To fire their boilers,
We resigned to
Dig the iron ore from their mines
To help them build their railroad lines
Where dragons once flew freely
The food they gave is all we crave
It can’t be found in crevasse or cave
For its sake we are mankind’s slaves
Where once we flew so freely
Now that I am blind and lame
A dragon only in my name
I would not lend my flight nor flame
To aid a man who’s bleeding
We can’t return to mountain homes
Where we would starve to scale and bone
For food and shelter we’ve been owned
No more to fly so freely
Other songs were standard tales of bravery in battle, a maiden’s beauty, a lasting love, a horse’s speed. Some had fantastic creatures in them. There were love ballads, murder ballads, work songs, and many about magical events that had happened a long time ago.
The nights were longer at Wormroost, broken by sleep and periodic breaks for tea and scones or sometimes cocoa and cake. Isabelle was a wonderful cook and baker, and Sergeant Foote often spontaneously burst into song. He had quite a nice voice when he wasn’t bellowing, but he did enjoy showing off by dancing around and pantomiming the lyrics. Most of the cats loved this, although a couple hid behind chairs or under a table. The place was as full of rickety old furniture and patched linens and coverlets as it was shells and manuscripts.
In the third week she was there, a parcel arrived wrapped in brown paper and string from Madame Marsha. It was her new altered gown and it was really warm and fit her well. She was delighted and wore it all evening then carefully packed it away again to save for special occasions.
Verity relaxed for the first time since her father died. She was doing important, useful work and getting an education besides, and she enjoyed singing with the others. It made her feel as if she had friends and she’d always wanted some. She hadn’t done much singing before and she could often offer something none of them had ever heard, culled from the shells she’d been listening to. After the song sessions, sometimes all four of them, sometimes just she and Isabelle, played cards or board games.
Eventually, the sergeant’s leave ended and he had to return to Brazoria to resume his duties. The Wormroost women saw him off at the train, he and Isabelle casting lingering looks at each other as he left. It wasn’t all studying, singing, and board games with the two of them, Verity suspected.
As the Worm Turns
Ephemera grew more forgetful as time went on and twice wandered off in the night. The first time, Isabelle and Sergeant Foote heard her sliding through the ice tunnels shouting wheee! and got her back to her bedchamber. The second time, Verity caught her aunt just as she was about to leave the castle without her coat.
“I’m just going to the shops, dear. They’re not that far,” she told Verity.
Verity clutched her scalp. “Please, Aunt, you’re killing me. Look, I’ve found a new song in the Archives today and it seems to be true. Come listen to it and tell me if you know of any other stories related to it.”
Ephemera, always passionate about her life’s work, perked up and turned around without further encouragement. “Oh good! Can you sing a few bars now…”
“That’s just it. I don’t know the tune to it. I thought you might know that as well.”
She detoured past Ephemera’s bedchamber on their way to the Archives and the older lady pulled away from her and sat on her bed. “I don’t want to do that now, dear. Can it wait? I’m very tired. Ought you not to be in bed, too?”
It was funny up to a point, but worrying, too. Verity was afraid she would not always notice when the old dear went wandering off and she’d injure herself or freeze to death. They might never find her. Isabelle was more sanguine. “She’s lived here all her life, cousin. Even if she gets lost, sooner or later she knows where she is.”
One day when Isabelle was down with a cold and Verity was up to her ears in shells, as usual, the delivery sled brought groceries from the village and Ephemera, seemingly having one of her better days, accepted and stored the groceries. Two days later, Verity was searching for some bread and cheese when she came across a sheet of paper that was keeping the cheese from falling between the slats on the cooling rack, which was a box dug into the icy wall of the cave.
Curious, she glanced at it, then picked it up and read it more thoroughly. It was on Uncle Nic’s stationery and had a few red hairs clinging to it.
Verity,
I have it on good authority that your long-lost mother is on her way to the port of Drague, in Glassovia. This seems an ideal time for you to reconnect with her. Suggest you take the eastbound train out of Wormroost Station, cross into Glassovia from Brazoria, through the Crystal Mountains and then south to Drague. I will try to gather more information to send you at a later date so when you arrive in Drague, please send word by return messenger and give directions to where you are staying.
The letter was typewritten on Uncle Nic’s stationery so, although it was not signed, she assumed it was from him, though it made her uneasy. It was unlike him to be so careless, but perhaps he was in a hurry.
What exciting, if a bit troubling, news! She remembered her mother as she had last seen her, hair a lighter shade of red than Uncle Nic’s, skin pale and touch soft but firm, her fragrance like the intriguing smells blown on the breeze after a rain. Papa had always told her that her mother had loved her very much and must have had a very good reason for leaving them. While Verity couldn’t help resenting that Mother had left them, now at last she could ask her why. Taking running slides through the halls, she rushed to find Ephemera and Isabelle.
“This says I’m to set out at once,” Verity said. And taking a deep breath, she did something she had not been able to do safely for a long time and said what she truly thought without worrying about offending someone. “And I’d like to go right away. If she’s already there, I want to find her and spend as much time as possible with her. If she’s not…”
“If she’s not,” Ephemera said, rubbing her hands together with anticipation. “It’s still a wonderful opportunity to see somewhere new. Traveling is so broadening, as they say. I have never had a chance to look into the songs and lore of Glassovia and I’ve heard it’s quite a fascinating blend of barbarian and Oriental cultures… Would you mind very much if I come with you? We can do some actual fieldwork. I have many tricks to teach you about collecting lore, and the Glassovian material will be new to our Archives. They had a major role in the Great War, so it will be good to get their viewpoint to add to what we have.”
“I’m surprised he didn’t suggest you come along as my chaperone,” Verity said.
“I doubt he thought your stepmother would consider me entirely suitable. My main attraction at the moment is that Wormroost is a good distance from Queenston, I’m sure.”
“Would you come? Please?” Verity asked for several reasons. The first was that from her original response, Ephemera clearly wanted to go. The second was that Isabelle could just manage to look after herself at the moment, and Verity had realized long ago that she was here less to serve the Archivist than to make sure she didn’t hurt herself by forgetting to take her wurmroot pills or brushing too near the fire when distracted and catching herself ablaze. The third was that while she wasn’t exactly the warm and cuddly grandmother she looked, and was in fact a bit distant much of the time, Ephemera seemed to respect her judgment and was disinclined to interfere with her, which was more than Verity could say for Sophronia, besides which she was a lot more interesting.
Ephemera smiled sweetly, “Certainly, my dear. I wouldn’t have brought it up otherwise. You strike me as a very sensible girl except for a fondness for wading rivers, so I hardly think you need a chaperone, and I’m afraid I wouldn’t be much protection at my age. However, if you need an ally, Ephemera’s your auntie!”
; She turned to Isabelle. “You won’t be bothered by minding the Archives will you, pet?”
“Certainly not, Auntie. I don’t imagine they’ll go anywhere until I feel well enough to tend to them.”
“May we bring you anything from Drague?”
“Ooooh, let me see. What do they make there?”
“The usual sort of Oriental things—silks, spices, intricate baubles.”
“Some silk long underwear might be handy, oh, and if you taste anything there that you really like, you might bring me the spices. And you know how I love baubles, even if I just dangle them for the cats… surprise me.”
The winter had truly descended during the time Verity had been at Wormroost, so Isabelle wrapped up extra well, blew her nose, and took them to the station in the sleigh rather than the wagon. It was a beautiful thing with swans carved on the sides. “They say it used to belong to a scoundrel of an ancestor who had it drawn by seven princesses enchanted to swan form, but we’ll just use the horses,” Isabelle told Verity when she exclaimed over it.
Ephemera insisted they load the sleigh with skis and snowshoes for each of them (“you never know when you might need them”), a bag of extra socks (“can’t have too many socks”), an extra pair of waterproof boots, coat, jumpers, and pants made from water repellent wool.
“I had the impression Glassovia was a warm place,” Verity said.
“No, dear, not according to the map. In the southern part, perhaps, but it’s the same latitude as we are so we’d best be prepared for it. Up here in the north, one must always prepare to be stranded, you know. Don’t forget the extra blankets, Isabelle dear.”
“Right here, Ephemera,” the younger woman replied, with a sneeze.
Settling into the sleigh, Ephemera sighed and dozed all the way to the train station.
Isabelle sniffled, mopped her nose, and smiled. “She was up most of the night trying to decide which shells to bring with her,” she said. “I know she’s supposed to be accompanying you, Verity, but please look out for her. You’ve seen for yourself so I don’t have to tell you, but it’s easy to forget when she’s having a good day that she can suddenly take a spell where she doesn’t know who either of you are or where she is. That’s fine here at home, but she’s not as young as she once was and she tires. The wearier she becomes the more apt she is to jump her track, so to speak. Also her head is filled with tales of many events that happened at many times and sometimes she forgets what is a tale and what is in front of her.”
“I’ll watch,” Verity promised. “Perhaps this won’t take us too long and we’ll be back soon.”
They all embraced before Isabelle, continually shedding and re-draping herself in wrappings, helped them load their belongings onto the train, plus a copy of A Traveler’s Guide to Glassovia and Drague and a new pair of warm woolly mittens with dragons embroidered on the tops for Verity.
A uniformed porter took charge of the excess baggage. “I’ll just stow these in the luggage compartment for you, shall I?” he asked, and showed them to their compartment. “It’s three days and nights to Drague,” he said, “so this is where you’ll sleep. If you prefer a more luxurious compartment, the train adds a premier class sleeper at Velasco and a dining car. Otherwise, you will probably prefer the main saloon for most of your waking hours. There’s a stove…”
“So we discovered on the way north,” Verity said, thinking she was now a seasoned traveler who didn’t require such advice.
This far north there were fewer feeder tracks, at least until the train drew nearer to Velasco. Until mid-day the train followed the jaw line of a mountain range.
Ephemera, shells in her ears and her kit bag for a pillow, dozed on the upholstered bench as the snowy mountain vistas swept past the window. There were few other passengers in the main saloon. Verity poked the fire now and then, though the conductor, who was the only railway attendant on this part of the run, added logs as necessary.
“Be nice if we had a dragon for this, too,” he said.
To be agreeable and make conversation, because she was a little lonely once Ephemera went back into her shell, she said, “Dragons are very handy, aren’t they?”
“That’s an understatement, Miss, if ever there was one,” the conductor said, and enthusiastically launched into his favorite subject.
Chapter 18
Without Dragons, There’d be no Railroad
“Why, without dragons, there’d be no railroad!”
“But dragons aren’t the only way to make fire!” Verity said.
“No, but you might say they’re the professionals. Fire is their business and there’s nothing better at it. A dragon not only produces a flame, but his flame will be a certain temperature, unless he damps it down. Take Kamari and Tatsuo, our engine-drakes. They’re young ones yet, and under the soot, their colors show that they’re at their optimum temperature—Kamari is usually bright blue, showing that he reaches temperatures up to 900 degrees. Tatsuo is a little younger and hotter, and when he cleans up, is mostly blue-green, at 960 degrees. When they’re cleaned up, you can tell what temperature they’re burning by the shades—the lighter the color, the cooler the dragon. Both those boys are bright and hot. Now, you take your coal and wood, like this stove here, you got to guess how much to put in, where to make it ignite and stay lit. Kamari and Tatsuo do that instinctively. They’re very efficient and all it takes for them to fire is a few bucketsful of dragon chow and they’re good to go.”
“I didn’t know that!” she said. Everything he was saying had the comfort of truth.
“Oh, yes, ma’am. They got railroads in other parts of the world that run on other fuel systems, but those take a lot of gauges and control levers and whatnot and then the boilers can overheat and explode. Dragons though, they do all of that themselves They know, you see, how hot they are, how hot the boiler’s running, if the fire mass is optimum for climbing a mountain, say, or something that takes more power.”
“I had no idea dragons did all that!” she said. “I’ve been around them all my life, but nobody mentioned that before.”
“Well, it takes a special dragon to drive a locomotive, Miss. On trips like this, it takes two special dragons. On flat land like we’re running on now, only one needs to fire while the other rests and eats, and that way they keep fresh without needing to take a third beast onboard, though there’s always a reserve dragon on call out here in the hinterlands.”
“Thanks for telling me about this,” she said. “Of course, you see dragons running boats and boiler rooms in factories and commuter trains, but nobody ever mentioned about the heat and their coloring. I wonder what color 369 was.”
“369? Was that a dragon?”
“Yes, sir. The iron miners called him Auld Smelt because he had been a smelting dragon for years and years, but apparently they’re formally just known by numbers.”
“That’s disrespectful,” he said. “Any railroad man knows the dragons by name, and usually nicknames, too! They get taken care of before anything else. A train’s only as good as her dragons.”
“I don’t know,” Verity said skeptically. “There have been a lot of dragon malfunctions reported recently. People are saying they’re not safe.”
“What is? Safe gets you nowhere, young lady. There’s them as think we should have the same kind of trains they have in other parts, that run on wood and coal fires stoked by a man instead of a proper dragon flame, but in those lands, the way I hear it, they’ve stripped the forests and mountains to find fuel. It’s bad enough tearing the Mother up as we do to get the iron we need for the rails and the engines, but why would we take all the trees and dig the ground up for fuel when we have perfectly good unemployed dragons who do the job better, faster, and more reliably?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “My father was killed in a balloon accident involving a dragon, but I know for sure she wasn’t to blame…”
“I’m very sorry to hear about that, Miss, and perhaps they’re using drago
ns in places they ought not. But I grew up in the forest and I know that when too many trees are taken, the land gets sick, the animals stay away, and there’s floods and suchlike. And the chimneys piping soot into the city air are bad enough, don’t you think, without the trains belching it too?”
This was interesting. The conductor was what was referred to in school as an Old Believer, who failed to realize that all of a country’s resources were intended for men to see how much use they could get from them. She had sometimes suspected that despite the source of his wealth, her father might have been one, too.
However peculiar her teachers might have found his opinions, the conductor seemed a nice enough man, and she really had formed no opinions on the matter herself. She did know that nothing he said gave her even the tiniest twinge of pain.
Ephemera, who had been dozing on the bench in front of the stove, woke up and dropped some of her shells and Verity busied herself picking them up. The conductor left with a nod and went about his duties, thinking he’d just watch out for them, as you never knew what might happen to a nice young girl like that, alone but for her peculiar old relative. They’d be safe on his watch, he thought, but as it turned out, they weren’t.
Border Station: Brazoria
“Next stop Border Station. The train will take on water and fuel for the firebeasts, so passengers may go into the station for three quarters of an hour and avail themselves of refreshments provided by local merchants.”
Much as she enjoyed the train ride, the monotony had become tiresome and Verity thought she might like it if the floor beneath her stood still when she did for a few minutes at least.
Stepping off the train, she watched it stop at the water tower and then to the castle-tower-like silo that she supposed must hold the dragon feed. The Archives held many tales of times when dragons had eaten livestock and even people, but it was difficult to think of them as the fierce predators they were supposed to have been. They seemed more than content with their feed, totally unlike the ferocious warrior beasts she’d encountered in her vision at Blazing Bog. To her regret, the food was carried into the huge domed engine room for the dragons’ consumption and they did not venture outside to stretch their legs and get a breath of fresh air. Now that she knew their names, she wanted to see their colors for herself, but it was not to be.
The Dragon, the Witch, and the Railroad Page 16