The Vorrh

made its presence felt on the confined space of footplate. It stared between the shovelled coals, stoking the fire, spitting embers. It leaned, annoyed, against the burning oil and steam. Voices worried the pipes and handrails; voices from the rushing night, which could not be heard over the thunder of the engine. Some said it was the angels becoming anxious about consciousness trespassing the Vorrh. Others said it was the ghosts of the Limboia, looking for their hosts. Those who worked the engine said less and less, as they heard more and more.
    They did not wake the next day. Nobody ever did. The next day was always dimmer, maybe because the forest grew thicker the deeper the train travelled, its huge canopy thrust up against the sky by greater and greater trees. Or it could have been the murmuring speed that never changed pulse or velocity, the rhythmic, chanting tracks sending the passengers into a haze of hypnotic coma, much like the metronome of a piano is said to do. Or perhaps, in this strangest of places, the natural laws of the world, which were known and trusted, came unbound and bent. Night here might have a different saturation, so that the dawn, which had begun to fragment onto the leaves, had taken forty hours to arrive.
    They blinked and rubbed their eyes against the new light, standing and stretching as the train whistled. There was a strange smell in the compartment, one that goes unnoticed in normal life. He knew the scent from his younger days, when he had attempted caving in Switzerland. He and his athletic guide had been forced to enter a shallow crawlspace, deep in the arteries of the Nidlenloch. It had taken them an hour to crawl through its pinching tunnel. That was when he had first noticed it.
    ‘What is that stench?’ he had asked his guide at the time.
    ‘It is us, mein herr. Humans.’
    The young Frenchman had recognised the truth in those words almost before they had been spoken. It was the smell of something inherent, innate.
    Yet this was a scent that was altogether new; another, higher note, complex and thrillingly shrill; he thought it might be the breath of the Vorrh itself. Turning to his guide, intent on asking more about it, his eyes alighted on the luggage rack, and his query was lost. He stepped onto the plush seat like a fretful lapdog and reached up, yanking at his case. It did not move. The fears of his first sight had proved correct: the rack had grown tendrils and stems, delicate branches, which extended from its hand-carved foliage and gripped his possessions, entangling themselves about the leather in licentious affection. The same thing had happened along the entire length of the rack, and the few other passengers present, noticing his reaction, realised that they were in the same predicament. They joined him, pulling and worrying their belongings away from the lustful new shoots. The Frenchman would have hacked at the foliage if he could have found a suitable tool, but Seil Kor stepped in to help him, bending back the stems and unwinding the tendrils, before lifting the unnecessary luggage and setting it down at the little man’s feet.
    The train slowed to a standstill, the hissing brakes dragging against the dreary momentum with a squeal that made singular ears turn, in the impenetrable distance of trees. There was a raised, wooden platform for the passengers and a ramp for the slave carriage. The low flatbeds continued, into a distance of scarred tracks and rutted furrows. The station had no name; none was needed. A small, wooden house lay beyond the platform. They gathered themselves and walked towards it, legs stiff from the carriage, their heads still dazed from sleep; a wooden hangover, badly nailed together by amnesia.
    The house was a waiting room, barren and empty. It contained only benches and a flyblown map of the Vorrh, pinned to one wall. They peered into the large, simple paper, which was wrinkled and made frail by sun and rain. It showed the city and the forest, balanced in ridiculous, improper proportions; the railway was delineated, as was the house, and there were a few lines leading away from it, which faded into nothing. The course of a river was suggested by an uncertain, faded blue contour; there was a shaded area, labelled ‘Forestry’, and a vague, dotted line which roamed about near the middle of the paper, accompanied by the word ‘Forbidden’.
    The map should have been informative and authoritarian, but its poor execution ensured