Raising Steam (Discworld 40)

The response was the slamming of the door and the turning of the key. And now the fool had locked him in for the night, just where he wanted to be.

There were guards, Albrecht knew, but like guards everywhere they tended to slumber or go off somewhere to smoke a pipe during the long hours of the night, and in any case very few of them came near to this particular dungeon since sensible guards didn’t want to upset someone like Albrecht. Even if you thought you were on the right side, you never knew who the winner would be and in those circumstances smaller fry might be the ones to get fried …

After a while, Albrecht picked up the little spoon with which he had eaten his meal and there was the subtle scratching of rock dust which led to the appearance of a goblin, who grinned at him in the gloom.

‘Here you are, squire, here’s clacks flimsies, fresh from Commander Vimes. And bottle of oil for lamp. Oh, and toothpaste you asks for. Have been told to tell you that train is moving like no one business. Sure to be here on schedule.’

It was a kind of therapy to hear of the inevitable approach of the famous Iron Girder, day after day.

The aroma of a goblin, Albrecht thought, seemed to be a metaphysical one. After the initial shock, you had to wonder if the goblin smell was somehow arriving inside your head as much as through your nostrils. It wasn’t even all that bad. It had the savour of old sculleries and southernwood.

He took the packages and scanned the flimsies with the speed of a dwarf who had learned to assimilate the written word quickly. And he spoke with interest to the young goblin, a caste he had hitherto dismissed as a waste of space at best and a nuisance otherwise, but they seemed to be more level-headed than most of his fellow dwarfs, especially that fool Ardent, and it was amazing how they could get about in the darkness of Schmaltzberg and make use of every rat hole before making use of the rat.

And this one waited patiently while Albrecht sorted out some flimsies of his own to go back to the locomotive. And then the old dwarf did something else that surprised him.

He said: ‘What’s your name, young goblin? And may I beg your pardon for not enquiring earlier? Please forgive an old dwarf who hasn’t kept up with the times.’

The goblin looked stunned and said, ‘Well, guv, if it don’t hurt anything, I am The Rattle of the Wheels. Railwaymen friends is calling me Rat for short name. That makes oldies very annoy.’

Albrecht held out a hand. The Rattle of the Wheels stepped back and then came forward sheepishly.

‘Nice to meet you, Rattle of the Wheels. Have you any family?’

‘Yes, your worship. My mother is Of the Happiness the Heart, father is Of the Sky the Rim and small brother is Of the Water the Crane.’

And after a moment the goblin said, ‘Actually, sir, you can stop holding my hand.’

‘Oh, yes. I suppose that my name should be Of the Moment the Stupefied. Good luck to you and your family. You know, in a way I’m jealous of you. And now I’ve finished my work for the day I’d like you to take my paperwork, such as it is, and hide it somewhere around here where no dwarf is going to look.’

‘We cleans toilets, sir. Knows plenty-many places that not visited. Same time tomorrow?’

The handshake fulfilled, the goblin disappeared into a hole that even a rat might find difficult to get into. And as the sounds of the goblin scrabbling through the hole faded away, Albrecht thought, I would never have done that before. What a fool I was.

Miss Gwendolyn Avery of Schmarm awoke in the middle of the night to the shaking and rattle of the multiple bottles of age-defying unguents on her dresser. And then she realized that the whole house was shaking to a rhythmic thudding.

When she described this episode in dramatic tones to her friend Daphne the following morning, she said that it was like the sound of a lot of men marching past. She put it down to the cherry brandy she had had before going to bed whilst Daphne, knowing Gwendolyn’s regrettable spinster status, put it down to wishful thinking.

The Slake ranges were half tundra, half desert, mostly windswept. In short, a fossil of a landscape where nothing generally grew but stumbleweed,fn76 and the occasional gregarious pine, the nuts of which were said to be an antidote to melancholy.

There was water, oh yes, but mostly underground, and prospectors and rock hounds were said to send down buckets to dredge water from the depths of the caves.

It was slightly easier to find water on the uplands hubwards of the tundra, where there were icy streams courtesy of the Everwind glacier, making it possible to raise goats there. And so goats were what young Knut’s family had bred and milked and minded down the centuries. And when the goats were eating what passed as grass on these highlands, he would sleep and dream of not chasing goats over a near-barren landscape. He had liked it at first but he was growing older and something was telling him that there was a better life than watching goats eat their lunch … once, twice and sometimes thrice. Sometimes the faces they made were an entertainment and sometimes he laughed. And yet a yearning in him told him that goats were not enough.

And so it was, when the long sound echoed across the tundra, that he hurried to see what was making the wonderful noise and saw a shining streak snaking its way over the landscape in the early morning light; and it was heading his way. He wondered if it was anything to do with the strange bars of metal laid carefully on the tundra below by the gangs of men some weeks before. He had run errands for them and sold them his mother’s cheese, but he couldn’t really understand what it was they were doing and since the goats stepped carefully over the metal strips without harm he had given up wondering. But as far as he could make out from what the men had said, it was all for a wondrous thing that could go around the world on a flash of steam, and now he wanted to know more about this singing beast coming over the tundra, occasionally spitting fire.

Knut scrambled down off the hillside to where the air was warmer, leaving the goats, and ultimately traced the noise to a kind of big shed. And just as he got to it, the creature, carrying people inside it, broke out of the shed and hurtled away along the metal rails. He watched it until it had entirely disappeared. And later some of the townspeople told him it was what they called a ‘locomotive’, and in his heart the yearning started and began by degrees to grow. Yes, there truly were other things than goats.

Having spent a long afternoon and evening alert for anything un toward while Simnel and his lads lay dead to the world, Moist in his turn had slept soundly all night and now dozed right through the morning, rocked by the motion of the train as she steamed on from Slake across the valley of the Smarl, dreaming of the bridge over the gorge at the Wilinus Pass, never a picnic at any time, that was looming up fast like a tax demand.

Anything could happen before they entered that dry-land maelstrom of sliding rocks, falling rocks and, well, rocks full of bandits of all disciplines. To coin a term that might fit the circumstances: it was like running a gauntlet with no shoes – a gauntlet full of rocks. And even pebbles had bad attitudes at that altitude. Moist winced at the thought of the place.

The train hurtled on through the vast landscape. A huge amount of space, oh yes, but not many towns, just the occasional settlement. There was so much space everywhere and Iron Girder ate it up like a tiger, attacking the horizon as if it were an affront, stopping only if it was known that water and coal were available. You could never have too much of either.

By the middle of the day, the mountain ranges of Uberwald were getting closer and the air was getting colder and Iron Girder’s pace had settled to a steady climb through the foothills towards their destination.

Lonely goatherds could be seen on the trackside, and amongst the people staring at this new mechanism there was a definite outbreak of dirndls. In every township they passed people were ready for them with flags and, above all, with bands that wheezed and oompah’d as the crowds cheered Iron Girder on her way. And, yes, as the train came past slowly and carefully you had to watch out for the little boys running after her, following the dream. It was a sight to yodel for.

And now Moist noticed that Simnel was looking increasingly worried and took the opportunity of one of the engineer’s rare breaks from the footplate to speak to him privately.