There were three more freight cars between them and the locomotive. Mari wondered what the passengers farther back on the train thought of the Roc’s attack, especially the Mechanics in the last passenger car. Mages are frauds. That’s what the Mechanics Guild insists, and that’s what you’ve always been taught. How are you going to rationalize a giant bird tearing apart the train you’re riding on? You’ll be told not to talk about it, just like I was. You’ll be told to pretend it never happened. Will any of you find yourselves unable to do that, and in the same trouble I got into?
She reached the end of the roof, gazing across the gap to the next freight car. It wasn’t all that far. An easy jump. Easy if the train wasn’t thundering along the track as fast as it could move and the cars weren’t threatening to jump the rails at any moment and the wind wasn’t tearing at her and a giant bird wasn’t somewhere above doubtless getting ready to dive on her again.
Mari jumped, landing with her boots sliding for purchase on the roof and her hands scrabbling for a hold, any hold, and her body starting to fall sideways toward the ground tearing past in a blur and…she got a hold and gripped it so tightly her hand hurt.
Looking back, Mari saw Alain watching, his own eyes betraying an unusual amount of apprehension. “Come on!” she yelled. “This is easy compared to facing a dragon!”
That brought a trace of grimace that might have been a smile to Alain’s face, then he jumped, his body crashing into her. Mari wrapped one arm around him, the other keeping its hold. Alain got himself set, then glanced up and back. “Down!” he shouted.
Mari, who had already started forward again, flattened herself onto the roof of this freight car. She heard and felt another whooshing over the roar of the train. A tremendous creaking sounded just overhead and she realized it was the sound of the Roc’s feathers shifting in the wind. A shadow flashed past, Mari swearing she saw the Roc’s wing brushing the top of the car ahead of them, then the massive bird was curving up and away to prepare for another strike.
Despite her terror, Mari found herself momentarily frozen in admiration as the smoke from the locomotive parted to give her a good glimpse. The Roc seemed much like a hawk with a slightly elongated neck, but a hawk so large that the figure of the robed Mage on its back seemed no bigger than that of a small mouse compared to a real hawk. The creature swept the air with its huge wings, moving with a titanic grace that left Mari smiling involuntarily at its graceful flight. The Mechanic part of her mind told her that no bird could possibly be that big and still fly, but the rest of her didn’t care that something so lovely was impossible. “All right,” she yelled at Alain. “I know why you didn’t want to kill it.”
She got up into a crouch and ran, not stopping when she reached the gap to the next car this time but leaping across without any pause that might let fear master her. Once again she felt her feet sliding out from under her and once again Mari managed to get a handhold in time.
Alain followed, landing clumsily and squinting into the wind, one hand trying to bat away the hot cinders pelting them. “Have you done this before?” he shouted over the rushing wind.
“Run on top of a moving train? No!”
“I do not want to do it again.”
“That makes two of us.” Mari gazed upward, searching the sky and spotting the Roc winging over for another dive. “Come on!”
Another run, right to the edge of the first car in the train and over to the tender without stopping. Mari dropped onto the tender, landing on lumps of coal that shifted under her and bruised her painfully. She rolled to one side, wincing as the coal lumps dug into her.
Alain came down and hit hard, staring at her and gritting his teeth. “I did not know we would be jumping onto rocks this time.”
“It’s not rocks. It’s coal,” Mari told him.
“It feels like rocks and it looks like rocks.”
“Rocks don’t burn! It’s coal!” Mari heard something and tugged Alain down. “Watch out!”
The Roc swept past again, its beak stabbing down and narrowly missing them. Mari stared after it. “If this keeps up, I’m going to kill that thing! I don’t care how beautiful it is!”
“I understand your feelings,” Alain assured her.
Mari scrambled down the slope of the coal to the cab of the locomotive. Two apprentices stopped frantically shoveling coal into the boiler for a moment to gape at her. The Mechanic driving the train was looking forward, his face set in desperate lines.
Mari pulled herself next to him. “We need to scare it!” she yelled over the roar of the boiler and the clashing of the locomotive’s drive wheels.
The other Mechanic jerked his head over to stare at her, his face white with fear. “You made it up here from the passenger car? Who are you?”
“I’m…never mind now! Just trust me!”
“You know how to stop that thing?” the Mechanic demanded. He was well past middle age, Mari could see now, probably not far from being able to retire after a lifetime of quiet train trips across the Empire.
“Yes!” I hope. Mari scanned the skies again. “Here it comes.”
Alain was near the back of the cab, eyeing the boiler with nervousness so plain that Mari could spot it easily. In Dorcastle he had seen what an exploding boiler could do. Or perhaps he still believed the locomotive to be a creature like a Mage troll or dragon, something that could go into an out-of-control rampage if the Mechanic commanding it made a mistake.
The Roc came arcing down, talons extended this time as if it intended to pluck her and Alain from the locomotive cab. Mari tried to keep breathing as the vast shape of the Roc grew rapidly in size. Fearing she had left it too long, Mari yanked down the whistle lanyard and held it.
The whistle of the locomotive screeched like a banshee, even louder than usual because of the high pressure in the boiler. The Roc jerked upward, its eyes flaring with fear, wings backing frantically as the huge bird broke its descent and tried to flee this awful thing shrieking as if a dozen Rocs were in torment.
Mari grinned and gave Alain a thumbs-up. “It worked.”
“It will be back,” he advised. “We have to keep it from coming back.”
“How—?” Mari coughed as another wave of harsh smoke swept across them from the locomotive’s smokestack. “That’s it!” She turned on the apprentices. “Smoke! We need as much smoke as you can make!”
“Lady Mechanic,” one of the apprentices gasped, “we’re already putting out a lot, and we’ll slow down if we lower the fires by making them smoke more.”
“You can’t outrun that thing! But you can drive it away with smoke! Do it!”
Both of the apprentices looked to the Mechanic driving the locomotive, who nodded hastily. They started reducing the airflow to the fire, causing tremendous clouds of black smoke mixed with a swarm of glowing cinders to billow out of the stack. Within moments Mari was coughing, her eyes smarting.
Alain was beside her. “This reminds me of something,” he got out between his own coughs.
“I remembered it first.” They had almost died from smoke inhalation during the fire in Ringhmon.
“And, just like that time, we have to escape,” Alain added.
She gave him a baffled look, then realized Alain wasn’t just referring to the Roc. Caught up in the need to drive off the Roc, Mari had forgotten that if these apprentices or that Mechanic recognized her they would try to arrest her. If she and Alain were still in this locomotive when it stopped—and it would stop as soon as possible to deal with the burning freight car before its flames spread—one of the Mechanics from the passenger car at the end of the train might well recognize her.