Raising Steam (Discworld 40)

There was another sign coming up now and he squinted to see the name on the board and – whoosh – he saw they were at Monks Deveril, or had been, since alas the speed of the train had shunted it into the past and – whoosh – here came – whoosh – Upper Feltwhistle, apparently. But the ever-moving train had passed on and he hungered for sight of the Lower Feltwhistle sign but the train sped past, sending the unexplored townships into oblivion. Strange-sounding places with strange-sounding names living in the moment of the triumphant train.

With a clatter another train passed them on the up line, but where from? And going where? Moist gave up. Too much travelling on the railway could turn you into a philosopher, although, he conceded, not a very good one.

There was another coal and water stop at Seven Bangs. The name meant nothing to Moist and even Vimes shook his head. It was one of those places where people got off the train and disappeared into the hinterland and, presumably, only the tax inspectors and the Post Office knew who lived where. And by the look of Seven Bangs, the tax inspectors would probably take a day off sick rather than go there and possibly the postman, too, if he had bad news to convey, such as overdue tax demands. But nevertheless, the people of Seven Bangs had been joined by four linesmen, with their houses and their families, all cosily close to the line.

Moist chatted with the man who operated the water crane and asked, ‘Do you have any trouble sleeping up here with trains going past all the time?’

‘Well, bless you, sir, but no, sir, not at all. Oh, it took a little time for us to get acclimatized,’ and he giggled like a man using an unusual word for the first time and finding it funny. ‘My wife sleeps like a baby and the only time she woke up was last week when the Flyer couldn’t get through, and she swears that the silence in the wrong place unsettled her.’

Vimes never seemed to leave the guard’s van, except for occasional journeys down the train to talk to the King and his bodyguards, and it was into the guard’s van that the clacks flimsies were delivered.

There were always goblins in the guard’s van, of course, but it didn’t stop at that. You found them everywhere, adjusting screws, oiling, greasing and, well, tinkering and tapping. Moist had asked Simnel about that early on and had been told they greased everything that needed greasing and tapped what needed tapping, and generally stopped things getting out of kilter.

Of course, there was still the smell, but once you got used to it, as Adora Belle had long ago, you never even thought about it. And they ran errands when the train stopped at out-of-the-way places, and collected clacks flimsies for news of everything that might pertain to the journey.

The good old clacks, people called it nowadays. They used to call it unsightly, but now, quite likely, you would ask the clacks what the weather was like ahead of your journey. A little comfort but not necessarily necessary. Nevertheless, once you were bereft of the clacks you thought of yourself as a second-class citizen. Spike was always telling him how enraged clients got about their clacks bills, which were, he considered, not bad in the circumstances; but a kind of ratchet formed in people’s minds: here is the new thing and here it is. And yesterday you never thought about it and after today you don’t know what you would do without it. That was what the technology was doing. It was your slave but, in a sense, it might be the other way round.

After the excitement of the water crane, Moist was at a loose end and now, by habit, if he felt himself at a loose end he went to the guard’s van. Detritus lay asleep on a pile of packing cases near by, snoring, surrounded by all the necessary debris of the place. It seemed that all the travellers who were not passengers treated the guard’s van as their home. Possibly the coffee maker was the reason for that. And here was Of the Twilight the Darkness, who made very special coffee. Moist thought about that for a moment, as the grinning goblin handed him a bubbling mug.

‘I’ve got it. You’re a shaman, aren’t you?’

The goblin’s grin was wider. ‘Sorry, mister. You is not on the money here. You could call me a shamegog. Unfortunately, dissonance, but can’t have everything.’

Moist looked into his coffee and said, ‘It smells lovely, but what’ll it make me do?’

The shamegog thought for a moment and said, ‘It make you wide awake, busy man! Maybe puts hair on chest. Slight tendency to make you piss more often.’ Now he gave Moist a sideways look that really only a goblin can achieve and said, ‘Guaranteed not to make you killer of dwarfs.’ It was really very good coffee. Moist had to give the goblin that.

He peered out of the window. Perhaps it was his imagination, but the Forest of Skund seemed to get blacker the closer they came to it. The forest was worse than the maquis. From what Moist remembered, the trees stood shoulder to shoulder. And if you thought that trees didn’t have shoulders, you hadn’t been to the Forest of Skund. It was one of those places where the magic hadn’t been cleaned out yet. And some of the old fears and fancies still hung around the place. Nobody went in there until they had to, the occasional woodcutter for a bet, perhaps. It was a dark place, staring out across the plain and biding its time. Not a place to go if you didn’t want a wizard dropping on your head. If a landscape could growl, that was the Forest of Skund.

Moist took the opportunity to look at the instrumentation in the van. There were two guards on the rota for this journey, and though the train couldn’t be driven from here, the guard could at least stop it – a fact worth knowing.

As dusk fell, the sound of Detritus’s snoring lessened from somewhere in the vicinity of badgers fighting to the death to a low rumble, which caused the rest of the van to resonate. There was a fascination in watching a chest made of stone move. Not for the first time Moist marvelled: They are stone and we are told that stone lives; and once again his thoughts harked back to Iron Girder, and, to his amazement, he stopped worrying: horses, trolls, golems, engines, well, where was the downside?

He looked around him. Apart from the sleeping Detritus the guard’s van was for once totally empty. The rest of the train’s occupants were settling down for the evening elsewhere, busy with their own affairs; Commander Vimes was making his rounds of the carriages.

Moist moved quickly, no longer able to fight the little devil inside him. After all, he reasoned, he

’d waited long enough to do this, and he might not have another chance. It was still light enough. He opened the door of the guard’s van, and, gripping the side of the carriage, climbed out, kicked shut the door behind him and clambered on to the top of the train. Once there he scrambled to his feet, and then, throwing caution to the winds, Moist danced on the top of the train, leaping from carriage to carriage, listening to the train’s rhythm, moving his body to accommodate it and feeling the engine and the moods of the railway until it seemed that he could understand it. It was a benison, a gift. It was a thing that could be courted but, he expected, it wouldn’t allow too much familiarity. It enthralled him and he thought: steam is not to be taken lightly.

Once, he heard a shout of ‘Oi!’ from below and Moist was no stranger to ‘Oi!’. He leaned down and said, ‘Moist von Lipwig. I’m doing a little test.’ He could hear the ‘Oi’ voice grumbling, and let it grumble because this was what he had wanted as soon as he had seen the new Flyers.

Flushed with the thrill of the ride, Moist dropped back down into the guard’s van, still empty except for the sleeping form of Detritus. He smoothed down his hair and wiped the smuts from his face, and wandered out of the carriage, a smile on his face.

Down the length of the train the lights were going out when Commander Vimes reappeared from his latest sortie and headed for the coffee.

‘The King and his council of war are making their plans,’ he said. ‘Your latest clacks reports and what I hear from let’s call them observers on the ground suggest that work on the rails is going ahead reasonably happily.’

He looked slyly at Moist. ‘Pretty soon, it seems, Mister Lipwig, you’ll have to put your money where your mouth is. Oh, and another thing. Here’s a flimsy from your good wife. Even with the news of the Schmaltzberg coup spreading, there appear to have been very few attacks on clacks towers outside Uberwald.’

Taken aback, Moist said, ‘Well, that is good news.’

But Vimes just frowned and said, ‘Don’t get excited. I’d wager that there are still some out there who’d knock over a clacks tower even if they saw Tak on the top of it. That’s the trouble, you see. When you’ve had hatred on your tongue for such a long time, you don’t know how to spit it out.’

Moist had made sure, oh bliss, right from the start that he would have a sleeping compartment of his own, but, unlike those in the First Class sleeper carriage, his was more utilitarian and using it was an exercise suited to people who like toying with twisty cubes and other notorious playthings. It had a folding bed, which folded down and hit him on the head, and a washbasin into which his toothbrush would just about fit. But there was a sponge provided, and since he was suitably athletic he made the best of it, ending up if not clean, not any dirtier either. And gods, he was tired, and whatever it was that drove him seriously needed a rest, but the mind was its own worst enemy and the more he tried to get himself lulled by the rhythms of the railway, the more his niggling thoughts seemed to burgeon like a cloud.

They had been lucky so far – only the two grag spies to deal with, and pretty poor spies at that – but sooner or later the rat would surely be out of the bag and the grags would know that Rhys was on board. Simnel’s hope seemed to rest on the fact that they would be using Iron Girder by that time. But could she really make a difference, Simnel’s little experiment, more used to giving children rides around the yard? I’m sure that when that locomotive of Simnel’s first arrived, Moist thought, it was pretty small and I wondered how it could go the distance, even to Sto Lat. But now she seems so powerful. And the way Simnel keeps upgrading her and paying her attention, it’s as if something bad would happen if she wasn’t the queen of the yard. She never sleeps. There’s always that little hiss. That little tinkle of metal. Mechanical susurration, whether or not she is ostensibly running.

Moist thought about whoever it was who had got into the compound to smash her up, who ended up dead, dead, dead. Wild steam from a train that wasn’t running. Earth, fire, wind and rain all in one element of speed. And slowly Moist shut down, although a part of him was always listening to the rhythm of the rails, listening in his sleep, like a sailor listening to the sounds of the sea.