Chapter 1: South Vertolia, North of Border

“You have five minutes.”


Julian grimaced as the train lurched, sending him bumping against the corridor wall, his satchel biting uncomfortably into his thigh. “Do we have to be going quite so fast?” he asked.


The guard fixed him with a withering glare. “Well now, I don’t know. You’re the reporter. What’s the punishment for delaying processing on a saboteur?”


Julian sighed. “Fair point. Can I go through now?”


After a formal glare, the guard moved aside his rifle, and Julian stepped out into the rattle and roar of the space between the cars -- and then into the vestibule of the salon car that followed, where a pair of guards nodded him wordlessly into the makeshift prison.


The prisoner had his head down, and at first Julian thought he might have passed out -- the dark curls lolled from side to side with the motion of the train, the face hidden from view. When Julian gave a polite cough, though, the prisoner looked up, a sharp jerk of the head that laid to rest any suspicions of somnolence or stupor.


“They have already questioned me. What more can you want?” the man croaked from between cracked lips that bled as they moved.


Julian fixed the challenging stare with one of his own. “Those were government interrogators. I am a reporter for the Vertolian Tribune. I’m here to tell your--”


A creaking sound escaped the prisoner’s broken face. After a moment Julian realized it was a laugh. “Is there a difference?”


Julian drew himself up to his full height, knowing the shadows thrown by the shaded lamps across the plush interior of the passenger car could only serve to heighten the effect. ‘I don’t know how it is in Telares, Mr. Baseri -- if that is your real name. But here in Vertolia, a journalist’s word is his--”


“Of course it’s my real name.”


Julian flinched under the hardened eyes glaring out at him from under those dark curls now.


“I have no reason to lie to any of you, because I had nothing to do with any of that.”


Julian gave a theatrical sigh. He was good at those, and they gave him a chance to recover his composure. “Of course I’m told that’s what you told the investigators too, Mr. Baseri, but--”


“You see how much good it did me, that truth,” the prisoner glowered, lifting his arms away from his sides so that Julian could see the chains extending from each to wing chairs on either side of the corridor. Lamplight glistened on the iron bolts that clamped the chairs to the wall for rail travel.


Julian also saw the bruises, dark against the fairer skin of the man’s chest, and a detached part of his mind expressed surprise at the variation in skin tone. He had thought it got so hot in the south that its people always went around shirtless. That, at least, had been the fantasy put forward by several gentlemen’s clubs in the city, come festival time…


The prisoner’s grin did not reach his eyes. “Let me guess. You find the actions of your countrymen barbaric?”


“Not at all. Saboteurs deserve no better. Those with peaceful civilians as their targets? Worse.”


“I am neither of those things.”


“So you keep saying. Why not share the real story? Give it a chance to go out into the world before you die.”


The prisoner glared. “If I die then my blood is on your hands, as surely as you believe your mayor’s blood is on mine.”


Julian pounced. “You mean the mayor, who was a target.”


“So it seems.”


“You admit it then?”


“I admit nothing!” A thin trail of blood trickled from the corner of the prisoner’s mouth. He had opened it too wide in his protestation, and his body rebelled.


“Yet you survived.”


“So did you!”


“I was not driving one of the steam engines involved.”


“Neither was I! Not at the time, and certainly not before. I’m a mail boy.”


Julian raised an eyebrow. “Mail boy? You’re a scant ten years my junior, perhaps, but no more.”


“It’s just what they call them.”


“Leaving aside, for a moment, the fact of your terrorism, why is a man over twenty years of age still working a job whose official title pegs him as a child?”


The prisoner’s eyes glittered. “Because I love the work.”


Julian was silent for a moment.


“A big city newspaper man like you wouldn’t understand. I grew up nowhere. It became the end of the line in my grandmother’s time, but it was still nowhere.” The prisoner coughed, and another trickle of blood snaked down from the other side of his mouth. “The train, though, takes you into a world of its own. You’re always somewhere, because you’re going there. You’re en route. Even this,” he lifted his hands, encompassing in the gesture the velvet chairs, the shaded lamps and card tables and, yes, the hastily attached shackles of the parlor car-turned-prison, “even your clanky Vertolian machinery serves the same purpose.” He grinned wryly, an act inconceivable to Julian, under the circumstances. “To a point.”


Julian felt, amidst the tumble of words that were all new to him -- guards’ reports notwithstanding -- a nationalist bear stirring in him, and his voice came out harsher than it needed to be. “Clanky?”


“Oh, so you’re a railway man too now, in addition to publishing whatever your government tells you to print?” The prisoner’s grin widened. “Then yes. It’s clanky. You’d know that if you’d taken a ride behind one of our smooth Telaran engines.”


“A chance I would have gotten,” Julian replied stiffly, “if you hadn’t blown them up.”


A shadow passed over the prisoner’s face. “I know you have already decided my guilt, but even had I done this thing, I never would have harmed the train. The Intrepid was a beautiful engine, the jewel of the Empire. It’s a shame she is gone.”


On the heels of this statement their own train lurched, and Julian -- who had not deigned to sit this entire time -- slammed into a wall, knocking a square painting of a river scene down onto his foot as he scrabbled his way off it. Behind him, one of the guards peered through the glass in the vestibule to make sure all was well. Julian felt his face flush as he signaled reassurance to the guard’s questioning glance.


“You’re pushing this engine faster than she was ever intended to go,” the prisoner observed as Julian set the fallen painting gently against the wall.


“Well whose fault is that?” the reporter snapped.


“That is what I would like to know,” the prisoner replied, rising to the bait. “Any engineer worth his salt should know the limits of the line he’s on, government thugs or no government thugs. Vertolian ley engines can only take so much strain. Why spend all that money constructing a line out to the border if you’re going to tear it up with a messy derailment the first day of service?”


“I’m fairly certain they weren’t planning on having a bomb go off at the ribbon-cutting ceremony, either,” July replied dryly.


“Still. It’s poor form. Assuming you have completely faith in the security of your own borders, what does reaching the capital a day or two early really do for you? You’re going to kill me one way or the other. Why the rush, risking your newly-minted train line in the process?”


“This may come as a shock to you, but bombing the first peaceful meeting our countries have had since the end of the war does have its repercussions.”


The prisoner rolled his eyes. “And so you will fill your papers with invective against us, and raise tariffs again. Surprise, surprise. Well, that, and murder a Telaran mail boy who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”


Julian felt his teeth grate. “I’m not talking about your short and traitorous life, mail boy, I’m talking about war.”


At this, the prisoner’s eyebrow arched. “You would really go to war over one train? One bombing? I thought your precious memorandum on pursuing Vertolian superiority forbade petty conflicts.”


“Our laws,” Julian hissed, enunciating his words so crisply he could feel his tongue cutting them off as they left his mouth, “do not demean wanton loss of life as mere petty conflict. You can expect us to retaliate accordingly.”


Now the prisoner’s eyes lost their cynical cast, widening pale and stark in his pummeled face. “But--but the peace was to last forever. It has been years!”


“Since your country embarrassed mine into accepting an abominable peace treaty, yes. One that still smarts in some quarters.”


“Yes but...surely one accident…”


“It was no accident!” Julian snarled, feeling the bear in him roar to life and doing nothing to stop it. Not now. “An international agreement, a lukewarm arrangement fanned into a tolerance twenty years in the making, and you blow it all up in a heartbeat with a few sticks of ley-powder. What did you think would happen? That the Vertolian people would simply mourn the dead border mayor as a national hero and leave it at that?” Julian’s breath snagged in his throat; he let the frustration and horror of the past day boil over in him. It felt good. “Don’t feed me your bullshit surprise, Telaran. You knew what this ceremony was as well as the next person. So what if the trains were meeting border to border in the middle of absolutely nowhere? It was a start. It was something to point to, something people like me could write about to try and…mitigate the national desire for vengeance, as the Speaker says. Well, thanks to you that didn’t really work out, did it? Here we are, barreling toward the capital at what you tell me is breakneck speed, all so we can engage in more spectacle of the other kind this time. It will be in all the papers -- The Trial of the Telaran Saboteur. I can see the headlines already, 48-point font.”


“And you will have your war,” the prisoner said softly.


”My war?” This was too much. “You think I relish the thought of what’s about to happen?”


“I do.”


“You lying Telaran bastard, I’ll--”


A sharp rap on the vestibule door halted Julian’s advance. “Time’s up,” a guard mouthed through the glass, pointing at his watch.


With an effort, Julian took a step back from the prisoner, steadying himself against the wall as the train heaved again. “Your lack of cooperation will be noted,” he said stiffly, keeping his eyes trained well to the right of the prisoner’s, lest eye contact move him to anger again.


“As will your warmongering,” the prisoner quipped, “though I’m sure the Speakers pay you a pretty penny for it.”


“I’ll enjoy watching you hang.”


“Only barbarians entertain themselves by slaughtering the innocent.”


Another bang on the vestibule door. “I said, time’s up!”


“Good thing we’re fresh out of innocents, then. You killed them all,” Julian snarled, spinning on his heel and almost stumbling from the force of it on his way out the door.


Behind him, the prisoner stared bleakly at the shifting patterns of the thick parlor carpet, as blood dripped down into its whorls, dot by dot by dot.


“Shut up,” Julian growled, before any of the guards could say anything. It was a foolish thing to say and under normal circumstances Julian supposed he’d pay for it. But not this trip, not this train. The guards had their hands full with other concerns; they all did. He stomped past unmolested, and silently thanked Tel for allowing him to indulge in his petty rage.


For it was, he admitted to himself as he made his way to his room, petty. The infantilized remnant of a man who’d never fought, lusting for a fight that had ended when he was still small.


And yet.


Julian had seen empires fall. Sometimes he was even able to entertain the conceit that he had engineered their fall. Merchants and kings all went the same way, after all, if enough words spilled into the right ears. And Julian was, above all else, a master of words. He had built the Tribune practically from the ground up, using all of the money his father had given him intending him to forge a family, an estate. A legacy.


The Tribune was his legacy. But, at thirty-two, he was beginning to feel that it wasn’t enough. Julian was his father’s son, loyal as the flag bearers along Victory Way, and he made sure the Tribune towed that line. But journalism, of late, had begun to take on a sour taste for him. His victories, as his father so dearly loved to point out, were on paper only. Never mind that the modern world ran on paper, and that a few well-chosen comments could end a career as surely as a sword-thrust. Paper victories, paper warriors, as Lord Stone always sniped at him. Julian was beginning to think his father was right, and that he’d spent the last decade of his life providing the platform on which others could live their stories, instead of writing his own.


This is foolishness, he told himself as he stalked down the corridor. He was a big man with a scowl -- people moved out of the way. I turned the Tribune from a wrapper for market fish to the country’s most trusted source for news.


Perhaps, that was the problem, he mused as he staggered into his room, narrowly avoiding tipping over his inkwell as he lost his footing. Trust. He thought of the blood in the corners of the prisoner’s busted mouth, of his father’s war medals hanging in the foyer, for all to see first thing upon entering their mountain stronghold. Trust.


Then he thought of the soot-dusted child he’d tried to haul from the rubble right after the explosion, her mouth open in her shock, most of her legs gone. Ribbons in her hair.


Trust.


Julian ducked his head out into the hallway and hailed the porter. “Get me the telegraph as soon as it’s open for civilian use,” he said gruffly into the frightened, acne-scarred face of the young man in blue.


“S-sir, we were told that all communication requests must pass through the military’s--”


“They’ll pass this.”


The porter, heart in his throat, bowed obsequiously before dashing off down the hallway at a run, ricocheting off the walls as the train’s shaking threw him momentarily off-balance.


As well he should be frightened, Julian thought blackly. He could be running across a field with a rifle in his hand in a month, the way this is going.


The way, if he found the right words, it would go.

Next Chapter: Chapter 2 : South Vertolian Railway