Railsea (6 page)

This savage underground & flatearth does not preclude complexity. There are many ways—often ingenious—one ravenous animal can eat another, or a hapless woman or man. The beasts of the railsea give them all a try. For trainsfolk, this means a hierarchy of awfulness.

Fast flatearth-runners are bad enough, they’ll tell you, of the animals that scurry with hungry intent on the surface, overleaping tracks, but what provokes the worst terror are the eruchthonous. That is a railsea word. It means
that which digs up from underneath & emerges
.

& of those eruchthonous beasts, connoisseurs of animal aggression debate the worst. Size, voracity & the sharpness of claws, while important considerations, may not define the most frightful hunter. There are other, more uncanny things to consider. There are reasons a certain animal above all, one particular tunneller more than any other, has a uniquely horrible place in the rail traveller’s imagination.

W
ITH A SHOVE OF AWFUL NAILLESS HANDS THE
mole rat flew at him. Sham stumbled. A
lucky
stumble. The animal flew over him, hit the wall & slid down, dazed.

In Streggeye Terrarium Sham had seen such things. Runt, domesticated versions, chewing what scraps their keepers threw. Kept carefully apart from each other. Below him right now, the wild cousins of those prisoners used guillotine teeth to bite paths through dirt. They rose into sight. They came as a colony. Collective soldiers. Thinking with the hive mind their Streggeye keepers so assiduously kept them from attaining.

The mole rats shook off earth. Like hairless, wrinkled mammal newborn, swollen to dog-size, snapping dreadful incisors. Eyes like raisins shoved in dough. They breathed throatily. The earth growled.

Sham jumped for the door-top. He hung. The beasts gathered. Sham heard teeth.

His fingers slipped.

He fell.

Was caught.

Vurinam, just beyond the door, gripped his arm & groaned in effort. The animals leapt & bit at Sham’s feet. Vurinam hauled, Sham climbed, & together they got Sham out. He fell among the crew in the sideways cabin.

“Go!” someone shouted. People jumped on what remnants of furniture there were, hammering at the earth with sticks & weapons, as it began to move. Hoe-toothed mole-rat faces boiled the grit in the window-frames.

Clinging to walls, overleaping the snapping lurches of the colony, the trainsfolk got up & out. Sham heard shots. He ran along the skew-whiff traintop.

Bats bustled & buffeted him. Sham leapt, he pitched, he landed heavily in the jollycart among the escapees, as Gansiffer Brownall & the others clubbed mole rats breaching all around them, & fired into the moiling ground. At the cart’s edge rose a flannelly animal face, all quivering whiskers & malevolent percussion. Sham grabbed for anything heavy & it was a kettle left for some dumb reason in the cart that his hand found & which he swung.

Vurinam staggered as he landed, smacked heavily into Unkus Stone. Who himself staggered to the cart’s edge, tipped, toppled, fell out, between two sets of rails.

Onto the ground.

Stone floundered. He sank a clear inch into crumbling earth. Quite redundantly—everyone saw it—someone screamed: “Man overboard!”

Mole rats looked up with a simultaneous motion, puppets on one string. The capsized carriage itself shuddered, as if something big & underneath it paid sudden attention.
Synchronised, the mole rats dived, bite-burrowed towards Unkus. Moving towards the jollycart, a ridge was rising in the earth.

“Grab hold!” Vurinam shouted, stretching out his hand. “Move!” Unkus crawled. Incompetent quadruped. Mole rats moved in with gusts of stygian dust. Ploughed massively from below, that big furrow still grew. Stone screamed.

Vurinam grabbed him & pulled, & others grabbed Vurinam. Agitated bats swept in chaos around Sham, making him flail. The earth rampart rose & growled & cracked & within, Sham could see a huge hump of saggy skin, a mole-rat back twice the size of any other. The mole rats were a hive, & what was coming was the queen.

There was an explosion of dirt, a great biting down, a glimpse of great mouthness. Sham cried out, Vurinam tugged, Unkus wailed & was pulled aboard. There was a rumbling as the queen descended invisibly, preyless, frustrated. The earth settled. But Unkus still screamed. A mole rat was dangling by clenched teeth from his bloody leg. “Hit the bloody thing!” Brownall shouted.

It was Sham who did. Smacked it with his kettle harder than he’d smacked anything before. The beast somersaulted backwards into the accelerating cart’s dirt.

There was one moment of exhilaration, one ragged cheer as the women & men of the
Medes
left the marauding colony. Then it was over & they saw the state of Unkus.

T
HE CREW OF THE
M
EDES
CROWDED THE EDGES OF
the cartops, in agonies at the attack they had seen but could not reach. Unkus moaned.

Sham heard a faint, pathetic beating & saw a flutter of colour. In the corner of the cart was an injured daybat. It flipped & fiddled, pitiful on damaged wings. He must have hit it when he swung. It foamed weakly from its mouth.

Vurinam went to tip it out. “No,” Sham said. He lifted it gently. It snapped at him, groggily enough that those teeth were easy to avoid. When his turn came to cross the walkway between the
Medes
& the cart, Sham had the daybat wrapped in his shirt.

The doctor was waiting for him. Took hold of him brusquely, checked he was not hurt, patted his shoulder & told him to get ready. Behind him, Unkus Stone was being carried aboard.

“H
OW’S HE DOING
, D
OC
?” The questions kept coming from the corridor. “Can we talk to him?” The doctor took off the bloody apron, caught Sham’s eye & nodded. Sham, still swallowing at the sight of the procedure, opened the surgery door to the crew.

“Alright,” Fremlo said with the abruptness of exhaustion. “Come in. You’ll not get much off him. Drugged him to the gills. & do
not
touch his leg.”

“Which leg?”

“Either bloody leg.”

Sham got out to give them room. He listened to them whisper.

“What did you find, Sham ap Soorap?” someone said.

He looked up. It was the captain.

Abacat Naphi. Her prosthetic arm was raised, barring his way. He stared into her dark blue eyes. They were about the same height, & he was heavier, but he felt as if he was craning back his neck to meet her gaze. Sham stammered. She had not spoken to him before, except for sentences like, “Move,” “Put it over there,” & “Get out.” He was astonished that she knew his name.

“Answer,” Fremlo growled.

Sham wondered:
Where’d the doctor come from?

“Captain, I …” Sham said. His bat—no hiding it now—squeaked.

“Attention,” Captain Naphi said. “Later we’ll consider whether you can keep your vermin, ap Soorap. Now we answer questions. What was in the wreck?”

“Nothing, Ma’am Captain,” Sham stuttered. “A skeleton I mean is all. That was it. That & only else also just rubbish.”

“Is that so?” Naphi said. She closed her eyes & lowered her artificial arm, leaving a thread of exhaust & the murmur of motors. Sham watched the intricacy of its workings, the lines of its black wood.

“Nothing, Ma’am Captain, not a thing.”
Are you insane?
Sham thought.
Why you lying?
& even as he thought about the little scrap of salvage he’d found that was his by finder’s right, he heard himself saying, “Oh except only this,” as he fished out the card from his pocket & gave it to her.

“If I might, Captain?” Fremlo was beckoning for her to follow—who else on the train could do that? Naphi looked once more, thoughtfully, at Sham.

“Thank you for the memory,” she said. She took it & followed Fremlo. Sham watched them go. Stood unmoving but for grinding jaw. Inside he was raging, demanding his tiny salvage back.

A
STORM WAS COMING
. Sham watched through portholes while clouds lowered, descending below the upsky & changing their nature, drawing rain across the landscape, turning the world to mud & replenishing pools & puddles between rails, speeding up the streams gushing from islands. The slick trainlines shone. The injured daybat stuck its head up from Sham’s shirt, as if it, too, wanted to watch the sky. He stroked it.

“Soorap,” Dr. Fremlo had said to him when they started work on Stone. “We know this is not your favourite activity. I ask only that you stay out of the way, do as I tell you when I tell you. You may not like it, you may not be very good at it—you are not, in fact, very good at it, & if
I
can tell that,
that means you are very not very good at it—but you are probably somewhat better than nothing. So if I say bandage, you know what to do. & so forth. His leg’s at risk. Let’s do what we can.”

After the whispered exchange with Naphi, Fremlo had found him again. “You do know,” the doctor had said, “that you don’t have to obey orders?”

“I thought that was the whole point of orders!”

“Oh yes, but no.” Fremlo’s voice had dropped. “I mean you are obligated to, formally, yes, but it’s not uncommon to not. You really wanted that card, did you not?”

Sham, vivid red, could not tell if this was a rebuke, advice, or what.

“Good,” he heard someone say, looking at the storm. “Drown the bloody things.” A fine curse & worthy anger, though it wouldn’t happen. Like all tellurian animals of the railsea, mole rats had strategies to avoid that fate when it rained. Airlocks, water traps, complicated tunnel shafts.

Sham saw Brank. Sham started a moment, but Brank barely looked at him. There were more important matters than briefly pilfered cockerel on the big man’s mind. Even Yashkan was too distracted to glance at Sham with more than a moment’s malevolence. He thought for a moment that he had escaped anger. It came for him, though, & from an unexpected direction.

“Stonefaces!” Vurinam emerged from the surgery. “You had to fart around with whatever you were doing in there, didn’t you?” It took Sham a moment to realise it was him the trainswain was shouting at.

“Hold on a minute,” Sham said. “I never—”

“Had to prick up the ears of the bloody mole rats & was
I not telling you to get out? Now look!” Vurinam stamped. He gesticulated towards where Unkus slept.

Sham tried to think of what to say.

“Steady, mate,” said someone. “Sham didn’t mean—”

“Well,” yelled Vurinam. “ ‘Didn’t mean’ never buttered no bloody parsnips, did it?”

“Attention,” the captain’s voice interrupted from the corridor speakers. “Unkus Stone,” she said, “needs a hospital. Dr. Fremlo assures me we don’t have the resources aboard. So.” You could hear a big sigh down the intercom. “Detour.” Another pause. “Switchers, brakers, engineers, stand by to set course,” she said. “Set course for Bollons.”

There were moments of silence. “Bollons?” Vurinam said.

“Stations!” the captain’s voice cracklingly demanded, & everyone moved.

“Unkus can’t be in a good way,” someone muttered.

“Why?” said Sham to the trainswoman’s retreating back. “How? How bad is it?”

“Bad enough,” Vurinam shouted back, “that we’re going where we’re going. Bad enough that we’re going to the nearest land, when it’s Bollons.”

He stamped away, leaving silence, a cold corridor, & Sham alone. Sham shivered. He wondered where to go. He lifted up the bat & stared into its confused animal eyes.
Don’t be scared
, he thought.
You need my help
.

NAKED MOLE RAT

(Heterocephalus smilodon glaber)
Reproduced with permission from the archives of the Streggeye Molers’ Benevolent Society
.
Credit: China Miéville
(illustration credit 2.1)