by Paul Stewart
As Cade lay there, his breathing soft and deep, the events of the long day played through his head. Finding the barkscrolls that Seftis had requested; talking to his uncle on the Viaduct Steps; flying to the Stone Gardens with the others, where Tug had excavated the final seed-stone. Then Great Glade’s sudden aerial attack on New Sanctaphrax – which had been thwarted at the last moment by the arrival of the tallow-hats. And now this, descending in the nightship that had taken so many months to construct; at last—
‘Come on, Cade,’ said Celestia, shaking him awake. ‘Time to get up.’
Three more days passed, and Cade became used to the rhythm of the descent through the darkness: the watchful tension, the moments of juddering chaos, then the steady sway of the winching. To sustain themselves, they ate rich gruel, made from dried compacted bricks of barleymeal dissolved in steam water, and made use of the tiny funnel room when necessary.
Then, on the fourth day, at six bells, with the winches turning, Cade glanced out through the glass panel – and recoiled in his seat.
Something was there.
The others on the descent deck had seen it too – all except for Nate, who continued to work the flight levers, keeping the nightship as steady as possible. Rising up from the cliff face, like some sort of ragged shroud, was an immense fluttering wave of translucent white. As it approached, the wave shimmered and split apart, revealing itself to be made up of a vast armada of pale winged creatures.
‘Edge wraiths,’ said Nate impassively, even though his eyes were fixed on the flight levers. He’d heard their strange, distinctive calls. Filling the air, low and resonating, they sounded like distant thunder fading to wind howl.
The creatures were huge. And hideous. One after another, they loomed up at the glass of the descent deck, enormous eyes staring, fanged mouths gaping, and skeletal bodies, with their gauze-like wings, scraping against the hull. For a minute or so, as the winches snagged and the vessel jolted, it was like swimming through some childhood nightmare, skittering and fluttering, the monstrous faces flashing close, then disappearing back into the pitch black.
Thankfully, the tolley ropes held as Tug and Theegum kept turning the winches. And slowly the hideous armada vanished back into the black night they had come from, their eerie calls fading away.
Nate continued to work the flight levers. He seemed calm enough, but Cade could tell by the way his jaw clenched and unclenched that what they had all just witnessed had brought back traumatic memories. He and Celestia exchanged troubled looks.
Sentafuce was in an even worse state than Nate. Curled up into a ball in her seat, her hands were pressed against her ears, her eyes clamped tightly shut. Demora reached out and placed a comforting hand on the trembling shoulder of her friend.
‘Waifs know only too well the terror and loneliness of the night,’ she explained to the others. ‘And Sentafuce here, more than most. Edge wraiths hold thoughts that can sting those minds open to them; that scald them like boiling water …’
The winches stopped turning as the nightship reached the tolley-rope anchors. The now familiar phrax detonations sounded, and the nightship dropped down further, over a great jutting ledge. At the controls, Nate threw the flight levers forward. The funnels billowed steam, the stone-band glowed white hot and the phraxchamber pitched the Linius Pallitax forward.
Far in the distance, the cliff wall appeared out of the blackness and, as they raced towards it through the suddenly still and silent air, Cade saw the outline of timber gantries and ribbed cocoon-like huts embedded in the rock face below the Great Overhang.
As they drew nearer, Nate slowed the Linius Pallitax down to a steady hover, then closed in to dock at the closest gantry. A light shone from a small round window in the ribbed hut above it.
‘Denizens Keep,’ said Nate. ‘The very furthest point of the Descenders’ range.’
· CHAPTER TWENTY ·
Cade stared out through the glass panels of the descent deck. Nate’s words were echoing in his head.
Denizens Keep.
Back in New Sanctaphrax, his uncle had spoken of the place with such pride. And there it was, coming towards them – a series of huts and gantries that clung to the underside of the Great Overhang.
Seftis had taken over control of the stone-band and Theegum was now managing the phraxchamber. The nightship approached the nearest gantry smoothly and, when they were close enough, Cade fired the tolley ropes through the mooring rings attached to it. Above him, on the upper deck, he heard Tug begin to winch them in. When they were tethered securely to the rock, the crew unbuckled their seat straps and prepared to disembark.
At least, most of them did …
‘Anything and everything is possible on this expedition,’ Demora had said before they’d set off. But even she hadn’t imagined what would happen to her as they descended into the depths.
As she looked through the glass at Denizens Keep, the small huts attached to the wooden gantries suddenly seemed to turn hazy and dissolve – and when the others started to leave, and Cade asked her whether or not she was coming with them, she didn’t hear his words.
Maybe it was the breakneck speed of the descent that had confused her. Maybe it was the glister-rich cliff rock affecting her thoughts, or her encounter with the Edge wraiths. Whatever the reason, for Demora Duste, she was no longer sitting in her sumpwood chair on board the Linius Pallitax, but instead seemed to have stepped out of time.
Suddenly she was immersed in childhood memories so vibrant – so real – she might as well have been plunged back into the past …
‘… and no lingering at the quarry …’
It was her mother’s voice, calling to her from the upper window of their cliff hut.
‘I’ll come straight home,’ Demora promised as she skipped off down the narrow walkway cut into the steep side of the gorge.
She was holding a flask of home-made clusterbean soup in her hand. Her father would welcome the warming broth after his long gruelling shift quarrying whitestone through the night.
All around her, Gorgetown was stirring. The leatherbacked scuttlebrigs and their herders were climbing up from the lower gorge, stones piled high in their side-baskets, while the traders in the hanging-market were busy laying out goods on their sumpwood stalls, ready for the returning quarry workers.
Demora wove her way in and out of the growing traffic on the steep quarry path. Her father and his crew should be finishing soon – so long as their quarry master, a gaunt sour-faced fourthling from Great Glade, played fair with the hourglass. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d extended the shift by ‘accidentally’ failing to turn the glass. Although when it came to their wages, he would always find some excuse or other to delay payment if he could.
As Demora’s father never tired of telling her, the life of a quarry trog was perilous and hard. That was why he wanted a better future for his daughter. But the thing was, Demora loved stonework. She always had. Right from the first time she was old enough to pick up a hammer and a chisel, she had felt a certain kinship with it. She could spot a seam of rock, sense the flow of the grain, and understand how to work it just by running her hands across its freshly cut surface.
‘You should take your talent to the academies in Great Glade or Hive,’ her father had told her more than once, ‘not waste them here in Gorgetown working for the quarry masters.’
Demora had reached the lower gantries, the flask grasped in her hand still warm. Below her, the quarry ledges echoed with the steady chink-chink-chink of hammer on chisel, and the rhythmic work chants of the quarry trogs. She glanced up at the dawn sky. Grey clouds filtered the early morning light as distant thunder rumbled. Except …
Demora froze.
That wasn’t thunder. She knew it almost instantly. It was a rock slide, the sound of rocks careening down the steep slope. Heart pounding inside her chest, she looked round to see a thick cloud of white dust rising up from the quarry ledges.
Demora dropped the fla
sk, which broke as it hit the ground, and dashed to the nearest ladder. Climbing up to meet her came a handful of dazed trogs, white with the stone dust, coughing and spluttering. Demora reached the first ledge to find the quarry master surrounded by an angry crowd.
‘The second ledge has collapsed,’ one of them was shouting, his eyes blazing with rage. ‘And it’s taken the third with it …’
‘Dolbin said we were cutting too deep,’ cried another trog, stabbing an accusing finger into the quarry master’s chest. ‘But you wouldn’t listen …’
Dolbin … Her father! Demora swallowed, her face twitching with foreboding.
More trogs were gathering on the ledge, clutching spades and pickaxes and crowding around the quarry master. They were muttering furiously, shaking their heads. The quarry master raised his arms.
‘Never mind that now,’ he shouted, his voice high and querulous. ‘Grab what tools you can find, and dig! You hear me? Dig!’
Demora ran to the tool racks bolted to the gorge wall, seized a pickaxe and shovel, then shouldered her way back through the throng. The quarry trogs all recognized her. Dolbin Duste’s daughter. Tall for her age, and with her father’s strength and gift for stone-working. Even the quarry master had been surprised she hadn’t begun quarrying several seasons earlier …
‘My father will have reinforced the cutting site,’ Demora told the quarry workers. ‘If we can just find it beneath the rubble, we can still save them …’
‘Follow her!’ the quarry master shouted as he backed away along the ledge, heading towards the wooden cabin at the far end, with its account scrolls and wage chests, and the comfortable armchair beside the lufwood stove. ‘And do what she says!’
Demora Duste wasn’t the only one reliving an incident from her childhood. Beside her, Sentafuce too was finding it impossible to separate the present from the past. And, as she squirmed in her seat, her face contorted with fear and pain, it was clear that the tiny waif was suffering …
It wasn’t meant to be like this …
Imprisoned in the quarry master’s hut, Sentafuce pulled her threadbare cape around her small shoulders and gazed into the purple flames of the stove. Inside it, the burning lufwood logs jostled and tumbled in their attempts to break free.
Just like Sentafuce herself.
They had captured her in the Nightwoods, the red dwarf slavers with their clawed feet and sharp beaks – and even sharper metal spikes that they had tortured their captives with. Tortured her with …
Sentafuce could just about remember the waif clan she’d been born into. The voices in her head. The comfort of communal thoughts in the eternal darkness. She could still recall the touch of her many mothers, fastening her cape and plaiting her hair, and how they would sing to her and her many, many siblings in their minds.
But then she’d been grabbed by a slaver’s hook, dragged into one of their cages and taken to the city of night. To Riverrise. She couldn’t have been much more than a baby …
The red dwarf slavers kept her and the other waifs chained up in their camp on the edge of the Thorn Forest. Sentafuce remembered also the huge nameless ones who had shared their captivity. Reading their thoughts, full of such hurt and bewilderment, overwhelmed her with sadness, and she had tried to keep them out.
Then the merchants came.
She was a nightwaif, wild and delicate. She wasn’t worth much, and the red dwarves were happy to throw her in as a job lot with two gigantic nameless ones. The merchants they were sold to were from Gorgetown in the Northern Reaches, in search of sturdy, unprotesting workers for the stone quarries. They agreed to take the nightwaif with them, hardly expecting her to survive long in the daylight world.
Sentafuce read their minds too, learning all she could from them, and from everyone else she encountered on board the skytavern during that long voyage to the distant city. The merchants, it turned out, were kindly. They treated her and the nameless ones well, and were genuinely sorry to hand the three of them over to the quarry master when they got to Gorgetown. But they took their commissions because they had families to support, mouths to feed …
The nameless ones were set to work hauling the stone slabs quarried by the trogs up to the masons at the top of the gorge. It was a tough existence, but they were happy to escape the cruelties of the Nightwoods, and grew fit and strong on the nourishing food and decent quarters they were given.
Sentafuce was less happy.
The quarry master was mean-spirited and petty. He resented the wages he had to pay the quarry trogs, and he objected to the kindness and generosity the trogs showed to the nameless ones. So he kept Sentafuce close, locking her up in the wooden hut above the quarry ledges, and forced her to read the minds of his workers. She had to keep him informed of anything – everything, no matter how small and insignificant it might seem – that he could use to dock their pay.
And she hated it.
The minds she had read on the skytavern had opened up to her new worlds which she longed to explore. On board, it was the blue-robed academics’ thoughts of the floating city of New Sanctaphrax and Undergarden that were Sentafuce’s favourites. They seemed further away than ever now. For here she was in the grey mists of Gorgetown, chained up and huddled beside a lufwood stove.
No, it wasn’t meant to be like this.
Just then, from outside, there came a sound like thunder, and Sentafuce heard agonized cries as despairing, panic-filled thoughts suddenly flooded her mind. She leaped to her feet and ran to the window, the ironwood chain at her ankle rattling across the floor and bringing her up just short. She could hear the quarry master’s high-pitched, wheedling voice as he scuttled back towards his hut.
‘Dig! Dig! Dig!’ he was shouting out loud; the thought in his head, Good riddance.
Two individuals. Two sets of memories. But then, as the bewildering influence of the depths grew more intense, something happened.
Just as, in the past, the lives of Demora and Sentafuce had come together, so now, their memories fused …
Demora strode to the wooden hut and hammered on the door.
‘What is it?’ The quarry master sounded exasperated.
‘We need help,’ Demora said desperately.
The door of the hut opened, and the quarry master peered out. He was holding a loaded phraxpistol.
‘The workers are blaming me for this,’ he hissed. ‘The waif has read their thoughts. I won’t put up with it, I’m warning the lot of you.’
‘We need to locate my father and the others,’ Demora pleaded, ‘so that we know where to dig.’
‘I can try,’ said Sentafuce, her voice sounding in Demora’s head, ‘but I need to be closer to listen for their thoughts …’
‘NO!’ the quarry master shouted, guessing what was going on. He levelled the phraxpistol at Demora. ‘The waif is mine. She goes nowhere.’
Demora’s pickaxe struck the pistol, knocking it out of the quarry master’s hand and sending it clattering across the floor. Reaching out, she grasped the quarry master by the throat and raised him off his feet.
‘The key is in his topcoat pocket,’ Sentafuce told Demora silently.
Demora dropped her pickaxe and searched the quarry master’s pockets with her free hand. He spluttered and choked and stared back at her with bulging bloodshot eyes. Demora found the key and let go of the quarry master, who fell in a crumpled heap at her feet.
‘You’ll … you’ll pay … for this …’ he rasped as Demora unchained Sentafuce, and the two of them hurried from the cabin.
Back at the site of the rock-slide, Sentafuce stood on the great pile of dust-covered rock that filled the lower reaches of the gorge. Trogs towered around the tiny figure of the nightwaif, their pickaxes and shovels raised, waiting to be told what to do next. The barbels at the corner of the waif’s mouth quivered as, eyes shut, she stooped and pressed an ear to the rubble.
‘There!’ She stood up and pointed to an area of scree to her left. ‘But hurry,’ she added ur
gently. ‘Their thoughts are fading.’
Demora sprang into action. She dug down through the porous white stone with her shovel, pausing only to prise boulders carefully free and toss them aside. All around her, the quarry trogs did the same, working as a unified team.
Two huge creatures in patchwork aprons, ropes hanging from harnesses at their shoulders, lumbered towards them. Both had ridged crests on their heads and leathery, mottled skin. The trogs attached the ropes to the largest of the remaining boulders and the nameless ones strained at their harnesses, grunting with effort, then hauled them aside.
Beneath the boulders, they uncovered a scaffold of ironwood timbers lashed together. And below it were eight sheltering trogs, huddled closely side by side, their raised arms shielding their heads. Excited murmuring went up as, one after the other, they were helped from the rubble.
‘Father!’
Demora fell into the arms of the last quarry trog to be rescued. Tears streamed down her face, streaking the white dust that covered it.
Dolbin Duste embraced her. ‘That was fine quarrying, daughter,’ he wheezed, sitting down on a boulder. ‘One wrong move and the whole pile would have shifted and crushed the lot of us.’
‘The quarry master has sent for the militia,’ whispered Sentafuce. ‘He plans to have you arrested, Demora.’
‘I’ve been meaning to leave Gorgetown for some time now,’ said Dolbin, climbing to his feet and shaking the dust from his apron. ‘I never wanted this life for Demora, and it’s taken a load of rock falling on my head to finally make up my mind.’
‘But where shall we go?’ Demora asked.
‘There is a place,’ said Sentafuce’s voice in their heads, ‘with a great floating city and gardens of stone …’
‘Demora?’ said Cade. ‘I asked whether you were coming with us.’ He nodded ahead. ‘Into Denizens Keep.’