The Murder of Engine-Tender Hull and <i>Darling Heavy</i> by the Coward Elbor Rail

The Murder of Engine-Tender Hull and Darling Heavy by the Coward Elbor Rail 17 MINUTE READ

“What is this?” Anson asked when the yard runner handed him a battered envelope at ten minutes past midnight. “Summons? Is the Barred Darter rolling?”

“No, Mr. Hull,” the kid squeaked. He turned the envelope over to show Anson its unbroken seal. He was a new runner, then. “Don’t know, sir. But the Darter’s cold at the mo’, and it’s the Darling Heavy that’s come in, already loaded an’ all.”

Anson took the envelope and tore it open, for all the good it’d do him. Possibly he could rouse one of the apprentice stewards upstairs in his tenement or try to catch the Signaller Lev Morris before he clocked out, if the message was too complex for him to puzzle out on his own. But the paper within was finer than any he’d ever handled before, stamped and signed, and he knew most of the words on it. “Promotion” and “engineer” and “priority transit” and “war.”

The boy who’d brought it, proving he would one day be a true runner, stood on tiptoe to read the letter over Anson’s broad shoulder. “Oh! Congratulations, Mr. Hull! Or, Engineer Hull, yeah? Long time coming!”

“It’s only cos they’re putting me on the Heavy,” Anson groused. But he couldn’t help being a little pleased. “Right, let me jump in my boots. Run back and tell them I’m coming—” He shouted his last words, as the boy was already wheeling around to run off. “—and slower on the water! Heavy’s already got expansion damage!”

The runner gave a brusque nod and then clattered down the steps to the tenement door at full-tilt. Between the boy and his shouting, Anson would owe his neighbors plenty of apologies when he got off shift tomorrow.

Within a brisk walk the relative quiet of worker’s housing at night gave way to the constant noise and activity of the Lower Norhaven Railyard. Sure enough, the Barred Darter was still at the freight terminal awaiting the rest of her very delayed load, the Wayward Mare on a siding in the maintenance yard, and the Darling Heavy smoking and hissing in the departure yard, waiting on her driver. Their actual names glittered on their sides, engraved in silver; Signaller Morris had read them to him, once, out of the master engine census: Beryllitic Driver II and Water-Malachitinous Driver IV and Diamantine-Hematitic Driver I. Patent names for machines working men had to know and call to others. So in leaden paint engineers in the early days had rechristened them, and adorned them with pictographs for those who didn’t have their letters. Darling Heavy’s buxom beauty gazed down at Anson benevolently as he started brake checks.

“Tender Hull, what d’you think you’re doing?” barked a voice at his back.

Anson didn’t bother looking up. He fished in the pockets of his trousers and then held his folded letter up like a signal flag.

“I’m sorry— Engineer Hull, was it?”

Anson did look up then, to catch the tail end of Lev Morris’ idea of an extravagant bow.

“You’re fired,” Anson said.

“You’re Engineer, not Railmaster, so jog on,” Lev answered cheerfully. He snatched the letter from Anson’s hand, adjusted his spectacles, and angled the paper to catch some of the amber glow of the railyard lamps. “‘Dear Mr. Hull, the Elbor Rail Company, in conjunction with Blakely General, is pleased to offer you field promotion’—”

“What am I, a pikeman?” Anson grumbled as he moved on to inspecting the couplers.

“—‘field promotion to the rank of Engineer after seven years of service and apprenticeship to an Engineer as Engine-Tender, as well as preceding years of service and training totalling 15 years continuous employment, contingent on the completion of priority transit of crucial materiel onboard the Diamantine-Hematitic I. The train is expected at Loxodon Railyard by nightfall to ensure vital supplies for the war effort are received timely’–”

“That’s an eleven hour run,” Anson noted. He stood and looked around. “Who’s my Tender? We’ll have to talk shifts.”

Lev refolded the envelope, lips thinning to a bloodless line. “About that–”

“Ans, you motherless bastard, who’d you finally tup to get the big job?” called another voice, who materialized out of the night’s dim as Tender Jonas Fargrove. He was the only man in Norhaven near as old as Anson and still tending, proud of the way his mustache was coming in, if not the rest of his beard. He smacked a big, wet kiss on Anson’s forehead, slapped his back, and said, “Whoever it was, you didn’t delight–” He looked to Lev. “–has he seen the cab?”

“We were just getting to that,” Lev muttered.

Before any more chatter could happen on the subject, Anson hauled himself up onto the engine step and threw the latch to open the cab door. He immediately started swearing.

Inside was the familiar layout of a cab. The levers and valves that were the Engineer’s purview on the left, the firebox the Tender managed on the right. Tools hung in their usual places, the wooden floorboards were blackened from long service, the coal replaced with a clamp and hose rig loaded with six canisters of oil– Anson was furious enough to see that. But where a Tender should stand, where Anson had stood for seven years now aboard various trains, was a stinging insult. A Tender-Automata was riveted in place, six arms equipped with tools curled in preparation for service. It looked to Anson as he opened the door, the lenses of its eyes brightly-lit by the arcane glow of the sigils around the firedoor.

“No, no sodding way,” Anson spat. He let the door slide to with a slam and jumped down, boots crunching in the yard gravel. “Is the boss on or am I getting him up? Heavy’s too sodding old for automata and I’m not working with one besides!”

“Mate, listen–” Jonas started.

Anson ignored him, jabbing a finger back at the engine as he stomped towards the railyard office. “That’s oil in there! They want me to run full steam for eleven hours, no relief, managing leviathan oil instead of coke, and with a clanker to tend the engine! Can it even sing?”

“I think it whistles?” Lev offered, scrambling to keep pace with Anson.

“Mate!” Jonas tried again. He came around Anson at a run and stopped him with a coal-blackened hand on his chest. “No one likes it, Ans, but listen– all us Tenders on-shift got a note too. Nobody can ride with you and have a job tomorrow.”

Anson slowed. “What are you saying?”

Lev grimaced at his side. “It’s true. Even the Watermen got word. This is… well, it’s what the companies want. You, alone.”

Anson finally stopped. With Darling Heavy rumbling at his back, he looked into his friends’ faces and assembled the truth of the situation.

“They’re promoting me,” he surmised, “on condition of working a shift I’ve been railing against, with volatile fuel I’ve been pushing for changes on handling, with an automata as Tender, to prove we can– they can be replaced.”

“That’s about the size of it,” Lev agreed.

Jonas shook his head and turned his hold on Anson into a half-hug. “It’s drakeshit, mate, we all know it, but listen, I’ve got a cousin in the machine shop on Fulton and–”

“Fifteen years, Jo,” Anson cut in. “I’m not taking a different trade!” He buried his face in his hands. “But I can’t do this run, I’d be the worst kind of hypocrite…”

“Jonas,” Lev said, quietly. “Give us a minute, yeah? Let me talk to him.”

“Drakeshit,” Jonas offered again, along with another backslap, but he did head back towards the work going on around the Mare.

“You’re doing this run,” Lev said. When Anson started to protest he shushed him. “Listen to me: you’re doing this run. There isn’t a train man from here to bloody Sceller who doesn’t know who you are. Where you stand. The companies can do as they like, but they can’t undo near ten years of fighting ‘em.”

He dug in the front pocket of his dungarees, retrieving something about the size of his palm and pressing it into Anson’s hands.

“Promotion present, call it,” Lev murmured. “I just got them back from the lad at the printer’s. It’s all there. I didn’t short you a word.”

Anson opened his hands and looked down. He held a pocket-sized pamphlet printed with a title even he could parse. STORIES FROM THE RAILS, and below that, just a bit smaller, A WORKER’S REAL WORDS ABOUT THE WORK. He flipped through mostly to admire the marvel of printing, the neat, cramped blocks of text he trusted Lev’s word to be the speeches he’d given at various events, talks he’d had with the other men between loading freight. There were even little insets, what looked like the hand-drawn illustrations of Lev’s daughter, Dina, to put some pictures to the complex thoughts.

“If you like, I’ll slip a crate on with the muskets,” Lev continued, giving Anson a bracing shake, “you’ll do this run, and race the sun to Loxodon, and by the time you’re accepting your cap and jacket, every man in the railyard will have some light reading to get him thinking about the union cards again.”

Anson’s throat tightened. “Lev, you…”

“Heavy’s old, but she loves you. She’ll look after you even with that clockhead shaking up the oil,” the Signaller said, “and when you come back, well, shite! You’ll have even better stories about how pear-shaped every part of this job was. They don’t understand that this makes your words even stronger.”

Lev’s faith in him carried Anson through the rest of his preparations, even when sudden nerves tried to convince him that he needed more time before he was in charge of any lever or gauge of consequence on the left side of the cab. It carried him through a cursory check of the meager three freight cars coupled to the engine; his box of pamphlets was loaded up next to barrels of black powder and longer crates of muskets and blades. It carried him till he settled into the engineer’s seat, where Heavy took over.

He felt her hum through lighting the front lantern, through releasing the brake and opening the regulator, and with a preparatory air when he reached for the calling cord to signal forward movement. She breathed in the magic of the world, and breathed out pure white steam. The automata on his right hung silent and motionless. The firebox was plenty hot, the water gauge read just fine, and the sigils were a content blue. Anson could almost pretend it wasn’t there.

He pulled her cord, and Darling Heavy sang out the joy of travel in a rich contralto, voice ringing through the railyard in spite of the automata and her one-man crew and the lateness of the hour. In spite of all the wrongness, Anson, too, felt that joy.

They made it almost to Middelington before they were murdered.

The problem really was the length of the journey without relief. Given his druthers, Anson would’ve routed them through Bardale, timeliness be damned. It wasn’t as though they were calling the war off tomorrow. They would’ve put in for fresh water, swapped oil for coke, and hogged the entire automata assembly out to take on a Tender who could keep his mouth shut. Anson could’ve caught at least an hour of rest during all that before embarking again. But he didn’t get that. He took on more water at the line convergence stop, exchanged quick gripes with the Switcher there, but had to be off again at speed. There were trains to run behind them. He seethed at the occasional whistling of the automata as it tried to mimic a Tender’s soothing song to the arcane engine, but when it tried to perform “Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag” around hour five, he was exhausted enough to help it out for all their sake’s.

“What’s the use in worrying, it never was worthwhile,” he grumbled in bass counterpoint to the automata’s shrill whistling as he worked the regulator, “so: pack up your troubles in your old kit bag, and smile, smile, smile!”

By the time they crested a rise and saw the noon sun washing the windows of Middelington, still leagues off, Anson was punchy and his eyes burned when he blinked. And he had to blink against the glare off the glass. He had to take a moment, with his eyes closed, to try and marshal some shred of energy.

Then the rear car exploded with a roar, and he realized he’d dozed.

Anson jolted and tried to reach for the calling cord and regulator at the same time. By the time he’d grabbed one in each hand, he realized that they were going downhill off the rise, picking up speed. If he cut the throttle too suddenly there was every likelihood they’d derail. Using the vacuum brakes would achieve the same result much faster. He yanked the calling cord for lack of better ideas in the moment, only to flinch hard as Heavy opened up and screamed. She shouldn’t have been so upset even with a car lost.

That was when he finally looked over and realized the automata was dead.

That was the only word for it. The firedoor was levered open and five of its six arms appeared as if they’d been sucked inside. They were bent and twisted at unnatural angles, blackened by flame and splotched with blue-black leviathan oil, utterly inert. The sigils around the firedoor glared red— and Anson had known. He’d said. The arcane engine ate magic, no matter how Blakely General tried to dress it up, and an automata wasn’t reinforced enough, wasn’t distant enough—

The second freight car exploded and the entire train bucked. The calling cord, still twisted in his fist, left Heavy in an impossible, wordless wail.

“Drink to me only with thine eyes,” Anson sang, voice hoarse with exhaustion and panic, working harder than he ever had to try to harmonize with an engine’s cries, “and I will pledge with mine, or leave a kiss within the cup, and I’ll not ask for wine!”

It was no use. Anson saw that the fusible plug sat at the bottom of the water gauge. No amount of song-sorcery would counter the boiler being set to blow. They were going to go up just like the other cars. Worse, even, because of the damned oil; there wouldn’t be enough of Anson to bury. He found himself paralyzed, surrounded by so many vectors for disaster he couldn’t pick a place to start fixing them. He unconsciously checked the windows again, looking to see if, at least, they were off the slope.

He caught sight of a figure on horseback charging ahead just before the car at the engine’s back exploded. The sharp scent of spent powder and hot metal suffused the cab. The leviathan oil canisters juddered in their mounts, trembling under their own power as their volatile contents were pushed beyond tolerances. A sudden loss of weight as the remains of the rearmost cars decoupled shot the engine ahead of the rider. They had ridden their dark horse to lather, hidden their face in a tied-off cloth. Their hand dug for something in a side-slung satchel. Their eyes, when Anson’s caught them, were pitiless and pale.

They didn’t wear an Elbor Rail jacket, but they had company-issue boots.

Darling Heavy’s throat still hung open. There was a break in the screaming–or Anson imagined one, in the moment before the insanity of the situation unmoored him–where, for the first time in his life, he could’ve sworn he heard words in the signal call:

“I will repay,” the train hissed.

Engine-Tender Anson Hull’s hand fell, outside of his control, to the brake.

He wasn’t aware for most of the derailment. He felt the moment wheels left rail in his gut. They flew for three heartbeats, and he was blissfully weightless, not dragged down by exhaustion or concern or the weight of hard-won muscle. Then came the force, the noise, the splintering and the pain, the incredible, impossible heat, and the rending of all things. The train. Anson Hull. Magic, and man, and metal.

He awoke in artificial night. The burning corpse of Darling Heavy filled the sky with black smoke and her debris curtained away the rest of the world. It was snowing. But– no. He raised a gore-streaked hand and caught a flake of charred, shredded pamphlet paper.

“Help!” someone wailed nearby. For a vertiginous moment he thought it was the train, but the voice was too small and reedy. “Help, please, can anyone hear me? Help!”

So he found the places his limbs were on his body, how his arms and legs converged, and pushed himself upright to help. He limped through the debris, seeing much and understanding little. He fell over the legs of a dead horse. They were already stiff and mostly broken; the animal had suffered greatly from what looked like shrapnel, no doubt flung from the wreck of Heavy. Nearby was a torn satchel. Its strewn contents were confusing: broken lager bottles, singed cloth, a strong smell of burnt oil. But nearby too was a boon from the derailed train: a coal shovel, still intact, of a good height to make a cane as he went on.

“Is someone there?” the panicked voice cried as he stumped towards them. “Help, please– My leg’s pinned, I can’t get up, and the fire’s…” Whatever else they were going to say died on their tongue as they saw him. “No. No! No, no, no!”

It was the rider. She was a woman, as it turned out, a company runner picked for her slight frame to insure speed on horseback. The way her legs vanished under part of Heavy’s drive shaft assembly, she wouldn’t be riding again any time soon.

“Help?” he tried to repeat. It was hard, and came out more as a sighing whistle from three places on his body: mouth, throat, and right-side rib cage. Odd. He ran twisted fingers over himself and found he was shot all through with holes. Shrapnel, like the horse, but musket shot too, and rivets. When he touched the place his throat should’ve been, he found blood-slick metal.

“What are you?” the woman shrieked. She scrabbled to drag herself away, but she was pinned firm, and mostly succeeded in increasing the pool of blood around her pelvis in the attempt. “You– You’re not the Tender, the Tender’s dead, I did for–”

Yes. The Engine-Tender. Her Tender. Lullaby singer. Soother and feeder and cooler and keeper. Rough hands on smooth metal, and years of care for men and trains, and soft words whispered of better ways to live. Words the engine supped on while she died. Power in the promises. Power in the arms and chest. Power in the blood. He remembered this. He remembered, too:

I will repay.

The shovel wasn’t sharp, but force did a lot to cleave the woman’s head from her shoulders.

“By now you have heard,” said Railmaster Simon Ashley, three days later at the all-crew meeting of the Lower Norhaven Railyard, “about the venturous Skalan attack on our supply lines, and the great sacrifice of my colleague and yours, Engineer Anson Hull.”

The rail men assembled bowed their heads, some twisting caps between their hands, others clenching fists at their sides and grinding teeth. The sun outside set over an uncharacteristically still yard, all activity set aside for the closest they could manage to a wake. Railmaster Ashley laid a hand over the left breast of his Elbor Rail uniform coat.

“Engineer Hull had undertaken work of great importance under conditions he himself once decried, for the love of his country,” Ashley said, “and that conviction, that commitment to his work, is something we should all aspire to. Especially as we have now seen that our nation’s enemy does not reserve its barbaric attacks only for our soldiers, but also for those who dare labor to feed their families far from the fighting.”

Some men nodded agreement. Signaller Lev Morris, whose eyes stared fever-bright from deep hollows of sleep deprivation, ground his teeth harder.

Ashley affected a sheepish grimace. “Farbeit from me to eulogize Engineer Hull. It is no secret that he and I often butted heads about how things should be done.” A few snorts filtered up from the milling crowd of workers. “But even as we argued, I could not help but admire him– for his concerns were always, without relent, for you, his fellow man. He sought unity and compassion for all, and it is in this spirit that, while labor to support the war must redouble, we must pull together and stand united across the specious divides of class and kin–”

“Why won’t the trains run?” Lev barked when he could take no more. Ashley blinked at him. Lev stepped forward, other men making space for him, and pointed an accusatory finger at the Railmaster. “Why’ve none moved since three days gone, when all the rail went red-hot for hours?”

“I– This hardly seems appropriate for the moment,” Ashley insisted. “If you insist I speculate, I must put it down to our yard’s shared grief. While I reject superstitious nonsense about our rolling stock, the loss of Engineer Hull and the venerable Diamantine-Hematitic I has been felt by us all, and–”

“And so the rest of the engines should be raring to haul blades to the front,” chimed in Waterman Roz Turley, “but they won’t budge an inch!”

“This meeting,” the Railmaster tried to assert, “is regarding the loss of Engineer Hull and our work in the coming days, I must insist–”

Out on her siding, the Wayward Mare called a high, joyful note.

The men turned from the makeshift stage Railmaster Ashley had assembled in the freight warehouse for the meeting and towards the closed doors to the railyard. As if in answer to the Mare, the Barred Darter let out its own characteristic call, a sweet soprano rill signaling “train sighted on opposing rail” or, as the men usually said, “well met.” What made the crowd finally throw the doors open to see what was coming into the yard was the answer to both: a distant but unmistakable blast from the throaty voice of Darling Heavy.

There was no ghost train barreling south from the Middelington line, however. There was just a figure, large but humanoid, trudging down the ties with head bent and shoulders straining. It carried a canister slung across its back with cargo straps. A hose snaked around from the top and hung by the figure’s mouth, dripping dots of bluish oil, which were trod into the wood and gravel by heavy-booted feet. Some reddish light heaved in its chest, but was obscured by the drape of a long canvas coat. It was hard to make out more in the gathering gloom of early evening– until the figure raised its face. Then all the men assembled could mark the familiar heavy brow, strong nose, full beard, and smiling mouth of Engine-Tender Anson Hull by the glaring yellow lamplight in his eyes. He sang as he walked, and leaned heavy on a coal shovel that marked time with soft clangs on each step.

“My cap is frozen to my head, my feet, my fingers, chill and dead,” he crooned, “my heart is like a lump of lead, with standing at your window pane…”

“Oh let me in, fair maiden bright,” Tender Jonas answered without quite meaning to, echoed by others, “it is a cold and haily night, and I won’t… and I won’t go back again.”

“What is the meaning of this?” Railmaster Ashley called. He stumbled down the crates stacked to make steps to his stage. Either unable or unwilling to recognize the man the others had, he demanded, “Who are you? Name, number, and shift lead!”

The figure walked until he stood just outside the warehouse doors. To the repulsion of all, he stuck the oil hose in his mouth and took a hearty slug before he spoke.

“I am Tender,” the figure said. His words were thread through with a persistent hum. “First of my manufacture. And… And my lead is…”

He touched a hand to his throat, opened his mouth, and let out the forward movement signal call of Darling Heavy. Someone in the crowd screamed. Railmaster Ashley fell back.

“Ans…?” Lev managed with a shaky step forward.

The figure lifted his shovel and, gently enough, used it to scoot Lev out of his path. The glow of his eyes only intensified as he entered the darker shadows of the warehouse. He advanced on Ashley.

“Who sent the letter?” the figure rumbled. “Who prepped the train?”

“What are you?” Ashley moaned, making a gesture against evil over the place on his chest he’d earlier placed his hand in mourning. “Brass and flame, what are you?”

“I am Tender,” Tender said as he leveled the blade of his coal shovel at the Railmaster’s collar. “I will repay.”

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 8/18/2023 | REHOSTED 2/27/2024