Clash of the Sky Galleons Read online

  For William, Joseph, Anna, Katy, and Jack

  INTRODUCTION

  It is well to remember one thing about the Edge. Nothing is ever what it seems.

  Nowhere is this truer than in the beautiful yet perilous Deepwoods. The fruit of the rosy heartapple, for instance, is sweet, juicy and fragrant, yet a single bite of its golden flesh is enough to strike its victim dead, the corpses round its trunk nourishing the treacherous tree and helping it to grow taller and still more alluring. Likewise wig-wigs. At first sight, these soft, fluffy, orange creatures look cute and harmless. But in an instant, they can part their fur to reveal jaws like bear-traps, and in frenzied packs they devour their prey in a matter of seconds.

  Then of course there are the banderbears. With their great curved claws and huge glinting tusks, these massive monsters are indeed ferocious if provoked -yet take the trouble to look behind that terrifying exterior and you will find one of the wisest, noblest, most loyal creatures in all the Edge.

  If the Deepwoods is a place of danger and deception, then other parts of the Edge are yet more treacherous. The Edgelands for instance, with their howling winds and swirling mists, are home to the phantasms, wraiths and strange restless spirits that prey on any who stray there; while the seemingly beautiful and enchanting Twilight Woods are more dangerous still. Here, the eternal half-light of the forest robs those who enter it of their thoughts, their memories, their senses, their minds - and yet refuses to let them die, no matter how hideously decayed they become.

  It is, however, beyond the Mire - a vast wilderness of shifting mud and towering dunes, deadly blowholes, sudden mudslides and loathsome scavengers - that perhaps the most insidious dangers of all lie. Here, where tribes and races from all parts of the Edge gather on the very lip of the world, are to be found the mighty twin cities.

  Above is Sanctaphrax, the great floating city, with its ancient academies and learned scholars, its fabulous towers and astonishing viaducts. Below lies Undertown, a vast sprawling city of foundries, markets and sky-shipyards; of squalid slums, crowded taverns and magnificent palaces of unsurpassed wealth and opulence. In the twin cities, the unwary and uninformed do not last long. It is essential to keep your eyes and ears open; to learn how things are - and fast!

  Learn, for instance, how the proud academics jealously guard their right to harvest the flight-rocks from the Stone Gardens, a place where trespassers face death. Learn also how the Leagues control everything and everyone in Undertown, and would control the sky itself if only they could. To cross a high-hat leagues-master means death at the hands of a waif assassin - or worse. Yet there are a few who dare to challenge the Leagues of Undertown and their cosy relationship with the academics of Sanctaphrax.

  These individuals are known as sky pirates - few in number, certainly but brave, reckless and bold beyond measure. But the days of these swashbuckling sky pirates - tolerated by the mighty Leagues only because they use their services themselves in their bitter internal feuds and rivalries - may be numbered. The powerful Ruptus Pentephraxis, head of the Leagues of Undertown, and his scheming henchman, Imbix Hoth, Master of the League of Rock Merchants and High Master of the Leagues of Flight, wish to crush the sky pirates once and for all.

  Listen in the refectories and cloisters of Sanctaphrax as professors whisper of it. Linger in the taverns of Undertown as sky pirates discuss it. Loiter at the gates of the sky-shipyards, where the yardmasters and their shipwrights talk of little else. There is danger in the air. A great showdown is coming; a reckoning. Everyone senses it. Yet the foundries and workshops bustle with industry as normal, the cradles of the sky-shipyards are full of ships under construction, and the academics await another rock harvest just as they always have.

  But it is well to remember one thing about the Edge. Nothing is ever what it seems …

  The Deepwoods, the Stone Gardens, the Edgewater River. Undertown and Sanctaphrax. Names on a map.

  Yet behind each name lie a thousand tales - tales that have been recorded in ancient scrolls, tales that have been passed down the generations by word of mouth -tales which even now are being told.

  What follows is but one of those tales.

  • CHAPTER ONE •

  EDGE WRAITHS

  Not even here in this place of ghosts and demons and half-formed things!’ bellow ed th e wi ld-eyed sky pirate captain, his voice cracking as he struggled to make himself heard above the screaming wind. ‘Not even here will you be safe from my vengeance!’

  The sky ship bucked and swayed as it fought against the violent air currents which kept all but the most reckless or foolhardy from venturing over the lip of the Edge and down into the abyss below. For here, where the warm Mire mud cascaded down over the cliff face in huge oozing mudflows and met the icy air currents of the void below, gales and hurricanes and turbulent fog were whipped up into a frenzy.

  ‘No matter how far down into these infernal depths you descend,’ Wind Jackal raged, shaking his fist at the eternal gloom below, ‘I shall hunt you down …’

  ‘Father, please,’ the young sky pirate by the captain’s side protested, and laid a hand on his shoulder. ‘The crew …’

  Wind Jackal turned from the balustrade at the helm of the Galerider, the look of glazed fury on his face giving way to a frown as he found the eyes of his crew upon him. There was Spillins, the ancient oakelf, high up in the caternest. Ratbit, the swivel-eyed mobgnome, his heavy jacket laden with charms. Steg Jambles, the harpooneer, with young Tem Barkwater, as ever, by his side. Sagbutt, the fierce flat-head goblin, his neck-rings gleaming. And Maris Pallitax, staring up from the fore-deck. They all shared the same expression - one of barely contained panic as they stared wide-eyed at their captain, looking to him for reassurance.

  Only the newest member of the crew seemed immune to the terror of this fearful place he had brought them to. The Stone Pilot. Concealed inside the tall conical hood that she never removed, and silent as the day - only weeks earlier - when she had been rescued from the Deepwoods slave market, she tended the flight-rock, seemingly oblivious to all around her. The sight of the Stone Pilot applying the cooling rods and adjusting the blazing sumpwood burners which surrounded the flight-rock seemed to calm the captain, for he took the wheel from his son with a grim smile.

  ‘Forgive me, Quint,’ he said, running his hands over the flight-levers. ‘It’s just that, after all these years, he seems so close …’

  A blast of wind hit the Galerider, making the sky ship shudder from stem to stern, and forcing Wind Jackal to feverishly adjust the hull-weights. His hands raced expertly over the bone-handled flight-levers on either side of the great wheel, raising this one a tad, lowering that one.

  ‘Sky curse this infernal wind!’ he snarled, scanning the mud-clogged cliff edge. ‘I can’t hold her much longer. We must find somewhere to tether …’

  Suddenly, the strident voice of Spillins cried out from the caternest. ‘Jutting rock at fifty strides!’

  ‘Thank Sky’ Wind Jackal murmured, removing his right hand from the hull-weight levers for a split second; just long enough to put the carved tilderhorn amulet gratefully to his lips. ‘Hold her steady as you can, Stone Pilot. We’re depending on you. Tem! Ratbit!’ he bellowed. ‘Man the winch! Steg, prepare to descend.’

  A chorus of voices and a flurry of movement erupted all round the sky ship as the crew hurried to do their captain’s bidding, taking up their positions and getting to grips with the ship’s heavy equipment. Ratbit barked commands at the young and lanky Tem Barkwater as the pair of them swung the winding-winch round until the great ironwood wheel was jutting out over the port side of the sky ship. Steg Jambles secured a leather harness round his midriff, sei
zed the rope that dangled from the winch-wheel and attached one to the other.

  ‘Jutting rock directly beneath us!’ Spillins shouted down.

  Quint and Maris scurried across the deck - skirting round Filbus Queep the thin-faced quartermaster, who had appeared from his quarters above the aft-hold - and peered over the side. Sure enough, there was the single jutting crag that Spillins had spotted, a small island of stillness and stability amidst the constantly shifting Mire. It stood proud of the oozing white mud, which swirled slowly round it, then poured over the edge in great globules that glistened for a moment, before disappearing into the eternal gloom below.

  Quint turned and looked up at the flight-rock platform. The Stone Pilot was standing to the left of the great rock, her back towards him. Since the moment they’d first met, the mysterious figure had uttered not a single word. Yet the hunched urgency with which she worked now, feverishly pumping the rock-bellows and riddling the ashes from the roaring furnace, spoke louder than any words.

  Every moment the Galerider hovered here, untethered over the void, it risked being swept away and lost for ever in Open Sky. But the Stone Pilot was a natural, whose skills seemed to grow with every passing day. Under her care now, the heated flight-rock was gradually becoming less buoyant and the Galerider was descending towards the jutting rock.

  ‘Now, Steg! Now!’ bellowed the captain, his hands leaping from lever to bone-handled lever as he fought to keep the sky ship hovering motionless in place.

  Steg Jambles didn’t need telling twice. He tested the rope with a quick tug - just to be on the safe side - before stepping off the side of the ship. Tem and Ratbit took the strain and, when Steg had gathered himself, began turning the pulley-lever. Slowly, carefully, they lowered the thick-set fore-decker down through the air towards the jutting rock.

  At the balustrade, Maris gripped Quint’s arm and turned to look up at him, her dark eyes glistening with a mixture of awe and excitement. Ever since Wind Jackal had plucked the pair of them away from Sanctaphrax those few short weeks earlier, she had seen so much: the snow-white desolation of the Mire, the treacherous glow of the Twilight Woods, the endless canopy of the Deepwoods from above - as well as the horrors of the slave market from which both the Stone Pilot and Tem Barkwater had been rescued. But this … this was the most chilling place they had visited so far, and she shivered with dread.

  ‘The great void,’ she murmured tremulously. ‘The realm of ghosts and demons and … what was it your father said?’

  ‘Half-formed things,’ said Quint, staring down at the fore-decker dangling below.

  ‘Stop!’ Steg’s bellowed command was just audible above the turbulent air.

  Tem and Ratbit stopped turning the winch at once, and slid the locking bolt across. Far below, Steg gripped hold of a rough chunk of the jutting rock with one white-knuckled hand, while with the other, he unhooked the glinting rock-spike from his sky pirate coat.

  ‘When you’re ready, Master Steg!’ Wind Jackal called out from the helm, battling to hold the ship steady, as the howling wind battered and buffeted it, seemingly from all sides at once.

  Steg thrust the pointed end of the spur into a narrow crack in the rock then, with a great round-bowled hammer that he’d unhooked from his belt, he pounded the spike into place with a flurry of colossal blows. As the sound of Steg’s hammer blows rose up from below, Wind Jackal smiled grimly.

  ‘Be ready with that tolley-rope, Master Tem,’ he bellowed down at Steg’s mate.

  ‘Aye-aye, Captain,’ Tem called back.

  ‘Spike secured!’ Steg’s voice floated up from below. He had driven the metal spike deep into the crack in the rock.

  ‘Tolley-rope, Master Tem!’ Wind Jackal’s command rang out.

  Quint looked down to see Tem Barkwater lean out over the balustrade and hurl the length of thick rope down to Steg Jambles. It uncoiled as it dropped. One end was secured to a tolley-post at the prow, the other dropped into Steg’s outstretched hands. With a deft turn, twist and threading through of the rope, he fashioned a perfect tilder-knot - so called because it was the type of knot used by slaughterer hunters to snare and bind any migrating tilder that happened past their hides - and slipped it over the head of the spike. He gave it a sharp tug. The rope closed round the shaft of metal.

  ‘Tolley-rope secured!’ he shouted. ‘Pull me up!’

  Tem and Ratbit jumped to the winch-handle and began turning. A moment later, Steg Jambles’s tousled head appeared above the balustrade. He grinned.

  ‘The old Galerider is tethered, Captain,’ he said as he jumped down onto the deck. ‘Should hold for a little while yet.’

  ‘Let’s hope so, Master Steg,’ said Wind Jackal, descending the stairs from the helm. He turned towards Quint, his eyes blazing with a frightening intensity. ‘I’ve waited many a long year for this moment,’ he said. ‘For your mother’s sake, Sky rest her soul, and your dear lost brothers … Will you come with me and watch my back, Quint?’

  ‘You know I will,’ said Quint, clasping his father’s arm and following him to the prow.

  Maris gazed after them, the blood draining from her face. ‘Sky protect you, Quint,’ she said hoarsely, her voice little more than a whisper.

  As Wind Jackal and Quint arrived on the fore-deck, Tem and Ratbit realigned the winding-winch and swung a second winch round into position next to it. Quint eyed the dangling harnesses warily, his courage beginning to drain away.

  ‘Don’t just stand there, lad,’ Wind Jackal was saying, looking up as he secured the harness straps around his legs and waist. ‘Get yourself buckled in. I need you, lad … If anything were to happen, I want to know that you’ll finish the job off.’

  Quint nodded. ‘You can count on me, Father,’ he said, climbing into his harness. ‘After all, I was there, too, remember.’

  The pair of them climbed up onto the balustrade. Tem was manning Wind Jackal’s winding-winch; Steg Jambles, Quint’s. At a word from Wind Jackal, both he and his son stepped off the Galerider and into mid air.

  Quint’s stomach lurched. The harness tightened around the top of his legs as the winding-winch creaked into motion and the rope began to descend. He’d seen how the wind had turned and twisted the suspended Steg Jambles, but nothing could have prepared him for the sheer violence of the turbulent air. It hit him like a blow to the ribs and sent him spinning round and round.

  ‘Stick your legs out, son,’ he heard Wind Jackal calling across to him and, when he looked round, he saw his father bent double, his legs jutting forwards at right angles to his body.

  Quint did the same. The spinning stopped and, as the rope continued to be let out, he found himself drawing level with the jutting rock the Galerider had been anchored to. A moment later, and the sheer rock face of the Edge itself was directly in front of him. He planted his legs squarely against the great wall of rock and, as the rope was released from above, began making his way down the vertical rock face in leaps.

  The wind howled louder than ever down here in the perpetual shadow of the void beneath the Edge, and it was cold - so cold that, even though there was sweat running down his back, Quint’s teeth chattered and his breath came in foggy puffs of air. Every so often, there would be a soft plqff-plqff sound from above him and a huge column of steaming Mire mud would whistle past him, breaking up as it did so and showering him and his father with a viscous, fetid-smelling spray

  Wind Jackal swung over towards his son and signalled for him to remain silent, before pointing to the gloom below. Quint glanced down. There, huddled in the shadowy darkness some fifty or so strides below him, were a series of vivid scars cut into the cliff face: jagged ledges, one above another, covered with the remains of lufwood roofing, splintered and wrecked by the howling winds.

  These must be the abandoned ledges of the ancient cliff quarry from the time of the First Scholars, Quint realized with a shudder. It looked as strange and ghostly as the priceless rock that was quarried there.

  Quint ran
his hand over the rock before him. Dark and grainy, rough to the touch and stained with the white Mire mud, it did not look anything special. He knew, however, that when it was polished, the rock was transformed into a shimmering, shining material that glowed from within, as though countless glisters had been sealed within it, like insects inside fossilized pine-sap.

  Highly prized by the early architects of Sanctaphrax, the polished rock was the chosen material for decorating the increasingly ostentatious schools and academies which sprang up around the great floating city. It was used in small amounts to top towers or crenellate rooftops, or to provide a detail or two above an arch -and so it would have remained if it hadn’t been for the Academy of Wind.

  When its high professor at the time, one Aurelius Ventilix, heard that the School of Light and Darkness was to have its upper towers clad in cliff-marble - as the substance was commonly known - he decided that the Academy of Wind should not be outdone. Consulting with his architects and organizing what was to become the first of the Leagues of Undertown, he determined that every inch of his own school of learning would be clad in the priceless rock - even striking a deal with the cliff quarry to ensure that all consignments of rock slabs were delivered to the Academy of Wind and nowhere else.

  Soon, the Academy of Wind had become the most spectacular building in all of Sanctaphrax. During the day, the polished walls swirled with ever-changing patterns of light, while at night the whole building glowed brightly, shining out like a magnificent beacon which could be seen for miles around. Mire travellers took to using it as a reliable landmark, while even migrating snowbirds were observed to orientate themselves by its light.

  They, however, were not the only creatures to be attracted to the resplendent edifice. At first, the gatherings of tiny lights clustering close to the walls were dismissed as being glow-worms, fireflies, embermoths. It was only when their numbers grew that their true identity was revealed.