Robalson visited him at all hours & would go on about nothing. Would start halfheartedly taunting Sham, until that was done & he’d just sit, uneasily. “There’s so many stories going round,” he said at last. “If whatever it is the Shroakes are after, that their family found, is even half as good as people think it might be, we’re going to be …” He made lip-smacking noises. “They say you can’t even imagine it. So we got to keep moving before anyone else gets smart. Course, they ain’t got your pictures, have they?”
No, thought Sham, but they’ll be after the Shroakes. He bit his lip.
A WHISTLE SOUNDED, & there came the heavy beat of running. The train accelerated, skewed away from the direction it had been going. This was skilled switching. The swift manoeuvres continued, these sudden changes of direction, abrupt speedings-up & slowings-down. Robalson leapt up.
“What is it?” Sham shouted. His jailer took a moment to shoot him a very nervous grin, then was gone & turning the key. Sham stared from the little window & caught his breath. The Tarralesh was racing after another train. Some small merchant vehicle, plying goods between railsea islands, now gusting at the limit of its steam strength. “Get out of here!” he shouted across the miles, & as if it heard him, the littler train tried.
There was a booming. A fusillade of missiles arced with dreadful laziness from the pirate train, over the rails, to rainbow down in a succession of withering explosions that sent ripped-up rail shreds & ties in all directions. One of the flying bombs hit the rear of their quarry.
Sham moaned. The caboose exploded, sent flames & metal & wood in a big splash, as well as, oh my Stonefaces, little pinwheeling figures. They landed scattered. & near those who still moved, now fitfully, injured, the earth erupted, as carnivorous burrowers smelled person-meat.
Another flurry of shots, & the train was immobilised. Over horrible minutes, the Tarralesh came closer. Sham could hear the crew catcalling & arming themselves. On the deck of the immobilized train the men & women waited with swords, guns & terrified expressions. They may not have been soldiers or pirates, but they would fight.
NOT THAT IT DID them overmuch good. The Tarralesh bombed them some more, spilt defenders like spillikins onto the awful ground. Elfrish’s vehicle came alongside, to an adjacent rail, & snagged the crippled merchant with grappling hooks. Hallooing to some aggressive pirate god, the fighting crew of the Tarralesh swept aboard, & the hand-to-hand melee began.
Sham couldn’t see much. A blessing. He could see enough. He saw women & men shoot each other at close hand, send wounded & dead flying off the train. Some fell near enough that he could hear their cries, see them crawling on broken bones, clutching at wounds, scrabbling to get back aboard.
The sandy soil began to churn. To swirl & sink. A circle slid down into a cone. A man slid down, too, crying out. From the base of that pit scissored two great chitin mandibles, beetle-coloured scythes. Compound eyes.
Sham looked away before the antlion’s jaws closed on its meal & a scream abruptly ended. He flattened himself against the wall below his porthole. He felt as if his heartbeat was fast & hard enough to shake the train. When he looked again, the predators were fighting between themselves, & the ground churned not only with men & women but with the squabbles of giant insects & mole rats, shrews & moles. While in the ruined train, pirates took control.
Those pirates overboard & still living were rescued. The merchants on the earth were left to scrabble their own way back to their wreck, around antlion pits, the loose earth of hungry badgers.
Elfrish’s crew hauled goods out of the holds, craned & grappling-hooked & pulleyed them across to the Tarralesh. Watching them under armed guard were the last dejected & sobbing merchants. Sham couldn’t hear what Elfrish was saying, but he saw two or three of the defeated crew pulled out—the best dressed, it looked like, the captain & officers. They were dragged onto the pirate train, out of his sight. Sham could hear scuffs above him. A groan of horror from the other merchants, all staring at whatever was occurring above Sham’s head.
When at last the Tarralesh pulled away, it left behind it an empty & immobile train, a big chunk of nu-salvage for someone to pick clean. On its roof the last of its crew, allowed by laziness to live, mourning, cold, marooned.
“What a day, eh?” Robalson said.
“What’ll happen to them?” Sham could not turn to look at him.
“Someone’ll probably come for them, maybe, when they don’t turn up where they’re expected,” Robalson said. He shrugged. He wouldn’t meet Sham’s eye. “Don’t look at me like that,” Robalson muttered. Sulkily put down a bowl.
“What did you do to those last ones?” Sham said. “I could hear …”
“Plank,” Robalson said. He made walking-finger motions. “They was the officers. I said don’t look at me like that. You know we lost six people? If they’d just surrendered we wouldn’t have had to do any of that.”
“Right,” said Sham, & turned back to the window. He felt like crying. He shivered. “What was under the plank? Where’d you do it?” When there was no answer, he said, “It was more antlions, weren’t it? Centipedes?” Robalson was already gone.
Sham hunted for paper as carefully as once his crew had hunted moldywarpes. Found a scrap of drawer-liner. Kept looking. Found at last a discarded pencil stub. Had to chew-sharpen it. He wrote:
“Please! I am a captive in the train Tarralesh. It is pirates. They have guns. They are a pirate train. They are making me show them the way to a secret if I don’t do it they will drop me into the railsea & maybe an antlion trap or something. My name is S. a. Soorap training under Capt. Naphi of the Medes. Please can you help me. Please also tell Troose yn Verba & Voam yn Soorap of Streggeye that I have not run away & that I will come back! The Tarralesh wants to Do Harm to two young Manihiki travellers & also to me please help!! West & North is all I know where we are going. Thank you.”
Sham leaned into the dark, chattered, beckoned until Daybe came in. Sham twisted up the paper very tight & tucked it into the tracer still secured to the daybat’s leg.
“Listen,” he said. “I know this is going to be hard. You came to find me. & you don’t know how much that meant. But you know what I need you to do now?” He swept out his arm, hard, in the direction they had come. “I need you to go back. Fly back. Find someone. Find anyone.”
The bat stared at him. Intimidated by the night. It huddled, licked him, met Sham’s eyes. His heart breaking, Sham started the long process of persuading it, intimidating it, frightening it if he had to, into flying away.
FIFTY-SIX
ANOTHER CARRIAGE WAS GONE, TAKEN SKYWARD IN vengeful & tremendous owl claws. Caldera had pressed the release, as the owl had flown. Just in time but at the right time, restraining herself until those strigine talons were directly over the track on which the Shroakes’ engine had still raced, the last to be dragged up, gunning it so the train lurched forward as the carriages fell & with sparks & terrifying bangs slammed wheels-down back onto the rails. One more moment, they’d have been too high, or too far to one side or the other, & the whole vehicle would have been lost.