Edge Chronicles 10: The Immortals

by Paul Stewart;Chris Riddell

  ‘The Stone Gardens and the Edgeriver waterfall lie to the east, beyond those mounds of scree,’ said Cirrus, indicating a series of grey ridges which stretched away through the mist to their left. ‘The Edgewater River itself flows somewhere beneath our feet, through what’s left of the old sewers, as far as I can recollect …’

  He continued looking around him.

  ‘And we’re standing in what was once a market square in the south of the city, not far from the palace of the old Undertown leagues.’

  Nate looked around at the low weed-infested piles of fallen masonry and tried to imagine the bustling streets and crowded shops and stalls that must once have existed in this forlorn place on the edge of the world.

  ‘Mother,’ whispered Tentermist, shivering in her long moss cloak as she looked about her with wide frightened eyes. ‘Where is the city of shining spires?’

  Wyver bent down and hugged the young’un, her own eyes full of doubt and uncertainty. ‘The guide knows,’ she said. ‘He’ll be here soon, with Thegthern and Mollver and all the rest, and then he’ll show us …’

  Cirrus and the Professor exchanged glances, while Squall, Slip and Weelum shifted about uneasily on their feet.

  ‘I for one would like to meet this so-called guide,’ growled Squall, ‘and ask him what he means by bringing humble working folk out here to this desolate place with the promise of a better life. Probably some lowdown Deepwoods swindler …’

  ‘He’s not!’ protested Tentermist, leaping high on her strange legs and shaking her tiny fists at the old sky pirate. ‘He’s not! He had a wise face, and kind eyes. He understood and listened to us, all of us, even young’uns like me.’

  ‘Perhaps, if you don’t mind, Professor,’ said Galston Prade, swinging his cane at a clump of broad-leafed weeds, ‘might I suggest that we delay our expedition to the waterfall just until our friends here are reunited with their companions? Weelum can weave them a simple windbreak, Squall can make them a fire, and Slip and I shall brew some bristleweed tea.’

  Cirrus nodded in agreement. ‘The Stone Gardens are close by, and the party we passed will be here in an hour or so. I can run a few checks on the hull weights in the meantime. What do you say, Professor?’

  ‘Very well,’ said the Professor, noting by the looks on their faces that Nate and Eudoxia agreed with Galston’s suggestion. ‘Like Squall, I’d like to have a word with this guide of theirs too.’ He removed his spectacles and wiped the mist from them, before putting them back on. ‘While we wait, I intend to have a look around. My brother and his party might just have left some sign or other of having been here … Nate, Eudoxia, perhaps you’d like to join me?’

  ‘Don’t stray too far from the Archemax,’ called Cirrus with his usual caution as they set off. ‘Particularly in this fog.’

  Eudoxia turned back and crouched down next to the troubled-looking young’un. ‘Don’t worry, Tentermist,’ she said. ‘My father and my friends will look after you until the other fettle-leggers get here, and then we can decide on the best thing to do.’

  Tentermist nodded solemnly and pulled her moss cloak tightly around her. Eudoxia patted her on the shoulder, before straightening up and hurrying after Nate and the Professor, their bodies already indistinct in the fog.

  She caught up with them a few moments later, and together the three of them continued into the eerie stillness of the abandoned city, the swirling mist laced with the fragrance of lush growth. The going was difficult. Beneath their feet, the mossy paving stones were slippery from the damp air and stuck out of the ground at all angles; gnarled knotted roots and stout woody stems thrusting up from below them. Some of the slabs had been smashed to pieces by huge lumps of masonry that had tumbled down from the surrounding buildings, forming an uneven jumble of rubble.

  From every crack and crevice, vegetation sprouted – tall, dense thorn bushes, tangles of tarrybriar suckers and black-stalked shrubs with broad flat leaves, their roots growing into the gaps between the stones where the mortar was crumbling; pale delicate ferns, clusters of tendrilled silverleafs, clumps of frondmoss and tall spiky bushes with dark mottled foliage … It was as though, just as the grassland had reseeded the polluted Mire, the lush vegetation had reclaimed the ruins of Undertown. The abandoned city had been transformed into a wild garden.

  Through it all were the twisting finger-like swirls of fog, weaving in and out of the broken windows and tumbledown arches, between the crumbling pillars and round the cracked leaning towers, blurring the corners of the broken buildings and glazing each leaf, spike and tendril growing out of them with droplets of dew. And as the three travellers made their way deeper into the ruined city, heads down as they picked their way over the treacherous slabs and boulders, the foliage dripped on them like soft rain.

  ‘It’s so quiet,’ said Eudoxia. ‘And so eerie. Not so much a city as a ghost of a city …’

  ‘It was abandoned long ago,’ said Nate, ‘sometime in the Second Age, I think.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said the Professor, stepping up onto a great block of stone and looking round, his eyes glinting behind his spectacles. ‘But what an incredible place it must once have been. Just imagine!’ he said. ‘Back in the First Age of Flight, this was the greatest city in all the Edge – or rather, one of the twin cities. For while here below was mighty Undertown, with its skyship yards, foundries and legendary sky pirate taverns, above there was the magnificent city of Sanctaphrax, built on the great floating rock and anchored by a massive chain …’

  ‘A great floating rock,’ said Eudoxia, a faraway look in her eyes. ‘How I would love to have seen that!’

  ‘The anchor chain was cut, isn’t that right, Professor?’ said Nate. ‘And the whole city floated off into Open Sky.’

  ‘A great tragedy,’ said the Professor absentmindedly as he bent down and picked something up from beside his right boot. ‘Then, in the Second Age,’ he went on, ‘Undertown itself was destroyed by a terrible storm. The black maelstrom, they called it. Though not before most of its inhabitants had escaped and journeyed to the Deepwoods, the legendary Rook Barkwater among them, to establish what became our own city of Great Glade.’

  At the sound of Rook’s name, Nate and Eudoxia exchanged looks, but the Professor didn’t seem to notice. Instead, he had stepped down from the stone block and was staring intently at the object in his hand.

  ‘It looks like a glader,’ said Nate, peering down at the small gold coin nestling in the Professor’s palm.

  ‘It is a glader,’ said the Professor. ‘Someone from Great Glade has been here. And recently. Look how bright and shiny it is …’

  ‘Your brother, do you think?’ said Eudoxia. ‘Or someone else from the descending party?’

  ‘Maybe,’ said the Professor thoughtfully.

  He pocketed the coin and the three of them walked on through the ruins of the city, lost in thoughts of its extraordinary past. The dense foggy air whistled softly as it swirled through the cracks in the dilapidated buildings, like the haunted sighs and whispers of those who had once lived here, and whose ghostly presence remained, lurking in dark shadows.

  They came to the crumbling remains of what must once have been a tall and elegant palace. Beneath their feet, the ground was littered with countless shards of shattered marble which, as they brushed away the thick lichen and moss that clung to its surface, revealed themselves to be carved fragments – fingers, ears; pieces of broken heads and undulating sections of stone-fashioned robes – of what must have been the hundreds of statues that once decorated its façade.

  ‘Someone’s had a fire here,’ Nate said, kicking at the powdery ash and charred embers which nestled in the middle of a blackened circle of stones.

  The Professor nodded. ‘A woodtroll campfire by the look of it,’ he observed, the toe of his boot prodding one of the charred embers, the unburned end of which looked almost like the head and shoulders of a hammelhorn. ‘See how the stones are piled to prevent the burning logs from floa
ting?’

  Eudoxia spotted something in a clump of weeds close by and, stooping down, she picked it up.

  ‘It’s some kind of shoe,’ she said.

  Nate and the Professor looked at the ungainly-looking slipper in her hand, with its stubby heel, wooden sole and thick plaited leather uppers.

  ‘It belonged to a cloddertrog matron,’ said the Professor, taking it and turning it over in his hand. ‘It’s the sort of clog a simple cave-dweller might wear,’ and added, ‘It definitely doesn’t belong to any of my brother’s party …’

  Just then, the sound of a steam klaxon boomed in the mist-filled air.

  ‘That’s the Archemax,’ said Eudoxia. ‘The fettle-leggers must have arrived!’

  They turned and hurried back the way they’d come through the eerie ruins. A short while later, with the fog beginning to thin, they emerged from the undergrowth to find the rubble-strewn square beneath the anchored Archemax crowded with newly arrived travellers.

  Nate stared at the fettle-leggers around him. Like Wyver and Tentermist, they stood on bird-like feet, with scaly skin and three long clawed toes. They all had narrow chiselled faces and large browless eyes, with shocks of thick hair rising up above their head, herbs and fragrant dried tree ferns woven into the matted tangle. And while Wyver and Tentermist had been loaded down with what seemed to Nate to be heavy packs on their backs, these newcomers looked even more burdened.

  Huge backpacks rested on the woven moss cloaks at their shoulders, each one bulging with a thousand items, with still more tied onto the outside; bedrolls and cooking pots, ropes, lanterns and phraxmuskets – and, Nate noticed, the looms with which they wove the famous nightspider silk into fine lengths of shimmering cloth. It seemed that the fettle-leggers had bundled up their entire lives into these backpacks when they left the Northern Reaches, and had carried them all the way here to this desolate ruined city.

  Nate’s heart went out to them. What in Sky’s name were they to do now? he wondered.

  Spotting them, Galston Prade came striding over to Nate, Eudoxia and the Professor.

  ‘They’re good simple folk,’ he said, ‘who followed this guide of theirs all the way from the Northern Reaches. No sooner do they get to the outskirts of Undertown than this so-called guide vanishes into the mist, saying they’re to wait here for his return. They’re all talking about some sort of feast – a welcome perhaps, that the guide has promised them …’

  The fettle-leggers were spread out across the square in exhausted-looking groups, while Squall, Weelum and Slip passed among them, pouring out steaming bristleweed tea from a brew kettle into the wooden bowls and flasks the travellers held out to them.

  The Professor’s hand went to the phraxpistol at his belt. ‘I don’t like it,’ he said, his eyes narrowing as he scanned the ruins surrounding the square. ‘This guide is probably no more than a brigand, with a gang of thieves lying in wait out there to ambush and rob these unfortunate weavers. Probably only holding off from attacking because they’ve spotted that we’re here. I’ve seen some despicable scams in my time, but this tops the lot.’

  The Professor paused. A fresh breeze had begun to blow, and with it the mist had finally cleared, sweeping away to the west to reveal the ruined city in all its leafy green confusion. A hush had fallen over the square, every head now turned to gaze up at the blue sky in the east and the astonishing sight it contained.

  Through the crowds, Tentermist came cantering excitedly, her face flushed and eyes sparkling.

  ‘Look! Look!’ she exclaimed to Eudoxia, pointing to the sky. ‘The city of shining spires!’

  • CHAPTER EIGHTY-FIVE •

  The great floating rock hovered in the air above the Stone Gardens, immense and yet dream-like, as if at any moment it might fade away like the tendrils of thick mist that had cloaked it.

  On top of the rock, glittering in the bright sunlight, was a magnificent city of elegant spires, castellated towers and tall minarets which reached up into the air at the top of gleaming academies and palaces, golden against the blue of the sky. Two immense platforms jutted out, one on each side of the great rock, with what looked like baskets suspended on ropes from heavy winches at their ends. And alongside the massive hanging weights that stabilized the gigantic rock from beneath was a long thick chain, which cut down through the air to the Stone Gardens beneath.

  ‘Sanctaphrax,’ breathed the Professor incredulously. ‘It has returned.’

  In the ruined square, all was movement; scurrying and scrabbling, bobbing and ducking as the fettle-leggers gathered up their belongings. Those who had been sitting on blankets spread out on the mossy paving stones were leaping to their feet, while those already standing were feverishly packing their backpacks and securing their bedrolls and cooking pots to the dangling straps and ties. The fire was extinguished, woollen capes and barkbonnets were secured and, to the insistent cries of the various fettle-legger elders, the three-hundred-strong crowd of villagers began to assemble in an orderly column – mothers and fathers, old’uns and young’uns, babes in arms.

  As Nate watched, one by one, they all turned their faces towards the great floating city of Sanctaphrax, their eyes sparkling, their hair, with the sun behind it, glowing like haloes – and their strange feet tapping on the ground with excitement. At the back of the column, their faces wreathed in smiles, stood Wyver and Tentermist.

  ‘Come,’ said the Professor, as if stirring himself from a dream. ‘We must get aboard the Archemax at once!’

  They hurried across the square, only for Eudoxia to pause for a moment beside the fettle-legger young’un.

  ‘The guide spoke the truth!’ Tentermist said exultantly, her eyes fixed on the floating city. ‘And we shall wait here for him to come for us, just as he promised!’

  ‘Leave her, Eudoxia,’ the Professor said gently. ‘Whoever this guide is, my guess is that we’ll find him up there.’

  Reluctantly, Eudoxia bade farewell to the fetter-legger young’un and followed Nate and the Professor over to the hovering phraxship, its funnel already sending a thin plume of white steam snaking up into the air. Nate held the sumpwood ladder steady for Eudoxia to climb, then hurried up the shifting rungs himself.

  ‘Wuh-wuh,’ Weelum the banderbear greeted him happily as Nate dropped down onto the deck, and together they began winding in the twin anchor spikes at the stern.

  At the helm, Cirrus Gladehawk, his eyes fixed straight ahead, pulled on the flight levers. First, at the funnel, the ribbon-like plume of steam thickened to a billowing cloud. Then the propulsion duct began to roar – causing some of those at the front of the crowd of fettle-leggers to cry out with surprise and shield their faces from the intense heat of the blast. The next moment, with a gentle lurch, the Archemax began to ascend.

  Up at the phraxchamber, Squall Razortooth patted the humming metal sphere encouragingly. ‘Steady as she goes,’ he called down to Cirrus Gladehawk. ‘We’ll be up there in no time.’

  The captain nodded as he pulled the central flight lever slowly back. Eudoxia hurried up to the prow of the phraxship to join her father, her gaze never straying for a moment from the great city in the sky ahead. A few moments later, Nate and the Professor joined them.

  As the Archemax rose above the ruins of Undertown, Nate glanced down and realized what a tiny area he and the other two had explored. The city below was vast and sprawling, spreading from one side of the point of the jutting Edge to the other.

  Dilapidated factories and foundries fringed its western borders, where the Edgewater River disappeared, to flow through the fractured sewers beneath. To the north and south were crumbling towers and palaces, shrubs and saplings clinging to their broken walls and sprouting up out of their roofs; while looking to the east, Nate saw that Undertown must once have been twice as large for, as they flew over the ruins, the occasional pointed spire or jutting finger of brickwork showed that half a city more lay beneath the jumbled mass of vegetation and rubble.

  As they a
pproached the huge floating rock in the sky ahead, the rubble below gave way to the barren rocky pavement of the Stone Gardens, into which the Edgewater River bubbled up once more to resume its course to the lip of rock at the Edge itself.

  Once, the Stone Gardens had been alive. Not with plants, but with the rocks themselves, which had sprouted from the ground, one upon the other, getting more and more buoyant as they’d grown. They’d formed great stacks that had risen ever taller, until the rock at the top had become so large and so buoyant it could be harvested and used in the sky galleons of the First Age of Flight. But then stone sickness had struck, turning the miraculous flight rocks to dust, and transforming the Stone Gardens into the barren pavement that Nate now looked down upon.

  The Archemax came closer to the floating rock, and from the prow Nate and his companions could see clearly where the end of the mighty Sanctaphrax chain had now anchored itself. At the point where the waterfall thundered over the tip of the Edge cliff and fell into the abyss below, was a single jutting crag. This, the very tip of the Edge, round which the water flowed, had snagged the great iron ring at the end of the chain, like a stone finger through a gold band.

  At the helm, Cirrus Gladehawk was battling with the flight levers as the Archemax was caught by turbulent winds. She pitched and juddered. Squall Razortooth ran a hasty check over the fragile cog lines and cotter pins connecting the controls to the phraxchamber, while Slip darted this way and that, battening down the open hatches and securing every loose item that threatened to be snatched away by the unpredictable gusts.

  They rose slowly, the captain making constant readjustments to the flight levers and hull weights as they went. Before them was the face of the mighty floating rock. Its pitted surface glistened in the sunlight as the Archemax’s shadow slid up over it. They passed a hanging basket which hung down from a minor jetty, then another. And looking up, they saw the jutting boards, rising stanchions and fluted pillars of the huge West Landing silhouetted against the sky above them.