by Paul Stewart
From his lofty position, Cade saw the lights of the Farrow Lake settlement twinkling. On the far shore, the stilt-cabins of the webfoot goblins were clustered together beside their eel-corrals and water gardens. Behind them, lufwood longhouses and thatched lodges circled allotments and glade orchards, where gnokgoblins and mobgnomes were already hard at work. Tree cabins on the forest edge to the west were evidence of the recent arrival of a clan of woodtrolls, while further along the reed-fringed shore, a recently founded slaughterer settlement was growing larger with every passing month. Their communal hammocks crisscrossed the clearing, crimson smoke-pits smouldering below them on the forest floor.
Cade had made many new friends among these newcomers. But he still remembered how it had been before they arrived – when it was just a handful of folk eking out a living around the Farrow Lake. These, the first settlers in the Farrow Ridges, were still his closest friends of all.
To his left, Cade saw the little cabin of Gart Ironside, the skyship platform-keeper, perched high at the top of the towering wooden structure. When Cade had first jumped ship, escaping from the clutches of Drax Adereth, it was Gart Ironside who had found him clinging to a branch of a lufwood tree and saved his life. He had been a good friend to Cade Quarter ever since.
Later, to his right as he galloped on, he passed the tree-cabin where his friend Celestia Helmstoft lived with her father, Blatch. Celestia was a Farrow Laker herself, raised in the untamed woods that fringed the lake’s shimmering waters. An excellent prowlgrin rider and able to shoot a phraxmusket from the saddle with deadly accuracy, Celestia also knew more about the healing herbs and plants of the forest than even the most experienced hammerhead goblin healer. She would tease Cade, calling him ‘city boy’, but her affection for him was obvious, and it was she who had taught him to ride a prowlgrin.
Yes, she had helped him. They all had. Gart. Celestia and Blatch. But of all the settlers Cade had met when he’d first arrived at the Farrow Ridges, it was Thorne Lammergyre who had helped him the most.
Thorne, a grey goblin who lived on the far side of the lake, had shown Cade how to build a cabin, how to fish and how to hunt the deep dark forest. It was thanks to Thorne that Cade had a full larder and a sturdy roof over his head. Thorne was always there for him when he had a problem – and it was to Thorne that Cade was headed now, his head still spinning with the news that Eudoxia had brought him, hoping that he might find the fisher goblin up.
He needn’t have worried. As he approached the familiar honey-coloured hive tower, Cade saw his friend in the lake, standing waist-deep in the water, tending to his nets in his eel-corrals.
‘Cade,’ said Thorne, looking round in surprise. ‘Not like you to be up so early. It must be something very important.’
‘It is,’ said Cade.
‘New Sanctaphrax, eh?’
Thorne Lammergyre’s eyes widened. They were a dark crystal blue, the colour of the Farrow Lake beneath a stormy sky, and the kindest, wisest eyes of anyone Cade knew.
‘As I understand it, the floating city is under blockade,’ said the grey goblin, letting go of the eel net he’d been mending and trudging out of the water. ‘So your visitor can’t have had an easy journey …’
‘Her name’s Eudoxia Prade,’ said Cade. ‘She arrived last night on the Hive-bound skytavern. Gart brought her over from his sky-platform as soon as she mentioned my name.’
‘You know her?’ asked Thorne, taking Cade by the arm and leading him back towards his hive tower.
Cade shook his head. ‘We’d never met before,’ he said as he followed the grey goblin along the path. Ahead of them, Thorne’s hive tower came into view, its wicker gables dark against the brightening sky. ‘Though it turns out that we’re related.’
‘Is that so?’ said Thorne.
The two of them went inside.
‘She’s married to my uncle. Nate Quarter,’ Cade said. ‘The one I’ve told you about.’
Thorne, who was forever making improvements to his hive tower, pulled over a couple of newly installed floating sumpwood chairs. The two of them sat down. Then, on releasing the chain locks, they both rose to the first-floor gantry, where carved lufwood beams were festooned with pots, pans and cooking utensils that clinked as they passed by.
‘Ah yes, the famous Nate Quarter,’ breathed Thorne, clicking the chain lock back into place. The chair hovered beside the gantry. ‘As I recall, your illustrious uncle is the reason why you ended up here at the Farrow Lake in the first place.’ His face creased up into a leathery smile. ‘For which I heartily thank him!’
‘Thank him … Thank him … Thank him …’ came a voice, and Cade started with surprise as a small furry creature with black and yellow stripes and a twitching nose suddenly landed on his lap.
Thorne chuckled. ‘You brought us all together, Cade. Me, Blatch Helmstoft, Celestia, Gart – Tak-Tak here,’ he added, nodding at his pet lemkin.
‘Tak-Tak here … Tak-Tak here …’ the creature mimicked.
‘Not to mention the webfoots, the hammerheads and the white trogs,’ Thorne went on. ‘Before you arrived, Cade, we were all virtual strangers.’
Cade smiled ruefully. Hearing himself described as someone who had brought the others together only made his news all the more difficult.
Thorne took a long-handled hook from a beam and used it to pull a hanging-stove towards them. Then, reaching up, he grabbed two bowls from one of the many shelves that lined the gantry, and filled them from the pot that was bubbling on the stove. He handed one to Cade, and released the chain lock again.
The sumpwood chair rose some more, past hammocks and a work gantry, and on towards the gabled turret. Cade followed him up, raising the bowl to his lips and taking a sip as he did so.
The breakfast soup was delicious – salted eel, fragrant charlock and succulent lake mushrooms in a clear, aromatic broth. Along with all his other skills, Thorne was an excellent cook.
They came to a halt in front of one of the triangular windows at the top of the hive tower. Thorne opened the shutters and the bright morning sunlight flooded in.
‘Just look at what Farrow Lake has become in the short time you’ve been here,’ said Thorne. He was still smiling, but Cade detected a catch in his friend’s voice, as if the grey goblin might suspect the reason for this early-morning visit.
Cade looked out of the window – and his gaze fell upon the unassuming timber building on the north shore, directly across the lake from the hive tower. His cabin home. Cade felt a lump in his throat. He took another sip of the broth and swallowed with difficulty.
He wondered whether Eudoxia was still asleep.
The scene became blurred, and Cade realized that his eyes were beginning to fill with tears. He wiped them away on the sleeve of his topcoat and tried to concentrate on the fishy broth. But Thorne, his gaze fixed on Cade, had already noticed how upset his young friend was becoming. Looking away, Thorne took aim and let go of his empty bowl. It dropped to the first-floor gantry, where it landed in a wicker basket with a soft clang.
‘You once told me that your uncle Nate Quarter was a Descender, didn’t you?’ he ventured.
Cade nodded.
‘And that Quove Lentis had your father murdered simply for being related to a Descender.’ He placed a hand on Cade’s arm. ‘He wanted you dead for the same reason.’ His narrowed gaze intensified. ‘That’s right, isn’t it?’
Cade nodded again, and swallowed hard.
‘You were forced to leave Great Glade – and still it wasn’t over.’ Thorne gripped Cade’s arm more tightly. ‘You had to jump from a skytavern to escape one of Quove’s assassins … And Gart rescued you from the top of an ironwood pine overlooking this beautiful lake of ours …’
‘Yes, yes,’ said Cade. Thorne wasn’t making him feel any better.
‘This beautiful lake,’ Thorne repeated softly, smiling as he glanced out of the window. ‘The past is behind you now, lad. It no longer exists. Only a fool would think othe
rwise.’ He chuckled. ‘And you’re no fool, Cade,’ he added. ‘Are you?’
Cade shook his head. He was smiling too, but remained unconvinced. Sometimes, as he was discovering, the past had a horrible way of intruding on the present.
‘You’re safe now,’ Thorne concluded. ‘Protected. Here at Farrow Lake, surrounded by friends, and a growing community that you, Cade, have done so much to protect.’
Cade looked down at his soup, the small chunks of smoked eel and thin slivers of lake mushroom floating in the clear broth. He stared into the bowl as if trying to read his fortune in its depths, then drained the dregs of the liquid, took aim and let go. The bowl missed the basket and fell, clanking and clattering through the hanging utensils, before smashing to pieces on the floor far below.
‘But …’ Thorne’s expression changed. ‘You’ve come here to tell me something, haven’t you, Cade?’ he said gently, his dark blue eyes reflecting back the storm that seemed to be building in Cade’s chest.
‘Eudoxia has brought me news,’ Cade admitted. He couldn’t keep it from his friend any longer. ‘It’s why she travelled so far …’
Thorne nodded grimly.
‘She says it’s no longer safe for me here,’ Cade told him. ‘Quove Lentis’s spies have seen me. I have to leave Farrow Lake.’
The scene outside the window swam before Cade’s eyes.
‘For ever.’
· CHAPTER FIVE ·
The little skyship dipped then rose in the rain-darkened sky. From the funnel of its phraxchamber, a trail of steam billowed back, stark against the slate-grey clouds.
In the wheelhouse, Captain Gart Ironside stood at the controls. His feet were planted wide apart, one hand gripping the rudder wheel while the other danced over the array of flight levers beside it. Gart’s eyes narrowed as he peered through the small circular window in front of him.
‘Nothing you can’t handle, old girl,’ he muttered. ‘We’ve sailed through worse sky squalls than this and lived to tell the tale.’
As if to prove the point, the New Hoverworm juddered and leaped forward in the air, like a racing prowlgrin out of the starting-trap.
‘That’s the way,’ Gart said proudly.
Truth was, the New Hoverworm was not the most beautiful skycraft to grace the skies. Even Gart recognized that. Cobbled together from his old phraxlighter, which had been badly damaged in a blood-storm, and a battered phraxsloop, once owned by a couple of cut-throat mire-pearlers, it was a curious hybrid. It had an angular prow, crowned with the figurehead of an open-mouthed hoverworm. The stern was blunt, with two sets of bi-rudders fixed on the port and starboard sides, while the phraxchamber, unusually for so large a vessel, had been fitted to the underside of the hull, giving the skycraft a bottom-heavy look.
‘Like a low-belly goblin,’ Thorne had once teased him.
But Gart hadn’t cared. Ugly it might be, but the New Hoverworm was strong, fast, stable and utterly dependable – and he loved and trusted her like an old friend.
‘Just a touch more phrax power,’ he muttered as they headed into low swirling clouds. ‘Easy on the aft-weights … There we go.’
Strapped into one of the stirrup chairs behind him, Cade Quarter smiled. From beneath his grey crushed funnel cap, a fringe of fair hair flopped over one eye. Cade brushed it back under the brim and pulled the peak down low.
In the time since they’d first met, he and the sky-platform keeper had voyaged far and wide. And during those journeys Cade had often heard Gart talk to his skyship. Usually, when on short ferry trips – loading goods and supplies on and off the passing skytaverns – he would be casual and matter of fact.
‘Down low on the left … Watch the cargo doesn’t shift … That’s more like it.’
At other times, such as the year before, when they’d set off over the treetops in hot pursuit of a renegade skyvessel, Gart had been terse and abrupt.
‘Faster, faster … That’s it … We’ve got ’em!’
Now, as the Hoverworm bucked and rolled with the buffeting winds, Gart’s voice was soft and coaxing.
‘Easy, girl. Easy … Steady on the hull-weights … You’re doing just fine …’
In the chair beside Cade, Celestia Helmstoft tensed with each dip and rise of the vessel. Her black hair was pulled back into a tight braided bun and her tilderskin jacket was buttoned up to the collar. Small tincture bottles and salve pots festooned the front of the jacket, with more strapped to the sleeves and hanging in clusters from her belt. Celestia was a walking apothecary store, medicinal herbs and soothing ointments always to hand.
Just as listening to Gart cajole the little skyship reassured Cade, so seeing Celestia – her broad knowledge of the healing arts so plainly visible on her jacket – made him feel safe. But Celestia was clearly not so happy.
‘It’s like riding a prowlgrin,’ said Cade, laughing as the Hoverworm suddenly pitched forward.
‘Prowlgrins I understand, Cade,’ she said, glancing back at him, her eyes wide with barely suppressed panic as she gripped the sides of the stirrup chair. ‘They’re living, breathing creatures. When they leap with you on their backs, you can trust them. But skyships, with their phraxchambers and flight levers and hull-weights …’ She shuddered.
‘To Gart, the Hoverworm is a living, breathing thing,’ said Cade. ‘Just listen to the way he talks to it.’
The skyship pitched forward again, then rolled violently to one side, its timbers creaking. At the controls, Gart swayed with the movement, his hands a blur over the flight levers as he struggled to bring the little vessel under control again.
‘Go with the cross-currents …’ he crooned softly as the Hoverworm righted itself. ‘Rise above them …’
Suddenly, cutting through his words of encouragement, there came a gruff, guttural voice.
‘Tug awake now,’ it said. ‘Bad dream.’
Behind Cade and Celestia, his great arms looped through mooring rings that were bolted to the cabin walls on either side of him, sat Tug. He was shaking his head from side to side, as though trying to dislodge the memories of the nightmare that had spoiled his sleep.
That morning at dawn – two days after Eudoxia’s arrival – Tug had loaded the New Hoverworm almost single-handed under Gart’s supervision. Moving the heavy crates of provisions as if they were bales of meadowgrass, Tug had skilfully stacked them in the cargo bays fore and aft, making use of every inch of available space.
‘He’s a strange one, your friend Tug,’ Gart had observed to Cade when the loading was complete and they were preparing to set steam from the sky-platform high above the Farrow Lake. ‘He looks so huge and cumbersome, and yet it’s amazing how he manages to master the most technical of tasks with such ease.’
Cade had had to agree. Ever since he’d first taken the half-starved creature in on that wild and stormy night and decided to share his home with him, Tug had never stopped surprising him. Not only had he continued to grow physically, becoming taller, stronger and more powerfully built than anyone else Cade knew, he also seemed to learn new skills every day.
Creatures like Tug dwelt in the perpetual darkness of the Nightwoods below Riverrise. Edge scholars had studied them in depth for centuries, but had never managed to unlock the secrets of their mysterious origins. That was why they had called them simply ‘the nameless ones’. Cade, however, no longer used this term, for this particular nameless one did have a name.
Tug. And Tug was his friend.
Cade had told Eudoxia all about him, which was probably the reason why, when she woke up – rested and refreshed after her sleep in Cade’s cabin – it was Tug she had first tried to persuade to accompany them back to Sanctaphrax.
‘You’re his rock,’ she told him. ‘His anchor. Cade depends on your strength and loyalty more than he could ever explain – perhaps more than he even knows.’
Tug wasn’t exactly sure what the stranger in the elegant clothes meant – not least because he found her unfamiliar accent difficult
to understand. But he got this much: she and Cade were about to leave the Farrow Lake and head to a city far to the east, and they wanted Tug to go with them.
‘Tug come,’ he’d told her at once, his great head nodding up and down. ‘Tug help Cade. Tug always help Cade.’
Eudoxia’s conversation with Celestia had not been quite so straightforward. For a start, her father, Blatch Helmstoft, had been there, and he was against the whole venture.
‘It sounds utterly foolhardy,’ he said. ‘Cade would be much safer here, among friends who can look after him. More importantly, I don’t want my daughter heading off into unknown dangers.’
Eudoxia had remained calm. Determined and persuasive, she’d pointed out that she and Nate were Cade’s closest relatives.
‘And as for Celestia,’ Eudoxia had said, turning to the girl who so reminded her of herself when she was younger, ‘Cade has spoken of you with such affection. And respect. You’ve become an important part of his life …’
She went on – flattering, cajoling, reasoning – and in the end, Celestia was unable to resist. Even Blatch himself found himself falling under Eudoxia’s spell. And it was agreed. Celestia would join her, Cade and Tug aboard Gart Ironside’s phraxsloop, and – since there was no time to lose – the five of them would set steam from the Farrow Lake the following morning.
As the Hoverworm continued to pitch and roll, Tug rubbed his deep-set eyes with the knuckle of a huge clawed hand.
‘Tug happy to be with Cade and Celestia,’ he said sleepily, and gave that lopsided smile of his.
Celestia smiled back at him, and despite the swaying of the skyship, which she hated so much, she released her grip on the side of the stirrup chair and patted Tug’s ridged head.
‘And we’re happy you’re with us,’ she said. ‘Aren’t we, Cade?’