Clash of the Sky Galleons

by Paul Stewart;Chris Riddell

  ‘For Sky’s sake, don’t let it fly off!’ one of them cried as he fell on the rock and tried wrestling it back to the ground.

  ‘The net! The net!’ another one shouted, but by now half of the sumpwood burners had burned out, and there wasn’t enough heat to keep it grounded.

  Suddenly, a College of Rain under-professor from one of the other stacks came hurrying across, a pair of white-hot callipers that he’d pulled from his own brazier grasped in his hands.

  ‘Take the other end,’ he bellowed to the apprentice closest to him.

  The youth leaped to do as he was told, and together the pair of them clamped the callipers round the rock. There was a hiss, a sigh and a cloud of steam - and finally the rock fell still. A cheer went up from the others.

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ they cried. ‘Thank you.’

  The under-professor nodded. ‘Next time, heat your callipers properly’ he said. ‘And always have a spare set at the ready’ He chuckled. ‘The College of Rain hasn’t lost a flight-rock for twelve harvests, but you lot came mighty close, I can tell you.’ He nodded towards the distant gates. ‘Now, take your rock, and join the grading queue.’

  Soon a great procession of academics was making its way back through the Stone Gardens. The groups from each academy and school clustered round their own individual rocks, tending them with glowing tapers, fire-floats, torches and lanterns of every description -anything to keep the new-born flight-rock warm. Back through the now silent stacks, already beginning to welcome the returning white ravens, the academics marched in triumph, and on towards the Reckoning Bench.

  There they were greeted by the rock bailiff, Silenius Quilp of the School of Light and Darkness. He was red-faced and breathless after his exertions, but smiling broadly. Beside him on the tall, ironwood bench sat the stone marshal, Zaphix Nemulis of the Academy of Wind, twitching slightly and adjusting his spectacles as he opened the giant ledger that was balanced on his knees. And to his left, standing stiffly upright, his arms folded, was Imbix Hoth, the Master of the League of Rock Merchants.

  As the first academics - a group of under-professors from the College of Cloud - approached the bench, carefully tending their flight-rock, Imbix smiled, and his small, reddish eyes glinted greedily Behind him, his black-feathered shrykes craned their necks and stared with unblinking yellow eyes.

  ‘Diameter?’ the stooped, wispy-haired rock bailiff enquired as the group of cloudwatchers reached the bench.

  Three strides, twelve,’ came the reply. Quilp frowned over the top of his half-moon glasses. ‘Are you sure?’ he queried. ‘Looks like three strides, thirteen, to me.’

  The cloudwatchers with the callipers clamped firmly round the rock held it steady while an under-professor took a measurement with a copper measuring rod.

  ‘Three strides, thirteen,’ he confirmed.

  ‘I knew it,’ said Quilp, turning to Zaphix the stone marshal with a smile of satisfaction. Although Silenius Quilp had never made it beyond sub-under-professor in the prestigious School of Light and Darkness, his skills in the Stone Gardens were legendary.

  Zaphix entered the measurement in the ledger on his balanced knees.

  ‘Right, now attach it to the weighing-basket,’ Quilp instructed.

  The cloudwatchers eased the net across to the weighing-basket, and secured it in place. As the rock cooled slightly it began to pull the basket upwards, which in turn tugged on the hook beneath it and caused the needle at the centre of the measuring dial to swing round. Silenius Quilp crouched down and squinted at the calibrations.

  ‘Eight hundred and sixty-three,’ he read off.

  Zaphix dipped his snowbird quill in the tiny pot of black ink and wrote the number in the column next to the diameter.

  ‘Which means …’ Quilp muttered under his breath, a complicated mental calculation involving the diameter of the rock times air temperature plus humidity, divided by the square root of its negative weight… ‘Flight grade … third class,’ he announced. ‘A real beauty.’

  Zaphix scratched away in the ledger before turning to the leaguesmaster, his eyebrows raised.

  ‘For such a rock?’ Imbix Hoth purred, his finger-spikes tapping down on the table-top. ‘Twelve refectory tables of finest lufwood,’ he said, ‘and the College of Cloud’s cellars filled with vintage sapwine.’

  The under-professors bowed to the leaguesmaster stiffly. They were clearly delighted with the price they’d obtained for their flight-rock but, as Sanctaphrax academics, they were hardly going to let a leaguesmaster, however lofty, see the pleasure on their faces.

  ‘Sold!’ announced the stone marshal, and entered the details in the ledger.

  ‘Next!’ the rock bailiff’s voice rang out.

  A group of mistsifters stepped confidently forward, the long sleeves of their checkerboard robes fluttering in the breeze. The rock they tended was massive, more than twice the size of the cloudwatchers’, but as Silenius Quilp was weighing it, he frowned and pointed to a fissure which ran, like a livid scar, halfway up the rock’s surface.

  ‘A rupture, I’m afraid, Professors,’ he announced to the mistsifters as Zaphix scratched in the ledger.

  They turned to Imbix, who smiled ruefully. ‘Pity’ he muttered. ‘Over-ripe … So close and yet so far …’

  ‘Fit only for rubble, I’m afraid,’ said the stone marshal, shrugging his shoulders.

  ‘A vat of woodale,’ Imbix announced. ‘Take it or leave it.’

  The mistsifters bowed as stiffly as the cloudwatchers before them, their faces - behind the metal noses they wore - betraying no emotion.

  ‘Next!’

  The procession of harvested flight-rocks continued until well into the morning, with the academics accepting the leaguesmaster’s bids for their rocks. Occasionally a group of older professors would hold out for more by standing silently, until Imbix added a gilded looking-glass or an ornamental wall-hanging or two to his bid. But most of them just accepted his offers.

  And why shouldn’t they? After all, the academics were being amply rewarded. A single flight-rock, for instance, had provided the Academy of Gloom with enough candles to last for a year, while a harvest of four rocks had ensured the Institute of Ice and Snow supplies of feathers, quills and down for decades to come. The leaguesmaster’s offers were invariably generous, lavishing upon them everything they could want, and more.

  It was, of course, in his best interests to do so. Without the Sanctaphrax academics’ expertise, built up over generations, together with the white ravens to whom they offered up their dead, there would be no harvest. On occasions in the past, Undertowners had attempted to harvest flight-rocks for themselves - those, that is, who were not terrified by the ferocious white ravens and the disturbing eeriness of the gardens - only to find that the skill of the ‘net-tenders’ and ‘rock-fasteners’ was not easily matched. What was more, those who had succeeded in securing a flight-rock had then had the academics-at-arms to contend with, making their chances even slimmer.

  Naturally, the Leagues of Undertown understood this only too well. It was the reason they furnished the Master of the League of Rock Merchants, Imbix Hoth, with all the luxuries they could, for him to shower on the academics in return for the precious flight-rocks which, it seemed, only the academics could successfully harvest. By selling the flight-rocks only to the League of Rock Merchants, the academics of Sanctaphrax avoided undignified haggling and squabbling with the Leagues of Undertown, and were able to retreat to their floating city with all the provisions and luxuries they could possibly need.

  It was an arrangement that suited them and Imbix Hoth very well indeed. The leaguesmaster guarded his position jealously and saw to it that anyone who sought to take his place met with an unfortunate end - usually from the razor-sharp tip of a shryke’s talon.

  At last, with the sun now high up above the rock stacks and the hammelhorn wagons at the gates of the Stone Gardens all carefully loaded with their precious cargo, Zaphix Nemulis closed the
ledger and put away his snowbird quill. The last of the academics - an irascible bunch of fog-graders who had haggled silently for ages - finally settled for twenty bales of tilder cloth and eighty barrels of pickled oozefish, before shuffling off after the departing academics-at-arms. Now, the Stone Gardens were peaceful once more, with only the desultory calls of the roosting white ravens breaking the stillness.

  ‘Sanctaphrax thanks you, Leaguesmaster,’ said, Zaphix, ‘for your generosity.’

  ‘As ever, I am pleased to be of service.’ Imbix smiled with a slight bow that almost caught his hat-tipper by surprise.

  The leaguesmaster ignored the flustered prodding of the hat pole, and took the stone marshal by the arm.

  ‘Now, on a more personal note …’ He glanced around furtively. The rock bailiff had packed away his equipment and was hurrying off to catch the noon-day baskets. ‘Shall we take a little walk, Stone Marshal?’

  Zaphix smiled smoothly and fell into step with the leaguesmaster as he walked. Behind him the razor-sharp talons of the black-feathered shrykes clicked on the rock as they followed.

  For a few minutes they walked through the Stone Gardens, neither of them speaking. Past the freshly harvested rock stacks and the smaller ‘infant’ stacks, they went; over rubble that had fused itself back into the rock surface and on between budding stone mounds that were about to sprout. Soon, they were nearing the very edge of the gardens - indeed the very edge of everything; where the rock stuck out and the Edgewater River cascaded down into the yawning void below.

  As the bright yellow sun had risen higher in the sky, it had slowly burned off the fog that enveloped the Stone Gardens through the morning. Now, with the distant bell at the top of the Great Hall softly chiming midday, all that remained were wispy snakes of mist that wound their way round the bottoms of the stone stacks and the ankles of those walking between them. And as they approached the tapering slab of jutting rock in the farthest corner of the gardens, with the yellowy-blue sky all round them, it felt to Zaphix Nemulis as though he was walking through the air.

  They came to a halt in front of the very last stone stack. The leaguesmaster and the stone marshal looked up.

  ‘How is it coming along?’ asked Imbix, his voice silken and his eyes glinting greedily. ‘How big is it exactly?’

  ‘Now, now, Imbix, it doesn’t do to hurry such things,’ said the stone marshal. ‘Ten strides, and still growing, by my latest measurements.’

  ‘Excellent! Excellent!’ cackled the leaguesmaster. ‘But I need it to grow bigger still!’

  ‘Yes, so you keep telling me,’ said the stone marshal, being careful to keep all irritation from his voice. ‘And as I have told you before, Imbix, delaying the flight of a mature rock is a very tricky business indeed …’

  ‘A business for which I’m paying you handsomely!’ snapped the leaguesmaster.

  ‘Yes, indeed you are, Imbix. Now take a look here …’ said the stone marshal smoothly, trying to deflect the leaguesmaster’s attention from the small fortune in marsh-gems and mire-pearls he’d already parted with. ‘I have drilled a small hole through the stonecomb …’

  He pointed above their heads to a tiny hole in the surface of the huge boulder at the top of the stack. Imbix followed his gaze, his brow furrowing.

  It leads to the very heartrock at its centre,’ said Zaphix. ‘A minute crystal of stormphrax in a length of glowworm skin has been inserted,’ he explained. ‘The skin has now rotted away and in darkness, the stormphrax weights the rock down sufficiently to allow it to grow untroubled. It can be removed later, when…’

  Ingenious,’ Imbix Hoth broke in. ‘But can you make the rock bigger?’

  ‘Given time,’ said the stone marshal.

  ‘I need it now,’ snapped Imbix.

  Zaphix Nemulis nodded. ‘I’ll do my best,’ he said, ‘but I can make no promises…’

  ‘Get it to fifteen strides and you shall be as rich as a leaguesmaster!’ Imbix declared, his finger-spikes digging into Zaphix’s arm.

  Just then, from behind them, one of the shrykes gave a loud hiss and leaped behind a small stone stack. Imbix and Zaphix turned to see it emerge a moment later with a struggling mobgnome clutched in its talons.

  ‘What’s this?’ screeched Imbix Hoth furiously. ‘A spy? A traitor? What have you heard? Speak up!’

  ‘Calm yourself,’ Zaphix Nemulis interrupted, eyeing the unfortunate creature, who was clutching a grubby sack in his trembling hands. ‘It’s just some poor wretch in search of rubble by the look of it. I’ll give him a reprimand and send him on his way …’

  ‘No!’ Imbix silenced him. ‘The mobgnome is mine!’

  Eyes blazing, the black-feathered shryke threw the mobgnome at the leaguesmaster’s feet.

  ‘Have mercy, sir,’ the mobgnome whimpered, wringing his hands together. ‘I … I gathered a little rubble, just chippings … My sky ferry’s on its last legs …’

  ‘That’s as may be,’ said Zaphix, icily.

  ‘Twelve mouths to feed, my wife has,’ the mobgnome wailed. ‘Twelve hungry mouths …’

  ‘Yes, well, now there’ll be one fewer for her to worry about,’ said Hoth, raising a spiked hand. ‘Shrykes!’ he shrieked, his raucous voice slicing through the air like a rusty blade. ‘Deal with this vermin!’

  A blood-curdling shriek went up as, in a flurry of black plumage, the eight shrykes fell on the hapless mobgnome, who disappeared beneath flashing talons and stabbing beaks. When the bloody flurry was over, all that was left of the mobgnome was a red stain on the rocky ground.

  ‘That,’ said Imbix Hoth, as the shrykes fell into formation behind him, ‘is how I deal with rock-rustlers.’ He glanced across at Zaphix Nemulis, his narrowed eyes as bloodshot as those of the shrykes under his command. ‘It is how I deal with any who cross me.’

  • CHAPTER SEVEN •

  THE BANE OF THE MIGHTY

  Quint glanced across at Maris. She was staring straight ahead, her face in profile, with that look of steady determination on her face that he knew so well.

  What was it? he wondered. The arch of her eyebrow, the delicate line of her chin - or perhaps the way her mouth curved up ever so slightly at the corners? Whatever it was, Quint had come to depend on that look, to seek it out whenever he needed courage or reassurance. Of course, he knew that beneath that expression there lurked the same worries, fears and confusion that he himself felt, but the fact that Maris seemed so determined not to show her emotions somehow always made him feel better.

  The day hadn’t started well. Quint had committed the tiny body of Nibblick, his ratbird, to Open Sky - sending a small bundle of blazing lufwood chippings up into the morning sky from his window.

  Maris turned and caught him staring at her, forcing Quint to look hurriedly away, his face reddening. The broad street leading to the sky-shipyards was lined with stalls and workshops, and teeming with Undertowners.

  As usual, the rock harvest had thrown everything into disarray. For most Undertowners, what with the white ravens and the chorus of the dead, the day was just beginning. They’d spent almost the entire morning inside, their doors locked and windows shuttered. Stores and stalls that should have opened at dawn had remained closed; in the foundries and factories, no one had turned up to relieve the night-shift; while the streets themselves - normally thronging with merchants and pedlars, barrows and carts - had been all but deserted.

  It wasn’t until eleven hours, when the white ravens had finally abandoned their terrible din and begun to return to the Stone Gardens, that the superstitious Undertowners, rich and poor alike, had ventured from their mansions and palaces, their hovels and dens. They’d emerged, blinking, into the sunlight and glanced furtively around. Then, fingering their charms and amulets gratefully, they’d muttered heartfelt thanks to Open Sky that they had been spared by the spirits of the dead, and that their harbingers - the white ravens - had returned to the eerie Stone Gardens. Now at last, they were able to get on with the concerns of the l
iving.

  Suddenly, the shops were open and the markets were trading. The air filled with the sounds of business - raised voices, bidding and bartering; chain-rattle and hammer-blow, and the crack of the hammelhorn-drivers’ whips as they urged their beasts of burden on.

  Just up ahead, Captain Wind Jackal and his crew made their way through the crowds, attracting long looks and furtive glances as they did so. Resplendent in their heavy greatcoats, bedecked with their compasses, telescopes, parawings and grappling-hooks, they each carried a sky chest upon their shoulders -huge tilder-leather and lufwood trunks packed with their personal belongings - in readiness for the long voyage ahead.

  They looked magnificent, thought Quint.

  It was an opinion that seemed to be shared by the Undertowners, judging from the warm smiles and approving nods the sky pirates attracted. The only exceptions were the odd, scowling faces of low-hat leaguesmen as they crossed the street to avoid them.

  A bevy of portly gnokgoblin matrons, one with a prowlgrin pup crushed beneath a fleshy arm, smiled broadly as Quint and Maris squeezed past them. Quint smiled back, proudly.

  All at once, the air was shot with the moist odour of the Mire. Quint peered in through a narrow doorway on his left to see a plump mobgnome perched on a tiny stool, his legs going up and down as he operated a foot-treadle. On the spinning platform before him, a pot was slowly taking shape as his large hands smoothed and teased and caressed the mound of white clay.

  Next to the potter’s, its squat façade decorated with hooks from which mugs, jugs, vases and vats were suspended, was a tall thin carpentry works. A stack of window frames stood on one side of the entrance; a dozen or so doors on the other. The air smelled of wood-pine and scorched timber, and the high-pitched squeal of a circular saw forced the two goblins - one buying and one selling - to conduct their haggling at maximum volume.