by Paul Stewart
They sped on, soundlessly riding the air currents, their stirrups clipping the tops of the tall grass as they closed in on the phraxfrigates. As they drew nearer, Celestia could see figures on the fore and aft decks. They wore green topcoats with distinctive chequerboard collars. Three of them were operating a swivel-gun mounted on the aft deck of each vessel, while at the prow ten more had their phraxmuskets trained on the grasslands below.
Brock indicated that he would take the phraxvessel on the left, which meant that the one on the right was Celestia’s. Their phraxcraft slowed as the glide faded, and Celestia brought the Stormhornet to a hover some three hundred strides from her target.
Below the phraxfrigates, the grasslands were getting churned up by the phraxguns. Celestia saw a scuttlebrig spring into view from beneath a matted clump of grass. As its rider clung onto the saddle strapped to its tail, the scuttlebrig galloped across the flattened grass in plain sight of the phraxfrigate’s swivel-gun.
One, two, three blinding flashes exploded from the barrel, followed by sharp whip-like cracks that cut through the air. The scuttlebrig reared up, then crashed into the muddy earth of the Mire in a heavy tumbling fall. Its rider, a fourthling in a grey rain-cape and crushed funnel cap, was thrown clear – but before he had a chance to climb to his feet, the phraxmuskets at the prow of the phraxfrigate riddled his body with bullets.
Celestia let out a small anguished cry.
Another brave scuttlebrig rider – trying to break the blockade and bring food and equipment, and maybe also newcomers, to the floating city – had ended up dying for the cause. As a healer, there was nothing she could do for him, but in her new role – a skymarshal out on patrol – she was determined to avenge his death.
Breathing deeply and slowly, she raised her long-barrelled phraxmusket and took aim at the centre of the vessel where, just visible through the circular wheelhouse window, a phraxengineer was bent low over the flight controls. Beneath her topcoat, as she focused on the wheelhouse window, Celestia’s heart was beating like a ratbird caught in a snare.
Some way further off, two more scuttlebrigs were making a run for it, their riders hunched forward in their saddles as phraxfire rained down around them. Celestia squeezed the trigger …
There was a tiny flashing spark as her shot ricocheted off the ironwood panelling of the phraxfrigate’s wheelhouse. A startled face peered out from the circular window before disappearing again as the phraxfrigate abruptly soared up into the air, forcing the crew on the aft- and foredecks to drop their weapons and cling on for dear life.
The phraxfrigate that Brock was targeting rose steeply too, then sped off after its companion vessel, listing sharply to one side as it did so, its swivel-gun firing blindly behind it. Stray phraxbullets scythed through the tall grass around Celestia, making her flinch. One bullet struck the Stormhornet. The phraxcraft spun round, almost throwing her from the saddle.
By the time Celestia had regained control of the vessel, the phraxfrigates were steaming off to join the rest of the fleet on the distant horizon. As for the scuttlebrig convoy, there was no sign of it.
Brock appeared at her side on the Rock Demon, his phraxchamber powered up. He was smiling.
‘Think I clipped one of their phraxengineers,’ he said, and shrugged. ‘We scared them off, which is the main thing.’ He paused, his expression becoming serious as he reached out a hand to Celestia’s shoulder. ‘You’re bleeding.’
The flight back to Undergarden was hard for Celestia. The pain from the phraxbullet in her shoulder kept hitting her in waves. And each time it did, she gripped the pommel of her saddle and gritted her teeth to avoid crying out.
Forced to land, she cleaned the wound as best she could, applied a dressing of hyleberry compress, then took drops of bitterroot tincture for the pain. Brock assisted her as best he could, untying the appropriate bundles from her topcoat and handing them to her when she requested them. Then he tethered the Stormhornet to the Rock Demon and the two of them resumed their flight, returning to the floating city at half steam. But with the intense pain continuing to wash over her, Celestia was finding it increasingly difficult to balance her phraxcraft.
‘Where are we?’ she asked at last, dimly aware that they’d stopped moving.
‘Undergarden,’ said Brock, helping her out of the saddle.
Through half-open eyes, Celestia saw two figures approach – a fettle-legger in blue-grey robes with a green trim, and …
‘Tug? Tug, is that you?’ she asked weakly.
Then darkness …
When Celestia awoke, she imagined for a moment that she was back on board Gart Ironside’s Hoverworm. She was lying in a hammock in a small room that was cloaked in shadow, with various bits and pieces hanging from overhead hooks.
Except, she realized, reaching out, this couldn’t be a skyvessel, because when she touched what she thought was the cabin wall, it was made of stone, not buoyant timber.
The movement made her wince, and the dull throb in her shoulder brought everything back to her. She sat up slowly, then carefully climbed out of the hammock. As her feet touched the cold stone of a paved floor, she shuddered.
Around her, in what appeared to be a vaulted chamber, were hundreds of small pots containing plants that were glowing with a soft blue light. On closer inspection, she discovered that the pots were in fact shards of stone, while the plants that were growing on them were a wide variety of mosses and lichens, the like of which Celestia had never seen before.
Folded neatly in a small alcove in the wall beside the hammock was Celestia’s topcoat, along with her boots and backpack. Apart from the ache in her shoulder which, Celestia was pleased to see, had been expertly bandaged, she felt fine.
A figure approached through the glowing plants. It was the fettle-legger.
‘I’m Fenda Fulefane from the Academy of Earth Studies,’ she announced. ‘Tug removed this from your shoulder,’ she said, holding up a leadwood bullet between her forefinger and thumb. ‘And dressed your wounds,’ she added. ‘You taught him well, by all accounts. A talented fellow, your friend Tug.’
Celestia smiled. ‘We looked after the wounded together at the Battle of Farrow Lake,’ she told the fettle-legger.
‘Yes, I know all about that,’ said Fenda. She helped Celestia on with her boots and then, taking care not to disturb the dressing, her topcoat. ‘Tug and I have become firm friends ourselves.’
‘Where is this place?’ asked Celestia. ‘And what are these plants?’
‘This is my laboratory in the sewer chambers of Old Undertown,’ said Fenda. ‘And as for these mosses, there’ll be plenty of time to discuss them. Tug tells me you’re quite a herbalist, Miss Helmstoft.’
‘Please, call me Celestia,’ she said, then added, ‘But where’s Brock? I need to report back to the Knights Academy …’
‘There’s no hurry,’ said Fenda gently. ‘You’ve been asleep here for three days.’ She took Celestia by the arm. ‘Skymarshal Rolnix returned your phraxcraft and made a report for both of you.’ She smiled warmly. ‘Now, I promised Tug I’d bring you to see him as soon as you were back on your feet, which, Celestia, it seems to me, you are!’
· CHAPTER FOURTEEN ·
‘Cade, lad, what’s the hurry?’
Cade looked round.
Sitting at the top of the Viaduct Steps was his uncle, his eyes glowing that weird, almost otherworldly, shade of blue. Cade would have waved if he could, but he had his arms full of barkscrolls. The jumble of notes, calculations and cut-away diagrams they contained seemed to match Cade’s thoughts, the inside of his head full of phraxglobes, power conversions and forge calibrations.
‘Seftis Bule is waiting for these,’ he called up to Nate.
His uncle was looking a lot better than when he had first seen him, Cade noted. The deathly pallor and dusty sheen to his face had gone – though the High Academe Elect’s white hair made him look far older than his thirty-four years.
‘Ah, yes,’ said
Nate thoughtfully. ‘Our chief armourer is keeping you busy. He clearly found those barkscroll diagrams of your father’s interesting. But still, we haven’t spoken for – what is it? Days? Weeks? …’ He shook his head. ‘I honestly can’t remember the last time.’ He patted the step he was seated on, indicating that Cade should sit beside him.
Seftis Bule could wait, Cade decided.
‘How’s the blockade-running going?’ Cade asked as he sat down next to Nate. ‘I’ve been so wrapped up with my work in the Armoury, I’m a little out of touch.’
Nate smiled, but he suddenly looked careworn and tired. ‘The scuttlebrig trail is holding,’ he said. ‘Just. And Undergarden is keeping us fed. But with no raw materials coming in by sky, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to replace or repair equipment. And our reserves of phrax and munitions are running dangerously low.’ He scowled. ‘All thanks to Quove Lentis.’
Cade shuddered. There was something he’d been meaning to ask his uncle, but the time had never seemed right. Until now.
‘Nate,’ he said slowly. ‘Are we related to Quove Lentis? That letter I gave you – the one Aunt Eudoxia showed me – in it Abe wrote that he had married a Hermia Lentis—’
‘His sister,’ Nate said, his voice flat. ‘Yes, Cade, Quove Lentis is my uncle.’
He fell still. Cade didn’t press him further. But Nate seemed to feel that he should explain more.
‘I went to see him once,’ he said quietly. ‘After I’d left the phraxmine in the Eastern Woods and gone to Great Glade. I was fourteen. I hoped he might be able to help me out.’ He snorted. ‘Fat chance of that. It turned out that Quove was still furious that his sister Hermia had married my father all those years earlier. “A common labourer”, he called him. Said Abe had dragged the Lentis family name through the mud.’ He paused, his face etched with pain. ‘I sometimes wonder whether everything that has happened since is because of Quove’s contempt for my father …’
He looked down at the yellowed documents in his lap. Realizing that their conversation about Great Glade’s tyrannical leader was at an end, Cade followed his uncle’s gaze – and saw that the papers contained notes and diagrams of what looked like the cliff face below the Edge. Glancing round, Nate saw him staring.
‘Yes, I’ve been doing a little work of my own – now that I feel my strength returning,’ he added. ‘These are notes on the descending trail.’ He smiled. ‘Fourteen years I was gone, but during that time the Descenders of the academy made enormous strides. You can see here, for example …’
Nate traced a finger down a leadwood pencil outline of a steep decline.
‘This is the central vertical ridge where the Professor and I got into so much trouble on our last descent,’ he said. ‘Now the route is fully chain-ringed from the Low Gantry to the Cusp, and marked with klaxon poles and flare lamps right the way down to the Great Overhang.’
Cade leaned across and looked closely.
‘The High Cliff and Mid Cliff have been conquered,’ Nate continued, his voice full of pride. ‘And with the construction of the Keep, just below the Great Overhang, the denizens were on the point of pushing down further into the depths.’
The denizens.
Just hearing the name gave Cade shryke-bumps. He had seen them in the refectory of the Knights Academy. They sat at their own long table on a balcony overlooking the rest. The denizens were the elite of the Descenders, and in their phrax-weighted armour and glister helmets they reminded Cade of the knights academic of the First Age of Flight: the legendary stormchasers.
Instead of prowlgrins, though, the denizens towed sumpwood sleds and wore the phrax-powered gauntlets he’d first seen back in a display case at the Armoury. They were called ‘flame claws’, and they could incinerate an Edge wraith at a hundred strides. Cade had marvelled at these gloves, and the visored helmets that protected the wearer from the disorientating effects of glister storms. Back in the Armoury, he’d even tried one on when nobody was looking, and imagined himself staking out rows of horizontal phraxlamps and threading them with glowing lightlines as he descended into the inky blackness of the unknown depths.
Not that he would get the chance to do that any time soon. Cade knew that well enough. Descending had been brought to a halt by the blockade, and if Great Glade prevailed, then the descending trail would be abandoned to the ravine demons and Edge wraiths for ever.
‘Of course, that was all before the blockade,’ Nate was saying, echoing Cade’s own thoughts. ‘Now Eudoxia is urging me to pull the last of the denizens back from the Keep and assign all the Descenders to the defence of the East and West Landings. It would put at risk all the progress they made in my absence.’ He shook his head. ‘But Eudoxia fears that an all-out attack is coming.’
‘Where is Aunt Eudoxia?’ Cade asked. ‘I haven’t seen her around lately.
Nate laughed. ‘Your aunt is a remarkable person, Cade,’ he said. ‘Without her, the city would never have survived for as long as it has. Right now, she’s off on one of those missions of hers, trying to get more help for New Sanctaphrax.’
‘Who from?’ Cade asked.
‘I don’t know,’ he replied with a shrug. ‘She doesn’t like to bother me with such things. “You concentrate on the future,” she told me before she left, “and I’ll worry about the present.”’ Nate tapped the sheaf of papers he was holding. ‘Which is how you come to find me concentrating on the next great descent.’
‘To find your friend – Professor Hentadile?’ Cade asked, recalling the afternoons he’d spent on the gantry in the Great Library, listening to his uncle reliving every detail of his last descent.
‘The Professor? I’ve almost given up hope of ever finding him,’ said Nate bitterly. ‘It’s anyone’s guess how far we fell. It might take years of painstaking descending from Denizens Keep before we find those scree fields again. And even that might only be the start …’
Cade frowned. ‘I don’t understand,’ he said. ‘If you don’t think you’ll be able to find the Professor, then why descend at all? Especially with New Sanctaphrax under attack from Great Glade.’
‘You’re right, Cade,’ said Nate, nodding thoughtfully, ‘it does seem strange – self-indulgent, even. Yet, if New Sanctaphrax has any purpose at all, it is the pursuit of knowledge. Once we abandon the attempt to deepen our understanding of the way the Edge works, then we may as well all pack up and move to Hive.’ He laughed. ‘Apart from anything else, it’s my own small act of resistance against that monster Quove Lentis.’
Cade thrilled at the words. The more he discovered about his uncle, the more Nate Quarter did remind him of his father.
‘What if … if you could fall the way you did,’ Cade suggested, ‘but … but control that fall? Charting a freefalling descent,’ he said, weighing up each thought. ‘If you did that, you could find your way back again, couldn’t you?’ He looked at his uncle askance. ‘Or if you had a ship that—’
‘Don’t think I haven’t thought about it, Cade,’ said his uncle, laying a hand on his shoulder, ‘but no phraxcraft has ever survived below the High Cliff. The air currents there are just too strong. The vessels end up being smashed against the cliff face.’
‘But—’ Cade began, only for Nate to interrupt him a second time.
‘Seftis got all excited about your father’s working drawings when you first arrived, but …’ He shook his head ruefully. ‘Well, you know what happened to the models he built. No, the only way is to descend the cliff face itself, mooring ring by mooring ring, the hard way.’
‘The hard way …’ Cade repeated. He turned to Nate. ‘Uncle,’ he said, ‘what would you say if I told you that one of the models did work; that Seftis and I have been working on a full-sized ship – a ship designed especially for you.’
Nate looked at him, hope glowing in his clear blue eyes.
‘Is it ready?’ he asked.
Cade smiled. ‘Almost.’
‘Then I’d say, the moment the threat to New Sanct
aphrax was over, we’d have to take such a vessel on a test run,’ said Nate. He clapped his nephew on the shoulder. ‘We would go descending!’
Back at the Armoury at last, Cade noticed that it was quieter than usual, and nowhere near as hot. It would make his work more pleasant, but the reason for the improved conditions was cause for concern. Despite all the sacrifices that had been made by those who now called New Sanctaphrax their home, the materials they’d amassed to be smelted down were rapidly running out.
Theegum looked up the moment Cade stepped into the forge hall, almost as though she’d been waiting for him to get back. Turning away from the bellows, she flung her arms wide. And, grinning, Cade hurried between the piles of phraxchamber cooling plates and hanging nets of ironwood charcoal, and fell into the banderbear’s warm embrace.
‘Really, Theegum?’ came a voice. ‘Do we have to endure this performance every time young Quarter enters the Armoury?’
Tutting loudly, the small mottled goblin rolled his eyes, then returned to the molten copperwood alloy he was pouring into the clay mould clamped to the forge bench.
‘Theegum’s just pleased to see me. Aren’t you, Theeg?’ laughed Cade. ‘How long has it been? Two hours?’
‘Four hours,’ said Seftis Bule sharply. ‘Just to pick up a couple of barkscrolls.’ He sniffed. ‘Still, if it helps us solve this torsion-ratio problem, I suppose it will have been worth it.’
Using long-handled tongs, the chief armourer plunged the ingot into the cooling trough. There was a loud hiss, a cloud of steam, and the metal turned from glowing red to a bright yellow-silver colour. He placed the ingot on the bench and took off his gloves.
‘Let’s see what you’ve got, then,’ he said, reaching out a hand to take the barkscrolls Cade was clutching – but stopped as Theegum held up a paw, claws raised, before lowering it in a series of fluttering gestures.
