The Curse of the Gloamglozer (26 page)

‘They feed on fear,’ said Bungus, and shook his head. ‘Though normally glisters are like … like woodgnats feeding on a hammelhorn. They do no harm. The prickles at the back of a neck or a shiver down a spine are enough to satisfy them. As an earth-scholar I have studied glisters down here in the stonecomb since I was a junior librarian, and believe me when I tell you…’ He glanced round at the mummified corpses littering the cavern. ‘ … the rogue glister is like no other glister that has ever…’

‘It was horrible,’ Maris moaned, more animated now. ‘It chased me. It caught me. I couldn't struggle. I couldn't move. I couldn't stop it prising my eyelids apart and forcing itself inside my head. And it hurt, Quint! It hurt so much.’ She fell silent and turned to Bungus, tears welling up in the corners of her eyes. ‘If you hadn't arrived when you did!’

‘But I did arrive,’ said Bungus softly. He stooped down and took hold of her hands. ‘You're safe now.’

Quint frowned uneasily. ‘How
did
you find us?’ he said. ‘Were you following us, too?’

At the back of his mind lurked the suspicion that the High Librarian was perhaps in on the intrigue against the Most High Academe. If Bungus Septrill noticed the mistrustful tone to Quint's question, he did not show it.

‘No, not you,’ he said in his dry, papery voice. ‘I was tracking the rogue glister itself.’ He sighed. ‘After the Great Library, the stonecomb is a second home to me – a refuge from the sky-scholars up there.’ He gazed up into the blackness and brandished his fist. ‘But for a long time now, I've been hearing rumours; talk of disappearances, of inexplicable noises and strange goings-on down here. You were followed, you say. Well, you weren't the first. It was the treasury-guards who initially reported sightings of a huge, blood-red glister. According to them, it not only fed on fear but, entering through the eyes, devoured every feeling, every memory, every thought – leaving its victims empty, dried out, without the instinct even to breathe. The sky-scholars dismissed the reports as Deepwoods superstition, but I knew better. And now, so do you.’

‘How did you get it off me?’ asked Quint. ‘Did you kill it?’

‘Kill it?’ Bungus shook his head woefully. ‘You clearly know nothing about glisters,’ he said. ‘What
do
they teach you in that school of yours?’

Quint suddenly found himself back in the Fountain House classroom chanting out cloud formations once again –
cursive low, cursive flat, anvil wide, anvil rising
… Mechanical. Pointless.

‘A lot of superstitious nonsense is spoken about glisters,’ Bungus was saying. ‘About them being souls, spirits or the like. In fact, they are the seeds of open sky which blow in from beyond the Edge. This they have done since the beginning of time, sowing the land with
life. They are the building blocks of existence itself, carried in on storm-force winds to Riverrise, where they come to earth and flow out into the Deepwoods along the Edgewater River, to blossom into every form and kind of life.’

He fell still, and Quint watched as his expression became thoughtful.

‘At least,’ he said, ‘that is what happened before the great Sanctaphrax rock rose above the Edge. Since then, some sky seeds have inevitably been blown into the great rock itself and taken root in the stonecomb. Here, far from Riverrise, they develop into glisters – the spectral beings that flitter throughout the tunnels.’

Quint glanced round him. Thankfully, there were none to be seen.

‘Of course, most of them are harmless,’ Bungus went on. ‘Occasionally, one will leave a small glister-burn if provoked, but I've never seen any others as huge and deadly as this one.’ He paused. ‘But whether large or small, you can't
kill
a glister, for the simple reason that they're not alive – at least, not as we understand it. They are the phantoms of things that have never lived. Those that stray outside the stonecomb soon dissolve into nothingness.’ Bungus pulled a leather pouch from the pocket of his cape and untied the drawstring. ‘Inside, I use this to ward them off.’

Maris and Quint peered inside.

‘Sand?’ said Quint. ‘What use is that?’ ‘It isn't sand,’ said Bungus. He reached into the pouch and drew out a pinch of grainy white powder. ‘To earth-scholars, it is known as chine,’ he said.

Quint looked closely at the tiny crystals glittering in the High Librarian's leathery palm.

‘It is gathered from the edges of the lake at Riverrise,’ Bungus explained.

‘Riverrise,’ Quint said, impressed. ‘Even my father's sky ship, the
Galerider
, has never ventured that far into the Deepwoods. I wasn't even sure it actually existed.’

‘Yet the Scholar Librarians visited Riverrise many times,’ said Bungus. He smiled. ‘I have often dreamt of travelling there myself, but like so much of earth-scholarship, the route to Riverrise is lost. More's the pity.’ He looked down at his hand. ‘What stormphrax is to sky-scholars, so chine is to us earth-scholars. It is the crystallized essence of the Edgewater. And to a glister,’ he added, ‘a crystal of chine is as corrosive as the strongest acid. If one comes threateningly close…’ He raised his hand to his mouth and blew a single grain into the air. ‘
Pfff!
And it is gone.’

‘I wish we'd had some earlier,’ said Quint.

‘Alas, I fear it'll take my entire supply of chine to deter the monstrous blood-red glister we encountered,’ said Bungus, returning the leather pouch to his pocket. ‘The pinch I caught it with will have weakened it – maybe for a few hours – but it
will
be back.’ He helped Maris to her feet and picked up his lantern. ‘Come now. We really should be leaving.’

Maris clasped his hand. She had still not fully recovered – either mentally or physically – from her terrible ordeal.

‘My father will reward you well for saving me,’ she murmured.

Bungus smiled and offered his arm as a support. ‘Your father?’ he said. ‘A sky-scholar, no doubt. You are very kind, but no sky-scholar would risk his position to help an old and decrepit earth-studies librarian like me.’

‘My father most certainly would,’ said Maris imperiously. ‘For he is the Most High Academe of Sanctaphrax himself.’

Bungus stopped in his tracks. He turned to Maris, eyes wide and mouth gaping. ‘You are the daughter of Linius Pallitax?’ he said.

It was Maris's turn to be surprised. ‘You know my father?’

‘Indeed I do,’ Bungus confirmed. ‘Or rather, I did.’

‘But how is that possible?’ said Maris, her eyes flashing. She grasped the old librarian by the sleeve. ‘You must tell me.’

‘Earth alive!’ Bungus exclaimed. ‘How like him you look. I can see it now …’ He shook his head. ‘Linius used to visit the Great Library when he was a lad,’ he explained. ‘He would sneak off from the Fountain House, frustrated by the nit-picking tedium of the lessons offered by those so-called teachers and keen to discover more about the true and ancient wisdom contained in the hanging barkscrolls. Initially, I introduced him to the rudiments of earth-studies. Later, once he had
got the hang of the library trees, he began to pursue his own interests independently.’

Quint nodded. ‘That would explain how he knows so much about the place,’ he said. ‘He was able to tell me exactly where to go to retrieve the barkscroll he needed.’

‘So that's what you were doing in my library,’ said Bungus, thoughtfully. He looked up. ‘I don't suppose you remember which barkscroll Linius was after?’

‘I … didn't read it properly,’ said Quint. ‘It…’

‘Then where exactly did you find it?’ said Bungus. ‘Do try to remember.’ He fixed Quint with an intense stare. ‘Which tree of knowledge did you climb?’

Quint racked his brains, fearing for a moment that his encounter with the rogue glister had erased that crucial part of his memory. But then, in his mind's eye, he suddenly saw the golden plaque. ‘
Aerial Creatures
,’ he said.

Bungus nodded. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes,’ said Quint, ‘I had to climb right up to the top, following the “not” branches –
not bird
,
not reptile
,
not mammal
… The barkscroll was hanging from where two twigs crossed,’ he said. ‘
Celestial
and … and … I just can't remember.’

Bungus's face darkened. ‘What can my old pupil be up to?’ he mused. ‘Come to think of it, what is he doing allowing his daughter and apprentice to go wandering off through the stonecomb on their own?’

Maris and Quint caught each other's eye. Standing there in the empty lair of the blood-red glister, both of
them suddenly felt very small, and very alone. Perhaps this strange ragged librarian with his papery clothes and powerful potions might actually be able to help. Quint squeezed Maris's hand in the darkness. She squeezed it back.

‘Can we trust you?’ said Maris.

‘Trust me?’ Bungus smiled. ‘I may be an earth-scholar, but your father trusted me once.’

‘Very well,’ said Maris, suddenly very tired. ‘Tell him, Quint.’

Quint nodded. He told him all about the Most High Academe's recent obsession with his work and how he, Quint, had been taken on to help him. He told him about the nightly trips down to the stonecomb and the terrible wounds the professor had sustained there. He described the shifty individual with the silver nose-piece, and the suspicious guard, and he explained about the sabotaging of the sky cage…

All the while Bungus listened in silence, head down and brow furrowed, his face betraying nothing of what he was thinking. It was only when Quint told him about what he had glimpsed and heard inside the chamber that he finally looked up.

‘A great sphere of light?’ he said. ‘Sobbing cries?’ The colour drained from his face. ‘Can it be true?’

Maris trembled. Her encounter with the terrible rogue glister had left her feeling weak and light-headed. ‘Can we just get out of here?’ she whispered. ‘Please.’

But Bungus made no reply. He gazed into the darkness. ‘So long ago,’ he breathed, almost to himself. ‘So long ago as to be almost a legend … could my old pupil Linius really have discovered the lost Ancient Laboratory of the First Scholars?’

Quint frowned. ‘But I thought the Great Laboratory was turned into the Treasury,’ he said, remembering the brief history lesson he'd received from the individual on the Viaduct Steps.

Bungus shook his head. ‘Once there were
two
laboratories,’ he said. ‘The Great Laboratory and the Ancient Laboratory. They each had very different purposes.
The Great Laboratory was the heart of earth-studies, a place where any new discoveries – be they animal, vegetable or mineral – were analysed and categorized … Before it was seized by the sky-scholars and turned into the Treasury,’ he added bitterly. ‘Whereas the Ancient Laboratory … Oh, Quint, lad,’ he said, ‘even back then when the rock was young, it was known as the
Ancient
Laboratory, because that is where the scholars of the origins of matter carried out their accursed work.’

He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and patted away the cold sweat which beaded his forehead.

‘What did they do?’ said Quint.

Bungus shuddered. ‘They were arrogant,’ he said. ‘They were vain. Understanding the world that already existed was not enough for them. They …’ His voice trailed off.

‘What?’ said Quint urgently.

‘They wanted to unlock the most ancient mystery of all, the secret of life,’ he said. ‘They played at creation.’

Quint's jaw dropped. ‘And … and were they successful?’ he asked.

‘Nobody knows,’ said Bungus. ‘But obviously something went badly wrong, for legend has it that the First Scholars shut the laboratory and blocked off the stonecomb leading to it. Soon after, the Great Schism between earth-studies and sky-scholarship took place, and both the laboratory and the experiments carried out there were forgotten.’ Bungus sighed. ‘From that day, it has remained a great mystery – yet from what you have
told me, there is one person in Sanctaphrax who could know the answer. Linius Pallitax.’

Maris, who had been finding it increasingly difficult to concentrate, looked up as she heard her father's name being spoken. He'd done something dangerous, that much was clear, but she was confused. She could barely breathe. Her head was spinning and her legs had returned to jelly. She stood, rocking back and forwards on the balls of her feet, threatening to tumble to the floor at any moment.