After the ferry sidled into its berth in the docks of Concord, the capital of the Union of Civilised Territories, Pilgrim caught a tram that rattled towards the Central Terminus through wide tree-lined greenways lit by the moonglow of incandescent lamps. The underground temple of the railway station was mostly empty at this late hour, as was the cross-continental train. It was drawn by a pair of electric locomotives that were, along with the streetlamps, trams and much else, a product of Master Able’s sponsors, the Sweetwater Collective. Like the wealthy dynastic families which were reshaping the economy and politics of the Union, the collective was a new kind of tribe: an association of like-minded people who pooled their skills to reverse engineer artefacts excavated from the fossilised remains of ogre cities, and shared the profits amongst themselves rather than with their kin. As he climbed aboard one of the passenger wagons Pilgrim thought with grim amusement that although the collective had refused to sponsor him, their powerful new locomotives would at least shorten the journey he must make to beg for scraps from his tribe’s table.

He rented cushions and a spongy mat, slept as best he could as the train rattled out of the city and sped through the night, and was woken early the next morning when a pair of train hands rolled back the tarpaulin that had covered the wagon during the night. He spent the next three days rereading Master Able’s manuscript and making extensive notes and rehearsing the case he needed to make to his mother, or simply watching the scenery flow past the sides of the wagon. Motion was good. It gave him purpose and direction.

Forested hills and broad river valleys patchworked with fields and orchards gave way to the grass plains of the heartland. Pilgrim purchased food from the train hands or from platform vendors when the train stopped at stations to take on or offload passengers and freight and swap out the locomotives’ batteries, and early on the morning of the fourth day of his journey, in a cloud forest high on the flanks of the mountain range that curved down the spine of the Union, he disembarked at the station, no more than a low platform and a couple of sheds, beside the saw mill of the little town of Tall Trees.