Clash of the Sky Galleons (38 page)

‘No!’ screamed Quint as the figure raised a curved sword above its grotesquely grinning head.

But Wind Jackal hadn’t noticed him. ‘Not…’ His voice reached Quint, just as the sky wreck’s hull loomed up to meet him and the terrible scene disappeared from view.

Bracing his legs, Quint crashed through the jagged opening in the aft-hull into which the tolley-line went. The next moment he landed, striking a great smothering mattress of foul-tasting dust and fetid spongy softness. Flailing around wildly, Quint fought off the clinging strands of spore-coated fungus that seemed to have enveloped him in the eerie blackness of the sky wreck’s interior. All around him, he could hear scratching and chattering as startled wreck-dwellers scuttled about.

Sword in hand, Quint struggled to his feet and sliced through the fungal blooms that flourished on the rafters and decking all round. He made his way towards a thin shaft of light breaking through from the aft-deck above his head. He had to get to the flight-rock platform.

Turbot Smeal
was
here! Even now, he could hear the unmistakable sound of metal on metal as two sky pirate swords clashed in battle.

Reaching the shaft of light, Quint found a ladder coated with white powdery spores leading up to the aft-deck. A small rat-like creature with huge, unblinking eyes shrank back into the mouldy shadows at his approach, and Quint clawed his way up the rungs of the ladder in a cloud of choking dust. At the top, he slashed
his way through a forest of stinking toadstools, disturbing pale, bloated-bodied spiders on stilt-like legs as he did so, and emerged at the steps to the flight-rock platform. Gasping for air and coated in foul-smelling dust, Quint looked up to see his father staring down at him.

‘Father! I…’ Quint’s voice choked in his throat, and hot stinging tears sprang to his eyes.

Wind Jackal was half-sitting, half-slumped against one of the moss-covered flight-rock levers. He was covered in the same powder of white mould spores that now coated Quint from head to foot, giving them both the appearance of ghostly figures on the dead sky ship.

As Quint climbed the steps to the flight-rock platform, the mark he’d instantly spotted on his father’s chest - bright red against the powdery white - rapidly grew from a tiny pinprick to a bloody blossom, to a great seeping stain …

Gasping with horror, Quint grasped his father’s shoulders. As he did so, Wind Jackal slumped forward into his arms.

‘No! No! No!’ Quint wept, seeing the vivid wound between Wind Jackal’s shoulder blades where a sharp blade had been driven.

Just then, between the wheezing of the mire-clams below him, came a hideous, chattering cry from inside the flight-rock itself. A moment later, it was followed by the sound of scuttling claws and leathery scales.

Looking down, Quint saw, with a sickening lurch of the stomach, that his father’s blood was dripping from the flight-rock platform straight down into the flight-rock below. Quint laid his father gently down, climbed to his feet and brandished his sword - just in time to see first one viciously clawed hand grip the edge of the platform; then another.

With a wheezing grunt, the creature pulled itself up out of the rock. There was a low, rasping sound as its leathery wings scraped against the tunnel-entrance to its lair at the heart of the flight-rock. The next moment, the mutant wreck-demon climbed onto the flight-rock platform. It paused, and regarded Quint malevolently through six gleaming yellow eyes.

Shimmering, venom-tipped tentacles quivered at either side of its broad, fang-fringed jaws, and an evil-looking spur crowned its lumpen, misshapen head. Behind its thin, scaly body, a vicious-looking whiplash tail flicked menacingly backwards and forwards. The creature swayed from side to side - its tail hissing as it slashed the air. The scent of the fresh blood had awoken in it a great hunger; now it was sizing up the latest intruder to the sky wreck, preparing to strike.

Quint stood his ground, his back against the shattered mast; his front stained with Wind Jackal’s blood. And as he stared ahead, a cold fury gripped him as all the trials
and tribulations of the terrible voyage he had endured seemed suddenly to be embodied in this loathsome, malformed creature before him.

‘I won’t leave you, Father!’ Quint shouted defiantly, as the wreck-demon curled its lips and hissed. ‘Not to this monstrous creature. Not like this …’

With a sharp crack, the razor-sharp barbed tail lashed out, ripping Quint’s greatcoat at the shoulder as it whistled past him and sending a thin streak of blood out across the powdery white moss on the platform. Quint leaped to one side as the tail swung back a second time -and sent the wreck-demon scuttling back with a deft slash of his sword.

‘I am a squire of the Knights Academy of Sanctaphrax,’ he roared defiantly, rounding on the creature and releasing a volley of plunging sword-cuts.

The wreck-demon fell back, hissing indignantly.

‘Schooled by scholars!’ Quint bellowed, urging himself on.

The creature howled in pain as a clawed hand was severed at the wrist, twisted in the air and clattered down to the mossy deck.

‘Trained by sword-masters!’

The barbed tail fell in three pieces.

‘And raised by a sky pirate captain!’

Six yellow eyes, wide with startled amazement, stared back at Quint as the wreck-demon’s head tumbled from its shoulders.

Quint sank to his knees, the tears coming thick and fast now, and sobs racking his body. He had slain the monstrous creature, yet this offered no release from the torment of grief that overwhelmed him …

‘Magnificent swordplay, young Quint.’ Thaw Daggerslash’s voice sounded behind him. ‘Just a pity it came too late for your poor father …’

Quint looked round. There was a hard, unfamiliar edge to Thaw’s voice. Then Quint saw why. The sky pirate had a deep wound in his shoulder, dark red with blood, which he gripped with white-knuckled fingers.

‘I saw Turbot Smeal,’ Quint began, ‘standing over my father, his sword raised …’

‘Turbot Smeal is dead,’ said Thaw. His face was drained of colour, his legs unsteady.

‘How … how do you know?’ asked Quint.

‘Because,’ said Thaw Daggerslash with a strained smile, ‘I have just killed him.’

• CHAPTER EIGHTEEN •
SHRYKE TEETH

What followed was a blur for Quint - a blur of pain and movement, of shouts, cries and disturbing shrieks. The sky wreck had burst into life all around them, and he and Thaw Daggerslash had stood back to back on the mossy flight-rock platform and defended the body of Wind Jackal from the loathsome denizens of the dead ship.

There were transparent wind snakes, bloated hull-crawlers, gelatinous tentacle-spinners, and far worse. Not even the
Galerider’s
log-baits could have prepared Quint for the hideous, half-formed creatures that slithered, oozed and scuttled from the depths of the mighty wreck, up to the eagerly anticipated feast on the flight-rock platform.

Quint’s arm ached now from the slashing cuts, parries and sword thrusts he rained down on anything that came near, while behind him Thaw’s grunts and snarls told him that the wounded sky pirate couldn’t hold out much longer. His own head was swimming, his eyes
were blinded by sweat. He slumped back and, half-crouching, half-kneeling, supported his weight on his slime-flecked sword …

All at once, strong arms grasped Quint by the shoulders. Before he could so much as cry out in protest, he felt himself being lifted off the flight-rock platform and into the air.

‘Wuh-wuh! Wuh!’

Hubble’s voice sounded in his ears, followed, moments later, by Tem Barkwater’s anxious call.

‘Hold onto them, Hubble! I’m winching as hard as I can!’

Quint looked up. He and Thaw were enfolded in the arms of the great white banderbear, who was gazing down at him with sad eyes. Hubble was in a harness attached to a long rope which extended up to the
Galerider
hovering high above his head, and getting closer by the second. Below him, Quint saw that the flight-rock platform was now seething with wriggling, crawling life.

‘Father!’ he cried out, as pain worse than any sword wound exploded in his chest.

The rattle of the deck-winch grew louder. Suddenly Quint was being lifted over the balustrade and lowered, sobbing, on to the deck. For several minutes he was lost in a blind, hysterical grief, before he became aware of being carried to a darkened cabin, and gentle hands -Maris’s hands - pressing a sedating wood-camphor poultice to his forehead.

Then, blackness …

Quint wasn’t sure how long he slept, but when he awoke, he found himself in his own hammock. The fetid stench of wreck-mould still clung to his clothes. There were sounds of activity coming from the fore-deck and, pulling on his jacket with aching arms, Quint stumbled out of his cabin towards them. As he emerged onto the aft-deck, Thaw Daggerslash’s voice rang out in the frost chilled air.

‘FIRE!’

Quint started.

From the prow, a blazing harpoon soared off through the air like a great shooting star, hissing and spitting as it went. In a great fiery arc it flew, from the
Galerider
down towards the great sky wreck below. With a great splintering crash, the harpoon’s flaming tip drove into the vessel’s hull and continued right up to its shaft. Instantly, the wooden planks and beams burst into flame and, as the fire spread rapidly through the sky wreck, the air filled with a thick, pungent smoke.

Slowly at first, the sky wreck began to climb in the sky as the fire took hold and the buoyant wood blazed. Then, as Quint watched, its ascent slowed until, once again, the great vessel hovered motionless in the air. Realizing that the heated flight-rock was acting as a counterweight to the up-thrust of the burning timber, Quint gripped the balustrade and watched closely as the great ship - now parallel with the
Galerider -
shuddered violently, its rotten timbers ablaze.

The ancient bloated flight-rock grew hotter and hotter, and the mire-clams hissed and screamed as they sizzled.
One by one, the giant shells began falling, taking chunks of hot rock with them and tearing the heart out of the ancient rock. The next moment, unable to take the strain any longer, the flight-rock disintegrated in a blazing shower of white-hot rock shards and shell splinters, which hissed like woodsnakes as they plunged down into the forest canopy far below.

Freed from the great flight-rock, the blazing vessel soared off into the sky. The wood hissed and crackled -but the sounds were drowned out by the noise of the wreck’s hideous inhabitants shrieking as they burned. Little by the little, the noise faded as the great fireball rose higher and higher. Quint watched as the blazing vessel became as small as a distant moon, a twinkling star, a pinprick of light that, in the blink of an eye, was extinguished.