Edge Chronicles 10: The Immortals

by Paul Stewart;Chris Riddell

  ‘That’s another thing,’ said Nate hotly. ‘You want to believe in this High Academe’s story of sanctuary in the city of shining spires for Tentermist’s sake, and the other fettle-leggers.’

  ‘Of course I do,’ said Eudoxia, her eyes glistening with passion, ‘because I’ve seen the dark side of this modern world of ours. And so have you, Nate. The harshness of life in the phraxmines, the greed of Great Glade, the poverty of the downtrodden in Hive, and the cruelty of the waifs in Riverrise. And then there was the battle … Have you forgotten the horror of the Midwood marshes?’ She grasped Nate’s hand. ‘If Linius Pallitax and his academics are opening up this beautiful city of shining spires to the poor and ill-treated of our world like little Tentermist, then yes, Nate, I do want to believe that a kindness and generosity of spirit has returned to the Edge from another age.’

  ‘But what if it’s not true?’ said Nate imploringly. ‘There’s something not quite right about this place, and I think we should warn the fettle-leggers before it’s too late …’

  Above them, in the pulpit, the sound of the High Academe’s gentle voice had stopped and, looking up, Nate saw that Galston, Cirrus and Slip were climbing down the pulpit ladder towards them.

  ‘Where did he go?’ Nate called up to them.

  ‘We were going to ask you the same thing,’ said Galston, reaching the shiny tiled floor of the Central Hall, Slip and Cirrus following close behind.

  ‘Slip looked down when we heard you and Mistress Eudoxia arguing, friend Nate,’ said Slip, his eyes wide, ‘and when Slip turned round, Linius Pallitax wasn’t there.’

  • CHAPTER NINETY-ONE •

  With a low grinding sound, the stone door swung open. Ifflix went through first, his flaming torch held high. The Professor followed, ducking down to avoid knocking his head. Straightening up, he raised his own torch – and gasped.

  ‘Where are we?’ he breathed, looking around.

  He was standing at the edge of a vast dimly-lit cavern, which was filled with a gleaming array of glass apparatus. There were numerous flagons and glass spheres suspended from long thin tubes which crisscrossed the chamber and seemed to sprout from the curved upper walls and high domed ceiling like the tendrils of a plant. At the centre of the chamber, hovering in the air between a tripod of glass pipes, was a huge glistening globe, which looked as though it had been woven from light.

  ‘Don’t you recognize it, Ambris?’ said Ifflix. ‘From the barkscrolls and ancient histories we used to pore over back at the Great Glade Academy?’

  Beside him, the Professor shook his head in disbelief. ‘You don’t mean … ?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Ifflix. ‘This is the ancient laboratory of the First Scholars, lost for hundreds of years before being rediscovered by …’

  ‘Linius Pallitax!’ breathed the Professor, staring at the gleaming paraphernalia. ‘You mean to say,’ he said, turning to his brother, the colour draining from his face, ‘that this is the very same laboratory in which the First Scholars attempted to create life?’

  ‘And Linius Pallitax followed their insane folly centuries later,’ nodded Ifflix, ‘and created the demon we know to this day as the gloamglozer.’

  ‘So the ancient tales are all true,’ said the Professor, shaking his head in wonder.

  ‘But that’s not all,’ said Ifflix. ‘As you can see, the ancient laboratory is still in use.’ He pointed to the phraxpistol at the Professor’s belt. ‘Only phraxfire can destroy the globe at the heart of this accursed apparatus. Sky knows, I’ve tried a hundred other ways. But now, with your help, brother,’ Ifflix continued, holding out his hand, ‘I can destroy it once and for all!’

  The Professor handed Ifflix his phraxpistol and, taking it, his brother crossed the laboratory towards the glowing glass sphere. He pointed the phraxpistol directly at the globe, his hand shaking.

  All at once, there was a cracking sound from high above.

  ‘Ifflix!’ shouted the Professor. ‘Look out!’

  Too late, Ifflix looked up to see that one of the thin tendrils of glass had detached itself from the domed ceiling above and was now hurtling down through the air towards the very spot on which he was standing. With a sickening crunch, the long thin shard of glass speared the descender through the chest and sent him crumpling to the ground.

  ‘Ifflix! Ifflix!’ cried the Professor, dashing to his brother’s side.

  He cradled his head in his arms as a dark pool of blood spread out across the laboratory floor.

  ‘You can’t die,’ he pleaded. ‘Not like this …’

  Ifflix looked up into the Professor’s eyes, which were misting with tears behind the wire-framed spectacles.

  ‘Finish this …’ he breathed, his eyes slowly closing. ‘Finish this, for ever!’

  From somewhere high up above, in the forest of curling glass tubes, there came the sound of soft low sniggering.

  • CHAPTER NINETY-TWO •

  ‘Leave the others and come with me,’ the Professor whispered from the shadows.

  Nate turned to see his friend, crushed funnel hat in hand and spectacles glinting, standing by an open door at the far side of the Central Hall. Eudoxia had been ignoring Nate since their little disagreement and was now, rather pointedly, showing Slip some carvings on a pulpit in the middle of the hall. Cirrus, arms folded and back arched, was examining the vaulted ceiling far above his head, with Galston standing by his side, tapping his fromp-headed cane absentmindedly on the polished wood tile floor.

  ‘Where have you been, Professor?’ asked Nate, hurrying over to his friend. ‘And where are we going?’

  The Professor smiled, before turning away and climbing the twisting flight of stairs that lay on the other side of the door, two at a time. His tongue flicked out from between his lips for the briefest of instants.

  ‘You’ll see,’ he whispered over his shoulder.

  Nate followed the Professor up the stairs and, emerging at last onto a wide gantry platform, found himself at the top of a tall wooden tower that rose up out of the gabled roof of the Upper Halls.

  ‘This is the Gantry Tower,’ said the Professor, turning to Nate and smiling broadly. ‘It’s where the knights academic of the First Age used to practise their stormchasing skills.’

  He pointed to the ancient skyship moored at the top of the tower above their heads. Nate read the words carved into its prow in old-fashioned letters. The Cloudslayer.

  ‘Just imagine it,’ said the Professor, gazing up at the skyship with its spidersilk sails, curved lufwood hull and iron flight cage enclosing an ancient floating rock from the First Age of Flight. ‘They trained in this academy to venture forth into the perilous Twilight Woods in pursuit of great storms aboard vessels such as this.’

  He turned to Nate, his eyes bright with excitement.

  ‘And there they’d enter the heart of the storm and wait for the lightning bolt to strike. Then those brave knights would descend into the Twilight Woods, clad in their magnificent armour and sitting astride their trusty prowlgrins, in order to grasp a shard of stormphrax before it disappeared for ever into the earth beneath …’

  ‘Not for ever,’ said Nate softly.

  ‘No, of course not,’ smiled the Professor, eyeing Nate through his glinting spectacles. ‘I’m forgetting that you’re from the Third Age.’

  ‘And so are you, Professor,’ said Nate.

  ‘Yes, so I am,’ he replied with an easy laugh. ‘So I am. Forgive me, I brought you up here so that you could enjoy with me this wonderful view of the city. That is where I’ve been, looking at the magnificent streets and walkways that surround us, and meeting their new inhabitants …’

  ‘You’ve seen them?’ said Nate excitedly. ‘Deepwooders, here in Sanctaphrax?’

  ‘But of course,’ smiled the Professor. ‘Woodtrolls, cloddertrogs, Hivers and Great Gladers, living side by side in simple harmony in the academies and schools.’

  ‘Which ones, Professor?’ asked Nate, scanning the deserted street
s far below.

  ‘Come here, to the edge of the gantry platform,’ the Professor said, smiling, ‘and I’ll show you.’

  • CHAPTER NINETY-THREE •

  The bells of Sanctaphrax were ringing out. From every campanile and belfry, gleaming in low sunlight, great brass bells were swinging to and fro, filling the air with sonorous peels. Loudest of all was the huge bell which tolled at the top of the distant great domed hall.

  ‘It’s wonderful!’ Tentermist gasped as she broke away from her mother’s hand and cantered round and round, her eyes closed and head thrown back.

  ‘More wonderful than I could ever have imagined,’ Wyver agreed.

  The pair of them had been at the end of the long column of fettle-leggers waiting for the hanging baskets to take them up from the Stone Gardens to the great floating city. It had taken a couple of hours, but their turn had finally arrived. And now at last they were here. All round them, their fellow villagers were milling about on the East Landing, their feet tapping on the boards with eager anticipation.

  ‘Welcome! Welcome!’ purred the smiling professors who glided between them, their long robes sparkling in the golden twilight glow. ‘Welcome to the city of shining spires!’

  There were dozens of them – smiling benevolent figures, ushering their visitors across the landing and into the city itself. And as the chattering group continued up the broad, intricately tiled avenue and through the ornately decorated squares, more gowned academics appeared, emerging from the various buildings, from the humblest of minor schools to the grandest academy.

  ‘This way,’ they smiled. ‘Follow us this way …’

  As the fettle-leggers rounded the great curved viaduct, those at the front let out cries of delight as the mosaic quadrangle opened up before them.

  ‘The welcome feast!’ Tentermist exclaimed, squeezing Wyver’s hand and dragging her forward. ‘Here,’ she said, and took a place at one of the benches. ‘I’ll sit here. You sit next to me.’ Then, smoothing down her best embroidered spidersilk smock, she turned to her mother and smiled. ‘And Mistress Eudoxia can sit here,’ she said, patting the place beside her.

  The benches filled quickly, the fettle-leggers eagerly taking their seats. Most were in their rest-day best clothes; many had garlands in their hair, newly fashioned from the weeds and wild flowers of the ruined city below. The air resounded with their excited voices as they surveyed the mosaic before them, with its strange intriguing design. All round the quadrangle, the academics gathered, beaming back happily at the faces that turned to look at them.

  One of the fettle-leggers – a tall elderly male, his shock of hair as white as snow – turned to the others with a shrug of his shoulders. ‘A welcome feast, the guide said, yet I see no food,’ he complained loudly.

  His companions grabbed his arm and urged him to sit down. An academic stepped forward in the flowing white robes of a professor from the School of Light and Darkness, a serene smile on his handsome face as he surveyed the expectant crowds staring back at him.

  ‘It’s the guide!’ whispered Tentermist excitedly to her mother.

  ‘You have journeyed far,’ the professor said, his eyes sparkling a strange yellow in the twilight glow. ‘Now, at last, you have entered the city of shining spires …’

  A cheer went up – a cheer which drowned out the soft sound of slurping as a hundred or more tongues flicked out from a hundred or more mouths and tasted the air greedily. The academic’s voice rang out.

  ‘Let the welcome feast begin!’

  • CHAPTER NINETY-FOUR •

  High up on the Gantry Tower of the Knights Academy, Nate listened to the sonorous chiming of the bells of Sanctaphrax. In the distance, the column of fettle-leggers were spilling out across the mosaic quadrangle and taking their places on the benches. From the academies and schools all over the city, brightly robed academics emerged in ones and twos and hurriedly made their way towards the square, like woodants sensing honey.

  ‘We should warn them,’ said Nate urgently, leaning as far as he dared over the gantry platform and gazing down at the mosaic quadrangle.

  ‘Warn them?’ said the Professor at his side. ‘Warn them of what? There is nothing to fear …’ he said, his voice low and quiet beside Nate’s ear. ‘Yet.’

  • CHAPTER NINETY-FIVE •

  The Professor pushed open the trapdoor and emerged into the Great Library from the tunnel beneath. Far below him, at the centre of the heartrock, the ancient laboratory now lay smashed and ruined beyond repair.

  The Professor’s grief and his phraxpistol had destroyed the accursed place for good. Now it would serve as his brother Ifflix Hentadile’s tomb. There would be time enough to honour his memory but now, the Professor told himself as he ran from the Great Library towards the Knights Academy, he had to warn the others.

  All around him, the streets echoed to the sound of ringing bells, and in the distance the mosaic square seemed to be thronging with bright-robed academics. Skirting round the School of Mist, the Professor looked up at the tall Gantry Tower of the Knights Academy.

  There, standing on the edge of a jutting platform, was Nate Quarter, staring back down at him, a look of bewildered confusion on his face. As the Professor ran towards the academy, he saw that his friend was not alone. There was another figure standing at his shoulder …

  With a gasp of disbelief, the Professor stopped dead in his tracks as he gazed up at his own face looking back at him.

  • CHAPTER NINETY-SIX •

  ‘Mother! Mother!’ screamed Tentermist, leaping into Wyver’s arms. ‘What’s happening?’

  All around the square, the academics’ smiling faces were dissolving in front of the fettle-leggers’ eyes. From the red robes of the College of Rain, a bulbous head abruptly sprouted ridged horns, the features of the face below contorting into a snarling leering mask of evil. Beside it, a cloudwatcher became a grinning skulled demon with eyes of blazing red, while the ranks of the Academies of Breeze, Hailstones and Gust threw back their hoods to reveal tentacled heads of rotting decay, pustules oozing grey slime and diseased-looking eyes popping from sockets on the ends of thin glistening strands.

  The fettle-leggers threw back their heads and screamed with terror as the grisly apparitions closed in from three sides. As they did so, the creatures flicked out their long forked tongues, greedily lapping up the fear in the air.

  In blind panic, the fettle-leggers stampeded across the square, leaping over upturned benches and discarded garlands as they did so, and ran down the broad avenue beside the College of Rain towards the East Landing. With raucous shrieks of delight, the monstrous apparitions swarmed after them, like woodwolves hunting tilder.

  High up on the Gantry Tower, Nate turned to the Professor, only to find himself staring into the hideous face of a creature in swirling black robes, its body apparently hovering in mid-air above the boards of the gantry. Huge curling horns sprouted from either side of its misshapen head. Its features were disfigured by angry scars, the skin seemingly melted by fire or some noxious substance, leaving it puckered and scaly. Its mouth was a snarling mass of vicious fangs; its unblinking eyes, yellow. And at the tattered sleeves of the black robe were bony hands, the vicious talons that tipped them glinting in the twilight glow.

  Nate recoiled in horror. He recognized the monstrous creature from descriptions in bedside stories and pictures in barkscrolls, as well as from innumerable old wives’ tales. Never take its name in vain; and, if you should ever spill salt, then a pinch thrown over your shoulder was said to blind it. It was a shapeshifter, a deceiver, a tempter, gleefully luring its prey to its death with seductive promises, whispers and lies, and feeding off its victims’ fear as it did so.

  All at once, the creature drew back its lips in a twisted smile of triumph, and rasped:

  ‘I am the gloamglozer!’

  • CHAPTER NINETY-SEVEN •

  ‘City of shining spires!’ the gloamglozer spat, its sneering voice suddenly giving way to loud
cackling laughter as it thrust its hideous face into Nate’s. He smelled the stench of death in the creature’s foul breath. ‘City of nightmares, more like!’ it hissed.

  It pulled back and swept an arm round in a broad arc, chuckling malevolently.

  ‘You’ve seen Sanctaphrax as I, the gloamglozer, wished you to see it,’ it said, ‘a beautiful illusion of the past. Now you shall see the city as it truly is!’

  As if falling into shadow, the glistening towers and spires and elegant sweeping domes below them abruptly lost their sheen. They revealed themselves as shattered and tumbledown ruins, their stones chipped and broken, and mortar crumbling where a thousand turbulent storms had, little by little, attacked the once magnificent buildings down the centuries. Tiles were broken, castellations in pieces, while the whole eastern wing of the School of Light and Darkness was no more than a pile of rubble, destroyed long ago by a mighty lightning bolt that had left its fallen stones cracked and charred.

  One by one, the other venerable schools and magnificent academies across the floating city revealed their true appearance as the glittering illusion melted away.

  The plastered walls of the Institute of Ice and Snow were shattered; tiny fissures in the once mirror-adorned white plaster were now great jagged cracks where rain and ice and scorching sunlight had slowly but surely destroyed its façade, reducing the smooth surface to a shattered jigsaw puzzle of broken stone. The soaring towers of the School of Mist were pitted and leaning. One of the two great spherical globes that had once crowned them was now a rusting tangle of twisted wires; the other lay crushed and crumpled on the broken courtyard slabs below.

  And through it all, a warm fetid wind swept round the dilapidated buildings, sighing like the dying and carrying with it the rank odour of decay. Even the sky had changed, the bright blue giving way to a glowering curdled mass of yellow and grey, which stained the ruins below a sickly shade of shadow-filled ochre.