6
The Night Train
Back inside the black
carriage, Kate sat beside Silas as they rolled their way speedily
back across town. But this time, Silas opened one of the curtains
to make sure he wasn’t being followed, giving Kate the chance to
see her town for one last time.
The snow made it all
look eerie and unreal. Children wandered without parents, dogs
snuffled through the streets, and the black robes of the wardens
were never far away, breaking down doors or wrestling people into
cages. She thought about Artemis and about all the years they had
spent worrying about this day. It had made no difference in the
end. Artemis was gone. Edgar was gone. Kate was alone.
It was almost dark by
the time she spotted the Night Train’s thick tracks slicing through
the town like a scar, carving a hard iron curve through the Eastern
Quarter as it threaded from the trading towns of the north to the
capital city of Fume in the distant south. Those rails linked every
town in Albion like an ominous metal vein, and the people who lived
close enough to see the Night Train pass by always closed their
curtains against its eerie light. It was easier to pretend that it
didn’t exist, that it didn’t choke the air with foul smoke and
leave the heavy rumble of metal on metal thrumming through the
ground long after it had gone.
The road they were
travelling upon ran alongside a stone wall that lined the track’s
route, but Kate did not recognise this part of town. The houses
were larger and grander than any other part of Morvane, yet few
people lived there. The station cast too dark a shadow over that
part of the Eastern Quarter. It made people uncomfortable. Kate had
seen pictures of the station in books at her uncle’s shop, but he
had never let her see it for herself. Now she was so close to it,
she found that her curiosity had gone. She didn’t want to see it
any more. All she wanted was to be back at home, getting ready for
the Night of Souls, living life just as she had lived it the day
before. But all that was impossible now. Silas had made sure of
it.
The driver shouted
out to someone up ahead. A gate screeched open and the carriage
wheels crunched on to gravelled ground, rolling past row after row
of wheeled cages with flaming torches punched into the ground to
light the paths between them. There were many more there than Kate
had expected. What she and Edgar had seen in the market square must
have been only a small part of the wardens’ plans for the town that
day. There were at least five times as many cages outside that
station than had been in the square, all filled with so many people
that it was hard to believe the wardens had left anyone
behind.
Most of the prisoners
were yelling angrily at the wardens, rattling their bars, trying to
find a way out. Others were trying to bargain with them, offering
up their businesses or savings for a second chance at freedom,
while the rest just sat there, quietly accepting the grim truth
that they were no longer in control of their lives.
‘Every one of these
people will do their duty to Albion,’ said Silas. ‘Just as
thousands of others have done before them. You are fortunate you
are not one of them.’
‘My uncle is one of
them,’ Kate said quietly.
‘That part of your
life is over. There is nothing you can do for him
now.’
The blazing torches
lit up the night and, as the carriage turned, Kate finally saw the
station with her own eyes. It was an ancient place, centuries old,
built for a single track and one special train. Kate knew from her
books that, long ago, the gravel where the cages now stood had been
a beautiful garden where the coffins of Morvane’s dead were taken
before being carried by train to Albion’s graveyard city. Friends
and family would have gathered for a funeral in that garden before
passing the coffin over to the bonemen - the keepers of the dead -
who took it on to the train, ready to make its final journey
south.
The bonemen were a
select group of the Skilled who had devoted their lives to helping
the spirits of the dead pass safely out of the living world and
into the next. They had once been the sole guardians of the
graveyard city, performing complex rituals, maintaining the tombs
and graves of the many families interred beneath its earth and
ensuring that their remains were treated with respect long after
their funeral day had passed. But that was before the wardens had
claimed the Night Train for themselves, before the bonemen had been
driven into hiding and one of the old High Councils had walled up
the country’s burial ground, transforming it into the great
fortress city of Fume.
Fume was now a place
for the wealthy, not the dead, and since the war with the Continent
had begun, it had been the only town spared the threat of the
wardens’ harvests. Living in the shadow of the High Council came at
a high price, but for those willing to pay it, Fume was the only
place in Albion to feel truly safe. The tall memorial towers looked
down over stone streets, built to house the High Council’s most
trusted followers and their families, while the extensive
underground maze of caverns and tombs were left to lawless groups
of smugglers and scavengers who managed to scrape out a living down
in the dark. The needs of the rich were served by hundreds of
servants and slaves, and none of them ever gave a thought to the
thousands of dead still buried beneath their feet.
In its prime,
Morvane’s station had been a simple building built from black
stone. The main structure straddled the tracks like a long tunnel
and a large arched entryway jutted out into the garden, with a
large wooden door that was always open, ready to welcome the dead.
That was how Kate had seen it in drawings copied from that time,
but now it looked very different.
Without the garden to
soften its dark façade, the station was a bleak, miserable place.
It looked angry and broken. Rain and wind had worn away most of the
entryway, leaving only the right-hand wall and a few crumbling
pieces of the rest. The wooden door lay rotting on the ground;
metal beams that had once held a curved slate roof were gradually
being devoured by rust; and, alongside what was left of the main
building, a decrepit clock tower stood like a sentry overlooking
the tracks. Normally that tower would have been in darkness, but on
that night its roof was alive with a crown of dancing fire. The
wardens were signalling the Night Train, ordering it to
stop.
Silas’s carriage
headed straight for the station, and as it rolled in through the
entryway every warden stood to attention, acknowledging his
arrival. Then a deep sound rumbled like the bowels of the earth and
somewhere to the north - still too far away to see - the oncoming
train’s great wheels began to slow down.
Inside the station,
the first cages were already being moved across the platform in
preparation for the train’s arrival. But all work stopped and every
prisoner fell silent when the ground began to tremble and a cold
blue light seeped out of the darkness, tracing along the edge of
the track’s boundary wall and focusing into a single blinding beam
that cut through the night like a knife. The deep noise sounded
again. Closer this time and unmistakable. Silas’s driver stopped
the carriage right on the edge of the platform, where he climbed
down, unhitched the horses and led them quickly away.
Kate could feel the
train approaching, but she still could not see it. The ground shook
hard. Silas swung open the carriage door and the horn wailed again,
deafeningly close. He pulled her out on to the slippery platform.
Light flooded the walls, the rumble of wheels echoed through Kate’s
bones and the Night Train thundered into the station, groaning and
grunting like a vast malodorous beast.
It was a moving stink
of dripping oil, hot grinding metal and burning fumes; a patchwork
of heavy repairs, newly forged metal and old hammered panels all
riveted together into one scarred machine. Its massive wheels
growled against the pressure of the brakes and its metal carriages
rolled behind, each one windowless and terrifying, accompanied by
the creaking sound of hanging chains.
The train was a
monster. Its engine car was taller than a house, with a twisted
steam chimney on top and a pointed grille mounted on the front
designed to push anything it encountered out of the way. Kate’s
head swam as a wave of putrid steam gushed from the wheels and
tumbled on to the platform, carrying with it the hot smell of
burning oil and churned-up dirt. The nearest carriage groaned as it
settled to a stop, letting the train fall into as close to a
silence as such a huge machine could get.
The Night Train
stretched back endlessly down the track, no longer the grand
funerary train of Albion’s last age, created to carry the dead to
their place of rest, but a twisted ruin of what it had once been: a
symbol of terror instead of hope. Its carriage doors opened one by
one, filling the air with the shriek of sliding metal, then the
first cages were rolled forward and the throbbing sound of
machinery echoed inside, sending many of the prisoners into a
panic.
The station was in
uproar. No one wanted to be put on that train and their shouts were
deafening. People fought at their locks, tried to squeeze through
the bars, and two cages crashed on to their sides as their
occupants tried desperately to escape. The wardens ignored them and
stood in silence along the platform, their daggers glinting in the
lantern light. They did not care if people shouted or fought or
begged or screamed. To them, Morvane was just another town and they
had already won.
‘You will not be
travelling with them,’ said Silas, turning Kate away from the
shouting people and leading her towards the front of the train. ‘I
want you where I can see you.’
A set of three metal
steps folded down from a door close to the front of the train and
Silas motioned for her to step aboard. Kate looked back across the
station, wondering where Artemis was amongst all of those people.
Maybe if she did what Silas wanted for now, he might make a
mistake, or at least leave her alone long enough for her to free
herself. Something told her Silas was not the kind of man who made
mistakes, but that small hope was enough to make her climb those
steps with a little less fear. She was going to get out of this and
she was going to help Artemis. She just didn’t have any idea how
she was going to do it yet.
Kate stepped up into
the monstrous carriage and was met by the dull flicker of tiny
lanterns swinging in groups from metal beams overhead, but other
than those beams the roof was completely open to the sky. Dark
clouds moved sluggishly through the night and the jagged remains of
the station’s roof criss-crossed above her. The night train was a
bare skeleton of what it had once been. It had walls but no roof
and no real floor besides the girders needed to hold it together.
One step to either side would have sent Kate falling through on to
the tracks and, if the train was moving, she had no doubt someone
could easily be dragged underneath.
‘Keep moving,’
ordered Silas.
Kate continued slowly
along the girder towards the centre of the carriage. To her right
three rows of cages hung from chains hooked on to the beams and
three more matched them on the left-hand side, swinging
precariously over wide open gaps in the floor. All of them were
empty.
Silas unlocked one of
the cages on the right and held it still while she climbed inside.
‘This is the quietest part of the train,’ he said, unclipping her
wrist chain and locking the door behind her. ‘The wardens do not
patrol this carriage and I have sole possession of the prisoners
carried here.’ He pulled a red blanket from a cage on the other
side and forced it through the bars into Kate’s hands. ‘Get some
sleep. We will not reach Fume until morning and there will be
plenty of work for you to do once we arrive. You will be no good to
me without rest.’
Kate shivered in the
icy cold. Snow began to fall again and she waited stubbornly for
Silas to walk back out on to the platform before wrapping the
blanket around herself for warmth. The great train’s door slid shut
and the finality of the sound reverberated through the walls. She
rattled the cage door. The lock was bent a little from a previous
occupant’s attempts at escape and it would not budge, so she stood
in the corner of the cage with the blanket around her, clutching
her mother’s necklace, not wanting to accept the
truth.
She was trapped on
the Night Train, helpless, just as her parents had been. Was this
how they had felt the day the wardens had taken them away? How long
had they survived after being taken on board? Kate knew that they
had made it to Fume, but Artemis had never told her what had
happened to them after that. She buried herself deeper in the
blanket. She was about to take the same journey her parents had
taken ten years ago and there was nothing she could do about
it.
There was no way out,
nowhere to go. All she could do was wait.
Crouching behind a
wall just outside the gravelled garden, Edgar would have done
almost anything for a blanket. His toes were numb, his fingers
ached with cold and his skin prickled in the icy air.
Getting across town
had been difficult enough. With time against him, he had ridden a
stolen bicycle the entire way, pumping the pedals as fast as he
could, taking shortcuts no warden would ever know about, dodging
patrols and trying to stay out of sight while the Night Train drew
closer to the town every second. He had made it. The train was
still there. All he had to do was sneak on board. That part had
sounded easy when he had first thought of it. Now, seeing so many
wardens in one place, it was starting to look
impossible.
Edgar was peering
over the wall, watching for a break in the warden patrols, when a
flutter of wings settled on the wall beside him and he turned to
look straight down the beak of Silas’s crow. The bird strode
proudly in front of him, not caring that it had been
seen.
‘Shoo!’ said Edgar,
slapping it away. ‘Get lost!’
The bird jumped
deftly out of reach, lowered its head and let out a loud, sharp
call. ‘Krrarrk!’
‘Stop that!’ Edgar
tried to grab hold of it, but it moved too fast, marching
stubbornly up and down the wall. ‘Fine.’ Edgar grabbed a chunk of
stone and threw it at the crow’s feet. The bird clicked its beak
and flapped its wings, glaring at him.
‘Didn’t like that,
eh? Next time it’ll be your head,’ said Edgar. ‘Go
on!’
The crow tilted its
head to one side, as if listening to something far away. Then it
snapped its beak viciously towards Edgar’s nose and took flight,
circling up to the nearest rooftop to keep watch from a place
Edgar’s stones could not reach.
‘Great,’ whispered
Edgar. If the crow knew where he was, it wouldn’t be long before
Silas sent the wardens out looking for him. It was time to do
something.
‘It isn’t that hard,’
he told himself, looking out at the cages and shuffling his feet to
keep warm. ‘Just stick to the plan.’
For his plan to work,
Edgar had to choose his moment carefully. With most of the wardens
loading cages on to the train there were fewer of them left to
guard the ones furthest away from it. All he had to do was climb
one, hide on top of its roof and let himself be taken
aboard.
He stood up as
straight as he dared, watching the commotion that had started
inside the station spreading quickly to the prisoners still waiting
outside. Edgar knew that sound well. The sound of fear. He knew
what was in store for the prisoners. The Night Train was the stuff
of nightmares to most people, but to him it was far more than that.
He had been ten years old the day the wardens had come to claim the
people of his own home town. He remembered being pushed into one of
those cages, holding his brother’s hand and promising him that
everything was going to be all right, even though he knew it
wasn’t. He could never have imagined that, seven years later, he
would be waiting for it again, trying to find his way on
board.
‘This is it,’ he
whispered, spotting a break in the patrols. He clenched his hands
into fists, not at all convinced that he was going to come out of
the next few minutes alive, and then he ran out into the moonlight,
darting between the cages, searching for an empty one he could
climb.
Some of the prisoners
shouted at him as he sped past, but their voices were lost among
the rest. Edgar ignored them. He couldn’t afford to slow down and
there was nothing he could do for them anyway without a warden’s
key. Then he saw them: a pair of wardens patrolling away from the
rest, close enough for him to see the whites of their eyes. He
ducked quickly behind the nearest cage and scrabbled beneath the
wheels, waiting for them to pass by.
‘Hey!
You!’
He had been too
slow.
For a moment, Edgar
just stared at the two men as they ran his way. Then he rolled out
across the dirt, sprang to his feet and was off at a sprint,
barrelling along like a wily mouse fleeing from two fast cats. He
raced past five burning torches and made a sharp turn before
colliding with a horse that reared up in fright.
‘Argh!’ He wriggled
away from the horse’s falling hooves, scrambled under a second cage
and changed direction. There was no time to climb on top of a cage
now, so instead he did what no warden would expect him to do. He
headed straight for the night train itself.
Groups of lanterns
fanned out from the station as patrols began sweeping the rows one
by one. The search was highly organised, making it predictable
enough for Edgar to slip between two groups and sneak right into
the station without being seen. Once inside, he crept along what
was left of the main wall and ran across the northern end of the
platform, jumping down on to the tracks between two of the train’s
enormous carriages. He ducked down, pressed his back against the
side of the platform and stopped there to catch his breath and
figure out his next move. Getting that far was amazing enough, but
the train would be leaving soon and he still had to find a way on
board.
Once all of the front
carriages were filled, the train’s brakes steamed suddenly and the
wheels began to move. Edgar heaved himself up on to the metal links
that held the two carriages together and, as the train rolled
forward to bring the rear carriages up to the platform, he
struggled to keep his feet up off the tracks, dragging himself
along on his belly and clinging on to the links for safety. Every
inch the train moved carried him an inch further down the platform,
past wardens and prisoners alike. He had to move.
Fast.
Edgar had been
carried right through the station by the time the train stopped
again. His hands stung as he peeled them off the icy metal and
began to climb hand to hand up a vertical bar fixed to the end of
one of the carriages. Once up, the snow was falling so heavily it
blinded him to everything further away than two carriages in either
direction. There was no way to tell where Kate would be, but if he
stayed out in the open for too long he would be too cold to do
anything other than curl up and hope the weather finished him off
before the wardens did.
There was no sign of
Silas’s crow inside the station and, as the prisoners continued to
be loaded, Edgar spotted some of the horse-drawn carriage drivers
walking their horses down the platform ready to be taken
aboard.
Horses?
Where there were
animals, there was heat. If the train had a horse box
…
Edgar set off,
skulking along the edges of the carriage roofs, moving parallel to
the horses as they made their way to the middle of the train. He
moved quickly, concentrating on where he was putting his feet and
daring to make the jump between carriages whenever one came to an
end. His stomach turned with every leap. He felt exposed, the
ground was too far away and he knew he would become nervous and
fall if he looked down. Somewhere through the snow he heard Silas’s
voice, but the order he was shouting was nothing to do with him and
so he kept going, feeling like a fly on a dog’s back, until the
smell of hay and animals reached his nose, drawing him on with its
promise of warmth.
He knelt on top of
the only carriage he had found with a proper roof and looked down
through a wooden grille at a collection of tired horses, each one
penned in, giving off a welcome heat that drifted up through the
bars and into his face. With two strong tugs, the old grille broke
off in his hands and he dropped down into an empty stall. The
neighbouring horses stamped their hooves, sensing the presence of
an intruder, but Edgar was too exhausted to care. He piled the hay
up around him, letting his muscles relax for the first time in
hours, and squeezed his freezing hands together, trying to warm up
his blood.
He sat there like
that for what felt like hours, watching the door and getting ready
to bury himself in hay just in case a warden stepped inside. Then
at last, the wardens’ work was done. Edgar felt the train shudder
and strain as its engine gathered power.
The horn sounded.
Brakes hissed. Wheels turned.
There was no turning
back now.