Just light! Only light!
Nate started along the path, pushing down the sense of anticipation threatening to bubble up from the recesses of his mind and replacing it with the light. Leaving the squat tower of the keep behind him, he increased his pace, his heart pounding in his chest as the ascent became steeper.
‘There you are!’ Golderayce’s sharp voice sounded in Gilmora’s head as the old gabtroll stepped back into his chamber.
‘Here I am,’ she said brightly, and began fussing with the candles, pulling them from her bag, dusting them on her apron and pushing them down into the guttering remains of the spent candles. As the Custodian General’s chamber slowly filled with flickering golden light, she turned to him. ‘Now isn’t that much better?’ she said. ‘All bright and friendly …’
‘Just like you, my dear Gilmora,’ said Golderayce, his voice soft and insidious. What is it you’re trying to conceal, you tedious creature? he asked himself.
Nate had gone no more than a hundred strides or so when he heard wings flapping near his head a second time. He looked round to see a tiny flitterwaif, its angled wings black against the distant lights of the town far below.
‘What’s this? What’s this?’ a savage squeak sounded in Nate’s head. ‘Light? Light! … No! … An intruder!’
Red eyes stared back at Nate as the creature swooped past him. Then, with a high-pitched screech, it wheeled round in the air and flew back towards him, its fangs bared in a grimace of hatred. Without thinking, Nate raised his lampstaff and swung it above his head.
As the lamp struck the creature, the orb of glass shattered and, in a burst of flame, the flitterwaif was sent spiralling out into the blackness, its wings on fire. Like a shooting star, the tiny creature blazed down towards the constellation of lights below, screeching in a death wail.
‘Aaaiii!’
Golderayce let go of his goblet of sapwine, sending it crashing to the floor. Gomber spun round, his face white with dread. Gilmora dropped the taper she’d been lighting the candles with. Both of them put their hands to their ears, though there was nothing either of them could do to keep out their master’s thoughts.
‘He’s dead,’ the Custodian General hissed. ‘My little flitterwaif is dead – and by the hands of an intruder. Someone has breached the keep, and is now on Kobold’s Steps. Someone who was helped by—’
He spun round and fixed his gaze on the two quivering gabtrolls who stood before him.
‘No, no,’ cried Gomber and Gilmora together.
Inside their heads, both aged gabtrolls could feel the Custodian General furiously prodding and probing, tearing down their thoughts and delving deep into their minds with razor-sharp talons. Gilmora fell to her knees.
‘No, master …’ she pleaded. ‘No …’
Gomber collapsed beside her, his arms clasped round his head as he writhed on the floor.
‘A visitor! … A lamplighter … You brought him to the keep …’
‘Yes,’ Gilmora whispered, the pain inside her head now unbearable as the waif dug ever deeper.
‘The Riverrise spring! He’s after the water …’
‘Yes,’ groaned Gomber.
‘TRAITORS!!’ Golderayce’s thought exploded in the gabtrolls’ heads.
Seizing his lampstaff, Golderayce stepped over the bodies of the two unconscious gabtrolls and strode towards the door. He made his way through the fortress and across to the tower.
‘Guards! Remain at your posts. There is no problem,’ he reassured the custodians who had heard the commotion. I mustn’t appear weak! Fooled by my own ignorant servants! No one must find out! I shall slit their throats and cut off their eyestalks … But first, the lamplighter …
Reaching the bottom of the tower, he looked around him. He pulled two darts from the shelf above the hooks and pushed them into a top pocket, then took a blowpipe from the rack below. Checking that no one was about, he unlocked the door and strode from the building out onto the path.
‘I shall visit the Garden of Life,’ he thought for the benefit of the guards. Once word gets out that one got past the keep, then all will try …
He paused and cocked his head to one side, his ears trembling as he listened to the sounds in the darkness.
‘A lamp …’ he whispered. So there you are! A smile flickered over his lips as his grip tightened on the carved blowpipe. Not for the first time, thought Golderayce One-Eye, as he made his way silently up Kobold’s Steps, the Garden of Life shall be visited by death …
• CHAPTER SEVENTY-FIVE •
Nate trembled with fear. Behind him, in the darkness, a waif was reaching out and entering his mind.
‘Yes, little lamplighter, I know you’re there,’ Golderayce’s vicious hissing voice sounded in his head. ‘Did you seriously think you could reach the Garden of Life without my knowing? Did you? You little fool! Now you shall pay for your impudence.’
Swallowing hard, Nate stumbled on up the rough rocky track, trying in vain to shut out Golderayce’s jeering voice. His lampstaff was broken and, though it helped him to walk up the steep slope, it could no longer illuminate the way. Time and again on the treacherous path, he slipped and skidded on unseen rocks beneath his feet that threatened at any moment to turn his ankle or send him tumbling. His breath wheezed loudly in his ears; his heart was racing, and inside his head, the light had faded, to be replaced with a single word that echoed repeatedly.
Faster! Faster!
Behind him, he could hear the Custodian General, and not just in his thoughts. No, it was his footsteps he heard now, and the click and clack of two staffs in his hands, one heavy and one light, as he drove himself on up the path.
Faster! Faster! Faster …
‘Your friends will have their eyestalks cut off and their throats cut. They will die slowly, and in agony,’ the Custodian General whispered inside Nate’s head. ‘But not as slowly as I shall kill you, lamplighter …’
Nate started back. The voice sounded closer than before.
‘Oh, it is closer, lamplighter,’ hissed Golderayce. ‘Much, much closer …’
Nate scrambled on, the words spurring him up the steep incline. Although even as he did so, he was aware that while his own eyes were barely able to make out a thing, the waif’s huge black eyes were designed for penetrating the blanket of darkness.
‘Precisely, lamplighter,’ Golderayce sneered, ‘and any second now, my gaze shall fall upon you. First I shall paralyse you, and then I shall skin you slowly, a limb at a time …’
As Nate struggled on, his chest aching with exertion, the air about him began to change. The darkness thickened and curdled, and he found himself enveloped in a warm moist swaddling of mist.
The clouds, he thought. I’ve reached the clouds …
‘It won’t help you,’ came Golderayce’s contemptuous voice. ‘You shall watch helplessly as I cut out your beating heart and hold it in front of your eyes.’
Below his feet now, Nate felt steps, carved out of the solid rock. He ran up them blindly, the fingertips of one hand trailing the side of the rock which rose up beside him.
Keep going, he told himself. Just a little further …
Already, as the cloud thickened, so the darkness was beginning to recede. The swirling fog turned from black to grey and, by degrees, to a dense blanket of white. Then, as he ran, he suddenly realized that he could actually see the broad steps cut into the rock beneath his feet and, looking up, the tall rocky chimney he was ascending. The fog continued to thin. Ahead of him, through the twists of mist, he saw the sky, blue and cloudless, with a warm sun shining down out of it into his upturned face. A moment later, just ahead, a great stone archway appeared.
‘So near and yet so far, lamplighter,’ came a whispered voice inside his head, and Nate spun round to see the thin ancient-looking Custodian General standing before him, his one eye blazing. ‘Didn’t I say you wouldn’t make it? Didn’t I promise that I would make you pay for your impudence?’ Golderayce gave a low
wheezing chuckle. ‘Now it is time to complete the rest of my promise …’
He raised the blowpipe to his mouth and shot the paralysing dart.
At that moment, from overhead, a great black bird soared up over the stone archway and down over Nate’s shoulder, its mighty wings stirring up a ferocious whirlwind around it. For an instant, the dart from the blowpipe froze in mid-air, inches from Nate’s terrified face, before turning and hissing back the way it had come. With a tiny glint, the dart embedded itself in the Custodian General’s neck.
In front of Nate, Golderayce One-Eye dropped his blowpipe and his lampstaff, and clutched desperately at his throat. As Nate watched, the skin on the waif’s face, legs, arms, fingers and neck turned darker and tougher, tightly constricting round the bones beneath it. His cheeks hollowed, his barbels withered and his ears turned ragged and drooped like tattered fragments of cloth. The one good eye, black and glinting, that only moments earlier had seemed almost to be boring right inside Nate’s skull, suddenly turned as dull and opaque as its neighbour. And all the while, the Custodian General seemed to be shrinking in on himself, his body growing stooped and gnarled as centuries of the rejuvenating properties of the water of life evaporated in seconds with the dart’s paralysing venom.
‘He… e … elp me …’ an ancient faltering voice stammered inside Nate’s head. ‘I …’
The voice quavered weakly and fell silent. And before Nate’s eyes, the ancient waif fell to the ground in a heap of yellowed bones and tattered skin that, as he watched, crumbled to a fine powdery dust and blew away on the wind. Finally, there was nothing left where Golderayce had been standing but the lampstaff, the blowpipe and the glistening black robes of the former Custodian General, which lay in a small crumpled heap.
‘What in Earth and Sky …’ Nate murmured.
The great black bird hovered above him for a moment, its wingbeats stirring up the swirling mist. Nate knew what it was. It had a large hooked bill and curved crest, black and white striped tail feathers and black plumage, so dark it gleamed purple in the sunlight. Nate had heard of the creatures, but this was the first caterbird he had ever seen. Then, just as he was marvelling at its magnificence, the caterbird soared upwards, its outstretched wings catching thermals which spiralled up high into the air above.
‘Wait,’ Nate called after it. ‘Come back …’
‘So,’ said a voice behind him, ‘you’ve come at last.’
• CHAPTER SEVENTY-SIX •
Nate looked round. In front of him were two gaunt figures in dark shimmering waif robes. They were standing on a broad terrace of white marble. Behind Nate was a high archway of stone, the entrance to this, the Garden of Life.
Below the archway lay the remains of Golderayce One-Eye; his lampstaff, blowpipe and black robes peppered with dust. In the clear, sunlit sky high overhead, the black outline of the mighty caterbird grew smaller by the second.
On the other side of the terrace, a stone staircase led down to the lush vegetation of the garden that fringed the turquoise waters of the Riverrise lake, while eight pinnacles of rock rose up around it. In the centre of the vast lake was a spike of rock which ascended in fluted columns to a jagged point, the highest in all the Edgelands. The waters of the Riverrise spring bubbled up from fissures in the flutes and flowed down in steady trickles into the lake below.
Opposite the spring, on the far side of the lake, a stone ledge jutted out from the garden and over the abyss below. This was the Riverrise waterfall, its flow controlled by a pair of heavy iron sluice gates at the side of the lake, their black winding mechanism disfiguring the beauty of the surrounding garden.
‘You have come, as the caterbird said you would,’ one of the gaunt figures said, his voice cracked and ancient-sounding.
He had a long, flowing white beard, and thick white hair pulled into tufts and knotted in the style favoured by woodtrolls of the First Age. By contrast, his companion was clean shaven, his steel grey hair oiled and combed in the way favoured by the librarians of the Second Age. Both of them seemed to shimmer and shine from beneath their dark robes, making it difficult for Nate to look directly into their faces.
‘Walk with us, down to the lake,’ the bearded figure said, holding out a shining hand, ‘visitor from the Third Age.’
Nate climbed to his feet and followed the two figures down the long stone staircase and into the Garden of Life. At the edge of the lake, they stopped and sat on the great stump of a silver-grey lufwood tree. A little way off was a small stone slab embedded in the mossy earth, with words that had been painstakingly carved into its surface: Maugin, The Stone Pilot.
‘Are you custodians?’ Nate asked uncertainly, fingering the glass vial in his jacket pocket. ‘I … I meant no harm. I came here to get water from the spring to cure my friend … She’s dying …’ He frowned. ‘Golderayce followed me. He was going to kill me.’
The clean-shaven figure turned his glowing face towards Nate.
‘So you managed to get past the keep?’ he said, with a bitter laugh. ‘That is something in all these long years we have never managed to do. No, we are not custodians,’ he said, in answer to Nate’s question. ‘Rather, we are prisoners here in the Garden of Life. Though, those who guard us speak of us in whispers as’ – he smiled – ‘the Immortals.’
• CHAPTER SEVENTY-SEVEN •
The Archemax steamed on through the howling winds, the sky overhead boiling with dark swirling clouds.
‘Keep the chamber gears free of ice,’ Cirrus Gladehawk shouted. ‘We’re going to need all the power we can get to ride out this storm.’
‘Aye aye, Captain,’ replied Squall Razortooth. ‘Weelum and I are right on it!’
‘It’s worse than any storm I’ve ever seen!’ said the Professor, emerging from the cabins below the aft deck and clutching hold of his funnel hat as he did so. ‘Should we put in at Four Lakes?’
‘Not if Galston’s going to have any hope of seeing his daughter again,’ said Cirrus bleakly. ‘Slip says he’s fading fast.’
Above the phraxship, the mighty storm seemed to be gathering pace, huge cloud banks merging into swirling eddies of lightning flashes and thunderclaps, the winds growing stronger by the second.
‘We’ll have to battle through it all the way to the Thorn Gate,’ said Cirrus grimly. ‘This is no ordinary storm. It’s like three storms in one. I’ve never known anything like it.’ He frowned. ‘The swirling eddies and cloud eruptions indicate a white storm, but the copper-coloured hues and cursive swirls are classic signs of a sepia storm. Then again, at its heart is a buildup of energy that suggests a storm from the furthest reaches of Open Sky. And judging by its course, there is only one place it can be heading for …’
‘You mean,’ said the Professor, staring up at the dark turbulent sky.
‘Yes,’ said Cirrus. ‘Riverrise.’
• CHAPTER SEVENTY-EIGHT •
‘The first time I came to Riverrise,’ said Twig, ‘I was little older than you are now, Nate. I was a Sanctaphrax academic and a sky pirate captain, and I’d come to rescue the last member of my missing crew, the stone pilot Maugin.’
His eyes lingered on the small gravestone by the lake.
‘I left here, strapped to the blazing trunk of this very tree – my apprentice, Cowlquape, by my side – and rode it all the way to the very Edge itself …’
His green eyes went dreamy as the old sky pirate captain was momentarily lost in thought. He looked back at Nate.
‘The second time, sixty years later, I was carried here by the caterbird, the mighty creature who has watched over me since its hatching. I was close to death, the crossbow bolt of a Guardian of Night lodged in my back. I remember opening my eyes and seeing the Riverrise waterfall glistening in the sunlight as we approached, and there on the very lip of the jutting rock was Maugin, still waiting as she’d promised to do, for my return. As we came closer, I saw her throw up her arms in joy – and then crumple to the ground …
‘We
swooped low over the lake and I heard the waif voice for the first time in my head. “You shall never be reunited.”
‘Above me, the caterbird shuddered as darts whistled past my head and struck its wings – and the next thing I knew, I was falling down towards the lake.
‘When I came to my senses, I was lying by the shore, Maugin’s lifeless body beside me. I’d spent a lifetime trying to return to her, and now finally I had – and she was dead. I drank from the spring and felt the life return to me, but it was too late for Maugin. I buried her body beside this tree stump and waited for the caterbird to return …
‘But he didn’t return,’ he added softly. ‘Instead, I felt the waif probing my thoughts, reading my mind and sifting through my memories.
‘What strength I had, as an old sky pirate, returned to me, but I knew that I was trapped, just as Maugin had been before me. I was too old to survive a second skyfiring – and anyway, it had been Maugin herself who had calculated the angle of flight on that previous occasion. Left to my own devices, I would probably have fired myself off into Open Sky.’ He shrugged. ‘And as for travelling on foot, I knew that far below me, in the darkness of the Nightwoods, there lurked the murderous waif and thousands of his kind.
‘Why he didn’t kill me, I didn’t understand. At first. But over the years that followed, I realized that the waif enjoyed reading my thoughts, just as he must have once enjoyed reading Maugin’s.
‘In those early days I spent at Riverrise, I never saw him. But bit by bit, the waif grew bolder. He would emerge from the darkness below and lurk by the gateway to the garden, his blowpipe in hand. He was young back then, and ambitious. As I got to know him – always from a distance and only through those thoughts he allowed me to hear – the awful truth began to dawn on me.
Edge Chronicles 10: The Immortals Page 45