by Paul Stewart
‘What happens in the upper world does not concern us,’ she pronounced. ‘If these mire-pearlers you talk of do not enter our caverns, we shall have no quarrel with them—’
‘But, your majesty,’ Blatch blurted out, ‘with all due respect, these mire-pearlers could do untold damage to the Farrow Lake if we do not resist.’
The white trog queen clicked her tongue, and the guard on spiderback closest to Blatch jabbed his crystal-shard spear into the professor’s chest a second time.
‘If they do not enter our caverns, we shall ignore them,’ the trog queen said again, slowly and clearly. ‘As is the way of the white trogs.’ Her eyes narrowed. ‘The sky sweetness you bring from the upper world is intoxicating, but I . . . we, can do without it.’
The words hung in the air.
‘The cave-cake is a gift, your majesty,’ said Gart Ironside graciously. ‘I would only ask that you remember this, should you change your mind,’ and with that he turned and headed back to the ladder.
Then, without saying another word, the flute-like shells on her cape echoing sonorously, the white trog queen swung round and, with another twitch of the reins, turned her spider and left the cavern. The guards followed behind, their spiders scuttling down the walls and across the floor after hers.
‘Now what?’ said Blatch bleakly, as the last of them disappeared, and they were alone again.
‘Now,’ said Thorne, turning and punching his fist into his open palm, ‘we shall face the mire-pearlers ourselves.’
Thorne sounded defiant, but Cade knew better. His friend was worried. Not that he was about to show it.
Looking up, the fisher goblin saw Gart climbing through the shaft of daylight towards the hovering phraxlighter and he climbed up after him. Cade and Blatch followed close behind.
At the top of the ladder, they emerged squinting into the daylight of the late afternoon and climbed aboard the phraxlighter. Gart was already at the controls and preparing to cast off.
The sun was orange and low in the sky, tipping the jagged treeline with gold. Cade looked down at the Farrow Ridges – the magnificent Five Falls, the tree-fringed Ledges and the lush meadowlands, with the mirror-like Farrow Lake nestling like a jewel in their midst.
Celestia was right. This was a place worth fighting for.
Just then, in the distant Western Woods, a blazing lufwood tree shot up above the forest canopy in a jagged ball of magenta flames and soared towards Open Sky. Cade’s heart missed a beat. It was a hammerhead flare! The hammerhead nations had spotted the mire-pearlers and were warning Cade and the Farrow Lakers, just as they had promised.
Cade turned to Thorne, Blatch and Gart. They too had seen the blazing lufwood.
‘The mire-pearlers are approaching,’ Thorne said bleakly. Then, as his military training in the Hive Militia came back to the old fisher goblin, he began issuing orders in a calm, steady voice. ‘Blatch, your cabin will be our headquarters. We’ll drop you on the western shore. Inform the webfoots of the impending danger, then tell Celestia to gather all the medicines she can lay her hands on. I’ll meet you there after I’ve collected the weapons from my hive-hut and picked up Cade’s prowlgrin.’
He turned and laid a reassuring hand on Cade’s shoulder.
‘I want you, Cade, lad, to go with Gart to the sky-platform and help him provision the phraxlighter with all the supplies she can hold.’
Cade nodded. Despite Thorne’s quiet authority, the desperation in the fisher goblin’s eyes was plain for all to see.
‘When the mire-pearlers get here,’ he said, ‘Sky protect us all.’
· CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE ·
‘DROP ME OFF down there,’ said Thorne, pointing to the moon-dappled eastern shore. His hive-hut rose out of the forest just beyond. ‘Don’t worry,’ he reassured Cade, ‘Rumblix and I will meet you at the tree-cabin.’
Cade nodded as Gart brought the phraxlighter down towards the row of eel-corrals at the edge of the lake. Hovering just above the shallows, Gart kept the little vessel steady as Thorne clambered over the side and splashed down into the ankle-deep water. On the far side of the shimmering lake, Cade could see the skycraft of the webfoots, all twelve of them, rising up from Fifth Lake Village and setting off for the Western Woods.
Blatch must have already delivered Thorne’s instructions to them, Cade realized. The plan was for everyone to gather at the tree-cabin – but first he and Gart had a job to do.
Cade waved to Thorne, then turned and joined Gart at the controls as the phraxpilot steered the Hoverworm towards the south-eastern end of the Farrow Lake. After a few moments, the sky-platform came into view.
The wooden structure, with its scaffold supports, squat cabin and massive water tank, protruded high above the canopy of trees around it. The lantern that hung above the cabin door, and that Gart kept burning night and day, shone like a lone yellow star against the gathering darkness.
‘Let’s try to be as quick as we can,’ said Gart as they drew closer. ‘We need weapons. Phraxmuskets, ironwood bullets. And any bill-hooks, axes or ice-picks you can lay your hands on. You’ll find them in the racks next to the hammock.’
He turned the flight wheel and pulled hard on the rudder lever. Instead of heading for the mooring cradle at the side of the wooden deck, Gart brought the small phraxlighter round in the sky and approached the sky-platform from below.
‘I’ll get blankets and bales of homespun from my stores,’ said Gart. ‘And then you can help me load the crates of woodgrog. Twenty or so there were at the last count.’
Gart smiled at the look on Cade’s face.
‘Purely medicinal, Cade,’ he said. ‘Celestia’s setting up an infirmary at the cabin.’ His expression darkened. ‘In case of casualties.’
A couple of strides below the deck of the sky-platform now, Gart brought the Hoverworm to a near standstill. It hung in the air, swaying slightly. Behind him, Cade heard the jet of fire at the propulsion duct fall still; the clouds of steam billowing from the funnel shrank to a thin, serpentine coil.
‘Easy does it,’ Gart muttered, as he edged the phraxlighter slowly forward between the struts of the tower until they were directly beneath the wooden platform.
The Hoverworm bumped gently against a narrow ledge that spanned the crossbeams, and Cade noticed the narrow flight of stairs that was fixed to them, leading up to a trap door in the deck.
‘Tolley rope, Cade,’ said Gart.
Cade left the wheelhouse and, seizing one of the coiled ropes from the stern, jumped onto the wooden ledge, then tethered the vessel securely to one of the mooring rings bolted to its side. Gart stepped off the Hoverworm and climbed the stairs to the trap door.
‘This is the back entrance,’ he said, reaching up and releasing the catch. ‘A little less obtrusive than the mooring cradle.’
The trap door swung down.
Cade followed Gart and stepped through onto the broad wooden deck. In front of them was the dimly lit cabin, with the dark silhouette of the water tower looming above it on tripod legs. Gart strode across the deck to the door of the cabin and pushed it open.
‘Racks are over there,’ he said, turning to Cade as the two of them went inside and pointing to the far side of the room.
With its high ceiling, supported by sturdy copperwood pillars, the cabin was a lot more spacious than it looked from the outside. In one corner was a hammock slung between two hooks, surrounded by hanging scroll-holders stuffed with barkscroll dockets and receipts. On the wall beyond were racks containing a row of eight phraxmuskets, and an assortment of axes, saws, hammers and other tools. Below them were several sacks of ironwood bullets, with stencilled labels that read Great Glade Militia.
‘Hurry now, Cade, lad,’ said Gart. ‘We probably don’t have much time.’
While Cade took armfuls of muskets and any tools that might serve as weapons back to the phraxlighter, Gart crossed to the other side of the cabin. There he gathered up bundles of blankets and rolls of roughly woven c
loth, then followed Cade out of the cabin, across the deck and back down the stairs to the Hoverworm.
It took them each several journeys to stow what they needed on board. Then they started on the crates of woodgrog, which were stacked outside against the cabin wall, awaiting delivery to the next visiting skytavern. Just like Celestia’s cave-cake, the woodgrog, supplied to Gart by Thorne and sold on to the skytaverns, was a lucrative sideline. Back and forth Cade and Gart went in relay, ten times, twenty times . . .
At last the Hoverworm was packed tight from port to starboard, prow to stern. Having slotted the last crate into place, Cade dragged a tarpaulin out from a locker at the back of the wheelhouse. The oiled material was heavy and awkward to manoeuvre, and it took him some while to spread it smoothly over the cargo and to secure the ties to the bow-cleats. Straightening up, Cade looked around for Gart, who had gone back up to lock and bolt the cabin door – and realized that something was wrong.
The trap door had been closed. He paused. From above his head, he could hear heavy footsteps, and voices. Gruff, angry voices . . .
Gart was talking loudly – for his benefit, Cade realized.
‘I’m the only one here,’ his voice rang out. ‘Take what you like. I don’t want any trouble . . . from either of the two of you . . .’
His heart hammering in his chest, Cade slung a phraxmusket onto his shoulders. Two of them, two of us, he thought, trying to stay calm. He couldn’t use the trap door as the intruders were directly overhead. He’d have to find another route up.
Crossing to the far side of the ledge, Cade clambered onto the wooden struts of the tower. His feet slipped on the angled crossbeams, threatening to pitch him into the yawning depths beneath. But he steadied himself. Then, trying hard not to look down, he began to climb. The platform was some ten or so strides above his head. Bracing his legs, Cade climbed up as far as he dared, then, just as he was about to peer over the edge of the deck, he felt a sharp pain in his hand.
It was all he could do not to cry out.
Looking down, he saw that a long splinter from the rough wood of the strut he’d grasped had embedded itself in his thumb. Wincing with pain, Cade pulled out the bloodied sliver of wood with his teeth and spat it away. Then he tried again. This time he took it more cautiously, gripping the struts above gently, then slowly easing himself up. As his head poked above the platform, he peered across the deck.
‘Earth and Sky,’ he breathed.
Above him, a battered phraxsloop had berthed at the cradle where Gart usually moored his phraxlighter. It must have just arrived, steam still rising from its twisted and corroded funnel. Its crew were standing outside the cabin, their backs to Cade. One of them was a broad-shouldered flathead in a heavy leather coat, his hairless skull glinting in the lantern light. The other, a fourthling in a crushed funnel hat of quarm fur and a gaudily decorated topcoat, had Gart pressed up against the door of the cabin, a phraxpistol at his head.
‘I won’t ask you again, tell me where the others are,’ he was demanding.
‘What others?’ said Gart innocently. ‘I don’t see anybody from one skytavern docking to the next. Whoever told you otherwise is mistaken. I . . . erm . . .’
At that moment, Gart spotted Cade. He was looking past his interrogator’s left shoulder, straight at him.
Slowly Cade slipped the phraxmusket from his shoulder with one hand and raised it, propping the barrel against the deck to steady it. He took aim at the fourthling.
‘I wouldn’t do that,’ Gart said, his eyes fixed on Cade.
‘Do what?’ the fourthling snarled. ‘Blow your head off for lying to us?’
‘There’s a much cleaner way to do it . . .’ Gart’s eyes darted upwards, once, twice, to the water tower looming over the cabin.
‘Reckon this one’s skytouched in the head,’ sneered the fourthling, pressing the phraxpistol into Gart’s temple.
Cade suddenly realized what Gart was trying to tell him.
‘The release valve,’ said Gart. ‘One shot is all you have.’
Cade raised his musket to the water tower, aiming it at the round plug at the base of the tall circular drum. He squeezed the trigger.
‘Release valve?’ The flathead’s voice rose in anger. ‘What in Sky’s name is a release val—’
There was a flash and an ear-splitting crack as the bullet struck the plug, which shattered. The next moment, a jet of lake water shot down from the base of the tower in a thundering torrent, sweeping the flathead and fourthling off their feet and washing them over the edge of the deck and down to the forest below.
Cade ducked back down below the deck as water flooded out of the emptying water tower and cascaded over the sides of the platform, like one of the Five Falls in full flow. When the last of the water had poured away, he pulled himself up onto the dripping deck and hurried across to the cabin. The water had swept the platform-keeper’s legs from under him, but he was clinging to the handle of the cabin door with both hands.
‘Good shot,’ he spluttered, as Cade helped him to his feet. ‘Now let’s get out of here before any more mire-pearlers show up.’
‘What about that?’ said Cade, pointing to the phrax-sloop berthed at the cradle.
Gart cast an eye over it as he stomped soggily over to the trap door and opened it. ‘Hull-rot, chamber-rust and ice-damage to the funnel,’ he said dismissively. ‘The thing’s a death trap.’
They boarded the Hoverworm and Cade cast off, a wave of relief washing over him. Relief that he’d managed to climb up the struts of the sky-platform; relief that he’d been able to hit the release valve, and that Gart had held on and, unlike the mire-pearlers, had not been washed from the deck to his death. As they flew low over the treetops, keeping to the fringes of the lake at a low steam to avoid being seen, Cade looked back the way they’d come – and instantly wished he hadn’t.
For there, looming up above the Needles and steaming towards the Farrow Lake, was a vast skyship. It was black in colour; decks, fore and aft, snub-nosed prow, high balustraded stern and great central phraxchamber and funnel all coated in pine-pitch. The hull portholes were tightly shuttered, and the hull rigging sagged under the weight of a thousand twinkling lanterns that clinked against the ship’s black sides.
Cade pulled his spyglass from his pocket and put it to his eye as Gart brought the Hoverworm to a slow glide and ducked down below the treeline. Up close, Cade could see what these ‘lanterns’ attached to the hull rigging actually were.
Skulls. Hundreds of them, each one strung on rope, and containing a tallow candle that shone out through the eye sockets. Skulls of goblins and fourthlings, trogs and trolls; skulls of those who had come up against this hideous skyship. And lost.
Now it had arrived at the Farrow Lake to bring more death and destruction. Cade’s scalp itched as he imagined his own skull strung alongside the others, a tallow candle set inside it.
No, he told himself bravely. That shall not happen.
But then, as he trained his spyglass along the shuttered side and up towards the black prow, his courage drained away. The name of the vessel was picked out in angular blood-red letters:
DOOMBRINGER.
· CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO ·
THE MOON WAS full and bright and high above their heads as Gart brought the Hoverworm down through the forest canopy, deep in the Western Woods. Shrouded in shadow beneath them was Blatch Helmstoft’s tree-cabin, suspended from the mighty ironwood pine. The window-shutters were closed and the place was in darkness. It looked deserted.
As they came down lower, Cade caught sight of Celestia’s two prowlgrins, fast asleep on the jutting roof-platform. To their left were the webfoot goblins’ twelve skycraft, tethered to mooring rings around the roof of the east turret. And far below on the forest floor, he could just make out the conical snailskin tents that Phineal Glyfphith and his webfoot brothers had erected, nestling in the undergrowth in a tight circle.
Dwarfing the tents, but almost invisible to th
e untrained eye, were four tall hive-towers. They looked like a part of the forest itself. Three of the towers had already been camouflaged, while the fourth was being worked on, with half a dozen hammerhead goblins clinging to its pointed roof, using lengths of forest vine to tie leafy branches and bunches of pine-needles to the woven matting walls.
The four clans of the Western Woods must have gathered, Cade realized, each erecting its own hive-tower. The Bone Clan and the Shadow Clan of the High Valley Nation, Cade had already encountered, but the two clans of the Low Valley Nation were new to him.
Cade looked down at the hive-towers as Gart brought the Hoverworm in to land on the under-balcony of the shuttered tree-cabin. Judging by the pearly fish scales, like droplets of rain, which decorated the entrance of the first hive-tower, and the barbed hooks and coiled nets that hung from the tunics and necks of the hammerheads outside it, this must be the River Clan. The hive-tower next to it was surrounded by shards of flint that anchored it into position. This was home to the Stone Clan, whose members were stocky, thick-set hammerhead goblins, with curious tusk-like teeth protruding from their lower jaws.
The hammerheads of the Bone Clan, with their brow tattoos and distinctive body armour of animal bones and teeth stitched onto their tunics, were outside their own hive-tower, silently preparing their weapons. Warriors sharpened their broadswords and double-headed axes on heavy whetstones; goblin matrons sat cross-legged on tilder hides, binding snowbird feathers to the ends of sharpened lengths of blackwood, then storing the finished arrows in leather quivers. Beyond them, members of the Shadow Clan circled the camp, almost invisible in the forest gloom as they attached tripwires and bell-clappers to the surrounding trees to alert them to intruders; and fish-hooks set at eye-level to punish any who strayed too close.
As Gart docked the Hoverworm, Cade noticed the webfoot goblins in a huddle beside their tents, their crests a uniform pale green as they gestured to the sky and talked animatedly. Cade waved to them as he stepped off the phraxlighter, but the webfoots were too deep in conversation to notice him.