Clash of the Sky Galleons by Paul Stewart, Chris Riddell Page B

Undertowners had remained in their beds, curled up beneath their covers, where they fingered the lucky amulets around their necks, murmuring prayers and incantations as the terrible chorus rang out. In starkest contrast, Sanctaphrax itself was a hive of activity as professors, under-professors, apprentices and acolytes streamed from the schools and academies, descended incrowded hanging-baskets, and hurried to the harvest in carts, carriages and barrows.
    They arrived in the eerie Stone Gardens not a moment too soon. The high stacks of rock were already ‘singing’ -a low, mournful humming sound that confirmed what the white ravens roosting on the topmost rocks had felt with their sensitive claws. The huge boulders were ripe at last.
    In time-honoured fashion, the schools and academies quickly spread out, gathering round their own rock stacks - rock stacks that the most venerable amongst them had watched mature over many a long year. From almost imperceptible bumps in the Edge rock they had grown into the towering stacks of a dozen or more boulders, one on top of the other, in ascending size. Forming a circle round their chosen stack, teams from the individual schools - mistsifters, raintasters, cloud-watchers, fog-graders, and numerous others from all the major and minor academies - raised their eyes skywards and waited expectantly. The rock bailiff, Silenius Quilp, marched through the gardens, excitedly shouting orders.
    ‘Prepare the rock nets!’ he bellowed. ‘Fire up the braziers! Be ready with those rock callipers!’
    At his command, the academics raised canopies of nets - each one fringed with a line of glowing sumpwood fire-floats - on the ends of long poles. They manoeuvred them high over the stacks, and waited. Beside them, apprentices stoked lufwood braziers furiously, while under-professors heated the huge, two-man rock callipers to a white-hot glow. Then, at the rock bailiff’s cry of ‘Silence!’, all fell still.
    In the early light of the morning, apart from the eerie stone song, the only sound to be heard was the far-off squawking of the white ravens perched at the top of the Loftus Observatory. Gradually, though, as the seconds passed, the low drone of the rocks became louder and more plaintive, like the mournful lament at a goblin wake, until one after the other, the uppermost rock on each stack gave a long low howl as it wobbled and shook, and then slowly rose up.
    ‘Harvest!’ roared the rock bailiff, rushing through the Stone Gardens, waving his staff above his head. ‘In the name of Sanctaphrax, harvest!’
    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 thatbetrayed 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