Free The Builders by Daniel Polansky

“Of course, ma’am,” he began, his voice exactly how you would expect. “How can I help you?”
    “Finally.” Behind her bifocals the mole’s eyes were huge and blind and stupid. “I asked the muskrat who was selling the tickets, and he said that he didn’t know but that you might know, and so that’s why I’m asking you. Do you know?”
    “Know what?”
    “Where my bags are, obviously.”
    “I’m afraid, ma’am, that I don’t have any—”
    “Of course you haven’t, I wouldn’t expect you have, but surely you must know someone who
has,
mustn’t you? When one gets on a train in the Capital one expects to find one’s bags when one gets to Last Gulch, doesn’t one? Assuming one is getting off in Last Gulch, which was where I changed trains.”
    “Of course, but—”
    “You certainly can’t expect me to survive forever with just the dress I’m wearing, can you? What do you take me for? A church mouse?”
    “No, obviously not—”
    “Good. I’m glad to see we can agree to that much. So what exactly do you plan to do about it?”
    “About what?”
    “My bags not being on this train,” said the mole, as if one of them were an idiot.
    “If you would just excuse me for a moment, I promise to come help you just as soon as—”
    But then the whistle blew, and the great iron steed bucked forward, and the conductor knew he had lost. For all that he might have wished otherwise, he could not very well throw a passenger off a moving train just because he didn’t like the look of him. He turned his attention back to the shrill mole, and her problem about which he could do nothing.

Chapter 33: Just Past Ciudad del Gato . . .
    The badger got up from where he was sitting and ambled forward, squeezing his bulk through the narrow rows of seats. The conductor saw him from a carriage away, and his stomach dropped out from under him, because there was absolutely no way a creature of such size could fit in the bathroom. He excused himself from explaining to another passenger—an elderly turtle, he thought she was elderly at least, it was hard to tell with turtles—why it wasn’t possible for her to use her unassigned ticket anytime today, or anytime tomorrow, or really, just any time at all, and he approached the badger, trying to come up with a polite way of informing him that he was going to have to hold his bladder for the better part of three hours.
    It was only then that he noticed the mouse, the one he hadn’t liked, walking in the long shadow cast by the badger, and behind him the salamander whom he had liked even less. The conductor—who was not a particularly clever sort of creature, but who wasn’t quite dumb as a carpenter’s nail—began to think that today might turn out to be one of those days where things failed to abide by their proper routine. The conductor hated those sorts of days.
    The conductor turned around and headed forward until he came to the first-class compartments. A chubby vole sat as guardian between the two sections, making sure the hoi polloi didn’t get any ideas above their station. His name was Harold, and the most important thing he had learned in his life, as far as he was concerned, was that it was entirely possible to sleep with one’s eyes open, or at least open enough to deceive passersby, if one was willing to put in a bit of practice. True, it wasn’t as good as a full-on nap, but any degree of slumber was better than waking. As far as Harold was concerned, the better part of existence lay in those little moments of oblivion that preceded the last.
    The conductor hustled past without realizing his protector was dim to the world; he even took some degree of comfort in the barrier he imagined he was putting between himself and the badger. Indeed, as soon as he reached the first-class compartment, with its slightly more comfortable seats and vaguely polished décor, he felt a concrete sense of relief. Nothing bad, after all, ever happened to the rich.
    Sad to