On the fourth day they rolled in the shadow of an old pumping rig crowning above a copse, still extracting oil though near its life’s end. A labour of moldywarpes, grey beasts of moderate size & quality, surfaced near them, playing & puffing dust. Three were swiftly skewered, roped, dragged to the butchery wagons, reduced to components.
“Hey, d’you remember,” Vurinam said abruptly to no one in particular, “how that Sham ap Soorap brought the grog when he had to?” He cleared his throat. “Couldn’t work out if he liked doing it more or less than his usual doctoring, weren’t that so, Fremlo?”
There were a few laughs. Were they happy or sad that Vurinam had mentioned their runaway? Yes. They were happy or sad.
“Shut up, Vurinam,” Yashkan said. “Nobody cares.” But his heart wasn’t in it.
“Didn’t know he had it in him,” Fremlo muttered to Mbenday when they drank bad smoky tea late that night. “He was hopeless, though you couldn’t but like the lad, but I’d never have thought he’d have the oomph to go be a salvor, no matter how mooningly he stared at them.”
The Medes passed a slave-powered train from Rockvane, which the captain would not hail. Shossunder & Dramin the cook stared out to railsea, as in their wake a big old bull armadillo, like a grunting armoured cart, groped up into the air, sniffed for prey, & ground below again.
“He was funny with his food,” Dramin said.
“Odd having him not around,” the cabin boy said.
They reached a huge & clanking wartrain from one of the Cabigo monarchies. They approached the double-decked wheeled fortress, porcupine-spined with guns, howling sooty smoke, on its manoeuvres & reconnaissance.
Admiral Shiverjay received Naphi, & after niceties & a cup of cactus tea, after paying sufficient polite attention to his ill-tempered train-cat, in the halting combination of languages with which they could get by, she asked him if he had any news of a large, pale moldywarpe.
& he only bloody had.
MANY TRAINS KEPT RECORDS of overhearings like sightings of megabeasts, of any talk of sports & monsters they encountered, knowing molers they met might be searching. Shiverjay ran a finger down a rumour-list, past tales of the largest badger, albino antlions, aardvarks of prodigious size. Some had the names of captains marked alongside. Some had more than one: oh, those were awkward occasions, clashes of hunt. What to do when more than one philosopher sought the same symbol? It was notoriously embarrassing.
“Ah now,” Shiverjay said. “Here’s a thing.” He had a superb stock of stories. “You know where the Bajjer roll?” Naphi nodded a vague nod. The sail-nomads gathered & hunted across great swathes of the railsea. “A deep-railsea spearhunter, back from their grounds, she told me something that she’d heard from a furrier who’d been trading with a salvor crew—”
The lineage, the genealogy by which the story was delivered at last into Captain Naphi’s ears, was convoluted & not important. What mattered was this: “A solo trainsman saw our quarry,” Naphi said, back on her own vehicle. She controlled herself, stiff & upright & careful, but she was all-but bass-string vibrating at the news. “He ain’t too far. Switchers, south-southwest.”
& still there was that sniff of loss about the Medes.
A PECULIARITY OF GEOGRAPHY HAD the railsea dipping into a sheltered declivity that thronged with rabbit. There a light steam train all the way from Gulflask passed on stories they, too, like the wartrain, had heard about the jaundiced-looking Talpa rex. They directed the Medes west, to where the earthworms were huge & sluggish & the largest moldywarpes fed.
Three days, following earth-trails of ever-increasing sizes, & the Medes saw two great southern moldywarpes. One sleek young male too far to chase; the second, a grizzled sow, they might have been able to run down. But Naphi told the harpoonists no.
As the sun dropped & the cold went vicious, they reached a dangerous intricate knot of rails, of manifold gauges. It would need charting for passage. The captain was untouched by any tiredness. She stared rapt & intently through her telescope, into the last of the light.
Abruptly she volunteered Mbenday, Brownall, Benightly & Borr to go with her. The crewmembers were like inflated people, so bundled were they in fleece & fur. The captain herself wore only a moderately quilted jacket.
“She don’t need no furs, she’s warmed by her crazy,” Borr whispered to Benightly as they took the jollycart slowly forward. They mapped & took careful notes, prepared switches for the Medes that would follow. They glanced longingly at the receding warmth & light of the train.
Slowly they rounded a patch of bushes metal-coloured in the twilight … steered between trees thin & gnarled as pained skeletons … knocked stones from the rails with their trainhooks … They moved at a creeping pace in thickets of tough vegetation, in a range of dense rails, broken by spare patches of ground & the curve of a hill towards which they steered.
“Stop here,” Naphi said, her voice trembling. She stood, ready to disembark. “Let’s see what we can see from the top.” They rolled closer to the pale hill. The shaggy bone-coloured hill.
The hill covered not in pale freeze-bleached grass but in hair.
The yellow hill rumbled. It shuddered.
The hill growled.
A twitch, a switch & stubs & tufted nubs on the hill moved. Moved as a chewing sound sounded, as there came from all around them a slam of teeth & a throaty animal exhalation.
The hill opened wicked eyes.
“Oh my good gods!” someone screamed. “It’s him!”
& with violence & suddenness the earth shook & birds were calling as loud as the crew & the hill was not a hill, was the colossal humped flank & back of Mocker-Jack the pale mole. & there was throating & a snarl of tree-sized slaver-spattering tusks & a plunging with appalling motion so enormous that the world itself, time itself, seemed to buckle, & countless tons of meat & malevolent muscle & dead-hued fur moved. & with a red stare near-sightless but quite terrible the beast rose an instant then plunged straight, straight down, leaving ruination, buckled rails, splintered ties, a quivering-edged pit.
A gun fired, a flash in the dark. The earth shuddered again. Benightly, Brownall, Borr were falling & clinging to the cart’s sides as the world pitched. Someone braked hard to stop them following the beast into the below. From which came a dust-choked roar.
Oh, so appalling a timbre.
ONE BY ONE THE CREW on the cart opened their eyes. They coughed in the clouds left by Mocker-Jack’s passing. Checked their cuts & bruises & that they were not dead.
They looked up one by dizzy one. To see, standing, unruffled, indeed exultant, the captain. She held a rifle against her hip. Smoke from its muzzle fingered the air.
Naphi was leaning towards the new hole, peering into the new shadow. In her artificial hand was the mechanism she had bought. Lights flashed upon it. She shook the gun, the electric box & smiled. It was a chilling smile. “Now,” she said. “We will just see.”
“Lizards,” Mbenday whispered at last, a curse to the strange iguana gods of Mendana, his home. “You knew what it was. But you knew we wouldn’t come if we knew. You saw it. This was the plan. Phase one. Is that not it, Captain?” There was as much admiration as anger in his voice.