China Mieville - Railsea

& he wasn’t. It hit Sham abruptly. The captain talking about missing something previously. The certainty in his voice when refuting Sham about the wreck’s contents. The sense, in all his talk of the Shroakes, not only of greed, but of work unfinished.

It was him , thought Sham. It was him took them before. It was this train wrecked the Shroakes .

Oh, Caldera , Sham thought. Dero, Caldera . He imagined the Tarralesh bearing down on what must have been a severely battered Shroake train. Grappling hooks fired across cold rails. The boarding, attackers sweeping through the tiny vehicle, swinging cutlasses, firing guns. Oh, Caldera .

A chance encounter on the Shroakes’ carefully roundabout voyage home? Elfrish must’ve found hints of the journey. Evidence of the astonishing feats of engineering & salvage. & realizing these were not just any nomads, remembered stories of the heaven the evasive coded logs hinted they’d approached, full of endless riches, the ghosts of money born & died & not yet made.

How the pirates must’ve hunted for hints as to the route. Stripped & ripped & wrecked the wreckage. Brutally demanded answers, if any Shroake then still breathed. Neglecting that frantically dug hole. No wonder Elfrish was obsessed. All possible rewards aside, those pictures were a rebuke to him. Evidence of his piracy fail.

Sham shivered at the sight of the captain. He should, he decided grimly, looking out to Railsea, he definitely should lie.

“Let me tell you why you definitely shouldn’t lie,” Elfrish said. “Because what’s keeping you alive is your directions. It’s like a checklist. You get one mark for each picture. We have a rough idea where we’re going, but we need to double-check with you. Twelve checks & you win, we get to the end. But if it’s too long between one mark to another, you don’t win, & then you stop. Dead … Stop.” Sham swallowed. “So. If this is not where we need to be, you better tell us, so we can rethink & get where we’re going fast, because you need your first checkmark.

“I just know,” Elfrish said, “you don’t want to die, do you?”

Really not. Even so, there was a part of Sham that wanted to simply tell some ludicrous untruth, have them roar off in thoroughly the wrong direction as long as he could sustain it. Would that be a glorious death?

“I can see you thinking it over,” Elfrish said kindly. “I’ll give you a minute or two. I quite understand. This is a big decision.”

“Come on,” muttered Robalson. He jerked Sham’s chain. “Don’t be stupid.”

Sham came close. Had given up hope, & why not, why not mess with them? He came close. But at that moment he looked into the little storm of railgulls arcing around the train & saw the silhouette of quite unavian wings.

Daybe! Lurching with a frantic bat flap, a careering pell-mell motion nothing like birds’. Sham kept himself still, did not show his excitement.

The bat had definitely seen him. Sham’s chest swelled. How far had Daybe come? How long been following? It was that, the sudden not-being-alone-ness, the presence of even an animal friend, that changed Sham’s mind. For reasons he couldn’t have put very clearly into words it was abruptly important to him that he keep himself alive, which at the moment meant useful, as long as possible. Because look, there was Daybe.

“Yeah,” he said. “That’s what was in the picture.”

“Good,” said Elfrish. “There really wasn’t very much else that first picture you described could be. If you’d told us no, I’d probably have had to chuck you off. Good decision. Welcome to staying alive.”

As he turned, Sham glimpsed Robalson’s face. To his shock, the pirate boy was staring at the bat in the air. He knew! He’d seen it! But Robalson looked at him, & said nothing.

He led Sham back to the cell, checked they were alone, then eagerly winked. “No harm in having a friendly face around,” he whispered, & gave Sham an uneasy smile.

What? thought Sham. You want to be friends ?

But he would not risk his daybat’s freedom or life. Swallowing distaste, Sham smiled back.

He waited until the sound of his young jailer’s footsteps had disappeared, then quickly Sham opened the tiny window of his cell & shoved his arm out into the gusts, as far as it would go. The angle was awkward, the pain in his limb not inconsiderable, the flying specks as random-looking & momentary as soot in a storm. Sham waved & whispered & made noises that must have been snatched by the wind & track-clatter, but he made them anyway. & after mere moments of this he let out a cry of triumph, because swooping down, landing heavy & warm & shaggy on his arm, was Daybe, snickering in greeting.

THEM ANGELS CAN’T HAVE DONE MUCH OF A JOB ON that bridgeknot,” Dero said.

“Celestial intervention,” said Caldera. “It ain’t what it used to be.”

“Look!” Dero pointed. Smoke. In the distance. Dirty smudgy smoke—the breath of a steam engine burning something not clean—that tickled the underside of the upsky, which was roiling & hazy that day.

“What is it?” Caldera said. Dero checked & rechecked, gazed through far-seeing scopes & persuaded his on-train ordinators to extrapolate & best-guess.

“I dunno,” he said. “It’s too far. But I think—I think … ” He turned to his sister. “I think it’s pirates.”

Caldera looked up. “What?” she shouted. “Again?”

AGAIN. THEIR SUBTERFUGE had lasted as long as it had lasted, the Shroakes’ misleading rumour-mongering about their intended journey. But now everyone in Manihiki who cared must know they’d gone, & that meant stories & grapevines, & that was why they had started, as the days went on, glimpsing pirate trains.

These were not undangerous railsea stretches. There were a plethora of islets, here, & ill-charted woodlands & chasms in which a skilful captain might hide. It was no surprise buccaneers favoured them. They had not, though, expected quite how many would be looking for them.

A few days previously they had had the first of them. It could still have been a random encounter, they had thought. A jumped-up little beast-train had emerged from low trees remarkably close to them, & charged. The captain had cracked his enormous whip—it had been close enough with the wind going the right way for the Shroakes to hear—& goaded his snorting six-animal gang, three to each side of the rail, into massive gallops, while the small & vicious-looking pirate crew jeered & sneered on the ornate battledeck.

“Ooh look,” Dero had said. “Rhinos. Never thought I’d see rhinos.”

“Mmm-hm.” Caldera had given a contemptuous little kick, a little lick of speed, & they had left their pursuers coughing in their exhaust. The Shroake train, driven as it was by a hermetic engine, emitted no smoke: it did, though, have tanks of specially synthesised filthy fumes that could, with a button-push, be spurted out backwards to make a point.

“I liked them rhinos,” Dero said. “Did you? Caldera?” She said nothing. “Sometimes you wish I wasn’t with you, don’t you?” he muttered.

Caldera had rolled her eyes. “Don’t be absurd,” she’d said. Just occasionally it would have been nice to have someone else around, was all. “Enjoy that rhino-sighting while you can, Dero, because you ain’t going to see any more.”

“Why?”

“There ain’t many places a beast-train can relax about what pulls it,” she said. “& there’s things here’ll take a rhino no problem. They ain’t going to last long. They’re a way from home. Must be looking for something.”

The siblings had glanced at each other when she said that, but had still not assumed they were the target of these pirate forays. Until two days later, when a gang of small vehicles, each armoured like a dark tortoise, nearly caught up to them in the night, with surprisingly skilful switching. As their alarms sounded & the Shroakes powered away, they heard the lead dieselpunk shouting, “That’s them!”