As the New Jarankyld Line makes its way into the forest, they run into unexpected difficulties. Teo learns that he doesn’t have the answer to every problem, and that he may be more unprepared than he thought. A familiar face makes an appearance. *dramatic chord*

Settle down with your stew and bad whiskey, because it's time to get our railroad on! Teo runs into some problems, we run into a familiar face, and what's this? Troublesome natives?! Brave soldiers?! Heavens! Here's the third chapter of An iron road running, clean for now. Smut again next chapter. Thanks to :iconSpudz: and :iconMax Coyote: for moving this forward.

Released under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license. Share, modify, and redistribute -- as long as it's attributed and noncommercial, anything goes.

An iron road running, by Rob Baird. Chapter 3: "And she's known quite well by all"

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The weight of the musket at Teo’s back was unsettling. The only thing that reassured him — and not terribly much at that — was that Carol Titthitch looked even more ridiculous trying to carry it, and he still loaded a new ball and powder twice as slowly as the dog could manage.

Nobody on the New Jarankyld Line really knew what they were to expect. The Dalrath was not uninhabited, that much was certain. What lived there, though, was a matter of speculation — and a great deal of it, around the campfires in a night rendered black and starless by the thick cover over them. For the first few days, they saw nothing much out of the ordinary. The trees were dense, but not unreasonably so; they were tall, but not mythically tall. They looked, indeed, nothing so much as normal trees, and the Adara made short work of them — tearing them out right by the roots.

And, at least, they were of good quality. Sturdy conifers that yielded dense, strong softwood that Allen Grensmann looked at with an appraisal that bordered on hunger. They wouldn’t want for material for the crossties; the rest of it could be sold, at no small profit. Cravern Garmery, the quartermaster, had set up a depot in their newly acquired real-estate, and from his somewhat drunken rambling Teo pictured massive stacks of timber waiting for the hungry mines and mills and factories of the northern Iron Kingdom.

A week lasted in this fashion: ripping up the forest and sending it back on the little freight train that chugged along behind Layleigh’s Adara like a little bear cub, puffing excitedly. Then, one day after lunch, Teo emerged from a conference with Dr. Grensmann to find the Adara stopped and the men of Stockman’s crew milling aimlessly.

The tree in their path was thirty feet across. The railbuilder’s shovel looked pitiful next to the thing, and heavy chains looped around it spoke to an abortive effort to drag it down with raw tractive effort. Teo trotted up in time to catch a building argument between Stockman and Layleigh. “— fuckin’ mean? It’s four hundred bloody feet tall!”

“Your job is to clear the damned trail!” 

Teo walked in a circle around the great tree. He had never seen anything like it — the size of a long freight consist,   shoved headfirst into the ground. He didn’t even want to consider the extent of the roots — old as the World Before? Older? There was no disturbed earth, no strain at the exposed gnarled wood to suggest that the effort to pull it down had even so much as caught the tree’s attention. “— with fucking handsaws? Selat — how bloody stupid are you?”

“Find a damned way.” And Lara Layleigh turned on her heel and stomped back to the ladder that led up to the Adara’s bridge.

“What do you think, Kitten?” Stockman shook his head. “Up for some more digging?”

They would be digging through the winter, though, Teo suspected, if they went down that track. Carol agreed; so did Dale Masseler. But what were their options? There were too many trees to route singularly around every one of them over the long miles between Mirhall and New Jaranklyd. “Tunnel through it?” Carol suggested, half-seriously. 

In the end they settled for blasting, which was not the precise engineering Teo would’ve preferred to apply to the problem. Stockman’s men bored holes deep into the trunk, and they packed those full of powder. And then they stood back, paying out long lines of fuse. Still muttering — for it had taken the rest of the day, and no progress to speak of — he lit the cord. Teo watched it smolder as it snaked closer and closer to the huge tree. 

Which was virtually impregnable. It had stood over centuries, against the sharp winds of the South Coast and the rainstorms and who knew what else. Teo clapped his paws over his ears — waited — narrowed his eyes... then the base of the tree disappeared in a great burst of smoke and the roar of a cannon salvo firing. 

To their disappointment, it was still standing — barely a quarter of the trunk had been chewed through by the blast. Stockman’s cursing invoked blasphemy against gods whose very existence was new to Teo, so novel and ardent was the bear’s passion. But they tried again, drilling deeper, and at the second blast they could see the tree shudder from the base of the trunk all the way up to its towering leaves. 

For a minute longer it held. The powder had knocked out most of its trunk, with the remainder carefully planned — that was the theory — so that the tree would fall perpendicular to the rail line, off into the wilderness. Of course, there was a vast difference between theory and practice: Teo wasn’t certain even the second attempt had managed anything productive.

Then a dark, primeval groan rolled through the forest and it began to tilt. Faster and faster — picking up speed, but even as it fell to the ground its great bulk gave a ponderousness to the whole affair. The sound of its crashing demise was louder than either of the blasts had been. Everyone — Layleigh included — exchanged nervous glances. 

Fortuitously, the colossal tree’s end had not managed to dislodge the Adara, and with some additional powder they took up enough of the roots to lay down another three hundred feet of rail line before dinner. This effort, however, was not what anyone had wanted, and Teo knew what was going to be asked of him even before Masseler appeared to ask it.

Forward, into the Dalrath. Teo and a handful of men from the work gang, Stockman included. An advanced crew, finding and marking the trees that would need to be cut down. Some, Teo hoped, they could detour around. Judging by what they faced, he wasn’t even certain there was appetite in the Iron Kingdom to use all the lumber they were producing.

“You’ve got your flint in?” Stockman asked.

Teo checked his musket, felt for the stone, and nodded. “Yes. You really think we’ll see anything?”

The bear snorted. “You really think I was expecting a tree the size of a bloody galleon? I don’t know what we’re going to see, Kitten.”

Five hundred feet beyond the railhead they found their first prospective victim — a little smaller than the one they’d taken out the day before, but not by so much that Teo was terribly reassured. “I suppose,” he said, measuring the diameter and tapping his pen against his notebook, “we should try to calculate how much powder we’ll need for each of these things.”

“I suppose,” Stockman growled, staring up at where the branches disappeared in the shadowy canopy, “we should triple that and blow this whole bloody forest to hell.”

“You don’t like this much, do you?”

“I don’t like not being able to see,” he corrected. “Piss-poor excuse for country this is.”

So far, there was still light filtering in from the edge of the woods, and the wide track that they’d blasted into it. By the next tree, two hundred feet further along, it was very much like dusk. Two more, and the only light came from their lamps, which Teo had at first felt very silly about bringing along. Back behind him, a whole eternity away, he could see the glow of the camp. In front of him there was nothing but pitch blackness. Apprehensively, he held his lamp up — and saw nothing. Swallowing heavily, he put his doubts aside and measured the new tree.

This, too, was forty feet across and he had no idea how tall it was. There was no way to tell — not a single blessed hint, for above them the sky was as dark as a moonless night. Closer to the edge, the mottled leaves of the canopy gave the appearance of stars — here there was not even that possibility for self-delusion. They were in a profoundly alien land. “If we get lost,” Teo murmured. 

“Shut your mouth,” Stockman snapped. “Nobody’s getting lost. Kitten, do you have your notes?”

He looked at his notebook. No... not really. He should not have been comfortable with their rigor... but... “Close enough,” he nodded.

“Next one?”

“I... I don’t know about that, boss,” one of his men said.

“Have to,” the bear told him. “We have to...”

They’d surveyed four trees. “Perhaps not,” Teo said. “We, ah... we’ll only be able to clear this much in a day anyway, right, Mr. Stockman? And remember, we...” He fumbled for explanations. “We need to test out how much powder it takes to bring one down.”

“Good point...”

“So perhaps this is good enough for one day?”

They gathered close, and then turned around. And they’d gone a hundred feet, perhaps, when a keening screech came from... somewhere, in the Dalrath behind them. A sound like stone dragged on stone, or a scream from the very earth itself. Teo gripped his musket tightly, and told himself that he was not running as they trotted back towards the safety of the railhead.

“No idea,” Dale Masseler shook his head, when Teo asked what it might’ve been. “No naturalists have really surveyed this part of the world, you know. We sent a team down, but...”

“‘But’ what?” Carol, who had joined them, wanted to know.

But, Teo knew, they had not come back. He stayed close to camp, the next day, and told himself that it was because he was observing the demolition work. By the fourth tree, he thought he had a pretty good guess at how much work it would take to bring one of the things down — and it was twenty times as much powder, at least, than they’d budgeted for a mile of track. Every tree took the effort of the entire work crew to bring safely down — and there was no good way to harvest them, so they lay where they fell like the massive walls of a giant’s fortress. 

Despite this he did not find them comforting.

Three days and barely two miles later, they halted work for the arrival of a new train. Teo tilted his head, for a passenger carriage was attached, and this was something new. Everyone gathered around as the door opened. The figure that emerged was a fox, grey-colored like the starched uniform he wore. He had a fox’s brush, and a fox’s ears — but he was tall, nearly as tall as Sam Stockman, and muscled like a wolf. The word that came to Teo’s mind immediately was hero.

Mythic or not, he wore a jaunty cap that took some of the edge away, and he saluted to Dale when he saw him. “Director Masseler.”

“At ease.” 

Without really intending to, Teo had trotted up until he was standing next to the stag. Twenty-odd more men and women filed from the carriage — all coming to rapt attention. With their neat packs and polished rifles they looked a little like leaden soldiers — and with a giddy start Teo realized what he was looking at even as the fox dropped his salute. “Director Masseler! K platoon, First Company, Fawret’s Arrow garrison.”

“Welcome to the railhead of the New Jarankyld Line,” Dale nodded. “Mr. Carol Titthitch is director of operations; Dr. Allen Grensmann is our lead engineer and I assume his — yes, there he is. Mr. Teobas Franklyn is Dr. Grensmann’s assistant and our architect. I hope the journey wasn’t too bad?”

“Smooth rail,” the soldier nodded. “Better from Salketh, to be honest.”

“It’s all new,” Dale explained. “The bridge was Mr. Franklyn’s doing. Mr. Samhal Stockman and Miss Lara Layleigh can take credit for the iron itself. We’ve made good progress. But before we go too much further, we’ll need protection, I fear. I don’t trust these woods.”

“We heard something, a few days ago,” Teo added. “Strange noises...”

“The men are spooked.” Dale was blunt about it, although nothing in his bluntness suggested that he found this concern ill-founded. “And I’m not going to start surveying until we can secure the railhead. Lieutenant... Pembæra, do I recall correctly?”

“Yes, sir.” His voice had a crisp authority that Teo found extremely reassuring in spite of his accent — which was very, very borderlands. “Garda Pembæra.”

“I’ve ridden the Arrow many times. Major Wortiss is a good man — I don’t doubt he sent me his best.” More names to remember; Teo was frequently astonished by the encyclopedic recall the stag seemed to have of the employees in his division. “Take as many of the workers as you need to start fortifying this place — just in case. And put together a small detail to accompany our surveyors...”

“Speaking of,” Allen Grensmann prompted.

On cue, a final person emerged from the passenger carriage. Like Grensmann, she was an otter, although much younger and without the paunch. Her skirt was neatly cut and functional, and he saw a pen tucked into the pocket of her blouse. “Hello, Mr. Masseler,” she said. 

“Hello, Kaen.” Allen’s voice had gone soft.

The otter ignored him, and focused on the stag. “I’ve brought down my equipment. You said this was fresh territory, didn’t you?” Teo listened carefully; she was plainly not a westerner like Allen. If anything, indeed, she sounded more like an easterner, or perhaps someone like Carol Titthitch. Well-heeled, in any case.

“That’s correct.” Ever political, Dale did not comment on her reaction. “I suppose you’ll work with Mr. Teobas Franklyn, here. Kaen Wulyth has plenty of experience — I recommend the two of you compare notes. Miss Wulyth, we have a wagon readied for you — let me show you the way?”

When the two left, Teo turned to Dr. Grensmann, with his head tilted in typical, puppyish curiosity. “Do you two know each other? She seems to have a problem with... the Railroad, sir? With you?”

“Just with me, laddie,” the otter said. His voice was quiet and he was more downbeat than Teo had ever seen him. “The Wulyths are an old Railroad family. Head of the local Railman’s Guild in their county for two generations, I believe. She lost her husband in a rockslide last year. It was a project I was supervising.”

“Oh,” Teo said. Such accidents were fairly rare — certainly he did not fear them — but they were not all that uncommon in the grand scheme of things and he did not see why it should have bothered either of them so. “Mr. Masseler trusts her, though?”

“Aye. She’s one of the best in the whole of the division. I trust her, too.” Allen took a deep breath, and the old otter shook his head. “You might do me a favor, lad?” 

“Anything, sir,” Teo told him, and meant it.

“I’d rather if you worked with her, rather than me. You won’t mind?”

“No, sir.”

The soldiers of the Iron Corps spent the rest of the day constructing a few walls about the railhead — nothing serious, although it gave their camp a sense of safety and Teo supposed that was really the goal more than anything else. They were ready to go by the following morning. Lieutenant Pembæra gathered a few of his men together — “the right anvil,” he called them — and they set off into the Dalrath together, with the soldiers bearing lamps and the civilians bearing their tools and all of them armed.

“Anvil?” Teo asked one of the soldiers. 

She didn’t pause in her step. Just glanced to him sideways. The dull slate of their uniforms made all of the Iron Corps’ soldiers look rather similar; only her outsized ears, carefully worked through the guards on her helmet, marked her as a rabbit. “Yes,” she said, flatly.

“I’m not certain what that means.”

Again that sideways glance. The eyes were exceptionally keen in their meaning, which was: you bloody civilian. “The company is a Lightning Company,” she offered by way of explanation. It wasn’t much of one. Teo knew the history of the Carregan Transcontinental Railroad by heart; he knew of the battles that the Iron Corps had waged, and he knew vaguely of their commanders, but fighting had never interested him and he was completely ignorant of their organization and tactics.

“I don’t really know what —”

“If I tell you,” the rabbit asked, facing ahead, “will you be quiet?”

“Er. Yes.” Teo flattened his ears, to show his chagrin. He’d always found a good Aultlands accent exceptionally useful at demonstrating the speaker’s superiority over their listener, though he was less than pleased to find that condescension turned on him.

“A Lighting Platoon is designed to strike quickly and powerfully, and then disappear. Like a bolt of lighting. You understand that, don’t you?” He blinked, and nodded. “Good. The platoon has two arms, like you. Each arm has an anvil and a hammer. The anvil’s job is to hold our foe in place. With this geffer,” she said, and gestured with her muzzle to her rifle, which was slung in favor of the lamp.

He thought he’d probably run across the slang word geffer in one of his more tawdry adventure novels, growing up. Clearly, it was different from his own weapon. Teo’s musket required careful and awkward loading. The rabbit’s weapon was sleek and polished, and he could see a steel breech that looked to have the stamp of a Tausrun armorer. “That’s Ellagdran, isn’t it?” Tausrunvast, one of the states in the Ellagdran Confederacy, was known across the continent for its gunsmiths. 

“Yes,” the rabbit said. “It’s from Askarech’s foundry.” And when she saw that he had no idea what she was talking about, her eyes darkened beneath her helmet. “Usur Askarech von Eunen. He invented the needlegun forty years ago. Mett, Dærwargr and Sons only makes a pale imitation — that’s why we don’t use them. This is a genuine Askarechan schessnetlgevär, here.”

Needleguns he knew of, though this was because the engineering was interesting to him. His musket was a clumsy thing: pour powder into the barrel, stuff a round atop it. A little more powder into the pan, and hope that when the trigger’s pulled the clash of flint on steel sets the powder alight. The pan sets off the main charge... hopefully. Needleguns — by extension, the rabbit’s weapon — were elegantly designed. They used paper cartridges, rather than messy loose powder. When she pulled her trigger, the needle pierced a small charge built right into the cartridge. And when she wanted to reload, it was just a matter of putting a new cartridge into the breech. 

This, at least, he could appreciate. “It’s a very fascinating technology,” he agreed. “You know, I was hearing that the Tausrunners are working on a new explosive compound? It’s supposed to be more powerful and more stable. There’s an article in the —”

“Dog,” the soldier cut him off. “Didn’t you say you would be quiet?” 

“Oh. Yes, ma’am,” he said, and splayed his ears again.

“As I was saying,” she continued. “The anvil holds our enemy in place. Between the eight of us, we can fire more than a shot a second. And while we are doing that, the hammer strikes them. You see Lieutenant Pembæra?” 

Teo glanced around; the tall fox was at the head of their group, but in the darkness they had all been reduced to little points of light. “Yes?”

“He started out in a hammer. The strongest, the smartest, the best of us — they don’t carry rifles. Theirs is sort of like what you’d use to hunt birds, if you’re a hunter... though you look like most of your birds come to you already plucked, to be honest. It’s a nice, short piece, quick in the hand. They use those, and they use their grenades. Our enemy’s flushed, or they die where they stand. Very simple. Happy now, dog?”

Teobas Franklyn, who indeed knew very little of hunting and the martial pursuits, couldn’t do much but nod. “It sounds effective.”

“Of course it’s effective,” the rabbit snorted. “Why else are we here?” And she walked away from him, back into formation.

He was aware that she looked down on him — perhaps all the soldiers did. At the same time, Teo decided that he would far rather have the Iron Corps on his side than anyone else. Certainly he would rather have them on his side, but patronizing him, than to have them on the other side, and murdering him with whatever a ‘grenade’ was.

“Charming, aren’t they?” This muttering, under her breath, came from Kaen Wulyth, who had trotted up to his side following the rabbit’s departure.

“Er. Dedicated, I guess,” Teo offered.

The otter only grimaced. “Right. Try riding with them on a crowded train car. Well, we’ll have to deal with them so I might as well get over myself. The message I got said that some surveying had already been done?”

Kaen had a heavy leather pack slung over her left shoulder that Teo found rather ominous. “It’s been pretty... rough,” he admitted. “We had maps all the way to the edge of the forest. I corrected those where I could, and I know that Dr. Grensmann also made some updates. I don’t know how he went about that...”

“Unerring precision, I’m sure.” The otter woman’s emphasis was quite dark, and Teobas decided that this was not a line of inquiry to be pressed until they were on better terms. “I saw your maps of the woods — such as they are. I’m guessing that you paced these distances?” 

“Yes, ma’am. Four times — there and back and there and back. Then I took averages.”

“Not a bad idea, young one. But if we want it done right...” She sighed. “We’ll start from the beginning, then, while the grey folk are playing soldier. You know, Lord Corwyck — Director Masseler, sorry — did mislead me about this operation. I wasn’t quite expecting it to be so... dark. I thought you might’ve cleared a path already...”

He grinned. “We weren’t expecting trees the size of the Uthariel,” he pointed out.

This at least was good for a laugh. She unslung her pack, and pulled what looked, at first, to be a bundle of sticks. They folded together, though, into a single staff, with a spirit level at the top. “Take this, please,” she ordered, and he did so. Wood, worn smooth through years of use — rather like the handle of a shovel, he thought, and winced.

“This is...” 

“Stay here,” she ordered. “Hold the staff level — wait. The lamp. Can you set it on the ground first?”

She showed him two glass mirrors on the staff, and he turned them until they caught the pale light of the oil lamp. When Kaen was satisfied, she walked off, and he watched the light of her own torch fade as it glowed in eerie halo around the otter’s body. 

“You’re level?” she called to him; her voice sounded rather distant.

He checked; the little bubble of the level was perfectly centered. “Yes, ma’am,” he shouted back.

Silence. A few minutes later Kaen returned. “Alright. Now, walk that way until I tell you to stop.” 

In this fashion, one tedious pause after the other, they slowly made up the distance to where Stockman was cursing at a tree, while the soldiers stared off into the blackness with rifles at the ready. The soft forest floor did not make a particularly appealing resting spot — thick as it was with detritus and what Teo generously assumed to be filth — but Kaen brushed the worst of the leaves and spiders off a boulder and sat anyway. “This is not,” she told the dog, “going to be easy.”

“I’ve gathered that, ma’am.” The trees had been their first sign. And the darkness. And the scream, which had thankfully yet to be repeated.

“Kaen,” the otter amended. “I don’t suppose we can wait until they’ve taken the trees down?” 

Teo looked behind him, at where Sam and his men were chopping holes in their newest victim — forty feet across if it was an inch, and like the others extending upwards into the unbroken night of the canopy. “I don’t believe so.”

“Was building without surveying Allen’s idea?”

Blinking, the dog shook his head. “No, ma’am — Kaen. Director Masseler’s, I believe, if it was anyone’s. We need to know where the rails are supposed to go, anyway, right?”

The otter pulled out a notebook that looked rather like Teo’s own, and flipped to the newest page. She’d already begun a rough map, although it had few marks and all of them seemed to be trees. “Easier said than done. This is a fool’s errand...”

They walked back to camp so that the others could begin the laborious process of removing the trees one explosion at a time. Back in the light, he refolded her staff carefully. From the corner of his eye, he could see Allen watching them — before vanishing again, back and into his office. “What was all this about?” he asked, as he returned the wooden bundle to her. 

“Making the best of a bad situation,” the otter woman told him, rather cryptically. “See these?” She tapped at the polished mirrors. 

“Yes...”

“When it’s unfolded, those two mirrors are exactly four feet apart.”

He could already envision the simple trigonometry. She must’ve been drawing a triangle between herself and the measuring stick. Knowing that angle, and the fixed distance between the two mirrors, it was easy enough to figure out how far she’d been from him at the time. Easy if, perhaps, a little time-consuming. “Distance measuring, then?”

Kaen shrugged her pack off and opened it. Slipping the folded staff inside, she produced instead a black box, shiny with lacquer. When she flipped the lid up, he saw what he took, at first, to be a sextant — except that it looked rather heavier, and far more complicated. A lacquered pane on the side held two round gauges; all around the lacquer was inlaid with intricate decorations in mother of pearl. A dragon, with fine gold-leaf scales, curled around each gauge snugly. “From the Otonichi,” she explained to him, which explained both the artisanship and the artwork; the mountain-dwellers were by far the most skilled craftsmen of anyone — even, he thought to himself, Usur Askarech von Eunen. “It’s a rangefinder.”

“Oh?” 

She turned it over carefully, and twisted a latch on the brass contraption’s side. A small panel opened. “See?”

He did not. Could not. Inside was a dense, complicated maze of clockwork that pointedly defied any such explanation as might be expected by a simple see? At the most basic level Teo understood the concept of a ‘gear’ — but here were dozens of them, at least, little tiny things, some shaped like spirals and some shaped like little rings. His ears pinned. “No.”

Kaen grinned, closed the latch, and handed him the rangefinder. It was heavy — dense. “Put it to your eye.”

It had a muzzle-rest that had not been adjusted for him, and so it was a little awkward, but he managed to get it into place. Through the eyepiece he could see... trees. The Adara, its shovel hard at work. The wagons of their camp, idle. He was watching it, he could tell, through a glass of some kind — because on the glass were etched little markings, at regular intervals. On the left, two metal pincers separated a tiny gap right in the middle of his view. On the right, practically in his peripheral vision, he could see two dials, one larger than the other.

He felt Kaen’s paw, guiding him to a protrusion on the device’s side. “Turn this. Slowly...”

When he did, he saw the needle of the smaller dial move. “What am I doing?”

“Look at... hmm. Look at the boxcar.” The Iron Corps had brought a freight car with them, and promptly pulled it off the rails to where it now served as an ersatz depot. “The height of a regulation boxcar is fourteen feet from floor to ceiling, right?”

Teo studied the car for a second or two. “Of a 845 boxcar, yes. That’s an 877 boxcar, though; they’re eleven feet tall. The older ones were blowing over on the plains when the winds caught the cars wrong. They redesigned them — if not for the height, you can tell by the journals. On an 877, the journal boxes are sprung.”

He glanced away from the rangefinder to see Kaen looking at him with a cocked eyebrow. “You’re a peculiar one, aren’t you? Fine, then, eleven feet. Turn the control until the little dial points to eleven.”

Now that he looked at it more carefully, he could indeed see the tiny notches in the dial. The tenth one was labeled; he twisted slowly, until the needle pointed exactly at the next marker past it. “Eleven.”

“Good,” she said. “Now...” Her fingers guided his further along the device. “This here is the fine control, and this is the coarse one. Two knobs.” Experimentally, he twisted each one; they moved smoothly, with little friction. The metal pincers opened wider. “Put the calipers at the top and bottom of the boxcar. Be as precise as you can, now...”

He did not need to be ordered to precision; it was in the dog’s nature, and it took him a good few seconds until he was satisfied. “Done.”

“And now, push the big knob in. It has a spring.”

When he did, he heard a sharp snick and felt a jolt in the rangefinder that made him fear for the intricate clockwork. Kaen Wulyth didn’t seem to care; she pulled it from the dog’s muzzle, and turned it over so he could see the gauges on the side. “There, see?” She tapped the rightmost gauge. “Ninety. It’s ninety feet away.”

“The one on the left?”

The otter shrugged. From the thing’s box she produced a silk towel, and carefully wiped the metal down. “It’s supposed to tell you the relative angle, so you can calculate the elevation. I’ve found that doesn’t work quite so well.”

“But... still! It’s marvelous,” he breathed. “The Otonichi made this? How did you come across it?”

“Well, they don’t make them here,” Kaen said. “I don’t own it, either. They tell me the Railroad bought this one for nearly eighty thousand pounds.” Once it was back in place, in its padded box, she closed the lid again.

Not for the first time, he was reminded that the Iron Kingdom, for all its strengths, did not lead the continent in everything — they would never have been able to craft such a device, certainly not at its size and capability. No doubt this explained the price. “You could buy a steamship for that...”

“But then,” Kaen pointed out, “you’d have to go to sea. Which, perhaps, is better than going into the woods. I brought all my equipment down here, but I’m afraid none of it is much use — that thing is just barely usable in the dark, and none of my other gear is going to be worth the hassle of even packing it. I guess I can see why you paced.”

An explosion boomed, and he saw one of the treetrunks shudder before slowly, slowly toppling. That, at least, the Iron Kingdom could lay claim to — brute, loud force, all at odds with the fantastic precision of the Otonichi’s clockwork. Powder and steam. “That, and we needed to get the work done. The Railroad carries on,” he shrugged. This, like a number of his sayings, was a line from a song.

“The Railroad and its 877 boxcars,” she recalled. “Did you grow up on the rails?” 

“No. I just read a lot about them. What about you? Dr. Grensmann said your family’s been doing this for generations.”

Kaen’s expression hardened, and set. “Oh, yes. Generations. It’s in our blood, and our blood, well...”

“I didn’t mean —”

“I know.” She pulled her pack back on. “I should take a look at my notes. I’ll see you tomorrow, Mr. Franklyn.”

Teobas was not certain what to make of Kaen Wulyth. He did not recall hearing of any particularly great disaster in the east, so whatever accident had killed her husband must’ve been rather unremarkable for everyone else. Stockman didn’t know anything, and nor did Cravern Garmery, and Teo was not ready to pry further with Allen Grensmann. Carol, whose family was from the area, said he thought it had been somewhere in the Seffish Valley, and that a few men had been lost. “But it was four years ago, at least, and awfully far away...”

Nursing his curiosity, the dog retired. There were other things to consider, anyway. The Iron Corps, for example — now those were some interesting souls! Anvils and hammers and all that! They ate by themselves, around a very orderly fire, and kept a careful watch that night. The stiff bearing of the stout men did not brook conversation, so he elected not to bother them. 

More of the same routine followed on the next day. Now that he was more practiced with what Kaen wanted him to do, he set himself up faster, and by later in the morning she offered to let him try his hand at the distance measuring. Now he understood why it took her so long — at a distance the mirrors in lamplight were tiny, and dim, and he measured the distance four times before he was satisfied that he’d done it properly.

Ill fortune decreed that the path was more thickly forested that day — five trees that would need to be demolished. It was slow, laborious work that the soldiers did not volunteer to assist with. Eventually, bored, Kaen suggested they scout a little ways ahead, and with nothing else to do Teo agreed. He had taken no more than twenty steps past the group when he felt a heavy hand on his shoulder and turned with a start to find himself staring at Lieutenant Pembæra. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“Surveying,” the dog blinked. “That’s what miss Wulyth and I are here for.” 

“Not beyond the rest of us you don’t,” Pembæra said. 

“Well...”

“That was an order,” the fox growled. “Now get back.”

Teo splayed his ears back and held up the staff. “But we need to take these measurements. If you ask miss Wulyth —”

“I said it was an order. You’re not to take one damned step past the perimeter unless I say so, not miss Wulyth or you or Æmer Himself for all I care. Do you understand me?” 

“But —”

Garda Pembæra, who had a very firm grip, seized the dog by the upper arm and pulled him back to where the rest of them were waiting for Stockman’s crew to finish drilling holes for the powder charges in the tree. Wulyth was also there, and from the way she rolled her eyes he was given to understand that she, too, had received a similar lecture. Every time he so much as shifted on his feet Pembæra’s attention shot to him, and by the end of the morning Teo was meeting the fox’s gaze with a glare.

“We can’t do our work,” he explained to Dale Masseler, “if we don’t have freedom of movement.”

“It’s for your own protection, my boy,” the stag reminded him gently. “We still don’t know what’s out there.”

“I know, but...” Teo grumped; by the time Sam was done with his drilling, there hadn’t been time to explore further before they needed to start leveling the trees and tearing up the course of the railbed. “I don’t know if we’re being guarded or wet-nursed...”

“Just listen to them, Mr. Franklyn.” Dale Masseler smiled his typical, grandfatherly smile. Inwardly, Teo was gritting his teeth, but he nodded his acquiescence. 

The Corps was at work transforming the camp as well. They staked out a perimeter with torches — there was, after all, no shortage of wood to be found — and sternly reminded the civilian workers of the New Jarankyld Line that nobody was to cross the line of torches without permission and escort, and nobody at all was to cross at night. Not that anyone would’ve anyway, although Teo had to admit that he found the imposition a little troublesome anyway.

He could still appreciate the soldiers for their professionalism and the sense of security they evoked. It was the superiority that the dog had not expected, and which chafed. They were, after all, on the same side. They had the same goal: the same mission, the same employer. He had hoped that there would be some shared sense of camaraderie — like the one he had with Samhal Stockman, even though the two had very little in common.

When the soldiers decided to shorten the perimeter further, forcing Stockman to relocate the tents of half his men, it became clear from the bear’s heavy footfalls that he, too, was not entirely thrilled with their new companions. Teobas witnessed a staring match between Stockman and the rabbit he’d spoken to that neither yielded until Dale appeared to separate the pair. Sam was still bubbling as he stalked off. Passing Teo, he shot the dog a look. “Gonna have to put some sense into that one,” he growled bitterly.

Teobas respected the bear’s abilities, although he would not have sworn, under oath, that Sam would’ve come out the victor of any such attempt. The soldiers had faced down enemies along thousands of miles of track — and those had been armed. The dog tried to remind himself that he was not Lieutenant Pembæra’s foe, but all the same it was hard to shake the feeling that, between the Iron Corps and the Dalrath, the workers of the Railroad were faced on either side with towering, stout authority that defied circumvention.

The added need for the fox to approve every single step of their work only slowed Teo and Kaen down; by the fourth day of this — nominally a day of rest — he had resigned himself that they would not exceed two thousand feet of rail per day, and that was if the powder cooperated. If a tree fell improperly, as one in five or six did, then it required the efforts of all of them and the Adara to drag it out of the path of the track.

And, by the fifth day, yet a new wrinkle emerged in their efforts. 

He found this, as he found many things, by observing someone patiently attempting to talk Stockman down from growling anger. The foreman was gesticulating sharply. Carol Titthitch, with his ears back, made clear by his pose that he weighed only half as much as the bear, and seemed to be shrinking into the forest floor by the second.

“Is there a... problem?”

“Kitten!” Stockman barked. “Talk some sense into your fancy friend.”

Carol shut his eyes, and turned to Teobas with a resigned look on his well-groomed face. “We won’t be doing any more surveying or trackwork today.”

“Hell we won’t,” Sam muttered.

“Why not?” Teo asked, as carefully as he could.

“The camp needs to be moved forward.”

“What?”

Carol explained, at times talking over Stockman, that Lieutenant Pembæra was unhappy with the distance between their temporary fortification and the work of the railhead. If they were to come under attack, after all, the men working on the rail could find themselves stranded — cut off from the trenches that had been dug, and their supplies. 

It was his desire, therefore, to leave the supplies and the camp no more than a mile from the railhead, which meant that it would need to be uprooted and moved every four or five days. Teobas could not judge from the explanation whether or not Carol agreed, or had been cowed. “Either way, we need to get the wagons and the supplies moved forward so the platoon can get set up again. Mr. Stockman’s men have been asked to assist in this.”

“Do you see a bloody bracelet on my wrist, Kitten?” Stockman asked.

“Well —”

“Do you?”

“No,” Teo admitted. They were none of them slaves.

The rabbit — Corporal Arstois, he’d heard — approached, and immediately Stockman bristled. “Is there a problem here?”

Carol, who Teo had not seen given to particular humility, flicked his ears. “No, ma’am.”

“But your work crews are idle?”

Sam Stockman flexed the muscles of his right arm, and bunched his paw into a fist that only Teo seemed to notice. “Well, there don’t seem to be a railroad to be built, do there now?”

As though she had only just apprehended the argument taking place, the rabbit gave a sigh of exaggerated patience. “Mr. Titthitch, fix this.” And she turned, and strode back to a small conference that Lieutenant Pembæra was similarly having with his men. The rest of the soldiers, Teo noticed, were already at work dismantling their equipment and loading it into the wagons.

He looked back to find Carol’s finger rubbing at his temple slowly. “Mr. Stockman, we’ve been asked to work alongside the Iron Corps. I know that they can be... difficult. But we are supposed to be partners, are we not?”

The bear glanced down, and tugged at his heavy denim overalls. “Sure as all fuck don’t look like a uniform, do it?”

“No...”

“Then why are they giving me orders?”

“Well...”

“Who do my orders come from?”

“Mr. Titthitch,” Teo spoke up. “He’s the director of operations, after all. Are we moving the camp or not, Carol?”

Carol jerked, as though the restatement of his position startled him. “What? Oh. Yes. We’re moving it forward about a mile.”

“That’s it settled, then.” Teobas was putting on a voice that he hoped connoted both trustworthiness and respect. “Those are our orders. We’ll get this moved — makes it easier to get work done if we don’t have to move so far in the mornings, anyway. Won’t take all day, and then you and your men can have a bit of a rest.”

Seeing an opening, Carol nodded. “Right. We’ll get ourselves set up again, and then you can take the rest of the day off.”

“Come along, Mr. Stockman,” Teo added. “I’ll help.”

With a heavy sigh — his fist hadn’t entirely unclenched — Sam surrendered. But he grumbled about it the rest of the morning, and Teo understand his frustration. Once the workmen had their tents pitched and latrines dug again, and Cravern Garmery was fixing something that passed for stew, Teo left the bear with a promise to raise the issue to Dr. Grensmann and Dale Masseler — not that they could really do anything, themselves.

“Six miles,” Dr. Grensmann frowned at dinner that evening. They were not eating the greasy, ill-smelling stew — one of the perks, Teo understood, of management. It wasn’t as though the sandwiches were much better, but at least the ingredients were recognizable. “We’ve made six miles since hitting the deep woods. The bedrock is good, the rails are good. The men are good. But gods, sir, six miles...”

Dale wasn’t any more enthused. His sandwich was half uneaten. “I know. But what can we do, Allen?”

“More men. Another two crews. Ten times the powder we have on hand.”

“We’re over budget as it is. Carol?”

“Yes, sir. Our expenditures of blasting powder are twenty-five times over what we’d budgeted per day of work. But we’d also estimated making two miles per day, and on average we’re only putting down a third of one. Per linear mile of track it’s taking therefore, ah. Six times the men and a hundred and fifty times the powder. We’ll have to consider ways to secure food after the harvest time, at this rate.”

“And the lumber?”

“Based on our estimates,” Carol said — rather dismally — “we’re starting to depress the price of raw wood across the nearest six counties. There’s, ah... more of it than we thought.”

Dale Masseler pushed his sandwich around on his plate. “Good news all around, then. How is your surveying, Mr. Franklyn? You and miss Wulyth have gone out every day with the men...”

Kaen Wulyth had chosen to take dinner privately. “Yes, sir. We’ve made relatively good progress, sir, but in this I’m afraid we’re limited by our escorts. The Iron Corps won’t permit us to go beyond their furthest march, so between the two of us we’re spending half the day idle.” 

“Lieutenant Pembæra’s... executive decision,” Carol added as tactfully as possible, “has not exactly helped their relationship with the rest of the work crews. I believe Mr. Stockman is waiting for it to come to blows.” 

“Sam won’t wait for that, laddie,” Allen countered. “I also didn’t get the surveying chains I requested on the last train down — space was taken up by rifle cartridges, apparently.”

The stag took a deep breath. Even now, he had a commanding nobility to him; his fine vest seemed to wrap about his frustration and channel it into something productive and helpful. “But we asked for the Corps’ protection, Allen. That goes for you two, too. We still don’t know what’s out there. We’ve had it easy so far, but who knows...”

“Well, perhaps a compromise?” Teo asked. “What if we at least let us survey the next step beyond — that’s still close enough for them to assist, and we’ll be able to get a better sense of the territory...”

“I suppose that makes —”

He never finished his sentence. A commotion from outside cut him off — the stag jumped to his feet, and pulled the window of the wagon open just in time to see a burst of flame erupt from the middle of the camp. “Car gal’th,” Allen gasped. “What the —”

“Arms!” Teo heard the shout from somewhere further distant. “To arms!”

His musket was propped by the wagon door; the pack with its accoutrements was tucked into a corner. He grabbed both, and followed Dale outside before he truly knew what he was doing. One of the workmen was smothering the fire with a heavy blanket — everywhere Teo could see movement, as people scrambled to respond to...

... To what?

“Arrow,” Lieutenant Pembæra intercepted them before they had gone more than a few feet from the wagon, and directed them back to the cover of its wooden walls. He held up a long shaft for their inspection. “Tipped with pitch and set on fire — then another one.”

“From where?” Dale wanted to know.

“Well. We didn’t fire it,” the fox answered.

A lean, fierce-looking feline slunk up to them. “Perimeter’s secure, sir,” he spoke directly to Garda Pembæra. “Head counts are all accurate.”

“Good work. Did anybody see...”

Pembæra trailed off. A moment later Teobas heard it too: a soft, low keening from above them. First from the left, then to the right — behind, before; it seemed to be coming from everywhere and nowhere all at once. It built in volume, in pitch, until it was a hideous wail — then it halted. The silence was thick. Ominous. Oppressive.

A dozen more arrows struck all at once — bright sparks of light, and then white-hot flames springing to life where they landed. As soldiers and railworkers tried to put the fires out, Garda Pembæra’s sharp muzzle turned in a jerking arc, searching the darkness around them. “Sergeant Hroschagn?” 

“Here, sir,” the cat answered. He, too, was scanning — and his razor teeth were bared to the night. 

“Douse the torches. Corporal Arstois takes the west and north; Corporal K’nErta takes the east and south. Stagger fire, one quarter. Look for those damned arrows.”

“Yes, sir.” The sergeant dipped his head in some form of salute, and crept off to pass the orders along. Teo swallowed heavily — for they could hear the eerie cacophony building again. Again it halted and they had a dreadful pause, waiting like a condemned man before a firing squad, before there came the whistle of arrows and the camp burst into light again. One had struck not ten feet away from them — its shaft was buried well into the ground, and the thick drops of burning pitch came within a body’s length of the young dog. 

He yelped, even as Lieutenant Pembæra leapt for the flames, tossing a bucket of what had once been stew over them. A second shape joined them. All around, the torches were going out — but in their fading light and the dancing tongues of fire he saw Sam Stockman’s bulk, tearing up dirt with his bare hands to smother the last of the pitch.

Then, darkness. Complete, utter darkness. Teo could see nothing — could hear nothing, except for the breathing of the men around him. “Kitten, is your —”

“Quiet,” Garda hissed at them.

From the sound, Sam was right behind him; he turned, and the bear dropped his voice. “Your musket. It’s loaded?”

“Yes,” Teo whispered back. “Where’s yours?”

“Tent. Bloody terrible luck...”

The blackness was awful. Pure. Horrid. A man could go mad staring at it — Teo felt certain that he was. They heard muffled yelps and screeches in the distance. Every time his ears flicked, his stomach tightened — he squinted, and could he see... light? The burning point of an arrow? Was that the last thing he would see?

A sharp, piercing ululation broke the quiet — then an answering one, from what Teo felt certain to be the other side of the camp. Another whistle — this time when the arrow struck, Teo heard a scream inside the palisade. When he looked to the glow of the flames, he saw nobody there — nobody had been hit. Just nerves. Just the specter of... of... a hundred thousand swarming barbarians, that’s what Sam had said, about the fall of Jarankyld. Poor bastards didn’t stand a chance.

“I don’t like this,” Lieutenant Pembæra muttered. “Mr. Masseler, get back into the wagon. Walls should hold off what they’re firing.” Save for the glass windows, of course; nothing was perfect.

“Very well,” the stag answered quietly. “Allen, Mr. Franklyn, Mr. Titthitch, you too.”

“The pup’s armed,” Garda said. “He can stay.”

“He’s a civilian.”

“He’s armed.” Garda’s voice did not portend the success of disagreement.

Teo heard the wagon door click open. Footsteps. It clicked shut again, and he squeezed his musket tightly. If he gripped it hard enough, the gun didn’t shake so badly.

“You’ve hunted before?”

“No, sir.” Teo’s voice sounded very small indeed to the dog’s ears. “I’m from the city.”

“Alright.” The thud of a few more arrows punctuated the silence that came afterwards. When they landed, shadows pounced on the sputtering flames to extinguish them — like something choreographed, and unreal. “So much for that. Just take your time, then. Do you see anything?” 

“No, sir.” 

The next arrow that landed was close — close enough that Teo could see the fox’s muzzle in profile, cast in orange glow. He hadn’t flinched at the impact, and he didn’t move to douse it. Trusting Stockman, Teobas gathered, for the bear was already on the move. “Let me know when you’re about to fire,” Garda ordered. “I’d like to keep my hearing.”

Further along the palisade, Teo saw little flashes, and the whip-cracking snap of rifle fire. It came intermittently — one shot for every five arrows, or ten. The dog couldn’t help feeling that the response was... puny. Pathetic. It did nothing to break the inky, strangling clutch of the forest night on his spine. His ears caught the thud of impacts with no fire — they were no longer lighting their arrows. 

He could not tell if his eyes were open or closed. Could not tell whether seconds passed, or hours. The crash of shattered glass from the wagon met with a shrill scream and Teo didn’t even notice until it had stopped that it was not his own. Not Dale, certainly — Carol, perhaps? Garda didn’t say anything.

The next squeal he heard — chattering and alien and wrong — was clearly not anything familiar. And — and it was coming closer, he knew it. Louder and louder, nearer and nearer — then stopped, and even as it did he sensed the rush of wind from a... a something overhead, sweeping past them. “That —”

“Came from above us, yes,” Garda confirmed.

“What was it?” Sam’s voice was not the voice of a twenty-stone giant. “One of them?”

It — whatever it was — started up again. Teobas swore he could even hear the pitch change, like a train whistle racing past — and when it stopped, without thinking, he snapped his musket up and fired. Sparks sprayed over his paw — the weapon bucked in his grasp — and —

Nothing, except that now his wrist hurt. “Asked you to warn me,” Pembæra reminded him.

“Sorry, sir.”

“Reload,” was all the fox said.

He tried to think through the steps logically. Powder, wadding — something about a ramrod. The ball. In the dark, though — in the dark how the hell was anybody supposed to manage that? And what the hell difference was it supposed to make? Teo forced the thought from his mind. Powder down the barrel — too much, probably. Wadding. Ball. He forced it all in as best as he could. “Ready, sir. I think.”

“Good.”

“Lieutenant?” Sergeant Hroschagn had managed to approach without Teo’s notice. “I think we’ve got them.”

“So do I,” the lieutenant answered, although Teobas had no way of even guessing how he might have come to this conclusion. “The one to the south and the one to the east?”

“Yes, sir,” Hroschagn agreed.

“Need to end this, then.” Teo heard movement as the man stood. “Left, right, hold fire!” His voice was suddenly booming and crisp. “Tasher, Whoull — flares, on my mark! Left, right — stand by!” The rifle fire stopped immediately; half a minute later, the dog heard two shouts of acknowledgment from along the palisade.

“Flares! Three. Two. One. Fire!”

Eight stars burst to life from around them — tearing a brilliant path up towards the trees in a steep arc. They cast a garish yellow light along the trunks and low branches — and then Teo saw it. Pairs of eyes in the darkness, glowing pale and green in the reflection of the flares. He could see nothing of the bodies — just the eyes, suddenly revealed to them.

“Left, right, open fire!” 

As the flares reached the apex of their arc the riflemen of the platoon opened up, and Corporal Arstois’s idle boast now came back to him. More than a shot a second. From each arm — the gunfire was a quick staccato, and as if in time Teo could see the eyes vanishing even before the light of the flares died away.

Blackness again. And, when the riflemen could no longer see, silence. 

And no more arrows.

Morning, an eternity later, was scarcely more than weak moonlight, but it was better than the night had been — none of them had slept; they had barely moved. Teo’s body ached when he finally forced himself to stand, after Pembæra’s hoarse “all clear!” shout.

“Got lucky this time,” the fox said. “They weren’t serious.”

“Weren’t serious?” Dale asked. He looked more haggard than Teo had ever seen him. “You really don’t think...”

“None of us are dead.” Garda’s answer was laconic, although from what the dog could tell he was being sincere. “So, no, not serious. Probably no more than twenty or thirty of them.”

“Bloody sods took out one of the windows in the wagon...” Allen Grensmann held up his paw; it was stained with blood, from a deep cut on his palm. “Luck?”

“Luck,” Lieutenant Pembæra agreed. “I believe they were trying to scare us.”

Dale Masseler shut his eyes, and shook his head. “Well, Mr. Franklyn,” the stag trailed off in a laugh that, for the stately lord, was unmistakably miserable. “What do you say? You still want to survey ahead of the Corps?”

On occasion, Teo longed for a tail — chiefly when wagging it would’ve given emphasis to his good spirits. At other times, such as now, he was grateful that he had nothing to tuck between his legs; it would have only added to his chagrin. “No, sir.”

Garda Pembæra, who had been listening, smirked at this. “Smart. Ha — Eezensmitt!”

It was not, as it turned out, a curse; one of the soldiers strode over obediently. He strode everywhere, probably; the badger had worked his body into something lean and sinewy, but even without a badger’s bulk he was imposing. Several inches taller than Garda; as tall as Stockman, probably. Were there more light about, Teo would’ve considered himself to be in shadow. “Reporting?” South Coaster; probably, considering the way he had practically sung ‘reporting,’ a traditional one at that.

“Teach this one to shoot.”

“Er...” 

Because Garda seemed to be ignoring the dog’s noncommittal protest, so did the badger. “He needs to learn, ya? With that?”

“With that, grenadier,” Garda confirmed; both of the soldiers looked at Teo’s musket as though it was something noisome and best kept at some distance. “He reloaded it last night but forgot the primer.”

“Flintlock?”

“I’ll order new ones down on the next train.”

Mollified, the badger turned to his victim. “Hello. Grenadier Jik Eezensmitt.”

“Teobas Franklyn...” Decorum suggested a handshake, but he considered this a risk to his paw.

“Good, good. I’ll teach you to shoot, ya. Even with that piece of shit.”

He had plenty of time. After the attack, Pembæra urged more caution, and Dale Masseler did not disagree. The palisade thickened, and grew higher. Between the Iron Corps and the workmen — Stockman also had had the protest shot out of him — they assembled some rough-hewn walls and propped them up against the fortifications to create drafty lean-tos. They kept a constant watch, which meant fewer men to come forward with the scouts.

And their forward progress halved. 

Sometimes there were arrows at night; sometimes only the keening wails and mysterious shouts that made Teo’s blood run cold. There didn’t seem to be a pattern to it. The dog could not sleep — could only become unconscious, for an hour or two at a spell, before he woke up with a jolt, not knowing if he was under attack or not. He saw the same creeping madness in all their eyes. Even Dale; he watched the stag, one morning, take fifteen full minutes to attempt his porridge before giving up.

The freight train’s wagons had been replaced by a proper Iron Corps’ armored consist — and now some of them could sleep in that, when the train stayed the night, but the heavier cars could carry fewer supplies and that, too, kept them from advancing. He received a new musket, a modern example that fired with percussion caps and required less clumsy reloading — but, despite Grenadier Eezensmitt’s exhortations, Teo couldn’t help but wish he’d received something, anything else instead. 

A change of clothes. Fresh fruit. A new book to read. Transfer orders? No, he was not quite to that point — but close. 

“It wasn’t like this in the east?” he asked Kaen Wulyth. They were near the end of the morning’s surveys and taking a break that did precious little to ease the weeks of stress.

The otter shook her head. “No.”

“No attacks.”

“No. Teo,” she gritted her teeth, and held up her notebook for his investigation. 

He had to strain to read it, by torchlight, and he couldn’t see what he was supposed to be concerned about. “What?”

“Your numbers. These are impossible. If it’s two hundred feet between marker 614 and marker 615, it can’t be two hundred thirty feet between 614 and 616.”

She was right. He splayed his ears. “I’m sorry. I must’ve —”

“Made a mistake? Obviously. Ach, ellad — Teo, we’re going to have to redo all this...”

His ears drooped lower, followed by his shoulders. “I just...”

“I don’t care what you just. Fuck! Why have I been treating you like a godsdamned surveyor? You don’t even know what you’re fucking —” Kaen cut herself off, and the otter clenched her eyes shut. She took a few deep breaths. “No. I didn’t mean that.”

“It’s true,” he reassured her, rather taken aback by the outburst.

“I’m just taking it out on you,” she sighed. “Let’s just start back from 614.” He nodded, and together they trudged back to the marker. Teobas made no effort to restart the conversation; it fell to the otter to sigh again: “I don’t know what I’m doing here. Dale asked, and...”

“They say you’re the best in the division,” Teo recalled. “Dr. Grensmann told me that.”

“Grensmann? Why didn’t you ask bloody Kutsar,” she scoffed. Kutsar, goddess of the third hell, ruled over the traitors and thieves that inhabited it. Before he could reply, she went on. “Even if Dale agrees, this damned place is nothing like the plains or the Seffish Valley. And I’m going to lose my mind...”

“Two of us...”

“Why don’t you hold the staff this time, Teo?”

After his mistake, he had no room to argue. They retook the measurements — double-checked each one — and made their way to the Iron Corps soldiers assigned to escort the scouting party. It was still early enough to keep going, but the soldiers were standing around idly, and railworkers were no more animated. “Can we move to the next tree?”

“Can you?” Corporal Arstois asked.

Teo cocked his head. “Er. Ma’am?” The rabbit laughed, grabbed her torch, and beckoned him to follow. Fifty feet. A hundred. Then she stopped. And when Teo caught up, he felt his heart sink.

Emptiness yawned beneath them. A formless, ugly void: when Arstois tilted her torch downwards, no light caught the canyon floor. Faintly, he could hear running water, but there was no sign of it — and no sign of the far wall. Footsteps announced Kaen’s arrival. The otter took one look; her eyes widened.

And then she began to laugh.

“I don’t know,” Teo said to Allen Grensmann, after they returned to camp. It was the third time he had answered that way in a row. First the otter had asked how far is it across? and then he had asked how are we going to get over? and finally how is Kaen doing?, because Corporal Arstois had needed to carry Kaen Wulyth back.

“What are we going to do, then?”

“Cross it,” Dale ordered. “Find a way.”

The next day the pair unrolled their old maps of the Dalrath — which were essentially useless. There was no way to tell how deep the canyon went, nor which way the river wound through the ancient trees. Without this knowledge there was also no clear solution to their problem. Teo could not imagine trying to pour cement foundations, not with the natives shooting at them. The attacks had been growing worse — there had been close calls. 

Day by day the camp crept nearer the canyon, until it was at its edge. There was nothing to be done: no more rail could be laid, no more ditches could be dug. They settled for slowly harvesting one of the massive fallen trees, and most of the lumber went to reinforcing the palisade. By the end of a week it had gained a walkway, and a gate, and an excavated depot. Teo was no close to having a solution to offer. “Run parallel,” Dr. Grensmann suggested; it was their best idea. Another long night had come to nothing; they were talking, well past dinner, and trying to ignore the intermittent howling from outside.

“For how long?”

“I don’t know, sir,” the otter had to admit.

Dale gritted his teeth. “Guess?”

“We might have to follow the river all the way down. With luck, this is the Chirel’s Tooth.”

“That’s more than thirty miles north of Jarankyld! Gods, Allen!”

“About twenty-five, sir,” Allen corrected the despondent stag. “But we don’t know that it’s the Chirel’s Tooth. It might be one of the rivers that feeds it, or it might flow to the Low Kingdom. For all we know it might disappear underground. The early explorers claimed that the Chirel’s Tooth came from a cave...”

“Or maybe Chirel herself pulled up her robes and pissed it — I — no, Allen, I don’t mean to be cross, but... gods, we can’t be stuck here.” It was by far the closest Teo had come to seeing Dale Masseler lose his temper, and the stag recovered quickly. “What if we sent out more surveyors? Maybe it’s easier further upriver?”

“Maybe.”

Dale stood, and made his way to a cabinet. He withdrew a bottle of Wauklausian brynt, and uncorked it — staring longingly. At length he recapped it. Then removed it again. The bottle was nearly to his lips when someone pounded on the door and they all started. When opened, the door revealed Carol Titthitch, his eyes wide. “Sir —” Behind him, a bugle sounded, and Teo heard shouting. Then gunfire. By instinct he grabbed his musket.

It had finally happened.

“Two dead, two wounded.” Lieutenant Pembæra’s face was impassive, but it was impossible to ignore the anger in his eyes.

“What happened?”

“Heard a noise outside the picket. Corporal K’nErta sent a party out to investigate...”

“We reckon it was a scout,” K’nErta added. “But we only saw tracks.”

“Archers hit them when they were at the gate. Let their guard down for just one damned minute and...”

“I’m... sorry.” Teo was reminded that Dale’s line had never ranged beyond the Pale; they were unused to fighting. The Iron Corps guarded those trains only against brigands and squabbling local lords, not against anyone serious. The stag had probably never faced anything like this either.

“It’s worse than that,” K’nErta, a borderlands canine, intoned. “The weapons, sir.”

“They’re tainted, I think.” Pembæra held up one of the arrows, and Teobas could not ignore the dark red stains along the shaft. “Not an ordinary poison, either.”

“Poison?”

“Both the dead men just dropped. Might be charmed.” K’nErta growled, and in his bared teeth Teo saw a distaste of the thaumaturgic arts that was not unlike the dog’s own. “The two who survived got lucky. Those arrows were on fire, an’ if that’s luck, then...”

When they retired to the wagon again, Dale did not hesitate before taking his drink. It was a long, deep pull, and he did not sit in his chair so much as crumple. “Gods above...”

“Poor lads,” Allen frowned. His voice was very soft. “What now?”

“What else?” The stag looked at his brandy, and judged it worthy of another visit. This sip was a little more... appropriate, for a man of his status. “We keep going.”

“Keep going?” Carol’s eyes had gone wide again, or perhaps they had never stopped.

“I will not be in charge of the Railroad’s first failure, Mr. Titthitch. Since you seem confused, here’s what you’ll do. Write a dispatch to Division informing them of what has transpired. Don’t spare the gory details. Tell Ciswalth Carregan we need reinforcements. We are no longer merely a construction operation. Make it clear to him that this forest needs to be pacified, and that until we have the resources to accomplish that his bloody New Jarankyld Line runs exactly thirty-five miles south of Mirhall to a godsdamned river. So he can move the city, or he can move some warm bodies.”

“Er... yes, sir...”

“Go. Get it out on the train tomorrow. Stay in Salketh until you get an answer.” Carol swallowed nervously, nodded, and made for the door. “Wait,” Dale added. “Stay in Salketh until you get the right answer.”

“You’re certain about this?” Allen asked the director quietly, when the door was latched again. “This line?”

Dale Masseler, Fourth Baron Corwyck, looked to be on the verge of saying something very un-lordlike. “I already said I wouldn’t supervise a failure. But let’s be perfectly honest, Allen. You can’t afford for this to go wrong, either.” Allen looked away, and didn’t answer. “You can’t. So let’s be clear. You two aren’t off the hook. We need more men, and we can’t keep going until we get them — but when they arrive, you need to have a plan for getting over that canyon and in the name of every god in the Coral Valley it better not be follow a river and hope. Am I clear?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Any questions?”

“Aye, at least one,” the otter muttered.

Dale slid the brandy across the table. “Of course you can.”

They could not come up with Dale’s plan without more information, and they could not come up with more information sitting in the wagon. In the morning, Teobas explained his needs to Kaen Wulyth and then, with substantial trepidation on the dog’s part, the pair approached Lieutenant Pembæra.

Thus it was that, half an hour later, he found himself being strapped into what felt like a hundred pounds of armor. It was heavy stuff, made of iron plate sewn into stiff cloth. It pinched his elbows and, when he walked, the visor bumped constantly into the bridge of his muzzle — but at least it was something. 

The rim of the canyon was no more than a hundred feet beyond the palisade, but half the platoon was assigned to escort the pair. Every step was careful; every noise made them jump. Corporal K’nErta, who looked rather like Teo if the dog had possessed a tail and slightly less puppyish features, insisted on going first. There was no dissuading him.

They anchored a stout rope around one of the trees at the canyon’s edge, and carefully paid it out as K’nErta descended. His lamp cast a pale light on the steep walls, and Teo scribbled a few notes as best he could — the letters large and ungainly with his wrist weighed down by armor. 

Not a sheer cliff — a few handholds, here and there. No trees; only the scanty vegetation that could feed off detritus. It seemed to take forever, but at last the light stopped moving and K’nErta’s voice called up to them. Two more of his soldiers followed; then it was Teo’s turn. He took careful hold of the rope, and reminded himself at every step that three men had already managed the journey, and he ought to have been no exception.

Actually, he reflected, it was not so difficult — terrifying, but not physically challenging. The path was quite steep, and he would not have even attempted it without the rope, but as long as he kept his grasp he could make good time. K’nErta, it seemed, was merely being cautious. That was his right, after all.

At the bottom Teo found a river with narrow, stony banks. The current was not particularly swift, but the water was so cold that he dared not attempt a crossing. The rocks were unremarkable: granite, probably, or something like it. Much like anywhere else in Mirhall — just the bottom of a canyon. When had civilized eyes last seen this river? Millennia ago, probably — they were in uncharted country! He was an explorer!

The soldiers did not seem quite as enthusiastic; they glanced around nervously, rifles constantly at the ready. In the lamplight, the barrels cast long shadows — though not quite long enough to reach the far bank. Teo decided to let them be, and got to work: the stone seemed to be sturdy enough; they could probably support a bridge there. There were the materials to be considered, of course — more cement?

Another arch, perhaps.

Kaen Wulyth touched down, and she had brought one end of a surveying chain; the other was in the darkness above her. “Three hundred forty feet,” were the first words out of her mouth. 

So much for putting any supports on the canyon floor. Teo shuddered to think of the quantity of falsework they’d need. “It didn’t seem so far...”

“You came down pretty fast. See if you feel the same way when you climb back up.”

“Same strata, though, I think. The floor we’ve been walking on up there seems to be a pretty thin covering, all things considered.” The Adara had come up against granite on more than a few occasions. “Now we just need to know if it’s the same on the other side...”

“Thought about crossing?”

“Water’s freezing,” Teo told her.

It proved to be deep, too — deeper than they could reasonably judge with the tools they had on hand. “We’d have to swim across?” Corporal K’nErta asked. He, too, did not seem enthused by the prospect. “Maybe one of you two should.”

“I can’t swim,” Kaen admitted.

“What kind of otter are you?”

“I didn’t ask your opinion,” she glared at the soldier. “Did you bring some of those flares down? Fire one and see if we can make out the other side.”

They could. In the flarelight the canyon was haunted and ethereal — the bright glare glittered off the exposed granite faces, and the spindly pale plants that nestled in the walls. Damp stone cast the light back at them — and far above, the edge of the canyon cut a jagged black ribbon from the centuries-old night of the deep Dalrath.

Lacking any better options, Kaen Wulyth suggested measuring the height of a rock layer on their side of the canyon, and using its counterpart on the far wall to calibrate her rangefinder. It was an imperfect solution, but the otter’s estimate of a hundred feet didn’t seem particularly outrageous. “Twice that, maybe, at the top?”

“Maybe,” Teo nodded. He was already trying to think of how they could get across it. The expedition had not really made things simpler — only confirmed that the answer would of necessity be complex.

“Are you done here?”

“Yes, sir,” he told the corporal. “I think. Kaen?”

“What’s this?” The otter wasn’t answering him; she was on her knees, looking closely at something on the canyon floor.

It was a plant, with roots pushed into cracks in the stone. Its leaves were light, and feathery, waving in the slightest breeze, and Teo saw what had caught Kaen’s attention: he had the sense that it was glowing, somehow; that its soft pink leaves were not merely reflecting the lamplight. “Can you close your shutters for a moment?” he asked.

One by one the soldiers did, and now it was unmistakable. The plant radiated strong, white-purple light — bright enough that the shadow of Kaen’s finger beneath the leaf was easily distinguishable. When their eyes adjusted, they could see others, too. All along the canyon floor plants shone — like the gas streetlights of an Aernian city, marking the river’s path. “What is this?”

“I don’t know, ma’am,” Corporal K’nErta said. “But we’re going to open our shutters again, now.”

“Wait, corporal...” One of his colleagues carefully made their way over. In the strange light of the glowing plants, the white wolf’s fur was oddly radiant. “My sister showed me these in the caves west of Peraford,” she recalled. She reached out her finger to touch the leaf — but even as gently as she did so, the wolf jerked her paw back abruptly.

“Private?”

She turned to look at her commander. “I’m fine... it’s called Lace of Jana. Or... Demon’s Campfire, ya, because it’s warm to the touch. Siron said that they were... what did she call it? Thaumatrophic. They live off magic instead of sunlight...” It seemed to be glowing more and more strongly by the minute.

K’nErta grunted, and opened his shutter again. The light from the plant became more muted. “Fascinating, Private Barnard.”

The wolf was still staring at it, as she carefully rose and grabbed her own lamp. “I’ve just... even in the Cave of the Moons, I’ve never seen it so strong. Or so radiant...”

Teobas studied bridges, and machines, and logical principles of physics. Like most in the Iron Kingdom he was skeptical at best of magic — used as it was chiefly by savages who had not yet learned to appreciate proper engineering. The glowing plants unnerved him; he did not understand their behavior, or their provenance, and as claustrophobic as the railhead camp was he was happy to be back within the palisade once more.

Between Kaen’s notes and his own — and the commentary of a few of the soldiers, who were all keen observers — he sketched out a rough map of the canyon, and explained the challenge to Allen Grensmann: they could not expect to put down falsework unopposed, they could not expect to cure the concrete without the bridge being attacked, and they could not in any case get any workers to the far wall to begin with. They would have to start building from their own side.

Eventually, in frustration, he built a scale replica of the canyon out of clay and dirt and set to work at building physical models, using bits of lead to represent the weight of a Carregan locomotive and its freight cars. Wood was a logical choice — in any case they could come up with wooden beams of suitable length just by felling one of the trees across the river. 

But the wooden bridges he designed, supported only from the northern rim, buckled and bowed warningly, and he had no doubt that they would give way. Teo imagined the train plunging four hundred feet into the frigid waters — lost forever, an eerie gravesite memorialized by Demon’s Campfire — and discarded the idea.

“Iron?” Dale asked one morning a week after the survey, watching the hapless dog staring bleakly at the model. No reinforcements had yet arrived, but Teobas was keenly aware of the pressure on him. “Iron would be stronger, wouldn’t it?”

But still this left the problem of the bridge’s structural integrity under construction. Teo shuddered to think of the stresses naked iron girders would be forced to bear without a proper falsework supporting them. Could they build safely across to the far side? Would the metal be left permanently warped and weakened?

Wood was out. Iron was out. Steel, as if he could afford it, was probably out as well. Concrete and stone was a rank impossibility.

Two weeks of idleness — two weeks of lost progress. As much as he hated to admit it, Teo did not see an answer. They would have to double back — perhaps to the edge of the forest, perhaps to Mirhall. Maybe the original plan had made more sense. Maybe if they tried a different route, they would find the canyon less impassable — perhaps they wouldn’t need to bridge the river until they were safely beyond the woods and much closer to New Jarankyld itself.

Unless there was a possibility he had missed.

He found himself staring at the diorama one last time. Perhaps if they — perhaps if he — perhaps... no. No, he had failed, and if the New Jarankyld Line was not to fail entirely then they would need to cut their losses. They would blame the dog, of course, and maybe it was indeed his fault. Only... 

“Have you considered magic?”

Teo turned around at the voice. It came from a vixen wearing the grey uniform of the Iron Corps, although he had not seen her before. “What?” They did not generally intrude on his studies, the soldiers, and he did not relish the interruption. “What do you mean?”

“You’re trying to build a bridge, aren’t you?” Glasses, and the neat fit of her martial uniform, made the vixen look something like a professional engineer, and he couldn’t quite dismiss her despite her pronounced eastern accent, even as she asked again — “have you considered thaumaturgically reinforcing the structure?”

“No,” he said, carefully. “I don’t know magic, anyway. Nor do I know anyone who does.”

“I do. You could charm these members here, and here...” She pointed to his latest model. “Make the wood as strong as steel beams. You could use half the materials at five times the strength. Let me show you...”

She reached for the bridge and Teo, at his wit’s end, held up a paw to stop her. “I don’t need your — well — actually, who in Æmer’s name are you, anyway? Barging into my office like this? Have-you-considered-magic — gods, this is my bloody job, not yours!”

The outburst drew a laugh from his visitor, although she made no further move towards the model. “So it is. My name’s Rescat; I’m with the Iron Corps, but I have some affinity for engineering...”

“Good for you,” he grumbled. “Doesn’t give you the right to go wandering everywhere you please. ‘Affinity for engineering,’ hmph. Cheek, that.” He was willing to begrudge the Iron Corps their need to fortify everything, and to keep the railroad crew under arms, but as far as he was concerned nothing in their charter empowered them to make decisions about the construction of the line itself. “Anyway it’s my responsibility, and I need to get back to it. So you’ll be off, then. Please.”

“What’s your name?”

“What? Teobas. Mr. Franklyn.”

“Teobas,” she repeated. The vixen’s smirk was a perfect match for the mischievous glint of her eyes. Lamplight played over the lenses of her glasses, and hid those eyes intermittently — but the grin remained. “I see. Rescat is my first name. My last name is Carregan — that’s the one that gives me the right to go wandering anywhere I damned well please...”

Rescat Carregan. The name was vaguely if not immediately familiar, although he knew it from news of the Railroad, so she was doubtless someone of consequence. And had he been making more progress on the bridge; had he slept more, or eaten better, he might’ve immediately flattened his ears in deference. Instead he merely frowned. “Are you taking over the bridging work, then?”

“No. As I said, I’m just a common soldier.”

“Then you’ll be off?”

Rescat laughed. In Teo’s judgment she was probably only five years his senior, but the laugh was far older. “I like your spirit, Teobas Franklyn. Alright, alright — I’ll let you be. But you’ll do me a favor, won’t you?”

Still frowning, he worried his claws idly. “What?”

The vixen stepped past him, to the model. It was simply designed — a short span that was effectively cantilevered despite a bracing beam he had wedged between the bridge and the canyon wall. “Just think about this. What if this brace was connected directly to the midpoint of the bridge?”

“It can’t be. A beam of that length is too long. It bends.”

“If they were physically connected, yes,” the vixen agreed. Her eyes glinted playfully, and she ran one of her claws over the brace. As Teo watched, it began to glow softly — a purple light spreading through it as though it had been overgrown in Lace of Jana. When she pulled her finger from it the glow wreathed her shiny claw, and followed as she tapped against the middle of his bridge. “But if they were thaumaturgically connected, you could force this beam to bear the bridge’s weight even without adding any additional latticing. Look...”

The glow had faded, and the bridge seemed to have returned to normal. But when Rescat pressed down on the center of the bridge, he could see the brace digging in to the clay wall of the canyon just as surely as if the two pieces had been directly linked. “How did you...”

“It’s relatively simple, of course. I don’t want to do your job for you, Mr. Franklyn — you’re no doubt... superlative. Just think about it. And think about a wooden bridge-builder refusing to use iron because it came from a forge instead of a lumber mill, or a mine-worker refusing to give up his mules for a steam engine because he can’t flog it.”

It had been a good demonstration, which changed nothing of at least one underlying problem. “I don’t understand it well enough to judge.”

“Then I’ll teach you. If you want. For now, it seems I’m being chased out. Good day, Mr. Franklyn,” Rescat grinned — and slipped lightly through the wagon door.

He stared at it for a minute before turning back to the model. Was she right? Was he merely being obstinate in refusing to consider the suggestion? It was clearly not her field of expertise — latticing? But... but now that he looked at it... the dog’s head tilted, and then tilted the other way. He clicked his tongue against the roof of his muzzle. What if? What if...

Teo bounded for the door, and flung it open. “Hey! Come back! I have a question!”