The Immortals by Paul Stewart & Chris Riddell

Author:Paul Stewart & Chris Riddell [Stewart, Paul & Riddell, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Ages 10 and up
ISBN: 9780375895630
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2009-09-12T06:00:00+00:00

Klug pulled down on a small lever, switching on the phraxlight, which threw a great circle of brightness across the shadowy ceiling above. Then he took a glass slide from a stack, placed the sliver of polished rock carefully upon it and secured the whole lot beneath the holding clips at the base of the magnifier. The light was instantly doused. Klug lowered the lens funnel, bent forward and looked through it, turning the focusing dial as he did so.

‘There,’ he said. ‘Take a look, Miss Eudoxia.’

Eudoxia stepped forward. A moment later, she took a sharp intake of breath.

‘What?’ said Nate. ‘What can you see?’

‘Thousands of tiny lights,’ she said. ‘They’re glowing …,’ She pulled away and turned to the archivists. ‘What are they?’ she asked.

‘Glister fossils,’ said Klug. ‘This is a sliver of Edge cliff rock.’

‘Quarried from the cliff face itself by members of the Society of Descenders,’ said Togtuft.

‘Let me see,’ said Nate.

Eudoxia moved aside for her friend. He put his eye to the lens funnel and focused in on the magnified sliver of rock. The tiny fossilized glisters sparkled like stars in a night sky.

‘We believe,’ said Togtuft, ‘that this rock contains the very seeds of life.’

‘Blown in from Open Sky,’ added Klug, ‘and preserved in the cliff rock.’

‘… Which is how rocks once germinated and grew in the Stone Gardens of Old Undertown.’

Nate looked up from the light magnifier and saw the archivists’ flushed excited faces staring back at him.

‘While most of the academics of Great Glade study the power of phraxcrystals, and our colleagues here on the bridge devote their time to the uses of sumpwood, Klug and I study the greatest mystery of all …’

‘And what’s that?’ asked Eudoxia, fascinated.

Togtuft smiled. ‘How life itself began,’ he said.

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