Railsea

Benightly went farther, jumped down onto the Pinschon that jostled behind them, right to its end. He stood silhouetted against the great angel scant yards behind. Its mouth-clamp opened. It roared.

Light was waning. Below the rumbling of the rails there was another rumbling, of the ground. “What’s that?” Caldera said. In the plain behind the chase, the earth trembled. & erupted. Sham gasped as a molehill burst up to huge height. A furrow roared in their direction.

“Stonefaces,” Sham whispered. Sirocco tugged at the wire-strewing transmitter & squeezed some impossible last drop of power from it. Miles off, through thick earth, Sham heard Mocker-Jack roar.

The Medes ploughed through a split in the rock line, followed seconds later by the gaining angel.

His crew watched Benightly. Even so big a man, even tensing all his bulk, he looked tiny in front of the onrushing visitation. He hefted his harpoon. Against the angel. It was laughable. But Benightly drew back his arm & waited & somehow did not look absurd. The angel grew closer.

“What are you doing?” the captain shouted. “Mocker-Jack’s not even here yet.” Benightly said not a word. But the world itself answered.

It shook. Rocks quivered. Behind them, at the entrance to the rock chasm, the ground rose. Broke. Bigger than a tidal wave. The dark dirt fell away from a surging yellow something that shook the stones & rails & sent rockfall hurtling down the inclines. As if the earth spat out a new, rearing, fur-clad mountain. With teeth. Impossible ivory talpa, the titan moldywarpe.

Blood dropped out of Sham’s stomach. He staggered. Abacat Naphi howled a welcome.

A pale & shaggy enormity, a glimpse of blind red eyes in a debris plume. The mole roared.

& crashed back through into the dark beneath. Behind the implacable angel, the last line in the railsea shifted uneasily, rucked in segments as the mole burrowed faster than any train towards its summons.

Sham blinked away tears of awe. The crew were open-mouthed, staggered, by the angel, & by what came behind it. There was no time for reflection. The echoes of their passage swept away & changed, & with a rush the Medes emerged from between rocks. The angel was closing. Sham turned to look ahead at what was coming, & gasped again.

A bridge. Endless. A bridge into dark, jutting from the end of the world.

They were at the rim of the railsea. Racing towards a final cliff. The world came to a stop. Into the nothing, the void beyond earth, their one true rail continued.

They were hurtling way too fast to stop, & an angel was right behind them. Was grinding in engine triumph.

“You,” Benightly said to it, “are close enough.”

The angel’s metal maw gaped. Benightly sang a hunt-hymn. Sham held out his hand.

Sirocco tugged the receiver free of the wire moorings that had boosted it. She handed it to Sham, stepped between him & the captain.

“No!” shouted Naphi, but the salvor kept her back, while Sham ran forward, whispered a prayer & hurled the receiver towards the Pinschon. Towards Benightly.

It arced. Too high! Too high oh what have I done?

But Benightly leapt straight up. He plucked the charged-up receiver from the air with his fingertips. Landed already clipping it to his harpoon. Stood, his throwing arm ready, took aim & Captain Naphi shouted, & the angel opened its mouth-thing again onto gnashing flaming gears with a blast of scorching triumph, into the gusts of which Benightly threw.

The spear flew. An immense throw. Benightly aimed not at the angel was but at where it would be. The spear slammed into its mouth. Which closed.

With a rush of wind the Medes’s wheels rattled on suddenly raised rails, as it careened onto the bridge to nowhere & the land receded. Someone screamed. “Brakes!” someone shouted. To either side was abyss. Sham reeled & stared as the angel bore down.

BEHIND IT SOMETHING CAME. A living earthquake. Shaking the edge of the world. Black earth parted, & animal enormity burst forth.

Pale leviathan, shoved up from the under. It gnashed in epic rage. That mouth! A vast slavering, where steeple-fangs jostled. The mole howled. Haunches like overhangs, claws like towers, shoving into light.

The vast harsh velvet beast breached.

Mocker-Jack soared. Cloud-great & ravening.

& twisted in the air, rolling as it came, so in its endless flanks & belly storming towards the angel, Sham saw the stubs of weapons. Snapped-off handles & hafts, a pelt-archaeology of failed hunts, stinging trophies accumulated over the centuries the colossal burrower had taunted & destroyed.

Hunting that unseen salvaged force, the signal now blaring from the angel’s mouth, down the giant moldywarpe came. Onto the angel. Slab-teeth bared. With a scream of metal ruination, Mocker-Jack bit.

The angel fired all its weapons. Fire gusted across the behemoth & scorched its yellow hair & it snarled but did not release its mouthgrip even as it smouldered. It ripped, it tore. The crew gaped.

The captain shouted to Mocker-Jack, a loud & wordless greeting, challenge, lamentation.

The godlike mole tore the angel from the rails. The two great presences somersaulted in slow time, skidded, gouged across the last of the land. Mocker-Jack shook its prey apart, strewing heaven-trash & fire.

At the brink of the precipice the angel poised for long seconds straight up, a tower, wheels spinning. As if undecided whether to topple back onto the flat land. Gripping it, Mocker-Jack, on fire, bled & gnawed through steel, stared at the Medes.

Sham knew those blood-coloured orbs could barely discern more than light & darkness. Still, he would always swear the moldywarpe looked carefully in their direction. Stared & chewed & pushed. Pushed its quarry & itself out of that instant, & over the world’s end.

The mole & the angel fell. The angel-train tumbled, & with it went the great southern moldywarpe, Talpa ferox rex, Mocker-Jack the great, the captain’s philosophy, into the abyss. & Sham would always swear on the lives of all the people he cared about that as it went, the mole looked with malice & satisfaction into the captain’s eyes.

THE ANGEL DISINTEGRATED into shadows, became a shower of burning. The island-sized talpa glowed ghostly as it fell, until the dark that filled the trench beyond the railsea swallowed it, & the Medes was left above emptiness, waiting for the sound of impact, a sound that never came.

“Well grubbed,” Sham whispered at last, into the silence.

Vurinam repeated it. Fremlo copied him. Fremlo copied him, & Mbenday Fremlo. Then others, & more & more. Even Yashkan cleared his throat & muttered the words. & they carried & grew louder until everyone was shouting, “Well grubbed! Well grubbed, by gods, well grubbed!

“Well grubbed, old mole!”

PART VIII

TUNDRA WORM

(Lumbricus frigidinculta)

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