The Descenders

by Paul Stewart

  ‘Keep to the central pavement,’ Eudoxia called after him as she and her own scuttlebrig drew level. She pointed. ‘Beyond the ridge line over there is the Edge cliff drop.’

  And some way behind, as he watched them galloping on over the barren wilderness of rock slabs and deep fissures, Cade swallowed, his pulse quickening at the thought of tumbling down into the terrible void below …

  Not only were the scuttlebrigs strong, dependable and supremely well camouflaged – lightening and darkening as day turned to night – but they had incredible stamina and endurance. Back in Gorgetown, Lemulis Lope had fed and watered them, and now they were able to continue on their long journey without ever needing to rest.

  While their riders ate and drank in the saddle, the scuttlebrigs maintained an unflagging pace. They followed each other in relays, unbidden, along seemingly well-trodden paths – routes that they alone could sense with their long probing antennae. The colour of their leathery skin changed continuously, a ripple of darkness running the length of their bodies as they crossed a dark crack in the rock; flashes of light or patches of muted green appearing, then disappearing, as they passed over shards of mica or scrubby plants.

  Once, as they were passing a cluster of angular boulders, Eudoxia motioned that she’d seen something. The others all looked up – to see a patrol of Great Glade skyvessels far in the distance. They slowed their pace, anxious that the dust they were kicking up might be spotted. But their fears proved unfounded. Camouflaged so well, the scuttlebrigs and their riders were invisible to the enemy fleet, which soon disappeared over the horizon, none the wiser.

  For four days they travelled like this. Cade soon got used to the swaying movement of the curious creature he was riding. He would doze in the saddle, wake up, then fall asleep again, sometimes for hours at a stretch.

  Then, just as everyone was beginning to think that the rock pavement might go on for ever, it abruptly gave way to the grasslands. Suddenly the travellers found themselves amid a swaying carpet of lush grass and reeds as tall as they were. And Cade watched, transfixed, as his scuttlebrig’s body turned from the pale yellow-grey of the bleached rock to a deep verdant shade of green.

  All around the advancing convoy, the air hummed with clouds of grassland insects. Small animals scurried for cover as the scuttlebrigs approached; booming marsh-herons and croaking reed-toads fell silent; huge flocks of purple and scarlet birds flapped up into the air, chattering indignantly. The scuttlebrigs never once broke stride, but ploughed on into the vegetation. Their antennae swished a path through the long grass in front, which closed behind them as they went.

  As they drew closer to New Sanctaphrax, their journey changed. Although they were camouflaged, the telltale movement of the grass threatened to give them away. And after so long in the saddle, it came as a relief to all of them when Eudoxia gave the command that, from now on, they were to travel by night, stopping during the hours of daylight and hunkering down beneath the green bodies of their scuttlebrigs.

  Cade soon realized that concealing themselves like this was wise advice for, high in the skies above them, he saw an increasing number of Great Glade phraxships weaving a latticework of steam trails in the air as they patrolled the area. Bristling phraxfrigates the size of skytaverns lumbered past overhead, with skeins of smaller phraxgunships following in arrowhead formations.

  It was all too clear to him that, with the blockade in place, no skyvessel could reach the floating city by flying over the Edgelands. The only other way was to circumnavigate the wall of Great Glade vessels, venturing out beyond the Edge and into Open Sky. But this, of course, would have meant flying over the yawning void below, a solution that was deemed far too perilous.

  ‘After all, they call the Descenders mad,’ Eudoxia pointed out as they crouched beneath a scuttlebrig in the shifting soil that oozed up around the grass roots, ‘but not even they would fly a skyvessel without an anchor point below.’

  She looked back at the line of resting creatures, and Cade was shocked to see the concern on her face.

  ‘I’ve been away a long time,’ she said. ‘When I left New Sanctaphrax, the scuttlebrig trail was a lifeline for the city,’ she went on, ‘but like all lines, it frays and stretches – and eventually, it will break.’

  ‘And when it breaks?’ Cade asked.

  Celestia and Tug were asleep on storm-capes spread out on the ground beneath their motionless scuttlebrigs, the chariot concealed beneath a thatch of lush Mire grass. Neither of them stirred as Eudoxia shifted round.

  ‘When it breaks, Quove Lentis’s thugs will take over the floating city without even needing to declare a war that the citizens of Great Glade might object to,’ said Eudoxia unhappily as they continued to watch the patrolling vessels. ‘Quove Lentis,’ she repeated, and snorted with disgust. ‘He’s seen to it that most of them don’t even know what he’s doing in their name – while the rest are too busy lining their pockets to care. When that lifeline breaks, Cade, then Quove Lentis will execute all Descenders and force the rest of New Sanctaphrax to accept his terms.’

  ‘Execute?’ said Cade, anger boiling up inside him. ‘Murder, you mean. Like he had my father murdered – and would have had me murdered too if I hadn’t fled.’ He shook his head bitterly. ‘And now he’s forced me to leave the new home I built, and the life I loved, for this …’ He grabbed a handful of Mire soil and flung it across the waving grass.

  Eudoxia smiled and took Cade’s hand in her own. ‘Tomorrow,’ she told him, her green eyes flashing, ‘we’ll be in New Sanctaphrax.’

  PART THREE

  NEW SANCTAPHRAX

  · CHAPTER NINE ·

  Nate Quarter, High Academe Elect of New Sanctaphrax, was sitting on a sumpwood chair, halfway up one of the scroll-pillars in the ancient Great Library. It was where he was to be found most afternoons.

  When the business of the High Council was concluded, reports on the progress of the blockade assessed and provisions audited, the council leaders went their separate ways. Heldar the fettle-legger, steward of Undergarden, would return to his flocks; Aldus Quodix would hurry back to his workshop; while he, Nate Quarter, would find solace among the roof beams and hanging barkscrolls.

  Here, as the shadows lengthened and the turrets and spires sang in the gathering breeze outside, Nate would make himself comfortable on a gantry high in the huge-domed roof, surrounded by ancient treatises and long-forgotten histories. Not that he spent all his time reading. Far from it. Indeed, most often he would sit back in the carved sumpwood chair, his fingers steepled below the shaggy white beard that Eudoxia had disliked so much, and simply think.

  Of the Professor mostly, down there in the depths, and the extraordinary sacrifice his friend had made for him …

  Almost two years had passed since Brocktinius Rolnix had discovered the High Academe, wild and raving in the Stone Gardens. Throughout that time, Nate had tried to piece together the events of the previous fourteen. Every day, carefully and patiently, he would sift through his memories of those years spent in the depths.

  For the most part, it was little more than a blur of tedious routine. Harvesting the mosses that had sustained them; scratching the passing of time onto the face of a boulder – until they’d given up.

  What had they talked about in all that time? he wondered. Had they talked …?

  Then it had all come to an abrupt end – for Nate, at least. He had ridden the storm-stone up from the depths – though he still had absolutely no memory of the ascent. From the moment the Professor had urged him not to forget him to the moment the skymarshal asked him who he was, it was all still a blank.

  And so it would remain. Nate would never know what had happened. He accepted that now. What he did know, however, and with every fibre of his being, was that he could not leave the Professor alone for ever down there in that infernal blue half-light. One day – when he was completely recovered and New Sanctaphrax was no longer under threat – he would descend once more into the depths to
rescue him.

  At least, that was what he hoped.

  Nate rolled up the barkscroll he’d been reading – a treatise on the sayings of Kobold the Wise – and returned it to its hanging-holder.

  Matters with Quove Lentis and Great Glade were coming to a head. The flood of Edgelanders heading for the floating city had fallen to a trickle. With the blockade in place, none were now able to arrive by skyship. Some, it was true, still made it on one of the scuttlebrigs via Gorgetown, while others, having endured the perilous journey across the grasslands, turned up on foot. But over the previous month, Nate could count the number of fresh arrivals on one hand.

  And New Sanctaphrax was suffering.

  As a new city – or rather, a city that had only recently been newly populated with incomers from various parts of the Edgelands – New Sanctaphrax needed contact with the other great cities. Given time, it would develop its own factories and foundries – workshops, mills and distilleries – but for now it was dependent on trade. And trade had come to a standstill.

  Everything was in short supply. From writing ink to woodhoney, from cutlery to clothing, from medical supplies to ammunition. Nothing was getting through. Even the sumpwood chair that Nate was sitting on – a product from the timber yards of the Midwood Decks that had arrived in the early days of New Sanctaphrax – would be impossible to come by today.

  And though Undergarden was still able to provide the floating city with an adequate amount of fruit, vegetables and grain, even that was running scarce. As for meat and fish, they had become luxury items, exorbitantly priced and available only from a growing network of black marketeers.

  Nate’s thoughts switched, as they so often did, to Eudoxia. Almost a year had passed since his wife had abruptly left New Sanctaphrax, yet he still hadn’t got used to her not being there at his side. Increasingly, he was plagued by fears that she might never return. After all, since almost no one was managing to make it through the blockade, why should she?

  Lost in his bleak reveries, Nate Quarter didn’t hear the low creak of the main entrance door as it opened and closed. Nor the sound of the two sets of footsteps that crossed the wooden floor towards him …

  The basket rose smoothly through the air, swaying in the gentle breeze from the rope that slowly wound itself around the rotating spool above Cade’s head. Gripping the side of the basket, Cade waved to Celestia and Tug on the ground below, then called down.

  ‘I’ll see you tonight in the …’ He glanced round at Eudoxia, who was standing beside him. ‘Where did you say again?’

  ‘The refectory of the Knights Academy,’ she called through cupped hands. ‘The basket tenders will show you the way.’

  Celestia and Tug waved back in acknowledgement, then led their scuttlebrigs off through the verdant vegetation of Undergarden to the old sewer pipes by the banks of the Edgewater River. As soon as they’d stabled the six-legged creatures – currently as green as the grass they were trudging over – Celestia was intent on exploring the pastures and growing plots of the extraordinary former city.

  Once a thriving industrial hub, the place was now an overgrown garden. Plash-ferns with huge plate-like canopies grew in dense, shadow-filled clumps; needleworts the size of hive towers rose up black against the sky; cascades of flowing dropdaisies swept through long abandoned streets and the ghostly structures of ancient wharfs, down to the verdant banks of the Edgewater River.

  ‘There are herbs and medicinal plants I’ve never even seen before,’ Celestia had told Cade earlier, unable to keep the excitement from her voice. ‘And the ones I do recognize are the biggest, lushest specimens I’ve ever come across.’

  Tug had agreed to help Celestia collect some samples. And Cade had smiled, glad to see his two friends happy and relaxed so soon after the tension of their long journey across the Mire grasslands.

  High above Undergarden now, the basket carrying Cade and Eudoxia continued up towards the great Sanctaphrax rock. First the mighty anchor chain came close, then the upside-down forest of ancient weights, hanging from hooks driven into the underside of the rock. Soon they were passing up the side of the rock itself, its surface pitted with cracks and fissures, offering tantalizing glimpses of the stonecomb inside.

  Cade was spellbound. He held on tight to the side of the basket and stared intently.

  All too soon, the basket came to a gentle halt. A couple of lean-looking basket tenders in threadbare blue-grey robes and peakless hats that bore the New Sanctaphrax emblem appeared. They unbuckled the boarding bridge and ushered Eudoxia and Cade out onto the magnificent West Landing of the floating city.

  Cade gasped. It was his first moment on the floating city he’d dreamed about all his life, and already it was exceeding his most feverish expectations.

  The ancient mist-shifting towers loomed high above him, and clustered around them were the turrets and spires of the other great academies, each one different in design and construction. Diaphanous wind flags billowed from some; others had roof tiles that rippled as breezes blew through them; and each one was festooned with intricate glass and metal mechanisms whose purposes Cade could only guess at.

  And then, as a gust of wind rose, Cade heard the music. He started back in surprise. Soft, discordant, then gathering in rhythm and harmony, the spires and towers were singing all around him. Even the cables from which the West Landing was suspended hummed and thrummed like a mighty, but extraordinarily delicate, harp. Cade found himself thinking of the strange, ethereal-sounding song that Eudoxia had sung on board the Hoverworm.

  ‘It’s all so beautiful,’ he murmured as he followed her down the landing, then out along a broad paved avenue. ‘Unlike any other place I’ve ever seen.’

  ‘I could say that you’ll get used to it,’ said Eudoxia, smiling at Cade. ‘But the truth is, if you’re anything like me, you never will. The city is so ancient, and has travelled such distances, there are wonderful new things to be discovered every day.’ Her expression hardened. ‘And it is this,’ she said, her hand sweeping round in a broad arc, ‘that Quove Lentis seeks to destroy.’

  To their right was the grandest architectural feature of all on the floating rock, the Great Viaduct. Looking up at its broad arches, Cade saw the turrets, minarets and crenulated roofs of the smaller academies that lined the top. Below, thronging with blue-grey robed academics, were the Viaduct Steps.

  ‘In previous times, every academy would have worn robes of a different colour and cut,’ Eudoxia explained, her voice calm and lilting once more. ‘But since the rock returned to us, we all wear the robes of New Sanctaphrax.’ She plucked at Cade’s jacket sleeve. ‘There’ll be some robes hanging by your sleeping closet at the Knights Academy, should you wish to wear them.’

  ‘Is that where we’re going now?’ asked Cade, trying to hide the excitement in his voice.

  The academics on the Viaduct Steps looked tired and drawn, yet as Eudoxia made her way past them they smiled and doffed their caps. And she acknowledged them graciously, her expression benevolent and serene. Beside her, Cade felt as awkward as he had on his very first day of school back in Great Glade.

  ‘No, Cade,’ said Eudoxia, climbing to the top of a set of empty steps and sitting down. ‘It isn’t.’

  She motioned for Cade to sit beside her.

  ‘I want to tell you about your uncle,’ Eudoxia began, her voice quiet and serious. ‘He has been through so much …’ She paused, her face clouding over. ‘Nate had already been lost for more than seven years when I first heard that he had a brother – or rather, a half-brother. Thadeus …’

  ‘My father,’ Cade breathed.

  ‘Your father,’ said Eudoxia sadly. ‘That was when I sent him the spyglass and the message.’ She clasped her hands tightly in her lap. ‘You know how guilty I feel about that, Cade.’

  Cade nodded.

  He knew he should say something like ‘you couldn’t have known’ or ‘it wasn’t your fault’, but could not bring himself to do so. Eudoxia, in any ca
se, continued without missing a beat.

  ‘Nate returned. Quove murdered your father – and, I feared, you too, Cade.’ She swallowed awkwardly, and Cade saw her cheeks colour. ‘But then … Nate had been home a year, but was still recovering from the descent when I received word of your whereabouts. I couldn’t wait until he was strong enough, so I left to find you – to bring you here.’

  High above their heads, a flock of small birds – stonefinches or cheepwits – flew from one academy tower to the next, twittering loudly. Cade wondered vaguely what might have disturbed them. Eudoxia hadn’t even noticed.

  ‘Nate doesn’t yet know he had a half-brother,’ she went on. ‘And he doesn’t know about you either, Cade. I’m going to take you to the Great Library to meet him. But before I do, I want to give you this.’

  She reached inside her cape and drew out a bark-scroll.

  ‘One of the Friends of New Sanctaphrax found this in a phraxmine stockade in the Eastern Woods,’ she told him. ‘I’ve been saving it, until now. It’s a scroll from your grandfather Abe’s journal. And I’d like you, Cade, to give it to your uncle.’

  Cade unfurled the scroll as the warm breeze stirred again, setting the spires singing all around them. He began to read the yellowed parchment:

  Phasia Hexatine was my first true love. I was a young phraxengineer with a promising career in Great Glade. Phasia lived next door to my lodgings in Ambristown. We married soon – perhaps too soon – after we first met. She was troubled, given to fits of uncontrollable jealousy and dark moods. And I confess, in my youthful arrogance, I did little to help. After a summer of happiness came an autumn of turmoil and despair. We parted. Phasia left me, and Ambristown, and disappeared.

  My life since then has been visited by both tragedy and joy. My career flourished. I married Hermia Lentis, despite her brother’s opposition to our union, and …

  Cade realized his hands were shaking. He stopped reading, unable to follow the florid handwriting as it blurred before his eyes.