‘Thank Earth and Sky you did, brother,’ Ifflix replied. ‘Yet part of me wishes you’d stayed away.’ He frowned, his face suddenly tense and serious. ‘For this is a place of terrible danger …’
‘Danger?’ said the Professor. ‘Is that why you jumped out at me like a mad cut-throat?’
‘It’s the only way,’ came Ifflix’s weary reply, ‘to tell whether someone is real or not. If they bleed, they’re real. If they slip through my fingers, they’re not …’
The Professor frowned. ‘You’re speaking in riddles, Ifflix,’ he said, and touched the scratch on the side of his neck. ‘You’ve spent too long descending in the darkness.’
Ifflix smiled, but the Professor noticed the deep sadness in his brother’s eyes.
‘Perhaps so,’ Ifflix said. ‘There is much to tell you. But not here, Ambris. Follow me. There is something you must see for yourself …’
• CHAPTER EIGHTY-EIGHT •
‘This,’ said the academic, smiling, ‘is the Gate of Humility. It is the entrance into the Knights Academy. Follow me.’ He bent double as he disappeared past a metal door and through the low opening in the towering west wall of the academy.
Stooping low, Eudoxia, Slip and Galston Prade followed the academic, intrigued by his relaxed air of authority and friendly demeanour. Nate was less sure. He bent forward and entered what he discovered was a low-ceilinged tunnel. Behind him, the metal door clanged shut; in front, Eudoxia and the others shuffled forward. As the ceiling came lower still, Nate was forced to crawl on all fours.
He emerged a moment later through a low opening, head bent and on his knees. Looking up, he found himself in a great open courtyard with the grandiose façade of the ancient Knights Academy in front of him.
‘Tell me … errm …’ Galston Prade said, hesitating.
‘Linius Pallitax, Most High Academe,’ the academic introduced himself, giving a small bow.
‘Tell me, Linius,’ Galston continued, brushing imaginary dust from the knees of his breeches, ‘how this city of yours comes to be here, unchanged and perfectly preserved after all these centuries.’
‘The Sanctaphrax rock was released from its anchor in Undertown many generations ago, it is true,’ said the Most High Academe, crossing the courtyard towards the grand entrance hall of the academy. ‘But a few academics refused to abandon the sacred rock. We remained with it on its extraordinary voyage into Open Sky, far beyond the Edgelands.’
Turning to them with a serene smile, the High Academe raised his eyes to the sky.
‘In those uncharted regions, home to the great Mother Storm and much else besides, we encountered weather we could hitherto never have imagined – emotion storms, white maelstroms, glister squalls and swirling vortexes whose properties we have studied ever since. It is to these strange phenomena that we ascribe our long lives and extraordinary health.’
The High Academe opened the doors to the Knights Academy and stepped inside, followed by Eudoxia, Galston, Slip and Nate. Ahead of them was a magnificent staircase of carved blackwood winding up into the gloom.
‘For centuries, we voyaged through the skies, our sacred rock providing for our every need. And we in turn, though few in number, lovingly took care of this city that nurtured us, as you can see.’
He indicated the carved staircase leading to the Upper Halls of the academy, and the high corridors which led off towards the Lower Halls.
‘And then, Sky be blessed,’ Linius Pallitax said, smiling benevolently, ‘our sacred rock was blown back to its birthplace, and the Anchor Chain miraculously secured itself on the Edge cliff below. Now,’ he said, with a sweep of his staff, ‘we wish to repay our immense good fortune by opening up the city of shining spires to the poor, the oppressed and the downtrodden in this modern world of yours, and offer them sanctuary and peace here with us.’
‘That’s beautiful,’ said Eudoxia, thinking of Tentermist the fettle-legger young’un in the ruins below.
‘Yes,’ said Nate, looking round the deserted academy. ‘But where exactly are all these simple folk you have given sanctuary to?’
‘All in good time,’ the Most High Academe said simply.
With that he turned and, staff clacking on the marble floor, strode down the corridor. Slip the scuttler looked up as the academic passed him by and, as he did so, he saw the expression on the academic’s face abruptly change. The smile disappeared. The eyes narrowed. And, for the briefest of moments, a long dark tongue darted out from between the Most High Academe’s lips and flickered in the gloom.
Almost, Slip thought with a shudder, as though it was tasting the air.
• CHAPTER EIGHTY-NINE •
‘The expedition started well at first,’ said Ifflix grimly, ‘and we made an excellent descent down the great incline from the Edgeriver waterfall. But once we reached the phantasmal depths, the trouble began.’ He turned and raised the flaming torch he was carrying, the flickering flames bathing his troubled face with golden light. ‘The realm of Edge wraiths and half-formed creatures …’
The Professor raised his own torch and shone it up ahead, illuminating the porous walls of the long stone tunnel. ‘Is it much further?’ he asked.
Ifflix nodded. ‘Still a way to go, Ambris,’ he replied.
The two brothers were walking one behind the other through the honeycomb of stone tunnels inside the Sanctaphrax rock. Every now and then they would have to duck to avoid the low ceiling, or squeeze their way along a narrow stretch where the walls came in from both sides – only to broaden out a few strides further on, enabling them to walk side by side.
Entrance to the tunnel had been gained through a concealed trapdoor in the far corner of the library, now far above their heads. Ifflix had seized the sunken handle in the floor and tugged, and the Professor had looked down to see a dark tunnel snaking away beneath. Ifflix had unhooked the two torches from the wall and lit the black pitch at their ends, then handed one to his brother, and they’d set off. That had been almost an hour ago.
‘We’d disembarked from the Archemax in the north of the Stone Gardens,’ Ifflix continued. ‘I’d had a long talk with the captain about the descent. We thought two weeks each way would be enough, though the captain had insisted that he would wait for six.’
The Professor nodded. It was just as Cirrus Gladehawk had described, and he felt bad for ever having doubted him.
‘But by the time we reached the depths, over a week had already passed,’ said Ifflix. ‘The four of us checked our equipment and supplies and continued the descent regardless. We’d gone too far to turn back then, though we hadn’t yet even reached the fluted decline.’ He shook his head. ‘We took a gamble that we’d make a faster ascent if we had to.’
They had come to a fork where the tunnel split in two. One way was large and wide; the other, low and narrow. It was this second tunnel that Ifflix took.
‘The winds down there in the depths were like nothing I’ve ever experienced, Ambris,’ Ifflix told his brother breathlessly as they squeezed, side on, through a narrow gap. ‘They roared and howled like the souls of the dead, swirling about us, ice cold and turbulent, setting our clothes flapping, snatching our hats from our heads and sending them tumbling down through the air.’
He glanced round at the Professor, who looked back at him, his eyes narrowed with sympathy.
‘Worse than that,’ Ifflix went on, ‘they plucked at everything our fingers struggled to hold on to, as if with fingers of their own. The writhing ropes. The hook spikes we hammered into the cliff to hold them. The stone mallets themselves … Time and again, one or the other of us would let out a cry as something else – something utterly irreplaceable on that barren rockface – would be snatched from our grasp and disappear down into the swirl of black cloud far beneath us.’ He shuddered. ‘And each time that happened, the roaring and howling sounded almost like scornful laughter.’
‘And yet you kept on,’ said the Professor, a mixture of respect and disbelief in his voice.<
br />
‘We kept on,’ Ifflix agreed. ‘We got into a routine. By day we would continue our descent, sometimes pausing for Lendil Spix to chip off a sample of rock, which Centix Thripp would record and log, noting the depth it was taken from. And when sunset came, Trapper Sluice would help us set up camp for the night – if camp is the right word for the curious rest places we created for ourselves on the vertical cliff face. Sometimes we would be lucky and find a ledge. More often than not, we would have to hammer our hook spikes directly into the rock to hang our hammocks from.’ He turned to his brother. ‘It’s quite something sleeping in such a bed, Ambris, I can tell you. Rocked to and fro by the wild wind, while all that separates you from the abyss below is a thin layer of tilderhide.’
The Professor nodded earnestly. ‘I can imagine,’ he said, though, when he tried to think of the ships’ hammocks he had slept in swinging from the cliff side, he found that he could not.
‘On the eighteenth day of our descent, we lost the first member of our expedition,’ said Ifflix, increasing his pace as he marched through a clear stretch of tunnel. ‘Already behind in our schedule, we awoke to find Lendil Spix gone. He’d been careless, failing to hammer his hook spikes far enough into the rock, and they’d come loose …’
‘He fell?’
Ifflix nodded bleakly. ‘Of course, Trapper Sluice blamed himself, but it wasn’t his fault.’ He paused and his eyes glazed for a moment with memories. ‘Hopefully, Spix never woke up …’
‘And the rest of you still continued?’ said the Professor.
‘Having come so far, we weren’t about to give up,’ came the reply. ‘We had reached the fluted decline at last, and it seemed to promise a clear descent into the blackest regions of all.’
The Professor waited as his brother navigated a particularly awkward section of the tunnel, where a large rock had fallen down, all but blocking their path. Scrambling up the pitted side, Ifflix turned and eased himself through the narrow gap beneath the ceiling. The Professor followed.
‘Anyway,’ said Ifflix, resuming his story as the tunnel widened and the Professor was once more able to join him at his side, ‘down we went, painstakingly slowly, stride after treacherous stride, our bodies battered and buffeted by the ferocious winds.’ He looked round at the Professor, and smiled at the expression on his face, so much more dour than he had remembered.
The Professor returned his gaze. ‘And?’ he said.
‘And we continued down into the inky blackness,’ Ifflix said simply, and trembled. ‘Such a strange experience, Ambris. It was like being immersed in cold swirling water. It numbed our fingers and stoppered our ears; it filled our eyes, making it impossible to see the rock before us, despite the phraxlamps we wore around our necks …’
The Professor nodded thoughtfully.
‘Trapper Sluice had hammered a hook spike into the rock at the top of the fluted decline and attached the longest rope we had to it. He was hoping that it might be long enough to take us right the way down the central flute …’ He sighed. ‘It wasn’t. Nowhere near. Fumbling blindly, Trapper knocked in a second spike and set another rope hanging from it. Then, just as he was about to continue his descent, out of nowhere, there came an Edge wraith …’
‘An Edge wraith?’ the Professor repeated.
Ifflix nodded and swallowed hard. ‘I saw it, Ambris, as if in slow motion.’ His voice was low and tremulous. ‘It was immense, with great bat-like wings and a wizened papery body. Its massive milk-white eyes stared out of a shrunken skull-like head – and its gaping jaws were lined with rows of needle teeth, the size of rapier blades.
‘It zigzagged through the dense air impossibly slowly, luminescent and blurred. The odour of rotting flesh filled my nostrils. Then, with a crack and a hiss, the huge creature opened its cavernous jaws and sank its razor-sharp fangs into Trapper’s body, ripping him away from the rockface, before flapping away into the depths on glowing wings. A moment later, we were plunged back into darkness.
‘I never saw Trapper Sluice again – nor,’ he added, ‘the supplies he was carrying in his sumpwood backpack.’
The Professor took a sharp intake of breath.
‘Thripp and I continued as best we could,’ Ifflix went on. ‘We did actually get to the bottom of the fluted decline. We left markers and rope rings every step of the way for others to follow after us,’ he added, with a wry smile. ‘The air was still there, but dark – impenetrably dark. Too dark, certainly, for our paltry phraxlamps to see further than a dozen, maybe twenty strides below us. It was a view which, no matter how far we descended, was never to change …’
‘You didn’t see the bottom of the Edge cliff then?’ said the Professor, unable to keep the disappointment from his voice.
‘Alas, no, Ambris,’ said Ifflix. ‘When the ropes we had ran out, there was no option for us but to start the long ascent back to the top once more. Despite our earlier optimism, it was to take us twice as long as the descent. Time and again we would have to stop, exhaustion making it impossible for us to continue, and all the while our supplies were running out. We were constantly hungry and thirsty. Our minds became addled. And not just through lack of sustenance, but – or so Centix claimed – because of the pernicious influence of the curious cliff face rock itself.’ He paused. ‘Perhaps it was that which made him do what he did,’ he said softly.
The Professor turned to him, his brow furrowed.
His brother sighed. ‘We were back above the depths by this time,’ he said, ‘but it was still dark, with the never-ending wind howling round us. “It’s been an honour knowing you, Hentadile,” Centix said, looking back at me, the strange smile on his face illuminated by our phraxlamps. The next thing I knew, he’d whipped his knife from his belt and, before I could stop him, he’d severed the rope and was plunging down into the abyss below.’
Ifflix turned to the Professor, his eyes sparkling.
‘Suddenly I was alone, Ambris; alone on the cliff face. I don’t know whether it was that fact that spurred me on, or realizing what might happen to me if I stayed any longer in the blackness, but I started climbing – and I kept climbing, pausing neither for breath nor water. I continued through the unchanging night, to the very top. There, pulling myself up the jutting rock with my last remaining ounce of strength, I crawled over the lip of the Edge – and collapsed …’
The tunnel had become narrower once again. The route the two brothers had taken had been slowly descending ever since they’d climbed down from the library. Now, for the first time, as Ifflix took a right-hand fork, the path became a gentle incline.
‘The next thing I knew, a soft voice was asking me who I was,’ said Ifflix. ‘“Your name?” it kept saying. “Your name?” “Your name … ?” I looked up to see a tall bearded figure smiling down at me. He was dressed in the clothes of an academic from the First Age; long robes, with pointed shoes on his feet and an elaborate four-pronged hat on his head.’
‘The Most High Academe?’ the Professor said.
Ifflix nodded grimly. ‘Little did I know that, far from being rescued, I’d end up a fugitive in this terrible floating city, where every exit is guarded and I dare not show my face.’ He shook his head. ‘When I discovered the appalling truth, I escaped and hid.’
He raised his flaming torch. The light swooped along the tunnel ahead, gleaming on the rock – and on a low circular door set into it.
As they approached, the torchlight flickered on the stone door and the Professor saw that it had been carved with innumerable creatures. At their centre, he noticed the round symbol with its forks of lightning that he’d seen both on the mosaic quadrangle and at the top of the Most High Academe’s staff. He turned to his brother.
‘What is this place?’ he asked.
‘This, Ambris,’ said Ifflix, his voice hushed and trembling, ‘is the dark secret at the heart of the city of shining spires …’
• CHAPTER NINETY •
The Knights Academy was one of the most extraordinar
y buildings Nate had ever entered. There were the four Lower Halls – the Hall of White Cloud, filled with furnaces and metalwork forges; the Hall of Storm Cloud, with its timber stores and woodworking benches; the magnificent Hall of High Cloud, with its great glass dome for cloudwatching and – Eudoxia’s favourite – the Hall of Grey Cloud, with its prowlgrin roosts and stables, the air sweet with the smell of glade hay and meadow straw.
Then there were the Upper Halls, dark wood-panelled chambers at the top of the great spiral staircase. These were dominated by huge pulpits as big as Deepwoods’ trees, ornately carved with designs of startling intricacy. Nate had counted at least twenty of these huge pulpits as they had wandered through the dimly lit central hall.
To think that this was only one of the seven great schools of Sanctaphrax! Nate thought. What other magnificent sights must they contain? It would take a lifetime to see them all. But then, by his own admission, the Most High Academe, Linius Pallitax, and his fellow academics had lived many lifetimes already in this extraordinary floating city of theirs.
Now, the kind-faced academic was standing up in one of the great blackwood pulpits talking to Galston, Cirrus and a wide-eyed nervous-looking Slip. Nate turned to Eudoxia, who was tracing an intricate carving of jumping tilder on the base of one of the pulpits with her finger.
‘Don’t you think it’s odd, Eudoxia,’ Nate said quietly, ‘that this city is practically deserted, yet these guides have been bringing villagers here from all over the Deepwoods? Woodtrolls, cloddertrogs, even folk from Great Glade, if the evidence of what we found in the ruins is to be believed. So where are they?’
‘You’ve seen how big this place is, Nate,’ said Eudoxia, ‘and this is just one academy of many. There are probably groups of Deepwooders living in other buildings in other parts of the city. I’m sure they’ll all come to the welcome feast when the fettle-leggers arrive.’
Edge Chronicles 10: The Immortals Page 52
