fades. I cannot quite express it in words. I might try to sketch its machinery, as I have sketched in these pages the neuron, the cerebellum, the pituitary gland—but to do so, I think, would miss its essence. I can say that it was long, very long; it was four, five men tall. It was jet-black and it smoked. It was plated with extrusions and grilles and thorns of iron that might have been armor, and might have been machinery, but which in any case made it rough, uneven, asymmetrical, and hideous. It reminded me somewhat of the ink-blot tests devised by Professor Kohler. It reminded me also somewhat of storm-clouds. From the complex cowling at the very front of the engine two lights shone through the gloom and the smoke of the Concourse. The light was the gray of moths’ wings or dirty old ice.
The carriages behind the Engine stretched out into the distance until the smoke and shadows of the Concourse swallowed them. I could not count them. A mile or more of carriages. Each journey of this thing carries the population of the town of Lodenstein back and forth across the continent. This world is mobile.
And the Gloriana Engine itself is more than a century old. It features prominently in a number of ancient battles recounted in Mr. General Enver’s Child’s History. Its physical form was destroyed once, by the forces of its adversary, in 1800 or thereabouts. It returned. The black coal dust that gathers in its upswept corners, that I breathe in as I write this, is ancient dust. For all that time this machine has run in its tracks, back and forth, across the countless miles. What is my own journey in comparison?
The lights went dim. The seats stretched with a groan of rust out into bunks. Liv closed her journal. The lights went out. In the darkness the Linesmen’s black boots clanked through the corridors. So many of them! And all so much the same. Massing for war, or business, or some mysterious and complex project. She’d overheard them talking in the corridor outside; many of them would be disgorged at Ravenbrook, birthed back into the solid and sunlit world . . .
Morning light streamed in through the cracks of the blind, making visible all the cabin’s dust and dark slow-settling soot.
Liv pulled back the blind. They were racing across white salt flats that gleamed like a mirror; running like a black line across new paper; smoke tumbling from them like spilled ink.
Mountains in the distance again. So much distance. Habitations and cultivation became fewer and fewer as they went west—the world becoming crude, wild, unnamed, only half-made—closer and closer to that nameless Western Sea where, they said, unformed land became fog and wild water and fire and night. . . .
The world blurred, and a sudden and surprising mood of exhilaration seized her. Koenigswald and the Academy and her old life were ten thousand miles behind her, and the world was a blur, the world was a dream, the world was unmade. Anything was possible. Wasn’t this what she’d come here for? She could hardly wait to step out into the world again and begin to remake it.
She noticed a shanty town out on the salt-flats. Little black dots of shacks—were those laborers bent double in salt-traps?—rushed up close and vanished at once behind. Perhaps the Engine had obliterated it with the boom of its passing, Liv thought. She let the blind fall again; the glare hurt her eyes. She blinked in the dark of the cabin, but the bright crude shapes of the world outside were burned into her vision.
Within the hour they’d left the salt-flats far behind.
It never stopped; there was never a chance to deboard and breathe fresh air. Liv’s mood of exhilaration came and went. She stepped out into the corridor sometimes, but the Linesmen who worked there looked at her with such annoyance and distaste that she soon retreated. Her legs and her back were stiff with disuse. No wonder the men of the Line were so stooped.
On the third night, someone came to her—she woke to a bright light in her face. She’d been dreaming she was before a blazing fire. She blinked slowly and in the glare, she could make out the vague shape of a man in black. He sat on the bunk opposite, leaning forward. He wore round reflective spectacles, a broad-brimmed hat; all else was dark. Maggfrid was asleep, slumped in shadows,