Clash of the Sky Galleons

by Paul Stewart;Chris Riddell

  Wind Jackal raised his hand and the crew behind him came to a halt. All, that is, except for the waif, who crept forward and crouched down beside the Sluice Tower’s outer wall. The little creature pressed its long thin fingers to the blistered wall and began fluttering and twitching its ears as it listened.

  ‘Take up positions. I want the Sluice Tower sealed,’ Wind Jackal ordered. ‘Sagbutt, the front entrance. Queep, the back. Steg and Ratbit, I want you to watch the drain-covers - I want no nasty surprises coming up from the sewers. And Spillins, an overview. Get yourself up onto the roof. If you see anything amiss - anything! -I want you to sound the alarm.’ He turned to Menisculis.

  The waif glanced back at him with its huge eyes. ‘Many voices,’ he said. ‘I can hear the thoughts of a trog female, who is with child and hungry, but terrified that her father might find her …’

  His ears swivelled round.

  ‘And here, a pair of gnokgoblin brothers. They were in service to a leaguesman … Ha!’ he cried. ‘Ruptus Pentephraxis, no less! And they have stolen from him. A sizeable amount of gold …’ He paused and shook his head. ‘But wait. One is planning on blaming it all on the other and making off with the lot…’

  The ears trembled and swivelled some more.

  ‘Oh, and here. Up on the top floor … Sad, sad thoughts. A lugtroll, fresh to Undertown. She believed the streets were paved with gold, yet now she has to forage in the rubbish dumps just to find enough to live on …’ He paused. ‘She misses her mother, back in the Deepwoods. Her grandmother.’ He gasped. ‘Her daughter…’

  ‘Keep listening,’ Wind Jackal said, ‘for dark thoughts; perhaps murderous …’

  The waif raised his hand, and hissed. ‘Wait, Captain,’ he whispered. His ears swivelled round, so that both of them were pointing downwards. The fluttering increased.

  ‘Down in the sewer pipe itself,’ the waif said. ‘Dark thoughts … Evil thoughts, Captain … There is one waiting, brooding on the past but with plans for the future … But the hate … It is powerful, Captain … Making it hard for me to read his thoughts.’

  Wind Jackal drew his sword and motioned for the crew to take their places. He then looked hard into the waif’s eyes for a moment. Menisculis nodded slowly. Turning away, Wind Jackal whispered to Quint tersely.

  ‘Follow me.’

  They crept over to the boundary wall beside the Sluice Tower and climbed it. Standing on top, Quint looked down into the yawning abyss on the other side.

  ‘How far does it go down?’ he wondered out loud.

  ‘For ever,’ said Wind Jackal, as he eased himself down onto the far side of the wall. ‘So you’d better not slip!’

  Heart thumping, Quint followed his father and the waif down the outer wall, picking out handholds and footholds by the shadows cast by the low moon. Then, shifting across to his right, he grasped hold of the lip of the huge sewer pipe, and swung round inside, landing with an echoing splash at the bottom. His father was waiting for him. The waif, Menisculis, was nowhere to be seen.

  Quint drew his sword as quietly as he could and followed his father inside. Somewhere ahead in the gloom, he knew, the mysterious message-sender was waiting. Wind Jackal’s waif had heard him. He’d heard the hatred in his thoughts; hatred so intense that it could only belong to Turbot Smeal, couldn’t it? Quint touched the small furry body of his ratbird in his greatcoat pocket, and felt a surge of hatred of his own.

  All around them, water dripped, the sound echoing round the cavernous pipe. Far ahead of them, glowing in the moonlight that bounced its way along the tunnel, were the bars of the sluice-cage, glinting like teeth, the odd branch or plank wedged between them like trapped food. And behind that, black and heavy, the sluice-gate itself, closed - all except for a tiny gap at the very bottom through which the tiny trickle emerged.

  From above their heads, filtering through the air-ducts and pipework, they could hear low conversation, laughter, snoring, as those in the upper storeys far above whiled away the long night.

  ‘Captain Wind Jackal, at last!’ came a strange lisping voice from the shadows ahead. ‘I have a message for you …’

  Just then, from behind him, there was a flurry of movement, and a waif threw himself at Wind Jackal from a shadowy recess, high above their heads. As he dropped down through the air, Quint caught sight of the dagger in his hand glinting …

  ‘Father!’ he cried out.

  But Wind Jackal had already seen his attacker. A fraction of a second before the waif would have landed on his back

  and embedded the blade in his throat, the sky pirate captain leaped to the floor and rolled over, dragging his son with him. As he fell, Quint heard something whistle over his head.

  ‘Aaaiiii‘

  The screech echoed down the long tunnel and back again. Then, silence.

  For a moment, Quint remained where he was, crushed against the bottom of the wet pipe, his father’s arm holding him down. He raised his head and peered ahead.

  ‘Wh … what happened?’ he gasped.

  There before him were two waifs. One was dead, a dagger in his hand and another dagger embedded in his chest, from which thick black blood was pouring. Kneeling down next to him was Menisculis.

  Quint scrambled to his feet, helped by his father.

  ‘I … I don’t understand,’ said Quint. ‘Where is he? The one you heard?’

  ‘What I heard,’ said Menisculis, looking round, ‘was this waif assassin here, throwing his thoughts …’ He nodded admiringly. ‘And very good he was, too.’

  He leaned down, pulled his dagger from the assassin’s chest, wiped it on his trousers and returned it to its sheath at his belt. Wind Jackal laid a hand on Quint’s shoulder.

  ‘It’s as I suspected all along, Quint, my lad,’ he said. ‘Another one of Smeal’s traps. But this time, thanks to our waif friend here, we outwitted him.’

  ‘You knew it was a trap all along,’ sighed Quint, a huge wave of relief washing over him. ‘I wish you’d said something before. Maris and I were so worried!…’

  ‘He couldn’t say anything,’ Menisculis’s voice sounded in Quint’s head, ‘or you would have given the game away to this waif assassin here. As it was, the hatred in your thoughts was a perfect cover for me, Master Quint, to assassinate the assassin.’ A thin whispery laugh sounded in Quint’s mind, making him shudder.

  Quint looked across at his father, who was smiling grimly. In the distance there came a low rumble.

  ‘Father!’ Quint gasped. ‘What … what’s that noise?’

  Coming towards them like rolling thunder was a rumbling, rushing, roaring sound.

  ‘Water!’ cried Menisculis.

  The next instant, there was a grinding sound of metal against stone. The sluice gate was being raised. The noise from beyond became tumultuous. Quint turned and peered into the darkness of the tunnel - and then he saw it. Bubbling, frothing, foaming; a vast torrent of water hurtling down the pipe towards them.

  ‘Run!’ bellowed Wind Jackal.

  But it was already too late. The wall of water surged towards them, picking them up and tossing them forward as it gushed towards the end of the tunnel. Menisculis disappeared from view; then Wind Jackal, his arms still waving frantically. Then Quint himself went under, and was rolled over and over, unable to see, unable to breathe …

  Oh, Maris, he thought. Maris …

  All at once, he burst out of the pipe, like a bubble from a bottle of sparkling winesap, out into the open air.

  Falling … He was falling …

  Thunk!

  And then he was falling no more, but was trapped in some kind of net, with the water still pouring over him, passing through the holes in the net and down, down, down into the endless void beneath the Edge. Beside him lay Wind Jackal. From far above them, Quint heard a familiar voice cry out and, looking up, he saw the small sky ferry - the Edgehopper - hovering overhead. It rose up above the Sluice Tower and away from the torrent of water still gushing from the pipe.
The faces of Maris and Tem, worried but smiling, peered down at them.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Maris shouted back. ‘We’ve got both of you! You’re safe.’

  Quint gripped his head in his hands and moaned softly. By the look on Wind Jackal’s face, and on those of the crew who now appeared at the cliff-edge wall, they heard it, too. In the Edgehopper, Maris and Tem exchanged shocked looks with the gnokgoblin pilot and buried their heads in their folded arms.

  Far below, falling into the endless night, yet in all of their heads, was the voice of the nightwaif, Menisculis, crying out to them - but growing fainter by the second.

  ‘Help mel Help me. Help …‘

  • CHAPTER SIX •

  IMBIX HOTH

  Halt!’ The g ruf f com mand cut through the cold, early Lmorning air. The academic -at-arms, in the h eavy armour of a rock guardian, levelled his crossbow at the leaguesmaster in the high hat before him. ‘Nobody enters the Stone Gardens while the rock harvest is in progress!’

  The guard was tall, but slightly built, with piercing grey-blue eyes and a shock of brown, curly hair that fell down over one side of his wide forehead. He was also young, yet the look in those eyes, betraying the dark horrors he had witnessed, seemed to belong to someone twice his age. Behind him, fifty of his comrades stood shoulder to shoulder, their full-length shields emblazoned with the red oval insignia of the Knights Academy.

  Imbix Hoth looked the academic-at-arms slowly up and down, his high hat wobbling and being steadied by his lop-eared goblin hat-tipper. The armour, he noted, was scuffed and dented, and the row of shields were scratched and pitted by sword blows and crossbow bolts.

  ‘I heard all about the Battle of the Knights Academy,’ Imbix purred, with a smile that revealed a mouthful of small, stained peg-like teeth. ‘And how Sanctaphrax lost many of her best academics-at-arms in that bloody fight…’

  He raised a hand of razor-sharp finger-spikes and waved the young academic-at-arms dismissively aside.

  ‘So, since you’re obviously new and this is your first harvest,’ he said, ‘I’ll forgive you your insolence in stopping me entering the Stone Gardens.’

  The leaguesmaster took a step forward - then stopped, outraged, his eyebrows shooting upwards, when the young academic held his ground.

  ‘Perhaps I didn’t make myself clear,’ he said coldly.

  Behind him, the eight massive Undertown shrykes of his bodyguard were getting restless. Dressed in full-length black cloaks and gleaming spiked helmets, they clacked their beaks and hissed with irritation, the ruffs of feathers at their necks standing on end.

  Stretching back from the gates of the Stone Gardens in the direction of Undertown was a line of some fifteen huge stone-wagons, teams of shaggy hammelhorns in harness. The wagoneers, who had been standing around stamping their feet and blowing on their hands in the chill of the early dawn, now all turned to watch the confrontation unfolding before them.

  ‘Just one word from me,’ hissed Imbix Hoth, no longer smiling, ‘and my shrykes will rip out your insolent heart and feast on your liver!’

  ‘There’ll be no need for that,’ came a slightly breathless voice. ‘Let the Master of the League of Rock Merchants through, Captain, there’s a good fellow.’

  The stone marshal, Zaphix Nemulis - a high professor in the violet and white striped robes of the Academy of Wind - pushed past the academic-at-arms, who was still blocking the entrance to the Stone Gardens, and ushered Imbix and his bodyguard inside with a flurry of apologies and excuses. As the shrykes strode past, one leaned towards the young guard, who had now lowered his crossbow, and spat a stream of green bile at his feet. The watching wagoneers - leaguers from the League of Rock Merchants - chuckled and went back to checking their hammelhorns’ harnesses and preparing their grappling-poles for the harvest to come.

  Just two hours earlier, as the first blinding darts of light had broken over the horizon and shot the mist-drenched Stone Gardens with long, stark shadows, a great multitude of white ravens had taken to the sky. High above Undertown the birds had flocked, thousands of them, breaking the dawn silence with their piercing cries as they headed for the great floating city.

  ‘Waaark! Waaark! Waaark!’

  Round the Raintasters’ Tower and Loftus Observatory they had wheeled, alerting the Sanctaphrax academics to the fact that a rock harvest was imminent. Their screeching din had woken even the deepest sleepers, who had tumbled from their beds with the rest, quickly dressed and, still bleary-eyed, headed for the Stone Gardens.

  Down in Undertown, this discordant din that had rudely torn every trog, troll, goblin, waif and shryke from their slumbers was known as the chorus of the dead. It was common knowledge that when the venerable academics of Sanctaphrax died, they were taken to the Stone Gardens to be laid out at the top of the stone stacks, where their earthbound bodies were consumed by the white ravens. To the superstitious Undertowners, it seemed logical that the spirits of those deceased entered the rocks. After all, what other reason could there be for the ghastly howls that filled the air when those same rocks finally broke free of the stacks as they floated up towards Open Sky?

  The thought of it all filled them with dread. On that particular morning - with the marked exception of the drivers of the stone wagons, who had no choice - the Undertowners had remained in their beds, curled up beneath their covers, where they fingered the lucky amulets around their necks, murmuring prayers and incantations as the terrible chorus rang out. In starkest contrast, Sanctaphrax itself was a hive of activity as professors, under-professors, apprentices and acolytes streamed from the schools and academies, descended in crowded hanging-baskets, and hurried to the harvest in carts, carriages and barrows.

  They arrived in the eerie Stone Gardens not a moment too soon. The high stacks of rock were already ‘singing’ -a low, mournful humming sound that confirmed what the white ravens roosting on the topmost rocks had felt with their sensitive claws. The huge boulders were ripe at last.

  In time-honoured fashion, the schools and academies quickly spread out, gathering round their own rock stacks - rock stacks that the most venerable amongst them had watched mature over many a long year. From almost imperceptible bumps in the Edge rock they had grown into the towering stacks of a dozen or more boulders, one on top of the other, in ascending size. Forming a circle round their chosen stack, teams from the individual schools - mistsifters, raintasters, cloud-watchers, fog-graders, and numerous others from all the major and minor academies - raised their eyes skywards and waited expectantly. The rock bailiff, Silenius Quilp, marched through the gardens, excitedly shouting orders.

  ‘Prepare the rock nets!’ he bellowed. ‘Fire up the braziers! Be ready with those rock callipers!’

  At his command, the academics raised canopies of nets - each one fringed with a line of glowing sumpwood fire-floats - on the ends of long poles. They manoeuvred them high over the stacks, and waited. Beside them, apprentices stoked lufwood braziers furiously, while under-professors heated the huge, two-man rock callipers to a white-hot glow. Then, at the rock bailiff’s cry of ‘Silence!’, all fell still.

  In the early light of the morning, apart from the eerie stone song, the only sound to be heard was the far-off squawking of the white ravens perched at the top of the Loftus Observatory. Gradually, though, as the seconds passed, the low drone of the rocks became louder and more plaintive, like the mournful lament at a goblin wake, until one after the other, the uppermost rock on each stack gave a long low howl as it wobbled and shook, and then slowly rose up.

  ‘Harvest!’ roared the rock bailiff, rushing through the Stone Gardens, waving his staff above his head. ‘In the name of Sanctaphrax, harvest!’

  At the sound of his voice, the academics leaped into action. The ‘net-tenders’ pulled their poles free, and the great circular nets closed round the rising rocks, weighted by the fire-floats. For a moment, the huge boulders hovered above the stacks. Then, one by one, fringed by the warmth of the glowing floats, the
y slowly sank.

  As the rocks approached the ground, the ‘rock-fasteners’ surged forward with their glowing callipers and seized the floating boulders in their fiery jaws. Great hisses of steam rose like storm clouds and, as the rock-fasteners held them tight, the rocks’ mournful howl was extinguished.

  All round the Stone Gardens the same procedure was being enacted. At a towering rock stack beside the Edgewater River, a team of cloudwatcher under-professors from the prestigious College of Cloud - each one wearing a scuffed, worn tilder-leather apron that betrayed their years of experience - netted and clamped their rock with both speed and precision. At the rock stack next to them, a team of fog-graders from the minor Academy of Fog was faring less well. Cobbled together only that morning, the group was a hotch-potch affair, ranging in age from callow apprentices to an elderly professor in his nineties who, despite his experience, was slow and so shaky that the others had to snatch his pole away from him before he got it tangled up in the net.

  Meanwhile, in the easternmost part of the garden, a group of seven young apprentice raintasters, their deep blue hoods pulled up over their heads, had set to work with enthusiasm. They’d raised their poles and positioned the net as they’d been shown, and when the rock had risen up from the stack, it had been caught and warmed, until it slowly descended once more.

  But then, as two of them clamped the rock with the heated callipers, they noticed that something was badly wrong. The apprentice on the brazier bellows hadn’t pumped them hard enough. The charcoal hadn’t blazed hot enough, which meant that the callipers themselves had glowed red rather than white-hot. So, while all around them, the clamped rocks from other stacks had fallen silent, their own rock had continued to howl like a wounded tilder.

  Worse than that, it began to rise up off the ground. The raintasters swarmed round their embattled rock-fasteners, concern plain on their faces. Twenty years it had taken for the rock to reach maturity. Twenty years! Pushing up from the ground, growing larger and lighter while those above it had been harvested, one after the other. Twenty whole years - about to be wasted, because of one moment of carelessness.