Read Midnight Over Sanctaphrax for Free Online Page B

the one below. Strange eerie groans and deep sonorous rumblings accompanied the rocks’ growth - noises which, combined with the towering silhouettes of the rock stacks, made the Stone Gardens a place of fear to Under to wners.
    If left untended, the uppermost rocks would becomeso large, so buoyant, that they would break free with a crumbling sigh and sail upwards into open sky But the Stone Gardens were tended. The colony of great white ravens over which Kraan ruled - sleek descendants of their smaller, scraggier cousins in the Mire - had been roosting in the stone stacks for centuries. It was they who monitored the growth of the rocks.

    Their sensitive talons could detect the shifts of a ripe flight-rock. Their acute ears could pick up the whisper of a rock about to float free. Once, occasionally twice, a season, the great flock would take to the sky and circle round the Raintasters’ Tower. Then, like a great drift of snow, they would alight on the sloping roof of the Loftus Observatory, signalling to the academics of Sanctaphrax that the rock harvest should begin.
    Under the watchful eye of the Most High Academe,the ceremonially blessed and ritually purified academics would descend from Sanctaphrax and go to work. k With stone-nets and rock callipers, they secured the flight-rocks one by one as, with ghastly howls, they broke free.
    Superstitious at the sight of the great white flock - like a visitation of ghostly spirits from beyond the Edge - the Undertowners quaked with fear. The howling of the rocks and the shrieking of the ravens - known by most as the chorus of the dead - was almost too much to bear. It panicked the animals, it sent youngsters scurrying indoors with their ears stopped and struck terror into even the bravest of hearts. The Undertowners would clutch their best-favoured talisman or charm and whisper urgent prayers that death might spare them a while longer.
    Yet, for all their fears and superstitions, the Undertowners would have been still more alarmed if the noise ever failed to come. For, terrifying as it was, the ghoulish clamour heralded the delivery of the flight-rocks upon which each and every one of them depended. If the supply of flight-rocks ever dried up, no ship would ever again be able to take to the sky.
    Richly rewarded by Undertown for the flight-rocks,the academics were only too aware of the importance of this material side to their duties. It brought them both great influence and enormous wealth, allowed them their elevated existence in the magnificent floating city, and enabled them to continue their own lofty studies.
    Despite the importance of the rocks, the academics felt no need to guard the Stone Gardens. That task could be safely left to the white ravens. The moment the academics finally completed their work and departed, the great white birds would swoop down noisily from the Lof tus Observatory to gorge on the hammelhorn and tilder carcasses left out for them - or, when death had visited Sanctaphrax, on the ceremonially laid-out bodies of the deceased academics themselves.
    It was into this place of death, and growth - the Stone Gardens - that the shooting star had fallen. Above the sound of the wind which whistled in and out of the stone stacks, a faint hissing had been heard and the white ravens had looked up to see a tiny ball of light flying in from beyond the Edge.
    As it came nearer the sizzling, spitting sound had grown louder; the light, bigger, brighter. Abruptly, a bank of dark cloud had blotted out the moon, but the Stone Gardens had become lighter, not darker, as the glowing ball of light had hurtled towards them. It had turned the water in the dips and hollows to black mirrors, and the stacks of spherical rocks to orbs of burnished silver.
    The white ravens had flapped their ragged wings and screeched with terror. It was a shooting star, andit was heading straight for their rocky home.
    Down, down, down and … CRASH ! The object had landed with a loud muddy