The Dragon, the Witch, and the Railroad

by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough

  Disappointed, she looked back down the length of the train. There were only the two passenger cars hitched to the engine now—the saloon car and the sleeper car. The rest of the train consisted of freight cars and boxcars. The door to one was partially open and she thought she heard voices coming from it. One said, “Fly?” and the other said, “Shhh.” Maybe a couple of railroad personnel were talking on the other side of the tracks, behind the train. But, no, that open door was tempting. Not as tempting as watching train dragons feed but still… she was curious. Her foot was poised to step down from the platform when Ephemera grabbed her elbow. “The porter says the food here is quite good. Let’s go see.”

  “I was just…”

  “Yes, I see. You were about to step off into the drift beside the tracks. It’s not a very good idea. I suspect the drift along the embankment here is quite deep.”

  And she was firmly turned back toward the station.

  It consisted of nothing more than a small room with long benches against the walls and a booth for a ticket seller. A table in the middle of the floor was spread with bread, cheese, dried fruit, and roast potatoes on a stick. One woman was doing a brisk business in jams, jellies, and pickled almost everything.

  “Boooard,” the conductor cried, “Allll aboard.”

  Grabbing a last loaf of bread and a jar of jam, Ephemera herded Verity back to the train.

  The sun was setting, and Ephemera said she was going to have a proper sleep in their compartment. The extra blankets and sheepskins she had brought from Wormroost Castle were duly fetched from the baggage compartment and piled onto the two bunks within.

  Verity lingered in the main saloon by the fire for a short time, warming her hands and hoping the conductor might show up for another chat, but he did not so, disappointed, she joined her aunt in the cold sleeping compartment and rather to her surprise was soon rocked to sleep by the swaying train.

  The next morning the train pulled into Velasco Station, and with great bustle and racket, freight cars were detached and different freight cars loaded with Brazorian exports bound for Drague were attached in their stead. Steward service and chamber pots were added to the sleeper car containing Verity and Ephemera’s compartment, which was hooked to the new luxury sleeping car. A dining car was added as well, and on the way to the border with Glassovia, they enjoyed a lovely hot luncheon served on a lace tablecloth with nice china and proper silverware. They were now the only ladies aboard the train, but the new gentlemen passengers all seemed to be men of business, who paid them scant attention.

  Verity wished someone would strike up a conversation. With Ephemera engrossed in the shells, she was either left to verify shells herself, which often gave her a headache, or found herself grieving for her father, re-living the accident as she had not had much time to do since the funeral. She worried about Toby and Taz. She looked forward to maybe seeing her mother again, but wondered if she would know her. She wished Uncle Nic had come himself to reacquaint them, but of course he was very busy.

  Underlying all of that was a constant, steady mumbling, she knew she would be able to understand if only there were not so many other noises. All of these concerns were submerged during conversation, but on the long trip to Glassovia, she strung herself a necklace of some of the instructive cowrie shells she’d brought to listen to and in the center placed her mother’s bead. Unfortunately, that occupied only a few minutes.

  Ephemera took her shells from her ears and gave Verity a sympathetic smile. “Businessmen are not the best traveling companions. I much prefer soldiers and adventurers, farmers and midwives. Their stories involve more people and fewer financial transactions, though I’m sure the soldiers, adventurers, farmers, and midwives probably wish they had more financial transactions to discuss.”

  “Too bad,” Verity said. There was no real untruth in this since, it was Ephemera’s opinion, but Verity’s father was a businessman, apparently a good one—and he had plenty of good stories and had taught her a great many things that had nothing to do with money. In fact, she had begun to wish, faced with the plotting of her stepmother, that he had taught her more about it. So maybe the people who loved some of these men felt the same. “Perhaps once they relax into the journey they’ll be more inclined to reveal better stories.”

  Ephemera smiled. “Perhaps.”

  Briciu

  The station at the border of Brazoria and Glassovia was little more than a whistle-stop. No one got on or off of their train, but passengers were waiting for the westbound. Both Verity and Ephemera waved gaily to those on the platform, who were well-wrapped up against the bright, freezing day. As the train pulled out of the station, however, one figure turned to stare after them. Sandwiched between the fur trimmed hood of a heavy coat and above the dun-colored scarf wrapped around his neck, Verity was startled to see a face that looked remarkably like Briciu’s.

  Someone else spotted Briciu, too.

  “That’s him, Taz,” Toby told the dragon, pointing. “He’s the one who was at the balloon hangar the day Mr. Brown was killed. What’s he doing here? I think we’d best see.”

  They jumped off the eastbound and hid until the westbound came to the stop. Toby watched Briciu board, and he and Taz chose another freight car. This one was filled with goods from Drague however, bound for Velasco Station. The car smelled of spices, and Taz sneezed.

  Velasco station was large and complicated. There were several tracks and diagonal tracks for switching from one to the other.

  The man Toby suspected of sabotaging his balloon detrained and Toby, with Taz meekly following behind like a dragon being led to work, shadowed him.

  To Toby’s surprise, his former boss Malachy Hide met the saboteur at the train, along with another prosperous looking gentleman. Hide embraced the saboteur, who then shook hands with the other man. Much as Toby wanted to hear their conversation, he felt trying to shadow someone with a dragon in tow would be cumbersome. He was relieved when instead of heading into town, as he expected, the saboteur and the rich man boarded another train. According to the board outside the ticket office, trains ran quite regularly between Velasco and Drague.

  Toby and Taz, using the trains on either side of the one the villain was riding for cover, found themselves another empty freight car and climbed aboard.

  Chapter 19

  Dragon Train (Eastbound)

  Brazoria, full of moors, tarns, rolling foothills, and meandering rivers, folded into the massive conical, glacier-laced peaks of the Crystal Mountains as the train bored into Glassovia. The higher they climbed, the harder it snowed. To the right of the train was a thick evergreen forest, to the left, all Verity could see for miles was a wall-like hillside.

  Five hours after they left the border station, it happened.

  The train chuffed and chugged, laboring up the slope toward a summit, and all the while the snow flocked the trees and covered the ground.

  Verity and Ephemera had retired to their compartment to nap until things got more interesting. Which they did, without warning.

  Suddenly the train hissed, the brakes screeching as if someone had dropped a silverware drawer into a suit of armor. The car lurched and the hand luggage tumbled down on top of their heads as the locomotive juddered to a screeching stop.

  An instant later, they heard a loud boom, as if a giant’s fist had slammed down on the roof of the train, shaking it on its tracks. A wall of snow slid down the slope, piling up against windows on the left side of the coach.

  Ephemera surprised Verity by rolling off the bench onto the floor like a large brown hedgehog and then crawling under it. “Avalanche,” she said.

  “Can you hide from them under the seat?” Verity asked.

  “There’d be an air pocket under the seat in case we get buried,” Ephemera told her.

  Verity heard the dragons quite distinctly, exceptionally clearly considering the car she and Ephemera rode in was closest to the back of the train. She pushed open the window on the right hand, fo
rest side of the compartment and leaned out as far as possible to try to see through the billows of steam blowing back from the engine. “The front of the train seems to be buried in snow,” she reported to her aunt. “It looks as if it’s gone into a tunnel.”

  Aunt Ephemera, apparently reassured that they were not going to be completely buried any time soon, pulled herself from under the bench to sit on it again and peer out the window as well.

  “So it does,” she agreed. “Shut that window. We may be stuck here a good long while. We’ll lose all the heat soon enough without giving the cold an engraved invitation.”

  Verity complied but said, “I want to go see. From what I’ve heard, this situation should prove educational. Besides,” she admitted as her right eyebrow zinged her. “It’s rather exciting.”

  “No rush, I should think. It will take them hours to dig us out.”

  But Verity was determined to enjoy whatever diversion presented itself on the journey. “They have the dragons do the digging when this sort of thing happens,” she told her aunt. “I want to see that.”

  “It’s not as if you’ve never seen a dragon before, Verity,” Aunt Ephemera said, sounding exasperated.

  “Yes, but there are two of the big ones firing the engine on this train. They are bright blue and teal green and their names are Kamari and Tatsuo. The conductor told me all about them and I want to see them in action.”

  “Dress warmly,” Ephemera said, and buttoned her coat, pulled on her gloves, put her shells in her ears and wrapped a scarf around them and her head, then pulled the hood of her coat up over everything, leaned back and closed her eyes.

  Verity pulled on her woolen snow pants, and fluffed her traveling skirt over them. She pulled the coat’s wolverine-trimmed hood up over her hair, forcing it forward and into her face. She completed her outfit with the thick fleece lined gloves from Isabelle, and sturdy waterproofed leather boots under which were two pairs of heavy socks, both knitted by Aunt Ephemera and presented to her shortly after her arrival at Wormroost.

  Shutting the compartment door behind her, she headed for the exit along with the crew and a few of the male passengers who had boarded at the Velasco station.

  “Extra shovels?” an elderly gentleman, squat, barrel-chested, and rough looking in spite of his fine clothes, asked the conductor.

  “Oh no, sir. No need, sir,” the conductor said. “Though it’s very good of you to offer, sir.”

  “Nonsense, man. I own eight mines. I know a thing or two about digging, I assure you.”

  The conductor backed off as the other passengers intent on de-training pushed past him. “That’s as may be, sir, but they’re unhitching the dragons now. They’ll have it cleared in a jiffy.”

  The men blocked the door and Verity feared that by the time they reached the front of the train, they would form a wall in front of her so that she wouldn’t be able to see properly. So she elbowed her way through them and leaped from the train, landing in the waist deep snow beside the track. She struggled to her feet without assistance as they climbed down without a glance at her.

  The engine had been nearing the top of the slope when the avalanche fell, and her car was at the back, down the hill on the tail of the train. Between the four cars that accommodated passengers were the freight cars, the box cars, and the flat cars, carrying goods to Drague. She hoped there were no animals in any of the cars.

  The men climbed the slope, hugging the side of the train as closely as possible and she trudged behind them, now content to let them blaze the trail to the front of the locomotive. She kept trying to see around or over them, afraid she wouldn’t know when they got near enough to watch the dragons in action.

  She looked around, leaning back to look up the slope, trying to get her bearings. The sun still teetered on the top of the tallest mountains, but it was a snowball of a sun in the dove gray sky.

  The Iron Dragon, the popular press called the train. Fortunate that it had been heading uphill when the avalanche occurred. Roaring down the mountain, it might have been unable to stop before it plowed into the ice and rock already clogging the track.

  The man in front of her deliberately pushed her back.

  “Best not get too close, Girly,” said the mine owner, the one who’d demanded a shovel. “Dangerous beasts, these railway dragons.”

  “I know that,” she told him. She could see over the heads of all but one of the men. The conductor hadn’t made the dragons sound dangerous at all. He considered them noble, and she wanted to see them.

  She did, quite soon.

  Great iron doors on the sides of the locomotive’s cab slid back against the car behind where the dragons were kept. The top of the car stood even higher than the smokestack. Chains clanked, men gave orders in the same kind of voices they’d use to talk to dogs or horses, and on her side of the train, a disappointingly sooty looking lizard-like beast with a spiked back and head, rather like a spiny mane, uncoiled and uncoiled and uncoiled itself from within the car. It looked neither blue nor teal and she couldn’t tell if it was Kamari or Tatsuo.

  “They’ll be having to release the tail restraints before it can come out, you see, Miss,” the fellow on her right said. He was standing knee deep in snow so she could have the shallow bit on the track. That was the sort of courtesy she appreciated.

  “Tail restraints?” she asked.

  “Oh yes. The Firemen keep the dragons’ tails suspended from the ceiling by slings and pulleys. It’s for safety’s sake, the same reason they keep the wings pinned to their bodies. You can’t have tails and wings lashing about in the tender. One blow of that tail could kill a man. And if the wings flapped about, well, the best thing that might happen is they’d get broken.”

  She thanked him, watching the animal stalk forward, led by one of the dragon wranglers, apparently called Firemen on trains. All of the modern conveyances that used dragons had a dragon wrangler to see that they did their duties correctly. If they didn’t—well, like poor Toby, they were held responsible and some had been hanged for surviving accidents that killed their passengers.

  The train’s wrangler—Fireman—pointed the sooty dragon in the right direction and gave a command. The beast let forth a gout of fire that, though expected, was shocking in its brightness and intensity.

  Snow cascaded over the boulders and the tracks as far ahead as she could see, but after a similar tongue of fire erupted from the other side of the engine, the snow was cleared.

  The Fireman gave another command and the dragon awkwardly made a three-quarter turn, undulating its tail as it did so, as if to flex it. With the next command the beast thrashed the tail back behind itself and lashed it, smashing boulders so hard some of them hurtled off the tracks and down into the valley below.

  A splinter of flying rock grazed her hood and she cried out in surprise, though she was not injured.

  “That’s why ladies should stay inside where they’ll be safe,” growled the little mine owner, brandishing his shovel.

  But she was not about to go back inside. So far this leg of the journey had been without novelty. Now that something noteworthy was happening, she had no intention of missing it.

  “Look at them go!” the man on her right said, nodding toward the beasts. Now only their feet and tails could be seen beneath the steam from the train and the vaporized snow, “In a horse drawn wagon, we’d have been killed…”

  “In a horse drawn wagon, we all wouldn’t have fit,” she pointed out.

  “I mean to say that in a similar situation, it would take days to clear the road, and with the help of the dragons, it is very fast and efficient.”

  The steam cleared while the dragons and their wrangler climbed over the smashed rocks to reach the part of the track that was still blocked.

  “It looks as if the tracks are blocked for half a mile at least!” she remarked to the man on the right.

  The dragons lowered their heads and were immediately obscured once more by the steam from their own fie
ry breath meeting the snow.

  “Are you lot going to help out or just stand about gawking?” the mine owner demanded. “The dragons will only get the big stuff. We need to clear the tracks of the smaller rubble. Train can’t run on all those rocks.” The men hurried forward and were swallowed by the steam. Metal shovel clunked against rock and soon small stones clattered over the side of the tracks to disappear into the snow below.

  The dragons grunted between gouts of flame and grumbled to each other. Verity felt as if the hissing of steaming snow, the clatter and rumble of rocks, and the clang of shovels were not so loud, she might be able to hear actual words, though she couldn’t have said so to anyone she knew in Queenston. No one was supposed to be able to understand beasts. That would be magic. But on the other hand, it couldn’t be a complete lie or she wouldn’t have thought it in the first place. Perhaps it was simply the kinship she felt for the historical dragons she’d read about in the Archives, ones her forbears had once befriended, notably the dragons Grimley, Grizel, and Grippeldice. They had been the earliest draconic friends of the Kingdom, back when it was a kingdom instead of a—whatever it had become.

  Sometime during the clearing of the tracks, the sun had disappeared behind the mountains and flakes pelted her in the face, enough ice in them to sting. Tracks, steam, and snowfall blended into a solid wall of white.