambin bourgeoise; I wondered if she, like Corbie, was of Ygressine blood. Miss Leverick’s face had considerably more character, laugh and frown lines both; her eyes were light brown, flecked with gold, and very sharp. They were both dressed respectably in dark suits; Corbie had judged her wardrobe well. Miss Bridger wore some unbecoming pearls; Miss Leverick’s only jewelry was a ring, amber set in silver, on her right index finger. As far as I had been able to determine, rings had no thaumaturgical meaning in Corambis; I was fairly certain in any event that Miss Leverick was annemer. Miss Bridger, on the other hand . . .
I leaned forward, caught and held her attention. Her eyes widened; she jerked her chin up, breaking eye contact, and I sat back.
“I’m glad,” I said, “that you’ve learned that much.” I had not, when Malkar found me. And then my words, my tone, echoed in my mind, and I was chilled by how much like Malkar I sounded, a predator deigning to toy with his prey.
“Everyone learns,” Miss Bridger said tightly. “Resisting a warlock is the first thing we’re taught.”
“Warlock?” Miss Leverick said. “Olive?”
“He ain’t!” Corbie said indignantly.
“He tried to enthrall me,” Miss Bridger said.
“Oh please,” I said. “I did no such thing.”
“He wouldn’t,” Corbie said, still indignant. “He’s my teacher.”
Miss Bridger turned rather sharply to look at Corbie; they locked stares, reminding me irresistibly of a pair of cats squaring off for a fight. “Ladies,” I said, kicking Corbie’s ankle in my turn, and they looked away from each other quickly, both flushing.
“I’m sorry,” Miss Bridger said, diffident again. “But that’s what warlocks do, and that’s how it starts. It’s why you must never look another magician in the eye for too long.” And, faltering, “It’s terribly rude.”
“I apologize,” I said stiffly, well aware that although I had certainly not been trying to enthrall the child, I had been bullying her. As Cabaline wizards habitually did to determine who ought to defer to whom. It was an ugly habit anyway, and in Corambis it looked as if it might get me in more trouble than I could talk myself out of.
“You must be a magician, then,” Miss Leverick said, her voice carefully neutral.
“Wizard,” I corrected and, bracing myself, showed them my palms.
Miss Bridger actually gasped. Miss Leverick said, “That will teach me to dismiss Una Semmence’s novels as nothing but lurid nonsense. Are they really . . . ?”
She started to reach out, then stopped and looked at me. “Go ahead,” I said; I owed them this much for being so dramatic about it.
Miss Leverick’s touch was very light. “How fascinating,” she said. “Is it true they’re done with magic?”
“They’re done with needles,” I said and pulled my hands back, resisting the urge to tuck them against my sides.
“I beg your pardon,” said Miss Leverick. “I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable. You must get tired of all the ridiculous notions people have. Have you been in Corambis long?”
“Only a few weeks,” I said, returning her smile. “And that mostly confined to a hotel room. My brother fell ill coming over the pass.”
“Oh how dreadful,” said Miss Leverick. “And traveling is tiring enough without adding illness into the equation.”
“Do you travel a great deal?” I asked, hoping to distract her away from my affairs. Corbie was still staring fixedly at the door of the compartment, face and neck an unbecoming blotchy red; there would be no help from her for a while yet.
But my stratagem worked very well, as it turned out Miss Leverick had traveled from one end of Corambis to the other. She had even been south of the Perblanches— once—although she said apologetically that she had found things very uncomfortable and had no par tic u lar desire to do so again.
At that point, the train began to move— with an appalling lurch that both Miss Leverick and Miss Bridger assured me was normal. Corbie looked more than a little wild- eyed; Mildmay didn’t even twitch.
“Have you not traveled on a train before, Mr. Harrowgate?” Miss Bridger said. Again like a cat, she was now carefully ignoring Corbie.
“I’d never seen a train before this morning,” I said, entranced by the rapidly moving view out the window.
“Oh,” said Miss Bridger, another little gasp.
“The railways don’t extend past the Perblanches,” Miss Leverick said, “and as far as I know, no other people have developed steam- powered travel. Am I correct, Mr. Harrowgate?”
“I’ve certainly never heard of such a thing before,” I said.
They left us alone for a while, as Corbie and I watched the buildings and streets of St. Melior gradually give way to countryside: farmland and then, after perhaps an hour, open meadows which then shifted again to farmland and then another city unfurled itself around us.
“Granderfold,” said Miss Leverick before I had to ask.
Granderfold was smaller than St. Melior, and not nearly as prosperous. The buildings looked older, and most of them could have used a fresh coat of paint. I took the opportunity of our stop to fetch Lilion out of my pocket and unfold the map. Corbie leaned in, and we read the names of the towns: Bernatha, Granderfold, Wildar, Kilrey, Skimfair, Follenfant, Esmer. And the Forest of Nauleverer in the middle of it all.
Miss Leverick and Miss Bridger returned from a brief promenade along the platform, and Miss Leverick said with immediate interest, “What a fantastic map! That must be Lilion’s
Guidebook
. He was a surveyor for the Company, so he actually went to the places he writes about.”
I thought of Challoner cribbing from Virenque. “Quite. ‘The Company’?”
“The Corambin Railway Company, sorry. My father also worked for them, and I’ve never entirely lost the habit of thinking of them as a sort of combined god and scapegoat. Whenever anything went wrong in Father’s life, it was always the Company to blame. In his old age, he even blamed them for his gout.”
The train jerked into motion again. This time Mildmay made a faint sound of protest, but did not stir. Miss Leverick said, “We reach Wildar in half an hour or so. Is that your destination?”
“No,” I said, “we’re going to Esmer.”
“Oh!” said Miss Bridger. “So are we!”
“Three cheers for you,” Corbie muttered, but I didn’t think either of the women heard her.
“You’re welcome to share our compartment on the Esmer train,” Miss Leverick said. “It will certainly be more restful for your brother.”
“That’s very kind of you,” I said. “Thank you.”
Dennifell Station was even worse than Clave; it was, Miss Leverick informed me, the Company’s southern hub and the busiest station in all of Corambis: “Esmer has more traffic, but three stations to sort it through.” Mildmay was groggy— not insensible, but truly not capable of managing by himself— and Corbie was showing a distressing tendency to cling, which I diverted by giving her to Mildmay to lean on. Miss Leverick, I decided, was almost certainly a saint, for she led us through the chaos of Dennifell and got us established in a compartment that was the mirror image of the one we’d left, all without turning a hair. I didn’t even have a chance to worry about missing the train until after we were all sitting down again and I’d unfolded Lilion’s map.
From Wildar to Kilrey was an hour; Corbie and I again watched out the window while Mildmay slept and Miss Leverick and Miss Bridger talked quietly. As we left Kilrey, Miss Leverick said, “We stop for lunch in Skimfair. Would you and your companions care to join us, Mr. Harrowgate?”
“We would be delighted,” I said promptly, but couldn’t help checking my pocket watch. “Lunch? Isn’t it a trifle early?”
“There are no stops in Nauleverer,” Miss Leverick said, “and we don’t reach Follenfant until seventeen- thirty.”
“Ah. I see.” I looked at Nauleverer sprawling across the middle of the map. “Lilion says it’s all wild?”
“There are some villages,” Miss Leverick said, “but all near the edges. No one lives in Nauleverer Deep.”
“There are stories,” Miss Bridger said.
“Oh, not just stories,” said Miss Leverick. “I don’t remember the final count of casualties for the laying of the Follenfant– Skimfair line, but it was appalling. More than twice that of the Esmer– Whallan line, which is I don’t know how many times as long. One of my students was a spike driver, and he says the forest hated them. When he’ll talk about it at all.”
“Nobody cuts wood in Nauleverer,” Miss Bridger said. “Not deeper than you can see the edge from.”
“And this train journey is safe?” I said, half- suspecting that they were merely teasing me.
“The rails are iron,” Miss Bridger said, as if that explained everything.
“And . . . ?” I said.
“Iron for warding,” Miss Leverick said.
Iron for warding was sheerest nonsense, otherwise every wizard in the Mirador would be wearing iron rings. But I didn’t want to start an argument with an annemer and an untrained student; I created a diversion by opening the
Guidebook
to the entry on Nauleverer and reading them what Lilion had written, as I’d read it to Mildmay in our room at the Fiddler’s Fox.
“Good old Lilion,” Miss Leverick said fondly. “Didn’t believe in anything that didn’t bite him first. I wonder what stories
he
heard.”
“Stories?” said Mildmay, coming suddenly alert. Then, “Powers, where
are
we?”
“Good morning,” I said. “I’ll remember this in future if I ever need to get your attention in a hurry.” He ducked his chin, blushing a little, and I answered his question: “We are somewhere between Kilrey and Skimfair, where we are going to have lunch with Miss Leverick and Miss Bridger.” Mildmay looked warily from one to the other; I remembered belatedly how much he disliked having strangers watch him eat and added, “And perhaps we can prevail on them to tell us stories about Nauleverer. Here,” and I directed his attention to the map.
He forgot instantly about his self- consciousness, and over his bowed head, I said to Miss Leverick, “You said one of your students was a spike driver. What do you teach?”
The answer to that question brought us into Skimfair; clearly Miss Leverick had been drawn to teaching by a natural propensity to lecture. She was employed by something called the Society for the Advancement of Universal Education, and she gave lectures on Corambin history to chapters of the Society all over the country. When she wasn’t traveling, she taught a history class. “In the eve nings,” she said.
“For people who work during the day,” Miss Bridger added, hero- worship naked in her eyes. Miss Bridger was the daughter of the Society’s chapter president in St. Melior. The occasion of Miss Leverick giving a lecture in St. Melior had been utilized to provide Miss Bridger a companion for her trip to Esmer and the Institution, where she was starting at the Women’s Thaumaturgical College. Beside me, Corbie shifted, but did not speak.
“Our goal is particularly to reach those people who did not have opportunities for conventional schooling,” said Miss Leverick. “I teach a great many retired railway workers, house servants— I have one student who began as a chimney sweep and is now a jockey.”
“So anybody can come?” Mildmay asked.
I startled; I hadn’t realized that he was paying attention, much less that he was interested.
He’d made an effort to speak clearly, and Miss Leverick went up in my estimation, for she made a corresponding effort to understand him, and did not look to me for a translation. “Yes,” she said. “There is a minimal fee for the classes— we have to rent a room, and there’s the matter of supplies— but the lectures are always free.”
Mildmay nodded his thanks and went back to the map. Miss Leverick watched him for a moment, then said to me, “It has been very painful, these past few indictions, giving lectures on the historical schisms between Corambis and Caloxa. I am grateful, of course, that the Insurgence has ended without further bloodshed, but I remain convinced that if the Convocation would pay better attention to its own history, it need not have happened at all.”
“Ah,” I said weakly, and counted myself fortunate that we were slowing to a halt in Skimfair before Miss Leverick could launch into one of her classroom lectures.
Lunch was at the station; much of Skimfair’s economy seemed to be centered around providing food for railway travelers, and Miss Leverick said we would find the same to be true in Follenfant. She was clearly known and liked by the station staff; it was not accidental that we ended up at a secluded corner table with a servitor saying in a confidential murmur, “You don’t want the fish today, Miss Frances. Fairlee put too much pepper in again.”
We followed the course of wisdom, and let Miss Leverick order for the table. The food— not fish, but a chicken en casserole— arrived promptly, and I reminded Miss Leverick that there were stories about Nauleverer.
“Of course,” she said. “There was one I remember, about how you must never go to sleep in the Forest of Nauleverer. That if you lie down for too long, the roots of the trees will reach up and pull you under the earth. Old Mrs. Worthing used to say that all that was ever found of people who slept in Nauleverer were a few well- polished bones.”
She went on easily, and we learned about the wolfmen said to live in the forest’s heart, the streams whose water was as beautiful as daylight and as lethal as nightshade (which was also said to grow in the forest in vast quantities), the will- o’- the- wisps who tempted unwary travelers off the path, and a dozen other such stories.
“And what about the, um, doom that came to Corybant?” I said, remembering Lilion’s dry skepticism.
“Well, that depends very much on whom you ask,” said Miss Leverick. “Some don’t believe there was ever a city in Nauleverer at all— our rec ords before the reign of Lessander the Archivist are spotty at best, and so there’s no conclusive proof that Corybant is more than a cautionary tale.”
“Cautioning about what?”
“The dangers of machines,” Miss Leverick said, dropping her voice dramatically. “The story is— well, the most common story, for as I said, there are several. The common story is that the people of Corybant built a great machine which could move by itself.”
“Like a train?” said Mildmay.