by Zac Gorman
The man threw off his hood and drank deeply of something that tasted like sewer water but made him pleasantly warm inside. He was staring into the bottom of his cup when he heard the chair across from him being pulled out. It made an awful sound against the wooden floor.
It’d been a rough couple of weeks, but he was here now. Here at the end of the world.
“Seat’s taken,” he mumbled.
“It is now,” said an obnoxiously familiar voice.
The former Master of the Black Mountain sighed and set down his cup. A small old goblin woman was sitting across from him. She set down her drink as if she were joining an old friend.
“What do you want?” he grunted.
“You can’t outrun what’s coming,” said Grunda.
“I can try,” he spat back.
The former Master upended his cup and finished whatever was left. It tasted terrible, but he was ready to do anything to make this conversation less painful.
“I thought nobody was going to win the Wretched Scrattle?” the goblin said with a grin.
“It’s not my fault Marl’s rules didn’t include conjurers!” he snapped, defensively. “My riddle should’ve been—”
Grunda burst into laughter. “Your riddle? You mean the Secret of Magic? Don’t tell me you’re still using the Secret of Magic? You use that same dumb riddle for everything! You know you’re not supposed to do that? You really should change your passwords!”
The former Master’s face grew beet red. “Did you come all the way here just to mock me?”
Grunda’s eyes grew dark as she leaned forward.
“Of course not. You know why I’m here. The wheels are in motion, and I think you know that better than anyone. The Eyes in the Dark—”
“Stop!” he interrupted. “Just stop, right there!”
He slammed his empty cup down on the table.
“I don’t care about the Black Mountain. I don’t care about the Eyes in the Dark. Frankly, I don’t care if and when this whole world burns. When it finally happens, you know where I’m gonna be? Sipping fancy, fruity drinks on a beach on the other side of the Nameless Sea, that’s where. Save your breath. I’m done with this. Forever. There’s nothing you can say or do that will change my mind.”
The former Master stood up to leave but didn’t start walking. Grunda sat perfectly still, wearing a wide, smug grin.
“What are you smiling about?” he said, immediately regretting he’d asked.
“I’m happy because you’re wrong,” she said. “There is something I can say that can change your mind.”
“Go on then, say it! Say the magic words that’ll make me stay. You better hurry up, because the second I walk out that door, I’m not coming back.”
The former Master threw up his hands and began to stomp away.
“Your son’s alive. Well, technically he’s undead, but you get the idea.”
The Master froze in his tracks, still turned away from the goblin.
“Where?” he demanded.
“In the dungeon. Right under your nose this whole time,” she said.
The Master sighed and turned around. He had his shoulders slumped in a look of mock defeat, but there was something else in his eyes. Something hopeful.
“Thanks for waiting until now to tell me,” he said.
“His name is Jono now. You’ve actually met him,” said Grunda.
The Master trudged back to the table.
“Then you know . . .” The Master trailed off.
“What, about you and Ulia? Or do you mean that I know who you really are? Of course I know. Admittedly it took me a while to figure it out, though . . . Elphond.” She grinned.
Grunda took an annoyingly long drink while the Master struggled to find a response. She finished her drink and set the empty cup down on the table emphatically.
“Come now, Elphond. We’ve got a lot to discuss,” she commanded.
Elphond the Evil sighed. He supposed it had only been a matter of time before somebody figured it out. The fact that it was her, however, only proved his earlier theory. Fate was trying to punish him.
“Where are we going?” he asked.
“To help save the world, I guess,” she said.
“Do I have to?” asked Elphond.
“Yes,” said Grunda.
Elphond sighed so long that he was still exhaling when the doors closed behind him. He stepped out into the street. The night was alive with the sounds of crashing waves and snapping flags over the muted din of the revelers inside. On the horizon, the sky was green and stormy, and somewhere in the distance a raven laughed.
About the Author and Illustrator
Author image by Sam Bosma
ZAC GORMAN is a cartoonist and author from Detroit, Michigan. He worked as a storyboard artist on the Emmy-winning series Over the Garden Wall (Cartoon Network) and was nominated for the Annie Award for Character Design for his work on Welcome to the Wayne (Nickelodeon). He wrote for the Rick and Morty comic series published monthly by Oni Press.
SAM BOSMA is a sentient orb discovered in an abandoned mine, of average height and build (for an orb). He is also the award-winning creator of the Fantasy Sports comics (NoBrow Press) and has fashioned illustrations for the New Yorker, Scholastic, Hulu, and the Cartoon Network show Steven Universe. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles.
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Copyright
THISBY THESTOOP AND THE WRETCHED SCRATTLE. Text copyright © 2019 by Zac Gorman. Illustrations copyright © 2019 by Sam Bosma. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
www.harpercollinschildrens.com
COVER ILLUSTRATION © 2019 BY SAM BOSMA
COVER DESIGN BY JOE MERKEL
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Gorman, Zac, author. | Bosma, Sam, illustrator.
Title: Thisby Thestoop and the Wretched Scrattle / by Zac Gorman ; [illustrated by] Sam Bosma.
Description: First edition. | New York, NY : Harper, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, [2019] | Sequel to: Thisby Thestoop and the Black Mountain. | Summary: “Thisby Thestoop, gamekeeper for all creatures gruesome and uncommon, must now win the Wretched Scrattle to save her home, the Black Mountain Dungeon” — Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018021206 | ISBN 978-0-06-249574-7 (hardback)
Subjects: | CYAC: Monsters--Fiction. | Magic--Fiction. | Adventure and adventurers—Fiction. | BISAC: JUVENILE FICTION / Fantasy & Magic. | JUVENILE FICTION / Monsters. | JUVENILE FICTION / Humorous Stories.
Classification: LCC PZ7.G6695 Th 2019 | DDC [Fic]--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018021206
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Digital Edition APRIL 2019 ISBN: 978-0-06-249572-3
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-249574-7
1920212223BRR10987654321
FIRST EDITION
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1 The top ten most common professions in Nth were as follows: 1. Gravedigger, 2. Farmer, 3. Soldier, 4. Merchant, 5. Adventurer, 6. Servant, 7. Town Guard, 8. Outlaw/Scofflaw/Rake, 9. Innkeeper, 10. Gravedigger’s Assistant.
2 When you look at a map, the white lines that divide continents into countries—and the countries into states or commonwealths or provinces or whatnot—are almost never neat, straight lines. Instead they look more like the kind of lines drawn by a toddler who has yet to master her fine motor skills. The reason for this, which you can see if you examine any map closely, is that most of these borders aren’t created by human beings at all but by natural phenomena: mountain ranges, rivers, lakes, gorges, and so on. This, in turn, is because it can be quite difficult to march an army through and over and across mountain ranges, rivers, lakes, gorges, and so on. The Seam fell into the category of gorges—in sort of the same way a dragon fell into the category of lizards—and for thousands of years, the colossal rip in the land formed a barrier between the kingdom of Nth to the west and the kingdom of Umberfall to the east. Eventually, Nth took control of the gorge and all the land to the east of the Seam, all the way out to the marker that stands as the current border between the two countries . . . the Black Mountain.
Although it wasn’t quite that simple. Nothing about history ever is. Even after Nth had successfully seized control of the land from the Seam to the Black Mountain from Umberfall, there were no records of settlers from either side occupying that territory for many centuries. This meant that all the vast stretch of land that sat between the Black Mountain and the Seam had been, for the vast majority of recorded history, unoccupied. Or at least that was what the history books said . . .
3 Schlumpy’s Dairy! Now with three convenient locations around the Greater West Black Mountain Valley area! Come try the new Strawberry Fig Cheese Delights or our world-famous vanilla hayseed milk shakes, only two copper apiece! Offer good for a limited time only. Present this book at participating locations!
4 It’s not particularly shocking, but the reason “the dungeon” was called “the dungeon” was because it’d begun as one. There were several iterations of the dungeon’s origin story, but the most popular one was that during the construction of Castle Grimstone, Elphond the Evil had dug down into the Black Mountain in order to build a dungeon—the traditional kind of dungeon with big iron-barred cells and shackles affixed to the walls, maybe some skeletons here and a torture rack there, that kind of place—but when he was digging down into the mountain to make room for it, he’d accidentally discovered the massive structures the Dünkeldwarves had built thousands of years earlier. When Elphond found these, he decided to claim it all as his own, as a natural extension of his “dungeon,” and the name just sort of stuck. So, technically, there was still “a dungeon” in “the dungeon,” although, for the sake of clarity, the dungeon within the dungeon was commonly referred to as “the hold.”
5 The dungeon, of course, continued on down below ground level, down quite impossibly deep past the City of Night and beyond that even into the Deep Down, but only the most foolhardy adventurers in the Wretched Scrattle went down instead of up. Though more did than you might think.
