The Descenders

by Paul Stewart

  Nate surveyed the scene. The Professor was right. They were in the midst of a seemingly endless slope of scree-like rubble, each boulder the size of a phraxbarge. The crevices between them were ink-black and forbidding, though the surface of the rock was springy and lush with the thick lawn of glowing blue vegetation. And then there were the sounds. Nate shuddered. Shrouded in fine mists and caressed by swirling winds, the scree was alive with hissing and whistling and soft howling moans that sounded horribly alive.

  Pushing his fears aside, Nate decided to check over their equipment. The phraxchambers were completely destroyed, the crystals of phrax gone. But some things had survived the fall. Nate had his hack-knife and phraxpistol, though no ammunition; the Professor had a couple of rock spikes and the coil of rope.

  Beside him, the Professor suddenly groaned with pain as he tried to move.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ Nate said. ‘I wasn’t thinking. I’ll make you more comfortable.’

  He pulled the hack-knife from his belt and started cutting away at the dense vegetation. Clouds of sparkling luminescence billowed up and floated off into the inky blackness. Nate checked around warily, hoping he wasn’t announcing their presence to an Edge wraith or ravine demon.

  Or something worse …

  He constructed a mattress with the spongy moss fronds and propped the Professor up. Then, having splinted his friend’s broken legs with the rock spikes, he returned his attention to the equipment.

  The ruined backpacks yielded some useable supplies. A large pack of hard-tack. A stove – which Nate hoped to power up with the phrax crystal from his pistol. A battered pot and two dented copperwood canteens. A coil of wire, needles and a spool of thread. And a mistsifter, to catch and condense the moisture in the air, and ensure they always had enough water.

  They ate hard-tack on that, their first day – and, keen to keep an accurate record of the time spent down in the depths, Nate cleared the moss from the surface of a nearby boulder and scratched a Descender’s mark into the bare rock with his hack-knife. It was the start of their calendar.

  Day one …

  By the end of the first week, the Professor and Nate had mastered the basic survival routines of living on the scree slope, and Nate began to explore further afield. For his part, the Professor rested up. He was in a bad way. With his legs splinted and the bones beginning to heal, he had begun to regain some feeling – and was suffering terrible pain as a result. Though Nate never once heard him complain.

  The first week turned into the first month. Then the second month. Then the third. And as the time passed, Nate was able to assess their situation more accurately.

  Wherever they were, it was not the ‘groundfall’ that the Professor had dreamed of finding on this fourth descent. The scree field descended further – much further – down into the darkness. The area of luminous blue vegetation they were stranded upon was relatively small. The rest, as far as Nate dared to venture, was arid and devoid of any obvious life.

  It was a harsh, wearisome existence, yet the two of them coped. Just. Sometimes they talked, reminiscing on the past or making tentative plans for the future. But the enforced solitude and constant uncertainty turned them in on themselves, and they remained silent for most of the time, lost in their own thoughts.

  When the hard-tack ran out, the two of them faced the prospect of starvation. This, six months in, was when the Professor came into his own. Although restricted, he was now able to move about with the aid of the rock spikes, which Nate had removed from his legs, lashed together and fashioned into a crutch.

  The strange vegetation they collected was analysed. Then the Professor began experimenting on himself.

  ‘You observe, Nate,’ he instructed. ‘There’s no point both of us poisoning ourselves.’

  The tall swaying fronds of glowing ‘plate-moss’ proved edible, if rather tasteless. ‘Like damp barkscroll,’ was Nate’s verdict when the Professor had given it the all-clear. There was plenty of the stuff on the boulders, though, and more grew quickly back whenever he chopped it down.

  The pungent ‘pattern-moss’ seemed promising at first but, after a day of extreme sickness, it was agreed never to try it again. There were other, more successful, specimens however. The ‘meat-lichen’ was delicious, but hard to find, while the ‘blue-spore clumps’ satisfied their desire for something sweet.

  Soon, Nate was foraging successfully, and the Professor was even experimenting with air-drying and smoking the edible moss to create a store. They were surviving, if not thriving. But the routine was as endless as it was mindless. Both of them were starting to wonder – though neither expressed it in words – exactly what they were surviving for.

  They stopped keeping the rock-surface calendar three years after their freefall. It was too disheartening. From then on, their eerie isolation really began to take its toll. Time lost any meaning, and, increasingly uncertain whether they were awake or asleep, both Nate and the Professor started to have vivid and terrifying dreams.

  For Nate, it was usually the looming face of an Edge wraith that haunted his nightmares. Sometimes he’d see Grint Grayle, the mine sergeant who had engineered the ‘accident’ that killed his father; at other times, the leering face of the black-eared goblin who had pulled a knife on him on board the Deadbolt Vulpoon – two characters from his past who had wanted to see him dead. Worst of all, though, were the few occasions when he closed his eyes only to find Eudoxia Prade standing before him, silently weeping.

  Nate missed her more than he could say. They had been through so much together; shared so many exciting adventures. Would they ever see each other again?

  As time continued to pass – months, years – the dark, sunless days merged into one another to form a single never-ending night. Worse than that, the two Descenders themselves seemed to be disappearing, their minds and bodies melting into the eerie blue light …

  Then, suddenly, everything changed.

  ‘Nate! Nate!’ the Professor cried as he shook him awake. ‘Come quickly, you must see this.’

  Nate pulled himself up from his moss bed and staggered after the ragged figure of the Professor, trying to remember the last time they’d spoken to each other. Was it days ago? Weeks? Perhaps even years. He’d been dreaming he was a boy again, back in the phraxmines of the Eastern Woods, with his father, Abe. He was ten years old in the dream. But how old was he now? he asked himself, and with mounting horror realized that he had no idea. Thirty? Forty? A hundred?

  ‘Look, Nate. Over there.’

  Nate shook himself from his thoughts. The Professor was pointing down towards the edge of what they thought of as their ‘moss island’. Thick curling plumes of faintly sparkling mist were spiralling up into the blackness from the crevices of the scree. Then, beneath this billowing mist, one large moss-covered rock began to wobble. Slowly, as the root tendrils of the mossy plants on its surface were prised away, the scree boulder began to rise and gently turn.

  There was something familiar about it, Nate thought, and he remembered the curious storm-stones that would sometimes appear up top. Hurtling upwards from beneath the jutting Edge rock, the mysterious objects would arc through the air, hissing and humming, before crashing down in the Stone Gardens or the grasslands of the Mire.

  Could this be where they originated?

  ‘Take this!’ the Professor said urgently, shoving his rock-spike crutch into Nate’s hands. He gestured to the boulder. ‘You’re still strong, Nate. Drive this into the rock and hold on …’

  He pushed Nate towards the spinning boulder. Nate stepped onto the rock’s surface, fell to his knees and drove the spike deep into the surface of the boulder, then clung on tightly.

  In front of him, the Professor’s face blurred as the mist surge took hold of the rock and suddenly sent it spinning upwards. Nate stared back helplessly.

  ‘Don’t forget me …’ the Professor’s voice rang in Nate’s ears.

  · CHAPTER THREE ·

  ‘Don’t forg
et me … Don’t forget me …’

  The words echoed in Nate’s head as he soared into the air, now quick and high-pitched, like the chirruping of cheepwits; now as slow and sonorous as a tolling bell.

  The boulder rose at an impossible speed – faster than freefall, faster than lightning. So fast that Nate felt himself being crushed against the surface of the boulder. His stomach churned and his face slumped. He struggled to breathe. And all the while the boulder spun ever quicker, threatening to hurl him back down into the void. Nate clutched hold of the rock spike, hoping and praying, the dizzying ascent no more than a series of half-glimpsed flashes.

  Blue glow …

  Pitch blackness …

  The glint of an eye; the flap of a papery wing.

  Cracks and crevices …

  Cloud swirl …

  Then breaking through the white billowing mass in an instant, back into the light; the sky above him and the cliff face seemingly all around him for a moment, until – with a sound like a cracking whip – he was tossed up over the tip of the jutting rock in a broad arc that projected him back over the land.

  At that moment, every thought, every memory, every feeling was driven from his head; everything but those final words he’d heard.

  Don’t forget me …

  I won’t, Nate promised. I won’t forget you, Professor. Ever …

  The skymarshal came down low and fast over the grasslands, the phraxchamber of his single-seater skycraft, the Rock Demon, thrumming. Brocktinius Rolnix raised the visor of his helmet and looked down as he sped past the glowing boulder that had thudded into the soft, oozing Mire soil moments before. Then, using the stirrup bars to control the craft, he circled round, slipping the long-barrelled phraxmusket from his shoulder as he did so.

  Brocktinius – or Brock, as he insisted his close friends call him – was young for a skymarshal of the Knights Academy, but he had already made quite a name for himself as a marksman. He could pick off an enemy captain in a wheelhouse at a thousand paces, shooting from the saddle. The eight stormhornets carved into his wrist armour – each one representing a Great Glade phraxship commander – bore witness to that.

  Brock slowed his skycraft to a hover, slipped out of the saddle and jumped down into the waist-high grass. Gripping the tolley-rope that was attached to the carved rock-demon prow, he pulled the skycraft behind him as he approached the boulder.

  It wasn’t a Great Glade projectile; that much was clear from the unfamiliar blue-grey moss and lichen that encrusted its surface. Reaching out, Brock touched one of the sprouting tendrils, only for it to disintegrate into smoky dust.

  The boulder had come down out of the broiling clouds and smashed into the Mire grasslands as Brock was returning from his dawn patrol. Recently, the blockade had grown in vessel numbers, but the skymarshals were holding the line on the outskirts of Undergarden. There was more though, so much more, to being a skymarshal out on patrol.

  Brocktinius Rolnix had seen such wondrous things in his short but exciting life as a skymarshal. Flocks of fighting vulpoons and wild tilder stampedes; glister showers in the low sky beyond the Edge falls; blow-holes and grass-slides in the Mire grasslands, when whole pastures would shift, buckle and slide beneath the bubbling soil …

  Even this – the sudden appearance of a great rock, seemingly out of nowhere – had been sighted before. Storm-stones, they were called. Brock knew that the Earth scholars of old believed these ancient rocks came from the darkest regions of the undercliff. Few ever landed in the inhabited regions of the Edgelands, and when they did, they buried themselves as deep as solidified lightning, yet had none of phrax’s immense value.

  As Brock watched, this storm-stone was already sinking into the soil. And then he saw it. Some sort of rock spike embedded in the surface of the boulder. He grabbed it and prised it free – just as the last of the immense boulder bubbled down into the earth, and shifting banks of grass slid over it like a green trap door closing.

  Brock turned the metal object over in his hand. He saw that it was in fact two rock spikes tightly bound together. One spike had been hammered over at the top and wrapped in moss-like padding that had been secured with coiled spidersilk rope.

  ‘Like a crutch,’ he mused.

  On the shaft of the second spike was a stamp. It was the tethered-rock symbol of New Sanctaphrax. Brock frowned, wondering what to make of it. But, already late returning from his patrol, he decided he’d examine it more closely later. He strapped the rock-spike crutch to the saddle of his phraxcraft and headed back to the Knights Academy.

  Leaving the grasslands behind him, Brock flew low over Undergarden, with its rumble stacks and tumbledown walls overgrown with dense vegetation. He pushed back on the stirrup bars and was about to steer the phraxcraft into a steep ascent that would take him up to the floating city above when, out of the corner of his eye, he caught a flash of white. He leaned forward, backing out of the climb and levelling off, and saw a flock of white ravens circling over the rock stacks of the Stone Gardens, cawing noisily.

  Something had agitated these ancient birds. Brocktinius Rolnix decided to discover what.

  He flew down through the flock and landed. He looked around – and there, propped up against the base rock of one of the oldest and tallest rock stacks, Brock saw a ghostly apparition.

  It was a fourthling dressed in strange ragged clothes – half patched cloth and leather; half woven coverings of vegetation, blue-grey and dusty. The figure’s hair was long and tangled and drained of colour, while a grizzled mane-like beard grew down to the waist. As Brock slowly approached, the figure opened its eyes. They stared back at him, glowing an unnatural luminescent blue, and the young skymarshal wanted nothing more than to draw his long-barrelled musket and keep this ghost at bay.

  ‘Who are you and how did you get here?’ Brock demanded, yet even as he spoke the words a nagging thought wormed its way into his head.

  He had been five years old when the fourth descent set off from the lip of rock at the edge of the Stone Gardens. In the fourteen years since then, he’d been schooled in the ancient Fountain House and accepted into the Knights Academy. By the age of sixteen, he had risen from junior cadet to the youngest skymarshal of the watch. And throughout that time, his fellow knights academic – the Descenders – had worked tirelessly to consolidate the work of the great Ambris Hentadile and his legendary fellow Descender …

  ‘Nate Quarter,’ said the ghost, the voice cracked and frail. ‘And I have absolutely no idea.’

  Sky Sergeant Mudgutt might well dock his pay for returning late from patrol, but Brock knew he had no choice. If this truly was Nate Quarter, High Academe Elect of New Sanctaphrax – mysteriously back after a fourteen-year absence – then there was someone who would want to see him at once.

  Brock helped Nate to his feet. ‘This way, sir,’ he said.

  Nate swayed where he stood, but did not move. Realizing that the ghost-like figure could barely remain upright, and was certainly too weak to walk, Brock picked him up in his arms and, shocked by how little he weighed, carried him across to the Rock Demon.

  Although strong enough, the little skycraft wasn’t really designed to carry passengers – particularly one in such a bad way – but Brock knew he would have to try. After all, the High Academe couldn’t be left on his own here in the Stone Gardens.

  Having secured Nate to the saddle, Brock climbed up behind him and, standing on the stirrup bars, managed to operate the controls. The phraxchamber hummed, a line of white vapour trailed back from the funnel, and the Rock Demon took off.

  It was an awkward flight back to the floating city. Nate kept slipping in and out of consciousness, and it was all Brock could do to keep him from sliding off the saddle and tumbling to the ground below. Soon, though, he had reached the city and was flying around the spires and towers of the majestic buildings.

  As the triple turrets of the renovated Knights Academy loomed up ahead, Brock brought the skyvessel round in a sweeping c
urve and steered it towards the uppermost storey. It was where the High Academe’s living quarters were situated – though with Nate missing and Eudoxia so often away on business, the place was more often than not locked up and empty.

  As Brock approached, he saw he might be in luck. The great glass doors that led onto the balcony were open, and there was a figure outside, back towards him, tending to the sapvines that grew over a series of trellised arches. Brock eased back the control lever, causing the phraxchamber’s hum to change pitch – and alerting the gardener on the balcony to his presence.

  In front of him, he heard Nate give a startled grunt. ‘Eudoxia?’ he muttered. ‘Eudoxia!’

  ‘Nate!’ she called back. ‘Nate, is that really you?’ She came running towards them, tears streaming down her face. ‘Oh, Nate,’ she cried. ‘I can’t believe you’re back. After all this time …’ She wiped away her tears. ‘What happened to you?’

  But Nate Quarter was in no position to answer. As the Rock Demon touched down, he finally succumbed to the exhaustion that had gripped him ever since he first stepped onto the spinning boulder. Before Eudoxia could take him in her arms, he fell from the saddle and collapsed at her feet in a deep faint.

  Nate Quarter’s extraordinary return was soon the main topic of conversation in every corner of New Sanctaphrax. And it wasn’t long before the news spread to the other great cities: Hive, Riverrise, Great Glade.

  Eudoxia didn’t push Nate to do too much too quickly. It was enough that her husband was home at last. Patiently and lovingly, she nursed him back to health; tending to his wounds, spoonfeeding him nourishing broth and leaving him to sleep – sometimes for days at a time – so that he might regain his strength.

  And physically, Nate did improve. Mentally, though, he was hard to reach.

  He recounted everything he could remember about the long years spent down on the luminous blue scree field with the Professor. He had thought he would die there, he told her, but then the terrible ordeal had come to an abrupt end. Forced to leave the Professor behind, Nate had ridden the storm-stone up from the depths. Alone.