by Paul Stewart
‘Trapped,’ Quint breathed. His palms were clammy; his scalp prickled.
Should he go forwards? Should he go back? The flapping grew louder. He had to go forwards.
Brow furrowed, Quint drew his knife, raised his lamp and continued. He remembered the lessons his father, Wind Jackal, had given him in self-defence. In such a situation, attack was the best, if not the only, means of defence. At the first sign of movement, he would lunge and stab.
Quint approached a narrow bend in the tunnel. He hesitated and listened before going any further. Behind him, the snuffling was getting louder again. The creature was so close. With his heart pounding and his muscles tensed, Quint edged forwards. The light seemed brighter than ever. He took a deep breath, turned the corner and…
‘Thank Sky!’ he murmured.
The light was neither crimson nor pulsing. It was the intense pinky-blue brightness of the new morning. Almost sobbing with relief and delight, Quint limped those last few strides towards the shining circle and stepped out onto the ledge. At last, he was free of the terrifying stonecomb.
Perched on top of the cage was the white raven. As Quint leaned across to open the cage door, it let out a raucous screech, hopped closer and jabbed at him with its vicious beak. Quint was gripped by a blinding rage.
‘Do you think I'm afraid of you – after I've been chased by … by bloodthirsty monsters?’ he roared. He swung a fist at the bird, which screeched again, its yellow eyes gleaming. ‘Do you?’ he shouted, swinging at the bird a second time. ‘Well, do you?’
With a noisy clapping of its wings, the great bird launched itself into the air and soared off, squawking with indignation as it went. Quint opened the cage door and was about to step back inside when he heard a noise coming from the tunnel.
He looked round, and gasped. ‘Professor!’ he cried. ‘But what … what's happened to you now?’
As he helped the professor into the sky cage, Quint's gaze fell on the gold medallion of high office which hung round the Most High Academe's neck. The bright sunlight glinted on it, throwing the famous design of lightning bolts into sharp relief. A thoughtful look played over his face.
‘Quint …’ the stricken professor groaned.
The apprentice dragged himself from his reveries. ‘Sorry, Professor,’ he said. ‘Hold tight, now. We'll have you back in no time.’
· CHAPTER TEN ·
PLOTTING AND
PLANNING
‘He what?’ Maris cried.
Quint looked round him anxiously. A couple of apprentice windtouchers approaching the wind-tower had paused and were staring back. Quint took Maris by the hand and led her round behind the tower. ‘Keep your voice down,’ he hissed. ‘The last thing we want to do is draw attention to ourselves now.’
‘I'm sorry,’ said Maris. She sounded a little guilty. ‘But … I can't believe…’
‘I'm just telling you what I saw and heard,’ said Quint. ‘He's got a creature locked up down there.’
Maris shook her head. ‘What sort of creature?’ she asked. ‘A pet, like Digit? Or a guard-animal? Or…’
‘It spoke,’ Quint broke in.
Maris gasped. ‘Spoke?’ she whispered. ‘Just repeated words? Like a loribus or a mimic-bird, maybe?’
Quint shook his head. ‘It pleaded,’ he said. ‘It reasoned.’
‘An intelligent creature, then,‘ Maris sighed. ‘Some kind of minor goblin or troll perhaps … And certainly a vicious one, judging by Father's wounds. I'm frightened, Quint. He was nearly killed.’
‘I know,’ said Quint, as he pictured Linius Pallitax emerging from the tunnel. He had been limping badly, blood all down his robes. Then, as he had raised his head, Quint had cried out as he saw the professor's ear, hanging on by a thread as though something had tried to slice it off completely. For a creature that had sounded so abject, so pitiful, so weak, it had certainly put up a ferocious fight.
The professor's words came back to Quint; words he hadn't taken quite seriously enough when he first heard them. ‘Your father called it an evil creature,’ he said softly.
‘I should think it must be, to cut him so badly,’ said Maris hotly. ‘And yet …’ She fell still. Quint waited expectantly for her to continue.
The only noise was the soft flupp flupp of the turning sails far above their heads as their great nets billowed repeatedly, in and out; although the air was almost still, the windtouchers' great wind-tower responded to the slightest of breezes.
‘Yet what?’ said Quint.
Maris looked up. ‘I don't know,’ she said. ‘I was just imagining how I might behave if I'd been locked up against my will.’
Quint nodded sympathetically. He knew how hard it must be for Maris to conceive that her father might be in the wrong. It was heartening to see that she was not beyond putting herself in the place of the captive creature.
‘We must go down there,’ she said abruptly. ‘You must take me there, Quint. I must see for myself what's going on. And if we find that …’ She hesitated. ‘If my father has …’ She stopped, her voice choking up in her throat.
‘We'll do the right thing,’ said Quint earnestly. ‘I…’ All at once, there was a sharp grating noise above him. He looked up to see the same two windtouchers pulling their heads back inside an upstairs window in an effort not to be seen. ‘We're being spied on, Maris,’ he hissed. ‘Let's get out of here.’
As usual, rumours and gossip, whispered plots and lies filled the Viaduct Steps, so that the air above them hissed like the pressurized steam which was currently spurting from the sourmist vats on the roof of the opulent College of Cloud. Like the steam, the words were heated, poisonous; sometimes opaque, sometimes crystal clear – and indicated that something dramatic was about to take place. In open sky, a Great Storm was imminent. In Sanctaphrax – if even half the rumours were true – an even greater storm was about to break.
The west side of the eighteenth staircase was more crowded than usual. As well as the habitual sprinkling of ranters and ravers with their conspiracy theories and apocalyptic warnings, there were other, less frequent visitors who were holding court on the marble steps. They were the fortune-tellers, the soothsayers, the prognosticators.
These sad individuals were said to be the last of the once-proud earth-scholars, now little more than carnival performers, their knowledge of the Deepwoods reduced to myth and superstition. The sky-scholars despised them, but tolerated them as evidence of how inferior earth-studies was. Each of the shabby soothsayers was armed with the tools of his or her trade: gyle-stones, tilder entrails, tripweed roots. One – a gangly, wall-eyed individual with grizzled jowls – had amassed a particularly sizeable crowd around him.
‘The bones cannot lie,’ he bellowed, his voice breaking with excitement as he waved the bleached oozefish skeletons at those standing closest to him. ‘I have seen death and despair in the Palace of Shadows. I have seen the Most High Academe ringed with blue flames and dancing with the dead.’ His voice grew hushed. ‘I have seen our own floating city – beloved Sanctaphrax – being swallowed up …’ His voice grew louder. ‘Chewed to pieces …’ And louder still. ‘And spat out by a fiend …’ He was shouting now. ‘A fiend unleashed by ignorance and ambition. A fiend no prison bars can contain. A fiend so fearsome that none will escape its terrible wrath.’
The crowd gasped as one. Fortune-tellers were seldom as gory as this character.
‘And how will we know this fiend?’ someone shouted.
‘With great difficulty,’ came the reply. ‘For it is a shapeshifter. It will speak with a familiar voice and bear the face of a nearest and dearest. It is a deceiver. A seducer. The most terrible creature in all of the Edge…’
‘Sounds like the gloamglozer!’ a high-pitched voice came from the back of the crowd, and a ripple of laughter went round.
Though feared by young'uns throughout the Edge, whose mothers, fathers and nannies would tell them bloodcurdling tales about the treacherous creature, among adults it
was only the more primitive Deepwoods tribes and gatherings who believed in the gloamglozer. Those who had left the Deepwoods for Sanctaphrax and Undertown had abandoned not only their families and villages, but also their superstitions; while those born in the floating city or the urban sprawl below it had never considered that the stories of the evil creature might be anything more than ancient myths and legends.
The fortune-teller brandished his fishbones furiously. ‘You can scoff !’ he roared.
‘Thank you kindly, sire,’ someone shouted back sarcastically, and the laughter became louder.
Undaunted, the fortune-teller turned slowly round and surveyed the crowd darkly. With his eyes pointing in different directions at the same time, it was impossible to tell where his gaze fell. A hush descended.
‘So you don't believe in the gloamglozer, eh?’ he said, his voice an icy whisper.
No-one spoke. No-one moved. ‘I know of those who didn't believe in flesh-eating trees either, yet that didn't stop them succumbing to the fearful bloodoak. Your lack of belief, my friends, is the gloamglozer's strength.’ His voice became louder, sharper. ‘Mark my words and mark them well,’ he said, ‘the gloamglozer is coming! The earth shall take its revenge on the sky. For so is it written in the bones!’
A derisory laugh went up.
‘What do you take us for?’ a voice called out.
‘Deepwoods young'uns,’ another shouted, and the crowd began to disperse.
Rumours of impending doom and gloom were nothing new on the Viaduct Steps. Before the fortune-teller with the oozefish bones had even arrived on the scene, feverish gambling was already taking place up and down the eighteenth staircase on the East Side. Despite their scepticism, news of these latest prognostications soon led to a fresh bout of wagers and bets. The tally-touts were besieged.
‘Ten gold pieces say the Palace of Shadows will be struck by lightning,’ said a tall apprentice raintaster in a fur-lined gown.
‘Fifteen gold pieces says the Most High Academe will be gone by the next full moon,’ said his companion.
The tally-touts noted the wagers and exchanged the gold coins for slips of paper bearing a record of both the bet and its odds. Further up the steps, the odds were shortening on whether the gloamglozer existed. A week, a day – even an hour earlier, you could have placed a bet at a thousand to one that the creature was no more than the stuff of fairy-tales and nightmares. But now the rumours had firmed up, the gossip had turned to gospel truth, and already there were several who were claiming that friends of friends had witnessed the terrible creature first-hand.
Further along the Viaduct Steps, an unusual cluster of academics had assembled on the seventeenth staircase. Situated beneath the middle of the viaduct, these steps – both East and West – were considered neutral ground, a kind of no-man's-land where academics from different schools and different places in the intricate hierarchy of Sanctaphrax could meet with one another anonymously.
Although they had all arrived without the characteristic robes of their particular schools, those who knew their faces would have spotted a dozen or so sub-deans from the ninth staircase on the East Side deep in conversation with a group of fresh-faced mistsifter apprentices and sub-acolytes. Everyone, it seemed, was trying to talk at the same time.
‘But aren't the proposals a little extreme?’ someone asked.
‘A drastic situation calls for drastic measures,’ came the reply.
‘The behaviour of the Most High Academe has been reprehensible. Intolerable. Unacceptable…’
‘And now he must go!’
‘And since he won't leave of his own free will…’
‘Those who will not jump must be pushed…’
Moving unnoticed through the increasingly agitated crowd was a tall robed individual, his hood down low over his head. As he turned to his companion, the light glinted on his protruding silver nose-piece. ‘You see how easy it is to set rumours rolling, Bagswill,’ he whispered. ‘To plot, to scheme, to sow dissent…’
The flat-head guard, also dressed in a long cape with his hood up, nodded enthusiastically. ‘It's all going better than I had imagined,’ he whispered back. ‘But what of the deed itself?’
‘It's all set,’ came the reply. The pair of them looked round furtively. ‘When the Most High Academe uses his cage tonight, he will find the chains cut…’
Still deep in whispered conversation, Quint and Maris continued slowly along the bank of the central canal which led from the wind-tower. The water – driven by a great wheel which, in turn, was powered by the sails on the wind-tower itself – coursed along the narrow channel and into the pipes which would deliver it to all but the very oldest and most rundown buildings in Sanctaphrax. As she listened to Quint, Maris found a small piece of sky-crystal in her pocket and absent-mindedly tossed it into the foaming stream.
She turned away. ‘It sounds horrible,’ she said.
‘It was,’ said Quint. ‘Snuffling, snorting, slurping – and there was this glow. Red, it was, Maris. Blood-red!’
Maris shuddered. ‘As if the stonecomb wasn't treacherous enough already,’ she said, ‘now you're telling me that it's full of … of … well, what exactly?’
‘I don't know,’ said Quint, shaking his head. ‘I've never seen or heard anything like it before. But I'll tell you what – I count myself lucky to have escaped with my life.’ Maris smiled weakly. Quint turned to her. ‘Maris,’ he said, ‘are you sure you still want to go down there?’
‘What?’ said Maris, her eyes blazing.
‘I … I just wondered,’ said Quint. ‘I mean, what with the rickety sky cage and the perilous stonecomb, not to mention the great blood-red whatever-it-is down there … it's still not too late to change your mind.’
Maris snorted. ‘Change my mind?’ she said. ‘Of course I'm not going to change my mind. Wild prowl-grins couldn't keep me away.’ And with that, she turned and hurried off. ‘Meet me on the West Landing an hour after sunset,’ her voice floated back.
Quint stood there watching Maris's busy little body bustling away into the distance, a look of bemusement playing around his lips. He didn't think he would ever be able to make her out.
· CHAPTER ELEVEN ·
FREEFALL
Maris stood in the dark corridor in front of her father's locked bedroom door. Her eyes were red and her legs were trembling. Her knuckles were grazed and throbbing from all the knocking.
It was bad enough that she was about to do something behind her father's back. But going off without kissing him goodbye somehow made her behaviour even worse. It seemed like a betrayal. But she had to know the secret of the underground chamber, however terrible it was. And Quint would help her.
She felt a pang of jealousy. Why had her father turned to this son of a sky pirate to run his errands for him rather than entrusting her, his daughter, with his secrets? She shook her head. This was no time for such negative emotions. Whatever the reason, it wasn't Quint's fault. In fact she should be grateful to him for the information he had provided – not angry.
Maris turned her attention back to the door. She really did want to see her father before leaving; she wanted him to know that she loved him, that she was proud to be the daughter of the Most High Academe, no matter what. If only he would let her in!
‘Open up!’ she shrieked, and hammered on the door louder than ever. ‘For the love of Sky, let me…’
There was a metallic click as a key turned in the lock. The door opened and Welma's rubbery features appeared in the gap. ‘Mistress Maris!’ she said sharply. ‘What is all this nonsense about?’
‘I want to see my father.’
‘Your father is resting,’ Welma said, a little more softly. ‘He gave me strict instructions not to let anyone in.’
‘But…’
‘Maris, the Most High Academe has recently undergone some dreadful ordeal,’ she explained. ‘He won't even talk about it…’
‘He'd talk to me, though,’ said Maris. ‘I k
now he would. He…’
Welma slipped out and closed the door behind her. ‘My little sugar-dumpling,’ she said, stroking Maris's cheek affectionately. ‘He especially said that I was not to let you in yet.’
‘Oh,’ Maris gasped. A lump formed in her throat. ‘Doesn't he … doesn't he love me any more?’ she whispered. Tears welled up in the corners of her eyes.
‘Love you? Of course he loves you, you daft thing.That's why he doesn't want you to see him the way he is now. His face is all scratched and bruised, and there's a horrible gash to his ear …’ Her brow creased up. ‘Come to that, Maris, you don't look too good yourself. Your nose is red and your eyes are all bloodshot and puffy.’ She pulled a large spotted handkerchief from the pocket of her apron. ‘Here,’ she said.
Maris took the handkerchief, wiped her eyes and blew her nose. ‘I'm sorry,’ she said. ‘I'm being silly. Besides, Father's probably tired now.’
‘Sleeping like a baby,’ Welma confirmed.
Maris smiled bravely. ‘Thank you for looking after him,’ she said. ‘I know he couldn't be in better hands. Just tell him from me, tell him …’ She leant forwards and planted a kiss at the end of her old nanny's rubbery nose. ‘Tell him I love him, no matter what,’ she said.
‘Of course I will,’ said the old nurse.
As Welma watched her young charge walk off down the corridor, she felt a pang of guilt. She had never liked lying to Maris. Yet, with the best will in the world, Welma could not have described the true state the Most High Academe was in. The great blood-soaked bandage which swaddled his head was bad enough, but even if she had wanted to – which she didn't – she had not words enough to describe the haunting terror in his unblinking eyes.