True to the prisoner’s prediction, the train derailed.

It happened on a curve -- where even the military’s censure couldn’t persuade the engineer not to slow down -- so it could have been worse. But any mitigation of injury due to the decrease in speed returned tenfold as the train rolled down the slope of what was not an insignificant hillside, into a forest of just-budding aspen and larch.

Julian had tied himself into his fold-down cot in an abortive attempt to sleep, after starting several calls to arms that sputtered and failed without the morbid details surrounding the planning of the explosion. Details he could have procured from the prisoner, had he not let his temper get away from him. It was all fine and good to describe the scene -- he thought of ribbons again, and quickly steered away from that memory -- but people needed to know the enemy. Or at least to think they knew him. Julian could have just made up the details, of course, but that didn’t feel right.

Julian had been chastising himself yet again that he should have remained in control when the world flipped upside-down in a roar of metal. For the second time in as many days, Julian found himself hurtling through the air -- albeit strapped into his bed, which also hurtled -- toward an unknowable abyss. He felt the yell rip from his throat even as the ground rose up to smash into his window, shattering the glass and raining most of it inward, first onto the ceiling as the ceiling became the floor, then down onto Julian as the train righted itself again amongst the trees that were now pressing in through Julian’s window.

Before he could even groan, a massive explosion rocked through the train, the trees, Julian’s chest cavity -- his second explosion in forty-eight hours! -- and he felt his ears pop. That would be the boiler, a distant part of his mind thought, as he struggled to remain buoyant against the tide of stupor that beckoned.

When consciousness seemed to have asserted its firm hold on his psyche, he inhaled deeply, trying to determine the extent of his wounds. The warring scents of pine and burning ley-stones assailed his nostrils, but his lungs filled without complaint. No ribs broken, then, he thought, and began to fiddle with the train’s system of straps that held him to his bead.

Too late, he realized what that meant for his dangling body, and he tumbled out onto the snow, into a maelstrom.

The boiler had, indeed, exploded, and anyone doubting this needed only look to the blistering, twisted remains of the once-elegant engine that had pummeled their way through the forest, leaving a trail of splintered branches and broken trees and...darker remains...in their wake. Further confirmation was to be found in the thick clouds of smoke billowing into the sky and streaking away in a long, dark arc as the spring winds picked it up and carried it east.

Screams rent the air, and Julian struggled to his feet, the jarring realization that he was not the lone participant in this disaster spurring him to action. He heard a woman sobbing hear him, and staggered over to offer what assistance he could, only to drift to a horrified stop when he saw that the body the woman was heaving over was only half there.

Ribbons.

Reeling, murmuring vague assurances that he would return, Julian tottered past the oblivious woman, north along the train’s length, toward the engine. Or what remained of the engine.

“Sir!” came a croaking cry. Julian froze, recognizing that he should know the owner of the voice, and didn’t. All he saw was blood and broken trees. “Sir!”

There he was, protruding at an awkward angle out from underneath a handsome mahogany-panelled wall. The opulence against the clutter of the spring forest would have been striking in any other circumstance; as it was it made Julian’s stomach churn.

The man calling for his attention was the porter, and he was dying.

Without a word Julian threw his considerable bulk against the fallen railcar, but he leapt back as if burned when the porter screamed.

“It...it won’t work, sir. It’s too late,” the boy gasped, when he could speak once more.

“It’s not too late,” Julian growled, but hesitated as he braced his feet to push the wall again. That scream.

“It is, sir. It’s...all right.”

It was not all right. There was nothing all right about it at all. Julian opened his mouth to say as much, but the porter’s pained expression gave him pause.

“He’s going to burn alive, sir.”

Julian blinked smoke out of his eyes as the wind shifted toward the north.

“What? Who?”

“The Telaran. The prisoner. He’s right by the engine. If he’s not dead already, he’ll--” The porter groaned as the rail car’s weight bore down on him.

“Just let me try again, boy, and then we’ll--”

“Marius. My name is Marius. And my brother burned alive at sea. One of the new warships, the failed ones. It was...horrible. You mustn’t let him. He shouldn’t burn just for…” He hissed in pain, hurrying onward. “For believing in Ria and Metazza. They’re not all that bad, the Telaran goddesses. My mother always said a prayer for--” The boy’s sentenced ended in a whimper.

“Marius, look, as a faithful servant of Vertolia you are worth far more than--”

“Not dead I’m not. Please, sir, please go to him. It’s...a terrible death. The worst way to die, my mother always said.” Another scream tore through him as the car settled above him. “Please, sir! Promise me!”

“I...all right! All right, I promise!”

Marius’ eyes staring wild and pleading at him were the last things to be claimed by the rail car’s shadow as it tipped forward from its impossible angle, crushing the young porter. Julian had to dodge out of the way as it fell, his simple freedom of movement somehow terrible, unjust. He stood still for a long moment, listening, hoping. But the car, and the area surrounding it, remained silent.

Julian began to trudge through the debris toward the front of the train, the porter’s eyes boring into him from memory.

He helped people. He did not remember who. It was as if his mind had refused to let in any more images, lest they be burned there forever like the girl with the ribbons; like the porter. The mind can only take so much. He hoisted, hefted, heaved. Responded, numbly, with words he did not remember to questions he did not hear.

He did not begin registering sounds again until they were neither cries nor screams, but low anticipatory murmurs, so foreign to the hellscape around him.

“--punish him for what his wretched friends have done.”

“We don’t know--”

“Really, Lionel? We don’t know? A train bound for Anticor bearing the prisoner who just touched off a war derails in the middle of nowhere, and you think it was an accident?”

“We were going pretty fast…”

“What, are you a Telaran sympathizer now? Going to start saying Ria and Matazza should have equal representation in the churches, next, are we?”

“Giorgio, no, I just--”

“Then let’s go make sure the little bastard’s good and torched for what he’s done here, shall we?”

Julian followed. He did not know why. Perhaps it was just because the two of them -- guards, by their uniforms -- were going the same was he was. Perhaps it was as simple as that. But the two burly men talking kept walking, and Julian trailed after them. Wary.

By now the cries of help had begun to dim -- not because all had been rescued, but because this end of the train had been kept deliberately empty, given its treasonous cargo. The smell of ley-stones was much stronger here, and Julian thought he heard the crackle of burning timber.

In a moment this proved to be the case. Skeletal limbs of trees, their outlines etched in flame, clawed madly at the sky as the two guards (with their unobtrusive addition) rounded the curve which had been the train’s undoing. The explosion had laid waste not only to the trees in the immediate vicinity but to its tinderbox and the car after it, as well. The car after that glowed crimson in the stark snowy wilderness as flames licked their way back along the gilded wood panelling.

Julian, recognizing the car in which he had so recently made a spectacular failure of an investigation, understood that the best thing, the easiest thing by far for all of them, would be for the prisoner to be already dead upon their arrival.

Unfortunately, however, he was not.

“In here! Damn your engineers to Metazza’s fires, I’m in here! Help!”

The guard who had initiated the walk, Giorgio, tut-tutted, peering into the collapsed end of the once-opulent parlor car-turned-prison. “Insulting the engineers of the Royal Vertolian Railway is hardly the best way to win your freedom, Telaran idolater.”

Julian had slowed to a stop as soon as the guards and done so; as soon as they heard the voice -- and was gripped by the sudden realization that he was outnumbered, out-trained and it all likelihood out-geared for what was about to happen. He faltered. Through the swiftly-alighting carriage rubble, he could see firelight glinting off of chains, and paintings fallen in the crash (including the one he’d knocked down) protruding at odd angles through the end of the car open to the air. He did not, he told himself, have to do this.

Then he thought of the porter’s eyes disappearing under the shadow of the train, and stepped forward.

“We must free him,” he pronounced with his heaviest dose of journalistic gravitas. “It is only the right thing to do.”

Giorgio turned, glanced at Julian and scoffed loud enough to be heard over the flames. “It’s the reporter who couldn’t report his way out of a paper bag. Never fear, Telaran scum, your valiant hero is here!”

“Giorgi, that’s the head of the Tribune--”

“I don’t care if he’s the fucking king. He’s going to stand back and watch this or he’ll join this one, in there.”

“Come on, Giorgi, you can’t be--”

“I am very serious, Lionel. You’re new, so you may not know this about the job, but seriousness concerning matters of state is kind of required.”

“How about matters of decency?” Julian quipped, striding forward. “No faith under the stars would support the burning of a man without proper trial. Now help me break open the manacles, or unclamp them or--”

“Stay back.”

Giorgio took a step forward, and Julian raised his hands, trying to exude confidence and not a sense of absurdity. He was no fighter, let alone a trained soldier. He had no idea what he was doing.

“Maybe we shouldn’t--”

“Shut up, Lionel!” Giorgio snapped, and in that moment of distraction Julian charged at him, toward the car with its prisoner. His opponent, however, stepped aside easily, sending Julian off-balance with a well-placed kick to the lower back. He stumbled once, twice, then went all the way down amid the wreckage of the train, pain blooming as wood and metal tore at him. The thick whorls of the parlor car’s carpet loomed in bright paisley patterns before his eyes.

The reporter had a half-second to try to get to his feet before there was an arm clamped around his throat. He tried to cough, found he lacked the air for even that, and panicked.

“Don’t...defend...killers!” Giorgio hissed into Julian’s ear, and a very distant part of Julian’s rapidly darkening mind cackled madly at the hypocrisy of the situation. Beyond the frame of the severed railcar, the snow, the trees and the slate-gray sky began to shrink to a central point, and he balked at the ridiculousness of being killed by one of his country’s own soldiers. His country, whose honors he had sung ceaselessly in print for years. Choking him to death by the side of the railroad tracks.

On the heels of this thought, a sickening crunch of metal-on-bone let loose very close to his hear, the vise around his neck went slack, and air thundered into his lungs like the first storm to end a drought. He gasped, coughing up what felt like most of his lungs, and fell onto his hands and knees. Peering under his left shoulder, still coughing, brought him face to face with dangling chains clotted on a few links with what very much looked like blood and, perhaps, hair.

“Run,” said the prisoner, and Julian’s attempt to protest resulted only in a wheeze.

But the order was not for him. “Giorgio…” the remaining guard whimpered.

“Run, or join your compatriot. It’s up to you,” the prisoner growled, and the younger man seemed to take the hint. Julian heard the crunch of boots on snow, slow at first but growing faster. Soon they were gone, and Julian could hear only the crackle of the flames over the ragged tearing of his own breath.

“Now then,” came the prisoner’s voice. “How do you want to do this?”

Julian stood up, a trifle unsteadily.

“He seems like a good enough boy, but I have no doubt that his report will spare little love for the man who tried to spare the Telaran scum who murdered his fellow guard. I don’t suppose foreigners get to claim self-defense in your lands, do we?”

Julian turned and saw that while the prisoner’s right hand, still in its bloodied chains, dangled loosely by his side, the chains of the left still led to the bolted-in armchair at its now-absurd angle in the tipped-over parlor car.

“I thought not,” the prisoner continued, meeting Julian’s eyes. “In that case, you have a choice. Watch me burn, or free me and try to use me re-capture as a bid for clemency.” Behind him, flames snaked along the richly-patterned carpet that still bore his bloodstains. “I warn you, though, you might want to decide soon. We are both running out of time.”