As soon as the train arrived at platform two at Big Cabbage several watchmen appeared alongside the guard’s van. Moist looked on as Commander Vimes passed out the captives he had been so awfully kind to, and watched them whisked away under guard in the hurry-up wagon.
As it disappeared, Vimes said to Moist, ‘We have the names and addresses of their families and they’ll have bodyguards day and night until this damn thing is over. I know Vetinari will huff and puff about the bill but then whenever doesn’t he?’
Right on schedule, the train pulled away from Big Cabbage, leaving the great dirty distant smog of Ankh-Morpork on the horizon far behind them. Moist had a constant feeling that he was going slightly uphill, which was at least moderately the truth. Things were running as they should, people were settling down for the long haul, and that gave him more time to think. Theoretically, he knew the time to worry was when things were going wrong, but his instinct had a tendency to worry when things were just too good to be true and right now a cumulonimbus of worry was again building over his head; the anvil of the gods was just waiting to drop on him. What had he missed? What had he forgotten? No, everything was going to be all right.
There was a bridge ahead, with the usual troll on guard. The troll railway families treated the bridges, shiny and new as they were, as their own. Oh yes, a tunnel to a troll was a delightful walk in the park, but a bridge, your own bridge … especially one with toilet facilities, courtesy of Harry King, and enough space to raise a family … Trolls, thought Moist … Who would have thought it, they keep their bridges sparkling. Indeed, Effie had announced a best-kept bridge contest for the troll bridges throughout the length of the Ankh-Morpork railway, with no fewer than twenty goats for the winner.
To travel by the railway was to see the world changing, as trees, houses, farms, meadows, streams, townships that Moist had never heard of before the railway and barely recalled now — like that one there, Much Come Lately according to the sign — whizzed past at railway speed. But who lived there and what did they do, Moist wondered?
The hamlets of the railway workers intrigued Moist. The wives, noticing that passengers got out of the train at the frequent stops for coal and water and showing a grasp of the mercantile world Lord Vetinari would have applauded, stood ready with clotted cream teas, home-made pies, hot and excellent coffee, and on one memorable occasion a small piglet.
But even this was eclipsed by the wheeze he’d encountered a month back, in the hinterland in deepest Twoshirts, considered by Ankh-Morpork the place that was nowhere. A simple slogan had been put up by two industrious ladies that said, ‘We knit nighties for railway sleepers!’. The ladies, knitting away while their husbands were walking the tracks, were building up a small fortune from all those passengers who, like Moist, had laughed and dug deep into their pockets. He loved the fact that if you got your customer laughing then you had their money in your pocket.
There was another sign coming up now and he squinted to see the name on the board and — whoosh — he saw they were at Monks Deveril, or had been, since alas the speed of the train had shunted it into the past and — whoosh — here came — whoosh — Upper Feltwhistle, apparently. But the ever-moving train had passed on and he hungered for sight of the Lower Feltwhistle sign but the train sped past, sending the unexplored townships into oblivion. Strange-sounding places with strange-sounding names living in the moment of the triumphant train.
With a clatter another train passed them on the up line, but where from? And going where? Moist gave up. Too much travelling on the railway could turn you into a philosopher, although, he conceded, not a very good one.
There was another coal and water stop at Seven Bangs. The name meant nothing to Moist and even Vimes shook his head. It was one of those places where people got off the train and disappeared into the hinterland and, presumably, only the tax inspectors and the Post Office knew who lived where. And by the look of Seven Bangs, the tax inspectors would probably take a day off sick rather than go there and possibly the postman, too, if he had bad news to convey, such as overdue tax demands. But nevertheless, the people of Seven Bangs had been joined by four linesmen, with their houses and their families, all cosily close to the line.
Moist chatted with the man who operated the water crane and asked, ‘Do you have any trouble sleeping up here with trains going past all the time?’
‘Well, bless you, sir, but no, sir, not at all. Oh, it took a little time for us to get acclimatized,’ and he giggled like a man using an unusual word for the first time and finding it funny. ‘My wife sleeps like a baby and the only time she woke up was last week when the Flyer couldn’t get through, and she swears that the silence in the wrong place unsettled her.’
Vimes never seemed to leave the guard’s van, except for occasional journeys down the train to talk to the King and his bodyguards, and it was into the guard’s van that the clacks flimsies were delivered.
There were always goblins in the guard’s van, of course, but it didn’t stop at that. You found them everywhere, adjusting screws, oiling, greasing and, well, tinkering and tapping. Moist had asked Simnel about that early on and had been told they greased everything that needed greasing and tapped what needed tapping, and generally stopped things getting out of kilter.
Of course, there was still the smell, but once you got used to it, as Adora Belle had long ago, you never even thought about it. And they ran errands when the train stopped at out-of-the-way places, and collected clacks flimsies for news of everything that might pertain to the journey.
The good old clacks, people called it nowadays. They used to call it unsightly, but now, quite likely, you would ask the clacks what the weather was like ahead of your journey. A little comfort but not necessarily necessary. Nevertheless, once you were bereft of the clacks you thought of yourself as a second-class citizen. Spike was always telling him how enraged clients got about their clacks bills, which were, he considered, not bad in the circumstances; but a kind of ratchet formed in people’s minds: here is the new thing and here it is. And yesterday you never thought about it and after today you don’t know what you would do without it. That was what the technology was doing. It was your slave but, in a sense, it might be the other way round.
After the excitement of the water crane, Moist was at a loose end and now, by habit, if he felt himself at a loose end he went to the guard’s van. Detritus lay asleep on a pile of packing cases near by, snoring, surrounded by all the necessary debris of the place. It seemed that all the travellers who were not passengers treated the guard’s van as their home. Possibly the coffee maker was the reason for that. And here was Of the Twilight the Darkness, who made very special coffee. Moist thought about that for a moment, as the grinning goblin handed him a bubbling mug.
‘I’ve got it. You’re a shaman, aren’t you?’
The goblin’s grin was wider. ‘Sorry, mister. You is not on the money here. You could call me a shamegog. Unfortunately, dissonance, but can’t have everything.’
Moist looked into his coffee and said, ‘It smells lovely, but what’ll it make me do?’
The shamegog thought for a moment and said, ‘It make you wide awake, busy man! Maybe puts hair on chest. Slight tendency to make you piss more often.’ Now he gave Moist a sideways look that really only a goblin can achieve and said, ‘Guaranteed not to make you killer of dwarfs.’ It was really very good coffee. Moist had to give the goblin that.