Railsea (28 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

C
OULD IT BE
? O
H, THEY THOUGHT IT COULD
. T
HEY
began to believe that they, the crew of the
Medes
, would make it into the Museum of Completion.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Mocker-Jack.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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