The Talisman

It was a wrong smell, not of the Territories, both metallic and greasy.
    Richard immediately went to one of the interior angles of the shed, sat down on the floor with his back to the wall, and closed his eyes.
    ‘D’ye ken its workings, my Lord?’ Anders asked in a low voice.
    Jack shook his head and walked up along the tracks to the head of the train. Yes, there were Anders’s ‘demons’. They were box batteries, just as Jack had supposed. Sixteen of them, in two rows strung together in a metal container supported by the cab’s first four wheels. The entire front part of the train looked like a more sophisticated version of a deliveryboy’s bicycle-cart – but where the bicycle itself should have been was a little cab which reminded Jack of something else . . . something he could not immediately identify.
    ‘The demons talk to the upright stick,’ Anders said from behind him.
    Jack hoisted himself up into the little cab. The ‘stick’ Anders had mentioned was a gearshift set in a slot with three notches. Then Jack knew what the little cab resembled. The whole train ran on the same principle as a golf cart. Battery-powered, it had only three gears: forward, neutral, and reverse. It was the only sort of train that might possibly work in the Territories, and Morgan Sloat must have had it specially constructed for him.
    ‘The demons in the boxes spit and spark, and talk to the stick, and the stick moves the train, my Lord.’ Anders hovered anxiously beside the cab, his face contorting into an astonishing display of wrinkles.
    ‘You were going to leave in the morning?’ Jack asked the old man.
    ‘Aye.’
    ‘But the train is ready now?’
    ‘Yes, my Lord.’
    Jack nodded, and jumped down. ‘What’s the cargo?’
    ‘Devil-things,’ Anders said grimly. ‘For the bad Wolfs. To take to the black hotel.’
    I’d be a jump ahead of Morgan Sloat if I left now, Jack thought. And looked uneasily over at Richard, who had managed to put himself asleep again. If it weren’t for pigheaded, hypochondriacal Rational Richard, he would never have stumbled onto Sloat’s choo-choo; and Sloat would have been able to use the ‘devil-things’ – weapons of some kind, surely – against him as soon as he got near the black hotel. For the hotel was the end of his quest, he was sure of that now. And all of that seemed to argue that Richard, as helpless and annoying as he now was, was going to be more important to his quest than Jack had ever imagined. The son of Sawyer and the son of Sloat: the son of Prince Philip Sawtelle and the son of Morgan of Orris. For an instant the world wheeled above Jack and he snagged a second’s insight that Richard might just be essential to whatever he was going to have to do in the black hotel. Then Richard snuffled and let his mouth drop open, and the feeling of momentary comprehension slipped away from Jack.
    ‘Let’s have a look at those devil-things,’ he said. He whirled around and marched back down the length of the train, along the way noticing for the first time that the floor of the octagonal shed was in two sections – most of it was one round circular mass, like an enormous dinner plate. Then there was a break in the wood, and what was beyond the perimeter of the circle extended to the walls. Jack had never heard of a roundhouse, but he understood the concept: the circular part of the floor could turn a hundred and eighty degrees. Normally, trains or coaches came in from the east, and returned in the same direction.
    The tarpaulin had been tied down over the cargo with thick brown cord so hairy it looked like steel wool. Jack strained to lift an edge, peered under, saw only blackness. ‘Help me,’ he said, turning to Anders.
    The old man stepped forward, frowning, and with one strong, deft motion released a knot. The tarpaulin loosened and sagged. Now when Jack lifted its edge, he saw that half of the flatcar held a row of wooden boxes stencilled MACHINE PARTS . Guns , he thought: Morgan is arming his rebel Wolfs. The other half of the space beneath the tarp was occupied by bulky rectangular packages of a squashy-looking substance wrapped in layers of clear plastic sheeting. Jack had no idea what this substance might be, but he was pretty sure it wasn’t Wonder Bread. He dropped the tarpaulin and stepped back, and Anders pulled at the thick rope and knotted it again.
    ‘We’re going tonight,’ Jack said, having just decided this.
    ‘But my Lord Jason . . . the