The Curse of the Gloamglozer (6 page)

Maris shivered unhappily. Things were not working out at all the way she'd hoped. By now, Quint should be gone. Instead, he had been left behind in Sanctaphrax to take up a place at the Fountain House school – and as if that wasn't bad enough,
she
had been put in charge of his well-being. She snorted with irritation. It just wasn't fair.

· CHAPTER THREE ·

THE GREAT LIBRARY

Q
uint put his pen down and listened. Yes, there it was again. A howling and shrieking, discordant, distant – but coming closer, and closer, till the air was throbbing with the terrible noise.

‘What
is
that?’ he muttered. He glanced over at the tiny window. There was only one way to find out.

Scraping his chair back on the wooden floorboards, Quint jumped up, knocking the barkscrolls he'd been reading to the floor, and hurried across the room. As he flung the window open, what had been a raucous noise abruptly became a deafening cacophony. What was causing it?

Quint thrust his head through the small window as far as it would go and craned his neck backwards. A blizzard? he thought, surprised by the sight of the snowy banks of whiteness swirling round in the air. In such warm weather? And making so much noise? Then, catching sight of the gleaming eyes and glinting talons, he realized that it was a blizzard not of snow, but of feathers.

‘White ravens!’ he gasped. ‘Hundreds of them.’

Of course, when in Undertown, he had seen the white ravens flocking before. Their eerie flights alerted the academics of Sanctaphrax that the flight-rocks in the Stone Gardens were ready to be harvested. Everyone knew that. But he'd never been so close before, nor heard them so loud. Even now, as they came spiralling down, down out of the sky, they were still maintaining their ear-splitting screech. Easing his feet off the ground, Quint squeezed himself a little further out of the window and twisted round until he was lying out across the sill.

He watched in awe as, in a great feathery drift, the flock of ravens came in to land on the roof of the Observatory.

‘Incredible!’ he murmured. ‘Quite …
Ouch!
’

Something hard and bony had taken hold of his ankle, and was wrenching at it painfully.

‘
Ow!
’ he cried – though nowhere near loud enough to be heard above the din of the ravens. He kicked out with his feet. ‘Get off me.’ He wriggled awkwardly backwards. The bony pincer-like objects suddenly grasped both his ankles.

‘Maris, if that's you, I'll …
whooaah
,’ he groaned, as he found himself being pulled back into the room. The next moment, the back of his head knocked sharply against the edge of the sill on its way down to the floor, which it struck with a loud
crack
!

‘
Unkhh!
’ he groaned.

His ankles were released and his legs crashed down. His eyelids fluttered, opened. The room gradually stopped leaping about. ‘You!’ shouted Quint. ‘Why in Sky's name did you do that?’

‘A thousand apologies,’ said Tweezel, bowing stiffly. ‘I did not mean … That is, I thought you were in danger.’ He trilled with agitation.

Quint rubbed his head and winced theatrically. ‘I'll be fine,’ he said.

‘That is just as well,’ said Tweezel, ‘for I have been requested to convey the following summons of attendance by my master, who is also your professor and who, as such…’

‘What?’ said Quint sharply.

The spindlebug solemnly closed the window to muffle the shrieking din of the white ravens. ‘The Most High Academe wants to see you.’

‘Now?’ said Quint, climbing unsteadily to his feet.

‘No,’ said Tweezel. ‘Fifteen minutes ago. Urgent, he said it was.
Extremely
urgent.’

Quint hurried towards the door. Over the last week he had heard, if not seen, just how angry the Most High Academe could be when kept waiting. He was just about to leave his room when Tweezel laid a pincer on his shoulder.

‘Just one thing, young apprentice,’ it said.

‘Yes?’ said Quint.

‘The Most High Academe hates to be kept waiting.’ With his poky little garret a narrow staircase up from the vast balcony-chamber, and the Most High Academe's study two storeys below that, Quint hurtled down the stairs in twos and threes. He didn't want to be even later than he already was.

‘Ah, there you are, lad,’ said Linius, looking over his shoulder as, hot and breathless, Quint knocked and poked his head round the open door of the professor's study. ‘Come in. Come in.’

Quint entered the room. He was relieved to find that the Most High Academe, who was seated on a tall battered stool at a cluttered desk overflowing with charts and scrolls, seemed in a better mood than he'd anticipated – although he looked strained and tired. Quint hadn't yet discovered that Tweezel would always lie about the time, so that those he
was called to summon were always on time.

‘And close the door,’ Linius added. His voice dropped to an urgent whisper. ‘I don't want a single word of what I'm about to say to go beyond these four walls. Is that understood?’

Quint nodded calmly as he pushed the door shut, but inside his heart was racing. What
was
the professor about to say?

The professor swivelled round completely. ‘So, Quint,’ he said, ‘how are you finding Sanctaphrax?’

‘It … it …’ he said, at a loss to know where to start. Everything was so bewilderingly different from what he was used to on board the
Galerider
– from the unspoken, yet rigidly upheld, pecking-order of the steamy refectory to the intrigue, whispers and lies that took place on the Viaduct Steps. And then there was the Fountain House school: the archaic rules he inadvertently kept breaking in Wilken Wordspool's classroom – and the lessons themselves, so long, so repetitive, so tedious…

Just then, the white ravens outside, who had been silent for a while, started up once again. His words were lost to their raucous clamour.

‘What was that?’ the professor shouted back, his hand cupped to his ear.

‘Noisy!’ Quint shouted back. ‘I find Sanctaphrax very noisy.’

‘I agree,’ Linius nodded earnestly. He stood up and, limping slightly, crossed to the windows and closed them all. ‘Shamefully noisy for a so-called place of learning, I would say.’ He turned and smiled. ‘How would
you like to go to the quietest corner in all of Sanctaphrax?’

‘I think I should like that very much,’ said Quint.

‘Very good,’ said Linius. He plucked at his fingers, making some of the joints crack. ‘It concerns one of those
little tasks
I mentioned the day your father dropped you off here. Do you remember?’

‘Yes,’ said Quint warily, remembering that the professor had also spoken about the Knights' Academy. He certainly hoped the task had nothing to do with that place. Then again, he thought, he had passed the academy several times and, what with all the para-jousting, pummelball, and one-to-one combat that was going on inside, it was probably the noisiest place in all Sanctaphrax.

‘The place I want you to visit,’ said Linius Pallitax, ‘is the Great Library.’

Quint's brow furrowed. ‘The Great …’ He paused. ‘I don't think I know where that is.’

‘Very few academics do, I'm afraid. It was an ancient centre for earth-studies. These days it is most unfashionable. Nobody goes there any more,’ said the professor, and tutted unhappily. ‘Sky above, have we really come so far?’ he murmured. ‘Here I am, Most High Academe of a place where the very presence of the Great Library is ignored.’

The High Academe's eyes had a faraway look in them. He seemed to be talking to himself. ‘Oh, it was a sad day indeed when the schism between earth-studies and sky-scholarship first occurred.’ He glanced round nervously, as if worried that someone might be listening. ‘Don't misunderstand me, lad. I am not saying that sky-scholarship is not invaluable. After all, were it not for the windtouchers and raintasters and, yes, the mistsifters also, we wouldn't know about stormphrax. And without stormphrax to weight down the floating rock, then Sanctaphrax itself would break its moorings and then everything would be lost. And yet…’ his eyes misted over, ‘the old scholars of earth-studies had accumulated so much knowledge…’

Quint listened closely, trying to take it all in.

‘About the properties of plants, the qualities of minerals, the secrets of trees. And living creatures! They listed and sorted and classified and categorized the Deepwoods more precisely than even the Professors of Light and Darkness grade luminosity. And that's saying something, I can tell you!’

Quint looked suitably impressed.

‘The problem, my lad, is that the knowledge they accumulated over the centuries is being lost. Despite my best efforts to revive it, earth-studies is ignored and the place where its wealth of information is stored – the Great Library – has been abandoned and left to fall into utter neglect. Even as we speak, the priceless barkscrolls and tomes it houses are crumbling to dust.’ He sighed.

‘And it is knowledge we cannot afford to lose…’

‘Can't we go and tidy the place up a bit?’ Quint suggested. ‘Sort things out?’

‘Oh, Quint,’ said Linius wearily. ‘You haven't a clue what you're saying. A hundred academics could work there for a thousand days and still barely scratch the surface.’

‘Then what do you want
me
to do?’ said Quint.

Outside, the departing white ravens flashed past the windows. Agitated, the professor began plucking at his fingers again, one after the other. ‘I want you to fetch me a barkscroll,’ he said.

‘Is that all?’ said Quint, smiling.

The colour drained from the professor's face. ‘This is no laughing matter, lad,’ he said coldly. ‘I would go myself, but my leg is still not up to it.’

‘I'm sorry,’ said Quint. ‘I didn't mean…’

‘I cannot impress upon you enough the importance of your task,’ the professor continued. ‘If you fail, then…’ A shudder ran the length of his body. ‘You must not fail.’

Quint nodded solemnly. Linius looked up to see the flock of white ravens, still streaming past his windows.

‘Listen well,’ he said. ‘Tweezel will give you precise directions to the Great Library. Once inside, the layout is complicated to the uninitiated, but not impossible to negotiate. It is set out like a forest – filled with trees of knowledge, so to speak. Each tree has a core subject –
Aquatic Vegetation
,
Earth Organisms
, that sort of thing. You'll find the exact academic discipline on a small plaque nailed to the trunk. The core subject you are looking for is
Aerial Creatures
.’

‘
Aerial Creatures
,’ Quint repeated, committing it to memory.

‘You are to climb into that tree,’ said Linius. ‘The higher you climb, the more branches you will come to. By following the words and symbols carved into the bark, you must climb up the relevant branches – each one representing a branch of the subject – until you home in on the barkscroll I need.’

‘It sounds complicated,’ said Quint.

‘That is why you must listen carefully,’ said Linius. As he spoke, the stragglers of the huge flock flapped past the windows and a plaintive cawing began. ‘Oh, no,’ he whispered nervously, ‘I shall be late again.’