The Winter Knights (32 page)

The pain grew more intense than ever, and the words and figures on the barkscrolls swam before his eyes, seeming to taunt him and goad him. He pushed them aside, and as he did so, his hands knocked against the silver tray with its untouched plate of food, the jug of sapwine, the small gold bowl …

All at once, he doubled up violently again, his chin on his knees, as a fiery convulsion erupted inside him. The pain was so bad, it felt as if his belly was about to explode.

‘Must be something … I … ate …’ he moaned.

His gaze fell on the gold bowl …

Of course! The delberry bonbons. And he had taken them as proof that not everyone hated him. How could he have been so stupid? So careless?

The searing pain inside him grew more and more intense. Hax's vision clouded over. The fire surged up from his belly, into his throat …

‘
Aaaargh!
’ he screamed, twisting out of the chair and crumpling, open-mouthed, to the marble floor like a gutted oozefish on a slab.

It took several moments before the convulsions ceased, the limbs stopped thrashing and the Hall Master of High Cloud fell still. As a bright streak of blood trickled from the corner of Hax's mouth onto his white beard, a low buzzing sound came up from his throat.

The next moment, a single dark striped insect appeared. It rested on Hax's swollen, protruding tongue for a few seconds, its feelers quivering as it tasted the air. Then the tiny creature spread its glistening wings and, with a rasping buzz, took flight.

Another insect appeared in its place …

And another, and another - until there was a thick stream of them, spewing out from the hall master's gaping mouth. Soon, the bedchamber was filled with the sound of angry buzzing as the swarm of newly-hatched woodwasps swirled round the room, while Hax's lifeless eyes stared sightlessly at the ceiling.

‘Murder! Murder!’

Daxiel Xaxis stormed into the Hall of Grey Cloud, his face disfigured by a mass of weeping purple blisters. He seized the nearest gatekeeper and thrust his swollen, pustular features into the startled guard's.

‘Rouse all the gatekeepers!’ he wheezed through blistered lips. ‘There is no time to lose! Hax Vostillix, our beloved leader, has been murdered!’

‘Murder!’

‘Murder!’

‘Murder!’

The news flew round, and before long the Hall of Grey Cloud was resounding with the indignant cries of the gatekeepers as they scrambled from their hammocks and benches, clambered into their white robes and grabbed whatever weapon was closest to hand. They clustered round the Captain of the Gatekeepers, who angrily pushed away the byre-gillie fussily attempting to apply a hyleberry poultice to the wasp stings. He raised his hand for silence.

‘When I took the Hall Master of High Cloud his supper last night, he was in good spirits,’ Daxiel began, wincing with pain. ‘Yet this morning, at seven hours, when I opened the doors to his chamber, I found the hall master dead and the place infested with woodwasps!’

All round him, there was a sharp intake of breath, and the gatekeepers exchanged dark looks.

‘Yes, yes, I know what you're thinking,’ said Daxiel. ‘Woodwasp eggs – an earth-scholar trick! But that's just what they want you to believe!’

‘They?’ asked a heavily-tattooed flat-head goblin with a puzzled frown.

‘The academics-at-arms, of course!’ snarled Daxiel. ‘They, and their friends in the Upper Halls. Sanctaphrax born and bred, the lot of them, and they hated Hax Vostillix because he wouldn't stand for their stuck-up ways! That's why he took on Undertowners like us to be his gatekeepers.’

Daxiel surveyed the heavily-armed ranks that filled the hall, their numbers swollen with recruits from the very worst parts of Undertown. Heft Vespius had chosen well.

‘That Dengreeve Yellowtusk was always trying to get him to disband the gatekeepers,’ he went on. ‘And when he wouldn't, he got one of his sneaky Sanctaphrax academics-at-arms to murder our beloved leader! Well, we're not going to let them get away with it! The gatekeepers will teach all them in the Academy Barracks a lesson they'll never forget …’

The hall was filled with nodding heads and grunts of approval.

‘And we won't stop when we've done that neither,’ he shouted. ‘We'll go on and show the whole of Sanctaphrax that they can't push us Undertowners around any more. I, your captain, have made powerful friends in the leagues. Together, we're going to change this floating city for ever!’

The gatekeepers roared their approval. Daxiel drew his sword and raised it high above his head.

‘Under shall rule above!’ he roared.

All round the hall, the gatekeepers took up the cry, ‘Under shall rule above! Under shall rule above! …’

‘The time to act has come!’ Daxiel told them. ‘We shall lock every gate, bolt every door and seal every entrance in the Knights Academy. Anyone found wandering about in the communal areas is to be killed. By the time those idle, in-bred academics-at-arms stir, they'll find the entrance doors to their Academy Barracks secured and bolted from outside.’ He smiled. ‘Penned up like ham-melhorns on market day, they'll be,’ he said. ‘Penned up and awaiting slaughter!’

A bloodcurdling cry went up, so loud that the rafters high up in the vaulted ceilings trembled and the sound of the Great Hall bell chiming eight hours was all but drowned out.

Soon there were gatekeepers running everywhere. Up stairs and down corridors, and out across the Inner Courtyard, blocking off entrances, barricading doors and bolting gates shut. There was no time to lose if they were to take control of the Knights Academy, and certainly the gatekeepers were far too preoccupied to notice the rickety stormchaser high up at the top of the Gantry Tower as it loosed its mooring tether and swooped off into the snow-flecked sky …

‘Locked?’ queried Dengreeve Yellowtusk. ‘What do you mean, locked?’

‘Exactly that, swordmaster,’ the young academic-at-arms replied, fear and excitement in his eyes. ‘The main doors have been locked … from the outside.’

‘The pair of us were just off to relieve the night-watch,’ his comrade added, his eyes flashing brightly. ‘At the eastern slingshots …’

‘And we couldn't get out …’

‘What's more,’ the first one said, ‘all the side entrances and the corridors have also been blocked – by the gatekeepers.’

Dengreeve's eyes narrowed as he sat back in the high-backed chair. ‘So, Hax Vostillix has made his move at last,’ he murmured.

Just then, a group of academics-at-arms strode through the barracks hall, two of them carrying a grey-faced mobgnome stable-hand, his tunic stained with blood.

‘Swordmaster.’ The heavily armoured academic saluted Dengreeve. ‘I think you should hear this.’ He gestured for the stable-hand to speak.

‘Sir, Hax Vostillix is dead … Murdered!’ the mob-gnome gasped once he'd been placed in a chair. There was a crossbow bolt embedded in his side, and he was clearly struggling for breath.

‘Wessel, here, is a stable-hand in the Hall of Grey Cloud,’ the academic-at-arms said, bending down and speaking in a low voice in Dengreeve's ear. ‘He escaped across the rooftops of the dormitory closets and climbed over the battlements of the barracks …’

‘The gatekeepers have locked every entrance in the academy …’ gasped Wessel, his face greyer than ever. ‘They got me just as I reached the barracks wall … But I kept going …’ He fell back, exhausted.

‘Well, Quelf?’ Dengreeve demanded. ‘Who committed this outrage? Eh? Who murdered Hax Vostillix?’

The academic's face reddened, and he leaned closer to Dengreeve's ear. ‘The gatekeepers think that
you
did, Captain.’

*

Outside, as a cold yellow-grey sun rose up above the glistening West Wall and a bitter wind howled round the towers of the Knights Academy, a flock of raucous white ravens circled high in the sky. The neverending winter had culled their numbers, for though many creatures had perished in the icy conditions, their bodies were instantly lost, entombed in impenetrable snow. Now the vicious, half-starved scavengers cawed and screeched with excitement, tumbling over one another as they wheeled around, as if sensing that the ground below would soon furnish them with a great feast.

Already, the crisp white snow of the Inner Courtyard was criss-crossed with footprints where the gatekeepers had taken up their positions. Daxiel Xaxis, his face swathed in bandages, stared across the carpet of snow towards the great leadwood doors of the Academy Barracks. Around him, his personal guard of massive cloddertrogs from the boom-docks – hand-picked by Heft Vespius himself – grasped their heavy spiked cudgels. In front of them, a vast unruly mass of gatekeepers armed with a bewildering array of weaponry jostled each other and stared at the Academy Barracks ahead.

‘Easy, lads,’ growled Daxiel, from behind his mask of bandages. ‘Let them come to us – and then we shall feed them to the ravens …’

Boom!

High above, the white ravens squawked with alarm as something heavy thudded noisily into the leadwood doors from inside.

CRASH!!!

The doors slammed to the ground, torn from their hinges by the solid ironwood pillar that now skidded across the snow and crashed into the Knights’ Tower on the corner of the West Wall. Behind it lumbered a fully-armoured party of academics-at-arms, dragging a heavy lufwood slingshot behind them.

They came to a halt by the steps of the Hall of High Cloud as gatekeepers appeared on the roof and sent a volley of crossbow bolts raining down on them.

Several academics screamed and fell, the lethal bolts finding the weak spots in their hard armour and embedding themselves in the soft flesh beneath. Some fell still at once; some writhed and twisted in the snow, blood spurting from their helmet visors and beneath their arms, evidence of where they'd been hit.

The others hastily loaded the slingshot with another missile – a heavy refectory table – and, as the crossbow bolts glanced off their armour, they cranked back the sling.

‘FIRE!’

The command rang out, and the sling snapped back, sending the great plank of wood hurtling at the mass of gatekeepers that Daxiel had sent racing across the snowy courtyard towards the academics-at-arms. It slammed into the midst of them with a splintering crash of wood and bone, and a sickening gush of blood.

At that moment, with a bloodcurdling cry, Dengreeve and his swordmasters raced out of the barracks. They charged past the slingshot crew, bellowing loudly, and fell heavily upon the gatekeepers.

Eyes glinting from behind his bandage mask, Daxiel signalled for his clodder-trogs to advance. As they lumbered forward, he turned and strode back across the courtyard towards the Hall of Grey Cloud.

Behind him, the sword-masters – though heavily out-numbered   —   were making short work of their gatekeeper adversaries. Leaping high in the air, their swords whirring about their heads, they left great spirals of red splattered across the white snow in their path as the heavy blades slashed and stabbed and plunged.

No Undertown tavern brawl could have prepared the gatekeepers for this controlled ferocity. With cries of terror they fled back across the courtyard, pushing past the massive cloddertrogs in their desperation to escape the flashing blades.

Meanwhile, a detachment of catapults up on the battlements of the barracks had managed to clear the adjoining hall roof of gatekeeper crossbows – though at a heavy price to the great dome of the Lecture Hall in shattered panes of glass. Down below, the cloddertrogs gave huge throaty roars and charged at Dengreeve and his swordmasters.

‘Come on, then,’ Dengreeve muttered coldly.

He ducked down below his opponent's guard as an attacking cloddertrog got close, skewered him through the heart with a single thrust – and spun neatly to one side. The cloddertrog crashed to the ground like a stricken ironwood pine, followed by twenty of his companions, as each of the other swordmasters struck home.

Now, out from the Academy Barracks ran the rest of the academics-at-arms – young missile-loaders, catapult and slingshot look-outs, cage-masters and rock-guardians, clutching axes, bludgeons, pikestaffs and any other weapons they could find. And, as the sword-masters looked on contemptuously, the remaining cloddertrogs turned on their heels and lumbered away towards the Hall of Grey Cloud.