Railsea

lost Sham. Not one part of this story makes any sense.”

The crew stared. Captain Naphi closed her eyes. “As we told him, once,” Naphi said, “sentiment & moletrains don’t mix.”

“There is nowhere,” Fremlo said, “more sentimental than a moletrain. Thankfully.”

Vurinam looked from one side of the deck to the other with sudden cocky urgency, met as many eyes as he could. He cleared his throat. Sham. Worst assistant train doctor ever. Couldn’t play quoits. The crew stared.

“I wish him the best,” said Yashkan suddenly, “but we can’t—”

“The best?” Vurinam said. “You?”

“The reputation of salvors precedes them,” Naphi said. She looked at Sirocco. “We have no idea why she is here. For what she’s searching. What is her agenda. Mr. Mbenday. Set course.” She pulled out the scanner. She waved it for a signal, shook it twice. The proximity of Daybe’s leg transmitter appeared to be interfering with it. Daybe squeaked & shuddered. There was a fingertip drumming of rain. Nobody went anywhere. The crew were looking in every direction.

“Mr. Mbenday,” the captain said. “You will plot us a course. We are scant miles from the greatest moldywarpe you or I or any of us have ever seen.” The captain reached quickly & grabbed Daybe with her uncovered flesh hand. It fluttered, & Sirocco hissed & caught its other outstretched wing. They stretched the bat between them. It squeaked. “A beast,” Naphi said, “that I’ve been hunting since I was little more than a girl. A beast desperate for us to catch it.” Her voice was rising. “We are a harpoon’s throw from a philosophy. I am your captain.”

The trainsfolk watched Captain Naphi pull & the salvor pull back. They spread Daybe’s wings. It made frightened sounds.

Vurinam muttered, “Sham,” looked as if he would say more, but at that moment Dramin coughed. Everyone looked at him. The cook held up a finger, seemed to be thinking.

“The boy is,” he said at last, audibly surprised at his own words, “in trouble.”

“What?” said Yashkan, but even as he spoke, Lind, his companion on more than one Sham-baiting escapade, put her finger to Yashkan’s lips.

“Mr. Mbenday,” Vurinam said. “May I suggest we set about & encourage this daybat to fly? Bet it’ll go back to him. Maybe we can ask this salvor where she arrived from?”

“Good idea,” Mbenday said. “I think that’s a fine suggestion.” He looked at Naphi. “Captain? Will you issue the order?”

Captain Naphi looked from one face to another. Some looked longingly in the direction of the Talpa ferox. Some looked stricken. You could all but hear flapping wings as the money they had imagined into their pockets from their imaginarily successful hunting of Mocker-Jack took imaginary flight. But more—the captain visibly, carefully tallied—did not. Beyond Mbenday’s courteous request lay mutiny.

The captain looked down. From deep inside her came a sound. An exhalation. She raised her head, started to keen, looking up & up until she stared right into the tipping-down sky, & was howling. A long, loud wail. A moment of lament for a moment lost. The crew gave her that. She was, for all of it, a good captain.

She finished. Looked down. Released the bat into Sirocco’s arms.

“Mr. Mbenday,” she said. Her voice was perfectly calm. “Find us a junction. Switchers, ready. Ms., Lady, Sirocco, salvor, person.” She didn’t pause. “The bat, we think, remembers the direction it came from. & it trusts you, now?”

The salvor shrugged. If Sirocco smiled, it was so subtle as to be hard to see. “I’ll stick around,” she said. “There’s bound to be some salvage on the way.”

“Stations,” the captain shouted. The train shuddered as engines fired. “Find us a way around this sinkhole. We hunt one young trainsmate, name of Sham ap Soorap.”

SIXTY-SEVEN

TACKING, SWITCHING EXPERTLY WITH & AGAINST THE wind, sliding from rail to rail with quick touches of the points, came the travellers. A community of trainsfolk in single-carriage vehicles. Each was light, made of fire-hardened wood. None encumbered with an engine, they gusted, were masted, complexly patchworked with triangular sails. Their canvas boomed as the wind yanked. The wind-powered trains hauled a zigzag way across the railsea. Standing at the prow of the front-running vehicle was Sham.

He still marvelled at the quiet running. (Even as he was willing them to get a bloody move on.) His vocabulary of clatternames was unhelpful for these nomads: their very wheels were wood, & the vibrations they sent his feet were softer & more whispered than any he had known. He would have to introduce new words when he made it back to Streggeye. The hrahoom of a skilfully executed line shift, the thehthehtheh of a long straight.

His rescuers, the Bajjer, followed a labour of moldywarpes: red-furred horse-sized moles, fast-moving, cantankerous by nature & made more so by the dive-bombing of the Bajjer’s domesticated hawks & the snaps of the dogs that ran with them trackside, by the harassment of the hunters who harried them with javelins to wear them down. The carts weaved across the animals’ paths, moving in concert, their sails swinging.

This hunt was opportunistic, chances taken en route to & from the net traps where the Bajjer gathered most of their meat. It was at one such that they had found Sham, hallucinating with hunger & exhaustion.

Over the last few days, he had grown used to the spices with which his rescuers cooked & the air-dried gamey molemeat with which they had coaxed him back to health. He wore what of his old clothes he could save & that were not so big they fell off him, together with the fur & skin vestments of the Bajjer.

A man only a little older than Sham came up behind him. What was his name again, Stoffer or something? He was one of those who spoke a few words of Railcreole, & he was keen to learn more. With several of the Bajjer, Sham was able to make halting conversation in simple mixed-up tongue.

Sham knew his urgency was beginning to annoy them. “So …” he said. “When? When Manihiki?” The young man shrugged. Sham did not even know for certain that that was where they were going.

The Bajjer had undoubtedly saved his life. Sham knew he had little right or reason to expect them to disrupt the rhythms of their own lives, too. But he was desperate & impatient & he could not stop asking. The rail-nomads’ travels took them, he understood, to trade points, every so often, where they might drop him. Mostly these were tiny market villages & isolated hunting communities in the railsea. Pirate towns, maybe, too. Well, that would be interesting. Whatever. Sometimes, though, they’d take their business to one of the larger hubs—very occasionally Manihiki.

So far as he could tell, Sham’s fervent campaign of begging had persuaded the Bajjer to make that city a stop on their unending journey slightly sooner than it might otherwise have been. Dangerous as it undoubtedly would be, it was his best chance of finding a way to get home, or to follow the Shroakes. All he could do meanwhile was console himself with two facts: one, that he was travelling much faster than he would have done alone; & two, that he was not dead.

Sham tried to learn to sail. He could not stop worrying about Caldera & Dero. The navy would be hunting for them. He consoled himself with the knowledge that if there was ever, anywhere in any of the railsea, a pair better suited to escaping even so total an enemy, it was Caldera & Dero Shroake. That put a smile on his face.

It was those thoughts, of that family, that reminded him of something. Sham had told his rescuers what little he could of his story. They had not seemed entirely surprised. Which in turn surprised him. Maybe they were forever rescuing castaways & playing host to fascinated travellers, he thought.

& a memory stirred in him then. Something Caldera had said in her salvage-cluttered kitchen, about her parents’ preparations, their researches. They were railseaologists. They had got ready for their journey assiduously. They had, Sham abruptly recalled, sought out & investigated the particular expertises among the railsea nomads.

“Shroakes,” he demanded. “Know them? Shroakes? In a train?” Shrood? the Bajjer muttered to each other. Shott? Shraht? “Shroake!” Ah. One or two remembered that name.