by Paul Stewart
Just then, everything was abruptly plunged into darkness as the nightship moved away. Cade gripped Nate and Celestia’s shoulders.
‘Look,’ he whispered.
One of the huge, luminescent creatures had returned. The sweeping beams from the nightship had picked it out, then shut off. They weren’t needed.
Glowing brightly, the creature glided silently through the dark air. Unlike the one they’d seen before, feeding on the blue moss, it wasn’t alone; merely one in a shifting constellation of hundreds. Each of them would glow intensely for a moment, then dim. Together, the entire airborne multitude created an endless rippling array of prismatic light pulses.
Standing on the boulder, Cade, Celestia and Nate stared up in astonishment, transfixed by the ever-shifting display. None of them knew what the creatures were, yet none of them were afraid. The mood felt tranquil, almost benevolent; as though the overwhelming sense of calm was emanating from the creatures themselves.
But then, all around them, the scree suddenly began to clink and rattle. Soft sighs rose from the crevices between the boulders as powerful currents of air stirred.
‘A wind storm is coming,’ said Nate. ‘Quickly, both of you. Back to the nightship.’
Celestia and Cade followed him to the Linius Pallitax, where Tug extended a massive arm to help the three of them up. As they scrambled aboard, Tug pulled down the hatch and secured it.
Back in their sumpwood seats once more, they watched the creatures moving slowly down the sloping scree and into the depths. Nate took out his notebook and consulted the Descenders’ marks he’d copied.
‘To be safe, we ought to anchor up until the storm passes and the air currents drop.’ He frowned. ‘The thing is, though, I’ve got a hunch that these sky creatures know where they’re going.’ He looked round. ‘Power up the phraxchamber, Seftis.’
With the chamber thrumming, Cade released the tolley ropes and the nightship began to descend, gathering speed as it headed after the great glowing shoal of translucent creatures. Below the glass panels of the descent deck, the massive boulders of the scree fields became a foggy blur.
‘Where are you, Professor?’ Nate whispered.
Ambris Hentadile. I am Ambris Hentadile. I am Ambris Hentadile.
Academic.
Ambris Hentadile. Academic … Along with my dear brother, Ifflix, I was the brightest talent in the Academy of Great Glade. But then the Society of Descenders was shut down, together with the School of Edge Cliff Studies. That was my cue. I abandoned my academic life, lured by the promise of easy riches at the gambling tables of the skytaverns, while Ifflix continued his search for knowledge by descending …
Yet here am I now, in a wilderness of scree far beneath the Edge, surrounded by endless night, marooned on this island of glowing blue.
How long has it been since Nate left …?
Concentrate, Ambris. Concentrate!
Time has no meaning here. Only the intervals of time make any sense – when the storms rise; when the scree ripples; when the air currents eddy around this blue island of mine, then fade away to stillness. There are patterns to it all. Times of stillness, times of turbulence. They are constantly changing, but recur in loops.
I will map these loops. What else is there to do?
The surface of this rock is rapidly filling with my observations. I scrape away the glowing lichen to make more room for my marks. And one day Descenders who follow after me might find this record …
How long have I been down here?
Those skytavern years, how futile they were, full of fights and intrigues, drunken nights and meaningless affairs. My life had no purpose – until young Nate needed rescuing and our fates became intertwined, leading me back to my dear brother Ifflix, and … and …
Concentrate, Ambris! Concentrate! …
The air currents are beginning to swirl once more, rising up through the scree, howling and sighing. This is the start of another of the big storms. It will rage and bluster, with hurricane-force winds, thunder and lightning. But then it will pass, just like every other storm has passed, and the stillness will return …
Time is as time does.
I have mapped the weather of this place now; the pulses, the ripples, the stirrings …
And the violent eruptions.
I know when they are about to begin. I know how long they, and the periods of stillness between them, will last.
But I have spent too long down here, alone on this glowing blue island. My hair and my beard have grown long. My descending armour is in tatters. Mapping is all I have to anchor my mind; to stop myself wandering off into the endless night. But even this cannot hold me much longer. I feel myself … how to describe it? Thinning. Becoming insubstantial. Turning translucent, like the sky creatures that loom up from the silent depths …
But who is this?
A pale figure in a tall hood is standing on the edge of the carpet of glowing blue lichen. It is as pale and see-through as I feel.
I move towards it … Or perhaps I am dreaming. I didn’t think I could dream any more, but how can I tell?
The figure reaches up and undoes the clasps that hold the hood in place, then takes the hood off. Bright orange hair cascades over slender shoulders. It is a young girl in the antique costume of a stone pilot – fire apron, gauntlets, belt with rock callipers and cooling spikes hanging from it. She looks back at me, her eyes wide, then smiles.
‘You’re fading,’ she observes, ‘as all must do.’
I hold up my hands. I can see through them. I nod.
‘Are you ready to find out what is below?’
I nod again.
‘Then follow me.’
The nightship continued down, dropping swiftly into the blackness, surrounded on all sides by the glowing sky creatures. At the controls, Nate kept the flight levers aligned, while Theegum and Seftis tended to the phraxchamber and flight-rock coils. Cade and Celestia sat forward in their seats, hands poised over the tolley-rope harpoons, while above them, on the upper deck, Tug stood ready at the winch.
They were dropping smoothly, silently, in perfect time with the sky creatures. Nate glanced down at the Professor’s descending marks again.
‘It’s as if we’re passing through the holes in a net,’ he said. ‘We’re surrounded by a mesh of air currents, with erupting storms swirling all around us, yet we’re falling through still air.’
He closed the notebook and put it back in his jacket pocket. His gaze returned to the scene beyond the glass panels.
‘Descending over the scree, anchoring during storms,’ said Nate, ‘it must have taken the Professor many long months to descend so far.’
Cade glanced up from the tolley-rope lever. Nate’s eyes were wide and bright, and there was a smile playing on his lips. He was looking younger and younger, as though all the cares and tribulations of his descending years were falling away as the nightship continued to drop.
‘Perhaps this is it,’ Nate said, looking around at the crew of the Linius Pallitax. ‘The time when we’ll finally make groundfall.’
We’re falling, falling, falling …
Yet somehow it doesn’t feel as though I’m falling at all. No, it’s more like floating. I can feel the swirls and eddies and ripples of the air currents as we pass over the near-vertical scree and continue down into the inky darkness.
My guide and companion, this young stone pilot from another age, is beside me but, when I reach out, my hand passes through hers like a glove through mist. Or maybe it is her hand passing through mine. It’s difficult to be sure. She is glowing, the outline of her body growing misty and diffuse. And I feel the same sense of blurring from within myself – yet as we fall, I am also overcome by an intoxicating sense of joy. One by one, the burdens of my past life are falling away, even as I fall through the blackness …
Except it isn’t blackness. Not any more. All around me, it is becoming lighter. Slowly at first, but growing in intensity. I can see the scree boulders
far below. They seem to smudge as we fall past them towards the ever-growing brightness, while the stone pilot herself is now just a glowing pulse of light, shimmering against swirling, gold-tinged clouds.
‘We are here,’ she says at last, and her voice seems to have a thousand whispering echoes.
My heart is hammering inside my chest. Suddenly it seems as if my entire life, with its countless twists and turns, has been leading up to this single moment.
‘Where?’ I say. ‘Groundfall?’
‘Not groundfall,’ thousands upon thousands of whispers respond as the clouds swirl around and through me. ‘Groundrise.’
Cade’s hands on the tolley levers felt cold and clammy. He looked around at his companions.
Theegum was standing stock-still, her muzzle pressed up against the glass panel in front of her. Celestia had taken off her glister helmet and was smiling back at Cade, her face radiant. Seftis was slumped in his sumpwood seat, his hands no longer on the phraxchamber controls, but shielding his eyes as he peered outside.
Only Tug was not there with them. He was on the upper deck at the winch, Cade remembered, waiting for Nate’s signal to turn the ironwood handle and bring them to rest.
Except that this was not what Tug was doing …
From the moment of his birth, life had treated the nameless one harshly, punctuating his days with pain and hunger; separation and loss as he’d wandered, frightened and alone, through the mighty Deepwoods. True, his lot had improved when he met Cade and his friends at the Farrow Lake. Half-starved and delirious with fever, Tug was hardly even aware of the gentle hands that dressed his wounds and fed him succulent gladegrass.
Slowly, light had come into Tug’s dark, nightmarish world.
But now there was this, the never-ending descent into the depths. It was proving to be the most testing trial of all. Tug felt his mind closing down again, the terrors of his past returning with ever more vivid intensity the further they went. The crew had endured many terrible trials and tragic losses before this latest part of their long journey, travelling down through the scree fields. Yet for Tug, this was the worst. Here. Now. Despite the glowing armada of sky creatures surrounding the nightship, he felt a darkness growing within him.
Down, down, down the nightship went and, beside the winch, Tug dropped trembling to the floor. He curled up in a tight ball.
He was back in the Nightwoods of his birth once again. Back in the endless cold night. Panic rose from the pit of his stomach and he fought the urge to throw open the hatch and end it all, the way Grent and Fenda had. At least that would be quick. And final. No more memories crawling out of the darkness to torment him …
But then the light began to grow more intense. Tug sensed it through eyelids clenched shut. He opened one eye, and then the other.
Light was flooding in through the hatch which, to his surprise, he saw was open after all. The nightship had come to rest now and Tug felt a strange energy suddenly coursing through his body. His muscles relaxed, his heart swelled and his head cleared. A figure was standing over him.
Tug climbed to his feet.
‘You are a creature of the Nightwoods,’ said the figure, transparent and glowing, glisters dancing around its outline. ‘The newest, most primitive life to be seeded in the Edgelands. Others of your kind will grow and evolve in time, and move out from the darkness. But you, Tug, have taken a faster path …’
The figure was wearing a crushed funnel hat and battered descending armour, and was as glowing and translucent as one of the sky creatures outside. This, Tug suddenly realized, must be Nate’s long-lost descending companion – Ambris Hentadile, the Professor.
‘What has happened to you?’ Tug asked, and was surprised by the sound of his own voice. It was no longer deep and rumbling, but sounded clear, almost lilting.
‘The same thing that is happening to you, Tug,’ said the Professor, in a voice with a thousand whispered echoes. ‘We are evolving …’ He reached out a pale hand and showered Tug in sparkling, sparking glisters. ‘And now we have to tell the others that their journey ends here. But we must hurry, Tug, for there isn’t much time …’
On the descent deck, Nate climbed out of his seat and stood looking out from the nightship. He unbuckled his glister helmet and let it clatter to the glass panelled floor. Cade did the same – and gasped.
They had stopped falling and were now floating in a dazzling, cloud-filled sky. It was almost as though they’d gone so far down into the depths that they had emerged on the other side, into an astonishing world where every known scientific law – meticulously calculated and tested by Edge academics down the centuries – had suddenly been turned upside down and inside out.
No one on board the Linius Pallitax had ever seen anything like the spectacle that lay before them. How could they? The wonders unfolding outside the confines of the tiny nightship were beyond their imagination.
Sky creatures of every description floated past in vast shoals – some winged and fluttering; some sinuous and writhing; some with tendrils, some with crests; others, huge and diaphanous, coiling and flexing as they floated off into the distance. And all the while, far below them in the constantly churning clouds, countless tiny glisters rose in glittering plumes.
At first, it was impossible to tell what was happening, but as they watched, they discerned a pattern – if not logic – to what was taking place.
From minute specks, the glisters grew in size and intensity, coalescing to form bright pebbles. The pebbles clustered together to form rocks, then boulders, then great columns of scree that rose higher and higher, up towards the nightship, and on into the darkness far beyond …
‘We’re here,’ came a voice, and looking round Cade saw Tug climbing down from the upper deck.
He looked younger than before, fresh-faced and bright-eyed. The scars on his shoulders had faded to nothing, and when he smiled his teeth were no longer jumbled and fang-like, but evenly spaced and regular.
And he wasn’t alone. Behind Tug came a pale shimmering figure dressed in a crushed funnel hat and worn, tattered descending armour.
Nate turned from the glass, his eyes wet with tears. ‘Professor,’ he breathed.
· CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE ·
The crew of the Linius Pallitax stood staring out from the descent deck.
‘So this is it,’ said Nate Quarter, his voice breathless with awe. ‘The place we’ve spent so long attempting to reach. And at such a cost,’ he added.
The Professor, pale and glowing beside him, nodded. ‘This,’ he said, ‘is groundrise.’
Cade pressed his nose up against the glass panel. It was an extraordinary sight. The swirling clouds sparked and glittered with glisters, countless millions of them.
‘Glisters are the building blocks of all life in the Edgelands,’ the Professor explained, his body glowing more brightly as he spoke. ‘The clouds of Open Sky around us carry them over the jutting rock in great storms – Mother Storms – seeding the Edgeworld with life.’
The Professor pointed to the long trails of glittering specks. The others watched spellbound as the marvel of creation continued before their eyes.
‘The glisters are also the building blocks of the Edge cliff itself,’ he said, ‘forming scree, then solid rock.’
He paused for a moment, his expression one of intense concentration. It was as though he was finding it difficult to speak, to find the right words.
‘The densest formations of all emerge as flight rocks in the Stone Gardens,’ he continued at last. ‘But there are others that are propelled upwards by air currents; sporadic eruptions that send them hurtling into the skies above the Edge.’
Nate Quarter turned to the Professor. ‘So the Edge cliff itself is floating in Open Sky?’
‘It is,’ said the Professor, ‘but more than that, Nate. So much more. You see, it is all part of the eternal cycle of Earth and Sky. Just as the ancient scholars of old Sanctaphrax always suspected.’
Nate nodded, strug
gling to make sense of the Professor’s words.
‘The glisters form the Edgelands, but they also form the clouds of Open Sky,’ the Professor went on slowly, patiently. ‘These clouds turn into storms above the Edgelands and deliver lightning. The lightning solidifies into stormphrax, buries itself, and sinks back down to groundrise. Then, back here, the stormphrax disintegrates in the light, releasing its innate energy and creating fresh clouds that are seeded with yet more glisters. And this cycle is repeated endlessly.’
‘For ever and ever,’ Nate murmured.
Celestia looked over at Cade, and frowned. ‘You seem to be glowing,’ she said.
Cade frowned back at her. ‘So do you,’ he said. ‘In fact, we all are …’
The Professor nodded. ‘The forces at groundrise are immensely powerful,’ he cautioned gravely. ‘Here, things return to what they are made of. What they originally came from. It is a wonderful feeling, and I welcome returning to Open Sky.’ He shook his head. ‘But none of you are ready for that. Not yet. You must leave this place now.’
Tug took a step forward and solemnly bowed his head to the Professor. ‘I am glad to have made this journey,’ he said, ‘and also glad that we found you, Professor.’
Accustomed to his friend’s guttural grunts, Cade was taken aback. Tug’s voice sounded clear and measured now, while the words themselves were as formal as those used by any well-bred fourthling.
‘Groundrise has been good for you, Tug,’ said the Professor, ‘but now you and your friends must return in this wonderful vessel of yours. Already the phrax crystals are becoming unstable, and the seed-stones of the flight-rock coil might fail at any moment …’
‘And you, old friend,’ said Nate. ‘What will become of you?’
The Professor smiled. ‘I will fade, until I am a collection of the glisters that made me,’ he said. ‘But before I do, let me help you.’
The Professor stepped forward, passing through the glass panel of the descent deck and outside. And without any warning, as Nate, Cade and the others watched, he transformed into a rippling, translucent sky creature.