Midnight Over Sanctaphrax (7 page)

‘
TOG
!’
she cried again.

‘I'm down here,’ came a muffled voice.

Clutching tightly with trembling fingers, Glim pulled herself forwards across the roof and peered down into the hole. The sight which greeted her made no sense. A huge piece of wood lay in the middle of the floor. Beneath it lay Tog.

‘Help me,’ he whispered. ‘Can't move. C … can't breathe.’

‘Just hang on,’ Glim shouted back. ‘I'll be right with you.’

Shakily, she eased herself back down the roof and felt
for the top rung of the ladder with her feet. The wind tugged at her fingers. The rain lashed at her face. Slowly, carefully, she descended the ladder and ran inside.

‘Oh, good gracious!’ she exclaimed, and her fingers flew to the lucky amulets around her neck.

Close to, the piece of wood looked even bigger. It was curved and varnished, and along its side, gold letters gleamed in the lamplight, EDGEDA … The word ended abruptly in a jagged mass of splinters.

It looks like a bit of a sky ship,’ said Glim. Though why anyone would want to go skysailing in this weather …’

‘Never mind all that,’ Tog wheezed. ‘Just get it off me!’

Glim started back guiltily. ‘Yes, Tog. Sorry, Tog,’ she said.

Brow taut with concentration, she tugged at the wood with all her might. It was heavy - much heavier than it looked. Despite all her efforts, it hardly moved. Yet move it did. And just enough for Tog to release his trapped legs and scramble backwards.

‘Yes!’ he cried.

‘Unrikhl’ Glim gasped, and the wood fell to the floor with a bang. ‘Oh, Tog,’ she said. ‘Are you all right?’

The mobgnome inspected his body carefully, up and
down. ‘I think so,’ he said finally. ‘Leastways, no bones broken.’ He nodded towards the section of broken sky ship. ‘Which is more than can be said for the crew of this thing, I dare say.’

‘Do you think they were leaguesmen or sky pirates?’ said Glim.

Tog ran his fingers over the fine wood and gold lettering. ‘Hard to say, really,’ he replied at last. ‘But I'll tell you this for nothing. This sky ship must have been a real beauty when she was all in one piece.’

Glim shuddered. ‘Oh, Tog,’ she said. ‘Can you imagine what it must be like being up in the sky when so terrible a storm strikes? Nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide …’ She looked up at the hole in the roof. ‘Puts our problems into perspective, don't it?’ she said.

‘Certainly does,’ said Tog thoughtfully. ‘I'd best get it repaired before the whole place floods.’

It wasn't only the mobgnomes who suffered damage. There were others, in various parts of Undertown, who lost their homes, their property, even their lives, to the falling debris.

In the main commercial centre, a broad section of hull flattened one side of the aviary run by Flabsweat the pet shop owner, killing half the captive birds outright and leaving the rest dazed but free to escape. The bowsprit flew down through the air like a spear, skewering an unsuspecting hammelhorn - penned up and ready for the following morning's sale - as it landed. The heavy main mast crushed a row of market stalls where it fell.

The west side of the town fared no better. A volley of falling hull-weights brought considerable damage to the opulent dwellings of several prominent leaguesmen. And the rudder-wheel - a great circular slab of rock which keeps a sky ship on an even keel - smashed through the roof of the Leagues’ Chamber itself. It broke the ceremonial ring-shaped table in two, and killed three leaguesmen in the process.

The three unfortunates were later identified as Simenon Xintax, the current Leaguesmaster, Farquhar Armwright, a slight, nervous individual who represented the League of Gluesloppers and Ropeteasers, and Ulbus Pentephraxis - a bull of a leaguesman known more for his ferocity in battle with the sky pirates than for any business acumen: none of them had stood a chance.

Even Sanctaphrax itself suffered damage from the
wreck of the sky ship. First, a large section of poop-deck completely destroyed all the intricate apparatus on the high balcony of the Cloudwatchers’ College. A moment later, a heavy fore-harpoon speared the side of the dilapidated - and thankfully abandoned - Raintasters’ Tower and remained there, swaying precariously, halfway up the crumbling wall.

The noise from the blow was tremendous. It echoed round the entire city and juddered through the floating rock itself.

That's it,’ the Professor of Windtouchers groaned. ‘We're all doomed now.’ He turned to the Professor of Cloudwatchers who was crouched beside him beneath his desk. Tt has been an honour and a pleasure knowing you, my friend,’ he said.

‘The pleasure has been all mine,’ the Professor of Cloudwatchers replied, beaming brightly.

The Professor of Windtouchers frowned. ‘All yours,’ he said. ‘If it was all yours, I wouldn't have derived any pleasure from our acquaintance. And I did.’

The Professor of Cloudwatchers nodded sagely. ‘But I derived more pleasure.’

‘Why, you obstinate, hog-headed …’

‘Who are you calling hog-headed?’

A second, and louder, noise filled the air and, as the city rocked, the contents of every shelf and cupboard in the study tumbled down to the floor with a crash.

‘That's it,’ the Professor of Windtouchers groaned. ‘We're certainly all doomed now.’

The third loud noise was the loudest of all. It boomed and thundered with such force that the two professors fell down flat on the floor. All over Sanctaphrax, academics and apprentices, servants and guards, did the same.

Only the Professor of Darkness, the Most High Academe of Sanctaphrax, knew what had happened. At the sound of the first crash, he had looked from the window of the Loftus Observatory to see a nearby tower swaying precariously, to and fro.

‘The Raintasters’ Tower,’ he murmured, and swallowed nervously. ‘Thank Sky I was not in it.’

Up until only a few days earlier, his own study had been situated at the top of the tower. But what had caused it to rock so? He looked down. And there, halfway up, he saw a gleaming spike of metal and wood buried deep in the shattered stonework.

The professor scratched his head. ‘It looks like a sky ship harpoon, but…
whooah!
‘

He stared in horror as the great harpoon juddered, slipped and, in a flurry of rocks and mortar, tumbled down through the air, landing with a loud crash on the roof of the covered cloisters far below. The first stone pillar crumpled; the rest toppled, one against the other like a line of dominoes, until all of them were down.

Then, just as the air was clearing, the weakened wall of the tower finally gave up the struggle to remain standing, and the whole lot came tumbling down to the ground in an explosion of rocks, rubble and dust.

The professor's jaw dropped. Deep furrows crisscrossed his brow. He was recalling the sky ship which had disappeared so mysteriously. The curious falling debris. The shooting stars …

The sound of insistent tapping interrupted his musings. He spun round and there, perched on the broad sill beyond the window, was a white -bird with yellow eyes and a vicious-looking beak which it was hammering at the glass.

‘Kraan!’ said the Professor of Darkness. ‘

Years earlier, he had found the bird as a bedraggled fledgling, half-dead in a snowstorm. He'd taken it back to his warm study where he'd both nursed it back to health and taught it the rudiments of speech. Now Kraan was fully-grown and powerful, and despite - or perhaps because of - its unpromising start in life, it had gone on to become leader of the flock of white ravens which roosted in the Stone Gardens, right at the tip of the Edge.

The professor hurried to the window and pushed it open. The gale-force wind burst in, ruffling his beard and setting his black robes flapping. ‘Kraan, my loyal friend,’ he said. ‘How good to see you - but what has brought you here in such terrible weather?’

The white raven cocked its head to one side and stared at him with one unblinking yellow eye. ‘Strange lights in sky,’ it said, its voice raucous and rasping as it shouted above the noise of the storm.

‘Shooting stars,’ the professor nodded. ‘I saw them too. I…’

‘Shooting stars,’ the white raven repeated. It turned its head and fixed him with the other eye. ‘One in Stone Gardens.’

The professor started with surprise. ‘You mean … You're saying …’ A broad grin spread over his face. ‘One of the shooting stars has come down in the Stone Gardens, yes?’

‘Stone Gardens,’ Kraan repeated.

‘But this is wonderful news you bring,’ the professor said.

‘Stone Gardens,’ Kraan called for a third time. It flapped its heavy wings, launched itself off from the sill and swooped away into the night.

‘Quite so,’ said the professor, as he hurried across to the top of the stairs. ‘I must go and investigate for myself at once.’

• CHAPTER FOUR •
THE STONE GARDENS

T
he Stone Gardens lay at the very tip of the jutting L Edge promontory There were no plants there. No shrubs or trees. No flowers. Nothing grew in this ghostly place but the rocks themselves.

Seeded long long ago, they had been growing in the Stone Gardens for as far back as anyone knew.
The Elemental Treatise
itself made several mentions of
‘The wondrous spheres of rock which do grow and, in their immensity, float skywards.’
The great floating rock upon which Sanctaphrax had been built had its origins there.

New rocks appeared beneath the old ones, pushing those above them higher as they grew. Over time, stacks had formed with the rocks standing one on top of the other, and each one larger than the one below. Strange eerie groans and deep sonorous rumblings accompanied the rocks’ growth - noises which, combined with the towering silhouettes of the rock stacks, made the Stone Gardens a place of fear to Under to wners.

If left untended, the uppermost rocks would become
so large, so buoyant, that they would break free with a crumbling sigh and sail upwards into open sky But the Stone Gardens
were
tended. The colony of great white ravens over which Kraan ruled - sleek descendants of their smaller, scraggier cousins in the Mire - had been roosting in the stone stacks for centuries. It was they who monitored the growth of the rocks.