Clash of the Sky Galleons (3 page)

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.

They were glisters.

Countless millions of the microscopic creatures - those elemental seeds of life, blown in from Open Sky and residing deep within the porous Sanctaphrax rock -were leaving their subterranean home and gathering all round the Academy of Wind. To those outside, watching, they made an attractive spectacle. Inside the institute, however, it was a different story. Surrounded by the mass of minute creatures which not only fed on emotions, but also affected them, those within the academy began to change - and not for the better.

The normally calm academic atmosphere was suffused with terror, rage and seemingly irrational displays of envy and despair. And all the while, the number of glisters clustered round the outer walls increased. Then one night, when the moon was full, a huge swarm of the minute creatures covered the academy, clogging its doors, its windows and gateways. From inside there came terrible sounds, howls of rage and screams of despair - listened to with awestruck terror by the academics from the other schools outside.

By the time morning dawned the next day, an awful quiet had descended upon the academy. When the noonday bell tolled the hour, the academics outside could bear it no longer. Taking their courage in their hands, they broke down the doors to the academy - to reveal a bloodbath within. Driven mad by the glisters, the academics of the Academy of Wind had slaughtered each other until none remained alive.

Needless to say, the Sanctaphrax academics were appalled, and ordered the immediate removal of the cliff-marble cladding - not only from the Academy of Wind, but also from the upper towers of the School of Light and Darkness, the turrets of the Colleges of Cloud and Rain, and everywhere else the beguilingly beautiful polished rock had been used. The only place it remained was the West Wall of the Knights Academy.

The proud knights academic defied the other academies and refused to demolish their beautiful wall -indeed they rather enjoyed the way it kept their inquisitive neighbours away. But few academics, even the knights academic themselves, would linger for long at the Great West Wall at night when its surface sparkled with tiny dancing glisters.

Quint, in particular, was wary of the place. After all, he had once ventured deep into the heart of the Sanctaphrax rock and had seen first hand what could happen when the reckless and the unwise meddled with these strange, beguiling creatures …

That aside, the horror triggered by the events that took place at the Academy of Wind was enough to put an end to
the quarrying of the rock. Work stopped immediately and was never resumed, and the cliff quarries fell into disuse.

At Wind Jackal’s signal, Quint followed him down the cliff face towards the quarry ledges, fifty or so strides below. When they landed on the first narrow ledge carved into the cliff face, Quint noticed that his father had unsheathed his sword. Grim-faced, he motioned for Quint to do the same, then began inching his way along the narrow cutting, which was no wider than a window ledge. Here and there, overhead, the remains of an awning - erected to protect the ancient quarry-workers from the howling wind and falling Mire mud - stuck out from the rock.

Not that it offered much protection now, for the jutting struts had snapped off and the lufwood planks were splintered and warped. Those that remained creaked and groaned and seemed to give the howling wind a new and sinister voice, as if the spirits of the long-dead stone masons were calling out a ghostly warning. Quint tried to shut out the awful noise as he crept along the ledge after his father, but in vain …

‘Don’t allow your harness rope to get snagged,’ Wind Jackal hissed over his shoulder, ‘or they’ll never be able to winch us out of here.’

Following his father’s example, Quint checked that the rope above his head was clear of the struts of the wrecked awning as he continued. At the end of the cutting, Wind Jackal paused for a moment, before swinging out across the cliff face and descending to the ledge below. Quint followed close behind, and again they inched along the narrow cutting, their backs
pressed against the smooth, quarried surface of the cliff face. Down they went, from ledge to ledge, until the gloom thickened and the ghostly howling made speech impossible.

Quint gripped his sword tightly and felt the reassuring tautness of the harness rope tug at his shoulder. It was good knowing that up there, in the light, Steg Jambles was holding onto the other end. Three short tugs and the harpooneer would winch him out of this waking nightmare.

Ghosts and demons and half-formed things …
Quint swallowed hard as his father’s words sounded in his head. How desperate was the one they hunted that he sought refuge in such a terrible place?

Still deep in thought, Quint felt his father’s hand on his shoulder. They had come to the lowest of the quarry ledges. Below them, the cliff face sloped sharply away into an inky blackness, and in front of them, the narrow ledge ended beside a narrow crack in the rock face, like a gap in some huge stone curtain - deep, dark and only inches wide.

Wind Jackal raised the hilt of his great sky pirate sabre to his lips and kissed it, then, checking his harness rope, he stepped inside.

At the prow of the
Galerider
Tem Barkwater turned the winch-wheel, feeding out the rope as steadily as he could manage. Beside him, Steg Jambles was doing the same.

‘How do you think they’re getting on down there?’ Tem murmured, his bony face wide-eyed with anxiety.

‘Don’t go concerning yourself with that, lad,’ said Steg. ‘The captain and his son have unfinished business to sort out down there.
Personal
business!’ He fixed the gaunt youth with an unblinking stare. ‘It’s up to you and me to keep feeding this here rope out nice and steady until they’re ready to come up.’

Tem nodded.

‘And when they give three tugs on this rope, then …’

‘We winch them up,’ Tem blurted out eagerly.

Steg smiled. ‘Like your life depends on it, Tem, lad. Like your life depends on it!’

The moment Wind Jackal and Quint stepped inside the narrow fissure in the cliff face, the howling of the wind was instantly shut out - only to be replaced with a dank and eerie stillness. Some way in the distance, a pale light was flickering. Quint’s mouth was dry and gritty with Mire mud, and he could feel the blood thumping in his temples.

Just ahead of him, his father crept along the narrow tunnel between the two huge walls of rock, his sword held out in front of him, the rope from his harness trailing out behind. Carefully, silently, scarcely daring to breathe, Quint followed. He must watch his father’s back, he told himself, be prepared to step in if he was needed; if something should go wrong …

The light grew brighter and Wind Jackal hesitated, then motioned for Quint to join him. Just ahead of them, some sort of chamber had been carved out of the tunnel wall.

At its entrance, stacked against the wall, lay a heap of ancient chisels, rock-hammers and quarrying tools,
while above them was a row of hooks, from which hung decaying cloaks, frayed gloves and long, pointed hoods that looked for all the world like long-dead, desiccated wood-moths. Inside the chamber, a hunched figure was squatting beneath a huge, ancient lamp - its light pale and feeble as the last of the tilder oil burned itself out.

Quint glanced at his father and was shocked to see a look of pure hatred contorting his features. With a hideous cry, like that of a wounded beast, Wind Jackal launched himself into the chamber and brought his heavy sabre down on the squatting figure in a savage, vicious sweep. There was an explosion of blood and guts as the bloated, lifeless sack disintegrated with the blow and Quint and Wind Jackal found themselves covered in stinking tilder entrails.

Wind Jackal stared for a moment at his son, his face blood-spattered and shocked, before the lamp spluttered out and pitched them into absolute darkness.

‘Nothing but a tilder-leather sack, filled with blood … Sky curse my blind thirst for vengeance!’ Quint’s father groaned. ‘I’ve led us into a trap …’

‘Father, I … Did you feel that?’ Quint’s harness rope twitched and bucked.

In the darkness, Quint heard the weary sky pirate captain sigh unhappily. Then the harness rope twitched again, more violently this time, and from the direction of the tunnel came an ominous rustling, scratching sound …

‘Three tugs!’ said Tem. ‘I felt them …’

‘Me, too,’ agreed Steg Jambles. ‘Well, what are you waiting for?’ He frowned at the young deckhand. ‘Winch, lad! Winch!’

Tem leaped at the winch-wheel and began winding it furiously. ‘I know, I know, you don’t have to tell me,’ he shouted over his shoulder to the harpooneer. ‘As if my life depends on it!’

‘Whoooah!’
Quint cried out, as he found himself being dragged back towards the tunnel entrance - and closer to the scratching, snuffling sounds.

Behind him, Wind Jackal stumbled on the end of his own harness rope. ‘Whatever you do,’ he shouted to Quint, ‘don’t cut the rope, or we’ll never get out of here.’

‘What’s out there?’ Quint whispered, as he slid and slithered through the pitch-black darkness of the tunnel, like an oozefish on the end of a line.

‘Only one way to find out,’ answered his father, and Quint found something hard and shiny being pressed into his hand.

It was a piece of sky-crystal; Quint could tell from its smooth, round shape. He slammed it against the tunnel
wall and it glowed in his hand with a warm, yellow light. Behind him, Wind Jackal did the same and together they held their glowing fists up above their heads as they approached the tunnel entrance, half running as the harness ropes dragged them ever faster.

There, blocking the narrow fissure, was a huge, white creature, its thin papery wings folded tightly behind it as it squeezed into the entrance. It had massive watery eyes that seemed far too big for its shrunken, skull-like head, and long, spidery hind-legs that stretched out towards them, glinting with long, needle-like talons. Thin spittlelike drool dripped from its jaws which, as Quint watched, seemed to dislocate as they opened to become impossibly huge.

‘Khhhaaah!’

The sound it let out was long, harsh and rasping, a blast of air that came from the very depths of its angular body and was expelled with great force from its gaping maw. Its head darted from side to side, the tiny nasal flaps at the top of its beak-like mouth flickering furiously. It was the smell of fetid tilder blood that had drawn it into the tunnel, like a woodmoth to a candle.

‘The neck!’ Wind Jackal shouted. ‘Aim for the neck!’

Quint gripped his sword and raised his forearm to fend off the lunging attack that instantly came. He felt the vicelike jaws crunch into his arm with the pain of a thousand hot needles, before swinging his sword in an upward arc.

A high-pitched shriek, choked off in mid-screech, followed by the sounds of crunching bone and the crumpling of papery wings, filled Quint’s ears - before
he found himself bursting from the tunnel’s entrance at the end of the harness rope and swinging free in the dark, freezing air. Below him, the hideous creature tumbled away into the murky blackness, its glassy-eyed head separated from its body.