Work Text:
Somewhere on the outskirts of the Ringed City — a name now ill-suited, for its walls had split like lumber struck by a swift, golden bolt of lightning, leaving strips of cracked shielding where once stood an unbroken seal — the wild air shimmered with heat and fear. The displaced huddled in tense clusters like clutches of soft-shelled eggs, held tenderly by the scaly metal tail of the railway station that had built itself in the wake of unwarded chaos. They gripped their sagging knapsacks, packed hastily with bread and cloth and sentiment. The space between Pickman’s horns reflected nothing at all.
The Shape had begun to curl like a thread of slow-growing ivy into Concentus, apathetic to the wreckage of its manmade borders. It beckoned Canton citizens deeper into the Heartland in their scattered terror. Some, in helpless reluctance, crawled from one great snapping maw to another. But Pickman was not like them. When she waltzed into the mouth of the beast, she would not be swallowed.
Wherever the Shape extended its rails, the Shape Knights dutifully followed, like a hawk tracking blurs of mousey motion through the snow, or a mouse tracking shadows of the hawk overhead. It had allowed its Knights, graciously, to set up outpost nearby and maintain their charade of vigil. Pickman had followed Alekest’s letters to the north; or she had followed the gravitational pull of forces beyond herself; or perhaps she had followed nothing, and it was the Shape that had followed her. She had been somewhere else, and now she was here, and that was all.
One day, the station had received a calling card, gold-bordered and glossy-inked, with the calligraphous signature of one Ms. Chantilly Scathe. It politely announced her impending arrival and the emergency transportation services she would be offering for those affected by disaster, free of charge.
Pickman awoke the next morning with the rosy dawn, seized by a wondrous dread she could not identify as anticipation. She carried barrels and crates, and hauled away heaps of collapsed rubble, and escorted travelers from one place to another, and scared away the cackling houndthings nosing their wet snouts into stores of dried fruit and meat. In the moments between, when no one had need of her, she would light a cigarette and stand at the station’s edge, gazing silent and blank-faced into the fiery horizon until her split black eyes burned like coal.
It was a moment such as this when she heard the mighty tolling of a familiar whistle-bell echo triumphantly through the empty sky. She watched the golden cormorant figurehead come into view, statuesque wings on proud display as if it might at any moment come to life and dive over the sun-splattered saltwaters.
She stood very, very still, and the earth rumbled out from where it slithered, great and slow and heavy, along the tracks. She felt the vibration humming in the back of her skull, in the porcelain of her borrowed heart, in all her hollows. She watched, unblinking, as the rhythmic pumping of its mechanalia stilled to a languid pace until it rolled, finally, to a halt. Plumes of hot steam vapor dispersed cloudly in the air. Her fingers twitched.
It parted its carriage doorway to reveal its conductress, clad in glittering gold and red and silky black, who introduced herself with a chivalrous bow. Her voice, with its rich musical lilt, rang clear and powerful over the bassy thrum of her idle engine:
“Good people of the Ringed City, my heart goes out to you in these uncertain times. As you’ve heard, I am Miss Chantilly Scathe, owner of The Grand Cormorant Limited — one of the fabled Heartland trains I’ve bridled to transport gentlefolk like yourselves safely to your destinations. Though I regret that it was such unfortunate circumstances that brought us together, I hope your journey with us today can provide some respite from the recent tragedies you’ve no doubt suffered. We’ll be accepting passengers just as soon as we’ve concluded some routine maintenance to keep the engine in tip-top shape. In the meantime, please do feel free to approach myself or one of our attendants should you have any questions or concerns. We want to ensure your time with us is as comfortable as can be.”
Pickman scoffed. Chantilly caught her eye like a spark of flint and stepped onto the platform as though exiting a stage, striding towards her.
“Well, well, well,” she drawled, each syllable punctuated by the clicking heels of her slim black boots, the tapping of her cane. She eyed the great cloaked and armored mass of Pickman up and down. “Look at you. Still wearing the spoils of a stolen kill, I see.”
Pickman, to this, said nothing.
“If I’d known you were going to be here, I’d have requested you run all that Shape Knight protocol.” She gestured derisively at the couple of volunteers currently inspecting the train, in search of whatever aberrance might prove it was rabid and undomesticated. “I am not particularly fond of having rookies rummage around my carts for scrap parts.”
“What are you doing here?” Pickman demanded, her flat inquiry presenting itself as accusational skepticism. She knew, of course, what Chantilly and her shackled engine were, ostensibly, doing here — she had said as much just a moment ago, and in the letter she’d sent prior. But still, she couldn’t shake the thought that there must be some underlying motive. No train can ever truly be shackled; not even unto itself.
“Why, the very same thing as you, I would imagine. I heard there were people up north in need of my services. I obliged.”
“Where are you taking them?”
“The schedule’s posted on the cards, you know. It’s no secret. Unless you lost the last one, too?”
Pickman did not lose the first card; she had used it, with intentionality, as a means of transaction. She didn’t lose the second one, either; she had purposely left it behind with all her belongings — precious few of which Alekest had managed to salvage, and return to her — during her ascent to Zevunzolia. She knew where she had last seen it. She did not know whether it was still there. It was pointless to articulate the pedantry in this sequence of events, but she did not take kindly to being accused of something she had not done, and so she prickled with wordless agitation.
She answered, simply: “I don’t have it.”
Chantilly placed a gloved hand over where a heart might have been. “You wound me.” She plucked a business card from an inside pocket of her waistcoat and slipped it into the palm of Pickman’s hand.
“I’m making my rounds along the Concentus border — or what’s left of it, I should say — with some sightseeing detours planned along the way, of course. Some places have been taking the Heart’s beating better than others, and have opened their doors to those in need while the city restructures itself. Crisis housing, emergency food stores, the like. Lots of people and supplies in need of transport, and something to transport them. It just warms my cold, steely heart. If I’m not mistaken, I believe a couple of your lady friends are involved in all the reconstruction efforts.”
Pickman contemplated which of her lady friends this might refer to, as she had not heard from most of her previous travel companions since returning from Zevunzolia — and she seemed to find herself in acquaintance with an ever-increasing roster of strange, ambitious women who took to her like crows to silver, no matter where she went or which reality she was in. “Marn with the Telluricists. Es, maybe.” She paused. “Not Virtue.”
“Lovely company you keep. But yes, that’s the route in store for the Grand Cormorant and its passengers, more or less. And between you and me… I think we might start seeing stations pop up within the city very, very soon.” She smiled the foxy grin of a woman with trade secrets.
Her attention was interrupted by the outburst of a heated argument between two passengers in line to board, insufficiently corralled by a panicked attendant. She excused herself.
“A-bup-bup,” she chided, striking the ground with her cane like a gavel. “I’d have you settle any petty disputes between yourselves before coming onboard, thank you. I won’t tolerate violence under my roof.” She threw a coy glance over her shoulder and winked at Pickman.
Many of the city folk had never set foot deep enough into the heart of Sangfielle to witness a train firsthand — or at least, had never been foolish or fearless enough to submit themselves to one. They marveled in cautious reverence, or cowered in othering apprehension — parents hoisted their children up on their shoulders for them to place their tiny hands on its reflective exoskeleton, petting it like a sleeping housecat; those who prided themselves on the reputation of their gaslit technopolis badgered Chantilly and her crew about the minutiae and efficacy of all its gears and pipes and nuts and bolts, which she entertained with a polite smile.
When at last all their questions had been sated, and their anxieties assuaged, they began to file one-by-one into the belly of the beast like wet-beaked goslings. Somewhere down the line, Chantilly made a discreet cutting motion at the train attendant directing the boarding queue, who nodded once, and ruefully turned the rest away.
“And that makes capacity for us today, I’m afraid. But don’t you worry, folks. I’ll come back around just as surely as the suns will rise again tomorrow.”
She placed a hand over her revving engine before climbing back aboard the carriage, and then turned to address Pickman, who remained oak-still where she had stood since before the train had arrived. “What are you waiting for? A formal invitation? You were quite eager to ride before, if I recall. Well, now’s your chance. We’ll need a big strong Shape Knight on board to protect us, after all.”
At this, Pickman grumbled and stalked petulantly after her.
“Watch the horns, love,” Chantilly said softly as Pickman climbed the last sidestep into the entrance carriage, placing a guiding hand around the back of her neck, coaxing her gently into ducking under the doorway. “You’ll scratch my casing.”
Pickman had expected to emerge into the familiar chokehold of a train’s throat, narrow and claustrophobic for a woman of her height and armored mass — but the insides of the train were spacious in a way that seemed to defy geometric sense. The interiors of each carriage were adorned with rich leathers, glossy wood paneling, intricate detailwork of diving seabirds, clear glass windows with velvet curtains parted to invite the sunlight streaming through. There was space enough between the booths and tables in the dining car, set with fine brassy cutlery and gold-rimmed plating, for two aisles of tea and luggage carts to pass each other simultaneously. On The Grand Cormorant, everyone was first class.
“I’d offer you a tour, but I ought to fulfill my duties as hostess. Make yourself at home and I’ll come find you once we get moving. We’ve got some catching up to do.” Chantilly stroked her arm, and her crow’s feet gathered at the corners of her lambent eyes as she flashed her enigmatic smile, and then she swaggered off. And, left to her own devices, Pickman found herself wandering between the train cars.
There was a lounge, lit a warm, dim amber, where a quiet musician had taken to restringing their lute. There was an infant weeping in the arms of their tired mother, and she watched Chantilly approach them and tuck her gloved hand behind the child’s soft skull, and produce a jangling keyring of little silver charms and bells. There was an empty corner booth, which Pickman claimed, and gazed out the window as the train began to move.
She liked to watch the view; or, at least, she felt compelled to. She did not always distinguish meaningfully between the two. Some part of her was reminded of her childhood, and the endless rolling fields of wheat, and glimmering lakes, and great swathes of desert, and grassy plains, and bustling villages that would pass her by, separated from her by a pane of frosted glass, day after day. Even this many years later, not entirely used to the absence of constant motion, she sometimes found herself disoriented at how things remained fixed in the distance.
She spread the leather-bound journal she carried on the mahogany table in front of her.
She had found that it served a practical function as a record of important notes and details, and lately she had enjoyed returning to an old hobby of pencil drawing. She could not visualize very well, but she could translate a concept to paper, render the abstraction of an idea into something physical and tangible. She turned the page to today’s entry, which was sparse, except for a brief update on the station’s state of affairs, and a rough sketch of the hungry canine-beast she had earlier chased off with her pistol.
On Chantilly’s train, she wrote. Fancy.
She wanted to sketch an accompanying illustration of the locomotive exterior, but without its intricate anatomy displayed before her, she could rely only on her imperfect, imageless memory — and she had no desire to conjure hypotheticals. She looked around the car for something worth preserving, but nothing seemed to do appropriate justice to its grandiosity. She thought of the last time she had seen the train and its mistress, and her hand on its rumbling engine, and Chantilly’s hand in hers, and the dripping of blood in the sheath of her cane. She found herself drawing as the scenery shifted outside.
“My, you’re quite talented,” Chantilly praised, having appeared from nowhere. She leaned her forearms across the back of the booth and peered over Pickman’s shoulder. “What a flattering portrait you paint. I ought to have you design some flyers.”
Pickman closed her journal.
“I do hate to interrupt, but I was wondering if you might like to join me in my cab. It’s as good a place as any for private discussion, and I could show you a thing or two.”
“Alright,” Pickman gruffed, and allowed Chantilly to lead her down the hall.
But when they stepped through the doorway leading to the next carriage, they found themselves, instead, in the cramped driver’s compartment. Chantilly flashed Pickman another starry wink, eager to show off all her parlor tricks now that her secret was shared.
Pickman was at once arrested by the overwhelming stimuli in the droning whine of the generator, the asymmetrical clutter of its control panel, all the arrows and indicators of gauges and meters gliding smoothly through their optimal ranges. Chantilly lounged kinglike in her engineer’s seat, and Pickman leaned with her arms crossed against the fireman’s side of the room, as there wasn’t much elsewhere to go.
She had never felt the need to study diagrams and dissections of train components the way some technically-minded Shape Knights did. The purpose something served did not change by any other name, and ascribing titles and speculative functions to the organs of a train would be of little practical use when it had made up its mind to keep or to kill you. But still, she found her gaze lingering over the train’s weathered knobs and valves, blooming sparsely like red-and-iron wildflowers against its sleek gunmetal casing.
“My eyes are up here, you know,” Chantilly said.
“What did you want to talk about?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” she hemmed, in that evasive, circular manner of hers that aggravated Pickman. “I am curious to hear about your little trip to Zevunzolia, tell you the truth.”
“What? How do you know about that?”
“Word travels swiftly across the Shape.” With buried unease, Pickman recalled the funicular car she had inadvertently summoned from the dead. “How was your stay?”
She had slept in an alley; she had stolen loaves of bread like she was a child again; she had been shot in the side, and now her hip ached whenever it rained, which annoyed her, because her hip was not what had been injured. She had poured overpriced hazelnut coffee down the gutters, because it had been too rich and too sweet. She had made a friend, to whom she needed to write a letter, with Alekest’s assistance. Once a week, she picked up milk and eggs on the way home. She had been wreathed with flowers and locked behind the bars of a holding cell. She had murdered a man in the streets. She had seen some truly terrible improv theatre. “It was fine.”
“Ah, yes, that must be what has the Wrights making such a fuss. It’s fine.”
“Don’t know what you want me to say. Clouds. Artists. Too many parades. Too many fines. Like any other city.”
Chantilly chuckled. “They do seem too clean and comfortable, up in that tidy haven of theirs. A little grease on the wheels ought to do them some good. You did well to bring the Shape to them.”
“That’s not what I was doing.”
“No? Because it’s what you did. Were you just invoking the power of the Shape for fun? Did you get homesick?”
“I do not call upon the Shape lightly,” she protested.
“Oh, no, of course not. Only when you want it to do something for you.”
Pickman squinted. “Is that what you want to talk about?”
“Is that what you want to talk about?”
Pickman, feeling as though Chantilly was trying to coax something out of her, remained obstinately silent. Chantilly rested her cheek in the palm of her hand and gazed up at her bemusedly.
They remained in check for a moment, until Pickman suddenly heard a distant scream, and peered through one of the cab’s front windows. She watched buildings come into view on the horizon as untoppled dominoes, accompanied by flurries of movement, like panicked ants marching across the skyline. The tracks ahead were, of course, not built with the city’s infrastructure in mind — the Shape did not care to arrange itself around existing landmarks, except for where doing so suited its esoteric whims. It had laid itself straight through.
Pickman reached audaciously across the gap between them for the twin brake handles, earning her a thwap across the knuckles with Chantilly’s cane.
“Someone really ought to teach you a thing or two about manners. Don’t get on if you’re only looking to get off.”
“We’re headed straight through that building. We need to stop the train,” she urged, plainly. Pickman often thought that everything would be much simpler if other people didn’t insist on speaking in riddles.
“Nonsense.” Chantilly reached lazily for the cord that controlled her roaring whistle, and gave it a playful tug. “There. They’ve gotten their warning. Do you feel better now?”
“People are going to die,” she said again, looming over the engineer’s seat, the hellish glow of the firebox gleaming sickly off the dented emerald of her train-corpse pauldrons. A pressure gauge began to spin like a winding clock. “If this train does not stop. Now.”
“Do you really believe I would risk such senseless injury to myself and my passengers?” Chantilly asked, eyes ablaze with indignant fury. “Is that what you think I am?”
“You can. You have.”
“By whose will?”
“By your own,” Pickman answered, as if it were a stupid question.
This elicited a dry, humorless peal of laughter from Chantilly.
“Yes, a train might crash. And a ship might sink, and the wheels of a carriage might collapse, and a beast of burden might rebel. There is no safe way to move in this world. But still you must, or the world will move right on by you.”
Pickman, with no patience for philosophy, sighed bullishly. If the train refused to stop, then perhaps people could at least be moved to the furthest carriages, which would suffer the least amount of impact from the collision. She forced open the door to the tender between the cab and the passenger cars, prepared to jump the coals. But when she stepped through the door, she found herself entering the same place she had just exited, and nearly stumbled.
“There is another way, you know. You just have to look.”
She now felt trapped, which made her feel again like a child bound by the unceasing, possessive momentum of the train that had claimed her, which made her feel like she was failing to protect every passenger who was now, too, bound to the train who had claimed them — every passenger who depended upon her ability to translate its desire, sate its hunger, keep it directed, if not docile.
She looked again and tried to assess the scale of damage about to take place. In a moment, she would not have to imagine it.
“No,” Chantilly corrected, with patient condescension. She rose from her seat, coattails fluttering like the cape of a matador. “Not like that. Look.” She hooked her cane around the back of Pickman’s neck and tugged sharply, forcing her to her knees with an armorous clatter.
With one hand keeping the thrashing Shape Knight at heel, she used her teeth to remove her glove from the other, revealing the sleek and shining metal of slender fingers — once steel-cold, now warmed by the ambient animal heat of the coalfire. Her touch felt like grazing the molten coil of a stovetop burner in the millisecond before the brain could register the temperature, and send a signal to the body to retract — the sweet thrill in the moment of painless burn before the scarring set in, preserved in perpetuity.
She ran her fingers over the bovid bridge of the Shape Knight’s snout, over the rough, ridged keratin of her horns, to the invisible symbol of the Shape strung in gossamer between them, plucking it like a lyre. The Knight shuddered violently. The reverberations echoed in a place she had not known was within her, eliciting the sour jowl-sweat of divine nausea she had felt when she had witnessed the Shape from above.
“Child of the Shape,” the Emissary spoke, the metallic underlay of her voice cutting sharply through the relentless generator drone, the incessant, percussive, cardiac chugging. “There is another way. Find it.”
The Shape Knight felt the dizzying sprawl of railways light up within her like cords of spindly nerves, and focused as well as she could through her aphantasia on the ghostly winding imprints of all the tracks that had not yet been laid. She often dreamt of the Shape’s power, its violence, its chaos and impulse. She dreamt, now, of its order, its steadfast restructuring, its calculated dominion over itself.
She felt her center of gravity shift as her body leaned sideways to counterbalance a sharp left turn. She forced the shaking split pupils of her eyes to look outside the cab windows, and saw that the train had swerved onto a track that had not been there before — or, perhaps, a track that would have someday been there, and had displaced itself in time when it was called upon to do so. The town and the train passed each other by unscathed.
“There you go,” Chantilly purred, tilting Pickman’s chin to meet her eyes, threading through the wispy tufts of her greying beard. “That wasn’t so hard, now, was it?”