Clash of the Sky Galleons Read Online Free PDF Page B

Sagbutt the flat-head, Steg Jambles the harpooneer, and Filbus Queep the quartermaster, engaged in their own hushed conversation.
    Wind Jackal was sitting at the head of the table, his brow furrowed and his eyes glassy, lost in dark thoughts of his own. Of the crew of the Galerider, only the Stone Pilot was absent - but then she never liked coming ashore, preferring instead to go below deck to her cabin, where she would curl up in her hammock in the darkness, and dream.
    ‘Perhaps you should ask my father that question,’ said Quint, looking across at the sky pirate captain.
    All eyes turned to Wind Jackal, who was tracing the long-forgotten names carved on the ancient table with his forefinger.
    ‘I thought he was dead,’ Wind Jackal said slowly. ‘Perished in that terrible fire that killed my beloved family and from which only my son Quintinius escaped …’
    His eyes glistened, but behind the tears there was a frightening intensity to his gaze. Quint reached out and patted his father’s arm.
    ‘Turbot Smeal!’ Wind Jackal almost spat the words out, so laden with hatred they seemed to be.
    Around the table, the crew-members nodded their heads reverently. Everyone knew of the terrible fire that his ambitious and vindictive quartermaster had started in Wind Jackal’s house when the young sky pirate captain had been away.
    It had blazed ferociously, spreading and engulfing half of the buildings in the Western Quays before fire sky ships had finally managed to quench the flames with water scooped from the Edgewater River. By the time the fire was doused, however, it had already taken the lives of his wife, Hermina, five of his six sons and their nanny. When he returned, only Quint - at five years old, his youngest - was there to greet him.
    ‘I swore there and then that I would avenge the death of my loved ones; that I would find Turbot Smeal and bring him to justice …’ Wind Jackal’s eyes blazed. ‘Justice! Pah! What justice was there that scum like him would understand?’
    His voice took on an ice-cold clarity. ‘There in the smoking embers of my home, I planned what to do with him when I caught him. I would hang, draw andquarter him. I would drench him in blood, tie him up in the Stone Gardens and leave it to the white ravens to pluck out his eyes, his tongue, his still-beating heart … I wanted him, drowned, burned, garotted, beheaded, sky-fired Anything! I wanted to see him die!’

    He paused and, clasping the sides of the table, stared round into the circle of faces, one after the other. And, one after the other, those faces looked back down at the table, pained and embarrassed, and unable to respond. Quint’s heart thumped. His face was flushed.
    ‘F … Father,’ he began, and reached again for Wind Jackal’s arm.
    This time the sky pirate captain brushed him aside.
    ‘But it wasn’t to be,’ he said, his voice as cold and sharp as a newly forged sword. ‘And why not? Because that filthy, low-down, no good son of a gutter vulpoon was already dead.’ He snorted. ‘Burned himself to death in the fire, didn’t he?’ A small, unpleasant smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. ‘At least, that was what everyone believed. There were even eye-witness reports that said he’d been seen on fire, trying to flee through the blazing streets.’
    The crew, who had been looking away, turned back.
    ‘And I believed them for so long,’ he said. ‘Until one afternoon, twelve years after the fire, almost to the day, a ratbird arrived with a message telling me I’d find the miserable wretch in an obscure slave-market clearing in the middle of the Deepwoods.’
    Maris gasped involuntarily.
    Wind Jackal sighed. ‘The ratbird died in my hands, and the note was unsigned. But I had to find out if it was true …’ He looked across at his son. ‘That’s why I picked you up and took you from the Knights Academy, son. Oh, I know I snatched you from your studies, putting on hold that great day when you