He peered out of the window. Perhaps it was his imagination, but the Forest of Skund seemed to get blacker the closer they came to it. The forest was worse than the maquis. From what Moist remembered, the trees stood shoulder to shoulder. And if you thought that trees didn’t have shoulders, you hadn’t been to the Forest of Skund. It was one of those places where the magic hadn’t been cleaned out yet. And some of the old fears and fancies still hung around the place. Nobody went in there until they had to, the occasional woodcutter for a bet, perhaps. It was a dark place, staring out across the plain and biding its time. Not a place to go if you didn’t want a wizard dropping on your head. If a landscape could growl, that was the Forest of Skund.
Moist took the opportunity to look at the instrumentation in the van. There were two guards on the rota for this journey, and though the train couldn’t be driven from here, the guard could at least stop it — a fact worth knowing.
As dusk fell, the sound of Detritus’s snoring lessened from somewhere in the vicinity of badgers fighting to the death to a low rumble, which caused the rest of the van to resonate. There was a fascination in watching a chest made of stone move. Not for the first time Moist marvelled: They are stone and we are told that stone lives; and once again his thoughts harked back to Iron Girder, and, to his amazement, he stopped worrying: horses, trolls, golems, engines, well, where was the downside?
He looked around him. Apart from the sleeping Detritus the guard’s van was for once totally empty. The rest of the train’s occupants were settling down for the evening elsewhere, busy with their own affairs; Commander Vimes was making his rounds of the carriages.
Moist moved quickly, no longer able to fight the little devil inside him. After all, he reasoned, he’d waited long enough to do this, and he might not have another chance. It was still light enough. He opened the door of the guard’s van, and, gripping the side of the carriage, climbed out, kicked shut the door behind him and clambered on to the top of the train. Once there he scrambled to his feet, and then, throwing caution to the winds, Moist danced on the top of the train, leaping from carriage to carriage, listening to the train’s rhythm, moving his body to accommodate it and feeling the engine and the moods of the railway until it seemed that he could understand it. It was a benison, a gift. It was a thing that could be courted but, he expected, it wouldn’t allow too much familiarity. It enthralled him and he thought: steam is not to be taken lightly.
Once, he heard a shout of ‘Oi!’ from below and Moist was no stranger to ‘Oi!’. He leaned down and said, ‘Moist von Lipwig. I’m doing a little test.’ He could hear the ‘Oi’ voice grumbling, and let it grumble because this was what he had wanted as soon as he had seen the new Flyers.
Flushed with the thrill of the ride, Moist dropped back down into the guard’s van, still empty except for the sleeping form of Detritus. He smoothed down his hair and wiped the smuts from his face, and wandered out of the carriage, a smile on his face.
Down the length of the train the lights were going out when Commander Vimes reappeared from his latest sortie and headed for the coffee.
‘The King and his council of war are making their plans,’ he said. ‘Your latest clacks reports and what I hear from let’s call them observers on the ground suggest that work on the rails is going ahead reasonably happily.’
He looked slyly at Moist. ‘Pretty soon, it seems, Mister Lipwig, you’ll have to put your money where your mouth is. Oh, and another thing. Here’s a flimsy from your good wife. Even with the news of the Schmaltzberg coup spreading, there appear to have been very few attacks on clacks towers outside Uberwald.’
Taken aback, Moist said, ‘Well, that is good news.’
But Vimes just frowned and said, ‘Don’t get excited. I’d wager that there are still some out there who’d knock over a clacks tower even if they saw Tak on the top of it. That’s the trouble, you see. When you’ve had hatred on your tongue for such a long time, you don’t know how to spit it out.’
Moist had made sure, oh bliss, right from the start that he would have a sleeping compartment of his own, but, unlike those in the First Class sleeper carriage, his was more utilitarian and using it was an exercise suited to people who like toying with twisty cubes and other notorious playthings. It had a folding bed, which folded down and hit him on the head, and a washbasin into which his toothbrush would just about fit. But there was a sponge provided, and since he was suitably athletic he made the best of it, ending up if not clean, not any dirtier either. And gods, he was tired, and whatever it was that drove him seriously needed a rest, but the mind was its own worst enemy and the more he tried to get himself lulled by the rhythms of the railway, the more his niggling thoughts seemed to burgeon like a cloud.
They had been lucky so far — only the two grag spies to deal with, and pretty poor spies at that — but sooner or later the rat would surely be out of the bag and the grags would know that Rhys was on board. Simnel’s hope seemed to rest on the fact that they would be using Iron Girder by that time. But could she really make a difference, Simnel’s little experiment, more used to giving children rides around the yard? I’m sure that when that locomotive of Simnel’s first arrived, Moist thought, it was pretty small and I wondered how it could go the distance, even to Sto Lat. But now she seems so powerful. And the way Simnel keeps upgrading her and paying her attention, it’s as if something bad would happen if she wasn’t the queen of the yard. She never sleeps. There’s always that little hiss. That little tinkle of metal. Mechanical susurration, whether or not she is ostensibly running.
Moist thought about whoever it was who had got into the compound to smash her up, who ended up dead, dead, dead. Wild steam from a train that wasn’t running. Earth, fire, wind and rain all in one element of speed. And slowly Moist shut down, although a part of him was always listening to the rhythm of the rails, listening in his sleep, like a sailor listening to the sounds of the sea.
As Moist slept, the train barrelled like a very slow meteor through the night, climbing up through the Carrack Mountains. Almost the only light to be seen with the moon under a cloud came from the engine’s headlamp and the glow from the furnace when the door was opened to shovel in more coal.
The engine stokers of the Hygienic Railway were a breed apart: taciturn, perennially grumpy, seemingly only willing to talk to the drivers. In the unwritten hierarchy of the footplate the drivers were at the top, of course, and then the stokers and after the stokers there would be the wheel-tappers and shunters: lesser beings but acknowledged as useful. At times it appeared that the stokers considered themselves the most important component of the railway, keepers of its soul, as it were. When off duty they all messed together, grumbling, puffing their wretched pipes, and talking to nobody else. But shovelling coal all day built muscles of iron, so the stokers were strong and fit, and sometimes between shifts there were sparring matches with shovels, with the combatants cheered on by their fellows.
In fact, one of the stokers on the train was a bit of a legend, according to the others, although Moist had not come across him yet. Stoker Blake was said to be death on legs if he was aroused. The other stokers were fierce fighters, but it was claimed that none of them ever got to touch Stoker Blake. A stoker’s shovel, incorrectly used, was an illustration of Commander Vimes’s dictum that a workman’s tool used cunningly could give the average watchman a real headache.