‘They’re feeding the gardens, which feed the milchgrubs – which feed them,’ explained the Professor as they reached the halfway point in the walkway’s spiralling climb up the tower.
Just then, a large cauldron filled to the brim and dripping with pink honey rose past them. It was connected by a chain to a crane which jutted out from a balcony ahead. Nate edged as close to the side of the walkway as he dared, and looked down. Just visible far below, glowing in the cellars of the palace, were the fungus beds, laid out like a patchwork quilt. Looking up again, he saw thirty or so gyle goblins carefully unhook the cauldron and carry it off the balcony and into the chamber beyond.
As Nate and Eudoxia marched past, they peered inside what appeared to be a vast kitchen. Huge steaming vats were perched on tall stoves, surrounded by twisting pipes and covered in gauges and levers. The air was impossibly sweet, warm and moist, and almost made Nate gag. An army of gyle goblins in stained aprons were pouring heated honey from a vat into a funnel embedded in the floor. From a chamber just below, the chants of waiting gyle goblins could be heard – animated, excited and shrill.
‘Honey! Honey! Honey!’
Suddenly, from out of the shadows, a huge gyle goblin grossmother waddled into view.
Nate had never seen anything like her. Dressed in a flowing gown the size of a skyship sail, encrusted in mire pearls and with an elaborately tied and knotted turban of finest woodspider-silk on her great head, the huge grossmother seemed to flow across the kitchen chamber like melted milchwax. As she moved, her eight chins wobbled and her tiny eyes glistened in the fleshy folds of her face like marsh gems in Mire mud.
‘Patience, my darlings,’ the grossmother trilled in a high-pitched fluting voice. ‘Your honey is coming.’
With a wave of a massive wobbling arm, the grossmother directed the gyle goblins to empty more vats into the funnel, before taking hold of a large brass lever and, her face glistening with sweat, pulling back. There was a great whooshing sound and, in the chamber below, the chanting gave way to shrieks of excitement and then the contented sounds of slurping.
Tearing his gaze away, Nate shouldered his phraxmusket and hurried after Eudoxia and the Professor, narrowly avoiding a shower of oakapple shavings cascading down through the air as he did so.
‘How much further?’ he gasped, catching them up.
He was hot and thirsty, and the sweet sickly odour of the palace was making his head swim.
‘Just up there,’ said the Professor, nodding towards the top of the conical tower where the walkway reached a small balcony, a wax-fringed doorway on its far side.
As they reached the top balcony of the central tower, Eudoxia sprang forward, only for the Professor to take her arm.
‘Stand to attention,’ he said firmly, straightening the phraxmusket on Eudoxia’s shoulder and adjusting the helmet on Nate’s head. ‘Until we know what’s on the other side of that door, we’re soldiers of the Hive Militia. Is that clear?’
Eudoxia and Nate nodded. The Professor turned and rapped briskly on the door.
‘Come in,’ replied a low voice from inside.
• CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR •
The Professor turned the handle of the lightly varnished gladeoak door, and entered. Behind him, Nate and Eudoxia peered out from behind the low visors of their copperwood helmets, their phraxmuskets braced at their shoulders.
Nate had expected to see some sort of cell, or cage with barred windows and chains bolted to walls. Instead, they found themselves standing in a spacious elegant chamber. The circular walls were painted with curling tendrils of Deepwoods plants with luxuriant foliage and heavy-headed flowers, their deep colours echoed in the elaborate woodsilk drapes at the high window and the heavy quilts and pillows on the large floating sumpwood bed. In the middle of the chamber, at a circular desk and attended by three expensively dressed gyle goblins, sat a figure. He was stooped forward, head down, over a bundle of barkscrolls.
The figure looked up, and from beside him Nate heard Eudoxia give a low gasp. Tall and elegant-looking, he was a fourthling with dishevelled grey hair and side-whiskers and a tired, careworn face. He was dressed in a topcoat of the finest quality, edged in quarm fur, and had a carved fromp-head cane propped against the table beside him. There was no mistaking that this was Eudoxia’s father. She had his features and bearing, but where her eyes were a deep green, Galston Prade’s were a startling blue.
As he looked wearily at the three guards from the Hive Militia standing before him, he stifled a cough, wisps of breath visible despite the warmth of the chamber. Nate had seen this all too often before, down in the mines. The blue eyes, the clouds of breath, the cough … Galston Prade’s eyes and lungs, he knew, had been affected by phraxdust, probably from his days as a miner in the Eastern Woods. He’d clearly worked at the phraxface himself, and must have clawed his way up to become the rich mine owner he was today. But at what cost?
‘I’ve been expecting you,’ Galston Prade said drily. ‘Or at least, someone like you. Once I did as Felftis Brack wished and signed over my mine to him, I knew my days were numbered. My own stupid fault for falling into this trap of his …’ He coughed softly, the clouds of breath rising up in wispy twists. ‘Now I suppose you’re taking me to be barrelled.’
He knocked the barkscrolls off the desk with a despairing sweep of his arm and Nate saw, for the first time, that Galston Prade had shackles on his wrists, a single chain connecting one to the other. Nate glanced at Eudoxia. She was trembling, he saw, and her knuckles showed white where she gripped the phraxmusket at her shoulder.
‘But none of it matters, so long as that slimy lakescum honours his word and ensures no harm befalls my daughter.’
Galston Prade got to his feet shakily, one shackled hand leaning heavily on the cane for support. At his side, the gyle goblins stared at Nate, Eudoxia and the Professor with heavy-lidded indifference.
‘You have orders?’ said the first gyle goblin.
The Professor saluted and handed him the barkscroll he carried. ‘To take Galston Prade to the Clan Hall in High Town,’ he said crisply.
‘He has orders,’ said the gyle goblin to his companions.
‘He has orders,’ they repeated in turn as they looked at the document, before handing it back to the first goblin.
‘We must tell the grossmothers,’ he said, walking towards the door.
‘Tell the grossmothers,’ his companions nodded behind him.
Opening the door, the goblin leaned out and shouted. ‘Tell the grossmothers that … unkhh! …’
The Professor swung the barrel of his phraxmusket and connected with the back of the goblin’s head. Taking their cue, Eudoxia and Nate dropped their phraxmuskets and sprang on the two startled goblins in front of them, grasping them by the collar and clamping a hand over their mouths. The Professor strode over to the window, tore down one of the drapes and spread it on the floor. Nate and Eudoxia dropped their goblins, kicking and struggling, onto the embroidered silk, which the Professor tied into a knotted bundle.
Outside, the cry of ‘Tell the grossmothers that … unkhh! …’ echoed through the corridors and passages of the colony.
‘I … I don’t understand,’ wheezed Galston Prade as the Professor took him by the arm.
‘We’ll explain later,’ the Professor said, ‘but for now, we have to get you out of here.’
Nate and Eudoxia picked up their phraxmuskets and fell in behind the Professor and Galston Prade, who’d stepped over the body of the unconscious gyle goblin at the door and were making their way back down the walkway. Nate could tell from the look in her eyes that Eudoxia was desperate to fling off her helmet and embrace her father, but they both knew that that would have to wait until they reached the safety of the Sumpwood Bridge Academy. Right now, they were too busy playing the role of guards, marching briskly behind the stooped and shackled figure of Galston Prade, phraxmuskets at their shoulders, while ahead of them the Professor barged gawping gyle goblins asi
de.
They made their way quickly down the hot humid walkway, past the teeming chambers of busy goblins on either side, while the cry of ‘Tell the grossmothers that … unkhh! …’ died away far below – to be replaced with a chorused response.
‘Tell the grossmothers what?’
Growing louder all the time, the cry approached, then overtook them and echoed up the central tower towards the top balcony.
‘Tell the grossmothers what? … Tell the grossmothers what?’
They had just reached the bottom of the tower and were back in the huge hall at the centre of the Gyle Palace when there came an urgent shout from high above. The gyle goblin the Professor had stunned had come to his senses.
‘Galston Prade is escaping! Galston Prade is escaping!’
‘Seize them!’
The high-pitched scream cut across the gyle goblins’ cries, and Nate turned to see two huge grossmothers waddling towards them from the opposite side of the hall. Behind them came a phalanx of furious-looking gyle goblins, the honey from the interrupted meal dripping from their bulbous noses and down the fronts of their embroidered topcoats.
On the thousandsticks field, Nate had faced this situation a hundred times. Only this time, the thousandsticks track was a walkway of glistening milchwax, and instead of a flying wedge of New Lake players, Nate was facing a phalanx of gyle goblins with two of the biggest blockers he’d ever seen. In his hands, he gripped the phraxmusket as if it was his trusty thousandstick and set off at full pelt towards the oncoming goblins. Behind him, the Professor and Galston Prade were hurrying down the corridor towards the entrance to the Gyle Palace. Eudoxia turned back.
‘Nate! What are you doing?’ she shouted in alarm.
Nate ducked low and slid along the waxy surface, sweeping his phraxmusket in rapid movements low to the ground in front of him. It was a move called the ‘Barley Cutter’, and he’d only ever used it in practice before – and then, with limited success.
This time, it was different. The barrel of the phraxmusket clipped first one heel, then the other, of the two grossmothers as he slid through the chink of light separating their huge wobbling bodies and ploughed on through the phalanx of goblins following. Like a scythe cutting through glade barley, the phraxmusket sent the goblins sprawling. Behind him, the two grossmothers had lost their balance and, with gurgling cries of terror, toppled off the walkway and down towards the cellar gardens far below, followed by dozens of shrieking gyle goblins.
Moments later, there came the sound of two huge glutinous splats followed by smaller plops. A wailing cry echoed up from the gardens – ‘The honey’s spoilt! The honey’s spoilt!’ – followed by the grossmothers’ indignant calls for help.
With the Gyle Palace in uproar, Nate scrambled to his feet and came running back to where Eudoxia was standing, open-mouthed.
‘What was that?’ she said, her eyes wide with astonishment.
‘Just something I picked up in thousandsticks training,’ Nate smiled. ‘Come on, we’d better get out of here before any more grossmothers show up – and catch up with the Professor and your father.’
They turned and hurried down the corridor towards the doors of the Gyle Palace. The three gyle goblin doorkeepers looked at each other, bewildered.
‘What should we do?’
‘I don’t know, what should we do?’ they repeated in confusion as Nate and Eudoxia elbowed them aside and hurried out of the stifling building and into the overcast gloom outside.
The heavy door clanged shut behind them. Eudoxia sighed with relief. Nate, his copperwood helmet slipping down over his eyes, paused and drew in a lungful of fresh cold air.
‘And where do you think you two are going?’ came a low growling voice.
• CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE •
As darkness began to fall, the going got harder. On the forest floor, the thin covering of leaf fall and needledrop obscured the crimped knots of tree root radiating out from the trees and the jagged rocks embedded in the mud. Eudoxia stumbled forward, but managed to right herself. She glanced round at the other recruits in the marching column, wondering whether she was the only one having difficulties.
There were a hundred recruits in all, marching three abreast, with her, Nate and a hard-faced tufted goblin forming one rank near the back of the column. Each of them was dressed in the same uniform: dark grey breeches, white waistcoat, burnished copperwood helmet and light grey topcoat, with a patch stitched onto the sleeve that read, 2nd Low Town Regiment.
On their backs, they each carried a pack made of canvas and tilderleather constructed on a buoyant sumpwood frame. Although bulky and containing kit, ammunition, bedroll and rations, the sumpwood frame made the backpacks virtually weightless. They didn’t, however, make the conditions underfoot any easier.
‘How much further?’ Eudoxia groaned, stumbling again and gripping Nate’s arm for support.
Nate shrugged, tipping his oversized helmet forward as he did so.
‘Till we can’t see our hands in front of our faces, like as not,’ came a gruff voice from the rank just in front of them, and a grey trog turned, his large bulbous nose and tiny eyes screwed up in a look of utter weariness.
‘Silence in the ranks!’ the company sergeant barked, waving the vicious-looking cane of woodwillow above his head and glaring back along the line.
The brutal flathead sergeant was in command of the second of the three infantry companies that made up the three-hundred-strong Second Low Town Regiment and, like the other two company sergeants, he kept his recruits in line through constant vigilance – and the occasional savage flogging.
Ever since Nate and Eudoxia had stumbled out of the Gyle Palace into the daylight, and heard that growling voice – ‘And where do you think you two are going?’ – their only thought had been one of escape.
The voice had belonged to the company sergeant, who was dressed in the light grey topcoat of the Hive Militia, the woodwillow switch beneath his arm. He had no interest in who they were as individuals, having eyes only for the uniforms they wore; uniforms which matched his own and bore the patch of the Second Low Town Regiment.
‘Fall in!’ the sergeant had barked, lashing out with the woodwillow cane, and Nate and Eudoxia had found themselves tramping back through East Ridge in a column of other dejected grey-coated recruits towards the Low Town barracks.
‘But my father and the Professor …’ Eudoxia had whispered desperately to Nate as they entered the cramped and dingy barracks courtyard.
‘Silence in the ranks!’ the sergeant had barked.
It would be the first of many times they would hear that order in the days to come.
‘As soon as we get a chance, we’ll ditch these uniforms and slip away,’ Nate had whispered.
‘Silence, I said!’
In the courtyard, they were each handed the impossibly heavy-looking backpacks, which they struggled into, and were amazed to find how light they were. Not that there was much time for amazement. Under the barked commands of the three flathead sergeants, the recruits were ordered outside and formed into company columns. A long-hair goblin officer in a stylish grey topcoat bedecked in gold braid and medal ribbons appeared, and walked up and down the ranks, giving the new recruits to the Second Low Town Regiment a cursory inspection. Satisfied, he mounted his skittish-looking black prowlgrin and led the regiment out of the city and into the forest.
That had been six hours earlier. Apart from one break to replenish their waterflasks from a stream, and another when a fourthling corporal had bagged a squealing woodhog, they hadn’t stopped at all. Now they were quite some distance from Hive and it was beginning to get dark.
As they went deeper into the forest, and the cackle and screech of the night creatures started up, the trees became older and larger, though there were fewer of them. The dense canopy above them shut out even the brightest day’s sunlight, plunging the forest into a darkness that starved the smaller, weaker saplings and shrubs, and nipped growth in the b
ud. The going underfoot became easier and, as the trees thinned, other columns could be seen around them, making their own way through the Deepwoods.
To their right, in the fading light of evening, Nate saw a regiment, like their own, about three hundred strong, trudging parallel to them. Their grey uniforms camouflaged them well, but he would occasionally glimpse the gleam of a phraxmusket or the glint of a helmet spike. And all the while, as the soft breeze blew through the branches, he could hear their marching feet stirring up the carpet of fallen pine needles and leaves. It sounded like a stream rushing along through the forest beside them.
‘Look over there,’ Eudoxia whispered, nudging Nate softly in the side.
To their left, through the trees, was a long row of sumpwood limbers – varnished wooden sleds that hovered above the ground – each being drawn by prowlgrins. The air was shot with their soft whinnying and occasional yelps. Some of them were buckled in between the shafts of covered limbers; some were harnessed in fours, and even eights, when the weight of their burden called for it. The larger limbers supported massive cannon, with bulging phraxchambers and barrels like tree trunks, while the smaller covered limbers carried the missiles they would fire: phraxshells of various shapes and sizes.
The whole column, Nate realized, represented an awesome display of power and a huge expenditure of resources. The massive phraxcannon and the shells they fired required more phraxcrystals than an entire fleet of skyships, while the sumpwood used to transport them must have left half a forest depleted. This was clearly where the clan chiefs of Hive had used up their city’s wealth.
Edge Chronicles 10: The Immortals Page 31
