Railsea

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.

PART V

BURROWING OWL

(Athene cunicularia trux)

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

Credit: China Mieville (illustration credit 5.1)

FIFTY-EIGHT

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

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

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

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

FIFTY-NINE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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