Clash of the Sky Galleons (36 page)

Stope and Raffix shook hands warmly.

‘It’s true,’ said Stope. ‘I
have
been busy. Just finished a prow harpoon for a league ship - and if the size of it is anything to go by, then the league ship itself must be an absolute giant…’

‘That’s funny,’ said Phin thoughtfully as the three friends stood at the prow of the old sky ship and looked out across the dark wintry sky.
‘I’ve
just helped harvest the largest flight-rock I’ve ever seen and delivered it to a sky-shipyard in Undertown this very night.’

Raffix took his spectacles off and polished them with a spider-silk handerchief. ‘Rumour has it the leagues are
up to something,’ he said slowly. ‘Been refitting and repairing their league ships for months now - buying up all the timber they can lay their hands on. But this is the first I’ve heard of a giant sky ship …’

‘The leagues,
pah!’
snorted Phin. ‘Probably just fighting amongst themselves as usual. We all know what they’re like.’

‘Maybe so,’ said Raffix, ‘but if the leagues ever
did
manage to act together, then one thing’s for certain …’

‘What’s that?’ asked Stope.

‘I wouldn’t want to be a sky pirate,’ said Raffix. ‘Talking of which …’

‘I know,’ said Phin, with a faraway look in his eyes. ‘Quint…’ He sighed. ‘I wonder where he is right now?’

iii
The Tarry Vine Tavern

Perched upon his high stool, Patricule the tavern-waif slowly rotated his wing-like ears. Fine as parchment and lined with a network of pale-blue veins that pulsed as they swivelled and fluttered, his ears listened to the thoughts in the great drinking hall of the Tarry Vine tavern, just as he did every night.

Although tonight was different…

The tables and drinking-benches were crowded as usual. Sky pirates of every description, from mire-pearlers to Deepwoods traders, Undertown sewer-skimmers to Edgeland pavement-poachers, sat
slumped over tankards or troughs of foaming woodale. Their greatcoats were done up, their polished tricorne hats set at jaunty angles, with their swords, cutlasses and bludgeons at the ready. Though none of them moved so much as a muscle, they all sat in a curious expectant-looking silence, as if listening for something …

Patricule’s great wing-like ears twitched. Up above the hall, beside the huge vats of woodale, he could hear the thoughts of the tavern keeper, Glaviel Glynte. Sharp, clear, cool thoughts, they were, full of calculation and cunning. High above him on the gantry, Patricule could hear Sister Horsefeather’s clucking thoughts - agitated and fierce; barely suppressed excitement in her strange shryke head. But in front of him, in the crowded drinking hall, there was an eerie silence …

Crash!

Patricule stifled a howl of pain as the sound of the tavern doors slamming back on their hinges exploded in his ears. And there, standing in the doorway, was the portly gnokgoblin with the high-collared jerkin - the doorkeeper, Jaggs. He stared into the tavern, his eyes bulging and a bemused half-smile on his face.

Pity, but it can’t be helped,
Patricule heard Glaviel Glynte’s thoughts above.

You’ll pay! You’ll pay for this!
Sister Horsefeather’s thoughts rose to a shriek that made the waif wince.

He stared across the tavern from his high stool. All at once, Glynte’s and Horsefeather’s thoughts made sense. The gnokgoblin doorkeeper’s feet were hovering
inches above the floor, and protruding from the centre of his chest were three glinting talons, each one dripping with blood. The next instant, the hapless creature was tossed aside like a discarded rag, and replaced in the doorway by a massive black-feathered shryke, dressed in a dark cloak, a gleaming spiked helmet and breastplate. A spiked ball and chain dangled from her left hand.

With a shriek of rage, the bird-creature launched herself at the nearest table, scattering the sky pirates with her flailing claws. Behind her, seven identical black-feathered shrykes -screaming with fury, green bile dripping from their beaks - came bursting into the tavern. They slashed and stabbed with their vicious claws, slicing through the heavy
leather greatcoats and staving in the bicorne and tricorne hats with axe, cosh and cudgel-blow.

At each swinging blow or dagger-like claw-thrust, blood sprayed into the air, splattering table-top and tavern floor alike. From his high stool, Patricule stared with horrified fascination, the hideous chorus of murderous shryke-thoughts clamouring inside his head …

Die! Pirate scum! Die!

Blood! Blood! Blood!

Rip and slash! That’s it, pirate! Spill your guts!

Then, a moment later …

But wait! What’s this? Tilder guts? Hammelhorn blood!

Looking up from the bloody mess of bodies around her, the black-feathered shryke leader’s yellow eyes narrowed.

‘Waaaaach! Waaaaach! Waaaaach!’
she screeched, as she raced around the tavern, lashing out at the lifeless dummies at the tables.

Around her, her shryke-sisters let out similar shrieks of outrage.

A trick, sisters! A trick!
their identical thoughts sounded in Patricule’s head.

All at once, they stopped stock still, and eight pairs of yellow eyes turned on the tiny waif perched on the high stool in the corner of the drinking hall.

Time, sweet ladies!
the waif’s voice sounded in each bird-like creature’s head.
Time…

The waif’s large pale eyes turned towards the gantry, high up above the massive woodale vats
where Glaviel Glynte and Sister Horsefeather stood. The eight pairs of eyes followed his gaze as Sister Horsefeather reached down and, with both hands, grasped a thick, grooved lever attached to the gantry and yanked it as hard as she could.

As she did so, there was a series of creaks and cracks, followed by a loud whooshing sound, as the fronts of the huge woodale vats swung open and their contents gushed out into the drinking hall below in a tremendous roar. Gurgling with fear, shock and horror, the eight shrykes had their legs pulled away from beneath them and, along with the bloody sky-pirate dummies, the tables, the chairs, the stools and drinking-troughs, were washed across the tavern floor in the frothing torrent.

With a satisfied smirk, Patricule jumped from his high stool and pulled the draining chain. At the end of the hall, metal trapdoors in the floor slid open as the foaming tide of woodale reached the waif, then thundered down into the sewers beneath the tavern. Spinning round in the heady swirl, the shrykes tried desperately to hold their ground - lashing out with their glinting claws
and savage beaks - to escape the great rushing flood. But all to no avail.

Save me!

I’m drowning!

A-aa-aaa-aiih…

The shrykes’ thoughts receded in the tavern-waif’s head, to be replaced a moment later by Glaviel Glynte’s ice-cool musings.

First blood to the sky pirates. Imbix Hoth will be in need of a new bodyguard …

iv
Palace in the Western Quays

Imbix Hoth stood on the balcony of his palace, staring out across the Undertown rooftops. On the other side of the Edgewater, far from the opulent palaces of the leagues, was that nest of sky piracy, the Tarry Vine tavern. For too long had that impudent sky vermin defied the power of the leagues. Now their time was up.

First, flush the sky pirates out of their filthy nest in Undertown! His beloved shrykes would see to that.

Imbix smiled as he looked down at the glittering moonlit waters of the Edgewater River.

Then draw them out into the skies in one stinking swarm, and …

But what was that? Imbix’s eyes narrowed as he
leaned out over the balcony. It couldn’t be … One, two … four … eight shrykes floating down the Edgewater River. Black, bedraggled - and very, very dead.

• CHAPTER SEVENTEEN •
THE SKY WRECK

The sky wreck hovered in the air, dark and brooding
-L
against a backdrop of billowing clouds. Far below lay the turbulent treetops of the Deepwoods forest, the windblown canopy moving like the swell of a mighty ocean. To the east, west and north, the forest stretched off towards the horizons, seemingly for ever. Only to the south - where the sun was already low in the sky - did the luxuriant trees thin out as they approached the rocky Edgelands, that barren strip of land, lashed by gales and wreathed in swirling mist.

It was there - now blurred by wisps of cloud; now stark against the yellow sky - that the ancient wreck of a once proud sky ship floated. The vessel had not turned turvey Upright, but only just, its great hull tilted at a sharp angle, as if caught for ever in the act of tacking into the winds of the long-forgotten storm that had wrecked her.

Somewhere along the line, both of the sky ship’s great ironwood masts had snapped off. One was now a blunted stump; the other had been left with a circle of
jagged splinters of wood, like a crown worn with jaunty disrespect. Huge gaping holes lined the vessel’s fore-and aft-hulls where the lufwood decking had fallen away. From every surface, every cracked panel, every shattered plank and shard of decking, there sprouted weird plants and fungal growths.

Some stood tall and jagged in yellow and orange peaks; some hugged the timber like ruffs of thick mottled fur; while some - resembling clusters of purple parasols -swayed delicately to and fro as wild winds buffeted the bows and the wreck rolled gently from side to side. Still more grew in the places where rain collected; clumps and clusters, like lowland shrubs and forest undergrowth. And in addition to all this, the entire floating vessel was festooned in great diaphanous swathes of shimmering threads that flapped and trembled in the shifting air like tattered silken sheets. Even the hanging-weights were not spared, with the chains and pitted rocks themselves covered with sky moss and air lichen and great tongue-like fronds.

As for the flight-rock at the heart of the vast wrecked vessel, like all other buoyant rocks whose origins lay in the Stone Gardens, it had continued to grow. Once it had been enclosed by the spherical rock cage. Now, years after the sky ship had been wrecked and without a stone pilot to trim it, the rock was bulging through the gaps between the criss-cross lattice of riveted bars, pushing the torn and twisted metal out of the way in some places; swallowing it up in others.