“Tell me where the Shroakes are going.”
FORTY-NINE
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.
“Is this thing safe?” Dero whispered.
“Angels will’ve kept it alright,” Caldera said.
“We hope,” Dero said.
“We hope.”
Sunlight dappled them through the old lines. The Shroake train was speckled as if they were deep in a hedge.
“Who gets wrecked in the middle of a thing like this?” Dero said, looking at the deserted vehicles embedded in the structure. One was close. They were approaching it.
“Careless people,” Caldera said. “Unlucky people.” She looked at the antique outlines of the train. “They weren’t wrecked, anyway. They were … becalmed.” The vehicle was heavy & huge & designed according to outmoded aesthetics. It had no chimney nor any exhaust: from its back jutted a huge lever. Clockwork.
“Maybe that’s why,” Caldera said. “I think that’s from Kammy Hammy. They got halfway up, wheels ran out. That bar you wind it up with—you can’t twist that in here, there’s no space to turn the key.”
It loomed over them on a steep side rail, as if watching as they passed. From every one of its windows billowed clouds of ivy & wiry bramble. In which, from the front-most window at least, they could see tangled-up tools, rain-ruined helmets & bones. The exuberant flora hogged the space, crowding out the dead.
“A few more switches,” Caldera said, “& we’ll be coming through to the other side.” Through the mossed & windblown palimpsest of crossbars ahead she could see the open railsea.
“We’ve got an amazing view,” Dero said. They pitched. Their passage shook the lines. The railknot swayed. Caldera grit her teeth. Behind her there was a resonant crack. The sound of metal snapping under strain. A groan. & the trembling of the rails grew.
“What,” said Caldera, “was that?” She checked her mirrors. “Oh,” she said.
That old train was not used to this shaking. Bolts had shaken, strained & sheared. Old brakes were long atrophied. Once-taut metal wheel-locks had given abruptly up under the vibrations. Blocks & chocks crumbled & the clockwork train was slipping from its position, & was rolling onto their track, following them. Accelerating.
“Oh … my …” said Dero.
“Quick now,” Caldera muttered. “Quick, quick, chop chop, on we go.” She yanked her controls, sped the Shroake train up. Their cold accidental pursuer accidentally pursued.
A working train versus one long ruined unto scrap? Quite foregone which would be faster, no? But Caldera had a grave disadvantage. She was alive. & she wanted to keep it that way. She had, then, to exercise care. The fossil that pursued them had no such restraint. Where she slowed at branches, it did not. Where she sought the best route out of the girderweb, it did not care. Where she strove to ensure that she did not send her brother & herself hurtling to their doom, doom had long ago claimed their hunters, who strove deadly for nothing but speed.
The old train was accelerating. Following them junction for junction, switch for switch, shaking the whole railknot & making the Shroakes scream. It roared after them, carried by gravity, gathering momentum, sending struts & supports of the strange structure scattered like spillikins behind it.
“Go faster!” Dero shouted.
“Oh, thank you!” shouted Caldera. “I hadn’t thought of that! Here I was going half speed!” They rolled towards the light, a dead crew close behind them. Only yards now to the flatearth where they could veer out of the path, but the clockwork was too close, too fast, was seconds from shunting them violently off the line.
“Purge!” shouted Caldera. Dero hesitated only one instant, then obeyed.
He stabbed at keys. Caldera listed what they would lose. I left my jumper in that carriage, she thought giddily, I left my second best pen, there’s all the liquorice, but no time for regrets, as with a last yank, Dero shouted “Purging!” & the rearmost carriage on the Shroake train was decoupled & blown backwards with percussive bolts, to slide right in the path of what came for them.
The dead train slammed into the retreating carriage. There was no way the discarded Shroake cabin could stop that hefty skeleton, but it did not need to. All it needed to do, & what it did, with a scream of wheels, was momentarily slow it. Long enough, those few seconds, that Caldera & Dero & their little train, lighter & faster now, hauled away & out & were back at railsea again, whooping with the whole being-alive-ness of it.
They switched, & were a way away on sidelines of the route they had been taking, rushing to the windows to watch. As it howled out into the bright sun, the carriage slowing it, the pursuing engine shook with the percussion of the bridgeknot. Which creaked, which swayed, until with thunderous clatter & the rush of air, the whole precarious rusted mass of the structure began to collapse.