"Mistress … if we stop … a m-moment …"
"Run!" Erlin shrieked. "Hurry!"
Through the deserted residential section north of the park, where shuttered walls hid private gardens and stately homes. Through poorer streets again, less deserted. An inn, a well, a square, the smell of pot-boil. Dogs barked at them, cats stared with glittery eyes. Erlin's face, under sweat in the moonlight, looked crazed. The armpits of her gown darkened, smelling of camphor.
They were in Camel Alley, within sight of the Merchant's Gate, when Jen knew the stitch in her side was not a stitch in her side.
"Erlin—"
"Run!"
The birth luck tingled, beginning somewhere under her left arm, near her heart. It spread upward to her shoulders, down along her arms to her quivering fingers. Jen had studied hard; the luck felt much stronger than in previous years, and the disciplining of it for investiture, the fruit of all those long and expensive lessons, took over her mind. She slowed to a walk, stopped. All of a sudden her stomach lurched.
"M-mother . . "
And then Erlin was beside her, peering and gasping into her face, and Erlin's hand was holding Jen together by the firm grip on her shoulder.
"You, guard—stay here by the gate. Keep a sharp eye on my daughter. And triple your fee if you don't watch what she does!"
"I—" the bewildered man began, looked at her face, and said no more.
Erlin led Jen, dazed and sick, over the maze of half-finished tracks to the shadows of a long shed. Swiftly she spread the blue silk over the ground, up to a nail on the rough wall, over a scraggly bush, and pushed Jen to sit in the nest of cloud-strewn sky. Above, stars shone in cloudless glory. Erlin put both turquoise amulets in Jen's hands.
"You can do it. You know how to do it, my daughter."
"But we … practiced for a twin investiture. I only learned how to do it together—"
"You can do it. No one in my family has failed at investiture in one hundred thirty years!"
"Cav—"
"You can do it, Jen!"
Erlin smiled at Jen, a smile so terrible that Jen closed her eyes. Birth luck coursed through her. Erlin straightened, walked to the other side of the shed, and bellowed in a voice of such power and fury that the bodyguard, lounging against the Merchant's Gate, jumped to terrified attention.
"Caveril Elanoren Demarion! You are decayed fish heads if I don't see you in three minutes flat!"
•
Three minutes passed, three hours. More. Jen could not do it. She knew how to invest luck, she felt it—but the luck would not flow in one direction, would not mount and crest, like a dark smooth wave, into the turquoise amulet. It … balked. There was no other word for it. Did luck have a life of its own, was it alive? What was she going to do?
Where was Cav?
Erlin could not find him. The unfinished railroad yard was vast, and it blended into the farmland and scrub brush from which it was only half-born. There were a thousand places for a boy to hide. If there had been clouds, she might have cast for him—but there were no clouds.
"Caaaavvvvv!"
At the note in her mother's voice, Jen shuddered.
"Mistress," a far different voice said, so close to Jen that she jumped in her blue silk nest and raised to the speaker a frightened, sweaty face. With a shock, she saw that it was past dawn. A man, dressed as if he had stopped at the railroad yard after a formal party in the city, loomed above her, his face backlit by the sun. There were flintlock pistols thrust through his sash.
The calm musical voice said, "But surely you aren't here, doing this, alone."
"What are you doing here?" Erlin tottered up to them, stumbling through a muddy pothole. Her brocade skirts hung in tatters, her hair whipped around her muddy face, her eyes burned like acid fires in the Great Waste. Count Dashif regarded her fastidiously.
"Mistress Erlin the Cloud Caster. What a very strange place to encounter you again."
"Get away! Go away! My bodyguard—"
"Has been dismissed. This is my land, you know."
"Your—"
"Recently acquired, most of it, and in the process of being reacquired by the Levar's Council for the railroad." He smiled. "A profitable transaction for all concerned. But one that does not lend itself as a site for petty investiture."
Before Erlin could react to that, Jen moaned. She did it loudly, and only half deliberately. Erlin dropped to her knees and flung her arms around her daughter; the count frowned. "How much time has she left?"
Jen looked up at him over a faceful of muddy brocade. Erlin cried hysterically, "Moments! Less than an hour! My daughter!"
Jen said, with difficulty, "Cav is here somewhere. My brother. On your land. It's a twin investiture—you have to find him!"
Count Dashif smiled. "I don't have to do anything, young mistress. And given that, why should I?"
"Because it might be bad luck for your land if an investiture failed and I died here. Two investitures—Cav's, too. Two deaths!"
The count considered this. He studied the position of the sun, holding a finger to the horizon. He considered Jen once more, and sighed.
"I see no reason to assume that. But …" Dashif drew his pistols. Almost carelessly, he fired a shot in what looked to Jen's dazed gaze like a random direction. It hit a pile of rails and ricocheted, producing two sharp cracks followed by a single yell.
Erlin screamed.
"You've killed Cav!"
"Certainly not. The yell came from that direction over there—there isn't a boy alive free enough of self-importance to think a pistol shot isn't fired at him, and yell in response. Not even your lumpish son, mistress. Bring the young mistress, if they need to invest together."
Jen could barely walk. The birth luck, hot and thick, foamed around her in all directions like a boiling river, so that she could not see. She staggered against Erlin, knocking them both down more than once. After a time she felt the count return to support her other side, and heard his low noise of fastidious impatience.
But her vision cleared when they reached Cav.
He lay in a shallow indentation covered with scrub, just to the right of the outcropping of rock. He must have dug the indentation himself, for the scrub was freshly cut and the ditch lay between two of the laid rails, ducking underneath one of them. To this rail Cav clung, full length, arms and legs wrapped around the wood and gleaming metal, and cheek pressed to it as to a lover.
As soon as the count glimpsed this, he dropped Jen. He hurled himself into the ditch beside Cav, reaching to pry the boy loose from the length of track. Cav clung like pitch, and the count drew his second pistol.
When he dropped her, Jen had sagged against Erlin, and they both had gone down. But when she saw the drawn pistol, lightning shot through her. Cav was in danger, Cav would be hurt! Jen rolled into the ditch and threw herself onto the count, knocking the pistol from his hand.
At that moment Jen, finally in contact with Cav, felt her birth luck mount and crest, and the dark wave of it flowed strong and powerful in one unified direction. Count Dashif screamed as if he had been burned and snatched at his legs where they rested against Jen's body. He scrambled out of the ditch, howling in pain.
"The amulet!" Erlin cried. "Jen—the amulet!"
Both amulets had been left in the blue-sky nest by the shed.
Jen closed her eyes and squeezed Cav. The luck flowed out of her into Cav, and a great peace descended, a timeless emptiness. But only for a moment. Into that emptiness came another thing, hard and unchanging and reliable as the bedrock underlying all the treacherous clouds in all the airs that ever existed.
Then that thing, too, vanished from her, and suddenly it was Cav's body that smoked and burned. Jen screamed, the same scream Count Dashif had given at the moment of her investiture, and climbed off Cav to huddle, dazed and weak, by the huge rock.
The length of rail Cav was holding began to glow, shining with an inner illumination no metal ever had. The glow was si
lvery, faintly undershot with red, and it made the track look even harder and more solid than it was.
All over the rail yard lengths of track began to glow.
Piled in squared-off stacks, slicing across the muddy ground, welded to each other or not, the metal strips and wooden rails glowed brighter and brighter, until Jen shoved her shaking hands against her eyes. Dimly she was aware of her mother groaning, and of the count cursing with a roughness she never would have associated with that melodious voice.
Then it was over. Jen lowered her hands. Cav crawled out of his ditch and stood upright before the three of them, and he was smiling with satisfied wanting.
•
"But what … what will he be able to do?" Erlin asked piteously. She slumped in her chair in the Inn of the Dancing Spider. The inn stood just within the Merchant's Gate, a discreet travelers' lodging with a great many discreet parlors, one of which Count Dashif had, with tight-lipped rage, commanded from the instantly cowed innkeeper. The four of them sat staring at each other. The count drummed his knuckles on the wooden table. Jen tried to take a sip of tea, but it would not go down. She stared at Cav, who was somehow Cav no longer. He was, for one thing, her luck piece. But only for one.
"Mistress," the count said brusquely, "I don't know what he will learn to do. He should not have been able to do what he has already done. Not only because His Scarlet Eminence will not like it at all, but also because the investiture itself was impossible. Railroad tracks are not a unity."
Jen found herself saying, "They are to Cav."
"Oh, what do you know about it!" Erlin snapped. "You've ruined your own chances—investing your luck in a living being! What if he died?"
The count's knuckles grew still, his eyes thoughtful. He turned to Cav. "What can you do, boy? What can you do with the Levar's railroad?"
"I don't know."
"What do you want to do?"
Cav smiled, and said nothing.
The count studied him a moment longer, smiled in his turn, and rose from his chair. His hand lay on the butt of one pistol. Jen felt fear slide through her like icy and brackish water. She stood and faced him.
"You can't ever have Cav killed."
Count Dashif gazed at her with such impassivity that she was incongruously reminded of Cav himself—the old Cav. She thought, too, of Dashif saying I don't have to do anything.
"He is the railroad," Jen said.
The count did not change expression.
"I saw it. At the moment my birth luck invested in Cav. I saw his luck flowing out. Only it didn't go into just the rail he was holding, or the rails in that place. It's all the rails everywhere, even the ones not anywhere yet. It's the railroad. Cav is the whole thing."
Dashif raised an eyebrow. "Not possible."
"For Cav it is." Despite the brackish fear, Jen sighed. When had any of them understood Cav? His silent stubbornness was the bedrock under their emotional weather, as buried and as dark. She blundered on.
"I saw it. Cav believes—no, he knows—the tracks are one whole thing, forever and ever, solid and permanent and … and connected. If you change the tracks, hook up more to these or take some away, it's still all the same one thing to Cav. It's still his tracks. It's the same as if … as if you change the bedrock under Liavek. The bedrock is always there, no matter how much you dig or drill or blast, because the earth needs it there, to hold Liavek together. Cav needs the railroad, to hold himself together. So it's his luck piece, all the tracks, even the ones still coming."
"Ridiculous!" the count said in a strangled voice.
"Well, I think so," Jen said. She was so tired.
"Do you mean," Dashif asked, "that Cav could do this because he believed he could? That he was ignorant enough or talented enough to believe he could?"
"Yes," Jen said. Was it the truth? She didn't know. She said it anyway; the count's hand lay, still, on his pistol. "Ah. And does this curious investiture include the tracks in, say, Tichen?"
"I don't know. Maybe when they're hooked up with our tracks."
"Ah," said the count again, and his hand suddenly shook. Jen, astonished, raised her eyes to his face, but whatever had been there was already gone. He said, "Then possibly Cav's luck will someday extend even to Tichen, if he reinvests it in the tracks each year."
"I guess so. But … doesn't Tichen already have the best magicians in the world?"
"They do indeed," Dashif said, and his hand moved off his flintlock. He sipped his tea. "So far." There was a little silence. Jen let out breath she did not know she had been holding. "But of course," Dashif continued, "we have no proof of any of this. We shall all have to wait and see."
"Yes," Jen said. "The only proof we have is what you just said—that what Cav already did was impossible, so he must have a very powerful talent. He might be a very powerful wizard. Possibly."
It was the first time any of them had used the word "wizard."
"Possibly," Dashif agreed. He watched Cav.
Suddenly Erlin sat up straight in her chair. Her ravaged face gleamed. "Powerful. With a luck piece that will stretch everywhere."
The count's eyes slid slowly toward the woman in the ridiculous gown.
"Of course," Erlin went on. as if to herself, "he would have to be within three paces of some tracks. No house on Wizard's Row. But still, a special one of these little cars that will run all over the tracks—velvet seats, ivory trim—people coming to him, control over all these strange trains—and you said even trains in Tichen, to be hooked up someday? You might find it profitable, Your Grace. We might all find it profitable."
The count looked at Cav, then at his mother. Erlin fingered the expensive twin amulets in her lap and smiled.
"I warn you, Your Grace, that I drive a very hard bargain."
"I don't doubt that for a moment, mistress," the count said. His voice sounded curiously strangled. "May I add that there may be certain … constraints on any plans you may have for your son? Her Magnificence the Levar has honored me with responsibility for overseeing the railroad for her Council."
The two measured each other; their polite smiles and hard eyes were twins. Suddenly Cav laughed. Startled, Jen looked at him; she did not ever remember having heard Cav laugh out loud before. He held out his hand and pulled her toward the door. The doughy feel was gone from his fingers, and to her dazed eyes he suddenly looked taller, thinner, harder. Not like himself. Like … a rail? Cav?
Erlin said, "My son, the Wizard of the Railroad."
Cav laughed again, a laugh that could have meant anything, and pulled Jen with him out the door and toward the railroad yard beyond the Merchant's Gate.
"Riding the Hammer" by John M. Ford
Copper had a lantern in his hand, a clock on his mind, and murder in his heart. It was the second week of Wind, and cold by night; Copper wore a jacket and trousers of black leather, high black boots, and felt the chill clear as the moon in the sky.
He stepped over a few loose spikes, shone the light past the barrels of tie plates, the stacks of ties and rail, the wall of the construction shack. Beyond it, Saltigos was sleeping, flat roofs silvered by the nearly full moon. It was less than a quarter hour to midnight. Copper didn't have long to find Deno and put him on the road—"Deno!" he shouted. There wasn't any reply.
"Copper, hey, Copper," someone sang out. It was Peysin, the track foreman, a woolen cloak tossed over her work coverall. She had a lantern out, and a mallet and wrench hung from her belt, looking oddly like weapons. "Lookin' for Deno, right?"
"Of course I'm looking for him," Copper snapped, then in a softer voice, "Sorry, Peyse. Not your fault. You know where he is?"
''This way. But you're not gonna like it."
"Oh, I know that," Copper said, and followed Peysin back to the track gang's house. The lights were low—blue damn, Copper thought, the lights ought to be out at this hour—and three men were on the porch, not quite sitting, more dropped untidily. Two were tracklayers. The middle one was Deno.
Copper kicked the sole of Deno's boot, hard. The driver didn't stir. "What was it?"
Peysin said "Gold Harbor rum. The fella that brought it in came whinin' to me that these three took it from him, or I'd never have found any o' the lot." She shuttered her lantern, crossed her arms. "They won't be movin' 'til morning."
"Gold Harbor rum, only one part'll be moving in the morning," Copper said, "and that'll gallop. All right," he said, no longer really angry; there wasn't anything else to be done here. He pulled a gold ten-levar piece from his leather jacket, shoved it into Deno's breast pocket. The man didn't even stir. "When he's sensible again, tell him to celebrate as long as he can on that: it's his severance."
"He's a good driver," Peysin said mildly.
"But not for me. You want to take him on the track crew, that's your job and your business. I'm done with him."
"Your department. Where are you going?"
"Someone's got to drive the midnight." He glanced once more sharply at Deno, then turned away. "And all honest men are sleeping now." He headed for the railway tracks.
The Lucksea Coastal & Northerly Railway stopped here, half a mile from the Saltigos town limit, on the landward side. There was still a political war going on with the wagoners as to when, if ever, tracks would run to the docks. There was one track complete to Liavek, sixty miles down the coast; there, the glass roof of the Main Station was already up, though the Railway would not officially open until the Levar's Birthday celebrations next year. Here there was only a temporary station, a wooden box with an all-purpose office and a mostly purposeless freight room. Just past the station, spur tracks switched out to the engine shed and the tracklayers' buildings.
By the time Copper reached the tracks, the hostler was unhooking the two-horse hitch that had pulled Brazen Venture from the shed; the little steam engine sat silent on her six coupled wheels while one engine tender bailed water into her tank and another shoveled wood chips into the fuel bunker. Venture was the smallest functional engine the line had, her bronze boiler and pipes lagged in raw wool and cased in oak, the wood further sheathed in sheet brass: in the light of lanterns and the fat moon, she looked like a great shiny beetle.
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