Clash of the Sky Galleons (14 page)

At the sound of his voice, the academics leaped into action. The ‘net-tenders’ pulled their poles free, and the great circular nets closed round the rising rocks, weighted by the fire-floats. For a moment, the huge boulders hovered above the stacks. Then, one by one, fringed by the warmth of the glowing floats, they slowly sank.

As the rocks approached the ground, the ‘rock-fasteners’ surged forward with their glowing callipers and seized the floating boulders in their fiery jaws. Great hisses of steam rose like storm clouds and, as the rock-fasteners held them tight, the rocks’ mournful howl was extinguished.

All round the Stone Gardens the same procedure was being enacted. At a towering rock stack beside the Edgewater River, a team of cloudwatcher under-professors from the prestigious College of Cloud - each one wearing a scuffed, worn tilder-leather apron that
betrayed their years of experience - netted and clamped their rock with both speed and precision. At the rock stack next to them, a team of fog-graders from the minor Academy of Fog was faring less well. Cobbled together only that morning, the group was a hotch-potch affair, ranging in age from callow apprentices to an elderly professor in his nineties who, despite his experience, was slow and so shaky that the others had to snatch his pole away from him before he got it tangled up in the net.

Meanwhile, in the easternmost part of the garden, a group of seven young apprentice raintasters, their deep blue hoods pulled up over their heads, had set to work with enthusiasm. They’d raised their poles and positioned the net as they’d been shown, and when the rock had risen up
from the stack, it had been caught and warmed, until it slowly descended once more.

But then, as two of them clamped the rock with the heated callipers, they noticed that something was badly wrong. The apprentice on the brazier bellows hadn’t pumped them hard enough. The charcoal hadn’t blazed hot enough, which meant that the callipers themselves had glowed red rather than white-hot. So, while all around them, the clamped rocks from other stacks had fallen silent, their own rock had continued to howl like a wounded tilder.

Worse than that, it began to rise up off the ground. The raintasters swarmed round their embattled rock-fasteners, concern plain on their faces. Twenty years it had taken for the rock to reach maturity. Twenty years! Pushing up from the ground, growing larger and lighter while those above it had been harvested, one after the other. Twenty whole years - about to be wasted, because of one moment of carelessness.

‘For Sky’s sake, don’t let it fly off!’ one of them cried as he fell on the rock and tried wrestling it back to the ground.

‘The net! The net!’ another one shouted, but by now half of the sumpwood burners had burned out, and there wasn’t enough heat to keep it grounded.

Suddenly, a College of Rain under-professor from one of the other stacks came hurrying across, a pair of white-hot callipers that he’d pulled from his own brazier grasped in his hands.

‘Take the other end,’ he bellowed to the apprentice closest to him.

The youth leaped to do as he was told, and together the pair of them clamped the callipers round the rock. There was a hiss, a sigh and a cloud of steam - and finally the rock fell still. A cheer went up from the others.

‘Thank you, sir,’ they cried. ‘Thank you.’

The under-professor nodded. ‘Next time, heat your callipers properly’ he said. ‘And always have a spare set at the ready’ He chuckled. ‘The College of Rain hasn’t lost a flight-rock for twelve harvests, but you lot came mighty close, I can tell you.’ He nodded towards the distant gates. ‘Now, take your rock, and join the grading queue.’

Soon a great procession of academics was making its way back through the Stone Gardens. The groups from each academy and school clustered round their own individual rocks, tending them with glowing tapers, fire-floats, torches and lanterns of every description -anything to keep the new-born flight-rock warm. Back through the now silent stacks, already beginning to welcome the returning white ravens, the academics marched in triumph, and on towards the Reckoning Bench.

There they were greeted by the rock bailiff, Silenius Quilp of the School of Light and Darkness. He was red-faced and breathless after his exertions, but smiling broadly. Beside him on the tall, ironwood bench sat the stone marshal, Zaphix Nemulis of the Academy of Wind, twitching slightly and adjusting his spectacles as he opened the giant ledger that was balanced on his knees. And to his left, standing stiffly upright, his arms folded,
was Imbix Hoth, the Master of the League of Rock Merchants.

As the first academics - a group of under-professors from the College of Cloud - approached the bench, carefully tending their flight-rock, Imbix smiled, and his small, reddish eyes glinted greedily Behind him, his black-feathered shrykes craned their necks and stared with unblinking yellow eyes.

‘Diameter?’ the stooped, wispy-haired rock bailiff enquired as the group of cloudwatchers reached the bench.

Three strides, twelve,’ came the reply. Quilp frowned over the top of his half-moon glasses. ‘Are you sure?’ he queried. ‘Looks like three strides,
thirteen,
to me.’

The cloudwatchers with the callipers clamped firmly round the rock held it steady while an under-professor took a measurement with a copper measuring rod.

‘Three strides, thirteen,’ he confirmed.

‘I knew it,’ said Quilp, turning to Zaphix the stone marshal with a smile of satisfaction. Although Silenius Quilp had never made it beyond sub-under-professor in the prestigious School of
Light and Darkness, his skills in the Stone Gardens were legendary.

Zaphix entered the measurement in the ledger on his balanced knees.

‘Right, now attach it to the weighing-basket,’ Quilp instructed.

The cloudwatchers eased the net across to the weighing-basket, and secured it in place. As the rock cooled slightly it began to pull the basket upwards, which in turn tugged on the hook beneath it and caused the needle at the centre of the measuring dial to swing round. Silenius Quilp crouched down and squinted at the calibrations.

‘Eight hundred and sixty-three,’ he read off.

Zaphix dipped his snowbird quill in the tiny pot of black ink and wrote the number in the column next to the diameter.

‘Which means …’ Quilp muttered under his breath, a complicated mental calculation involving the diameter of the rock times air temperature plus humidity, divided by the square root of its negative weight… ‘Flight grade … third class,’ he announced. ‘A real beauty.’

Zaphix scratched away in the ledger before turning to the leaguesmaster, his eyebrows raised.

‘For such a rock?’ Imbix Hoth purred, his finger-spikes tapping down on the table-top. ‘Twelve refectory tables of finest lufwood,’ he said, ‘and the College of Cloud’s cellars filled with vintage sapwine.’

The under-professors bowed to the leaguesmaster
stiffly. They were clearly delighted with the price they’d obtained for their flight-rock but, as Sanctaphrax academics, they were hardly going to let a leaguesmaster, however lofty, see the pleasure on their faces.

‘Sold!’ announced the stone marshal, and entered the details in the ledger.

‘Next!’ the rock bailiff’s voice rang out.

A group of mistsifters stepped confidently forward, the long sleeves of their checkerboard robes fluttering in the breeze. The rock they tended was massive, more than twice the size of the cloudwatchers’, but as Silenius Quilp was weighing it, he frowned and pointed to a fissure which ran, like a livid scar, halfway up the rock’s surface.

‘A rupture, I’m afraid, Professors,’ he announced to the mistsifters as Zaphix scratched in the ledger.

They turned to Imbix, who smiled ruefully. ‘Pity’ he muttered. ‘Over-ripe … So close and yet so far …’

‘Fit only for rubble, I’m afraid,’ said the stone marshal, shrugging his shoulders.

‘A vat of woodale,’ Imbix announced. ‘Take it or leave it.’

The mistsifters bowed as stiffly as the cloudwatchers before them, their faces - behind the metal noses they wore - betraying no emotion.

‘Next!’

The procession of harvested flight-rocks continued until well into the morning, with the academics accepting the leaguesmaster’s bids for their rocks. Occasionally a group of older professors would hold
out for more by standing silently, until Imbix added a gilded looking-glass or an ornamental wall-hanging or two to his bid. But most of them just accepted his offers.

And why shouldn’t they? After all, the academics were being amply rewarded. A single flight-rock, for instance, had provided the Academy of Gloom with enough candles to last for a year, while a harvest of four rocks had ensured the Institute of Ice and Snow supplies of feathers, quills and down for decades to come. The leaguesmaster’s offers were invariably generous, lavishing upon them everything they could want, and more.

It was, of course, in his best interests to do so. Without the Sanctaphrax academics’ expertise, built up over generations, together with the white ravens to whom they offered up their dead, there would be no harvest. On occasions in the past, Undertowners had attempted to harvest flight-rocks for themselves - those, that is, who were not terrified by the ferocious white ravens and the disturbing eeriness of the gardens - only to find that the skill of the ‘net-tenders’ and ‘rock-fasteners’ was not easily matched. What was more, those who had succeeded in securing a flight-rock had then had the academics-at-arms to contend with, making their chances even slimmer.

Naturally, the Leagues of Undertown understood this only too well. It was the reason they furnished the Master of the League of Rock Merchants, Imbix Hoth, with all the luxuries they could, for him to shower on the
academics in return for the precious flight-rocks which, it seemed, only the academics could successfully harvest. By selling the flight-rocks only to the League of Rock Merchants, the academics of Sanctaphrax avoided undignified haggling and squabbling with the Leagues of Undertown, and were able to retreat to their floating city with all the provisions and luxuries they could possibly need.

It was an arrangement that suited them and Imbix Hoth very well indeed. The leaguesmaster guarded his position jealously and saw to it that anyone who sought to take his place met with an unfortunate end - usually from the razor-sharp tip of a shryke’s talon.

At last, with the sun now high up above the rock stacks and the hammelhorn wagons at the gates of the Stone Gardens all carefully loaded with their precious cargo, Zaphix Nemulis closed the ledger and put away his snowbird quill. The last of the academics - an irascible bunch of fog-graders who had haggled silently for ages - finally settled for twenty bales of tilder cloth and eighty barrels of pickled oozefish, before shuffling off after the departing academics-at-arms. Now, the Stone Gardens were peaceful once more, with only the desultory calls of the roosting white ravens breaking the stillness.

‘Sanctaphrax thanks you, Leaguesmaster,’ said, Zaphix, ‘for your generosity.’

‘As ever, I am pleased to be of service.’ Imbix smiled with a slight bow that almost caught his hat-tipper by surprise.

The leaguesmaster ignored the flustered prodding of the hat pole, and took the stone marshal by the arm.