The Winter Knights (36 page)

It gulped greedily, huge lumps of compacted snow and shards of ice falling away from its body as it swelled and contracted, like a wood-python swallowing a fromp. As the Winter Knights watched, the creature sucked the very last strands of cloud into its great gaping mouth, leaving nothing but empty sky in its place. The mouth closed and, for a moment, the creature seemed to pause.

Then its eyes swivelled and its long, coiled body writhed and swayed. From deep inside it, there came a low rumbling sound, as it began to ripple, to convulse …

All at once, a particularly violent spasm passed from its bulbous head, all the way down towards the fraying strands at the end of its tail. The wispy tendrils trembled and strained, but remained stretched taut in the sky, as if trapped in an invisible vice. However violently the creature twisted its immense body, the tail seemed to tether it in the sky.

The rumbling grew louder and louder, and was joined by a long moaning hiss. Maris gasped. Quint held his breath …

The next moment, exploding from the ducts along its great ice-encrusted body, came huge billowing jets of freezing air which stabbed the sky like great glistening spikes, before dissolving at their ends into white clouds. As they did so, the very sky itself seemed to curdle, and the creature ululated with a low, wailing howl.

From their vantage point, high up above, the Winter Knights watched as the clouds which had been expelled by the creature sped across the sky towards the Edge in great swirling blizzards of snow and ice. Soon the Edge cliff, the Stone Gardens and the floating rock itself were lost from view, swallowed up by the ice and snow being expelled from the creature's writhing body.

Even at this distance from the creature, those on board the sky ship were not spared. With a sudden rushing sound, the
Cloudslayer
was abruptly engulfed in a wave of ice-cold air that set the vessel pitching precariously to and fro. Several of the fire floats were extinguished in the blast, and the flight-rock juddered violently, threatening at any moment to turn super-buoyant and pitch them into the farthest reaches of Open Sky, a place from which there would be no return.

‘So this … this …
thing
,’ said Phin with a shudder as he gripped the balustrade, ‘is what's causing the endless winter?’

‘It certainly looks like it,’ said Raffix grimly. ‘Gobbling up cloud and spewing out ice and snow like that … Quanx-Querix must have discovered something just like it, and slain it with stormphrax.’ His lip curled. ‘Hideous, loathsome, evil creature …’

‘No,’ said Maris softly. ‘Not evil …’

Quint stared at its frost-encrusted body, the outer carapace pitted and cracked. Thick, pale liquids oozed from the fissures - liquids which froze and melted, melted and froze, as the wheezing creature breathed painfully in and out. Its eyes were dim and misted. They swivelled round, some pale blue, others milky white and dripping with filmy mucus. Its jaws shuddered, its mouth opened a crack, and a thick glutinous stream of half-frozen fluid drooled from the corners.

‘No, not evil,’ he echoed Maris. ‘But sick.’ He continued to gaze at the creature. There was something about it that seemed horribly familiar. It reminded him of the formless monster which had roamed the stonecomb – the blood-red glister which had been created by the ancient scholars in their Great Laboratory from the curious, ethereal glisters that inhabited the depths of the Sanctaphrax rock. They were creatures of the air, sucked into the glass tubes of the laboratory, and horribly deformed there. The writhing, shifting body, the clusters of glistening eyes, the long tendrils that swayed and swung in the sky like ragged ribbons blowing in the wind …

‘Whatever it is, it's a creature of the air,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘When your father re-opened the Great Laboratory and attempted to create life, it must have been drawn here from Open Sky. And now,’ he sighed, ‘it is trapped, look …’

Quint pointed to the long fraying tail. The Winter Knights followed his gaze. As the creature writhed and twisted, the taut strands of its tail looked, more than ever, like strands of rope from which it was struggling to break free.

‘It's as if it's frozen from the tail up,’ said Stope, ‘and every time it gulps down the warm clouds and tries to blast itself free, it just freezes up a little more …’

‘And freezes Sanctaphrax and Undertown along with it,’ interrupted Raffix. ‘We'll have to kill it …’

‘The poor thing can't help it. It's only trying to break free,’ said Maris. ‘We can't just kill it …’

Quint motioned to Raffix to take the wheel, and walked away. When he returned a few moments later, he was wearing a pair of parawings and holding the glowing light-casket in his gauntleted hands.

‘If we don't kill it, then Sanctaphrax is doomed,’ he said grimly. ‘But I was your father's apprentice, Maris. I am responsible. I can't ask the rest of you to risk your lives.’

He turned to Raffix. ‘Do you think you can get close enough for me to jump?’

Raffix smiled. ‘Oh, I reckon I can get us close enough all right, old chap,’ he said. ‘But we're the Winter Knights, remember. We stick together. There's going to be no jumping.’

Phin and Stope both nodded, and Maris grabbed Quint's hand. ‘The Winter Knights stick together, Quint,’ she said. ‘You mustn't do anything stupid. Promise me you won't.’

‘I promise,’ said Quint.

Far below them, the creature swayed back and forth in the sky, icy blasts of snow-filled air bursting from the ducts along its body as it swallowed another bank of incoming cloud.

‘Everybody rope themselves down!’ Raffix called out. ‘I'm taking us in!’

With its ragged, patched sails billowing and hull-weights swinging, the old sky ship swooped down in a wide arc, gathering speed as it did so. The sound of protesting timbers filled the air as the topmast cracked, the rudder creaked and the fore-decking buckled and groaned. Ice particles and snow flurries flew towards them, clinging to the hull-weights, settling in the folds of the now frozen sails and, despite the fire floats, beginning to clog up the porous flight-rock.

Tied to the helm, Raffix clenched his jaw as his hands raced over the flight-levers. On the rock-platform, Stope and Phin - their faces pale, their bodies trembling - had lashed themselves to the mast. Behind them, the fire floats on the ends of their silver chains - twists of dark, aromatic smoke coiling from the orange sumpwood charcoal as it hissed and glowed - spread out from the flight-rock like the wings of a giant snowbird.

Up at the battered prow, Quint stood like a carved figurehead in full knight academic armour with the shining light-casket clutched to his breast-plate in both hands while Maris crouched behind him, the rope around her waist tied to the foredeck balustrade. She was staring up at her friend, her face drawn and white with fear.

They sailed out further into Open Sky, then turned and raced back towards the Edge, through the gathering clouds. Up ahead of them, the cloudeater loomed. And as they drew closer, the glistening eyes focused once more on the tiny sky ship.

With a shudder, Quint saw that the eyeballs were tinged a jaundiced yellow colour and that the surface of every one was covered in a latticework of broken capillaries. The filmy discharge had thickened, becoming as viscous and opaque as prowlgrin glue. It hung down beneath the lower eyelids in pleated ribbons of frozen mucus.

From behind him, Quint heard Maris gasp. And from the helm, Raffix's voice rang out.

‘I'll follow this cloudbank in as far as I can, Quint, old chap. Then, I'll pull up sharp. But we're only going to get one go at it, so be ready to release the stormphrax on my command!’ Ahead of him, through the thinning clouds, Quint saw the lips of the great creature slowly part to reveal a huge, cavernous mouth. Out of it came a long, silent roar.

For a moment, warm, sickly air enveloped the sky ship, melting the snow and ice and causing the flight-rock to sink in the sky … But only for a moment. The next, the creature took in a huge, gulping breath, and the
Cloudslayer
hurtled towards the creature's great, gaping maw.

Quint gritted his teeth and raised the glowing light-casket.

‘Now, Quint!’ bellowed Raffix. ‘Now!’

Quint looked up into the cavernous mouth of the monster, which filled the sky ahead, its glowing red edges disappearing into the inky blackness of the gullet at the centre. All he had to do was flick the catch at the top of the light-casket, and the precious shard of storm-phrax would be released. His fingers tensed inside the metal gauntlets.

Click!

The gauntlets jammed! He flexed and strained, but they wouldn't open. They wouldn't move! His hands were locked tightly into place around the glowing lamp …

‘
Now, Quint!
’ bellowed Raffix.

Desperately, Quint struggled to break free from the rope that tethered him to the ship. If he couldn't release the stormphrax crystal then he'd throw himself into the gaping mouth instead – light-casket, stormphrax and all!

With a grunt of effort, he wrenched himself free – only for Maris to grab him by the arm.

‘Don't, Quint!’ she shouted. ‘You promised!’

With nimble fingers, she reached forward and flicked the catch on the light-casket. The door sprang open. There was a low hiss and the pungent scent of toasted almonds filled the air as the tiny crystal flew out of the box, as if shot from a crossbow. Sparking and flashing, it blazed a trail through the sky as it shot into the vast dark maw of the creature.

The next instant, as Raffix slammed the flight-levers back, Quint was knocked from his feet. The
Cloudslayer
pulled up hard, juddering to a halt in mid air, preventing it, too, from being swallowed up by the gargantuan creature.

A dazzling flash lit up the sky as the crystal exploded deep down inside the cloudeater's body. Every cell, every tendril, every scale of its icy carapace glowed as the fragment of stormphrax, made solid in the Twilight Woods, returned to its original form in Open Sky – pure energy, blindingly bright and blazing hot.

Suddenly the
Cloudslayer
was speeding across the sky back the way it had come, tossed and twisted on the bucking eddies as the shockwaves from the massive explosion rippled out through the air. For a moment, it seemed as if the sky ship's timbers had finally had enough and would shatter into fragments beneath the feet of the Winter Knights. The topmast splintered, the rudder shattered and much of the fore-decking was ripped to pieces – but somehow, the
Cloudslayer
stayed intact.

When it finally righted itself, and Raffix had brought it under control, Quint struggled to his feet and gazed out into Open Sky.

‘Did we kill it?’ he asked.

A warm wind was blowing in from Open Sky, and ahead the carapace of snow and ice that had enveloped the cloudeater was falling away. Icicles dripped, snapped off and plunged down through the air like discarded lances. Great disintegrating chunks cracked and slipped from the creature's back, breaking up in mid air, and turning to showers of ice fragments which seemed almost to effervesce. And as they melted in the turbulent air, so the sky was filled with shimmering curtains of rainbow-coloured light – red and yellow, purple and green – that criss-crossed and collided with each other in shifting arcs of exquisite colour.