“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 as soon as the train settled down and proceeded smoothly again. 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 for the Brigadier 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. Try as he might, though, he couldn't imagine how.

     The train lurched again as it passed over another patch of uneven 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.

      The Brigadier look up to see the man looking down at him expectantly. He handed it across and watched while the Inspector subjected it to careful scrutiny before cutting 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. Back in Farwell, he'd seen that there was a railway track that went to Carrow and that 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 end up behind the house before long, 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 she was with. They were both dressed expensively, the Brigadier saw. The woman was wearing a drape of fox fur around her neck, and the man was 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...