Dero gasped as realisation took hold. “… is an alarm call,” he said. He fell into his own seat, clicking through controls. They backed up. The newborns staggered after them, sounding piteously.
From behind the train came a much deeper, much louder call. It sent frost down Caldera’s bones. They heard a grating step.
Swinging side to side, eyes like giant lanterns hypnotic with rage, recurved beak an evil hook, an owl parent stepped into their hindlights. Its claws were out & ready. It rushed in to protect its babies.
“I’d go the other way,” Dero said in a choked voice.
The owl was taller than their train, hunched & stooped to scratch its way through the tunnels, filling the shaft with its wings. Its eyes shone like the worst moon. It screamed. Those claws would rip the Shroake train apart. To get at the soft Shroake grubs within.
Switch, clickety split. Caldera was getting good at these abrupt & sudden line changes. Back past the junction while the chicks stumbled & the terrifying adult closed in, forward again down a sideline, accelerating out of that predator’s burrow.
“It’s still coming,” said Dero.
“I know,” Caldera said. Switch, forward, star’d, fast.
“It’s still coming!” Dero shouted.
“Wait!” Caldera shouted. “I think we’re—”
With a rush & the merciful dissipation of all the close-up noise, they burst out again, into the day. On the far side of the river. The raging owl stamped out after them, almost at their speed, opening wings & lurching on stilty legs, half flying, half running, fast, but not as fast as a fleeing Shroake train zipping through grass.
“& farewell to you, angry owl,” said Caldera triumphantly.
“No! More! Quick routes! Through weird things!” shouted Dero.
“Ah, hush. It was your idea. We made it, didn’t we?”
“Yeah, but now I’m just wondering …” said Dero.
“What?” Caldera said. “Don’t I even get any well-dones for having got us out?”
“It’s just … doesn’t it take two big owls to make little ones?” said Dero.
A colossal noise above, a thunderclap of wings.
In this case, they learnt, as a shadow blotted out the sun beyond the upsky, it took one big & one very, very big owl. Which, that latter, descended, with a bass hoot that made the Shroakes’ bones & their train vibrate. Which swooped down towards the rear of the rearmost carriage, clenched claws like dockyard machines that split & splintered the vehicle’s roof, &, wings hammering again, ascended. Still gripping. So that one by one, from the back of the train forward, the cars of the Shroakes’ train uncoupled from the rails, began to rise.
FIFTY-FOUR
ELSEWHERE IN THE RAILSEA, THE TIES WERE STONE-HARD, the iron of the rails was a black no amount of train-wheel polishing could make shine, & the ground beneath & between them was very cold. Over such tracks came the Medes.
Had it been observed by a sky-dwelling god with any knowledge of moling, such a watcher would have been struck by the vehicle’s speed. The Medes raced on the icy railroad in shekkachashek, a rhythm suited to hot pursuit, not to these conditions. No moldywarpe was visible: the train would, the imagined watcher might have presumed, been better suited to prowl at lower speeds & slippery wheelbeats.
At the Medes’s prow, the captain, her tracer in her mechanical hand, looked up & down between screen & the horizon. The latter was all grey air & baleful clouds: the former a dancing dot of red, a complaining diode.
“Mr. Mbenday,” Naphi said, “it’s taken a turn star’d. Switchers to switch.” Switch they did, curving through a sequence of points, until the scanner light was again nearly straight ahead.
When she did not track on that relentless screen, the captain retired with books of philosophies. Reading memoirs & thoughts & speculations of the rare completers. She made notes in the margins. What happens when the evasive concepts you hunt, get found?
Three times the devilish fast beast they followed dug too far, too fast, too deep to be followed, dragged its glimmer-self beyond the range of Captain Naphi’s reader. Each time, within a few days of roaming, scanner at maximum power, drawing on more traditional techniques of moleground deduction, she found the signal again.
The second time they lost & found the blip that meant great talpa, they had seen, far, far off, a molehill born. An eruption of dust that silenced them with awe, & left a truly prodigious mound behind.
“Wish the lad could see this,” Fremlo had muttered. “I heard it was him got her the scanner. He’d have liked this.” No one answered.
There was still a chase; they were still molers, tracking & inferring & judging on their hunterly insights. But now Captain Naphi’s philosophy left an electrical spoor. Perhaps once or twice the captain looked like she was whispering, muttering something that might have including the word “thanks” as she fiddled with her receiver.
Mocker-Jack did not travel like a moldywarpe should travel. “How does it know?” Vurinam demanded of the world. “How does it know we’re on its bloody tail? How come it keeps trying to get away?” That was how he interpreted the creature’s unusual evasive speed & motion.
It’s always taunted the captain, some crewmates whispered back. That’s why it’s her philosophy.
Hob Vurinam had another question. As they circled a stretch of ice, in the very bloody light of evening, as he turned his pockets inside out & right-way round again in fret, he said to Dr. Fremlo, “D’you ever feel like it might be cheating?”
The doctor was watching groundhogs bicker by their holes. Fremlo said nothing.
“If Naphi gets Mocker-Jack like this,” Vurinam said, “mightn’t it be cheating to complete your philosophy that way? Can you shortcut an insight-hunt, do you think?” Fremlo threw scrunched-up paper into a groundhog squabble as the train passed. “Wonder what Sham would think,” Vurinam said.
“Not much,” Fremlo said. “It isn’t salvage, is it? It’s just a big mole.”
The sun went down on the two of them talking about Sham, while the vehicle to which they owed temporary paid loyalty described raggedy spirals in intersecting rails, closing in on its captain’s obsession.
FIFTY-FIVE
THE FIRST FEW TIMES HE ENTICED IT FROM THE SKY, Sham just stroked Daybe & took heart from the presence of something that liked him & didn’t care if he could verify that a piece of railsea was a particular piece of pictured railsea. Those duties continued. He said yes to a petrified forest; a glacier creeping at them, its slowly incoming edge already eating railsea rails; a particular patch of distinctive hillocky ground. “Is that what you saw?”
Each time Sham was out there to check, Daybe circled. Each time Sham said yes—until that last one, when, after a hesitation, he told the truth: no. & after another hesitation, Elfrish nodded & altered course.
Daybe wouldn’t enter Sham’s dreary cell, but it perched on the rim of the tiny window. With outswept arms & exaggerated pointings Sham would encourage it out to local islands, to disrupt railgulls & to pick up snacks of grubs. With swoopy beckonings he’d entice it back. He saw it flit under the clouds & upsky, above a ragged reef of salvage.
Where were they?
Sham was at the mercy of a man he knew to be wholly ruthless. Of murderers who would throw him overboard or spit him on a trainhook for the laugh of it, if the thought appealed. But as long as he was alive & making himself useful, he was somewhere he had never been. Neither doctoring nor pining, but somewhere quite new, doing something new, & with that came—whatever the danger—excitement.