The Winter Knights Read online

  For William, Joseph, Anna, Katy, and Jack

  INTRODUCTION

  A cloud of uncertainty hangs over Sanctaphrax, the magnificent centre of sky-scholarship. Perched high up on top of the great floating rock, the city has been in a state of crisis ever since its Most High Academe – Linius Pallitax – fell mysteriously ill.

  Since that time, the academics have talked of little else. Rumours are rife that Linius Pallitax did things he ought not to have done – that he gleaned forbidden earth-scholar knowledge from the Great Library; that he ventured down inside the rock and broke into the Ancient Laboratory, which the First Scholars had taken such care to seal up; that he used their scientific paraphernalia and, in an act of terrible folly, attempted to create life.

  Of course, no-one has any proof that this is what actually happened, but the further the rumours spread, the more certain they seem until the whole city is convinced that Linius Pallitax is to blame for his own illness. And after all, what was the Most High Academe doing up on the rooftops the night the Palace of Shadows burned to the ground?

  There are two individuals who are especially concerned about the ailing High Academe's health. One is his daughter, Maris, who loves him deeply and can't bear to think about what will happen to her if he should die. The other is Quint Verginix, son of sky pirate captain, Wind Jackal, and the Most High Academe's former apprentice.

  The youth has been promised a place in the prestigious Knights Academy as Linius Pallitax's protégé. Without sponsorship Quint will have to leave Sanctaphrax once and for all, and learn instead to be a sky pirate.

  Of course, there would be no shame in this. As a young lad, Quint often dreamed of standing up at the helm beside his father, the wind in his hair and sun in his eyes as they sailed high above the Edge. Indeed, the pair of them have already had many adventures together as they voyaged between the dark Deepwoods and bustling Undertown, the hold of the Galerider laden with all manner of illicit cargo.

  Quint, though, has tasted the heady excitement of life up in the floating city in the service of the Most High Academe, and knows that this is only the beginning. He dreams of entering the Knights Academy and learning how to become a full knight academic who, Sky willing, might one day be sent off to the Twilight Woods on a stormchasing voyage – the greatest adventure of them all.

  For the great floating city depends for its very survival on the amazing properties of stormphrax -tiny shards of lightning found only in the far-off Twilight Woods, that in darkness weigh more than a thousand ironwood pines. Used to weigh down the Sanctaphrax rock, stormphrax is the prize that has been sought by the Knights Academic on their solitary storm-chasing quests ever since the days of their illustrious founder, the great Quode Quanx-Querix.

  But now, with Linius Pallitax's life hanging in the balance, all that has suddenly been thrown into doubt. All Quint can do is hope and pray that, for Maris's sake and his own, and for the good of Sanctaphrax itself, the Most High Academe will recover. Yet as Linius's eyes dim and his breathing becomes ever more laboured, the signs are not looking promising.

  The Deepwoods, the Stone Gardens, the Edgewater River. Undertown and Sanctaphrax. Names on a map.

  Yet behind each name lie a thousand tales – tales that have been recorded in ancient scrolls, tales that have been passed down the generations by word of mouth – tales which even now are being told.

  What follows is but one of those tales.

  •CHAPTER ONE•

  THE SCHOOL OF

  COLOUR AND LIGHT

  STUDIES

  The academic, in his grubby, paint-spattered robes of faded ‘viaduct’ blue, turned the crank lever with his free hand. The cog wheels in the rotating tower high above him chattered and squealed like angry ratbirds, and a shaft of light cut through the dusty air. The academic levelled the brush in his other hand and tilted his head to one side, his pale yellow eyes fixed on the youth before him.

  ‘A little more to the left now, I think, Master Quint,’ he said, his voice soft but insinuating. ‘So the light catches you. Just so …’

  Quint did as he was told. The early morning light streaming in from the high tower window fell across his face, glinting on his cheekbones, the tips of his ears and nose and, with its rusting pipes and gauges, the battered armour he wore.

  ‘Excellent, my young squire,’ the academic muttered approvingly. He dipped the tip of the hammelhornhair brush into the white paint on his palette and dabbed lightly at the tiny painting on the easel before him. ‘Now we must let the light work its magic,’ he murmured. The dabbing continued. ‘The highlights complete the picture, Master Quint. But I must insist that you hold still.’

  Quint tried to maintain the pose – but it wasn't easy. The tower was small and airless, and the heady odours from the pigments, the pinewood oils and the thinning varnishes were combining to make his eyes water and his head ache. The rusty, ill-fitting armour chafed his neck, and his left leg had gone quite numb. Besides, he was dying to see the finished portrait. It was all he could do not to turn right round and inspect it for himself.

  ‘The dawn light,’ clucked the academic. ‘There's nothing like it for illuminating the subject …’ His pale yellow eyes darted back and forth over Quint's features. ‘And what an illustrious subject we are, my young squire.’

  He chuckled, and Quint tried not to blush.

  ‘The protégé of none other than the Most High Academe of Sanctaphrax …’ He turned away and began stabbing at the palette like a woodthrush after a spanglebug. ‘How lucky you are, Master Quint, not to have to scrabble about with the rest of us in the minor schools, but to be given a place at the most prestigious academy of them all. I wonder …’ The academic's voice was laden with sudden spite. ‘I wonder what you actually did to deserve it?’

  The academic's eyes were fixed on Quint's face once more. They were so pale that there was almost no difference between the irises and the yellowish white that surrounded them. It was a mark of his trade, Quint told himself, trying not to shudder. Just as years of working as an Undertown rope-turner resulted in spatula-shaped fingers, and just as a slaughterer tanner from the Deepwoods ended up with skin the colour of blood, so, as the years passed, the eyes of Sanctaphrax portraitists were gradually bleached by the vapours of the thinning varnishes they used – and Ferule Gleet had been a portraitist for many, many years.

  ‘I was the Most High Academe's apprentice …’ Quint looked down, his cheeks blazing as he remembered the monstrous gloamglozer and the night of the terrible fire.

  ‘Keep still!’ rasped Gleet, irritatedly dabbing at the portrait. ‘Ah, yes,’ he smiled thinly. ‘There was that fire at the Palace of Shadows, wasn't there? Strange and dreadful business … How is the Most High Academe? Recovering well, I hope.’

  The pale yellow eyes bored into Quint's once more.

  ‘As well as can be expected,’ the youth replied, but the words rang hollow in his ears as he thought of his mentor lying in the gloomy bedchamber at the School of Mist.

  Linius Pallitax had suffered grievously at the hands of the terrible gloamglozer. He had almost been destroyed. Perhaps it would have been better if he had, for now he never left his bed, and his haunted eyes stared into the distance, seeing neither his faithful servant, Tweezel, nor Quint, his apprentice - nor even his own daughter, Maris, who sat beside him for so many hours, praying for him to recover.

  Ferule Gleet daubed at the tiny painting in silence for a moment.

  ‘As well as can be expected, eh?’ he mused at last. ‘Doesn't sound too good. You wouldn't want anything to happen to him, my fine young squire. Not in your position.’

  ‘My position?’ said Quint, trying not to move.

  ‘You're the High Academe's pr
otégé, aren't you? Without him, you don't expect that the Knights Academy would accept you into its hallowed halls, do you? Of course not!’ Ferule shook his head. ‘Sanctaphrax born and bred, that's always been the rule. The rest of us have to get by at the minor academies as best we can.’

  He wiped his brush on a piece of rag, and turned the easel round.

  ‘There,’ he announced.

  Quint found himself staring at the miniature painting of a young knight academic in gleaming armour, with deep indigo eyes and a smile on his face. Ferule Gleet of the School of Colour and Light Studies had done a fine job all right. Quint shivered.

  ‘Is anything wrong?’ Ferule asked.

  ‘It's nothing,’ Quint said quietly.

  He had no intention of telling the pale-eyed academic about the memories the miniature painting had stirred – memories of the first time he'd had his portrait done.

  How young he'd been then. Four, maybe five years old; the youngest of six brothers. His father, Wind Jackal, had commissioned the mural of the whole family for the grand hall of their palace in the Western Quays. What happy days they'd been. But they hadn't lasted, he thought bitterly. Within a year of the painting being completed, Turbot Smeal – his father's treacherous quartermaster – had torched his master's house. Quint's mother and brothers had perished in the blaze, and with them, the painting itself had been destroyed.

  ‘Of course, there's one thing you haven't captured at all accurately,’ Quint said quickly.

  ‘Indeed?’ said Gleet, raising his eyebrows.

  Quint tapped the pipes and gauges on the armour he was wearing, each one more corroded and tarnished than the next; then nodded towards the picture. ‘The armour there sparkles like burnished brass and silver,’ he said, ‘newly forged and freshly polished. Whereas this …’ He looked back down at the breast-plate.

  Gleet laughed, revealing a mouthful of thin, pin-like teeth. ‘You're right, Master Quint,’ he said. ‘The armour you are wearing has indeed seen better days. I use it as a mere prop. Once you enter the Knights Academy, you will have to work hard to win the honour of wearing a suit of armour as fine as the one I have painted; a suit of armour fit for a knight academic on a stormchasing voyage. That is why every squire has a portrait painted – to remind him always of his ultimate goal.’

  Quint nodded solemnly and reached for the miniature portrait.

  ‘Not so fast!’ snapped Ferule Gleet. ‘There is still the background to do. The School of Mist is your mentor's academy, I believe. I must go up to the balcony at the top of the tower to paint in the Mistsifting Towers before the sun rises too high and I lose the shadows.’ He began packing up the paints and brushes into a small leadwood box. ‘If you would care to join me?’ he said.

  ‘I certainly would,’ Quint replied, rubbing his eyes. ‘I could do with some fresh air.’

  With Gleet carrying the heavy box in one hand and the tiny half-finished picture in the fingertips of the other, and Quint manoeuvring the cumbersome easel up the circular stairs, the two of them made their way to the upper balcony.

  At the top, Quint leaned over the balustrade and took deep gulps of air. It was a crisp, clear morning, with broad billowing clouds sweeping majestically across the sky, and a golden light falling across the towers of Sanctaphrax.

  To his left and right, lining the broad span of the mighty viaduct, were the minarets and turrets of the two hundred minor schools. At one end was the stately Great Hall, its dome and belfry gleaming in the morning light; at the other end, towering above every other building in Sanctaphrax, was the magnificent Loftus Observatory, with the unmistakable outline of the twin Mistsifting Towers just beyond.

  Quint looked across at them. The huge globes, like two vast balls of twine, rotated and shimmered in the morning breeze and, as they did so, they produced a soft, haunting music of exquisitely subtle harmonies.

  It was the sounds of Sanctaphrax, even more than the sight of its resplendent buildings, that always thrilled Quint. Now, on the balcony of the viaduct School of Colour and Light Studies, there was music all round, filling the air, the paraphernalia of every tower adding to the mighty symphony. It was said that the blind could never get lost in Sanctaphrax. All they had to do was keep their ears open to know exactly where they were. Quint didn't doubt for a moment that it was true.

  Cocking his head to one side and closing his eyes, he listened dreamily. There was the buzz of pinwheels, the clatter of hail-weights, the timpani of wind-vanes and fog-clappers. From the Academy of Wind, there came flute-like notes as the breeze blew over the calibrated air-apertures, and the mesmeric hum of the sifting-combs; while from the Raintasters’ Tower there came a constant tinkling sound, as the glass collecting-bottles which hung down in great bunches from the jutting gantries overhead knocked softly together.

  It wasn't only the buildings that were making a sound that morning. As Ferule Gleet began sketching in the outline of the Mistsifting Towers, Quint could hear a babble of voices bubbling up from the viaduct below.

  He opened his eyes and looked down at the viaduct walkway, flanked by towers on each side, stretching into the distance. Every one of the two hundred towers was different – some were castellated, some had spires; some were shaped like pepper pots, others like colanders. One, tall and conical, was bedecked with small lanterns that hung from hooks. Another was strung with wind-chimes. And one, he noticed, had fluted columns, like a small-scale parody of the School of Light and Darkness itself. The only thing they all had in common was the number of individuals scurrying in and out of them.

  Most wore robes of ‘viaduct’ blue, showing that they were academics from the lowly viaduct schools, housed in the towers. On one side of the School of Colour and Light Studies was the School of Refraction and Reflection, full of academics polishing and grinding lenses for the telescopes of the major academies. On the other, Quint could see the School of Sight and Smell-Filtering, where academics busily spun spider-silk and soaked woodmoth gauze in scented tinctures for the delicate weather instruments of the more important schools of Wind, Rain, Cloud and Mist.

  Across the way, a group of academics in the red capes and black and white chequerboard collars of the School of Mist barged the blue-robed scholars aside. Approaching them, a dozen white- and grey-robed professors from the Institute of Ice and Snow raised their noses snootily in the air, and close behind, a gaggle of yellow-caped apprentices from the College of Cloud gossiped and laughed noisily.

  ‘A little more ochre, I think,’ Gleet was saying.

  Just then, a furtive-looking individual caught Quint's eye as he emerged from the door at the bottom of a battered turret opposite. He glanced over both shoulders – clearly forgetting that someone might be looking at him from above – and pushed a gleaming phial of dark red liquid inside his gown, before scurrying off. He was thin and stooped, and from his flapping green gown with its distinctive fur trim Quint could tell he was an under-professor from the Academy of Wind.

  Quint looked more closely at the turret. It seemed neglected. The windows were shuttered, the roof had missing tiles, while the walls were cracked and in need of serious repair. He wondered what viaduct school it might be. Maybe the clue lay with the dried corpse of the vulpoon – an ungainly bird of prey with straggly plumage, a viciously serrated beak and razor-sharp talons – suspended from a jutting hook above the door.

  ‘What do they study there?’ Quint asked Gleet, nodding down at the strange tower.

  The portraitist followed Quint's gaze and shook his head. ‘A fine young squire of the Knights Academy doesn't need to concern himself with such schools.’ He smiled thinly. ‘Or the services they offer.’

  He held up the disc of wood and Quint could see, in the background, the two Mistsifting Towers of the School of Mist.

  ‘Once it is dry,’ said the academic, gathering up his brushes and paints, ‘you can get it fixed to the handle of your sword. You do have a sword, I take it?’

  ‘Of course,’ Quint nod
ded, unsheathing the long, curved sky-pirate sword his father had given him.

  Gleet laughed unpleasantly as he eyed the sword with disdain. ‘Yes, well,’ he sniffed. ‘There won't be many squires at the Knights Academy with swords like that, I can tell you.’

  Quint's face fell.

  ‘Just as well you're the protégé of the Most High Academe is all I can say …’

  Just then, as Ferule was turning to go, the loud sonorous tones of a tolling bell filled the air. Quint looked up to see the huge bell of the Great Hall swinging back and forth. As if in answer, rising up from the Stone Gardens and filling the sky above Sanctaphrax like a mighty swirling snowstorm, there appeared a vast flock of white ravens. They wheeled through the sky, a great halo high above the Viaduct Towers, looping round at the Great Hall and the Loftus Observatory. And as their numbers grew, so the raucous cawing became a deafening cacophony that drowned out the sound of the ringing bell that seemed to have summoned them all in the first place.

  Quint gripped the balustrade, his face ashen white. ‘No!’ he cried. ‘It can't be! Not now, after everything …’

  Ferule Gleet turned and shook his head, his yellow eyes glinting and a malicious smile on his thin lips.

  ‘The tolling bell; the white ravens … It can mean only one thing.’ He handed Quint the miniature portrait. ‘Your mentor, the Most High Academe … is dead.’

  •CHAPTER TWO•

  THE CHORUS OF THE

  DEAD

  The gnokgoblins and mobgnomes in charge of the hanging-baskets had been busy since daybreak, lowering load after load of academics from the East and West Landings down to Undertown below. They'd had all types coming their way and using their services that chilly morning. Old and young, venerable and callow: professors, apprentices, squires and knights-in-waiting – academics from every institute, college and school in the great floating city and representing every department and discipline of Sanctaphrax life.