Edge Chronicles 10: The Immortals

by Paul Stewart;Chris Riddell

  Klug pulled down on a small lever, switching on the phraxlight, which threw a great circle of brightness across the shadowy ceiling above. Then he took a glass slide from a stack, placed the sliver of polished rock carefully upon it and secured the whole lot beneath the holding clips at the base of the magnifier. The light was instantly doused. Klug lowered the lens funnel, bent forward and looked through it, turning the focusing dial as he did so.

  ‘There,’ he said. ‘Take a look, Miss Eudoxia.’

  Eudoxia stepped forward. A moment later, she took a sharp intake of breath.

  ‘What?’ said Nate. ‘What can you see?’

  ‘Thousands of tiny lights,’ she said. ‘They’re glowing …,’ She pulled away and turned to the archivists. ‘What are they?’ she asked.

  ‘Glister fossils,’ said Klug. ‘This is a sliver of Edge cliff rock.’

  ‘Quarried from the cliff face itself by members of the Society of Descenders,’ said Togtuft.

  ‘Let me see,’ said Nate.

  Eudoxia moved aside for her friend. He put his eye to the lens funnel and focused in on the magnified sliver of rock. The tiny fossilized glisters sparkled like stars in a night sky.

  ‘We believe,’ said Togtuft, ‘that this rock contains the very seeds of life.’

  ‘Blown in from Open Sky,’ added Klug, ‘and preserved in the cliff rock.’

  ‘… Which is how rocks once germinated and grew in the Stone Gardens of Old Undertown.’

  Nate looked up from the light magnifier and saw the archivists’ flushed excited faces staring back at him.

  ‘While most of the academics of Great Glade study the power of phraxcrystals, and our colleagues here on the bridge devote their time to the uses of sumpwood, Klug and I study the greatest mystery of all …’

  ‘And what’s that?’ asked Eudoxia, fascinated.

  Togtuft smiled. ‘How life itself began,’ he said.

  • CHAPTER FORTY-NINE •

  Nate, Eudoxia and the archivists emerged from the darkened laboratory to find Slip, Weelum and Squall returning from their expedition. They came in noisily, looking short of breath and sparkle-eyed with excitement.

  ‘We didn’t go far,’ said the old sky pirate, throwing off his cloak to reveal a heavily laden forage sack. He crossed to the sumpwood table and emptied the contents onto its glowing amber surface.

  Beside him, Weelum and Slip did the same.

  ‘Just the local market in the square at the end of the bridge. You were right.’ Squall grinned. ‘They did seem happy to take our gladers, and this is what we got in return …’

  The two archivists stared in silence at the mound of provisions on the table before them.

  ‘Black bread and white bread,’ Squall announced. ‘Shoulder of hammelhorn. Spiced tilder sausages. Four, five … six bottles of finest Hive sapwine. Pickled snowbird eggs. Hammelhorn curds. Glimmeronions, smetterlings and nibblick …’

  Klug licked his lips appreciatively and Togtuft chuckled with glee.

  ‘Woodapples, sweetgourds …’ said Squall. ‘Squabfruits …’

  ‘Oh, and pickled tripweed!’ Eudoxia exclaimed, her eyes sparkling mischievously as her gaze fell upon the tightly packed jar of green and yellow fronds. ‘That’s Nate’s favourite!’

  Nate made a face at her and laughed, only to stop when he saw the look on Slip the scuttler’s face.

  ‘Slip, what’s wrong?’ he asked.

  The grey goblin looked down at the pile of sumptuous food on the table and shook his head.

  ‘The market stalls were full of good things to eat, friend Nate,’ Slip said in a quiet voice. ‘But only the rich folk from High Town seemed to be buying anything. All around, Slip saw hungry faces, desperate faces. Young’uns begging for food, fighting over scraps …’ He clenched his fists in anger. ‘It just wasn’t right, friend Nate!’ he said fiercely.

  ‘Slip here gave away what he could,’ Squall admitted, ‘but I had to stop him when the militia showed up. That’s when we came away.’

  Eudoxia crossed the study and hugged the grey goblin. ‘I’m sorry for bringing you to this place,’ she said, tears springing to her eyes. ‘Truly sorry.’

  ‘No, Miss Eudoxia,’ Slip protested. ‘You’ve nothing to be sorry for. Slip’s here because he wants to help you find your father, just like friend Nate!’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Eudoxia, wiping her eyes.

  Behind her, Weelum gave a low growl and put a massive paw on her shoulder. Eudoxia glanced round.

  ‘And you, Weelum,’ she smiled.

  They set to work in the galley of the sumpwood cloister, with its huge wrought iron oven whose twisting chimney led up into one of the building’s spiral towers. Soon, the top of the stove was covered in bubbling pots and pans of all shapes and sizes, with coils of steam rising up into the air and gathering in clouds at the low ceiling. Behind heavy iron doors below, the shoulder of hammelhorn was roasting, while the tilder sausages sizzled and spat in a pan on the hob above.

  Squall Razortooth revealed himself to be an excellent cook, ably assisted by Eudoxia. Nate peeled and chopped the vegetables, while Weelum – with a stone pestle grasped in his huge paws – carefully ground the herbs and spices that Slip kept adding, little by little, to the mortar in front of the banderbear.

  A full moon had risen over the torrid waters of the Hive river by the time the Professor and Cirrus Gladehawk finally returned to the archivists’ cloister on the Sumpwood Bridge. They both looked drawn and tired, and their boots were crusted with dark forest mud – but they brightened up when they saw the sumpwood table laden with delicious dishes.

  They all sat down at the floating table. Togtuft and Klug both proposed toasts to their guests and praised the cooks, before everyone started tucking in. Next to Eudoxia, the Professor was pensive and quiet, and while the others ate, he seemed barely to touch his food.

  ‘Are you all right?’ asked Eudoxia quietly, touching the Professor’s arm.

  ‘Forgive me, Eudoxia,’ the Professor replied, taking off his spectacles and pinching the bridge of his nose. ‘It’s been a long day, and I’ve learned that mounting a rescue mission for my brother seems, in the present circumstances, all but impossible.’

  Replacing his spectacles, he looked across at Cirrus Gladehawk, who nodded grimly.

  ‘But if I can’t help my brother,’ the Professor said, ‘then, by Earth and Sky, I intend to find your father, Eudoxia, and provide him every assistance it’s in my power to give!’

  Nate raised his tumbler of sapwine. ‘Here’s to finding Eudoxia’s father!’

  Around the table, everyone echoed his toast.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Eudoxia, her eyes sparkling. ‘Thank you … When can we start?’

  ‘Tomorrow morning,’ said the Professor firmly. ‘At dawn.’

  • CHAPTER FIFTY •

  After supper, Klug and Togtuft took their guests up a small staircase to their sleeping quarters in the broad roof of the cloister. The room was long and square, with angled ceilings and a boarded floor. A row of small doors lined the wall at the far end.

  ‘Sleeping closets,’ Klug announced, opening the first of the double doors set into the sloping pitch of the roof.

  ‘Take whichever you please,’ said Togtuft. ‘But you, Weelum, might be more comfortable in the gable end closet. It’s the largest.’

  Thanking the archivists and bidding them goodnight, Nate and the others climbed into their respective closets.

  ‘I’ll wake you,’ Eudoxia whispered to Nate, before disappearing inside her own sleeping closet. ‘Early!’

  Nate pulled the small doors towards him and they closed with a soft click. He quickly undressed. The small chamber was similar to the cabin in the timber tower of the Midwood Decks, but the sumpwood here had a richer glow and a comforting warmth that the other lacked. As Nate lay down on the soft bedding and dimmed the small lamp fixed to the panelled wall, another sensation overwhelmed him. The smells of fragrant wood lavende
r and earthy sumpwood filled the air of the sleeping closet, and Nate realized that the blanket and pillow had been impregnated with their fragrance.

  He felt warm and heavy, cocooned in the sweet-smelling sleeping closet, and was lulled by the faint rushing sound of the river water sweeping along far beneath him, which sounded so much like the soft wind rustling through the leaves of the forest. His eyelids flickered for a moment as drowsiness overwhelmed him. And, as he closed his eyes, Nate was no longer in the bewildering troubled city of Hive, but safe in a banderbear nest in the vast expanse of the mighty Deepwoods …

  When Nate awoke, a shaft of daylight had pierced the shutters of the small triangular window at the foot of his bed. Rolling over, he pushed the shutters open and stuck his head outside.

  Far below him, the swirling torrent of the Hive river thundered past, throwing up a fine refreshing spray. Nate wiped his face with his sleeve and gazed at the two ridges that towered before him.

  The central area of West Ridge was swathed in mist, while the spires of the palaces and fine buildings at its summit poked up through the cloud. Nearest to the Sumpwood Bridge, the slums around the docks were already stirring; chimneys smoking, forge fires glowing and timber barges steaming slowly into the docks.

  In the jumble of huts and longhouses on the ridge opposite, the lights of Low Town also shone at the windows as the inhabitants rose early, ready for a long day in the fields and vineyards. High up at the top of East Ridge, Nate could see the extraordinary fluted towers and glistening domes of the Gyle Palace, picked out by the early light of dawn.

  Somewhere in this vast woodanthill of a city, his friend Eudoxia hoped to find her missing father. As Nate gazed at the maze of streets, terraces and winding paths in front of him, it seemed like an impossible task.

  ‘Nate? Nate? Are you awake? It’s dawn. Time to go.’ Eudoxia’s voice sounded from the other side of the door.

  ‘I’ll be right with you,’ Nate said sleepily, and began to pull on his shirt. Next he jammed his arms into the sleeves of his undercoat, pulled on his breeches, noting a number of fraying patches, and fumbled with the buttons of his waistcoat. Pulling on his topcoat, he grabbed his tilderleather boots, their toecaps scuffed and worn, and stepped out of the closet.

  Eudoxia was waiting for him, her face flushed with a mixture of excitement and anxiety.

  ‘Come on, Nate, you’re slower than a giant tree fromp! Put your boots on,’ she urged. ‘Everyone else is up! Cirrus Gladehawk is going with Squall and Weelum to the docks to ask around, while you, me, Slip and the Professor are going to the Hive towers of West Ridge …’

  ‘We are?’ said Nate, stumbling down the stairs after Eudoxia.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘According to the Professor, it’s where my father would have gone to recruit the hammerheads for the New Lake thousandsticks team.’

  In the chamber, the others were waiting for them.

  ‘Remember,’ said Cirrus Gladehawk as they made for the door. He jammed his crushed funnel hat down on his head. ‘Be careful who you speak to, and avoid the Bloody Blades at all costs.’

  Togtuft and Klug wished them luck in cheery voices, but it was plain by the looks on their faces that the two archivists were concerned for their safety.

  They crossed the Sumpwood Bridge to West Ridge, then split up. Cirrus Gladehawk, Weelum and Squall headed for the docks, while Nate and the others followed the Professor on the long climb up Hive’s West Ridge.

  They skirted round the docks area, the smoke-filled air already loud with the business of loading and unloading, and continued along a narrow winding road that zigzagged its way up the steep hill behind. To their left and right, the pitted track was lined with ramshackle shacks and humble dwellings, with cracked walls and tiny windows, where the dockworkers and their families lived in cramped, dirty conditions. The sound of squalling young’uns and screeching goblin mothers echoed round the blocks, and the air was ripe with the stench of waste and decay.

  As they climbed higher, the ramshackle and dilapidated housing gave way to older and more traditional buildings. And instead of lining the road, the goblin dwellings had been laid out in ‘villages’ – circular clusters, linked one to the other with connecting paths, their individual design reflecting the traditions of those who dwelled in them.

  The long-hairs lived in villages with a central open-sided clan hall which was built on a raised mound. Radiating out from this hall were narrow pathways, at the end of which were more modest buildings, each one surrounded by a deep moat and housing an extended family of some twenty or so goblins. Further on, they came to a typical thatched longhouse favoured by the lop-eared goblins, with its circle of squat roundhuts about it, and a tall wooden post given pride of place.

  ‘It’s called an ancestor tree,’ said the Professor as they passed it. ‘Cut down and brought with the tribe when they first settled in Hive, to remind them of their Deepwoods roots.’

  The post was intricately carved with scenes that, Nate could only suppose, came from stories handed down through the generations, and he would have loved to study it in detail, but Eudoxia was clearly anxious to press on. Beside him, Slip, wide-eyed, shared his fascination, but he too was aware of Eudoxia’s anxiety.

  Keeping to the tracks, the four of them made their way through the various goblin districts. They passed by the sunken pit houses of the tusked goblins, the painted roundhouses of the mottled goblins, and a stand of original ironwood pines, where a colony of diminutive treegoblins had secured their woven cabins to the upper branches. Scraggy woodfowl strutted about, scratching and pecking at the ground; a mangy-looking hammelhorn stared at them for a moment before trudging away. Eventually, through the thickening cloud mist, they saw the distinctive shapes of the hive towers of West Ridge silhouetted up ahead.

  They were huge, each conical tower with its three-cornered roof windows housing up to twenty extended families. Looming up out of the mist, the towers looked as forbidding as the war-like hammerhead goblins who lived in them.

  ‘Let me do the talking,’ said the Professor as they approached the first of a dozen or more towers.

  Up close, Nate could see its massive walls were constructed of woven woodwillow, with a coating of black pine pitch. Hoods pulled down low over their faces, Eudoxia, Slip and Nate followed the Professor through the open entrance of the hive tower into the gloom inside.

  The air was thick with woodsmoke from numerous open fires, and the roof windows high above their heads in the conical roof allowed only the minimum of light into the huge enclosed space. Dozens of tall wooden pillars, as thick as tree trunks and with red and black horizontal stripes painted from top to bottom, supported a mass of roof beams above, with hammocks and sleeping nets strung out across them. There were no walls, the pillars marking out areas of the floor occupied by different family groups.

  To their right, half a dozen elderly hammerhead matrons sat on rocking stools around a bundle of willow branches, weaving elaborate-looking bowls and baskets with their gnarled fingers. Further on, to their left, three young’uns played a wrestling game of rough-and-tumble near a smoking brazier fire, over which their exhausted-looking mother was stirring a cooking pot.

  As Nate looked around, he was struck by the fact that all the hammerheads he could see in the tower seemed to be either very young or very old, or nursing mothers. Of the war-like hammerheads, there was not a trace.

  ‘What do you want?’ came a gruff voice, and the four of them turned to see a tall, powerfully built hammerhead eyeing them warily.

  ‘We’re looking for a Great Glader by the name of Galston Prade,’ said the Professor, ‘who we believe visited the hive towers to recruit players for his thousandsticks team …’

  ‘Thousandsticks?’ said the hammerhead, his wide-spaced eyes narrowing. ‘Last recruiters we had round here were a couple of webfoots, who paid handsomely, as I recall. That was a good six months ago, before the call up.’

  ‘Call up?’ said the Professor
.

  ‘That’s right. You’ll find all our finest thousandsticks players serving in the hammerhead legion of the Hive Militia now,’ said the hammerhead. ‘So if this Galston Prade of yours did come to the hive towers, he wouldn’t have had much luck.’

  The Professor pulled aside his oilskin cape, reached into the pocket of his topcoat and pulled out a five-glader note. The hammerhead’s eyes widened and he reached for the note with a badly scarred hand that lacked several fingers. His other arm, Nate noticed, was missing from the elbow down.

  ‘Ask round the towers whether anyone has seen Galston Prade,’ said the Professor, placing the note in the hammerhead’s open palm. ‘If you learn anything, there’ll be twenty gladers more coming your way. You’ll find me at the splinters table in the Winesap Tavern in East Ridge later this afternoon.’

  ‘Twenty gladers!’ said the hammerhead in amazement. ‘That’s a fortune to an old legionary like me, wounded in the service of his city.’ He deftly folded the five-glader note into a tiny square and placed it in the pocket of his grubby triple-breasted waistcoat. ‘It’ll take a few hours,’ he added as they turned to leave.

  ‘I’ll be waiting,’ said the Professor.

  Nate and Eudoxia followed the Professor back towards the entrance of the hive towers, only for Eudoxia to pause and turn back to the hammerhead.

  ‘These webfoot recruiters you mentioned,’ she said. ‘Did they say who they worked for?’

  The hammerhead scratched his broad head. ‘Let me see … er … yes …’ he said. ‘An associate of theirs in Great Glade by the name of Felftis Brack.’

  Leaving the hive towers, they continued through West Ridge until they hit the gorge path, then turned right towards the lake in the Back Ridge district of Hive.