by Paul Stewart
Hermia Lentis? Her brother … Could this brother be Quove Lentis, High Professor of the Academy of Flight? The monster who’d had his father killed; who wanted him dead as well. Could he, Cade, be related to him? Could he? Earth and Sky, that would be such a cruel twist!
‘Are you all right, Cade? he heard Eudoxia ask, and felt a reassuring hand on his arm.
No. No, he was not all right. How could he be? But he nodded, jaw clenched and fighting back the tears, and continued reading his grandfather’s words.
… we enjoyed a happiness that would never have been possible with Phasia. She gave me a fine son, who I named, at her wish, Nate, only for fever to take her from me. I took my grief, along with my beautiful baby boy, to the Eastern Woods and a new life – but, all these long years later, my old life returned to haunt me.
Phasia too is dead, the circumstances of her passing uncertain, but I now learn from her dying note of an infant son – Thadeus – who was born but a short while after we parted, and abandoned on the steps of the Great Glade Academy School. Nate turns eleven next spring and I yearn to make him a present of a long-lost brother. As soon as the next shipment of phrax is ready, I intend to return to Great Glade with Nate and find this son I never knew I had, bringing forth joy at last from poor Phasia’s sorrow.
Grent One-Tusk untangled the sleeves of his blue-grey robes. Long hours among the barkscroll stacks – climbing the pillars to the reading gantries, then traversing the roof beams in the library baskets – played havoc with one’s robes, he noted.
The sleeves were threadbare and frayed at the cuffs, but the long-haired goblin was rather proud of them. Battered robes told his fellow academics that he was a serious scholar, too busy with his studies to take overdue care of his clothes.
His side-whiskers and forehead tuft were another matter, however. As a proud long-haired goblin, grooming was an important aspect of clan pride. Back in his home city of Hive, well-oiled tufts and plaited side-whiskers denoted a goblin to be reckoned with. Here in New Sanctaphrax, although his immaculate grooming was seldom mentioned, he liked to maintain the same high personal standards.
Grent climbed down the rungs of the pillar to the floor of the Great Library, a bundle of barkscrolls clamped under one arm. He anticipated another long night back in his rooms at the Loftus Observatory, reading their contents by the light of a phraxlamp. Pausing for a moment, he checked the titles of the scrolls he’d collected – Storm-Stones: Their Origins and Trajectories; Enquiries into Rock Density; and Observations of Samples Recovered at Mire Craters …
Quite enough for one night, he decided.
His own barkscroll treatise was on the desk in his study, still incomplete despite all his efforts. But he lived in hope. You had to if you were an academic of New Sanctaphrax; ostracized by the academies of Great Glade, ignored by the Hive Academy, and positively loathed by the waif professors of Riverrise.
At the bottom of the pillar, Grent paused again.
Perhaps just one or two more barkscrolls, he wondered, looking up into the roof beams – which was when he caught sight of Nate Quarter, High Academe Elect.
The fabled Descender was sitting on a reading gantry halfway up a pillar in the adjacent row. As always, Grent was struck by his leader’s appearance. His hair was as white as a raven’s plumage; his skin pale, almost translucent. And as for that unkempt beard of his …
‘Ah, well,’ he muttered. ‘Each to his own in New Sanctaphrax,’ and was turning to leave when he heard footsteps approaching.
Cautious – some might say suspicious – by nature, Grent took a step back and concealed himself behind a pillar. Taking care not be seen, he peered out as the footsteps came closer.
There were two visitors to the Great Library. A youth in a dark blue storm-cape, the type they wore out in the Deepwoods settlements, and …
Grent One-Tusk’s hand flew to his mouth.
Surely not, he thought. It couldn’t be true. After all this time! Yet, there she stood in her storm-grey travel cape, her fair hair wild and wind-tossed, wife of the Most High Academe Elect of New Sanctaphrax: Eudoxia Prade.
As Grent continued to watch, not daring to emerge from his hiding place, Eudoxia and the youth approached the pillar where, high above, Nate was seated. They stopped, their bodies bathed in the shaft of sunlight shining in from one of the library’s high latticed windows, and looked up.
‘Nate!’ Eudoxia called. ‘They told me I’d find you here.’
‘Eudoxia?’ a voice floated down. ‘Eudoxia, is that really you?’ Nate’s pale face appeared high up in the shadows of the gantries. ‘Where have you been all this time? And how did you manage to get through the blockade? Wait, wait, I’ll be right down—’
‘No, Nate,’ Eudoxia said, and raised her hand. ‘Stay there. I’ll explain everything in a short while … In the meantime,’ she went on, ignoring Nate’s sigh, ‘there’s someone who has travelled a long way to meet you …’
‘Who?’ Nate called down.
Eudoxia turned to Cade and gave him a little nudge. ‘Go on, then,’ she whispered. ‘Climb up.’
Heart thumping in his chest, Cade started up the pegs that were hammered into the sides of the pillar, hand over hand, foot after foot, climbing up to the gaunt figure with the wild white beard and curiously intense blue eyes that he’d seen looking down at him. Could this really be his uncle Nate?
Leaving the two of them to get acquainted, Eudoxia turned and made her way back to one of the adjacent pillars. Seeing the edge of the blue-grey robes sticking out from the side of the pillar, she smiled.
‘Grent One-Tusk,’ she said quietly. ‘How’s that treatise of yours coming along?’
The long-haired goblin started, and almost dropped the bundle of barkscrolls he was clutching. He stepped forward.
‘Why, Eudoxia!’ he exclaimed, smiling broadly. ‘I … I had no idea you were back. I hope your journey was a success.’
Just then, from above them, there came a gasp of surprise. Eudoxia took the long-hair goblin by the arm and ushered him to the door, leaving Cade and Nate to themselves.
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I believe it was.’
‘To see me?’ Nate said. ‘All the way from the Farrow Ridges. It must be for something very important.’
Cade nodded uncertainly. He’d imagined that Nate would resemble his father, but they couldn’t have looked more different. Thadeus Quarter had been stocky, clean-shaven, with a shock of black hair and dark intense eyes. Whereas Nate …
‘I have this,’ said Cade, and he handed his uncle the barkscroll that Eudoxia had given him.
‘What is it?’ asked Nate.
‘Read it,’ said Cade, and he sat back in his sumpwood chair.
Nate turned the barkscroll over in his hand. It was different from the others in the Great Library. Smaller, lighter, and tightly laced. He glanced up at Cade, his blue eyes shining an almost unnatural shade of blue. Then, with shaking fingers, he carefully undid the cord bindings and unfurled the scroll. His eyes narrowed as he started to read the contents.
Cade felt his heart hammering inside his chest. What was his uncle thinking? How would he react?
He didn’t have to wait long to find out. All at once, eyes flashing and a grin on his face, Nate tossed the scroll aside, jumped to his feet and pulled Cade up from his chair by the hem of his storm-cape. For a moment the two of them stood facing each other. Then Nate flung his arms wide open and Cade fell into his warm, reassuring – and curiously familiar – hug.
Maybe, he thought, his father and his uncle were similar after all.
‘Cade, Cade, Cade,’ Nate murmured. ‘My own flesh and blood …’ He pulled away and gripped his nephew by both arms. ‘Welcome to New Sanctaphrax.’
· CHAPTER TEN ·
As a rule, Grent One-Tusk cooked for himself in the small kitchens below the observatory and took his meals in his room. Every so often, though, he would join the throng in the academy refectory to swap the latest gos
sip over a slice of snowbird pie. And that evening, after the incident in the Great Library, Grent simply wasn’t able to resist attending supper in the vaulted hall.
‘Cade Quarter,’ he told his dining companions, ‘is the High Academe Elect’s nephew. Eudoxia Prade, who is back at last,’ he added, enjoying the gasps of surprise from his fellow diners, ‘told me herself.’
Of course, the mistsifters and raintasters opposite him at the refectory table wanted to know more. And on the benches behind him, a group of Earth scholars pretended to talk among themselves, but Grent could tell that they too were all ears.
‘He was born in Great Glade,’ he went on, ‘but fled the city after the unfortunate death of his father …’
‘Unfortunate,’ the mistsifters chorused, exchanging looks with the raintasters.
Everyone knew what that meant.
‘Quove Lentis?’ a cloddertrog called Demblick ventured. He worked the bellows in the Knights Academy Armoury, and it was common knowledge that he had lost relatives of his own in the Great Glade purges.
‘Who else would it be?’ asked Nebulix Fort, a cloudwatcher from the Academy of Drizzle, high up on the Great Viaduct.
Grent wanted to tell them more. He was enjoying being the centre of attention. All too often, he found himself on the fringes of the groups discussing incidents on patrol, or observations in laboratories. But the truth was, his conversation with Eudoxia had been all too short. After their brief exchange, she’d joined the High Academe and his nephew on the reading gantry, and then the three of them had left for their rooms in the Knights Academy soon after.
‘He was living in a Deepwoods settlement – one of those new outposts that are springing up on the skytavern routes,’ Grent told them. ‘Farrow Lake, it’s called.’
‘Never heard of it,’ said a raintaster, turning away.
‘No reason why you should,’ said his companion. ‘These settlements. They come, they go, evaporating like mist, most of them.’
The others at the table nodded. Many of them had started out in just such places themselves, before making the long journey to the floating city – back when the skytaverns used to come to New Sanctaphrax. They knew only too well how hard life could be in the mighty Deepwoods.
Not that it was much easier in New Sanctaphrax these days. Not with the Great Glade blockade.
‘He has two companions with him,’ Grent went on, attempting to hold their attention. ‘A fourthling girl and a nameless one, apparently …’
Grent continued his story, but his dining companions were losing interest in what he had to say. The conversation turned to politics, the way it frequently did in the current climate.
Although they all wore the blue-grey robes of New Sanctaphrax, there was considerable disagreement between them. Most accepted the decisions of the New Sanctaphrax Council without question. But there were others in the academies – and it was a number that was rapidly growing – who questioned the wisdom of descending the Edge cliff when it provoked such extreme reactions from Great Glade and Riverrise. The mistsifters and Earth scholars were soon in fierce debate, and Grent feared that at any moment goblets would be spilled and platters overturned.
Vulgar and unseemly, he thought, and pushing away his half-eaten tildersteak he got up from the bench and left them to it.
As he made his way out of the refectory, Grent ran into his friend Brocktinius Rolnix, the young skymarshal. The two of them had first met three years earlier, when Grent was just starting out on his research into storm-stones.
‘Still working on that treatise, Grent?’ Brock asked.
‘For my sins,’ Grent replied with a rueful smile.
‘Well, here’s something that might interest you,’ Brock told him. ‘I caught sight of a couple of mist tornadoes rising from the void while I was out on patrol earlier this evening,’ he said. ‘If you like, now the Rock Demon has been refitted, I can take you stone-spotting tomorrow – so long as you’re up early enough.’
And Grent decided to accept his friend’s offer.
The following morning, he rose from his bed shortly after sunrise. Yawning sleepily, he climbed out of his wickerwork cot, stretched extravagantly, then crossed his room to the oval mirror. Peering at his reflection, the long-haired goblin reached across to the small table for his trimming shears. Bottles of hair tonic and beard grease clinked as he felt about for them, his eyes still fixed on the mirror.
Finding the shears at last, he began trimming the fringe of his brow tuft, then his side-whiskers, and finally the tips of his ears. Next, he combed his face and applied hyleroot wax to his beard before splitting it into three bunches and plaiting each one in turn. Finally satisfied with his daily grooming routine, Grent turned away from the mirror and got dressed.
As he made his way to the door, he glanced out of his chamber window, high in the tower of the Loftus Observatory. Some of his fellow academics were crossing the square below, already on their way to breakfast in the refectory. But not him. Not today. Today he had something to do that might help him to complete his treatise once and for all.
He met Brock, as arranged, on the East Landing. The skymarshal was sitting on the long-ruddered phraxcraft. As Grent approached, Brock greeted him, and indicated the kitbag behind the saddle.
‘Jump up,’ he said with a smile. ‘And hold on tight!’
Grent was just about to when he caught sight of someone leaning against the parapet of the landing, gazing down below. It was someone he recognized.
‘Cade?’ he said. ‘Cade Quarter? It is you, isn’t it?’
Cade turned, and was surprised to be faced by a rather well-turned-out long-haired goblin. ‘Do I know you?’ he asked.
‘Grent One-Tusk,’ he said. ‘We … that is, I saw you in the Great Library,’ he explained. ‘Yesterday afternoon. When Eudoxia introduced you to your long-lost uncle,’ he added. ‘How did that go, by the way?’
‘It was wonderful,’ said Cade, happily reliving the moment.
‘You must have had so much to talk about,’ said Grent, fishing about for something he might entertain his dining companions with later.
And Cade, assuming that this long-hair must know Nate and Eudoxia well, confirmed that he and his uncle had talked for hours. About Abe Quarter. About Quove Lentis. About descending, and the Professor, and the curious storm-stone that had returned his uncle to the floating city after fourteen years spent down in the Depths …
‘Well, there’s a coincidence,’ Grent said. ‘Brock, here, and myself are about to do a little stone-spotting of our own. If you’d care to join us,’ he added spontaneously, then turned to the skymarshal. ‘Assuming this vessel of yours is strong enough to carry three, Brock.’
‘Oh, the Rock Demon’s strong enough,’ came the reply. ‘It’s whether there’s enough room – though if one of you sits on the cargo rack it should be possible.’ He frowned. ‘But maybe Cade here has other things to do.’ Brock turned to him. ‘Would you like to go stone-spotting?’
Cade hesitated. He’d been on his way to the Academy Forge. His uncle had told him about someone there who would be interested in Thadeus’s working drawings. If he hadn’t been distracted by the magnificent view from the East Landing, he’d be there now. Then again, the chance to see for himself one of the mysterious flying rocks that Nate had ridden was certainly tempting. He decided that the barkscrolls could remain stitched into his jacket for just a little while longer.
‘I’d love to,’ he said.
Brock clapped his hands together. ‘All aboard, then!’ he said.
With the skymarshal in the saddle at the front, Grent behind him, and Cade seated on the jutting cargo rack at the back, they were ready to go. Brock raised a gloved hand, signalling that he was all set. Then, as he pushed back on the stirrup bars, the small craft shot up into the sky, leaving Grent’s stomach behind – and making the long-haired goblin thankful he’d had no time for breakfast.
Brock took the skycraft into a sharp dive, hurtli
ng down out of the sky, then levelled out abruptly and steered the Rock Demon through the Stone Gardens, where he wove a zigzag path between the towering rock stacks at breakneck speed. They swooped and soared; they swerved round stack after stack.
Grent couldn’t bear it. He screwed his eyes tightly shut as he clung desperately to the skymarshal’s shoulders.
‘You’re not going to spot any storm-stones with your eyes shut,’ laughed Brock, glancing behind him.
The goblin opened one eye and instantly regretted it as they skimmed over the top of the tallest rock stack, sending the roosting white ravens flapping into the air, cawing furiously. He groaned miserably.
‘And you, Cade?’ Brock called. ‘How are you doing back there?’
Cade grinned. For him, the flight was fantastic; every swoop, every swerve, every stomach-churning dive. It reminded him of the time he’d sailed in Phineal’s Second-Age skycraft, the Caterbird; or when he’d raced Celestia over the forest canopy and up to the Pinnacles on Rumblix’s back; or their recent flight, riding the air currents of high sky aboard Gart’s Hoverworm – except it was better than any of these.
‘I’m doing just fine!’ he shouted back, then smiled to himself when he heard Grent One-Tusk groan all the louder as they went into another vertical drop.
As the lip of the Edge cliff came up to meet them, the skycraft listed to one side, strong crosswinds rising from below the clifftop buffeting them hard at starboard. Brock brought the phraxcraft round in a tight curving manoeuvre and, ignoring Grent’s cries that they were all about to die, pointed below him.
‘Down there. Do you see it?’ he shouted above the howl of the wind.
Cade looked down. Grent forced himself to do the same.
Far below them was a mist tornado, twisting and swirling up out of the distant darkness. Inside the blurred column, sparks and flashes of fizzing energy crackled. Then, with a noise like a clap of thunder, a glowing blue boulder suddenly shot out of the heart of the storm and came spinning up towards them at incredible speed.