Goblin Quest

by Philip Reeve

  “She is gone,” said Hellesvor. “Thus, in the golden days of Elvensea, did we rid ourselves of criminals and captive mortal kings.” She laughed again. “I have not time to waste in killing you. In the great old days I could have sent an army of elven warriors to finish you. As it is, I must find a humbler army, but they will kill you all the same. Perhaps if you use that pretty sword of yours with skill, Prince Rhind, a few of you will survive just long enough to see my torches lit.”

  She opened the doors and stalked out through them into sunlight and the spiky black shadow of the dragon. Rhind and Gutgust ran to shut them, afraid that Mortholow might reach a talon in, or set her snout against the open doorway and fill the hall with fire. They did not see the dragon go creeping after Hellesvor as obediently as a puppy as she started to descend the long stairways. They did not see Hellesvor stop, and stoop to pick up a little white crab that was sidling across the flagstones, wondering where the sea had gone.

  She lifted it in her white hands, blew upon it with a smile, and tossed it into the shadows under one of the dragon statues. Then, still smiling, she hurried on down the stairways of Elvensea, with the great black dragon spilling down behind her.

  Back in the hall, Henwyn was still shouting, “Zeewa!” and leaning out so far over the edge of that pearly pool that Skarper was afraid he’d tumble after her.

  “Didn’t you hear what the elf witch said?” he asked, grabbing Henwyn by the back of his trousers. “Zeewa’s gone! It’s a pool of poison or something, where they used to drown their enemies.”

  Henwyn shook his head. “It’s not poison. It’s magic.”

  “Well, that’s just as bad. She’s probably been turned into a statue or an amoeba or something, and if you jump in after her you’ll get changed too!”

  “And we need you, Henwyn,” agreed Rhind, running to help Skarper pull Henwyn away from the dreadful pool. “We need your sword. We have to stop Hellesvor before she can fly to the Nibbled Coast and light those torches of hers.”

  “Well, I don’t see what’s so very bad about lighting torches,” said Breenge, who was a little wiser than her brother and guessed that neither his sword nor Henwyn’s could harm Hellesvor where Zeewa’s spear had failed.

  “She didn’t mean torches literally,” said Prince Rhind. “It was a metaphor or simile (I can never remember the difference). She means to fly that beastly dragon of hers over Choon and Lusuenn and Floonhaven and Porthstrewy and burn them to ashes with its fiery breath! That’s why we have to stop her! Or die trying! It is our duty as heroes!”

  He started to run towards the doors, but Skarper called him back. “Careful, Rhind! Don’t you remember – Hellesvor said she would send an army to deal with us.”

  “She said ‘a humble army’,” Rhind reminded him.

  Henwyn stood up, still shaky, still unwilling to admit that Zeewa was truly gone. “It does not much matter how humble they are,” he said. “What do we have? Two swords, Breenge’s bow, two goblin knives, and a sofa. Even the humblest army will defeat us if there are enough of them.”

  “Then let’s not wait here to get defeated!” said Skarper. “Let’s get out of here! Maybe Kestle and Woon Gumpus have sorted out a way to get the Sea Cucumber afloat.”

  There was a rattling, scraping, stony sort of noise behind him. He spun round with a squeak, afraid that Hellesvor’s humble army had already arrived. But it was only Grumpling. The Chilli Hat was harder to squash than anyone had imagined; he had been stunned when that slab of ceiling landed on him, but he was still more-or-less three dimensional, and he heaved it off himself and stood up, dusty, bloody and blinking.

  “Two swords, Breenge’s bow, two goblin knives, a sofa an’ an AXE,” he said.

  “Grumpling!” they all shouted (except Spurtle, of course, who could only rustle his cushions a bit). None of them had ever imagined being pleased to see Grumpling.

  Grumpling himself seemed a bit surprised by their greeting. “Well, where’s this army then?” he asked, swishing his axe about in an experimental way.

  “Maybe there is no army,” said Henwyn. “Maybe it was only Hellesvor’s ruse to keep us here while she takes flight. Our blades may not be able to harm her, but perhaps they will at least work on that dragon of hers.”

  “What dragon?” asked Grumpling.

  Skarper realized that Grumpling had no idea of anything that happened since Flegg blew the Elvenhorn and the roof came down on him. “The dragon outside!” he said. “It wasn’t stone at all, but real.”

  “I tole you so,” said Grumpling.

  “And Ninnis isn’t dead, and she isn’t Ninnis either – she’s an old elf sorceress called Hellesvor and she chucked poor Zeewa down that hole and now she’s gone to set fire to the Nibbled Coast. Clear?”

  Grumpling scratched his head. It wasn’t really, but there wasn’t time to explain properly. Skarper ran back to the doors, opened them a crack, and peeked out. The wide paved balcony outside the hall was empty. There were a few scratches on the stonework left by Motholow’s claws, and that was all. He opened the door wider and slipped outside. The others followed him. Henwyn and Rhind had their swords in their hands, Grumpling clutched his axe, and Gutgust carried the sofa. Breenge had tucked Fuzzy-Nose into the open neck of her tunic and taken her bow from her shoulder. She paused at the balcony’s edge to string it and ready an arrow. Then they started down. Far below them they could hear faint scraping, slinking sounds such as a large dragon might make, squeezing through the narrow streets and colonnades they had explored earlier.

  They had gone down one level, and were starting down the next flight of stairs, when Skarper happened to look over the handrail and saw that a lot of small oval buildings on the level below had started moving. Then he remembered that there hadn’t been any small oval buildings on the level below.

  He was just about to point this out to everybody else when Gutgust shouted, “Anchovies!” and Breenge screamed, “Crabs! Hundreds of them!”

  The crabs were the same colour as the stone thatElvensea was built from, so it was not surprising that Skarper had mistaken their shells for the roofs of small buildings. The other reason, of course, was that they were the size of small buildings. They clustered for a moment at the foot of the stairs, peering up at the people above them with their tiny black eyes, waving their feelers, and making precise little pinching motions with their claws. Then, scrambling over each other in their eagerness to attack, they began to scuttle upwards.

  “A humble army indeed,” whispered Henwyn.

  Breenge loosed an arrow. It stuck in the shell of the leading crab, who didn’t even seem to notice. Everyone turned and ran back to the level above, but the crabs moved with surprising speed, dancing along on the points of their hairy claws like eight-legged, armoured ballerinas who could only go sideways. Huge pincers reached for the companions, clopping and snicking. There was a horrible smell of rotting fish.

  “It is Ninnis’s joke on us,” said Rhind, swinging his sword and lopping off a crab’s claw. “She knows I don’t like seafood!”

  “We’ll hold them off!” shouted Henwyn, leaping to Rhind’s side. “The rest of you, find another way down!”

  Grumpling shouldered both him and Rhind aside, and sank his axe through the shell of a massive crab. “This is a job fer an axe, not rubbish softling swords,” he roared. “Crumble-crab armies is no match fer Grumpling the Magnifificent!”

  The axe swung, meteor bright, hewing through pincers and jointed legs, smashing shells, lopping off eye-stalks. Crab paste spurted high into the air.

  The others fell back, slowly at first, then faster, realizing that they must use the time Grumpling was buying them to find an escape route. Skarper helped Gutgust lug Spurtle into one of the nearby buildings, despite the way the sofa kept protesting. “I’m done for!” it mumbled, in its muffled, cushiony voice. “Leave me here, Skarper! I’m no use to
you. There’s no room in a hard fight for soft furnishings like me. Leave me, and save yourselves!”

  “You’re coming with us, Spurtle,” Skarper promised him. “We never know when we might need a nice sit down.”

  But Elvensea was playing its tricks on them again. Already Skarper had lost sight of Henwyn, Rhind and Breenge. Now he lost Gutgust and Spurtle too. He was not sure how it happened. He lingered for a moment to look back at the stairs, where Grumpling was swinging his bright axe to and fro at the heart of an explosion of shell and crab meat, and when he ran on, they were no longer ahead of him. He doubled back, checking passages that they might have turned down. It should not have been hard to spot a large goblin dragging a small sofa, but there was no sign of them. He shouted, “Gutgust!” and thought he heard a faint, answering cry of, “Anchovies!” but Grumpling was making an awful racket out on the stairs, bellowing war cries and slaughtering crabs, and it was hard to tell where Gutgust’s voice had come from. Gulls had arrived, too, drawn by the smell of the crabs, and they were adding their screams to the din of the battle.

  Skarper opened a door, found a narrow stairway leading down, and followed it for a way. But long before he reached the bottom he saw crabs climbing up towards him, and hastily retraced his steps, slamming the door behind him. He ran on, through glass-roofed orangeries where dead trees stood, through courts where dragon fountains had once played, through halls and chambers where Hellesvor’s people must once have met and mingled and played music – an unstrung harp still stood in one, carved in the shape of a rearing dragon with mother-of-pearl eyes. Poor old elves; he almost felt sorry for them, driven out of the Westlands by noisy, messy softlings and noisier, messier goblins.

  Then, stopping to catch his breath in one wide room, he glanced up at the ceiling and saw a painting there that showed a whole troop of armoured elves, riding dragons as big as Mortholow, wheeling above a blazing human town. He didn’t feel sorry for them, he decided. Not for Hellesvor and her kind. But probably not all elves were the same, just as not all goblins or all humans were the same. Those other elves, the ones who’d gone to find a peaceful new life in the west, perhaps they’d been all right. He hoped they had found what they were seeking, out there along the sunset path.

  Beyond the room with the painted ceiling was another stairway. No sound of crab claws or scrape of crabshells came from below. He started down it, but by some quirk of elvish architecture it swerved round upon itself and led up instead. He reached a small bronze door, pushed it open, and stumbled out on to the balcony outside the domed hall at the top of the island.

  “We’ll never get out of this place!” he wailed.

  Gull shadows scattered across the flagstones, and behind them came another shadow, wider, darker. Skarper looked up.

  “Oh, bumcakes!” he said.

  Mortholow folded her vast bat wings and plunged towards him, and flames came belching from her open mouth.

  Ten levels below, Hellesvor had been busy in her armoury. She had girded herself in shining silver-green armour, more delicate than any mortal smith could forge, yet stronger than any mortal blade could pierce. She had strapped a long sword across her back, where it would not dangle down and get in the way when she was riding Mortholow. She had found a harness made from slowsilver and dragonhide, and Mortholow, who had been waiting outside all this time, perched on a turret with her wings spread in the sun like a cormorant, came meekly when she called, and let herself be bridled.

  The elves who rode dragons into battle did not saddle them, as humans saddled horses. There was nowhere on a dragon’s spiny back that would be comfortable to sit, and if you did find a perch there, the creatures were so big that you would see nothing but their wings on either side of you and their long necks arching ahead. Instead, a dragon rider of Elvensea lay in a harness slung beneath the dragon’s chest, rather as, in other worlds, humans hang from hangliders and kites.

  Into this harness climbed Hellesvor, and at a tug on the reins (which attached to the horny spurs on either side of Mortholow’s huge head) the dragon launched itself into the air and went spiralling around the flanks of Elvensea, down towards the blue waves. Each beat of her huge wings carried her clear round the island. Swinging beneath her, her hair streaming back on the wind, Hellesvor glared at the wreck of her city – empty windows and mounds of weed that disfigured the lower levels which had had no spells to protect them during their time under the sea. And what was that, that ugly black thing, like a giant’s dirty slipper, caught between the turrets of the Tower of Amlowenhe? It was a ship, a horrid, ugly, shabby, mortal ship!

  Hellesvor tugged on the reins again, and shouted a command as Mortholow swung towards the stranded ship. Above her head the dragon’s chest glowed like the panes of a bone lantern as her inner fires ignited. Then with a whooof the flames spewed out of her, enwrapping the Sea Cucumber, and her wingbeats fanned the blaze as she soared past it and on around the island, leaving the old ship to burn behind her; leaving Captain Kestle and Woon Gumpus (who had luckily not been on board at the time) to look up in dismay from the street below, and dodge the burning chunks of timber and spots of tar which came raining down on them.

  Now Mortholow rose again, up past stairways crawling with the giant crabs Hellesvor’s spell had conjured. Hellesvor saw Grumpling struggling there, at the top of the stairs on the level below the pillared hall. A burst of dragon fire blew down on him; black smoke and a smell of roast crab swirled into the air, and Mortholow went with it, spreading her wings and riding her own thermal up high into the sky above Elvensea.

  And that was when Hellesvor saw Skarper, stumbling out of his little doorway and on to the balcony in front of the hall. She even heard his voice borne on the clear air. “We’ll never get out of this place!”

  “No, goblin,” said Hellesvor, recalling all the goblins much like him who had been her gaolers during the years of her captivity in Clovenstone. “No, you will not!” And she dragged Mortholow into a steep dive and screamed, “Burn him! Blast him!”, closing her eyes as the flames belched and the sparks blew back at her.

  When she opened them, Mortholow was circling high again. The balcony was blackened and deserted, smoke drifted to leeward, the stones glowed red in places. Hellesvor felt suddenly sorry. Not because she’d just roasted Skarper, but because she had left that black scar upon her beautiful island.

  “Come, Mortholow,” she shouted. “It is human towns that should be burning, not the city of the elves!”

  And she hauled on her dragon’s reins and it wheeled once more around the heights of Elvensea and then went flying away towards the east, where the lands of man lay like a grubby stain along the far horizon.

  Skarper heard the wingbeats as the dragon turned above the hall. He did not realize that Mortholow was leaving. He had only just survived the first attack, crashing in through the big double doors of the hall as that spout of flame hit the pavement behind him. Now he imagined the huge beast flapping down to stick its head through those same doors and breathe more fire at him. He ran into the cool shadows of the hall, and as he ran he looked back over his shoulder, expecting at any moment Mortholow’s scaly snout to shove the doors apart behind him.

  The doors did not open, but he did notice that his tail was on fire. What he didn’t notice was the magical pool ahead of him. Not until he put down his foot expecting to find floor beneath it and found nothing but a short drop into an enchanted mist instead.

  “Oh bum—” he said, falling.

  The pool swallowed him, and the rest of the word with him.

  “—cakes!” said Skarper.

  He had landed on a floor after all. There had been a moment of silvery cold as the enchanted mist closed over him, and then a sharp thud. Now here he lay, face down on a smooth white floor that looked like marble, but wasn’t cool enough for marble.

  He looked up. He was in a kind of corridor whose walls were made of colo
ured boxes. High above him, white lights shone without flame inside more boxes on a high, white ceiling.

  As he watched, a woman passed across the end of the corridor. She was pushing a small cart made of criss-crossed silver wire. Through the mesh of the cart Skarper could see bottles, boxes and – were those tin cans?

  “Skarper!” hissed a voice.

  “Zeewa!”

  The Muskish girl was crouched close by. She looked odd and defenceless without her spear, and he remembered how she had tried to stab Hellesvor, and how she had been thrown into the magic pool.

  “The pool…” he said. “It’s not a pool at all, it’s a pathway to another world. I think we’re in Etty’s super market.”

  “Or another just like it,” said Zeewa.

  “There can’t be two super markets,” said Skarper.

  Zeewa wrinkled her nose. “What’s that smell?”

  Skarper smelled it too. An acrid, burnt-hair sort of smell, almost as if…

  He looked round. The jaunty ginger tuft on the end of his tail was jaunty and ginger no longer. It was black, and a yellow flame fluttered from it. As he stood gawping at it, the flame spread to one of the boxes on the shelves behind him. The box was made of a sort of thick paper, decorated with pictures of small brown grating-like objects floating in a bowl of milk. It burned very well, and the flames spread quickly to the boxes on either side of it, and then up to the shelf above.

  “Help!” shouted Skarper. “Fire!”

  “Shhh!” hissed Zeewa, grabbing his tail and stamping the flames out while he went, “Ow! Ow!” But it was too late. The super market seemed quiet, but the woman with the cart had heard his shout. She reappeared at the end of the aisle of coloured boxes, and her eyes widened as she saw all the smoke. “Fire!” she screamed. “Help! Fire!”

  Zeewa let go of Skarper’s tail, grabbed his hand, and set off running, dragging him after her, as a terrible noise began to fill the air. Bells rang, and weird voices wailed: OooooOOOooOOOOO! Up on the ceiling, lights started to flash red, and other voices boomed, “This is an emergency. Please make your way to the nearest exit.”