by Paul Stewart
‘There’s no knowing how deep they are nor what horrors they contain,’ said Gart. ‘But the tribes around here don’t go near them. And they talk of the white trogs who live in their depths, and scare even them . . .’
Cade swallowed. What sort of place had he landed in? he wondered. A nightmare home to flesh-eating trees, torturing tribes, monstrous lake creatures and ghostly trogs . . .
He kept on stroking Rumblix’s neck and flanks. The small creature had closed his eyes and was softly snoring. Cade felt his own eyelids grow heavy. He sank back into the wooden chair, which suddenly felt as soft as a heap of feathers.
Gart was still talking: ‘. . . and as for me, I stay up here on the platform, where I can see things coming, or stick to the phraxlighter. Eight years I’ve been in this desolate place and I’m proud to say I’ve yet to set foot on its soil.’ He snorted. ‘Welcome to the Farrow Ridges . . .’
Cade nodded again, struggling to stay awake as Gart Ironside’s words echoed in his head: ‘Welcome to the Farrow Ridges . . .’
Eyes shut and lulled by the rhythmic breathing of the prowlgrin pup in his lap, he allowed sleep to start lapping over him. And, as the moon rose higher in the sky, Cade heard the drowsy breeze whispering in the trees around him, their secretive murmurings punctuated by night creatures: quarms squealing, fromps coughing, a banderbear yodelling to its far-off mate.
‘. . . the Farrow Ridges . . . Farrow Ridges . . . Farrow Ridges . . .’
· CHAPTER SEVENTEEN ·
CADE AWOKE TO the bright sun shining in his eyes. There was a blanket over him that Gart Ironside must have thoughtfully placed there. It had kept the chill out during the night. But now Cade was too hot, and he threw the blanket aside and climbed to his feet, groaning as his head throbbed. Gart had also thought to put a tankard of water on the table, which Cade downed gratefully.
He wiped his mouth on his sleeve and looked around him, getting his bearings, sorting through the events of the previous ten days in his head. The almost skyfiring . . . The murder of the two professors . . . The leap from the Xanth Filatine and subsequent rescue by Gart Ironside, who had brought him here, to this spindly tower in the Farrow Ridges, a remote and insignificant backwater in the vastness of the mighty Deepwoods, so far from Cade’s old home in Great Glade.
The wind had changed direction now, and the roar of the five falls coursing down into the lake sounded more distant. A flock of long-legged white birds flapped low over the surface of the water, snapping at insects, then on across the mudflats on the far side of the lake, where they landed and began strutting about, jabbing their beaks into the mud in search of bugs and worms. Rumblix was perched on the back of the wooden chair, his eyes closed, gently snoring. Cade’s backpack stood propped up against the chair leg.
Cade smiled to himself. This was everything that he owned in the world. Everything he cared about. A sleeping prowlgrin pup and a battered old backpack.
Cade laid the backpack on the table and untied the fastenings at the top. Then, reaching in, he removed the contents, one by one. A pair of socks. A couple of shirts. A knife. His journal. A stubby leadwood pencil . . . Things closest to hand which he’d hurriedly stuffed into his backpack the night his father had told him to leave.
And then there were the three things he’d taken great care to pack.
Cade reached into the backpack and drew out a brass spyglass stamped with the initials N.Q. He turned it over in his hand. The spyglass had once belonged to Cade’s uncle, Nate Quarter. His father had given it to him on his seventh birthday, but had never spoken about the famous descender himself until that fateful night.
Cade placed the spyglass on the table and reached once more into the backpack. He took out a small glass vial of perfume, and his eyes filled with tears.
It had belonged to his mother, Sensa, who, like his uncle, he had never known. She’d succumbed to the ‘wasters’ – a fever more prevalent in the poorer areas of Great Glade than the Cloud Quarter, and which turned a fit, healthy adult into a bag of bones in weeks – when Cade had been so very young. According to Cade’s father, she had probably caught it while distributing alms to the down-and-outs of East Glade and Copperwood. For that was what she was like, he’d explained, always putting others before herself.
‘A good person,’ he’d always told Cade. ‘Your mother was a good person.’
Cade unstoppered the vial and held it to his nose. He breathed deep the remnants of her sweet scent, his face taut with loss. It hadn’t helped her, being a good person, he thought, sad – and not for the first time – that he’d had to grow up without a mother. Not that he would ever have confessed that to his father. Cade swallowed. His father had also been a good person.
And it hadn’t helped him either.
Cade put the stopper back in the vial and placed it next to the spyglass on the table top. Slowly he reached into the backpack and removed the last, and bulkiest, item: the bundle of four scrolls, bound together with a ribbon bearing the name Thadeus Quarter in flowing script, that his father had pressed into his hand and made him promise to look after.
Cade slipped off the ribbon. He realized his hands were trembling. The memories of that night were still too fresh, too raw.
He unrolled the scrolls. The wind set them fluttering as he scanned the graphs and annotated diagrams, and neat clusters of numbers and symbols. He guessed they were equations of some sort, but they were far too complicated for him to decipher. All he knew for certain was that the scrolls must be important for his father to have entrusted them to him. Now his father was dead. He would never see him again. And he missed him. He missed him so much.
Reaching up, he wiped away the tears that filmed his eyes, making the diagrams blur and dissolve. Slowly, thoughtfully, Cade rolled up the scrolls and re-tied them with the ribbon.
Before him, the Farrow Ridges spread out like a beautiful tapestry. To his left were tall jagged pinnacles of rock. The Needles, Gart had called them. Beyond them, like mighty steps, were the ridges themselves, with the gushing cascades of water – the Five Falls – tumbling from the five great caverns at their western end and splashing down into the deep dark-shadowed lake below. And, as Cade watched, as if to some signal, the flock of foraging white birds flapped their wings, rose up from the mudflats and wheeled round across the forest.
He returned his attention to the scrolls, turning them over thoughtfully in his hand. On the skytavern, when he’d met Tillman Spoke, the prowlgrin breeder, he’d dreamed of the possibility of a new life in Hive. He remembered the excitement and relief he’d felt when he imagined helping out in the stables, caring for the prowlgrins, watching them high-jumping down the Hive Falls . . .
But if Quove Lentis’s spies could find him in Great Glade, what was to stop them searching him out in Hive? After all, the High Professor of Flight’s spies were everywhere – even in the depths of the skytavern. Cade shivered as he pictured Drax Adereth’s pale face staring back at him.
But here . . . Who would think to look for him in this ‘desolate place’, as Gart had called it, with its bloodoaks and hammerheads and trogs?
He looked up, just as the sun broke over the high forest behind him and spread out across the Farrow Lake. The slate-grey darkness turned to a dazzling display of burnished silver and gold. He noticed sallow-ash and weeping willoaks down at the water’s edge that could provide timber to construct a small cabin, and tall reeds extending into the shallows that could thatch it . . .
A smile spread across Cade Quarter’s face as the thought dawned. Perhaps, despite all its dangers, the Farrow Ridges might be the safest place to be.
· CHAPTER EIGHTEEN ·
SENSES TAUT, CADE crept through the dark forest. The mighty ironwood pines rose up around him, their spreading branches far above cutting out the light. In the gloom of the forest floor, each cracked twig or rustling branch made Cade pause, and his heart thumped as he strained to hear where the sound had come from. Every movement he caught out of t
he corner of his eye made him flinch and grip the phraxmusket that Gart Ironside had given him all the tighter.
At his shoulders, Rumblix held onto the backpack with his powerful back legs and growled softly.
‘It’s all right, boy,’ Cade reassured the pup. ‘Not far now, and we should come out at the lake. Then we can follow the shoreline.’
Gart had offered to fly Cade to the north side of the lake in his phraxlighter, but Cade had politely refused. If he was to make the Farrow Ridges his home, Cade decided, then he’d have to get used to the surrounding forest, no matter how daunting that might be.
‘Are you absolutely sure?’ Gart Ironside had asked him. ‘You’re welcome to stay here. I’ve got room enough,’ he went on. ‘And I can always use a bit of help when the skyships come in . . .’
But Cade knew that this was not an option. He needed to lie low, to avoid the skyships – at least until Quove Lentis and his spies forgot about him. Down here on the ground he could find a quiet, out-of-the-way spot, build a dwelling place, teach himself to hunt, to fish. And lie low . . .
‘Thank you, Gart,’ he’d said, reading the disappointment in the pilot’s eyes, ‘but I need to be on my own right now . . .’ He’d paused. ‘And I’d appreciate it if you didn’t tell anyone I was here.’
Gart had smiled and nodded knowingly.
‘But at least let me give you some stuff to help you set up,’ Gart had insisted. ‘And if it makes you feel better, you can think of it as a loan,’ he’d added when Cade had protested that he had no money. ‘You can return them to me any time you like.’
As well as the phraxmusket, Gart had given Cade a net, a length of fishing line and a couple of hooks; some rope, nails and wire; a lantern, a small tarpaulin; fire-flints and a water pot. And tools. There was a hammer and a hacksaw, an axe and a spade, all of which were strapped onto the now bulging backpack on Cade’s shoulders.
The lakeside hadn’t looked too far from the top of the platform. But with the weight on his back, and sights and sounds slowing him down, Cade’s progress through the gloomy forest had been little more than a crawl. Then, just as he was beginning to lose heart and was considering retracing his steps back to the platform, the ground in front of him abruptly fell away.
Stepping carefully over gnarled tree roots, Cade emerged from the forest beside a vast body of water, its surface glittering like diamonds in the early-afternoon sun. He breathed in sharply and his face broke into a grin.
‘We made it, lad,’ he said to Rumblix as the prowlgrin pup jumped down beside him.
The sun splashed across Cade’s face as he slipped the heavy backpack from his shoulders and walked down the sloping shore to the water’s edge. There, he squatted down and dabbled his hands in the cold clear water, his gaze looking out across the still expanse of the lake. Next to him, Rumblix lapped at the water.
Now and then, a fish broke the surface, snatching at insects hovering above; birds flapped and tumbled overhead in the warm air. Their chittering and squawking cries echoed through the trees all around . . .
‘The Farrow Lake,’ Cade murmured, and he ruffled the prowlgrin’s fur affectionately. ‘Our new home.’
Rumblix looked round at him and purred.
Climbing to his feet, Cade peered up and down the shoreline. Towards the Five Falls to his left, the forest came down almost to the lake and he knew he would have to clear the trees before he could build anything there. Far off to his right, however, he could see broad meadowlands stretching back from the water’s edge to the treeline. It looked a more promising place and, hoiking the heavy pack back onto his shoulders, Cade headed north-west along the lake for a closer look.
In the bright sunshine of the lake edge, he walked at a brisk pace, Rumblix bounding along at his side. There were plump-looking waterbirds feeding on the soggy meadowlands in the distance.
They looked like they’d make good eating, Cade noted, if he could snare a few.
And then there were the footprints in the soft mud of the lakeshore all around – the footprints of the forest creatures that came down to the water to drink. Perhaps he could shoot a tilder. Or even a hammelhorn . . . Properly smoked and stored, a fully-grown hammelhorn could feed him and Rumblix for months.
Cade’s mouth watered at the prospect.
He scanned the lakeshore. There were tall pine trees and lichened outcrops of rock that Cade identified as possible look-out points, as well as dips and hollows where he might hide and lie in wait for quarry. And as he rounded a curved inlet and the meadowlands began, he came to a natural jetty of rock that jutted out into the lake and which, at its end, looked ideal for casting a fishing line from.
With every stride he took, Cade’s optimism was growing . . .
The other end of the rock jetty, Cade saw, was embedded in a low wind-shadowed ridge that rose up above the lake. He swung his backpack from his shoulders and dropped it to the ground. Then he stood back, hands on hips, eyes narrowed.
The ridge provided shelter and the rock jetty offered easy access to the lake. And, just as he’d seen from the flat roof of the lofty cabin, there was timber close by for him to construct a simple lean-to shelter, as well as thick meadowgrass and water-reeds growing in abundance to thatch a roof.
Cade turned and looked back across the lake. Gart Ironside’s platform was now no more than a speck in the distance. No one would spot a small dwelling here. He smiled and patted Rumblix on his back and shoulders. It was the perfect spot for a cabin, Cade thought. Now all he had to do was build it.
But first things first . . .
Removing from his backpack the snare he’d fashioned back at Gart’s place under the pilot’s watchful eye, Cade carried it up to the edge of the forest. Then he set it at the base of a lufwood sapling, with the wire noose primed and taut and concealed in long grass, and the whole lot anchored to the tree with a length of rope.
‘Sky willing,’ he told Rumblix, ‘we’ll catch one of those plump birds for supper.’
He turned and, whistling tunelessly, gathered a couple of the straightest branches he could find and headed back down the slope to the lakeshore. There, in the shadow of the low ridge, he sharpened the branches into stakes and hammered them into the soft earth on either side of the rock jetty. Taking the tarpaulin Gart had given him, Cade tied the corners of one end to the stakes, then pegged the other end down at the top of the ridge, to form a tented lean-to.
It wasn’t much, but it would provide some shelter in the days ahead as Cade set about the serious business of collecting timber and thatch, and building himself something more permanent.
Still whistling, Cade built a small brushwood fire, encircled with stones he’d collected from the lakeshore, and lit it with the sparks from his fire-flints. He set a small pot of water to heat on the flickering flames and placed handfuls of the wild nibblick he’d collected in the boiling water. And as the sun set below the trees, he lit the lantern that Gart Ironside had given him.
A breeze rose over the lake and a chill came into the air that made Cade shiver. Behind him, the forest sounds changed as the evening creatures started to stir, and strange howls and whooping calls echoed through the dark trees.
Suddenly, from close by, Cade heard heavy footfalls. A moment later there was the twang of his snare wire being tripped, followed by a soft and wheezing cry.
A waterfowl, perhaps? Cade thought. Maybe a tilder fawn?
He reached out and picked up the phraxmusket, then climbed to his feet. He spotted Rumblix halfway along the stretch of rock that jutted out into the lake.
‘Here, boy!’ he called.
The prowlgrin pup hesitated, then turned and came bounding over to Cade. Purring loudly, he nuzzled at Cade’s knee.
‘Time for supper, lad,’ Cade told him, enjoying the normality of his own voice as he spoke to the young pup. He patted Rumblix’s head. ‘Let’s see what we’ve caught.’
Cade set off across the meadow towards the treeline through the gathering d
arkness, Rumblix at his heels. A moment later he arrived at the spot where he’d set the snare. Cade prodded around the base of the tree with his boot. Rumblix looked up at him inquisitively, then let out a strange, shrill, high-pitched chattering. Cade was staring down at the ground in disbelief.
The snare had disappeared.
‘I definitely heard it go off,’ Cade muttered.
He looked around anxiously. Listened. But there was nothing there. He crouched down and inspected the base of the tree. The end of the rope was still tied around the trunk, but just beyond the knot, it had been severed. Cade fingered the frayed ends.
It was too ragged to have been cut with a knife. And there was no wetness, so nothing had bitten through the rope. Cade sat back on his haunches, his head spinning. The way the rope strands were stretched and feathered at the ends, it looked as though something had simply torn the rope in two; something unimaginably strong.
Cade swallowed. There was a hollow feeling in the pit of his stomach, and it wasn’t caused by hunger. He reached out and hugged Rumblix tightly.
‘Maybe,’ he said, ‘Gart Ironside is right to stay up there on that platform of his.’
· CHAPTER NINETEEN ·
THE NIBBLICK SOUP had tasted good, but Cade was still hungry. The night was cold, but with the glowing embers of the small fire and the body-heat of the prowlgrin pup curled up next to him, Cade was warm enough. His stomach gurgled, the sound mingling with the strange calls of the night creatures in the forests around him.
Up on Gart Ironside’s platform they’d seemed reassuringly distant, but down here on the ground it was a different matter. The harsh coughing of tree fromps, the rasping sighs of weezits, the snuffles and grunts of creatures Cade couldn’t identify, all seemed far too close for comfort. Several times, Cade thought he could hear scampering and tramping just beyond the flickering light cast by the dying fire, and had gripped the phraxmusket even more tightly. Once, Rumblix had stirred, opened an eye, his nostrils quivering, before going back to sleep.