Edge Chronicles 10: The Immortals

by Paul Stewart;Chris Riddell

  ‘Apply three times a day for three days,’ she said. ‘And keep the wound uncovered,’ she added. ‘It needs to breathe.’ She smiled and wiped her fingers on her apron. ‘That’ll be five hundred dockets.’

  ‘Five hundred dockets?’ Eudoxia repeated. The price sounded high. ‘Are they anything like gladers?’

  The gabtroll frowned.

  ‘I’ve got some gladers,’ said Nate, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a roll of damp notes.

  ‘Dockets, gladers, waifmarks or hivegeld, I don’t mind,’ said the gabtroll, her face brightening up. ‘Everyone’s money’s welcome here in the Midwood Decks.’ She smiled. ‘That’ll be two gladers.’

  Nate peeled off two notes and handed them to the gabtroll, who folded them and placed them carefully into the pocket of her apron.

  ‘Just … slurp … passing through?’ the gabtroll enquired.

  ‘Yes,’ said Eudoxia. ‘We’re hoping to take a phraxbarge to Hive …’

  ‘Hive, you say?’ said the gabtroll, her eyes narrowing as the stalks recoiled towards her forehead. ‘There’s plenty here in the Midwood Decks who’d welcome the clans of Hive with … slurp … open arms. Those academics from that Sumpwood Bridge Academy of theirs have helped build the settlement into … slurp … what it is today – what with their engineering skills and way with the sumpwood …’

  ‘Really?’ said Eudoxia, fascinated.

  Nate could tell she would enjoy imparting anything she learned to the Professor in due course.

  ‘Oh … slurp … yes,’ said the gabtroll, her eyestalks extending towards Eudoxia and her tongue flicking out at them. ‘Greeg Kleft the gangmaster, for example. He’s the leader of the pro-Hivers. He’d have us join with Hivce tomorrow if he could …’

  ‘And that would be a good thing?’ Eudoxia asked.

  ‘Not necessarily,’ came the reply. ‘Certainly not according to the free timbersmiths. They’re led by … slurp … Hoathly Hextree, the woodtroll. Hoathly says Hive will chop down all the sumpwood they can find, and when it’s gone, they’ll leave Midwooders to … slurp … starve. He says we should fight Hive if they try to take us over, and send for help from Great Glade …’

  ‘A war?’ exclaimed Eudoxia, growing suddenly pale.

  ‘That’s what some folks say … slurp,’ said the gabtroll. ‘These are dark times here in the Midwood Decks, I can tell you. Why, slurp … there’ve been occasions just lately when I’ve thought about selling up and returning to Riverrise …’

  Just then, from outside on the walkway, there came the sound of raised voices. Nate went to the small latticed window of the shop and peered out. A stocky woodtroll in a stained topcoat and chequerboard waistcoat was squaring up to a tall and rangy flathead in a broad-brimmed hat and oilskin cape. Eudoxia and Weelum joined him at the window and, as they watched, they saw the flathead take three steps back and sweep back the folds of his cape to reveal a pair of gleaming phraxpistols.

  The bystanders fled down the walkway, leaving it suddenly deserted in the warm heavy rain. The woodtroll stood his ground, waving a fist at the flathead and shouting something about the free timbersmiths.

  With a snarl, the flathead drew his phraxpistols and fired. Two billowing jets of steam spurted from the ducts in the pistol’s phraxchambers. When the air cleared, the crumpled figure of the woodtroll was revealed lying at the flathead’s feet.

  ‘One of Greeg Kleft’s pro-Hivers … slurp …’ said the gabtroll behind them. ‘It’s getting worse by the day …’

  Outside, the flathead pushed the body of the woodtroll off the walkway, sending it tumbling down to the marshy ground below, before striding off. A small pool of blood was left on the timber boards, but was soon washed away by the torrential rain. A moment later, with harsh raucous cries, half a dozen hammelbills launched themselves off the guttering and, with purposeful flaps of their crimson wings, flew across the square and down to the unexpected feast lying in the mud far below.

  Leaving the apothecary’s store, Nate, Weelum and Eudoxia set off at a trot, the banderbear hobbling as quickly as he could. None of them wanted to spend more time out on the walkways and platforms of the Midwood Decks than they had to. After the splendour of the Deepwoods, the casual violence they had just witnessed sickened them.

  ‘There you are!’ called the Professor when they approached the timber towers on the far side of the platform. ‘We’ve booked six sleeping cabins. They’re ready and waiting for us …’ He paused when he saw the looks on their faces. ‘We heard shots,’ he said. ‘What happened?’

  Eudoxia looked at the Professor, and Nate knew that tears were mingling with the raindrops running down her face.

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ she said.

  • CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR •

  After the incident outside the apothecary’s, Nate was glad to turn in for the night. His sleeping cabin was warm and dry, its shuttered doors opening out onto a covered balcony high in the timber tower. The cabin was lined with a mattress of soft snowbird down and had a shelf to stow his belongings away – the bedroll, waterflask, knapsack.

  Nate checked the oil level on his lightbox and went through the contents of his little memory chest. He retrieved the painted medallion and turned it over in his fingers, inspecting the portrait thoughtfully, before tying the cord it hung on around his neck. Then, pulling from his pocket the sky crystals that Squall Razortooth had just made him a present of, he added them to the small chest.

  ‘You saved our friend Weelum with these, lad,’ the old sky pirate had said, pressing them into his hand when Nate had tried to return them that evening. ‘They’re yours now.’

  Nate smiled and placed the crystals next to the ‘Professor of Light’ splinter from the skytavern and Eudoxia’s false moustache. He closed the chest and placed it next to the lightbox in his knapsack. He was lucky to have friends like these, he thought as the gentle sway of the tower rocked the cabin from side to side.

  The Professor was knowledgeable, cool-headed and, despite his career as an itinerant skytavern gambler, honourable. Nate trusted him with his life. Weelum the banderbear was steadfast and loyal, as only one of his kind could be, and the same could be said for the old sky pirate, Squall Razortooth. Nate had grown to admire his skill, both theoretical and practical – the way he could read a sky map one moment, and fashion a hanging brazier from a pinecone the next.

  Nate smiled and stretched out on the bed.

  Then there was Slip, the grey goblin from the mine. Who would have thought that the frightened phrax-touched little scuttler would become Nate’s best friend? Observant, resourceful, and now a crack shot with his blackwood bow, Nate felt that the tables had turned, and Slip was now protecting him as much as the other way round.

  His eyes closed.

  And then there was Eudoxia. Eudoxia Prade, the mine owner’s daughter. Nate had never met anyone like her. She could outride, outshoot, outthink any one of them, and yet was never boastful, never proud. Despite her privileged upbringing, she’d never once made Nate feel awkward about his humble background in the rough mining camps of the Eastern Woods. In fact, quite the opposite …

  Yes, he was lucky to have friends like these, Nate thought as he drifted off to sleep.

  ‘Wake up! Nate, wake up!’

  Nate’s eyes snapped open, and he was surprised to see a chink of sunlight streaming in through the shutters. The night had passed, seemingly in the blink of an eye, and now it was already morning. He opened the doors of the sleeping cabin and stepped out onto the covered balcony, stretching as he did so. Eudoxia, dressed in a green topcoat and newly patched and mended riding breeches, stood before him, hands on her hips and her green eyes sparkling brightly.

  ‘The rain’s stopped, it’s a beautiful day,’ she said, and laughed delightedly. ‘The Professor and Slip have gone up to the decks to find us a passage to Hive on a timber barge, and Squall’s looking after Weelum, insisting that he rest that leg of his. So that leaves you a
nd me, Nate!’

  ‘It does?’ said Nate sleepily.

  ‘Yes, so hurry up and get dressed. We’re going out into the forest to see the sumpwood stands.’ Eudoxia’s eyes glazed over momentarily. ‘After what happened yesterday, I’d like to get out of the city … Besides,’ she said, brightening up again, ‘it’s such a glorious morning, and it might not last. According to the Professor, it rains every day here. And the sumpwood stands, Nate! The Professor says they’re magnificent. We can’t miss seeing them …’

  ‘All right, all right,’ said Nate, smiling, happy to share her excitement. ‘I’ll throw on some clothes and see you downstairs.’

  Half an hour later, leaving the town behind them, Nate and Eudoxia took a broad sloping boardwalk out into the forest. It was the major thoroughfare, used every day by those who lived in the Midwood Decks but worked in the surrounding sumpwood stands. At the centre of the boards, the wood was splintered and worn, and spattered with mud from the boots of the timbersmiths who’d passed along it earlier that morning.

  Like the walkways back at the Midwood Decks, the boards had been anchored in the earth below them, with long chains keeping them in place, and that could be moved whenever the felling operations shifted from one spot to another. Far ahead of them, they caught glimpses of tiny phraxcraft darting across the sky; behind them, the Midwood Decks steamed gently in the hot sun, while all around, the mighty stands of sumpwood trees rose up from the marshy, waterlogged ground below.

  ‘The Professor was right,’ Eudoxia breathed. ‘They are magnificent!’

  Nate nodded. He’d never seen trees quite like them before. Tall and pointed at the top, with upturned branches covered in dense blue sumpneedles, the trees had squat bulbous trunks that were almost spherical, like phraxchambers. But more remarkable still were the roots of the sumpwood. These, in comparison to the tree above, were huge, and mostly exposed. To Nate, they resembled nothing so much as a series of huge waterfalls, tumbling down from the tree trunk, dividing and dividing again into a thousand cascades until burying themselves in the sodden earth beneath.

  Eudoxia turned to Nate. ‘The Professor was telling me it’s the boll of the sumpwood that produces the most buoyant timber of all. Ten times more buoyant than the roots, apparently. And more remarkable still, he said that if you chop the tree down just below the boll, being careful not to damage the roots, it’ll grow back again! The whole tree!’

  Just then, overhead, they heard a squawking cry and the flapping of wings and looked up to see a hammelbill soaring across the sky. In the warm sun its feathers trailed behind it like glistening ribbons of crimson silk. Drawing in its long neck, the creature flew down through the air and landed, feet first, on a great vertical slab of bulbous root, where it gripped on tightly with its sharp claws.

  Nate and Eudoxia watched as the bird cocked its head first to one side, then to the other, before walking up the root a couple of strides and repeating the process. Suddenly it froze. The next instant, it stabbed at the oily rootbark with such force that the tip of its bill plunged deep into the wood. It shuddered as it braced itself, its feathers shimmering with colour, then, with a sharp backward jerk, pulled its beak free – and at the end, wriggling and writhing, was a long red worm-like creature.

  Eudoxia shuddered. Like Nate, the sight of the bird had reminded her of the shooting of the woodtroll the day before, and how the hammelbills had swooped down to feed on the body.

  ‘At least here, those hideous birds do some good,’ she murmured. ‘It’s caught a rootweevil. The Professor says the rootweevil burrows into the sumpwood’s roots and kills the tree.’

  The hammelbill shook its head vigorously from side to side until the rootweevil fell still. Then it flipped the lifeless creature up into the air, opened its beak and swallowed it whole. With a triumphant squawk, the bird released its grip on the bark, flapped its wings and soared off into the depths of the forest. Nate looked up at the sun, already high in the sky.

  ‘Come on,’ he said as cheerfully as he could, ‘I want to see as much as possible while the weather holds.’

  As they ventured deeper into the forest, the sounds of the creatures who had made their homes in the sumpwood stands grew louder. As well as the squawking of the hammelbills, there were odd stuttering cries, lone howls and the muffled chattering of flocks of riffraffs; small ragged birds that flew round and round the upper branches of the trees, snapping at the woodmidges and sumpgnats that gathered there in drifting clouds.

  Suddenly Eudoxia stopped. She grabbed Nate’s arm and pointed. Nate peered into the shadows.

  ‘What?’ he whispered.

  ‘Just there,’ said Eudoxia. ‘Behind that knobbly root … There!’

  As she spoke, there came a rustling sound, and Nate saw a flash of movement as a small grey animal abruptly emerged from the shadows and leaped across from one root to the next. It paused, sniffed at the air and looked around, its small eyes glinting in the shafts of sunlight, then darted back out of sight. A moment later it was back, a large sumpwood seedpod clutched in its paws.

  ‘I think the Professor said they were called ghost quarms,’ said Eudoxia. ‘They feed off the seedpods. Apparently, though, they’re very shy, which is why they live down here among the roots, foraging for pods that have dropped down, rather than risk picking them from the exposed branches up above.’

  She glanced round at Nate, only to find him grinning broadly.

  ‘What?’ she demanded.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Nate. ‘Only you sound like an academic from the Cloud Quarter, or one of those fusty old librarians from the Great Library in the Free Glades district,’ he said, and laughed.

  ‘Fusty old librarians?’ came a voice from behind them. ‘Surely not! Your companion’s far too pretty to be mistaken for an old librarian …’

  Nate and Eudoxia turned from the sight of the quarm feeding to see a tall, thin fourthling standing on the walkway a little way off, watching them with amusement. He wore a peaked funnel hat with earflaps, a short battered topcoat of green tilderleather and breeches that had been patched and repatched so many times it was difficult to tell what they’d been originally made of. A sabre hung from his belt, and the harness over his shoulder had a crossbow and a cluster of ironwood bolts hanging from it.

  ‘Forgive me,’ said the stranger, giving a small bow, ‘but I couldn’t help noticing from your clothes that you’re from Great Glade …’

  ‘New Lake,’ said Eudoxia politely. ‘And Nate’s from Copperwood.’

  ‘Pleased to meet you, Nate,’ said the fourthling. ‘And you … ?’

  ‘Eudoxia,’ said Eudoxia. ‘Eudoxia Prade.’

  ‘Eudoxia Prade of New Lake, very pleased to make your acquaintance,’ he said, smiling broadly. ‘Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Zelphyius Dax, and I’m’ – he glanced at Nate, his eyes twinkling with amusement – ‘a fusty old librarian from the Third Great Library of the Free Glades.’

  Nate blushed, and Eudoxia laughed.

  ‘Though I left the library to avoid becoming too fusty many years ago,’ Zelphyius Dax continued, in a soft measured voice that suggested he didn’t often get a chance to chat, and was enjoying this opportunity to do so. ‘And I’ve travelled the Deepwoods ever since, compiling a treatise that never quite seems to be finished.’

  He crossed over the walkway to join them, and studied the ghost quarm in the distance.

  It was plump and squat, with hunched shoulders and silvery grey fur. Its limbs were long and sinewy, and its fingers dextrous. Most distinctive of all, though, were the two long yellow incisors which grew down from its upper jaw, giving it a comical bucktoothed appearance. The ghost quarm was slowly turning the pod over in its paws, its chisel-like teeth drilling a line right the way round the hard outer casing as it did so until, with a soft crack, the whole pod fell into two halves, which clattered away below. The creature gripped the soft inner kernel in its claws and was raising it to its mouth when, with a startled yelp, it w
as suddenly attacked.

  In the blink of an eye, a worm-like creature with rough mottled skin had dropped down from the roots above, its huge fang-tipped jaws gaping, and swallowed the hapless ghost quarm whole. The thin end of the predator’s serpentine body was wrapped around a high jutting root, anchoring it in place. Dangling in mid-air, the body grew broader as it neared the angular head with its small eyes and writhing feelers. The creature’s jaws had closed, and the ghost quarm was now a large bulge that moved slowly up inside the creature’s body, pushed by strong muscles that rippled as they flexed.

  ‘The lanternjaw,’ said Zelphyius Dax, turning to Nate and Eudoxia.

  Although younger than Squall Razortooth, the librarian had the same weather-beaten complexion as the sky pirate, suggesting a long career in the skies. Despite the deep-etched lines, there was an openness in the librarian’s features – his clear grey eyes, firm-set jaw and broad cheekbones – which gave him a look of honesty and trustworthiness which Nate couldn’t help but like.

  ‘Like the ghost quarm on which it feeds, the lanternjaw is found nowhere else in the Deepwoods, to my knowledge, which’ – he smiled at Eudoxia – ‘is extensive.’

  Eudoxia smiled back. ‘What brings you to the Midwood Decks?’ she asked.

  ‘My skycraft, the Varis Lodd, needs repairs.’

  ‘If it’s to do with the phraxchamber, perhaps I could help,’ said Nate. ‘I worked in a phraxchamber works in Copperwood.’

  ‘Thank you, Nate … ?’

  ‘Quarter,’ said Nate.

  ‘Thank you, Nate Quarter – but, no thank you,’ said Zelphyius Dax. ‘I’m a librarian of the old school. I was taught sky flight at the Lake Landing Academy. None of your phraxchambers for me – just sumpwood, varnish and spidersilk sails. I was on my way to the logging stands to purchase timber, if you’d care to accompany me.’

  ‘We’d love to,’ said Eudoxia.

  They set off along the boardwalk, and as they walked Zelphyius Dax told them all about himself; how he’d grown up in the Southern Woods near a small settlement called the Farrow Ridges, and come to Great Glade to study at the Lake Landing Academy. But life in the big city had not been to his liking and, though he loved the academy, he yearned to return to the Deepwoods. Finally, he had designed and built a twin-masted skycraft of the finest sumpwood and set off on a treatise voyage of a couple of months – and never looked back.