The Iron Ship (24 page)

He picked at the hard brown bread, so different to the bread at home, but bread still. He stared at the Appin range as he ate. They had grown to an uneven wall, capped by white where the snow never melted. The roof of the world. There were no mountains in Karsa like that.

The Sentinel caught him by surprise, appearing from his left from nowhere. Some fold in the landscape smoothed out, revealing the mountain. Little more than a mound at first, as they approached he began to get a true impression of its scale. Rising as straight as a pillar from the plateau for four and a half thousand feet, no foothills to soften the contrast. Wizened trees clung to cracks in its wrinkled cliffs. Two thousand feet up slumped shoulders allowed thicker forest, so isolate as to never have been trodden by man. He wondered if Wild Tyn dwelled there. It was the sort of place they should. Over the russets of the autumn trees and deep greens of conifers, striated grey cliffs resumed, stretching up endlessly to the sky where the early sun bathed its eastern flank with orange light. The western side was black as night, cloaked in mystery. That something so massive could be there amid all this flatness was astounding. The train went into the mountain’s shadow. The temperature dropped. The grass was white with frost. Rel looked up with something akin to awe. His every sense was alive. He took a bite of his bread and chewed slowly, relished this breakfast at the edge of the world.

He was beginning to enjoy his adventure after all.

S
EVEN DAYS LATER.
Zhinsky roused Rel at noon. He rubbed at his neck, stiff from sleeping on the hard wooden seats. He started when his eyes focussed.

Zhinsky had changed. His incongruous suit was gone, replaced with a pair of baggy wool pantaloons ballooning over a pair of tight riding boots. They were clean but much patched and weatherstained. His shirt, by contrast, was new and its linen dazzling white. Like his trousers, his shirt sleeves swelled out, flaring around his biceps, complicated pleats drawing them in just below his elbows. The lower portion was heavily embroidered in red, green and yellow, especially about his wrists. Three large silver buttons closed the cuffs. Over this he wore a goat fleece jerkin, the hair turned inside. He wore a pointed hat of the same material, the back of it fashioned into a bifurcated tail that covered his unbound hair. Zhinsky had upon him many silver charms and bracelets, and had beaded his hair like his moustache.

“Now you look like a Khushiak sauralier,” yawned Rel.

“I did not before?”

“You looked like I don’t know what before. It was the suit.”

“We are whatever we are no matter what we wear, my friend. I wear this, I sauralier. I put on lady’s nightdress, I still sauralier. I take you out of that fussy red coat, and put you in clothes like mine, and you still be spoiled merchant boy. Clothes do not make the man. The man makes the man.”

“They say the opposite in my country.”

“Your country sounds much blessed with idiots, goodfellow.” Zhinsky clapped Rel on the shoulder; Rel sincerely wished he’d stop doing that. The sauralier had hands like rock. Rel scowled and rubbed his arm. Zhinsky grinned the wider.

“Come my friend. We approach. Soon you will see the land of opportunity!” his gold teeth flashed in his smile. “Follow me.” He switched languages. “We are speaking Low Maceriyan now.” He stopped, and asked with a serious expression, “You do speak Low Maceriyan, yes?”

Rel gritted his teeth. “Low and High and Ancient Hethikan. I am an educated man.”

Zhinsky frowned. “So that is what is one looks like. A big waste of money, eh?” He grinned and thumped Rel’s shoulder again.

Rel winced. He followed Zhinsky up the carriage with exaggerated, plodding strides, being used to the sway of the train after so long travelling. He was in a foul mood, as he often was on awakening, but a part of him felt the anticipation of relief. He was extremely weary of trains.

They went out onto the little platform at the end of the carriage.

A round-bellied mountain jutting from the others gave a false end to the range. The train pulled around its feet, and the view ahead to the Gates of the World opened up.

The Gates were a cleft in the mountains, so precise it looked made. Not a pass, not a high, hard road winding along snow-choked rock where the mountain would allow it, but an actual gap that came down, down, down, almost level with the plateau. A lake, deep blue and cold, fronted it. The water came some way to the south, full of captured clouds. The larger part of its stretched away to the north for miles.

Commanding the pass was a slender tower on the northernmost side.

“The Glass Fort?” asked Rel. “It does not look like the pictures I have seen.”

Zhinsky smiled and hit him on the back.

“No! No my friend, it does not look like the pictures, because that is not it! That is the Rearward Watch. The fortress itself in Farside.”

“It is so big. I thought that was the castle.”

“If this is impressive to you, the Glass Fort will steal your breath, my friend. Here, drink this so you are prepared for the shock.” He passed Rel his flask. Rel absently shook his head.

Constructed in ages past by inhuman beings, in this era the Gates of the World was affronted by the meaner efforts of men that surrounded its opening. The mountainsides had been stripped bare of trees for miles in either direction. Log flumes ran from ruined forests of pale stumps. Raw landslips wounded the slopes. A tented shanty of considerable size infested the lake shore. Small boats disturbed the crystal waters. There was a rich scent on the air, the unmistakable reek of unplanned human habitation. Doubtless it would be unbearable in the streets. Northwards there was a stock yard. Hoppers bridged the rails, tall warehouses next to them. Over everything was a haze of wood smoke, coal smoke and glimmer discharge. After several days travelling along the untouched splendour of the mountains, the despoliations of industry were marked and ugly.

The train passed onto the lake’s littoral on tracks crammed between the silent cliffs and the dark water. In places the water went right up to the rock, here wooden piles bridged the gap, carrying the tracks. The water lost its reflected blue and white and became black and sinister. As they approached Gate Town, Rel saw an increasing amount of trash in the water—offal, broken barrels, shattered planks. On one beach of grey sand, two men fished a bloated body from the lake with boat hooks.

“I am sure you know how to use your sword, little merchant boy,” said Zhinsky. “Keep it close to you. Gate Town is a squalid place.”

“My father is not a merchant,” said Rel, but Zhinsky made no acknowledgement he had heard.

Human noise joined human activity. The clinking of hammers on rock in the quarry, shouts, the whistles of glimmer engines, the sounds of a dozen small industries, music, the howls of dogs, the buzzing whine of sawmills. An explosion rumbled out, a slow billow of rock dust from a mountainside revealed its origin.

The lake shore widened. Wooden buildings appeared in increasing density. They passed a slaughterhouse, the screams of animals outmatched in awfulness by the stench. A swirling cloud of flies, scavenging true birds and dracon-birds lifted from open barrels of viscera as the train rattled by. A slick of thick blood ran under the tracks to turn the lake red.

Gate Town’s passenger terminal was rough and ready, a single platform of unfinished planks bleaching in the weak mountain sun. A station building was under construction, but as yet was nothing but three courses of brick and a framework of scaffolding. The platform’s lower boards disappeared into the churned mud of Gate Town’s main street. The settlement had the air of impermanence. Half the buildings were tents or part tent; wooden bases with canvas sides and roof. The timber of the more solid structures was pale and new. Only the glimmer warehouses in the goods yard were of stone. Gate Town had been built quickly. It looked like it could disappear just as fast. The people were dirty. Half swaggered, half skulked despairingly. A lot were drunk. Some wore fine clothes, but they were crusted with the filth of squalid living. Rel saw the national dresses of fifty lands, and the tattered finery of last year’s city fashions.

“This a desperate place, it attracts desperate people,” said Zhinsky. “There is fortune here, and death. Only desperate people would want to mine the sands. We get off here. The train goes on to the yard, there your luggage will be. I will send for it. We will go directly to the fortress. It is not wise to stay here.” Zhinsky’s usual bluff manner was absent, his accent less pronounced. He looked around him attentively.

Zhinsky shouted his way through the alighting passengers in a rough mix of languages. From the platform edge he whistled loudly, attracting the attention of a dirty man waiting with a two-dog cart. He nodded in recognition and urged his dogs forward. His dogs—mongrel, piebald creatures—were paired in all things; paired in size, paired in looks, paired in filth. They reached the platform.

“Jovankic!” Zhinsky shouted at the man. He tipped his hat. Zhinsky and Jovankic proceeded to exchange words in a language Rel did not recognise. There came one of those awkward moments all who are struck dumb by unfamiliarity with a foreign tongue must endure; Zhinsky clapped Rel on the back and gestured at him, spouting a rapid stream of nonsense that could have been complimentary, insulting, or neither. Rel smiled and bowed his head. There was little else he could do.

Jovankic indicated they should board. Zhinsky stepped lightly right off the platform into the cart. Rel followed, the little carriage rocked with their weight.

“Hyah!” shouted Jovankic. This at least Rel understood. The dogs strained forward, struggling to drag the little cart free of the grasp of the mud. Jovankic yelled angrily at a sixteen-dog wagon that sped past, spattering them all with dirt. A glimmer walker clanked past, spider legs fastidiously pecking at the road.

“Twenty years ago,” said Zhinsky, “there nothing here at all. Only garrison and customs officials. Then the new processing, glimmer from the black sands, boom time! This place very good if you want get rich quick, very easy to die quick too. No law here, only us in the fortress. But I am soldier, not policeman. What to do? This frontier my friend. Money or death? The gods decide.”

Jovankic piloted them skilfully through the chaotic streets. The town was ostensibly laid out on a grid pattern, but the system had been flagrantly abused. Tents were pitched in what should have been thoroughfares. Buildings with greedy footprints reduced roads to alleys.

“It’s very muddy!” shouted Rel.

“Rains come here at autumn and they are early this year. It stay like this till spring,” said Zhinsky, then brightened. “In four, five weeks’ time it freeze solid, so merchant boy not get so dirty, eh?” Another comradely punch. Rel gritted his teeth.

They passed a rowdy tavern. Lights blazed inside even though it was slightly past noon. Past this last wooden building, Gate Town gave out as quickly as it began. A few rows of small tents, then bare rock.

So near to noon the shadow of the mountains was off most of the town, but it waited, biding its time by the mountains’ roots. They crossed the boundary between light and dark. Out of the sun, autumn bit. The noises of Gate Town lessened in volume, scared away by the eternal silences of stone.

Jovankic’s dogs found the old road and turned sharp right onto it, running dead straight at the Gates of the World. The paving was pitted and worn yet where whole, remarkable. Morfaan workmanship, old as time. A rail line joined the road, covering a third of the surface with ballast, but there was still space for two carts to pass abreast. Looking back, Rel saw that it went down a slight slope and ploughed on right through Gate Town towards the goods yard, the railway arcing off in a graceful, brown iron curve to link with the track there. The old road was left to bottom out in the lagoon of slurry that was the town’s main crossroads. He thought he could see the original outline continue on through the confusion of tents and shacks until it plunged directly into the lake.

“Road was on causeway, they say, and lake smaller once,” said Zhinsky. “The arche—archao—the digging man! Jakkar, he is called. You meet him sometime. He say much about this place but pah! What does it matter? Morfaan long dead.”

The sky appeared starkly through the gap, a dazzling blue slot framed by perfect Morfaan stonecraft.

“The other side,” said Zhinsky, pointing. “Three miles away. The walls are unmatched, completely straight. Nothing so perfect in this world anymore.”

The dogs picked up speed as they passed into the gap.

“The railway goes right to the black sands?”

“Yes,” said Zhinsky. They spoke quietly. The gap was as quiet as a sepulchre after the roar of Gate Town. “Across Farside. It only five miles wide here, the Black Sands close. Another town there, Railhead. Farside much wider further north and south, one hundred miles wide in places, but here the desert creeps close to mountains.”

They passed deep trenches cut into the floor and walls of the canyon, those in the floor bridged over with timber that boomed as they sped over it. “These are the famous Gates of the World, the actual gates.” Zhinsky said. “The gates are gone, and the slots are too deep to fill in.”

The road passed out of the gap, emerging onto a narrow, fenceless plain of closely cropped grass of green, studded with golden tussocks. The mountains north and south extended arms far out toward the east, revealing the position of the Gates as occupying a natural indentation in the range. To the north the monolithic wall of the Appins fragmented into hundreds of individual, densely packed conical mountains. Away to the east the steppe gave way to a black desert. There was no mingling of the two landscapes. The grass ended, the sand began, neighbours for millennia but strangers to one another still. Evenly spaced obelisks marked their boundary, one every three quarters of a mile.

“The Sentinels, also Morfaan. They keep out the badness in the sands,” said Zhinsky. “Is your job, little merchant boy, to patrol them.”

A haze clogged the desert horizon, robbing Rel of a sense of perspective. There was no telling how far he could see, nor how tall the mountains were. The railway and the road continued side by side over the grass. The road stopped by a small town, Railhead, he guessed, equally new and impermanent as Gate Town. The road vanished, but the rails plunged onto the sand, the glinting of their metal the only feature for miles. In the distance where the desert met the sky he thought he could see a structure of some sort, but it was at the limits of his vision and disrupted by the haze in the air.