It occurred to Mildred that the benefits of trains are not simple.

  They are not simply faster than horses and cheaper than coaches. Rather, their advantages are deeper and more nuanced, and the ways in which they expedite transport are multifarious.

  For, in absence of the convenience that trains afford, it is inevitable that one must contend with difficult terrain. Deserts, for instance, abuse the traveller with heat and have in very short supply things which sustain life. Thus, to avoid entering a desert and never leaving, the traveller must be properly attired and stocked at the outset of their journey. And to pass from one side of a mountain to the other, a traveller can either make the arduous trek slowly up and over, or the even slower trek out and around. And always, there will be rocks to slip on, high places to fall from, and mud and snow which might become incontinent and slide away under its own weight.

  In cases where roads are poor or there are no roads at all, it becomes prudent to hire a local guide. Not just so that you know where to go, but also to know where not to go. For there are things out there, hostile and hungry things, thriving secretly in the far-off wild places that civilisation has never touched, spawning with impunity broods which no wizard has ever been paid to cull, and where the deep darknesses of the forests have never been brightened by a logger’s axe. Probably. Or so people say, at any rate. The local guides certainly seem to think so, and they’d know, so it's generally a good idea to listen.

  Trains mostly did away with these difficulties and this danger. After their advent, it became the case that the ravages of a given route needed only be experienced once – by the men laying the track, and thereafter seldom again.

  Now, the hazards of travel disappear for the regular traveller in places where trains are an amenity, and previously perilous places become only interesting scenery; brief interludes between origin and destination, which are newly the only two places amidst the many that a journey might touch which ever really need to considered as being more than just sights to see.

  All of this occurred to Mildred as she looked back at the train, hoping for it to be the last time she saw that particularly grim sight.

  It sat dead in the east behind them, as a grey anomaly against the white and green and brown backdrop of perhaps a dozen squat mountains and a dozen more lesser eminences. These mounds of earth all swelled up into and against each other, with their valleys mingling to birth many little meltwater streams which trickled down and away westward to irrigate the fields of lowland farmers.

  The whole of the vista reminded Mildred of the lives on the train, which had flowed out of all those people to mingle inseparably on the floor. She looked away, off to the calmly rolling lowland fields, but found herself forced to imagine them being fed by streams of blood. The events of the night would probably haunt her for a while, likely for much longer than any of the other harrowing things her journey had suffered.

  She tried not to think about it, which was becoming a habit of hers, Mildred noticed, and it occured to her that avoiding specific thoughts might soon become more odious a task than the thoughts themselves. It was a worry, but a pointless worry, because she utterly failed to stop thinking about it.

  The train behind her wasn’t entirely grey.

  A single carriage – the only one still with all its windows – was covered in splotches of red. They were unidentifiable from the distance, but she knew what they were, and she wouldn’t soon forget.

  They were blood. Words in blood, and words written in blood tend to maintain a sticky-gooey presence in the mind long after reading, even if you happen to be on good terms with their author. Mental stains are hard to launder.

  So mentioned, Mildred was walking arm-in-crippled-arm with the artist of this macabre design, who hobbled along under the combined power of her support, his working leg, and his staff. Notably, he was also unhappy with his work, though for a very different reason.

  It read:

  THIS TRAIN SERVES AS TOMB FOR THE MANY MERCENARIES WHO HEREIN SOUGHT THE DEATH OF THE WIZARD GREGOR, AND ALSO FOR THE UNINVOLVED WHOM THEY SLAUGHTERED FOR CONVENIENCE

  It simply wasn’t good, if he was to be frank. Too long, and too… specific, and it lacked a certain tone of unknowable menace, which was of sovereign value to wizardly aesthetics. It had ended up sounding like a factual cenotaph inscription for the benefit of history, rather than being the chilling warning that he’d intended. This obviously displeased Gregor, because he had certain ideological qualms about explaining himself, or even being seen as attempting to explain himself.

  After all, explaining himself was almost a tacit admission that he might need to explain himself, and that was impossible. Who in the world could ever demand answers from Gregor?

  The message should have been short and simple, perhaps containing a threat concise enough for placement in a headline, but Mildred had insisted that they leave absolutely no room for misinterpretation about the fates of the other passengers.

  It was his position that the actual state of affairs was immediately obvious from a simple ‘HERE BE THE DEAD ENEMIES OF GREGOR’, but Mildred assured him that failure to address the other corpses on the train would very definitely lead to unpleasant misunderstanding. Such misunderstanding wouldn’t really bother him, and might even be of benefit to his pursuit as a fearmonger. But Mildred, taking seriously her position as the diplomat between them, employed her comparatively expert understanding of people and emotions to determine that, no, actually, it would be a poor idea to be brief.

  Gregor’s chosen medium being the blood of the dead was already bad enough, if she let him make it much easier to believe that he killed everyone on the train, it wouldn’t just be the Worldeater hunting them.

  Laws and lawmen, she had told him, were things that very likely actually existed, and which could introduce unnecessary difficulty to their plight. This addition, it seemed, was her job to prevent.

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  He did not resent her intercession – such concerns were healthy for the maintenance of her normality – rather, he regretted his inability to construct a proper threat under the restrictions she imposed.

  A reasonable man would have lent himself lenience in light of the fight and loss of blood and the consequent weakness of body and mind, but Gregor was Gregor.

  And so they walked, neither quite happy.

  “I might cut it off,” Gregor remarked out of nowhere as they went, looking down at his limp limb which did not actually limp. It dragged in the snowy muck as they trode down to the vanishing point of the valley, where all the elevation turned gentle and the lowlands began. It wouldn’t be far to travel for a regular man, but it was a great distance to a cripple. It didn’t seem nearly so snowy down there, which would be an improvement.

  “What?”

  “The leg.”

  As a testament to Mildred’s adaptability, it took her only an instant to parse and consider this newest of Gregor’s absurdities.

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “It is generally better to have two legs, I think.”

  “I would obviously fashion a replacement, which should be much more simple than a hand or an eye.”

  “A pegleg.”

  “An enchanted pegleg.”

  “…Gregor, I don’t think I need to tell you this, but your leg will heal if you leave it on. Removing it will prevent this.”

  Looking at the wizard, she could tell that he was weary. Really, truly weary. His usually proudly-held head was down between hunched and bunched shoulders, and his hat seemed almost wilted in some token effort to match its master. His eye, usually mean with intensity, was focused on nothing in particular. It didn’t flick to the shadows of nearby trees to search for lurking danger, nor trawl the horizon for the silhouettes of coming trouble.

  He looked only vaguely about the road, and occasionally to her, which she noticed because she was on his blind right side, and he had to turn his head.

  Gregor suffered from the kind of exhaustion that a single night’s rest wouldn’t fix.

  And yet…

  “The leg is currently a burden, and will continue to be a burden for quite a long time. Amputation and replacement can be made quick, and even a crude prosthetic will be an immediate improvement.” His voice was weak, but it had steel behind it. Clearly, this was not some momentary fancy born from infirm delirium.

  Mildred was not unsympathetic to his point. She understood what he was getting at – convalescence would take a while, and he’d be double the cripple during that time. It could be a deadly detriment for the both of them, but Gregor cutting off his own leg was too extreme a self-cruelty for her to sanction.

  It was just… insane.

  He’d be exchanging his future as the owner and operator of two perfectly functional legs for the more immediate minor advantage of being half as mobile as a regular person, which was only an advantage when compared to his current self, and was a significant detriment in nearly all other views. It was too extreme, and it would be her fault.

  She had to prevent this, and she knew that she’d need to do more of the same in the future. A new duty of hers was thus born: moderating Gregor’s cruelty to himself, because he obviously would not.

  In this pursuit, Mildred attempted to adopt a kind of queenly, imperious expression (learned from her aunt), and Gregor watched that one special freckle migrate.

  “You are not cutting off your own leg.” She declared, though she didn’t really imagine that she had the power to order him to not do whatever he pleased, and was actually hoping that he wouldn’t be offended by the notion. Very swiftly, her expression crumbled. “It would, uh, impact your future ability to guard my body, and also it would significantly impact your ability to do nearly everything else. Please do not cut off your own leg.”

  Gregor fixed her with a one-eyed squint, weighing the advice and appraising the advisor.

  “Then what do you propose I do?”

  “A cane.”

  “A cane?”

  “It will make walking easier.”

  “I already have a staff.”

  “It’ll be easier than walking with a staff. There’s more mechanical advantage.” She put her hand down to her side and began to hobble, miming the act. “You can put your whole bodyweight over a cane.”

  As the freckle returned to normal position, he realised that she was right. It was a simple matter of leverage.

  To support yourself with a cane, all you needed to do was lean into it, but staves were held away from the body’s centre of gravity, rather than beneath it, and so had to use the strength of the arm to support the body, rather than the body’s own weight. Staves were comparatively effort-inefficient.

  This information wasn’t hard to come by, but it had strangely hidden from Gregor’s genius until the revelation of Mildred.

  Could this be a hint of her worth? Might she be some agent of the phenomenon of inspiration?

  Gregor’s eye dragged itself slowly from Mildred’s face to settle on his staff for a moment, then glided back again to her freckle, watching for any interesting changes.

  “You are very valuable.”

  She blinked and it stretched wide, though only very slightly.

  “…Thank you?”

  “A cane… isn’t unthinkable,” he continued, “Wizards have staves, but it isn’t a hard rule. Some have wands, some have nothing. I had a poleaxe… at one point.”

  It was slightly strange for Mildred to realise that convention and tradition also factored into Gregor’s considerations, alongside the seemingly much more important matter of whether or not a cane would actually be useful, but Gregor’s strangeness no longer felt strange to her, and so it made complete sense in a oddly strange way.

  “In fact, a cane is almost the midpoint between a staff and a wand, which either makes it half as good as each of them combined, or exactly as good as half of both of them. Perhaps I could create one to perform the functions of the two.”

  “So… you won’t cut off your leg?”

  “Likely not.”

  Crisis had been averted.

  Down to the lowlands they hobbled together, with Mildred’s attention temporarily stolen away from the bodies in her wake and put to work considering all the ways she might compel a certain wizard to be nicer to himself, and with Gregor’s eye cruising tiredly about in search of a convenient branch.