FORTY-EIGHT
SHAM THEN.
What happened miles, days ago, was that Sham wobbled slowly up from the deeps of unconsciousness until he popped right into his own head. & into a headache. & winced & opened his eyes.
A room. A tiny train cabin. A cold line of light from a porthole. Boxes & papers wedged into shelves. Footsteps above him. The light wavered & swayed & dragged across the wall as the train changed direction. Sham could feel the shuddering now, through his back. He could feel that he was travelling fast.
He could not sit up. Was trussed on a bunk. He could just about see his own hands clutching at nothing. He tried to shout & discovered that a gag was in the way. Sham thrashed, but it was no good. He panicked. The panic was no good either. It gave up at last & left. He stretched each muscle that he could.
Vurinam? he thought. Fremlo? Captain Naphi? He tried to say the names out loud, & made muffled noises. Caldera? Where was he? Where was everyone else? An image of the Shroake train took him. Could he be on the Shroake train? Minutes, or hours, or seconds, passed. The door at last opened. Sham strained, turned his head, croaking. Robalson stood in the doorway.
“Ah ha,” Robalson said. “At last. We didn’t give you that much. I thought you’d wake up ages ago.” He grinned. “I’m going to untie your hands & mouth, let you sit up,” he said. “Your end of the deal is you’re not going to be a pain in my arse.”
He put down a bowl of food & loosened Sham’s bonds, & Sham began to shout even as the dirty cloth left his mouth. “What the hell are you doing my captain’s going to find me you’re going to pay for this you crazy pig,” & so on. Sham had hoped it would sound like a bellow. It came out more like a loud whine. Robalson sighed & tugged the gag back on.
“Now is that being not a pain in my arse?” he said. “Goat porridge for non-arse-painery. That’s the deal. There’s worse things I can do than put a gag on.”
This time when Robalson relaxed the mouthpiece Sham said nothing. Just stared at him in cold fury.
He also stared at the porridge. He really was hungry.
“WHAT THE BLOODY HELL do you call this?” Sham said through a mouthful of the delicious stuff.
Robalson rubbed his nose. “A kidnapping, I suppose. What do you call it?”
“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?