The ship gave another lurch and Ratbit leaned forward to steady himself. Beneath the floorboards, in the dark bowels of the ship, the ratbirds twittered and squeaked.
‘Getting turbulent,’ said Ratbit. ‘Come in to shelter, have we?’
Critch! Critch! Critch!
He spun round, just in time to see a long scaly tail disappear down the aisle behind him. He peered down the narrow gap. And there, scurrying away, was a scrabster -one of the more destructive examples of Edgeland sky-vermin. Gelatinous beneath an opaque, bleached shell, the creature had a whiplash tail, three clawed mandibles and a dozen or so spindly legs. Ratbit raised the crossbow and fired. There was a thud as the bolt embedded itself in the floor - the scrabster froze, squeaked, then scampered away between the crates, unhurt.
‘Damn you to Open Sky, Ratbit cursed, turning sideways on to slip down the aisle.
Two hundred crates were stacked tightly together in the cargo-hold beneath the fore-deck, each one containing a thousand candles made from the finest hammelhorn-rendered tallow, the best that the League of Taper and Tallow Moulders could produce. They burned for hours, smelled sweet and produced no drips of wax. The shrykes loved them. Unfortunately, so too did scrabsters. In the worst infestations, entire cargoes could be consumed.
Suddenly, as Ratbit turned a corner, there was the creature just ahead of him, crouching down on its spindly legs, its beady black eyes glinting back at him from the shadows.
‘There you are,’ Ratbit purred, before loosing a second bolt. But the scrabster darted off before the bolt had even landed. ‘Sky curse you!’ he shouted as he slipped another bolt into the chamber and primed it.
Scrabsters were just one of the verminous creatures that could infest a well-stocked sky ship. Hull-weevils, bow-worms, hullrot- and mire-clams all floated, hovered or sailed on the air currents in the hope of finding a free ride on a passing sky ship. Ratbirds usually picked most of them off and kept the hull and cabins clear, but in a well-stocked cargo-hold, you had to be on constant guard …
Ratbit caught the sight of movement out of the corner of his eye. Slowly, silently, he twisted round, raising lantern and crossbow as he did so. And there, not half a dozen strides in front of him, was the scrabster. This time, however, it was not looking at him, but rather at a narrow crack in the side of a crate, as if trying to determine whether it was wide enough to squeeze through.
It was a large specimen, fat, clawed and oozing gelatinously out of its knobbly shell which, Ratbit thought, rather suggested that it had already started on the tallow candles. Its black eyes extended on the end of thin stalks and glinted in the lantern light as they peered into the hole in the crate. A moment later - having made up its mind - it raised one claw to the splintered wood and cut round its edges.
Ratbit pulled the trigger, firing the crossbow bolt. It sped through the air with a soft whistle and embedded itself in the right flank of the revolting creature. For a moment, nothing happened. Then, as if a lightning bolt had passed through its body, the scrabster twitched and jolted, green ooze pouring from the wound as it emitted a strangulated high-pitched squeal.
The next instant, it flipped over and its claws went limp.
‘That’ll learn you,’ Ratbit murmured. He crossed over to the dead creature, seized its tail and pulled it free of the crate. Then, holding it up, he inspected it by the light of the lantern - and gave a low groan. An empty egg sac hung down from beneath the creature’s shell. From behind him there came tiny scuttling sounds in the shadows.
‘Young’uns,’ Ratbit growled, reloading his crossbow. ‘This means war …’
In the small cabin on the port-side of one of the central rudder-cogs, Maris pulled open the storm shutters and let the light in.
‘That’s better,’ she said brightly, turning to Duggin the gnokgoblin. ‘Now we can see what we’re doing.’
She opened the sumpwood trunk that hovered in front of her and searched its velvet-lined compartments. They were full of small bottles and stoppered phials that clinked musically as she rummaged.
Tweezel the spindlebug had taught Maris everything she knew about cures and remedies. Her father’s old butler had had a medicine for every occasion. Tinctures for rashes, potions for aches and pains, poultices and salves for cuts and burns, grazes and bruises. Many was the time that he had patiently and methodically cleaned and dressed a cut or scratch that she’d picked up at the Fountain House School in the floating city.
It seemed so far away now, Maris thought…
Duggin peeled the poultice-dressing from the nasty-looking bump above his left eye and smiled. ‘Galerider’s a lot bigger than what I’m used to, Mistress Maris, but to be hit by a swinging jib-sail - an old ferry pilot like me -why, it makes me blush …’
‘You’ll get used to the Galerider,’ said Maris, gently. ‘I have. Now, hold still…’
She took the dressing from the gnokgoblin, reached into the trunk and pulled out a small pot of salve. As she unscrewed the pot, a sweet herbal fragrance - at once fruity and peppery - filled the small cabin. Duggin licked his lips.
‘That smells good,’ he said.
Maris laughed. ‘Certainly better than the smell of frying woodonions coming from the galley’
‘What is it, though?’
‘Hyleberry,’ said Maris. ‘It’s excellent as a salve for burns and bruises - and Welma, my old nurse, used to make jam from it as well. Absolutely delicious …’
Her eyes took on a distant look once more. Long ago, when they’d first met in her father’s palace, Quint had burned himself, and she’d tried to soothe the burn by smearing hyleberry jam on his fingers. Her nurse, Welma, had been furious - not that she’d wasted the jam, but that Quint had been fiddling with the lufwood stove in the first place. But he was being brave, trying to protect her, just as he always did …
‘What are you thinking about?’ said Duggin, dragging Maris back from her memories.
‘I … I was just wondering how you got to be a sky ferry pilot,’ she lied, her cheeks reddening. She busied herself with the hyleberry salve.
‘I joined the leagues as a young’un,’ said Duggin. ‘But being a leaguer and taking orders from high-hats wasn’t for me. So then I got work on a rubble-barge in the boom-docks. Stayed there for ten years, and earned enough to get a sky ferry of my own built.’ He smiled at Maris. ‘Ten long years, they were. But the Edgehopper was worth every day of it.’
Maris smiled back and, leaning across, removed a roll of bandage from one of the chest’s velvet-lined compartments. She placed the end of the bandage gently over the gnokgoblin’s bruise. Next, taking care not to make it too tight, she wound it round his forehead and tied it behind his rubbery ear.
‘And now you’re a sky pirate,’ she said. ‘Just like the rest of us.’
A flock of snowbirds flew high over the stern of the Galerider, their plaintive mewing cries filling the sky.
‘Never thought I’d live to sail in a sky pirate ship,’ said Duggin, joining Maris at the small cabin window, ‘and see snowbirds flying high over the Deepwoods.’
Maris adjusted the gnokgoblin’s bandage which had slipped down over one eye.
‘If you want to live any longer,’ she laughed, ‘next time you see a jib-sail, duck!’
In the ornately decorated main cabin, high in the aft-castle of the Galerider, Wind Jackal stood before the great ‘Captain’s Desk’. With its edges and corners covered in inlaid calibrations of tilder ivory, and its leather surface tooled with flight paths and tether-points, the desk was a template on which to place the sky charts of tracing-parchment.
Wind Jackal flattened out a roll of parchment on the desk before him and weighted it down at the corners with four polished ironwood pinecones. Then he opened one of the broad, flat drawers of the desk and surveyed the array of glistening gold dividers laid out carefully upon its velvet lining. Each divider was set to the particular distance a sky ship could sail from ‘tether to tether’.
; Depending on cloud and weather conditions, a sky ship could sometimes sail for days over the Edgelands before needing to descend and tether itself to the anchor rings, rocky crags or ancient ironwood pines that dotted the time-worn flight paths which led to the great markets of the Deepwoods. At other times, a sky ship would go barely a hundred strides at a time in the teeth of ice gales or driving storms - a course charted by the smallest dividers in the drawer.
Of course, a sky ship could always soar off high into the sky, far higher than its tether chain - yet only the most desperate or foolhardy captain would risk his vessel in Open Sky No, it made sense to judge your flight carefully from tether-point to tether-point, keeping low over the endless canopy of Deepwoods forest, and inching closer each day to the remote hammelhorn runs, timber yards or …
‘Great Shryke Slave Market,’ Wind Jackal murmured, picking up a large divider and walking it, point to point, across the expanse of parchment spread out before him on the Captain’s Desk. Twenty teth-erings at least, he thought, and that was only if the weather held …
He glanced across the cabin at the barometer on the wall and shook his head. The needle was still falling. There was definitely a storm imminent - and it looked like a bad one. The last thing he wanted now was to get blown off-course. After all, it was hard enough plotting a path to the great market at the best of times - one could sail for weeks tracking the routes the slavers had taken.
That was the thing with shrykes. Always on the move. They would arrive at a particular part of the forest, set up their roosts - killing the trees and enslaving all who lived in the surrounding area - then, when the forest around had been stripped bare, they would up sticks, pack everything onto the backs of their prowlgrins and move on. In good weather, a voyage to the slave market could take weeks. In bad weather, with an ill wind and worse luck, a voyage could take years …
Wind Jackal laid down the divider and sat back in his tooled tilder-leather chair. Hands folded behind his head, he looked up at the ornately panelled ceiling and sighed a long, weary sigh. All his life he’d thrilled to the excitement of skysailing. He’d relished the challenge of plotting a course, calculating when to risk everything and when to sail safe and treetop close … But somehow, on this voyage, the joy had gone out of it. The charts, the dividers, the barometer were no longer his friends. Ahead seemed to lie only storm clouds and foreboding and …
‘Turbot Smeal,’ he murmured coldly.
Wind Jackal had barely slept for days. Every time he closed his eyes, the quartermaster’s evil face would loom up before him. Even here in his cabin with its panelled walls and polished instruments, with the great Captain’s Desk inlaid with tilder ivory and clam-pearl, with its sumpwood hammock and fire-crystal lanterns -the place he felt most at home in the whole world - the spectre of Turbot Smeal hovered. He heard his nasal voice in the whispering of the sails, his laughter in the creaking of the hull, and sometimes when he looked in the mirror it was Smeal’s sneering face he saw, overlaid upon his own.
He leaned forwards and clasped his head in his hands. His stomach churned and his heart was thumping.
Just then, outside the broad windows, a flock of snowbirds flew past, their haunting cries filtering through into the cabin. Wind Jackal groaned and put his hands over his ears. It wasn’t the cry of the snowbirds he could hear, but Turbot Smeal’s mocking laughter …
Up at the helm, Quint stared ahead as the Galerider soared across the sky, the setting sun in his eyes and the cold wind on his face. His nimble fingers danced over the bone-handled flight-levers, constantly adjusting the sails and hull-weights to keep the Galerider on an even keel.
He had what sky-sailors called ‘the touch’ - the instinctive ability to know precisely which of the twenty-four levers - each one attached to its own sail or weight; each one set differently - to move in order to compensate for every wind eddy or temperature shift. Now he could steer the Galerider almost without thinking, as if the great sky ship with all its different crew-members was simply an extension of himself.
Quint loved the feeling he had when he stood at the helm, the flight-levers beneath his fingers. It was as if, here at the topmost deck of the sky ship, he was protecting all on board: his father, hollow-eyed and distracted as he pawed over the sky charts in the great cabin; Maris, as she tended to cuts and scrapes in the aft-store cabin she’d turned into an infirmary.
Down in the depths of the cargo-hold, Quint could hear Ratbit cursing and stamping about as he hunted cargo vermin, while up at the prow, Steg Jambles and young Tem Barkwater were deep in conversation. Tem seemed to be laughing and crying at the same time … Up from the galley came the smell of frying woodonions and the sound of raised voices. Queep and Sagbutt were having another one of their furious arguments. Quint smiled. What an odd couple the small quartermaster and the great hulking flat-head goblin were - always shouting at one another, always fighting. And yet Sagbutt would lay down his life for Queep without a second thought.
The haunting cry of snowbirds rang out, and a great flock, in arrow-head formation, passed over the sky ship, a thousand strong. It was one of the great sights of the Edgeland skies and Quint never tired of it.
Just then, the wind swung round and gusted from the north, cold and strong, buffeting the starboard-side of the sky ship. Quint’s hands automatically moved to the mainsail and neben-hull-weight levers.
Down on the flight-rock platform, the Stone Pilot was cleaning the cooling-rods.
‘Down a tad, Stone Pilot!’ Quint called across, and the Stone Pilot jumped up and hurried across to the bellows.
Within seconds, the combination of the burners and bellows had raised the temperature of the flight-rock just enough to bring the Galerider down the required dozen strides in the sky. The Stone Pilot was a natural, Quint thought with a smile - though he wondered if he would ever truly understand what went on in that head of hers, hidden beneath the great conical hood.
High above him, at the top of the mast, Quint could see the head of Spillins poking out of his beloved caterbird cocoon. The oakelf look-out was stroking the caternest with one gnarled hand almost as one might stroke a pet fromp or a friendly hammelhorn. Spillins was the oldest member of the crew. What sights those great dark eyes of his must have seen, Quint marvelled …
Just then, the oakelf’s high, urgent voice rang out. ‘Storm on the horizon!’ Spillins cried. ‘Approaching fast! …’
• CHAPTER NINE •
STORMLASHED
Wind Jackal lowered his telescope. Time is of the essence!’ he reminded the crew in a booming voice. ‘Make her stormtight. I want everything lashed down.’
He pulled down hard on two of the bone-handled levers, simultaneously staying the mainsail and lowering the stern-weight. The Galerider slowed and, as he raised the large starboard hull-weight, it swung round so that the stern was lowered and the prow pointed upwards.
‘I’m waiting!’ Wind Jackal’s voice rang out. ‘Let me hear those reports!’
Steg Jambles and Tem secured the second boomsail they had been struggling with and turned their attention instead to the winch-drives, drawing in the sail-sheets and tying them off as fast as they could. Sagbutt worked feverishly on the aft-deck, fastening the tolley-ropes and securing the nether-fetters, while Duggin - his head still bandaged - helped Ratbit as best he could with the rigging-locks.
‘Storm at ten thousand strides and closing,’ Spillins called out from the caternest high above their heads.
‘Report!’ Wind Jackal repeated, his hands tensed over the flight-levers.
At the flight-rock platform, the Stone Pilot had just finished preparing the drenching-tanks and chilling the cooling-rods. Now she was pumping the bellows, heating the rock as much as she dared. Quint hurried past her, with Maris close behind. The pair of them had battened down the hatches on the aft-deck to prevent the rain from getting in, having already secured those on the fore-deck. Meanwhile, Filbus Queep was down below, lashing the tarpaulins in the hold
and unfastening the hull-shutters, just in case it did. A heavy downpour, sluicing unchecked off the deck and cascading down the stairs, could fill the bowels of a sky ship in minutes - with the watery ballast ruining the cargo and rendering the vessel all but unsailable.
Quint and Maris arrived at the helm, gasping for breath.
‘Hatches battened down!’ Quint made his report.
Beside him, Maris bit her lower lip nervously, her face drained of all colour.
The sky pirate captain nodded. ‘Secure yourselves!’ he told them grimly.
Quint did as he was told. He fastened the long tether-rope around his waist and then, since Maris appeared frozen to the spot, one around her waist too, and tied them both to the balustrade.
Maris shook her head as she stared ahead, her eyes wide and unblinking. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’ she whispered.
‘Father knows what he’s doing,’ said Quint, resting his hand on her shoulder. ‘And the Galerider hasn’t let us down yet.’
Despite his confident words, as he watched the wall of cloud rolling towards them, Quint’s own heart began to quicken. It was dark and turbulent, a boiling mass of charcoal grey exploding out of itself, each fresh excrescence tinged with purple and orange and shot with dazzling flashes of iridescent white. All round them, the mighty Deepwoods forest had changed colour. It was as though a dark yellow filter had been placed across the sun, leaving everything beneath it gloomy, yet malevolently glowing. The canopy of leaves below them surged and swirled like a mighty ocean swell, threatening to swallow up anything that dropped into its raging depths.
‘Eight hundred strides,’ Spillins shouted down.
‘Sail-sheets secure, Captain!’ Steg Jambles’s hoarse voice rang out.
‘Aft-deck secure!’ growled Sagbutt.
‘Rigging-locks secure!’ Ratbit joined the chorus.
Clash of the Sky Galleons Page 12
