The western heavy-duty timber spur curved through the dripping pine forest like a clean steel stitch through the wilderness.
Unlike the muddy royal post road three hundred yards away, the spur track was built on crushed trap-rock ballast, well-ditched and dry.
The Iron Bastion moved down the line with muted power.
Master Borin Bronze-Lung had closed the draft dampers to a quarter notch. That let the locomotive glide almost silently at fifteen miles per hour through the misty pines.
From the small roof-dome, Giles Croft surveyed the royal baggage train.
Stretched along the narrow, rutted highway for four miles were four hundred heavy canvas-covered wagons. The road had collapsed into a quagmire of yellow clay.
Wagons were sunken to their axles. Teams of six and eight draft oxen stood steaming in the drizzle, heads lowered in tiredness.
Thousands of peasant wagon drivers and wagon drivers in sodden wool tunics stood huddled under pine branches, chewing raw grain or cursing their stuck wheels.
