“Tickets please,” said the Inspector in the tatty, threadbare uniform.

He was swaying his way along the central aisle of the train carriage, holding onto the backs of the chairs to steady himself as the floor lurched under him to the rhythmic clattering of the iron wheels over the rails. He had to let go in order to take the ticket from the man in the stripy suit, hold it close to his eyes while he examined it and then cut out a tiny triangular piece with the clipper he held in his other hand. The train chose that moment to go over a particularly uneven section of track and the man had to spread his legs and lower his centre of gravity to prevent himself from being thrown to the floor. He managed to do this while maintaining most of his grace, though, returning to his full height again as soon as the train settled down and proceeded smoothly again, and the Brigadier guessed that he'd had quite a lot of practice on this particular section of track.

The inspector handed the ticket back to the man in the stripy suit and moved on to the next passenger. “Tickets. Your tickets please.” A woman and a half raised sheep were the next to offer their tickets, and since they were several seats away from him the Brigadier returned his gaze to the view outside the window for a moment longer.

They’d been passing through cattle country the whole day. The land here was flat, so flat that the horizon was a perfectly straight line where the straw coloured land met the pale blue sky. The soil was far too thin and stony for crops, and so the land had been given over to cattle that roamed across the stubby grasslands, the herds of several neighbouring ranchers intermingling. When the train had been forced to slow to walking speed for some reason earlier that day, there had been cattle close enough to the train for him to see animals bearing the brands of several neighbouring ranchers standing side by side.

The Brigadier wondered how long it took a rancher to separate his animals out from all the others when he wanted to take them to market or whatever. He knew almost nothing about cattle ranching, but now that he was passing through their country a thousand questions filled his head. How could such dry, barren looking land support such a large number of grazing animals? If two cows from different herds adopted a rabbit and raised it between them, to which rancher did the new cow belong? How did they deal with the depredations of rustlers? He imagined it would be quite easy for criminals to drive a wagon into that herd, kill one or two animals and skin them, removing the owner’s brands, before selling them to families too hungry to care where they came from. These problems, and a great many others, must all have been solved, maybe not with complete success but well enough to allow the ranchers to survive, but try as he might he couldn't imagine how.

The train lurched again as it passed over another uneven patch of ground. The Brigadier had travelled on trains before, but never across such poorly maintained track. He wondered how long it had been since a team of engineers had passed this way to shore up the places where the flash floods to which this land was prone had washed the ground away from under the steel rails. He imagined the Inspector was wondering the same thing as he reached out to grab the back of a seat to steady himself and grabbed a young woman's shoulder instead. He apologised, then asked her for her ticket.

The state of the track meant that the train was not making good speed. He'd been hoping that it would be going between fifty and sixty miles per hour, but he doubted if they were making more than thirty at the moment. That still meant they were travelling more then seven hundred miles in a day, though. They had travelled more than two hundred miles since he'd boarded the train that morning, and it would have taken him four days to travel that distance on horseback. What's more, the train didn't have to stop for rest and could keep on going all through the night, only having to stop to take on more coal and water. The longer he stayed on the train the more time and distance he was saving, and his horse was getting some rest back in the horse carriage . You couldn’t always count on finding someone willing to swap a tired horse for a fresh one, and in these troubled times you never knew when your life might depend on your horse having enough energy to carry you to safety. Even so, though, he wished the track was good enough to allow the train to reach its full speed. His mind kept insisting on making the calculations of how far they could have gone by now at sixty miles per hour, and the Princess needed him.

He made himself settle down in his seat, trying to ignore the uneven feel of the worn fabric under him. The state of the train had appalled him when he'd first come aboard that morning. It had looked good enough on the outside, the engine all billowing steam and oily metal, the driver and engineer looking professional and experienced with all the soot and sweat that covered their faces and clothing. The carriages had looked a little the worse for wear, it was true. Most of the paint and varnish had worn away, leaving bare wood exposed to the elements, but the Brigadier was prepared to forgive that so long as the structure was sound.

Inside, though, the state of neglect had shocked him. The pretty floral pattern that had once adorned the fabric of the padded seats was now only visible at the edges and in the creases. Everywhere else it had faded to a dull, greenish grey and had worn so thin in places that only the strongest strands of the weft remained to hold the padding in. Many seats had lost their padding altogether as the fabric had torn open, and some of the passengers were sitting on bare wood. The backrests had been carved with the initials of bored passengers and gouged and defaced in other ways, and several of the bolts holding the seats to the floor were missing, so that they rocked and shifted with every bounce of the train along the uneven rails. Worst of all, though, was the state of the floor, where the planks had shrunk and warped to the point where he could actually see the ground passing by below through the gaps. There was one gap in particular that widened and narrowed in a way he didn't like at all, with the accompanying sound of rubbing wood, every time the train went over a hump in the ground.

He forced himself to relax and ignore it. The fact that the train was so old was reassuring, he told himself. After doing the run through the Bonnerell Territories for so many decades, it was unlikely to choose today to have some kind of major malfunction. The trouble is that I'm spoiled, he thought ruefully. I'm an aristocrat, used to being surrounded by the finest and most expensive that the world has to offer, and when I'm not an aristocrat I'm a soldier, used to the harshest conditions that only a hardened veteran could endure. This in between condition, though, this casual neglect and decay, this is how most ordinary people live their lives. He looked around at the other passengers and saw that they seemed to be happy enough. None of them seemed to be shocked and appalled by the state of the carriage, and there were several conversations going on which the noise of the train prevented him from overhearing. This is normal for them, he realised, and so I have to pretend that it’s normal for me too or I'll make myself stand out.

“Ticket please,” said the Inspector, and the Brigadier look up to see the man looking down at him expectantly. He handed it across, watched while the Inspector subjected it to careful scrutiny, then cut off the corner with his clipper. “Does the train go faster further on?” he asked as he took it back.

“Oh yes, Sir,” the Inspector replied. “After Camerton the track is much better. The train gets up to seventy miles per hour in places!” He made to move away to the next passenger, but the Brigadier held up a hand to stall him. “How much further is it to Camerton?” he asked.

“Two days from here, Sir.”

“Two days?” That was well after he would have to leave the train.

“Yes, Sir. We fairly fly after that! They call this train the Whitemay Flier. Farwell to Whitemay in four days, Sir.”

“Very impressive. When will we be reaching Ramback?”

“Probably around sundown, Sir.”

“Very good. Thank you.” The guard nodded and moved on to the next passenger. So. No more than thirty miles per hour for the rest of the day, after which he would have to leave this train to keep going east. He knew, from the timetable and the map of the rail network he'd studied back in Farwell, that the train he was on turned to the north after passing through the town of Ramback, where he'd have to change trains. There was a railway track that went to Carrow and there was a train scheduled to take it two days from now, but he'd decided that it would be better to wait for it in Ramback than Farwell. In Ramback, he'd be that much closer to the Princess, and you never knew if there might be some kind of trouble between the capital and the country town that it would be better to be on the right side of. At least the trains seemed to be fairly reliable in the Empire. He wouldn’t have to worry about wasting two days in Ramback for a train that never arrived.

The Brigadier turned his attention back to the view through the window. There was a stately home of some kind on the horizon, he saw. Not very large by stately home standards. Probably the home of some minor baron who owned a handful of ranches in the area. It was silhouetted against a bright patch of sky so he couldn't get a very good look at it, but there were dark clouds to the west, and as the train continued on and turned a slight bend the Brigadier thought that those clouds might be behind the house in a few minutes’ time, giving him a better view of it. He made up his mind to look, it would take away some of the tedium of the journey.

He heard the connecting door to the next carriage opening behind him and two people coming through accompanied by the smell of expensive perfume. “Good, There’s plenty of empty seats in here,” he heard a woman's voice saying, and a moment later they came into view as they moved forward, swaying with the movements of the train. “A much better class of people, too. Not that such things matter to me, of course.”

“Of course not, my dear,” agreed the man with her. They were both dressed expensively, the Brigadier saw, the woman wearing a drape of fox fur around her neck and the man carrying a crocodile leather suitcase.

“Yes, I should feel much safer here. Not that I'm a timid woman, as you know very well, but I simply could not abide those people any longer. If things had taken a turn for the worse, you might have been called upon to defend me, Barnaby, and I know that you abhor violence as much as I do. Where shall we sit, Barnaby?”

“Just pick a seat, dear. If you can find one fit to bear your delicate derriere.”

“Please don't use words like that, Barnaby. It's not becoming.”

The Brigadier breathed a sigh of relief as they moved past him, but the woman was scrutinizing the occupants of the carriage, himself included, and he saw the tiniest change of expression on her face whenever she saw a half raised animal sitting next to a passenger, or some evidence that a passenger who seemed to be of noble standing at first glance was, in fact, a tradesman or a merchant who was able to dress expensively because of financial success. He saw her lips silently forming the words “New money” when she saw a man wearing a cow leather jacket and reading a copy of the Cattle Breeders Gazette, and she actually went pale when the next man she looked at turned his head to smile back at her, revealing teeth brown with chewing tobacco stains.

Maybe you'll have more luck in the next carriage up, thought the Brigadier hopefully, but then, to his dismay, she turned and came back towards him, brushing the seat facing his with her hand as if it were covered with invisible breadcrumbs. Her husband came to stand next to her and gave the Brigadier an apologetic smile. The Brigadier looked back out the window. Perhaps if he refused to acknowledge their presence, refused to engage with them in any way...

“Is this seat taken?” asked the woman, and the Brigadier groaned internally. There was no way to avoid replying without breaking the rules of civilised conduct, and then he would be in a conversation with her. Oh well. If it had to be, might as well make the best of it. “No, Madam,” he said therefore. “Please be seated.”

“Thank you.” She sat opposite him and Barnaby sat beside her. “The last carriage was full of the most awful People! Working men, all talking about how much better things will be when the rebels overthrow the government, and they kept looking at us in the most awful way, as if they were going to attack us! We didn't feel safe, we had to get out of there, find a carriage filled with more civilised People.”

“I don’t think they would have done anything,” said Barnaby. “It was just talk...”

“Oh Barnaby! You heard them! You saw how they were! They were like animals! They were working themselves up to violence!”

“They were doing no such thing, dear. They were just talking, that’s all.” He turned to the Brigadier. “She tends to overreact. They were probably perfectly decent people....”

“Please don’t talk like that about me to other people! What will he think?” She turned back to the Brigadier. “I do hate train journeys! It wouldn’t be so bad if they still had separate carriages for the upper classes...”

“The upper classes don't use trains any more,” replied Barnaby. “It was just a fad. The moment they started carrying cargo they became quite unfashionable. Trains are for coal, cattle and the masses. No real nobleman would be caught dead on a train these days! We wouldn’t be here ourselves if it weren’t so urgent that we reach Whitemay before the end of the week.”

“And what would you call this gentleman?” asked the woman. “A proper aristocrat if ever I saw one, and probably just as grateful to have quality people to talk to. You are an aristocrat, I assume, Sir?”

“I suppose,” replied the Brigadier. “I don't actually have a title, but I come from a wealthy family and I suppose I’ve earned a certain reputation during my army days, the result being that people treat me with a certain, deference is probably the best word.”

“An army man!” said the woman, beaming with delight. “May I ask what rank you hold?”

“Brigadier. Brigadier Weyland James at your service, Madam.”

“And my name is Isobelle. Isabelle Frankes, and this is my husband, Barnaby Frankes. We own a respectable textiles industry, employing dozens of people.”

“Charmed.” The Brigadier stood and bowed, then sat again, while thinking that anyone who felt it necessary to say that their business was respectable was probably anything but.

“Such a comfort to have an army man with us, with those ruffians in the next carriage!”

“I don't think they're going to come chasing after you, Dear. They were probably just as glad to see us go as you were to leave them.”

“Why Barnaby! What a thing to say!” The Brigadier mentally tuned out their bickering and looked out the window again. The small stately home was moving in front of the dark clouds, as he'd thought it would, and as the background became less bright he found he could make out details of its structure. It was hard to be sure from this distance, but he thought there were dark smudges above the windows, as if the building had been gutted by fire. Then he saw tiny figures moving around in front of it, which confused him if the building had been abandoned for some time. Perhaps the owners were thinking of having the fire damage repaired.

The gardens around the building contained large, neatly pruned hedges, and as the train continued to move different parts of the gardens came into view through gaps in the hedge. Gradually, something large and red came into view, and the Brigadier leaned forward in his seat, feeling a twinge of alarm when he saw that it was a fire truck. Most of the small figures were firemen, he now saw. The fire must only just have been put out. An accident? Or was it arson, committed by members of the Popular Uprising against a hated member of the nobility? And if the latter, were those people still in the area? His hand went to his pistol, hidden under his jacket.

“Is everything all right, Brigadier?” asked Barnaby.

“Of course,” replied the Brigadier, still watching the small mansion. Then the train passed behind a small patch of woodland and it was hidden from sight. Probably nothing for us to worry about, he thought. As Barnaby had said, trains were used by the common people much more than the nobility. There was no reason they would be interested in attacking a train. Or at least, he corrected himself, they wouldn’t have any interest in the passengers. Cargo trains also used this length of track, though, and they might have a great interest in seeing that certain goods didn't reach their destinations...

He wondered what the official procedure would be If the rebels had blown up a section of track ahead of them. The train couldn't just sit there waiting for the next one to come crashing into the back of it. Neither could it return to a crossover and proceed on the other section of track running parallel to it unless they were completely certain there wasn't another train coming in the other direction. The only thing it could do, he decided, was to return the way it had come until it came to a crossover and then return to Farwell, where they could inform the railway authorities that there was a section of track needing repair. If that happened, he would have to leave the train. Take his horse and go the rest of the way to Carrow on his own. He had two days before the train to Carrow left Ramback. It was possible that he might arrive in time to catch it. The poor horse would be exhausted, of course, but it would have a nice long train journey in which to recover.

So. No need to become alarmed. Even if the worse happened and the rebels sabotaged the track, he still had an excellent chance of reaching the Princess in Bonewell. He couldn't help but take one last look back towards the burned out mansion, though, before settling back in his seat.

He became aware that the woman had asked him a question, and he had to replay the last few seconds in his mind to remember what it had been. “Yes, I've seen action,” he replied. “It's not something I like to talk about, though. I hope you understand.”

“Of course, of course,” she said, nodding sympathetically. “It must be very traumatic for you. The violence, the killing. Losing comrades. What you soldiers do to protect the Empire... You're heroes, every last one of you!”

He was wearing civilian clothes that were Imperial in style, so of course she thought he was a soldier of the Empire, and the Brigadier saw no reason to correct her. “Thank you,” he said, therefore, feeling a little awkward.

“Do you have a lot of medals?”

“We don't do it for medals. We do it to protect our homes and the people we love.” He thought of starting a new topic of conversation to get away from the uncomfortable subject, but that would probably just encourage her. Better to just keep his answers as short and boring as possible in the hope that she eventually lost interest.

A gentle deceleration pulled him forward in his seat and his hand went to his pistol again in sudden alarm. He relaxed when he realised that it was a gentle, controlled slowing of the train, not the sudden slamming on of the brakes in response to a blown section of track or something. It was probably just a scheduled stop to take on water. His guess was confirmed when he looked out the window and saw a water tower standing beside the track, beside a small hut where the water engineer had his office. As the train approached, the engineer, a small, wiry man in a grimy grey uniform with a peaked cap, emerged from his hut to stand beside it and grin at them in obvious excitement. “That guy must have the most boring job in the world!” said Barnaby, leaning towards the Brigadier to see out the window. “How often does the pump have a problem that needs an engineer to fix it?”

“We’re over a hundred miles from the nearest large town here,” pointed out the Brigadier, “and that tower probably only stores enough water to supply half a dozen trains or so. It the pump fails, it might be days before someone could be brought here to fix it, and the laws of economics mean that the company builds as few of these towers as possible. If a problem with the pump means that the tank’s empty and the train can't get water here, it probably won't have enough to get it to the next one, leaving it blocking the track. Very bad for business. Employing someone to just sit here for months on end in case the pump fails makes sense from the Company’s point of view.”

“The poor guy's probably half crazy from the isolation!”

“Yes. This looks like a pretty isolated spot. The train drivers might be the only people he ever gets to talk to. Still, some people might like the isolation. Poets, philosophers and so on. They might enjoy a job that pays the bills and leaves them plenty of time to indulge their hobby. And there are always people who are just antisocial by nature, who hate the company of other human beings.” If that was so, though, this particular man didn’t seem to be one of them. He was clearly glad to see the train, and was waving at them with a wide grin on his face. The Brigadier wondered whether he actually lived in the water house, or whether he had a real home nearby. There might be a small town just out of sight through the trees where he went at the end of the day, after making sure the tower contained enough water to supply any train that passed by during the night.

The driver was bringing the train to a gentle stop that would leave the engine under the tower's water pipe, and so the Brigadier stood. “If you will excuse me,” he said, bowing politely to each of them in turn, “I should take the opportunity to check on my horse.”

“Yes, of course,” said Isobel Frankes with visible disappointment, and the Brigadier left through the connecting door they'd come in by, heading for the back of the train.

He found his horse, along with half a dozen others, in the rearmost carriage and patted it on the neck while he checked to see that it was healthy and comfortable. Most of the water had slopped out of the water trough, he saw, and as soon as the train came to a complete stop he opened the sliding door and jumped out onto the dry, yellow grass that covered the ground. The driver was jumping out of the engine to pass some words with the slightly crazed looking water engineer, and the Brigadier waited patiently while the train engineer opened the hatch of the train's water tank and guided the tank’s dispensor chute towards it. He pulled a lever on the side of the chute and water began to flow.

“Passengers should remain on the train,” the engineer said when he saw the Brigadier standing there.

“Yes, Sir,” replied the Brigadier. “I was wondering whether I could have some water for the horse trough.”

“There's a bucket in the office,” said the water engineer cheerfully. “Fill ‘er up from the pipe by the pump.” The Brigadier thanked him and went off in the indicated direction.

He kept an ear on the sound of the pouring water as he went back and forth between the office and the horse carriage with the bucket, not wanting to be left behind if the train left unexpectedly. Not that there was much danger, really. Every other time the train had left a station or a watering point, it had accelerated slowly. If it did the same this time, he would have plenty of time to hop back aboard so long as he didn’t leave it too long. The horses all crowded around the trough as he filled it, drinking thirstily, and he wondered what the owners of the other horses were doing. Didn't they care enough about their animals to check up on them? The trouble was, of course, that no-one kept the same horse for long, in case they formed a parent bond with them. Any owner that held onto the same horse for very long would soon be looking for another owner to swap it with, possibly someone who'd been riding his horse hard and needed a fresh animal that he could continue on with. Another result of this, though, was that owners rarely developed feelings of affection for animals, unless they intended to adopt them and raise them as children.

When the water trough was full, he checked the oat trough, filling it with the scoop that had been left in the food box. Then he replaced the bucket in the engineer's office, noting as he did so that the engineer was still in conversion with the driver. The train engineer, meanwhile, had cut off the flow of water and was pushing the dispenser chute away from the engine. Seeing this, the driver made his apologies to the water engineer and walked back towards the engine, the other man following as he did so, still talking with what the Brigadier thought was a slightly desperate tone of voice. He carried on talking in his slightly insane, chattery way even as the driver shovelled more coal into the fire box and turned a wheel on the boiler.

The Brigadier climbed back aboard the train as it began to move away, gathering speed with glacial slowness. He found himself in a different carriage than the one he'd left, which suited him just fine. He had no wish to endure more conversation with Mrs Isobel Frankes. He found a section of the carriage in which all the seats were empty and chose one with a good view ahead through the window. On an impulse, he turned to look back the way they'd come, to see the water engineer still standing there, staring after them as if watching his only son marching off to war. He wondered how long it would be before the next train came. The next passenger train, the one he needed to catch, would be two days, but cargo trains also used the track and he was pretty sure they ran more frequently. Even so, the evening was getting on, and the Brigadier thought it unlikely that another train would be passing by today.

The idea preyed on his mind a little, but with an effort he settled back in his seat as the train gathered speed and closed his eyes. It would be nice if he was able to get a little sleep, lulled by the gentle swaying of the train.