Edge Chronicles 10: The Immortals

by Paul Stewart;Chris Riddell

  Nate turned away, but not before he felt the full power of the hate in Branxford Drew’s stare. It was a look he’d grown familiar with …

  It must have been about three months ago, by Nate’s reckoning. He’d recently made friends with Weelum the banderbear, and had taken to visiting the gatekeeper in his lodge by the factory gates after his shifts.

  Sitting together round a pot-bellied stove, Weelum had slowly taught Nate the rudiments of his language. To the untrained ear, the language of these strange secretive denizens of the Deepwoods appeared deceptively simple. Just three guttural sounds in the back of the throat – ‘wuh’, ‘waah’ and a more aggressive exclamation, ‘wurgh!’. But it hadn’t taken Nate long to realize that there was much more to banderbear communication than that. Indeed, it wasn’t so much a language of sounds, as a language of movement.

  A simple ‘wuh’, when combined with a twitch of an ear, the sweep of a claw or tilt of the head, could mean a thousand different things. Nate learned that the language of the banderbears was not as short and gruff as it first appeared. In fact, once he’d mastered a few of the basic movements and understood more of what Weelum said to him, Nate began to comprehend how poetic the language of these solitary creatures was.

  ‘Morning’ in banderbear, for instance, was now the hunger of warmth has climbed the highest tree, while ‘night’ was time of the silence of the eyes.

  ‘Wuh-wuh,’ Weelum would growl, tusks bared and one claw raised. ‘Wuh,’ his clenched fist touching the tip of the chin, and Nate would hear, Watcher in the time of the silence of the eyes greets he who is the keeper of light.

  Putting another log on the stove, Nate would smile, then touch his forehead before spreading his arms wide, fingers outstretched.

  ‘Wurgh!’ he would exclaim. The forest distances grow small with your friendship.

  One night, at the end of a long shift working on a series of replacement phraxchambers for the Great Glade fleet, Nate had left the factory and started across the yard towards the gatekeeper’s lodge. He was walking beneath the stilts when he spotted a familiar figure hurrying towards the gates. It was the girl he’d met at the mansion in New Lake, the mine owner’s daughter, Eudoxia Prade. As he’d watched, Branxford Drew burst from the shadows in hot pursuit.

  ‘Wait, Eudoxia! Wait!’ His voice sounded both irritated and imploring. ‘You don’t understand …’

  Eudoxia paused just inside the gates and turned, her beautiful green eyes blazing.

  ‘Oh, I understand all right,’ she declared as Branxford caught up with her. ‘Where I come from, it’s called stealing!’

  ‘The old man can afford it, and besides, what he doesn’t know about can’t hurt him …’ Branxford reached out and grabbed Eudoxia’s wrist. ‘And he won’t find out,’ he said, viciously twisting her arm, ‘will he … ? I said, will he?’

  Nate started forward, his fists clenched – only to stop moments later in the middle of the yard. Eudoxia had suddenly dropped her shoulder and, with a graceful flick of her leg, taken Branxford’s legs out from under him. The oafish bully landed flat on his back in a puddle of clear water. As he struggled back to his feet, Nate was shocked to see a small silver phraxpistol in his hand.

  ‘Wurgh!’

  Weelum appeared out of the night behind Branxford, enveloped him in his cloak and clasped him in a suffocating bear hug. The phraxpistol clattered to the ground.

  ‘Umph! Umph! Urrumph!’ Branxford’s muffled protestations sounded from beneath the banderbear’s cloak. Only his legs were visible, kicking about, as Weelum held him tight.

  Nate looked across at Eudoxia. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked.

  ‘Fine!’ said Eudoxia, her eyes still blazing with anger. She suddenly checked herself. ‘I know you, don’t I?’

  ‘We’ve met,’ said Nate, feeling a blush begin to spread up from his neck and across his cheek. ‘At your father’s house. I had the prowlgrin with saddlerash.’

  Eudoxia’s face softened. ‘Of course. Nate, isn’t it? How is the prowlgrin?’

  ‘He’s fine. That woodsalvia you gave me worked like a charm.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it,’ said Eudoxia, turning to leave.

  ‘Perhaps …’ said Nate, painfully aware of his reddening face, ‘we could go for a ride some time … That is, if you and Branxford …’

  ‘There is no “me and Branxford”,’ said Eudoxia hotly. ‘I don’t go out with sons who steal from their fathers …’ She paused, then smiled as she walked through the gates and over to the roosting post where her prowlgrin was sitting patiently. ‘Yes, Nate, I’d like to go for a ride some time. I’d like that very much.’

  Nate turned away. ‘Wuh-wuh,’ he said, touching his left elbow and then his shoulder.

  Weelum nodded and let go of Branxford, who staggered forward, goggle-eyed and gasping for breath.

  ‘Eudoxia?’

  ‘Eudoxia has gone,’ said Nate, handing the factory owner’s son the silver phraxpistol.

  ‘Miss Prade, to you, lamplighter,’ rasped Branxford, snatching back the pistol and pocketing it. ‘And in future, you and the gatekeeper had better mind your business or I’ll throw both of you out on the streets!’

  ‘We work for your father, not for you,’ said Nate coolly.

  Branxford stared at Nate for a moment, a look of loathing on his face. ‘We’ll see about that,’ he muttered, before striding through the gates and hurrying off down the street.

  ‘Wuh,’ said Weelum to Nate as they watched him go. ‘Wuh-wuh.’ The mighty Copperwood has sown a twisting sapling.

  • CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE •

  Nate scanned the crowd as the thousandsticks teams continued to process round the outer track, waiting for the steam klaxon to announce the beginning of the Reckoning. There, in a box decked out in the dark ochre and white chequerboard colours of the Copperwood district, sat Eudoxia, next to Slip and Weelum the banderbear. The Professor was meant to be with them, but as Nate returned their waves, he was unable to spot him. Behind them was a seat reserved for Friston Drew, the factory owner, who, despite living in New Lake and having a son who led the New Lake team, always supported his workers from Copperwood when it came to thousandsticks. He didn’t seem to be there either.

  Strange, thought Nate. If they didn’t hurry, they’d miss the start of the match.

  Suddenly the steam klaxon boomed and, with a full-throated roar from the crowd, the twelve teams, more than a thousand strong, burst from the outer tracks onto the wooden boards of the inner tracks that connected the ring of low hills to each other, and to the central high hill.

  ‘Form up, we’re taking Hill Three!’

  The word came back through the ranks as the Copperwood team, thousandsticks held at shoulder height, pounded along one of the boarded tracks. Peering over the helmets of his team mates, Nate could see the combined teams of New Undertown, the Free Glades and Ambristown coming towards them from the opposite side of the field.

  ‘Brace!’ came the command from the Copperwood captain, Gerrix Brove, a lathe turner for the Quentling Brothers’ metalworks, and the team instantly responded.

  The smallest slipped through to the front of the formation, while the biggest fell in directly behind. The rest, including Nate, their thousandsticks held horizontally across their chests just beneath their chins, provided ballast, packing in tightly at the rear.

  ‘Ummph!’ the crowd roared collectively as three hundred thousandsticks slammed into the Copperwood formation of one hundred.

  Towards the back, Nate’s helmeted head jerked back as the force of the impact rippled through the team. At the front, the rattling clatter of thousandsticks clashing filled the air as the front ranks attempted to get the upper hand.

  ‘Shove!’ roared Gerrix Brove and, head down, Nate pushed into the back of his team mates in front with all his might.

  Sweat stung his eyes and he fought for breath as a player behind him shoved hard in the small of his back. Unable to make out much
of what was happening in front, Nate poured all his concentration into placing one foot in front of the other to inch forward along the track.

  ‘One, two, one, two, one, two …’

  Half groan, half grunt, it was the familiar chant of a thousandsticks team involved in a shove. Nate had practised it endlessly along with the rest of the team. Keep formation. Keep going forward, he repeated over and over to himself in his mind. The few beat the many if they shove as one …

  ‘Ah! … Aah! … Aaah!’ the crowd sounded, telling Nate that they were reaching the critical point, where one formation would have to break in the face of the other’s power.

  ‘Go on, boys! That’s it, go on … Yes!’ Brove urged the Copperwood team on.

  A thunderous roar greeted the sudden surge that sent Nate stumbling forward down the track. The New Undertown, Free Glade and Ambristown teams scattered as their formation buckled and broke, and the Copperwood formation shoved them off the inner track onto the gravel – and out of the game.

  ‘Scramble!’ shouted Brove, and Nate, as one of the fastest in the team, surged through the ranks of his team mates and up the low hill ahead.

  As he, along with twenty others, reached the top of Hill Three, they looked across to see the other five hills bristling with thousandsticks, and the gravel beds between the inner tracks strewn with fallen and dejected players, who were picking themselves up and leaving the field. On Hill Five, Branxford Drew, surrounded by the broad-shouldered hammerhead goblins of the New Lake team, acknowledged the cheers of the crowd with a wave of his blackwood thousandstick.

  The Reckoning was just beginning …

  ‘The last of the hammerheads arrived over a month ago,’ Eudoxia had told Nate, ‘recruited for New Lake by my father personally in Hive. So why hasn’t he come home yet?’

  Nate couldn’t answer her.

  Since their encounter at the factory gates of Glemlop and Drew’s, when Eudoxia had confronted Branxford about him taking money from his father’s safe, Nate and she had become firm friends. They went on rides, they got together after work to walk through the Copperwood allotments; once, they’d even met up at the Lake Landing Academy in the Free Glades district. It was where, quite by chance, Nate had run into his friend, the Professor, from the skytavern.

  Strange, Nate had thought often since, how fate throws people together. It could, it seemed, also keep them apart.

  He and Eudoxia were in the stables of her father’s mansion on the shores of beautiful New Lake. They had just returned from an exhilarating treetop gallop through Old Forest, and Tallix and Majestix were perched on their roost branches, blowing hard but growling with contentment.

  ‘Perhaps there’s some other business keeping him in Hive?’ Nate ventured.

  He didn’t like to see Eudoxia worried. Nate had come to appreciate how tough and resourceful this daughter of a rich mine owner actually was, so different from most of the pampered, richly clothed New Laker girls he’d seen. If she was worried, then it must be something worth worrying about, Nate knew. Yet he felt powerless to help.

  ‘What does your father’s chief clerk say?’ asked Nate as they walked out into the gardens that led down to the lake.

  ‘Felftis Brack?’ Eudoxia said with distaste. ‘He just keeps saying that I shouldn’t worry my “pretty little head” about it, and do I need an increase in my dress allowance? I mean, honestly! My father has disappeared in Hive and his chief clerk is concerned that I don’t have enough ball gowns!’

  Nate smiled. Even in her topcoat and riding breeches, spattered in tree pollen and bark rust, his friend still managed to look stylish and elegant. Eudoxia caught him staring at her, and her green eyes flashed.

  ‘Don’t tell me you agree with that slimy snail, Nate!’ she exclaimed.

  ‘No, of course not,’ protested Nate. ‘Look, perhaps I could ask the Professor to look into it. He might be a skytavern gambler, but he does seem to know an awful lot of important people …’

  They had reached the jetty at the lake’s edge, and Nate stared out across the broad, shimmering expanse of water, so beautiful and tranquil. The Reckoning was less than a month away, and despite the rumours about the strengthened New Lake team, Nate was feeling confident. After all, he and the rest of the factory hands in Copperwood had been training for months.

  Suddenly he felt Eudoxia’s hand on his arm. Looking up, he followed her gaze back towards the steps of the mansion.

  There, emerging from the entrance hall, was Felftis Brack, his snailskin topcoat flapping at his scaly heels and his tufted quiff quivering. Beside him walked Branxford Drew, funnel hat in hand. Reaching into his expensive fur-lined topcoat, the factory owner’s son handed the chief clerk a barkscroll. In return, Felftis handed Branxford a tightly bundled wad of gladers. They shook hands and Branxford left.

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Eudoxia, a frown clouding her face, ‘you might ask that “Professor” of yours after all.’

  • CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR •

  With all six low hills on the thousandsticks field successfully occupied, the Reckoning now became a game of tactics rather than brute force. The cadets of Old Forest and the herders from the Silver Pastures held the hills on either side of the Copperwood team. Nate could see them in tight huddles discussing their next move. On the far side of the field, the Cloud Quarter team of academics had made an unlikely alliance with the rough factory hands of East Glade, and now crowded together on the top of Hill One. But the team with the upper hand, Nate saw in an instant, was New Lake, which now held two of the hills, the hulking hammerheads forming a phalanx on each of them and clashing their thousandsticks together in a rhythmic beat, much to the delight of the crowd.

  It was now that the faster, more agile thousandsticks players like Nate came into their own. With the help of their larger and heftier team mates, or ‘blockers’, they had to get onto one of the two snaking inner tracks that led to the high hill at the centre of the field. And with six hundred players still in the Reckoning, it wouldn’t be easy.

  ‘Runners!’ barked Brove. ‘Find your blockers!’

  Nate joined the eight blockers who would attempt to clear his way. The other Copperwood runners did the same. Already, Nate could see as he glanced over, Old Forest had organized themselves into a ‘three-way wedge’ and were flooding down onto the tracks, heading for the high hill. From Hill One, the Cloud Quarter and East Glade teams saw their chance and instantly made for the hill Old Forest had just left. As Nate watched, they came surging up onto Hill Two and then down the other side into the rear of Old Forest, who were caught off guard and scattered.

  ‘Cadets,’ Gerrix Brove said ruefully. ‘Brave, but green as saplings!’

  Below them, the three teams splintered into clusters of thousandsticks duels, with the crowd roaring on the individual contests.

  ‘This way!’ ordered Gerrix Brove, and the Copperwood team fell in behind their captain and set off at a sprint.

  On Hill Six, the Silver Pastures team leaped into action to head them off, but Nate and the Copperwooders were too quick for them. By the time the herders had come down onto the tracks, the Copperwood blockers stood in their way. There was a huge collision of thousandsticks and a great surging melee, but the Copperwood team’s tactic had worked. Nate and his fellow runners were off on the track towards the high hill.

  Up ahead, leaping down from Hills Four and Five, came the New Lake hammerheads with strange, guttural-sounding war chants.

  ‘Unkh! Aargh! Unkh! Aargh …’

  The wave of Copperwood runners ahead of Nate rebounded off the hulking hammerhead blockers in their path and tumbled into the gravel. Nate, without checking his run, swerved in, then out, round two of the blockers, then past a third. Sticking out his glove, he handed off a fourth, who went barrelling backwards into a cluster of his team mates, sending them all sprawling.

  Around the field, the crowd were on their feet. ‘Copperwood! Copperwood! Copperwood!’ they roared.

  Nate had rea
ched the snaking path to the high hill and swerved down it. Not a single New Laker had laid a glove on him.

  ‘Careful! Careful!’ he told himself as his heart hammered away beneath his body armour.

  The track to the high hill was narrow, hardly wide enough for one player and he knew that, up above in the phraxlighter, the sky marshal would be scrutinizing every step he took. A single foot in the gravel and Nate would be disqualified. Behind him, he could hear the curses of his hammerhead pursuers as they blundered off the narrow track.

  ‘Out! Out!’ Nate heard the sky marshal call overhead.

  ‘Yes!’ the collective roar of the crowd greeted him as he reached the high hill and began to scramble up.

  Head down and jaw clenched, Nate gripped his thousandstick tightly.

  ‘Yes!’ the crowd roared again.

  Someone else must have reached the hill down the other track. Looking up, Nate felt the woodmoths flutter into action once again in his stomach.

  That someone else was Branxford Drew …

  ‘You wanted to see me, sir?’ said Nate.

  ‘Yes, come in, my boy, and pull up a chair.’ Friston Drew the factory owner ushered the lamplighter into his office and closed the door.

  It was the night before the Reckoning and Nate was eager to get back home to the cabin and practise his thousandsticks moves one last time before the match. But Friston Drew had been looking so worried and careworn these past few weeks that, when he’d asked Nate to come to his office at the end of his shift, Nate had been loath to refuse.

  Friston Drew sat down in his high-backed sumpwood chair with a heavy sigh and massaged his temples with his fingertips.

  ‘This is something I should have done a very long time ago,’ he said slowly, looking up at Nate with solemn dark-ringed eyes, ‘but somehow, until now, I just couldn’t bring myself to do it …’