Railsea (29 page)

“Those rails!” Vurinam shouted. “That shunt you into the damn hole! Why don’t the angels fix them?”

“They aren’t broken,” said Dr. Fremlo. “In this place, that’s how the rails are supposed to be. This place is an old, old, old trap.”

“Captain,” Vurinam said. “We have to go back.” Captain Naphi was examining her tracker. She didn’t speak. “I thought this place was a bloody legend,” Vurinam gabbled. He stared at Naphi & abruptly stood straighter. “You knew,” he said.

There was silence. Naphi raised her head to meet his eyes. She did not look cowed. She put the scanner down. Spread her artificial fingers.

“Don’t shilly-shally, Mr. Vurinam,” she said. “Make your accusation.”

“You knew where we were,” he breathed. “But because your damned moldywarpe’s nearby, you said nothing. Couldn’t be bothered to have us go the long way round.” He choked up & stopped. The crew were all open-eyed & staring.

“Anyone else?” Naphi said at last. “Anyone similar accusations?
Speak freely.” Nothing. “Very well. I’ve heard of this place, as have you. & it is true that when Mr. Mbenday said the switches were misbehaving, a possibility occurred to me. So if you arraign me before your court accused of having halfheld notions, fleeting recollections, then I plead guilty.

“If, however, you claim I deliberately allowed my crew to steer themselves into danger, then sir how dare you?” She walked towards Vurinam. “I did not hear you complaining about our route nor our objective. I haven’t heard you declining your share of whatever comes should we be successful in this endeavour.”

Vurinam wriggled under her gaze. “You
still
keep checking that scanner,” he said. “You still want to know where that bloody mole is, more’n anything.”

“Yes,” Naphi shouted. She raised her hand. Her louder, clattering one. She shook it. “I do. That’s what we
hunt
. That’s what we’re
doing here
. If anything’s going to provide for Klimy’s family now, to keep alive her memory & that of Teodoso, to ensure that this terrible moment has a purpose, it is
bringing the beast down
. Snaring the philosophy. So, yes, Mr. Vurinam. I want Mocker-Jack.”

The captain still clenched her fist at him. Its lights winked, it rattled. But—wait. “Your arm,” Vurinam said. “Captain. That thing hurt you, you’re—bleeding?”

Her constructed limb had cracked. &, what made no sense, the split was oozing blood.

“How can she …?”

“Where’s it …?”

The captain herself stared, as fascinated by the red drips as anyone else. Fremlo was there in a moment, prodding & squinting at the damaged limb. Naphi seemed to wake, tried
to shake herself free, but the doctor was having none of it, kept on with the examination.

“You’re cut rather badly, Captain,” Fremlo announced at last. With scorn, the doctor released the arm as if it was hot, turned to face the crew, & continued. “Your arm, Captain. The one that appears to have been encased in metal & molebone, all this time. That is in fact not missing at all, only hidden. Your still-present left arm is injured, Captain.”

Silence spread like a slick. Naphi drew herself calmly up. Not an instant of embarrassment crossed her face. Slowly, with ostentation, refusing to flinch from her crew’s gazes, she held up the bleeding limb.

“Indeed,” she said at last. “I will require you to take care of this for me.”

“All this time,” Vurinam whispered. Mbenday was staring at Naphi, back at his friend Vurinam, back & forth. “You were lying!” Vurinam said. “It was like some game! Oh, I get it. It was so they’d take you serious.” Vurinam shimmied pugnaciously in his dusty coat, his eyes wide. “So you didn’t get left out.”

It had been a badge of intensity, of honour, that pretended lack. Had Naphi feared that fully in possession of her original body, she would not possess some requisite rigour? Certainly it looked that way.

She drew herself up. “There are those,” she said. She was using her most splendid voice. “Whose faith. In their philosophies. Follows from something being taken from them. Who need that terrible bite & rupture to spur their fascination. Their revenge.

“It is weak of them,” she said. “I would not so wait. Nor, however, would I fail to know what it is to suffer those agonies
for a philosophy. & so. & hence.” She raised her mechanical limb-glove. “I fail to see your point. My rigour, Mr. Vurinam, is such that I have both made & refused to make a sacrifice.”

It was a good line. One by one, the crew looked back at Vurinam. He stamped in frustration.

“That don’t even bloody
mean
anything!” he despaired. “It’s complete bloody gibberish!”

“Something occurs to me,” said Dr. Fremlo. “Arguably, right now it ain’t where Mocker-Jack is that should concern us. Forget for a moment our captain’s skin, bones & circuitry.” There was a noise, an engine grind, from somewhere. “Let’s focus on what’s important. We’ve just lost two friends.” The doctor let that sit with them a moment. “The issue is not so much where the moldywarpe is, as what it’s doing.”

Fremlo pointed at the pass through which they’d come. “Do you think it lay just so, sounded off like it did, just at this point, when we were where we were, by chance? It
wanted
us to go through there. It was sending us into the trap.”

“Don’t be crazy,” someone started to say.

“It’s leading us into danger,” Fremlo interrupted. “The mole is trying to kill us.”

Only the wind spoke, for a long while. It seemed as if Mocker-Jack might laugh, as if they might hear a booming moldywarpe snigger, but no.

“Oh, Stonefaces help us,” said Zhed the Yimmer at last. Captain Naphi moved her fingers like horse’s hooves. “What do we do?” Zhed said. “Things couldn’t get any weirder.”

It would have been simply rude for reality not to respond to a challenge like that. As that last word came out of Zhed’s mouth, there came the whistling noise of something plummeting,
& a small, firm, heavy body fell out of the air into Vurinam’s hands.

Everyone yelled. Vurinam yelled, he staggered back, but what had landed held him tight, & Vurinam saw its jabbering little face. Sham’s bat. Daybe, the transmitter still winking on its leg.

T
IME FOR THE
S
HROAKES
?

Not yet.

S
HAM ROLLED UP HIS SLEEVES, WENT TO THE SHORELINE
, & looked out at the ruined trains.

With care, effort & bravery, he was able to brace himself on the iron, the ties, the various bits of natural & wrecky business he could reach. He even walked the earth where he had to, dragging a makeshift cart. Sham made it at last to the ruin of some once-grand cargo train, stripped it of fittings. He dug into the ground & hauled out debris.

Dangerous work, but he got on with it. He dumped his finds on the shore. Gathered junk. A few more trips out to the wreck & Sham had a yard-load of nu-salvage. As night fell he began to cobble it together. When the sun came up he was standing, proudly, in a hut.

He made it into the old train’s hold where he discovered that, by happy chance, it had been carrying seeds. These he planted. He continued building until he had made a small township of corrugated iron. His crop grew. Sham collected rainwater & wove flax. He tamed local animals & got more stuff from the train. Sham made bread.

In the second year he got a bit lonely & then luckily he found the footprints of another human being on the island. He followed them & met a native, who was astonished but impressed by him & became his happy servant. Together they continued building, & after a few more years Sham managed to build an actual train, & he left the new country that he had founded with the handy discards of his old, & he set out on a journey back to Streggeye, the wind in his hair.

That didn’t happen.

Sham sat, cold, frightened, starving, on the beach. Staring at nothing. His fantasy hadn’t made him feel any better. It hadn’t been convincing at all.

He chewed at the … well, it was a sort of leaf that he had found.

“Mmmm,” he said. Out loud. “Piney. You’re the first ingredient for a new drink I’m going to make.” He grimaced & swallowed. “I’m going to call you fizzboont.”

He had, in fact, built a shelter out of rubbish, but he would hesitate to say he had “salvaged” it: it was only trash lying at shoreside. & he would hesitate to say he had “built” it: he had really sort of leaned it up one bit against another. & he would hesitate to call it a “shelter.” It was more of a pile.

“Troose,” he said. He sniffed. “Voam.” Their hopes for him—were they so foolish? Did their ultimate aim, that he might at least abut a philosophy, seem quite so terrible now?

The wind blew on him, & it felt like it was mocking him. Like it was saying
Pfffft
, disdainfully, at this almighty castaway failure. Whatever, the wind said, smacking him on the head. He could have cried. He did, a bit. Just a little bit in the corners of his eyes. It was just because he was staring into blown grit, but then again it wasn’t just that really.

Sham did spend a lot of time looking out at the salvage, like in his daydream. He was very hungry. It had been two days. He was
very
hungry. He spent his time looking at ruined trains, at spread-eagled bonelike stubs of cranes, at scattered carts, bruising & bloodying his thumb by using it like a crude chisel or awl on his slowly enfiguring stick. He wondered what would happen to him.

Scattered carts. Some were bust up, some upside down. One, half-hidden in a thicket a few score yards offshore, right-way-up, was on its wheels.

On its wheels. On the rails.

Sham got slowly up & walked to where the rails started. It wasn’t even a jollycart. No motor. It didn’t even have sides. It was an ancient, tiny, flat handcart. A tabletop, basically, with a crank like a seesaw, for two operators to pump up & down, to make the wheels turn.

A two-person pump that, in a pinch, one person could use.

Actually—

Actually
, thought Sham,
enough
.

Looking straight into the wind that rushed across the railsea, blinking from its gust-borne dust, & in the flurry of his own resolve, too, Sham felt something catch inside him. Long-stalled wheels strained for purchase. Straining to pull himself together.

Sham swallowed. Like the crew-member he was, with the skills into which he had been trained, he traced a rail-route to the cart with his eyes. He threw his unfinished nail-carved figure away.

S
HOULDN’T YOU JUST STAY
?

Sham heard that voice in him more than once. As he gathered his useless stuff, a few odds & ends of rubbish on the shore. As he stretched & psyched himself up. A fearful bit of his head asked him if he was quite sure he wouldn’t rather wait a bit? That, you never knew, someone might turn up.

Enough. He shut it up. He surprised himself, battening down that little whine as if it were something troublesome rolling on a deck in a gale.
No I should not wait
, he thought.
Will not
.

He had to go. Sham didn’t stop to think about what the stakes were—he simply knew he would not stay & wait. He wanted food, he wanted revenge, he wanted to find his old crew. & he was worried for the Shroakes. Their enemies still hunted.

He stood on the beach & swung his arms. Sham stripped to the waist. He’d lost weight. He threw a handful of rocks, in diversion. Another. Then while his missiles still settled, he jumped onto the nearest tie. He walked the rail. Balanced on the iron, jumped from plank to plank. Threw another bunch of distracting stones. He veered at a junction, & jumped across a couple of yards of unbroken earth, & onto another rail.

Sham rolled, Sham staggered, Sham threw more stones. He was walking on the rails! He was in the railsea! The only thing worse would be if he was on the actual earth.

Hush, don’t think about that. He ran fast, & ever faster, his heart hammering, taking the route he had planned until with an almighty jump & a gasp of triumph he leapt, & landed on the handcart. He lay still.

“How about that, Daybe, eh?” he gasped. “What d’you say, Caldera?”

He wasn’t losing his mind. He knew the bat was elsewhere, that the older Shroake was countless miles away. He just wished that wasn’t so. He remembered the colours in the former’s pretty pelt, the latter’s frank stare, the one that flustered him. He rose. Standing there on his new perch, Sham was overwhelmingly bored of feeling overwhelmed. The more he worked, he realised, the quicker he worked.

O
F COURSE THE HANDLE
was solid with rust, but he worked at it, hitting it with a stone. Tried to spread what grease remained on the mechanism around. Again & again & again. Hit, smear.

His percussion went on so long the railsea, the railsea animals, began to ignore it. Slowly, the fauna emerged, as Sham continued his cack-handed engineering. The twitching-nosed face of a moldywarpe broke ground nearby, a specimen about his size. It sniffed & made dry-throated noises & he paid it no mind. A shoal of arm-sized earthworms churned amid the ties. There was the plastic-on-plastic rattle of scute: a buried bug, a glimpse of its mandibles telling him it was a good thing he was on the platform. Bang, smear, clang, smear. & now it was evening, & Sham was still banging & smearing.