China Mieville - Railsea

“It ain’t funny!”

“It is a bit.”

“You … You’re a pirate !”

Robalson shook his head as if at imbecility. “I told you I was,” he said.

“Where are we going?”

“That depends.”

“Where’s my bat?” Sham said.

“Flew off when we took you.”

“Why are we going so fast?”

“Because we want to get there quickly, & because we’re pirates. We ain’t the only ones heard things. Salvors’ve been asking after you. & what with us up & suddenly buggering off like that, you can bet a bunch of other people are curious & looking our way.”

“What do you want with me?”

“What we want,” said a new voice, “Sham ap Soorap, is information.” In from the corridor came a man.

He wore an engineer’s boiler suit. His hair was short & greased. He held his hands together gently, he spoke quietly, & his bloodshot eyes fixed on Sham’s with intelligence. “I’m Captain Elfrish,” he said gently. “You are, I haven’t decided yet.”

“I’m Sham ap Soorap!”

“I haven’t decided what you are, yet.”

The captain of the pirate train did not wear a greatcoat in which lived polecats & weasels. He did not have a beard woven with smouldering twists of gunpowder to surround himself with a stench & demonic aura. He did not cock a tricorn hat or have handprints in blood on his shirt. He did not dangle a necklace of bones & flesh-scraps. All these were things of which Sham had heard, ways in which railsea pirates spread the terror on which they relied.

This man wore large glasses. He had what Sham would, had circumstances been otherwise, have said was a kind face. He couldn’t help thinking it, & then he couldn’t help a miserable little laugh.

The man folded his arms. “Your situation amuses you?” he said. He sounded like an office manager asking someone to clarify a row of figures.

“No,” Sham said. It was, to his own surprise & grim pleasure, anger more than fear that swept him. “You’re in so much trouble, don’t you even know? My captain’s going to come for you. She’s going to—”

“She’s going to nothing,” said the captain. He cleaned his glasses. “She got your message. The one about wanting to be a salvor? The one about rolling off with them? Full of details only you’d know? Wishing her good luck & goodbye? Telling her you were seeking your fortune? She got it.”

He put his spectacles back on. “Everyone knows you’ve been with those Shroakes. It’s not as if your aspirations come out of the blue. Your captain knows you’ve gone, are following your dream. She’s not coming for you, boy.”

All those things , Sham thought. All those stories, those secrets, those desires, the sense of adventure, the pining after the vividly dressed salvors, that he had harboured, that he had confessed to Robalson—used against him.

“What do you want?” he croaked. “I ain’t got no money.”

“No indeed,” Elfrish said. “& our train’s short of space. If you’ve no purpose, there’s no point keeping you, you see? So it might be worth your while to think about what you can offer instead of coin. To be indispensable.”

“What do you want?” Sham was whispering now.

“Oh, I don’t know.” Elfrish said. “What might one want? My decks are swabbed. We have cooks, we have crew, we have everything we could need. Oh, but wait a minute.” He looked thoughtful. “There is one thing, though. That’s a thought. How about you show us on a map where you found the wreck. Of which none of your crew were supposed to speak. While you’re at it, you tell me what you found on it. Stories have been after you since, ooh, Bollons. About where poor old Captains Shroake ended up. How about you tell me everything, & I do mean everything, that you brought with you to give those Shroakes.

“We on this train have a little bit of a vested interest. These are names not wholly unknown to us. Names I wasn’t expecting to deal with again, though of course one keeps a little ear out for what the oh-so-clever second generation Shroakes are up to. Plenty of people do, of course, but some of us have more investment than others.

“Experiments don’t interest me. Journeys, however, especially journeys in response to secret posthumous messages, journeys after absolutely unique treasures, now they do . Apart from anything, it makes a person think they missed something, & that’s never a good feeling, now, is it?”

“What?” said Sham. “Missed what?” But Elfrish did not answer. Instead, from his pocket, he pulled Sham’s little camera.

“There’s a picture on this I’m particularly interested in,” he said. “Par, tick, you, lairly. & I don’t mean your penguins. See, I had no idea they’d be leaving yet, those Shroakelets. Or we’d have gone after them our own selves. Caught us on the hop. But we know you’ve been chatting to them.

“& if,” he said, & his voice was suddenly chill & bony & metal & like the scuttling of a very bad insect, “you’d like not to be cut open & dangled over the side of this train & dragged along with your legs on the ground spilling blood everything under the flatearth can smell while we go slow enough for long, long miles that they can rise & eat you from the toes up & from the inside out, you know what you could do for me, Sham?

“Tell me where the Shroakes are going.”

SO WHAT DO THEY DO?” SINCE THEIR CLOSE ESCAPE from the light-deploying wreckers Dero had become obsessed with them, with whatever the Siblings Shroake had just avoided.

“I told you, I don’t know,” Caldera said. “Release some of that pressure—we’ve got a buildup in the port engines. They lure stuff in, smash them up, & take them apart, I suppose.”

The train arced over a rise—here, the flatearth was not quite, well, flat. They passed little streams & ponds, shaggy trees sprouting right between the rails. Sometimes there would be a rattling as branches knocked the side of the vehicle, as if something was asking for entrance.

“That’s what they do to trains,” said Dero. “What about people? In the trains? What about if they’d got us?”

“What’s that?” Caldera said. The iron rails ahead looked as if they were spreading out from something. Specifically, from a hill, it looked like, a stub island of the railsea. But you shouldn’t be able to see through an island. It should not have a silhouette like filigree, an island should not glint .

“It’s a bridgeknot,” Dero said.

The rails thicketed together, clumped, clotted, weaving over & under each other on girders & supports, on buttresses & poles in an absurdly tight snarl. It could have been the iron skeleton of a quite impossible behemoth. Within it at various heights, the Shroakes could see two, three old trains. Cold, deserted, of old design. Lifeless as husks & long abandoned.

“Go round it,” Dero said.

“It ain’t as simple as that,” Caldera said. She switched, line to line. “The rails everywhere round here are coming off it. Like wax off a candle. It’s going to take hours ‘n’ hours to plot a route around it. We want to be right on the other side.” She pointed.

“So?”

“We go through it.”

THE NOISE OF THEIR PASSAGE changed on the footrails. Suspended suddenly on rickety rattling rises, the percussion went from heartbeat to performance, tinnier & more resonant. Raised rails made temporary little skies. The Shroakes passed into shadows, & through the patterings of moisture dripping from the lines’ undersides.

Rails below, rails above. They were six, seven yards up, shaking the strut maze, switching switches, pushing through the heart of it all. They looked uneasily at each other as the tracks wobbled.