The Last of the Sky Pirates (41 page)

A volley of harpoons and rocks exploded from the Tower of Night and hurtled towards the sky ship. One of the harpoons struck the starboard bow; a second skittered across the lower deck. Further back, a boulder dealt a glancing blow to the stern. All would have shattered a small skycraft, but the mighty sky ship barely seemed to flinch.

The Guardians of Night reloaded. The
Skyraider
rose up higher in the sky. The harpoon-turrets and swivel catapults were realigned.

‘FIRE!’

The second bombardment did even less harm than the first, with not a single harpoon or boulder meeting its target. Peering through their telescopes into the swirling cloud, the guard masters saw the bearded figure at the helm – resplendent in satin frock coat and tricorn hat – barking commands of his own. The main-sail billowed. The stern hull-weights dropped. Abruptly, the hovering sky ship soared upwards, returning fire as it did so.

‘They’re heading for Midnight’s Spike,’ someone cried.

‘Defend the spike!’

‘Defend her with your lives!’

‘FIRE!’

A third salvo of rocks and harpoons soared into the sky, a single rock hitting amidships, where a lone banderbear feverishly tended the great flight-rock. The bander-bears at the rear of the ship replied with a heavy bombardment of the flaming ironwood balls. The walls of the tower suffered more damage and one harpoon-turret was destroyed by a direct hit. Two Guardians – one up high on a look-out gantry and one on a weapon-platform some way below – were struck by arrows simultaneously. The pair of them keeled forwards and, one after the other, tumbled down through the air as in some strange and terrible dance.

‘More fire-power!’ roared a guard master.

‘Reinforcements to the spike chamber at once!’ bellowed another.

‘Alert the Most High Guardian!’

‘Call Orbix Xaxis!’

Slab crouched down on the boards and peered out through the shattered wall. He had neither harpoon-turrets nor swivel catapults up here at the look-out gantry, yet the death of his comrade-in-arms would be avenged. With trembling hands, he raised the sight of the crossbow to his eye, slid the ironwood bolt into place and ratcheted the string back.

‘This is for Bragknot,’ he muttered grimly.

The sky ship loomed up before him, thick clouds of mist swirling around it. Slab lowered his head. He took aim. For the briefest of moments, the sky ship drew level. He fired the crossbow.

There was a thump. A
twang
. The bolt shot into the air and disappeared into the thick misty cloud. Slab held his breath. The next instant, rising up above the cacophony of noise from the tower itself, there came an anguished yodelling cry and, as the cloud fleetingly thinned out, he saw a banderbear clutch at its heart and fall off the sky ship.

‘Got you!’ Slab snarled, as the great hairy beast tumbled down through the air. He raised the crossbow to his eye a second time. As he looked through the view-finder, he saw three great flaming balls hurtling straight towards him.

Before he had a chance even to cry out, the ironwood balls struck – tearing apart the whole upper section of the tower and snuffing out the life of the hammerhead guard. The building shook from top to bottom. The sky ship rose higher, almost level with the great spike that topped the tower.

‘They’re using grappling-hooks!’ screeched a guard from the base of the spike as a heavy three-pronged hook abruptly flew out from the
Skyraider
and hurtled towards it. ‘They’re trying to destroy Midnight’s Spike!’

‘Sacrilege!’ bellowed another.

‘Destroy the invaders!’ roared yet another.

The Guardians intensified their efforts to repel the attacking sky ship with volley after volley of boulders and harpoons, arrows and crossbow bolts – and anything else they could lay their hands on. The air trembled with the din of battle. The
Skyraider
responded with arrows and crossbow bolts of its own, and the great flaming balls of ironwood which tore chunk after chunk from the dark tower. Numerous goblins, trogs and trolls in the black robes of the Guardians of Night plummeted to their deaths. Another grappling-iron clanged against Midnight’s Spike. A second banderbear was struck …

On the other side of the tower the skycraft approached. Lightly, stealthily – like a woodmoth on the wing – it flitted up and down the great east wall, its rider looking for a place to enter. Finally he swooped down onto a small, jutting gantry, two-thirds of the way up, which appeared to be deserted.

The rider dismounted. As he tethered the skycraft securely to eye-hooks screwed into the wall, the weak milky sunlight penetrated the thick cloud and shone into his face. The youth – jaw set and brow creased with concentration – turned towards the small, dark entrance and disappeared inside.

As Rook peered into the gloom, the dark, menacing atmosphere assaulted his senses like a battering-ram slamming into locked fortress doors. It was dark within the tower despite the hanging-lamps, and the stench of death and rancid decay was overpowering. Rook faltered – numb, dumbstruck, incredulous that anyone could have created so evil a place.

He could hear voices, countless voices. Their muffled moans and feeble cries echoed in the darkness, a soft and terrible accompaniment to the bass rumbles and furious percussion of the battle raging far above him. ‘Poor wretches,’ Rook murmured. ‘If only I could save you all.’

As his eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, he wrapped the cloak of nightspider-silk round his shoulders and ventured further into the tower. He found himself in a confusing labyrinth of narrow walkways and rickety flights of stairs sandwiched between the outer wall of the tower and an inner wall. At wild irregular angles, the wooden stairways zigzagged off in all directions – above and below him, and away to both sides. The sound of the hopeless, groaning prisoners grew louder, the foul stench more intense.

Rook’s eyes followed the path of the walkway he was standing on. It led to a small, square landing, before doubling back on itself and rising steeply further up. At the far side of the landing, set into the shadowy inner wall of the tower, was a door.

Is that one of the cells? he wondered. There was only one way to find out.

Rook dashed up the stairs. On the landing, as he approached the heavy, wooden door, he saw what looked like markings. He pulled the sky-crystals from his pockets and, holding them together, used the pale light they emitted to examine the door more closely. Several names had been scratched crudely into hard wood:
RILK TILDERHORN, LEMBEL FLITCH, REB MARWOOD, LOQUBAR AMSEL
… Each of them had a line gouged through them. Only the name at the bottom remained untouched.

‘Finius Flabtrix,’ Rook whispered. ‘An academic, by the sound of him.’

There was a shuttered spy-hole in the door and heavy bolts at the top and bottom. Rook reached forwards, slid aside the spy-hole cover and quickly glanced inside. He couldn’t make out anything in the blackness, but the stench intensified. Gingerly he reached up and drew the top bolt across; then the bottom bolt. Slowly he pushed the heavy door open and looked in.

With no walls, no chains, no bars, the cell was nothing like he had ever seen. A narrow set of steps led from the door down to a single ledge, which jutted out from the wall into a cavernous atrium beyond. Apart from the door which, when shut, formed a smooth, unbroken part of the inward-sloping wall, the only way out was to step off the ledge and tumble down through the fetid air to certain death below. Looking out into the atrium, Rook could make out countless other ledges, each connected by their own steps to individual cell doors.

Appalled, his gaze fell upon the individual at the corner of the ledge before him. Curled up in a foetal ball, he lay on a stinking mattress of straw, bony arms hugged round bonier legs; his robes in tatters, his breath uneven, rasping. Long, matted hair hung down over his face. In places it had fallen out in clumps, leaving angry scab-encrusted patches all over his scalp. His beard was thick and soiled; his skin was covered in grime and red, weeping sores – the result of scratching and scratching with his filthy, jagged nails to relieve the intolerable itching of the tick-lice which burrowed beneath the surface to lay their eggs.

‘Finius? Finius Flabtrix,’ said Rook softly, moving closer.
‘Professor
Finius Flabtrix?’

The breathing quickened. The eyelids flickered and opened for an instant but, though the eyes stared in his direction, Rook knew that they had not seen him. They closed again.

‘Not my fault,’ the old professor murmured, his voice hoarse and faltering. ‘Not my fault. Not my fault …’

‘It’s all right, I won’t hurt you,’ Rook whispered, tears welling up in his eyes.

The professor ignored him, lost in his own private torment. Rook turned and made his way carefully back up the stairs and out through the cell door. There was no time to lose; the
Skyraider
couldn’t keep the Guardians occupied for ever. He
must
find Cowlquape and get out of this terrible place.

He hurried down another walkway, and saw a row of cell doors embedded in the inner wall. Quickly, by the glow from the sky-crystals, he checked the names scratched into each door:
JUG-JUG ROMPERSTAMP
, Rook read.
ELDRICK SWILL
.
RAIN HAWK III. SILVIX ARMENIUS. GROLL
… If the names were anything to go by, then the prisoners came from every walk of Edge life. Merchants and academics. Slaughterers, goblins and trolls. A former sky pirate …

At some, Rook simply read off the name and continued without stopping. At others, he paused to look through the spy-hole – though each time he did so, he wished that he had not. The abject creatures inside were too terrible to witness. Jabbering. Twitching. Deranged. Some rocked slowly back and forwards, some ranted and raved, some paced round and round mumbling beneath their breath, while others – the worst of them; those who had given up all hope – simply lay on the ledge, waiting for death to come and embrace them.

A fiery anger spread through Rook’s body. Curse the Guardians of Night! he thought bitterly. ‘The dungeons are an abomination! An affront to every living creature in the Edge – to life itself! Why, if I was ever uncertain whether the war between the librarian knights and the Guardians of Night was a just one, then here is the proof,’ he told himself. ‘This is truly a battle between good and evil!’

‘Well said,’ came a voice close by.

Rook jumped. ‘Who’s that?’ he whispered.

‘Over here,’ said the voice.

Rook approached a cell door. He looked down.
CODSAP
was scratched into its heavy, dark wood.

‘Open the door,’ came the voice. ‘Give it a good shove. A
really
good shove! Go on!’

Rook unbolted the door, and gave it a hard push. There was a thud, and a muffled cry. Rook’s heart missed a beat. What had happened? What had he
done?
He thrust his head inside the doorway just in time to see a green, scaly creature tumbling back off the stairs and down into the yawning void of the great atrium.

‘No!’ Rook bellowed, his howl of anguish spinning round and round the rank air. ‘I’m sorry! I …’