Zelle, the station supervisor, was locking up four ironbound dispatch boxes with keys on an enormous ring. She looked up as Copper approached. "Deno?"
"No Deno, and no more Deno, either."
"Oh, Copper, you didn't kill him."
"Knew I'd forgotten something." He looked at the engine, at the sky. "How long 'til midnight?"
Zelle snapped the last lock. "Spitting distance."
"I'll need a hot start then. Is Omalfi awake?"
"He is now," Omalfi said, stepping onto the station platform, sashing a black velvet gown over his red nightshirt. He stretched out his arms and went dancing barefoot down the platform steps, singing "There's no rest for the wicked, no, and the wizard isn't born who can sleep when the moon turns full—ah!" He snapped his fingers, shooting sparks. "Figured you'd need me."
"Just warm her up, Omalfi," Copper said, but he was smiling.
Omalfi bowed elaborately and skipped off to Brazen Venture's side. Copper picked up the dispatch cases; Zelle said, "I'll get your clock." Copper nodded and followed the wizard.
Omalfi was standing in the little cabin of the engine, feet and arms spread, sleeves pushed back. The moonlight caught a sheen of sweat on his forehead and neck; there was a dull red glow around his splayed fingers, and another coming to life in the engine's firebox. Copper shoved the cases into a corner of the cabin, vaulted up, and spun the stoker crank. A steel auger, like those that raised grain from underground storage, ground woodchips into the open firebox, and they flared.
Omalfi leaned forward, bracing his hands on the boiler above the fire. Red-gold light rippled over his shoulders, through his hands, and the engine shuddered slightly; a valve spat steam, and there was a rumble as the water bubbled in the boiler tubes. Copper stoked the fire, checked it for even burn, rapped the glass tube that showed water properly over the crown sheet, ready to boil and drive the pistons. Hot starting was dangerous: sudden steam could rip the piping apart, seize the pistons; uneven heat could buckle the firebox. But without magic it took an hour or more to raise steam, even in a little engine like Venture. And it was midnight.
"Clock," Zelle said, and handed up the timepiece. It was drum-shaped, the span of a hand across and half that thick, a brass case with a glass face and two black hands, showing just a hair past the hour. Copper reached behind Omalfi and hung it on the cabin wall just above the driver's seat.
Omalfi stood straight, closed his eyes, breathed deep, and clenched his fists. The firebox blazed up, and Copper kicked its door shut. Omalfi exhaled, clapped his hands. "All yours, driver," he said. "There's a pillow calling my name." He hopped down from the cabin.
"Thanks, Omalfi," Copper said, and checked the valves and glasses. Steam was building fast, and power with it. One of the tenders struck light to the oil headlamp, and the beam lit up night mist and bright steel rails for a quarter-mile ahead.
Zelle said "Copper."
He turned.
"How long have you been awake?"
Copper made a meaningless gesture and cracked a valve.
"You take a half-day off before you come back, understand?" Zelle said. "Eight hours' sleep before you drive again." She paused. "It's your own rule, Copper."
"I'll bring her back on the nine tomorrow," Copper said, and pulled down the throttle. The wheels ground forward. "Go answer Omalfi's pillow," he shouted back, and watched Zelle's face twist up before she was lost in the steam and the dark and the distance behind him. Copper let out more throttle, cranked the stoker, blew a long low note on the whistle as he left the limits of Saltigos. He looked at the clock: eleven minutes after midnight, eleven minutes late.
And who would care, and who would know, Syvann—or, oh, any number of people—would have said, when no one in the world was holding a clock to him, when damn few were awake at all; but Copper knew. And he knew that the world would change. In time. In railway, click-wheeled, steam-driven, brass-geared time.
Copper shot a glance at the dispatch cases in the corner. For twenty levars, anything you could get into a box would leave Saltigos exactly at midnight, to arrive at Liavek Station near Merchant's Gate within three hours. Copper knew perfectly well that no one used the service for speed, but rather for security; a train moved at three or four times the speed of a coach, and the highway robbers hadn't caught up yet.
Deno had been a coach driver before he joined the Railway, and he'd never stopped thinking like a coach driver. He had no doubt been quite sure he could sober up and get the train into Liavek by dawn, which was when the boxes would be claimed anyway.
Copper knew better. In time, three-hour dispatch would be counted on. And then it would become necessary, just like half-copper news rags and fresh fish for breakfast and sorcerous weather reports.
And for now—well, for now the Railway needed the twenty levars a case.
Copper listened for the slip of wheels below him, and satisfied that he had traction, gave Brazen Venture more steam, making up time that only a handful of people on earth would ever know he had lost.
The clock had just touched the one mark when Copper saw the flicker in his headlamp, something white that cast a long dark shadow on the rails, something on the track. He wound in the throttle, blew a high note on the whistle. The thing stayed there as the engine bore down on it. It was upright and still and looked suddenly terribly human. Copper shoved the throttle all the way in and grabbed the brake wheel, spinning it, clamping the blocks down on the engine's small wheels. Sparks flew, and metal and wood ground against one another with a hideous noise.
The engine slowed to a walk. The person on the tracks didn't move. Copper shouted. No effect. He swung down on the cabin steps, hopped off. The engine crawled on. Copper ran ahead of it, jumped for the white figure standing between the rails. He saw that it was a girl (perhaps fifteen or sixteen years old, in a long white dress) just before he struck her and rolled with her out of the engine's path.
Copper looked up. Brazen Venture squeaked to a stop perhaps twenty paces beyond where the girl had been standing. He looked down. Well, there she was, looking up at him, silent, dust on her face and her dress—nightgown, really.
"Would you like to explain what you were doing?" Copper said. There had been a fad for youth suicide in Liavek over the last year, but by all reports it was over, and had leaned more toward quiet poison-swallowing than violent ends—and besides, they were still at least twenty miles away from Liavek, more than thirty from Saltigos.
"I'm on my way to Liavek," she said. Her voice had a strange resonance, as if she were speaking through a hollow pipe.
"The passenger service doesn't start 'til next year," Copper said, and then looked around. There was plenty of moonlight, and the mist was thin, but he didn't see a coach anywhere, or a cart, or even a pony. And the coast road was a long way off—another insistence of the wagoners' association. "How did you get out here?"
"I'm on my way to Liavek," the girl said again, then, "Are you the iron-road man? Will you take me to the Liavek Station?"
"I suppose I'm going to, aren't I," Copper said, and helped her stand up. "Rule of stranded travelers—" He stopped, looked around, with a sudden unpleasant thought. Stranded travelers were an old bandit trick. But there was no one out there, just moon-silvered dirt, the Silverspine to the north, and rails to two horizons.
Copper led the girl in white to the engine. As she climbed into the cabin, he noticed that she wasn't wearing shoes—but her feet were pale and soft and quite clean; she couldn't have walked barefoot any distance at all.
She glanced around the cabin once, indifferently, and looked down the tracks. "Are we going to Liavek now?"
"That's right," Copper said. "And then we're going to find a few things out." He released the brakes, poked and stoked the fire, let the throttle out. The rods creaked and they started rolling. "Just to get a head start, do you have a name?"
"Krisia," the girl said.
Copper waited a moment, but the girl just looked up the tracks; Coppe
r sighed and pointed to the dispatch cases. "You might be more comfortable sitting on those," he said, "and you'd definitely be more out of my way."
Krisia nodded slowly and sat. Copper cranked the stoker and worked the throttle out to mainline speed. Then he heard the tick of the clock, reminding him that he'd lost time again, and pulled the lever wide. The wind chirped past the windows. The wheels clicked like a steel heart. Copper said "If you look, there, you can see the lights on the city walls."
There was no reply. Copper said "We have to run all the way around the city—the Station's on the west side, by Merchant's Gate. Look, is someone meeting you? Expecting you?"
Nothing.
Copper turned.
Krisia was gone.
Copper stared, feeling ice in his chest. She had jumped, at speed—but no, she couldn't have jumped, not without his seeing, not without her bumping his arm, damn it. He looked back over the rear of the engine, but knew already there was no place she could be hanging on or hiding there. He let go of the throttle lever and bent down by the cases where she'd been sitting: there was a little bit of dust on the topmost box, a faint trace of a damp footprint, evaporating even as he watched.
All right, he thought, it was some kind of magic, an illusion (did illusions leave footprints? He didn't know). But why would anyone cast—
He looked hard at the four locked boxes. They seemed to be the ones Zelle had loaded. He rapped his knuckles on them: solid wood and iron. But then, anyone who could cast an image of a person that was solid enough to be flying-tackled would surely have no problem with a stack of boxes.
Copper turned. He was nearly to the eastern edge of the city, doing full speed and then some. He eased off the throttle, trying at once to make sense of it and not to think about it. He didn't have keys to the boxes. There was nothing at all he could do about them until he got into the Station—and then what exactly was he going to say?
Brazen Venture glided around the last curve. Liavek Station stood ahead, its glass roof luminous from within. The artisans worked day and night on it: it was a showplace, a Civic Landmark. The Railway might have to haul valuables at twenty levars the case to get tracks laid and engines maintained, but there was no problem at all with glowing glass pavilions. Copper shoved down the throttle and wound up the brakes, coming to a halt just at the center of the main platform.
No one met him. There was a boy cleaning the windows of the supervisor's office. Copper swung out of the cabin—keeping an eye on the boxes—and asked the boy, "Hey! Where's Tavish?"
"At home, sir, expected a little before dawn."
Copper gritted his teeth. If only all his problems were as easy to dismiss as Deno. ''Then you go there and you get him back here now. Tell him Copper sent you."
"What shall I tell him when he fires me, Master Driver?"
"Tell him you're a driver trainee now, and only I can fire you."
The boy bowed and scooted off. Copper sat down in the engine cabin, leaned against the strongboxes, and wondered just what would turn out to be inside them.
The answer, he learned within the hour, was: two sets of legal documents, one dozen uncut gemstones, and a matched pair of flintlock pistols intended as a gift for the Margrave of Someplace-or-Other's wedding. In other words, exactly what was supposed to be in them.
The station supervisor, Tavish ola Shenai, said, "I'm not happy with you, Copper. You know I'm not supposed to open these until the clients take delivery."
Copper said, "You'd have been a lot less happy if the goods had been out of order."
"As would you," ola Shenai said. "Now what about the girl?"
"I've told you about the girl."
"Nothing that makes sense."
"Does magic ever make any sense?"
"Always the rationalist, aren't you, Copper."
"Not always," Copper said under his breath.
''Odd that you should suddenly be blaming magic for things. Next you'll be telling me you've decided to believe in gods after all."
Copper said nothing. His eyes burned, and he rubbed sand out of them.
"Just how long have you been awake, Copper?'
''That's what Zelle asked," Copper muttered, then said aloud, "Not long enough to be seeing things."
"Hm," ola Shenai said. "Well, the room at the Marketplace Inn's empty. You can use that."
"And what are you going to do about the girl?"
"What exactly am I supposed to do about her?"
"I don't know." Copper said, and started for the door, suddenly enormously tired. "Sign her on as a passenger hostess." As he went out of the office, he seemed to feel triumph radiating from ola Shenai like the first rays of sun in the East. The sun hurt his eyes. Ola Shenai hurt his stomach.
He walked through Merchant's Gate. The Market was already hitting its stride, the butchers and bakers calling Fresh, fresh; Copper bought a handful of soft new rolls and nibbled them on the way to the Marketplace Inn. He checked into the room the Railway kept for employees on call, which was just comfortable, no more; stripped and crawled between the clean coarse sheets. He was asleep at once, and slept very, very badly.
•
Copper was awakened from a dream of iron bands and smothering by the boy from the Station. From the angle of the sun, Copper guessed he had been asleep perhaps three hours. "I'm to tell you that Supervisor ola Shenai wants to see you immediately," the boy said, "and that I'm now the First Morning Crew Caller, so you can't dismiss me."
"At this rate, you'll be Managing Director by noon," Copper said. He dressed by touch and headed for the Station, pausing just long enough in the Market to knock back a mug of cider.
Tavish ola Shenai was rather better dressed than at dawn, in a red formal robe with Railway emblems embroidered in gold. He sat behind his desk in the Station office, the sun through the glass train shed spraying his shoulders with light, his hands folded on the desk in a kind of temple to himself.
There was another man in the office, an old man with hair thin on top and a badly-trimmed gray beard. His purplish gray gown was tidy but had seen better days, and his boots urgently needed resoling.
Ola Shenai said, "Copper, this is the Master Wizard Rion Daaveh. Master, this is Copper, one of our engine drivers."
Rion Daaveh made an elaborate seated bow, and said, '''The word was spread for information of a young woman. You are the man who saw her?"
Copper said, "I saw something."
Ola Shenai said, "Copper has a reputation as a doubter."
Rion Daaveh nodded. "She was seventeen? Quite slender, with dark gold hair?"
"About that age. And slender, yes, but I didn't really notice the color of her hair. It was late, and dark."
"And you met her on the ironroad from Saltigos to Liavek. Her name was Krisia."
Copper looked at ola Shenai, who said smoothly, "We did not mention a name in the request for information. Nor the location."
Copper said, "That was where I met her. And that was the name she gave me."
Rion Daaveh pressed his palms together in front of his face, let out a long, low sigh. Copper said, "Do you know her?"
"I knew her well, yes," the wizard said. "She was my niece, raised by me from the age of five, when her parents were killed in a coaching accident."
"Don't tell me," Copper said. "Along the road to Saltigos."
"No, oh, no, young man. Their tragedy took place here in Liavek, on the Street of Clay Vessels. It is a matter of public record."
Copper glanced at Tavish, who merely raised an eyebrow.
Rion Daaveh continued. "But Krisia was much given to walking east; she loved the view of the Silverspine."
"She went for walks at high midnight?"
Rion Daaveh smiled gently. "Young man, have you not guessed it? My niece was taken with a disease of the heart—I mean that literally and figuratively as well. She died nearly four months ago." He gestured toward the tracks outside the office window. "I buried her at a spot off the coast road, I can no
longer say just where, except that it had a fine view of the Mountains, and the Moon above them."
Copper could feel himself frowning. Tavish ola Shenai looked insufferably smug. Rion Daaveh was just staring at the railway tracks. "Fine," Copper said finally. "Is that all?"
"One thing," the wizard said. "Did she seem … happy?"
"I couldn't say." Copper tried to keep his voice level. "We didn't talk much."
"Oh. Then yes," Rion Daaveh said, "that's all."
Copper turned. Ola Shenai said, "We did publicize a reward for information."
"In my name," Copper said.
"It was your request. Five levars was the named sum."
"That's the going rate now, to talk to the dead?" Copper found a five-levar coin in his pocket, put it on ola Shenai's desk with rather a crack.
He turned again to go. Rion Daaveh said "Master Driver—I would thank you. I am happy to hear that Krisia's spirit lives."
Copper gave a jerky nod. Rion Daaveh stood up slowly, palmed the coin, and went out of the office.
Ola Shenai said, "Well. Where is the man of ticking clocks and connecting rods now?"
"He's on his way to the inn," Copper said, "to get back to his bed before the sheets get cold."
Copper shut the door on ola Shenai's last comment, something about warm sheets, and too damned intimate.
•
Copper woke again just before noon, put on his leathers and went downstairs. ''I'm done with the room," he told the clerk. "Have it made up for the next driver."
"Sir," the clerk said, and then pushed a sheet of paper at him. It was a half-copper news rag, the Mystery Hill Observer. "Seen this, sir?"
Copper picked it up. The headline read
STRANGE VISITATION ON IRON WAY
Girl's Specter Appears
"I, an Unbeliever, Saw Her," Driver Says
Copper handed the paper back, headed for the door.
"Sir?" the clerk said.
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