Railsea

“Dero, wait!” Sham shouted. He dithered, as Naphi followed Caldera. “Dero, come back!” he shouted, & ran after the older Shroake, into shadow.

Light & gusts of dust-grey wind came slantwise into a half-memory of a room. Staircase stubs rose a few feet in steep zigzags. There had once been many floors in this railside hall. All were gone; the travellers stood at the bottom of a concrete hole, shin-deep in splinters & plastic shapes once desks & ordinators. A maze & dented blocky slope where a building’s worth of filing cabinets had piled up. Some were burst open, strewing paperwork become mulch. Some were buried, some wedged shut.

Caldera scrambled up them. She grabbed at handles. Reached into shafts between cabinets. She pried at them. “What are you doing?” Sham said.

Her voice echoed out with the banging of yanked-open drawers. “Take these,” she said, handing back ragged papers. “Careful. They’re falling apart.”

“Come out,” Sham said. She handed him more. The metal creaked. She spelunked a scree of drawers, her hands full of folders. She looked lost.

“What is it,” Naphi said, “you’re looking for?”

“I need to know,” Caldera said after a long silence. “About … about everything. Everything our mum & dad always said.” She furrowed her brow & began, manically, to scan the papers she held. “About the railsea.”

“Know what?” Sham said. “Come out of there.”

“It doesn’t … I can’t …” She shook her head, hunting for meaning to it all. “I don’t know. Why did we do all this?” The report in her hand disintegrated. Her fingers trailed its muck. “Mum taught us this old writing. Points …” she read. “Oil stores …” She went through the sheets, one by mouldy one. “Personnel. Ticket prices. Credit. I can read it, but I can’t put it together!”

“You already did,” Sham said gently.

“I came here to understand!”

“There’s nothing here you don’t understand,” Sham said. Caldera stared at him. “You’ve known all this for ages. Things head out from here. You seen which way that dead angel was facing.” He spoke slowly. “You told me all this. What the godsquabble was. Well, this is the town where it happened. The town where the winners were.” He raised his hands slowly. “& they’re gone. You was never going to find out anything new here. That ain’t why you’re here, Caldera.”

Caldera sniffed. “Really?” she said. “Why am I here?”

“You’re here because your parents wouldn’t do what they was told. Wouldn’t shun anything. They wanted to see what’s at the end of the world. & you actually did. Do. Are doing.” Sham held her gaze.

“HEY.” It was Dero. He stood silhouetted in the doorway. Behind him Daybe veered in agitation.

“You Shroakes,” said Sham. “Always gallivanting off in all directions …”

“You need to see something,” Dero said. He spoke in a dreamlike monotone. “There’s something you need to see.”

BEYOND THE BUILDING & the rails there were yards of paved land, more nothingy concrete-stubbed remains, & then the land, all land, abruptly stopped. But not on void this time.

They stood on a pitted coastline road, a raised walkway just like a shore in the railsea. It rose not out of rails, though, as any shoreline must surely, but from miles upon miles, from a giddying, endless expanse of water.

EIGHTY-THREE

SHAM REELED. THE WATER FOAMED. IT ROCKED & slapped against the concrete wall. Sham’s heart powered. What was this? & what was beyond? A ruined jetty poked above the waves just as normal jetties did above rails. Tentative with wonder, Sham walked to its end.

The enormity of that water. It rose & fell back in lurching swells. It was like nothing he could have imagined.

Above it, the strange deadness of the air ended. Gulls! They wheeled & whooped. Swept curiously past Daybe, which soared in exhilarated aerobatics. This was the source of the repeated noise. The water huffed & shuffled & rocked back & forth against the land.

“The water level’s so high,” Naphi whispered at last. She looked back the way they had come. “It should be flooding back into that chasm. Even back into the railsea. Should half-fill it.”

“You told me they jury-rigged the world,” Sham said to Caldera. “Maybe they did something to seal the rock here when they put the water in, so it can’t spill out. Can’t seep through the sides.”

“Yeah,” said Caldera. “Only they didn’t put the water here: they left it here.” She was staring, too, but dividing her attention, still sifting through the papers she held, frowning as she glanced at the disorganised snips of information. “They drained all the rest. To make more rail-ready real estate.”

“The world?” Sham said.

“Used to be underwater.”

THEY STAYED THERE, said nothing more, for a long time. Sham was too awed to care much that he was cold. The sun dawdled slowly through space, behind the upsky, illuminating it. They could see no beasts up there just then. Only the arcing gulls.

The birds looped & skimmed the surface of the liquid. There’s stuff in there they can eat, thought Sham. He thought of the stringy fish that lived in the small ponds & pools of the islands & the railsea itself. Looked as far as he could to the horizon. Thought how much bigger such creatures might get in a space so uncramped.

Sham felt something rising through his bones. Daybe felt it, too, snuffled in alarm. A rhythm, getting louder. “Getterbirds,” Sham said.

Three of them. They came from behind the hills into the downbeat heaven. They veered towards the travellers. They farted smoke, lower than Sham had ever seen them before. The wind from their whirling wings sent up rubbish. They zoomed abruptly off, over the ancient debris, to some out-of-sight nest for old, tired angels.

“What was that?” Dero said. “Curiosity?”

“I don’t think so,” Sham said quietly. “I think they were giving directions.” He pointed.

Figures were emerging from the ash & stubs of the old city.

What were they, these dwellers beyond the world? Rag-clad, hulking & shaggy, creeping, sniffing, they loped out of the dust that announced them. Ten, twelve, fifteen figures. Big women & men, all muscle & sinew, baring their teeth, coming on two limbs & four, apelike, wolflike, fatly feline. Staring as they came.

“We have to go,” Dero said, but they could not get past. The newcomers had reached the base of the jetty. & there they stopped. Their dark clothes were so shredded they looked like feathers. They licked their lips; they stared a long time.

“Is it me,” Dero said at last, “or do they look excited?”

“It’s not you,” Sham said.

Something was approaching from the ruins. Seven feet tall, sloped, immense. An ancient, powerful man, of great girth. He wore a repatched dark coat, a tall black hat.

“That costume,” Caldera said. “It’s like That Apt Ohm.”

What looked like a degenerate avatar of the god stepped slowly past his fellows, towards Sham & the others. The jetty shook with his great steps. He licked his face in delight.

“What are we going to do?” whispered Dero.

“Wait,” said Sham. He kept his pistol down. The man’s eyes were wide. He stopped a few feet away, & gazed at the visitors.