by Ben Galley
More hammering rang out from the end of the line. Holes were being hammered into an inconvenient rock. Holes for nitroglycerin. When the hammering stopped, there was more shouting, and three slim vials were brought forth by young runners, barely older than Merion himself. They ran with their arms straight out in front of them, legs wobbly. Everybody else in the group took a long step back, then another, and another.
Merion almost wanted to do the same, even though they were still quite a distance away, and standing behind some scrub bushes. Lurker was currently relieving himself on a nearby rock, ambivalent to the fact he was splashing his boots.
Merion kept his eyes fixed on the workers. ‘What are they doing?’
Lurker replied in a series of grunts. ‘First you drill a hole into the rock. Then you fill it with nitroglycerin. Then you light the fuse and run away.’
‘Do you ever use it?’
Lurker looked amused at that. ‘Nitroglycerin is for miners who don’t know where to look.’
‘Of course,’ Merion said.
A few more shouts echoed across the scrub as the nitroglycerin was lit. The workers scurried back to crouch behind their barrows or stand solemnly with their grubby fingers in their ears. An itchy moment passed, until stomachs got tired of clenching, and faces began to ache from expectant grimacing. For a moment it seemed that some poor soul would be sent to examine or relight the fuse. A runner was thrust forward, but he had barely taken two steps before the explosion came. A simple, sharp crack that made the ground shiver. Merion wished he had covered his ears. Even from that distance it had still hurt.
When the grey smoke cleared, the patch of rock was nothing but a ruptured hole. For now, the desert was no match for the march of industry. The workers crept forwards again, nodding and congratulating themselves. The work teams moved up then, working in tandem with each other. While one team chipped away at the broken rock, the other paved the way for the rail ties and ballast that would form the spine of the rail. Thick, oily beams were ushered up the lines on the backs of mules and carried into the ground one by one, looking like coffins for snakes. Once the ties were laid, horse-drawn carts dragged up the railspikes and plates, then the rails themselves, and with them the engineers and the Cathayan hammers. They were relentless.
Yard by yard the railroad grew, and quickly too. The sheer weight and force of the workers saw to that. In one hour, they had laid almost a mile of track. Castor Serped seemed to have taken ahold of the desert and wrapped his hand around its neck, thought Merion. Now there was a man who echoed his father, bending the world to his will. That took power.
A flicker of nervousness stole his breath away for a moment. Only a handful of hours separated him from the Serped table. Help was only as far off as a polite conversation with a powerful man. Merion could almost taste the salt of the London docks on his tongue. The little speech he had been practising echoed alongside the sound of seagulls.
My Lord Serped …
An almighty squeal ripped through his daydream. Merion winced and clapped his hands to his ears at a speed that would have made a hummingbird jealous. There was a dreadful pause, just long enough to make Merion wonder if it had just been a locomotive breaking down, or a cart tipping over. There was to be no such luck. That was a rare thing, in this desert.
Merion turned and found Lurker quickly screwing the cap back onto his flask. ‘I think it’s time we left,’ he said firmly, barely slurring at all.
Drunkenness always flees when there is panic in the air. And what panic there was. The well-ordered teams of workers had descended into a herd of spooked buffalo. They yelled and shouted and hollered as they fled back along the line. Carts were tipped and thrown aside. Tools were flung to the ground. Horses galloped and mules brayed with abject fear. Men fell and trampled each other in their mad rush to escape what they knew was coming.
When a wraith begins to bite the rail, it never lets go. The rails squealed again. Merion could see the metal puckering and bending as if claws were grasping at it. Something was pulling it every which way, wresting it from its spikes and bolts. The metal groaned like a tortured banshee. Then it faded. Silence reigned over the dust and the fleeing, frenzied crowds for a cold moment. More than a few workers snuck looks over their shoulders as they ran, to see if they had the guts to stare death in the face. Merion did. He did not dare look away. His eyes were rooted to the rail, glued there by some kind of morbid curiosity.
With an ear-splitting crash, a forty-foot section of rail tore itself from its ties and shattered into ragged pieces. The screech of rent metal was like a knife through the skull. Railspikes and splinters danced and spun across the dust, twirling around the centre of an invisible maelstrom. Piece by ragged piece, bone by iron bone, the wraith built itself a body. It shuddered as its head and broad shoulders rose up out of the clattering metal and swirling dust. It growled as the wooden splinters and railspikes gave it ribs and a throat to rattle. It grinned as its grotesque, hammer-beaten skull was filled with iron shards—makeshift teeth straight from a nightmare. It clamped its claws together as its arms were forged from lengths of twisted rail.
When the railwraith took its first steps, they shook the ground like thunder. Black oil and grease began to drip from its glittering mouth, and when it roared, it sounded as though an entire brass band had been murdered mid-performance. Monster. The word almost came close.
‘Don’t move,’ Lurker whispered.
‘I thought you said we needed to leave.’
‘Too late for that now. Hush. He’s more interested in the workers.’
Merion watched the creature swing its iron head around towards them. He felt his face drain. ‘Erm, John? I don’t think he is.’
‘Damn the Maker,’ Lurker cursed, breath sharp. The boy was right. Horrendously right. The railwraith had spied them in the scrub, and by now they were the closest piece of meat he could see. ‘Run!’ he barked.
The railwraith charged, and so did they, careening through scrub and dead cactus, vaulting over rock and rut and dragging sand. But the railwraith was fast and full of hunger. Its loping strides pounded the rocks to dust as it swiftly closed the distance.
‘What have you got in that satchel?!’ Lurker yelled, stuck on the other side of a patch of cacti.
‘Salmon. Otter. Er…’ Merion’s feet pelted the ground like pistons as he fished vial after vial out of the satchel. He was running so hard he thought he might break them. ‘Seal? Bat?’
‘No bat!’
‘Crab?’
‘Yes! What kind?’
‘It just says crab!’ Merion squinted at the vial bobbing up and down before him. His chest was heaving and the corners of his eyes were turning fuzzy. He stared hard. ‘No wait, ghost crab!’
‘Fine! Drink it!’ Lurker was fumbling around at the small of his back now, fishing for his mammoth of a gun.
Merion snatched a look over his shoulder and sorely wished he hadn’t. The railwraith was just a stone’s throw away, and a weak throw at that. With every giant step it took, its pieces squealed and clanged like dying seagulls hurling themselves at bells. Merion’s heart skipped so many beats he thought it had stopped for good.
Lurker’s gun crackled like thunder, and a slug buried itself in the wraith’s eye socket. It would have killed any lesser beast, but this was a wraith made of iron and wood. The only blood it had to bleed was the grease that oozed from its joints. Lurker was smiling nonetheless. The bullet had done its job of distracting the monster.
Merion was already gulping down the blood. The magic hit him like a locomotive, setting his head spinning. Suddenly his body was lurching violently to the left, his legs moving unbidden and unnaturally, skipping through the sand in a way that made him fear they would snap in two. It certainly felt as if they were about to. The more he tried to push forward, the faster he moved left. Before he knew it he was a hundred yards to the left of the railwraith and tottering on aching legs.
The railwraith was furious. It gr
ound its teeth as it cast around for a prey that had somehow escaped. Merion was already down in the dust. As was Lurker, hidden behind a broken cactus, already spinning the barrel of his gun. The railwraith sniffed. It was so odd, for a being made of iron and splinters to sniff. Beginning to swipe at the scrub, its arms and ragged claws swung in great arcs, ripping dead shrubs and stunted trees from their roots and casting them into the air. Rock and metal sang as they clashed over and over again. With every swipe, the monster came closer and closer to Lurker. Merion lifted his head as high as he dared, wincing with each crash of its claws. He could not see Lurker. Merion pushed himself up a little further. Lurker’s gun cracked again and the railwraith screeched with fury.
‘No!’ Merion cried, as the wraith raised its claws. Filled with a strange and sudden bravery, Merion made to sprint forwards but instead he threw himself to the right. The next time he sprang left.
‘Crab!’ Merion smacked himself on the forehead and turned so the railwraith was directly to his right. And he ran. Oh, how he ran.
His legs moved so fast they were a painful blur. His hands waggled, frantically trying to balance himself. This shade was both a blessing and a curse, but Merion had no choice. He ran on, straight through the legs of the railwraith and straight into Lurker, crouched beneath the shadow of the jagged claws.
It wasn’t pretty, it wasn’t clever, but it worked. Merion barrelled into the man and shoved him clear of the falling claws. They buried themselves deep in the sand, barely an inch from Merion’s heels. The railwraith roared at them, so close and so loud that flecks of grease spattered their faces. In that moment, they knew they were finished. It was inevitable: as soon as the monster tugged its claws from the ground, they would be cut to shreds. Merion wondered if Lilain would poke inside him like she did all the others. But no end came—at least, not yet.
The railwraith was straining to pull its claws from the earth. They had bitten hard, and they had bitten deep, and now the earth held them tight. It strained so hard that its joints began to pull apart. The young Hark could have sworn he saw beads of oil grace its grotesque brow, as it grimaced with frustration and hunger. Merion stared right into the wraith’s iron face and knew he would never forget it until his dying day.
Pang!
A bullet ricocheted off the railwraith’s back and buried itself in the sand with a puff of dust.
‘Sheriffsmen!’ Lurker croaked. The prospector was right. As they set to running, they watched the horses charging.
The sheriffsmen whooped and hollered as they fired their guns. Their rifles were long and their aim rough, and the bullets flew wide and high. Merion kept running. He did not fancy coming to his end because of a stray bullet. How undignified and pointless, he thought.
Seeing the railwraith was stuck, they fired and reloaded like clockwork, each one of them eager to get that lucky shot in, if such a thing existed. Bullets shattered and bounced but they kept firing. Another shout came. Another rider was approaching. A lordsguard with a bundle under his arm and an idea in his head, apparently.
He shouted something, but Merion could not discern it. Whatever it was sent the sheriffsmen and their horses running. The lordsguard was left alone to charge the wraith. One of its arms was already free, and it had turned to grin at its challenger.
Merion saw it now—the bundle in the lordsguard’s careful hands, and the fear on his face. The wide berth the sheriffsmen had given him was because it was nitroglycerin. The poor fool was either tired of living or aching to be a hero. Only the next few moments would define him. As his horse galloped on beneath him, the lordsguard held up the bundle of explosives and shouted something to the nearest sheriffsman, something that made the man cock his rifle and wedge it into his shoulder.
‘Throw, damn it!’ hissed Lurker.
He was right: the lordsguard was being too bold, leaving it to the last second. It came sooner than he had expected. The railwraith wrenched its other arm from the earth with a roar and swung it towards the lordsguard, who was now standing bravely in his saddle. An iron fist ripped through his breastplate like a bullet through a tin can. The guard was riding so hard that by the time he finally came to a halt, the wraith had run him through up to its elbow. The guard hung there, legs twitching, staring down at the twisted metal that had replaced his insides with a face of abject horror.
Lurker’s gun fired one last time, and never a truer nor kinder shot had ever been fired. It would have been perfect had the muzzle of the cannon not been resting beside Merion’s ear. The boy cried out and slumped to the floor, almost missing the enormous bubble of fire that enveloped the railwraith, blasting its iron bones asunder. What was not melted was blown to smithereens. Shards of the railwraith scattered in all directions. One sheriffsmen caught a railspike in the neck and went down gargling a fountain of blood. A long wooden splinter skewered the leg of another. The last had his horse speared by a spar of metal and was thrown unceremoniously to the dust as the beast collapsed.
Merion slowly unfurled from the tight ball he had forced himself into. ‘Is it over?’
The man nodded and holstered his gun. ‘It’s over alright.’
Merion put a hand out to steady himself and found something sticky and wet instead. There was a dark puddle forming under Lurker’s right knee. Two inches up, he found the culprit: a slim shard of iron, sticking out of his thigh at a right angle. ‘Lurker, you’re hurt.’
‘It’s nothing.’
Merion was aghast. What had Lilain told him once? Drunk men can very quickly turn into dead men if they open up a vein. Whiskey thins the blood and makes it pour.
‘You’re bleeding to death, you big fool.’
With a grunt and a curse, Lurker reached inside his coat to rip at its tough lining. He bound a strip around his leg, just above the wound. He bared his teeth as he knotted it.
‘Pull it tight, boy,’ he ordered.
Merion pulled. Lurker growled like a dragon.
‘We need to get you back to Lilain. If anyone asks, we can say you fell.’
‘Drunk again,’ Lurker muttered.
‘That’s the story.’ Merion strained as he lifted the big man to his feet. He stank of sweat and gunpowder.
The sheriffsmen were running over, still waving their rifles. ‘You,’ said the nearest man, as he pointed at Lurker. ‘You seem to have an ’abit of being in the wrong place at the wrong time,’ he barked.
‘Seems that way,’ Lurker shrugged.
‘What were you doin’ out here?’ asked another.
‘We were just going for a walk,’ Merion explained. ‘Nothing special. We wanted to see the railroad. We would have been meat if you hadn’t have come.’
‘Yeah, well,’ groused the first man. He looked as though he were desperately trying to concoct some sort of plot or scheme, as if the empty, blood-soaked scrub would suddenly sprout some evidence of a villainous conspiracy. In the end he had nothing to say except: ‘Do you need help?’
Lurker grunted a no, and that was that. ‘The boy’s stronger than he looks,’ he said, and the sheriffsmen were good enough to leave them alone, going back to tend to their own wounded and dead. Merion rolled his eyes. He was not stronger than he looked, not by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, to be accurate, he was a great deal weaker than he looked. Lurker didn’t seem to care. He leant heavily on the boy, bending him almost double with his weight. Merion staggered and shuffled, still sideways, and led the man slowly back towards the town, where the workers stood in nervous hordes, their conversation a dull roar.
They quietened somewhat when they saw a bloodied man and an exhausted young boy staggering towards them. They had heard the shots, and seen the explosion. The sight of them stirred hushed whispers and narrowed looks. The crowd split right down the middle to let them pass, standing like hedgerows as the two awkwardly lumbered along.
Somebody buried several rows back began to clap. Slowly at first, then faster. Others took up the rhythm. The clapping grew stronger an
d louder. Merion looked about at the dusty, sweat-streaked faces of the men standing beside them, and met gaze after gaze. They looked pleased, not angry, appreciative, not aggressive. He tried to smile and thanked the Almighty, the crab blood had finally worn off.
When they eventually escaped the applauding throngs of workers and gawping citizens, they began the long walk up the rocky slant of the Runnels. Lurker was still bleeding despite the cloth tourniquet. Every now and again, his pained shuffle would flick a drop of blood on the hot sand. Merion could not help but think of the old treasure maps on his father’s study walls, with the paths all marked out by red dots.
The Runnels were quieter than usual if that were possible. Folk had run down to the town when the commotion had started. All except Lilain, that was, who was busy standing on the lip of the hill, stark and black against the blue sky behind her, hands framed on hips. Merion did not need to see her face to know what expression was pasted across it: one of fury, no doubt.
Merion steeled himself. Lurker was getting heavier with every step, and they had already taken quite a few falls. Merion gritted his teeth and pushed his legs on, one after the other. They ached after the crab blood, but at least he still had a little strength in him. Almighty if he wasn’t tired.
Lilain spat as they came near. If anything Merion had underestimated her expression. She looked livid. ‘If you weren’t already bleeding, Lurker, I’d be the first one tickling your throat with a scalpel,’ she hissed at the big man.
‘Lil,’ he began, holding up his free hand, ‘it weren’t like that. Came out of nowhere. We were far south o’ the rail.’
‘I don’t want your excuses, prospector, just get yourself on the kitchen table, so I can fix that damn leg. Even I don’t punch cripples.’
Lurker sighed and hopped up the steps one by one. The shade of the porch was welcome after the hot and heavy work of carrying Lurker. Merion slumped onto the wooden bench and exhaled good and hard. He looked at his hands and grimaced at the blood on them.