‘You look like you need cheering up, Nate,’ said Rudd, glancing round at his friend. He stopped. ‘So what’s it to be? More slop at the stockade?’ He nodded up the left-hand fork, the lamplight shining along the track which led to the stockade. He swung round, till the same beam of light danced along the track to their right. ‘Or an evening at the Hulks?’
‘Hard call,’ grinned Nate – and set off after the others along the well-trodden path which would take them to the miners’ tavern.
‘Good choice,’ said Rudd, clapping his friend on the shoulders.
The pair of them fell into step with a group of returning miners. As they neared their destination, the atmosphere grew rowdier and rowdier.
There were a dozen mining stockades in the area, each one run by a different mine owner and housing anything up to two hundred miners each. Mining was thirsty work and Mother Hinnyplume – an enterprising shryke matron who, some twenty years earlier, had passed that way quite by chance – had immediately spotted a gaping hole in the market. Six months later, the Hulks – two ancient wrecked sky galleons, lodged in a massive lufwood tree, which had been shored up and turned into a tavern for the nearby stockades – was up and running.
At first, the mine owners had tried to shut the place down. They feared that the woodale, winesap and woodgrog on sale in the tavern would lower productivity in the mines. But they were wrong. The miners worked harder than ever, knowing that at the end of their long day’s work, they were to be rewarded with a night of carousing. What was more, the cut of the shryke matron’s profits which the mine owners took ensured that half the wages they paid out to the miners went straight back into their own pockets.
A cheer went up when the glittering lights of the Hulks came into view at last. Nate smiled as he heard the pounding music and looked up to see the great timbered sides of the old skyships, peppered with gantries and walkways and illuminated with strings of lamps. The two mighty vessels had crashed centuries before, and were skewered by the branches of the great tree that now grew around them. Mother Hinnyplume had built onto the original hulks until the former shapes of the great vessels were all but buried beneath cabins, gantries and viewing platforms.
The first of the miners marched up the wooden walkway that wound round the tree, shoved the swing doors open and strode inside. Nate and Rudd were jostled from both sides and behind as the eager crowd funnelled through the narrow opening, laughing and shouting as they spilled into the cavernous hall beyond. Originally the aft hold of the old skyship, it was now open from keel to the captain’s cabin, several storeys above. Huge ale vats, embedded in the walls, disgorged a steady stream of frothing woodale into drinking troughs below.
Rudd and Nate drew up a bench and sat down. They weren’t the first. The tavern was already half full of workers from the other stockades, loud with deep, hearty voices and gales of laughter.
Rudd leaned across to a passing tavern maid – a young gabtroll with a funnel-shaped cap and a filthy apron over her threadbare dress – and took two empty tankards from her upraised tray.
‘Stick ’em on the slate, Gelba,’ he said. He handed Nate one of the tankards and dipped his own in the nearest trough. All round him, the cluster of fellow miners did the same. Rudd raised his tankard high. ‘To Gallery Five!’ he roared.
‘Gallery Five!’ The bellowing cry echoed round the hot, dark tavern as the twenty-strong team lifted their glasses and quaffed the woodale to the dregs in one fluid movement.
Two more gabtroll tavern maids brought broad platters of snowbird wings and highly spiced tilder sausages. They laid them in front of the hungry miners, who tucked in with relish.
‘It’s not so bad, is it?’ said Rudd, turning to Nate. ‘This life.’
Nate shrugged. His father had hoped for better things for him.
‘Food. Place to sleep. Constant work … Y’know, I’ve been hearing all kinds of stuff from Hive. That new pink-eye recruit was saying … ‘Parently, there’s no work to be found. All sorts are living on the streets. Begging.’ His face grimaced indignantly. ‘Begging! Can you believe it, Nate, eh?’
Nate shook his head. Distant Hive, like Great Glade – the city of Nate’s birth – was fabled for its wealth and opulence. Could such rumours really be believed?
Rudd was beginning to slur his words. ‘And, of course,’ he said, stumbling to his feet and sweeping his arm around expansively. ‘Best of all. We’ve got all this …’
A puzzled frown passed across his face as his arm struck something solid. He glanced round blearily and found himself staring into the furious gaze of a massive hammerhead goblin. The hammerhead looked down slowly at the woodale dripping down the front of his ornately embroidered topcoat, then back into the cloddertrog’s reddening face.
‘A … apologies … Thuggbutt,’ Rudd muttered, recognizing the hammerhead before him. He pulled a rag from his back pocket and began dabbing uselessly at the wet patch.
The hammerhead knocked his hand away viciously. Two more hammerheads, even taller and broader than the first, loomed at his shoulders. They had phraxpistols holstered at their sides.
‘It … it was an accident,’ Nate said, climbing to his feet.
The first hammerhead thrust his brutal face into Nate’s. ‘You again,’ he snarled. ‘Nate Quarter, the lamplighter I gave a flogging to just last week – and who, only this morning, was so … disrespectful.’
Nate held his ground. He too had recognized Thuggbutt and the others at once. They belonged to Grint Grayle, the mine sergeant, and were leading members of the mine guard. They didn’t often come to the Hulks, preferring the relative comfort of the mine sergeants’ mess – but when they did, it invariably spelled trouble.
‘We’re not looking for any trouble,’ Nate persisted. ‘And I’ll make good any damage …’
Thuggbutt laughed unpleasantly. ‘Let’s see how you make good this bit of damage,’ he said, suddenly pulling a heavy ironwood cudgel from inside his topcoat and striking Nate hard across the side of his head.
Nate spun round and tumbled heavily to the floor. For a moment, everything went black. The next minute, there were legs all around him and arms reaching down towards him. The tavern waif was peering at him through huge black eyes, his ears twitching as he searched Nate’s thoughts to find out what he would do next, while Mother Hinnyplume herself – her gaudy red and purple feathered cape flapping – carved a path through the gawping crowd, a flail cracking menacingly in her claws.
‘I’ll have no fighting in my tavern,’ she screeched.
‘There will be no fighting, Mother Hinnyplume,’ came a gruff, slightly nasal voice. ‘I shall see to that.’
Grint Grayle stepped forward from the shadows. He pulled a phraxpistol from his belt and raised it. Nate stared in horror, unable to move. The barrel of the weapon was pointing directly at his chest. Their eyes met. The mine sergeant’s jaw clenched, his upper lip curled – and at that instant, Nate Quarter knew with absolute certainty that the death of his father had been no accident. Now, he too was about to be disposed of, in what later would be passed off as an unfortunate drunken brawl.
‘No!’ howled a loud voice.
It was Rudd. Elbowing the closest hammerhead hard in his gut, he threw himself through the air. The phraxpistol went off, filling the great hall with a blinding flash, the tang of woodalmonds and a crack so loud that, for a moment, the pounding music seemed to fall silent. Nate looked down, to see his friend slumping to the ground at his feet, a hole the size of a woodsap in the back of his skull.
The triumphant expression on Grint Grayle’s vicious scarred face turned to one of fury. Nate spun on his heels.
‘Don’t let him get away!’ the mine sergeant’s voice roared as he reloaded his weapon.
Head down, Nate shoved his way between the scrum of bodies lurching this way and that as they struggled to find cover. Behind him, he could hear the mine sergeant bellowing for the guards to ‘Stop him!’ The hammerheads came after him, cur
sing and swearing as they barged into miner after panicking phraxminer in their path. Without looking back, Nate reached the door and plunged into the cool night air outside.
He could scarcely take it in.
Rudd, his friend, was dead. Decent, loyal Rudd, who’d watched his back and done his best to protect him in the rough, lawless mining camp ever since his father’s death. Rudd, who had toiled tirelessly at the phraxface and asked nothing more of life than a pitcher of woodale and good companions to share it with. Rudd had saved Nate’s life – at the cost of his own.
The mine sergeant had finally shown his true colours. He wanted Nate Quarter out of the way, and he no longer cared who knew it. Nate knew that if he valued his life, then he had no choice but to leave the phraxmines of the Eastern Woods.
But first there was something he had to do …
• CHAPTER FIVE •
Nate hurtled down the spiral walkway and out into the clearing beneath the massive lufwood trees. The full moon shone down over the jagged outline of the Hulks and, as he made a run for the safety of the forest, Nate heard the thud of heavy footsteps pounding down the stairs behind him. Skidding over muddy ruts where delivery wagons had churned up the soft earth, he dodged between mounds of rubbish waiting to be burned and stacks of empty woodale vats. Woodmice and piebald rats scurried for cover.
Gliding across the night sky, a solitary razorflit spied the movement, widened its gimlet eyes and dived. It sliced through the night sky at an angle, before twisting its wings back and sinking its claws into the back of a squealing rat. For a moment, as the razorflit wobbled in the air, it seemed as though it had taken on prey too heavy for its slender build – but then, with a flap of its wings, it righted itself and soared off towards the surrounding trees, where it would perch on a branch and eat its supper at leisure.
Far below in the moonlit clearing, Nate urged himself forward over those seemingly endless last few strides of exposed bare ground, and into the obscurity of closely packed tree trunks and matted undergrowth beyond. He kept going, panting hard, his heart pounding in his ears.
‘After him!’ the mine sergeant’s thin, braying voice sounded from the open door of the tavern high above. ‘And bring him back alive for a flogging he’ll never forget!’
Fern fronds and tree vines slapped and slashed at him as Nate zigzagged through the forest, his breath puffs of cloud in the cold moist air. Bushes, thick with curved thorns, scratched his raised hands and lowered head. And as he ploughed on, they snagged on his clothes, the brittle thorns cracking and splintering as he wrenched himself free.
From behind him came the guttural calls of Grint Grayle’s hammerhead guards as they pursued him like some wounded tilder they’d let slip on a hunting party and were now running to ground. Nate blundered into a fallen log, soft with decay, that fell to spongelike pieces as he crushed it underfoot, then stumbled over a broken branch, before tripping on a gnarled tree root.
It was no good, he realized with mounting panic.
Here in the dense undergrowth, the one asset he had over his hulking pursuers – his speed – was of no use. Already, he could hear the snarls and grunts of the hammerheads getting closer on either side of him. If they got in front, they’d cut him off, and then he’d be finished. Nate knew that his only chance of escape lay in the deep forest away from the mining settlements. There, the undergrowth was less dense and the trees were taller – but stray too far from the sounds of mines and the wheelhouses and he risked losing his bearings and getting lost for ever.
As he ran, Nate tore off his heavy jacket and hurled it back over his shoulder into the shadows to distract his pursuers, before veering to the west, away from the track, towards the stockade. The forest deepened and the canopy far over his head became denser. Far below, deprived of the nourishing sun, the undergrowth began to thin out. Nate speeded up, darting between tree trunks that became more and more enormous the further he ran. Knobbly-barked scentwoods rubbed branches with majestic lufwoods. Ironwood pines grew in wild stands, the soft mattress of needles sweet and aromatic as Nate raced across them.
Behind him, but more distant now, he could still hear the chilling screeches and roars of the three hammerhead goblins as they called to each other through the trees. Nate realized he couldn’t go much further without risking being out of earshot of the stockade. It was time to go to ground – or rather, Nate thought, looking round, to take to the trees …
Not far off, to his right, was a lullabee. The strange turquoise light given off by lullabee groves was, around this solitary specimen, but the faintest glow, yet Nate spotted the tree instantly.
Lullabees – with their huge gnarled trunks and tree knots, ideal for handholds and footholds – had been his favourite trees to climb as a young’un. With the agility of a lemkin, he would scamper up their bottle-shaped trunks to a perch high in the spreading branches and sit there for hours. Now, he would have to do the same.
Nate dashed to the tree and grasped one of the low jutting knots, capped with curled twists of parchment-like bark, and heaved himself onto it. He reached up, clamped his hands round two smaller whorls and pushed off with his left foot. Then, without pausing, he pulled himself up to a higher tree knot and continued, hand over hand, leg after leg. Despite the darkness of the forest, the tree’s faint glow helped him, illuminating his path up the colossal trunk until he came to the first of the enormous spreading branches.
Higher, Nate climbed, branch after branch. A soft breeze set the long, fluted leaves rustling around him. All at once, he saw what he had been hoping to find – a drinking trough.
The lullabee tree had no blossom and bore no fruit. To seed itself, it needed heat: intense heat – the type of heat that came only from the direct strike of one of the lightning bolts that, in the midst of a thunderstorm, would hurtle down from the turbulent clouds above. When the tip of a bolt hit one of the great bulbous growths, the parchment bark would turn to ash, the sap inside would boil and froth until, with a loud hiss, the swelling would abruptly split open. As it did so, countless million bean-shaped seeds would be propelled up into the air, to be carried off by the wind on papery wings. What was left – bowl-shaped depressions in the branches – were known by many denizens of the Deepwoods as ‘drinking troughs’, because of the rainwater that collected in them after storms.
Clearly, it hadn’t rained heavily for some time, for this particular trough was dry, Nate noted as he slipped into the shallow depression and sat back to wait …
‘Came this way,’ said a gruff voice from below him moments later, and Nate’s heart missed a beat as he realized just how close behind him the hammerheads had been.
‘Almost had him, we did. Then you stops for his jacket!’
‘Slippery little runt, and no mistake!’
There was a soft crack and a sudden flash as one of the hammerheads lit a copperwood torch. Then another. A flickering light danced over the silky fluted leaves above Nate’s head.
‘Face it,’ a gruff voice grumbled. ‘We’ve lost him.’
‘Or he’s lost hisself out there,’ said another, ‘in these here woods!’
‘Then good riddance to him,’ said the third, and spat. ‘He can starve out here or get flogged to death when we catches him sneaking back into town. Same difference.’
For a moment, there was silence. Nate leaned forward and peered down cautiously. Below him, he saw the three hammerheads from the Hulks standing in a triangle, their backs turned to one another as they peered round the forest, thrusting their blazing torches into the shadows.
Nate trembled, yet couldn’t take his eyes off them. They were wild, hard, barbaric hammerheads that Grint Grayle had working for him. Their bodies were covered with tattoos; intricate black bars and swirls that curled round their arms, legs, shoulders and over their heads – tattoos that had been common on the bodies of goblin warriors centuries earlier in the First Age of Flight, but were seldom seen any more amongst the civilized tribes.
Loo
king down at those fierce, ink-stained faces lit up by flaming torchlight, Nate felt as if he’d gone back in time to the days before stone sickness had struck, when the majestic sky galleons, buoyed up by massive flight rocks, sailed the skies over the savage Deepwoods on epic voyages of exploration and adventure.
‘Could have killed him nice and neatly in the Hulks if that mate of his hadn’t got in the way,’ growled the shorter, most powerfully built hammerhead, and Nate realized that it was Thuggbutt speaking.
‘Certainly did the little runt a favour – even if the cloddertrog did pay for it with his life.’
‘Not the only one looking out for him, neither,’ said one of the others. ‘That little scuttler down the shaft. I spotted him whispering to Quarter on the last shift. The little piece of vermin must have tipped him the wink.’
Nate sat back in the trough, head spinning and hardly daring to breathe. Far below him, the hammerheads’ angry voices grew fainter as they tramped back the way they’d come.
‘Well, I’ll tell you something for nothing,’ a voice floated back.
‘What’s that, then?’
‘That scuttler’s going the same way as the cloddertrog when I catches up with him.’
‘Too right – but it’ll keep till day shift.’ Thuggbutt laughed unpleasantly. ‘That little scuttler’s not going anywhere …’
The voices faded away. Nate sat up. He caught sight of the glittering flames disappearing into the shadows. Then they, too, were gone.
• CHAPTER SIX •
Nate climbed quickly down the tree and leaped to the forest floor, then paused. Far in the distance he could hear the sound of the steam klaxon in the stockade calling a shift to the wheelhouse. To the east, at the other end of the path, lay the pithead. He started running.
He was tired, but there was no time for rest. As he loped over the springy forest floor, Nate’s head cleared and a plan began to form. It wasn’t long before he caught sight of the walkway up ahead, the silvery boards glowing in moonlight for a moment, before being plunged back into shadow.
Edge Chronicles 10: The Immortals Page 4
