‘Look at that sky,’ said Zelphyius Dax, his voice hushed with awe. ‘It’s going to be a magnificent night …’
• CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO •
It was a dark, moonless night, and the stars patterning the great vault of the sky seemed brighter than Nate could ever remember. Next to him on the narrow deck, Zelphyius Dax stood, as usual, with one hand on the tiller and the other playing out rope to the billowing sails. With his legs planted apart and flexing from the knees, the librarian scholar seemed to anticipate every buck and sway of the skycraft beneath his feet.
‘Might as well get some sleep, Nate,’ Zelphyius said, without taking his eyes off the stars overhead. ‘We’ll be riding this current till sunrise.’
‘I don’t feel like sleeping,’ said Nate, which was true. Although he was tired from the long day’s sailing, he was too worried about Eudoxia to sleep. ‘I’d rather talk …’
‘Ah, talk,’ said Zelphyius with a low chuckle. ‘That’s a rare treat for an old librarian scholar like me. Many’s the night I’ve spent up here in the high skies with only the wind and the stars for company. Mind you, that’s generally the way I like it. I can’t be doing with the ways of the earthbound folk in their settlements and great cities …’ He shook his head. ‘For all their phraxships, factories and fine buildings, they never seem to be content – always finding some reason or other to fall out and go to war. Take this business over the Midwood Decks, for instance …’
Nate shuddered. The horrors of the battle in the marshes were still fresh in his mind; the thunder of the phraxcannon, the crack of the phraxmuskets and the screams of the wounded and dying.
‘If the Varis Lodd hadn’t needed a new bowsprit, I would have left the Midwood forests weeks ago. As it was, I was kicking my heels in the sumpwood stands when your lot came marching out of the woods …’
‘They weren’t my lot,’ said Nate indignantly. ‘I told you, Eudoxia and I were caught in Hive and forced into their militia.’
‘Which just goes to prove my point, Nate,’ said Zelphyius, playing out some rope to the sails as the skycraft trembled beneath them. ‘That’s what happens in these great cities. You get caught up in events beyond your control. That’s why I decided to leave the library in Great Glade. I wanted to get away from the intrigues and rivalries of the academics and under-librarians and chart my own course through the Deepwoods before it was too late.’
‘What do you mean,’ said Nate, ‘before it was too late?’
‘The Edgelands are changing, Nate,’ said Zelphyius bleakly. ‘It began with the dawn of the Third Age of Flight, five hundred years ago, when the master of the Lake Landing Academy, Xanth Filatine, built the first phraxchamber. Ever since then, the Deepwoods has been in retreat as the first settlements grew into the three great cities, and phraxships took over the skies. Now there are a dozen more settlements that’ll soon be as big as Hive or Great Glade – from the Midwood Decks in the east to Four Lakes in the west; New Hive, Gorge Town, the Farrow Ridges and all the others. Each one consumes the forest around it and competes with the others as it grows, causing skirmishes and unrest that erupt into wars. And at the heart of it all, driving this expansion on, is the curse of phraxflight.’
Zelphyius fell silent for a while, standing motionless, a dark shape against a glittering backdrop of stars.
‘I was a phraxminer in the Eastern Woods,’ said Nate quietly. ‘And I worked in a phraxchamber works in Great Glade. I’ve always thought of phraxcrystals as something precious, something good …’
‘Are the phraxcannon used by the Hive Militia good?’ said Zelphyius. ‘Or the phraxsaws used by pro-Hivers to decimate the sumpwood stands? What about the phraxmusket that embedded a leadwood bullet in your friend Eudoxia’s head? All of them were made possible by those precious phraxcrystals of yours.’
‘But there are good people out there!’ Nate protested. ‘Phraxminers who I was proud to call my friends, factory hands I played thousandsticks with, and honest souls forced – like me – to march in the Hive Militia with phraxmuskets on their shoulders. They didn’t cause this war. Their leaders did!’
‘Maybe you’re right, Nate,’ Zelphyius said.
In the darkness, Nate couldn’t make out the expression on his face, but he sounded tired and disappointed.
‘I’m a lonely old librarian,’ he said. ‘I chose to retreat from the world into a dream from the Second Age of Flight, where rope, sail and varnished wood were the only tools with which to take to the skies. You’re different, Nate. You belong in this Third Age we live in, and perhaps you and these friends of yours will make a difference.’ He paused to make an adjustment to the tiller, and when he spoke again, the librarian scholar seemed more cheerful. ‘Certainly,’ he conceded, ‘from what I saw on the battlefield of the Midwood marshes, that long-hair legion …’
‘The Bloody Blades, they’re called in Hive,’ said Nate.
‘The Bloody Blades,’ Zelphyius continued, with a nod of the head, ‘will not be terrorizing Hive any more. They were pretty much destroyed by the Freeglade Lancers along with their phraxcannon. I stepped over countless black-topcoated dead before I stumbled across you and your friend. As for the rest of the Hive Militia, they’d disappeared back into the woods as a disorganized rabble, and will be halfway back to Hive by now, I’d wager. The Midwooders were doing their best to care for the wounded of both sides,’ he added, ‘but one look at your friend convinced me that her only hope lay in Riverrise.’
‘I’m very grateful to you, Zelphyius,’ said Nate, patting the smooth sumpwood decking. ‘And to the Varis Lodd, for helping Eudoxia and me like this. I don’t know what we’d have done without you and your skycraft from the Second Age of Flight.’
The librarian scholar stood as motionless and impassive as ever at the tiller of the Varis Lodd as they sailed on through the dark star-filled sky. When he spoke, his voice was hoarse and constricted with emotion.
‘I only hope, for young Eudoxia’s sake,’ he said, ‘that this voyage of ours will not have been in vain.’
• CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE •
‘Check the logbait, Nate,’ Zelphyius Dax said, his silhouetted figure black against the rosy dawn sky, ‘and let’s see what we’ve caught for breakfast.’
On the narrow sumpwood deck, Nate rose to his feet, flexing from the knees to accommodate the swaying motion of the skycraft. The brazier he’d just lit, a small burnished copper globe with sturdy tripod legs, had caught and was crackling as the flames sped through the scentwood kindling and began to bite at the larger lufwood logs, filling the air with a soft woody aroma.
‘Aah, the smell of scentwood,’ said Zelphyius as the twists of aromatic smoke blew back past him. ‘There’s nothing like it after a long night in the high skies.’
The librarian yawned and stretched before resuming his stance, legs braced, one hand on the tiller and the other grasping a length of sail rope. Nate didn’t know how he did it. At first, he’d assumed that Zelphyius never slept. But after watching him over several nights, Nate realized that, in the moments between the swells and eddies of the air currents, when the sails were full and the tiller set, the librarian did in fact close his eyes. These moments – naps of no longer than three or four minutes at a time – seemed to be enough for Zelphyius, who’d remained at his post on the sumpwood deck for the entire voyage. He clearly appreciated having Nate on board, however, to secure ropes, fetch water from the mist catchers at the base of the masts and perform routine errands like raising the logbait.
Nate paused on the mast cradle, where a thick rope was tethered to one of the sumpwood struts. He crouched down and, with one hand holding on to the mast, reached over the side with the other. His fingers closed round the rough damp fibres of the rope and gripped tightly. He gave a sharp tug.
‘Feels promising,’ he grunted as the heavy load swung below him.
Hand over hand, he pulled the rope up through the air, before hefting the whole lot onto the narrow deck behind
him. Tied to the end of the rope was a length of lufwood log, gnarled and wormy, which landed on the sumpwood boards with a thud and a soft crunch. And clinging hold of the log, their claws and suckers sunk into the timber, was a writhing mass of airborne creatures that had been lured to the bait during the night.
There were windsnappers with curved claws, whiplash feelers and broad white shells; whiskered skyworms, their slimy bodies glistening as they writhed; and mist barnacles, huddled together in transparent clusters, their soft shells fringed with long hair-like tentacles. Nate pulled his knife from his belt and began prising the creatures from the log, dispatching the edible specimens with a swift blow or knife cut, and allowing the others to scuttle across the deck and disappear back into the dawn sky. The sumpwood deck on which he worked was scored with knife marks that attested to its use as a chopping board for many such feasts in the past.
He glanced round at the stern cabin, where Eudoxia seemed to be sleeping a little more peacefully. Nate had spent most of the night helping her fight another of the fevers that had tormented her for most of the three days and three long nights of their voyage. He felt so helpless as he mopped her brow and got her to sip water from the flask, aware that neither he nor Zelphyius possessed the skill to remove the leadwood bullet that was slowly killing her.
‘Hold on, Eudoxia,’ he’d whispered to her as she tossed and turned. ‘Just hold on …’
Turning to the brazier, Nate lifted its lid to reveal a griddle nestling over the now glowing embers of lufwood. Scooping up handfuls of skyworms and mist barnacles, he piled them onto the griddle and replaced the lid on the brazier.
Fire and varnished sumpwood, Zelphyius had impressed upon Nate, didn’t mix, and every care had to be taken with a lit brazier.
Beneath the copperwood lid, the skyfare sizzled enticingly, giving off a mouth-watering aroma and causing Nate’s stomach to rumble with hunger. Nate checked it every so often, lifting the lid and turning the sizzling morsels with his knife until they were browned on both sides.
When he was satisfied that they were done, he pulled a couple of thorn needles and a length of greased twine from the pocket of his topcoat and opened the brazier once more. Quickly, he skewered the juicy chunks of skyfare with the thorn needles and threaded them onto the greased twine, which was knotted at the other end, before extinguishing the lufwood embers by closing the ventilation holes in the brazier’s lid. Then he turned and handed Zelphyius one of the steaming strings of skyfare.
‘Breakfast,’ he said.
The librarian scholar took it with thanks, raising the string to his lips and pulling off chunks with his teeth – his other hand never leaving the tiller.
As Nate turned and made his way back towards the stern cabin, he couldn’t help but marvel at how self-sufficient the Varis Lodd was. Drinking water was collected in the mist catchers, two small containers attached to the bottom of each mast. These caught the condensed vapour of the clouds which formed on the masts and trickled down. Small, light lufwood logs were kept in a net that hung down beneath the mast cradles and served as fuel. The wood was light, but not the lightest available.
‘I refuse to burn sumpwood root logs, no matter how light they are,’ Zelphyius Dax had told Nate. ‘It’s a crime, those pro-Hivers destroying the sumpwoods, and I for one won’t be a party to it.’
As for food, apart from the skyfare hauled up each morning from the logbaits, the hooks along the curved prow of the Varis Lodd were festooned with oilskin sacks containing dried or cured provisions. There were chunks of woodapple, gladeonions and steam celery, strips of hammelhorn and tilder, while rings of smoked lake eel could be found dangling from hooks set into the sumpwood prow below the carved figurehead.
At the stern, Nate ducked down and crawled into the tiny cabin. Eudoxia was lying on her side, the two topcoats that had been covering her now lying in a heap at her feet. There was a watery stain on the bandage at her neck. He leaned forward and rested the backs of his fingers against her forehead. It was hot to the touch, though nowhere near as hot as it had been in the night, and her breathing – which had been rasping and faltering – was low and regular.
‘I’ve brought you some food,’ he said softly, reaching down and shaking her shoulder gently. ‘Eudoxia,’ he said. ‘A little something to eat.’ She didn’t stir. ‘Come on, now,’ he told her. ‘Just a mouthful or two, to keep your strength up.’
Eudoxia’s eyelids flickered, then snapped open. For a moment, she looked round her wildly, before her gaze focused on Nate’s face and a smile plucked at the corners of her mouth.
‘Nate,’ she said. ‘Is it time to march … ?’
‘I’ve brought you some food,’ he repeated. He hooked the string of skyfare to the cabin strut beside the waterflask and, leaning forward, helped her to sit up a little, wincing at how thin and light her body had become. He wedged one of the folded topcoats behind her shoulder, then pulled off a piece of grilled mist barnacle.
‘Here,’ he said, putting the morsel to her lips.
She took it and chewed slowly, her eyes dull and glassy-looking. She swallowed finally, with difficulty, and when Nate offered her another piece, she turned her head away.
‘We’ve got to fall in, Nate. The sergeant’s waiting … So tired, Nate … So … tired …’
Eudoxia closed her eyes and drifted off again into a troubled sleep.
Gently, Nate laid her back down on her side. Leaving one of the topcoats as a pillow, he pulled the other one up to her shoulders. He looked at the bandage again. Moving her must have disturbed the wound. The watery stain had spread, and was edged now with a line of dark red.
‘Let me just see to this,’ he said softly, reaching behind him for the small tethered sumpwood chest floating in the corner, with its bandages, lint and salves.
He unknotted the bandage and, slipping his hand under her partly raised head, unwound it. The wound beneath her ear looked angry – the flesh about it bright red and raised – with a yellow centre, thick with pus. He wiped it clean as best he could with a moist cloth. Then he reached into the chest for a small pot, unscrewed the lid and scooped out a large green dollop of fragrant hyleberry and feverfew salve, which he smeared gingerly over her burning skin. Eudoxia flinched in her sleep and groaned softly.
‘Nearly done,’ said Nate. He took a square of fibrous lint and placed it on the wound, then wrapped a clean length round her neck and head, before tying it off at the end.
He sat back on his heels and looked at her. Her eyes were dark-ringed and sunken, and she was painfully thin. Beneath the fresh bandage and soothing salve, the deadly leadwood bullet still lay embedded behind her ear. They couldn’t get to Riverrise too soon, Nate thought, his stomach knotted with an unspoken dread.
‘Nate,’ Zelphyius called from the helm. ‘Nate, this is something you should see!’
As he crawled out of the stern cabin, the dazzling low sun struck him in the face, all but blinding him. With one hand raised to shield his eyes, he picked his way back along the narrow deck.
‘There,’ said Zelphyius, pointing ahead.
Nate gripped the side of the helm and peered into the distance. Like a handful of great silver coins, clustered together and gleaming brightly against the backdrop of dark green forest and emerald grassy glade, were four mighty lakes, fringed with clusters of cabins and towers with landing decks. Here and there, lone chimneys belched thin spirals of smoke, and small coracles and oared boats, like waterbeetles, paddled across the glistening waters.
‘That,’ said Zelphyius with a smile, ‘is the settlement of Four Lakes. One day, it too will be a great city. It is home to the webfoot goblin clans,’ he said. ‘The crested, the tusked, the red-ringed and the white … And these are their magnificent lakes, the largest and most ancient in all the Deepwoods. That one, there,’ he said indicating the nearest of the four, ‘is called the Silent One. The one next to it is the Shimmerer. And that,’ he said, pointing to the most distant lake, whose waters a
ppeared milky white, ‘is called the Lake of Cloud.’
‘And that one?’ said Nate, pointing to the wide expanse of the third lake, its surface reflecting the forest all round it.
‘That,’ said Zelphyius, ‘is the most miraculous of the lakes. It is called the Mirror of the Sky and its waters are home to the Great Blueshell Clam, one of the most ancient living beings in the whole of the Edgelands. Apart from the crested webfoots who tend it, the Great Blueshell Clam has only ever been seen by one person …’
‘Who?’ said Nate, intrigued.
‘Keris Verginix,’ said Zelphyius, leaning on the tiller and bringing them down lower in the sky. ‘Granddaughter of the great Maris, founder of the Free Glades in the First Age, daughter of the legendary sky pirate captain, Twig. Hers was a truly remarkable story …’
‘Go on,’ said Nate, staring out at the glassy waters of the Mirror of the Sky in the distance.
Playing out the sail rope of the portside mainsail, Zelphyius continued.
‘Keris Verginix was born and raised in a slaughterer village far off in the northern Deepwoods,’ he said. ‘Her father, Twig, had left shortly after her birth to rescue his crew, who were stranded at Riverrise. But back then, in the First Age of Flight, his task proved impossible. Years later, Keris heard of the Great Blueshell Clam from webfoot traders and set off to journey to Four Lakes to seek an audience with it, hoping that it could tell her if her father was still alive.’
Zelphyius smiled to himself.
‘As a young librarian, I once found a dusty barkscroll in the Great Library with an account of her epic journey.’ He glanced round at Nate. ‘The perils, the wonders and more …’
‘So she saw the clam?’ Nate asked.
‘Yes, the only outlaker ever to do so,’ said Zelphyius, ‘and it sent her to the Free Glades, where she seeded the South Lake with clams, and met Maris, her grandmother.’
Edge Chronicles 10: The Immortals Page 35
