Stormchaser by Paul Stewart, Chris Riddell Page A

tremulous.
    Cloud Wolf sighed impatiently. The weather looked unpromisingly good. What had happened to the Great Storm that the windtouchers and cloudwatchers had predicted; that the Professor of Light himself had confirmed?
    Just then, Spiker let out a yell from his look-out. ‘Storm to port!’ he cried.
    The captain spun round and peered into the distance. At first, he could make out nothing unusual in the featureless darkness of the receding night. But then there was a flash. And another. Short, dazzling bursts of light in the shape of a circle – a circle which, when the lightning faded, still remained. Black on indigo. Growing larger with every passing second.
    The lightning flashed again, and Cloud Wolf saw that it was not a circle, but rather, a ball – an immense fizzing,crackling ball of electrical energy, darkness and light combined, which was rolling headlong across the sky towards them.

    ‘It's the Great Storm,’ he roared, above the howl of the rising wind. ‘Unfurl the mainsail, batten down the hatches and rope yourselves securely. We’re going stormchasing!’

• CHAPTER NINE •
S TORMCHASING
    I t had seemed like a good idea at the time, stowing away on the sky ship. Now Twig was not so sure. As the Stormchaser pitched and tossed, he retched emptily. Sweat beaded his ice-cold forehead; tears streamed down his burning cheeks.
    Mugbutt sniggered unpleasantly. ‘Feeling queasy?’ he sneered. ‘Too rough for you, is it?’
    Twig shook his head. It wasn’t the flight that was making him ill, but having to breathe the warm, fetid air he was sharing with the goblin. No flat-heads were known for their cleanliness, and Mugbutt was a particularly filthy specimen. He never washed, his bed of straw was wet and fouled, and remnants from the meat he had gleaned from the dinner table lay all around in various stages of decomposition.
    Covering his nose with his scarf, Twig breathed indeeply. Slowly, the nausea subsided, and with it the awful clamouring in his ears. He breathed in again.
    Outside, he could hear the familiar noises of Undertown as the Stormchaser sped through the busy boom-docks, over the early-morning markets and past the foundries and forges. Bargains, banter, hog-squeal and hammer-blow; a cackle of laughter, a chorus of song, a muffled explosion – the intricate cacophony of life in Undertown which, even this early in the day, was already in full swing.
    Soon, the sounds faded away and were gone, and Twig knew they must have left the bustling town and were heading out across the Mire. Now he could hear the Stormchaser itself. The creaking, the groaning; the hissing of air as it rushed past the hull. From below him, came the squeaking and scratching of the ratbirds that lived in the bowels of the sky ship; from above – if he strained – the murmur of voices.
    ‘Oh, how I wish I could be up there with them,’ Twig whispered.

    ‘And face the captain's wrath?’ Mugbutt growled. ‘I don’t think so.’
    Twig sighed. He knew the flat-head was right. Cloud Wolf would surely skin him alive when he discovered that he had been disobeyed. Yet remaining hidden below deck was torture. He missed the feel of the wind in his hair, of soaring through the air, with the places of the Edge spread out below like an intricate map, and above the yawning expanse of endless open sky.
    All through the childhood he’d spent in the Deepwoods, Twig had longed to rise up over the forest canopy and explore the sky above. It was as if, even then, his body had known that this was where he belonged. And perhaps it had. After all, Cloud Wolf, himself, had said on more than one occasion that sky-piracy was ‘in the blood’ – and with such a father…
    Twig could hear him now, bellowing commands, and he smiled as he imagined the crew hurrying to obey him. For Cloud Wolf kept a tight ship. He was harsh, but just, and it was to his credit that, with him as its captain, the Stormchaser had suffered fewer casualties