Book Nine

The Salt Line

Bandits lift eleven hundred yards of rail for the iron, and rather than stand three weeks in raider country the Meridian is diverted down a branch line no living driver has ever run. At a halt at the end of it — three sidings, a stone weigh-house, an unreasonable quantity of barrels — a grounder carter answers a stupid question with a plain one: where do you think the dried fish comes from? There is a sea. There are cities on it, the size of trains, keeping their own circuits and their own books. Nobody hid them. Nobody asked. And the ship standing into the roads eighteen miles away has been sailing a course that has been quietly wrong for two hundred and forty years — on the most honest train-or-ship on the network, where every decision that can kill people is signed by name.

Start reading →