Railsea

eat other than old salted burrowmeat & weevily biscuits, who stopped at the town. Bollons was the nearest port to Cambellia. To Bollons came those brave brigands, pioneers & pillagers, to buy the whispers & the stories that surrounded such continents. Stories about the terrible engined angels, monstrous cousins to the protectors & repairers of the tracks, that guarded the edge of the world. Fables of how, one day, you might get past them, out of time & history. To epochs’ worth of dead & unborn riches. To all the prodigious treasures of Heaven.

Sham sniffed with what might have been desire, might have been something. In those explorers’ carriages would be rations, weapons, hiking gear. Maybe an overland carriage, monitors, trade goods for the peoples of the inland. Perhaps even mountaineering gear, for the most ambitious, like that woman now taking off the helmet & gesticulating thumbs-up at the pumpers.

An updiver. She wasn’t just going into Cambellia: she was going to climb. Beyond the border, roaming into uplands, to the limits of her cable, while the support crews waited below at the edge & pumped & kept her alive, or at least kept her breathing, till something other than the bad air, some bad-air beast or ghost of poisoned high ground, did for her instead.

FOURTEEN

A BUREAUCRAT TOOK MILD PITY. THE MEDES GOT A dockside mooring, shunting into place by the harbourmaster’s offices. En route it passed a navy train all the way from Manihiki: like many of the less muscular island nations, Bollons subcontracted its defence—& attack—to that great ferronaval power. Bored-looking officers in grey uniforms wandered up & down the rooftop decks, eyed the Medes, oiled their guns.

Sham was in the first lot out, going with Dr. Fremlo to deliver Unkus Stone into the hands of the local sawbones. He stepped off the gangway onto solid ground, cobbles that didn’t wobble, didn’t rock. It was an old cliche that the first step on hardland after weeks at railsea made you stumble again, the inertness of rock suddenly feeling mad as a trampoline. An old cliche but true: Sham fell over. His comrades cackled. He started to cringe, then stopped & laughed, too.

A local cart took Sham, the doctor, the captain & first mate, all fussing over the wildly delirious Unkus Stone, through narrow Bollons streets. Sham tended the wounded man as the doctor checked the dressings. He muttered in his head to That Apt Ohm, the great rotund boss-god, one of the few deities worshipped across the railsea, whatever the peculiarities of local pantheons. Bollons was ecumenical, granted church-licences to any deities whose worshippers could pay the fees. But the disrespectful worship of That Apt Ohm was taken more seriously there, pursued with more verve, than at most stops on the railsea. Sham had no idea quite what, if anything, he believed, but there seemed little harm in a quick silent word with one of the few gods whose name he remembered.

WHEN THEY MADE IT to the infirmary the doctor stayed, bickering with the local caregivers over the best course of treatment. So it was to Sham that the captain spoke, at last, on their way back to the Medes.

“What’s your professional opinion, Soorap?” she said.

“Um …” Professional opinion! He could give her a professional opinion on what to carve on a wooden belly to allay boredom, if that was any use? He shrugged. “Dr. Fremlo seems hopeful, ma’am.”

She looked away.

Sham was to return to the hospital the next day, for orders. For now, he was briefly free.

Now Stone was delivered, a weight & urgency dissipated. For all that they had slurred Bollons on the way, the crew were suddenly eager to explore it. They grouped according to various priorities. Yashkan & Lind sauntered off to some unpleasant gathering place the password to which, they kept hinting, they knew, to participate in something scandalous & questionably legal. The crew’s devout members headed off to worship at temples to whatever. Others rubbed their hands, licked their lips for shore-food. Some were lustful.

Sham was certainly curious about that last. He watched that sniggering section of the crew making rude gestures & jokes, lascivious intimations & muttering about to which establishment they would go. Certainly he was intrigued, but on that issue he was shyer than he was curious, so after a second Sham veered & followed Vurinam & Borr, Benightly, Kiragabo Luck, a bunch of cheerful & chatty crew whose intentions were clear from their raucous rendition of the traditional landfall shanty, “We’re Going to Get Unbelievably Drunk (in a Pub).”

IT TURNED OUT, in fact, that the song was misleading: they visited not one pub but many, migrating from one alcohol-hole to the next in an increasingly bleary & beery & ultimately slobbering group like some restless migratory herd.

The first was called the Tall Bird. Its proper name was in Bollons, but it announced itself pictorially in its sign. It was lugubrious & underlit & full of muttering locals & visitors eyeing each other. Kiragabo put a small glass of something in front of Sham. It tasted like blackberries & dust.

“What was it the captain took from you?” said Kiragabo. “After Stone was bit?”

“Something from the wreck.”

“Ooh, mystery man. What was it, Soorap you toerag?”

“Just a thing,” he muttered, while his companions jeered & nudged him while he drank so it slopped on him, & demanded to know more, then forgot what they were talking about when Vurinam launched into some unlikely lewd anecdote. Then to the Grumpy Molly, a more flamboyant place where the walls were garish & a gleaming jukebox blared syncopated JazzleHouse that quickly had Vurinam bouncing like a fool, flirting with anyone near. He was shouting & comparing clothes with a temporary dance partner, a young woman pretty enough to make Sham blush without her even seeing him.

Benightly saw him, though, Sham realised, & laughed at him. Then Vurinam was back at the table, & there was something sweeter & darker & a lot thicker than the first drink going down Sham’s throat. He pulled Daybe from beneath his shirt, let it have a sip, & his companions screamed at him for bringing the happy animal with them, then forgot what had scandalised them.

“It was a wossname,” Sham said. “Little thing for a camera.” It took a moment for his crewmates to understand he was answering a question from a whole pub ago.

“A memory!” said Luck. Benightly raised an eyebrow & was about to ask more, but was distracted by the insistence of a local bravo challenging him to an arm-wrestle. Then they were all at the pinnacle of a thoroughly corkscrewing path at the Clockerel, a snooty establishment signed by a hybrid timepiece-fowl, on a rock spur overlooking the raily harbour. Its staff tried for a moment to keep them out till it looked like causing more difficulties than letting them in.

“Look!” Sham bellowed. “ ’S the train!” Visible through the windows, it was, yes, the Medes. On it glimmered a few home lights. & it was Sham’s round, it turned out, his trainmates helpfully informed him, & helpfully they took out his moneypouch, & helpfully emptied it to pay for jugs of Stone-faces knew what, & this time some bar snacks, too, chilli-fried dustcrab & locust thing the whiskers & segmenty legs of which Sham eyed without enthusiasm but chewed on nonetheless.

“How’d you even end up on the moler?” Vurinam asked him, bewildered but not unkind. The others were leaning in with interest to hear his answer. “Was it your mum & dad?” Sham was befuddled enough that he wasn’t even sure what it was he said in response.

“ ‘Mumble mumble mum & dad mumble’?” Vurinam said. “Well, thank you for elucidating.”

“It weren’t me,” Sham tried to explain, “it was my cousins. I ain’t got a …” The last four words sounded suddenly loud to him, & he closed his mouth before the words mum & dad could get out past his teeth & dampen the evening.

No one was listening anyway. His Medes-mates were all cackling loudly at Vurinam’s impression of him. Vurinam who was punching him on the shoulder, now, in friendly enough fashion, telling him, “Aaah, you’re alright, Soorap, just need to ease up a bit,” & there was Sham thinking