by Philip Reeve
Surely someone will see it? thought Skarper, crouched by the stream with the helm in his trembly paws. Surely someone will hear? Surely they would not leave it up to him?
But the goblins above him were hard pressed, the fight spreading along the base of the Inner Wall. A Redcap’s lopped-off head came bounding past Skarper like a lost football, still wearing its chilli-shaped hat. It set off little avalanches of small stones as it bounced by, and somehow the dwarven mole riders heard it and looked up.
A flaming missile from a catapult hurtled overhead just then, on its way to smash against the Blackspike. Skarper crouched there quivering, bathed in the passing light with his shadow stretching and shifting around him. The dwarves on the diremole couldn’t miss him.
Eek! thought Skarper, and Poomonkeys! He turned to run, but the idea of scrambling back up that slope with the dwarves behind him, probably aiming crossbows and fire-spout-thingies at his fleeing bottom, wasn’t pleasant. So instead he did something that must have looked quite brave to the dwarves, although all he was really doing was trying to buy time, in the desperate hope that somebody might come and rescue him.
He drew his spindly little sword and stepped into the diremole’s path. He shouted, as loudly as he could, “Stop!”
Whatever the dwarves thought of him, it made no difference. The diremole kept coming. Its snuffly, stinking breath jetted out through holes in its armour, smoky in the cold night air, as if it were more dragon than mole. Skarper ran as close as he dared and jabbed his sword through one of the nose holes. “That’s for Soakaway!” he shouted. The mole squealed and reared back, the dwarves on its back shouting and lashing at it. Skarper jumped backwards too, feeling rather pleased with himself. It was only a silly old overgrown mole, after all! “Come on!” he shouted, beckoning to it, readying his sword to strike again. “Come and have another taste of goblin steel!”
Unfortunately the diremole took him at his word. It had been startled when he first appeared, jabbing that sharp spike into its nose. Now it was angry. Shoving itself uphill with its strong pink hands, it lunged at him. Skarper’s courage vanished as quickly as it had come. He dropped his knife and ran, but something tripped him. He hit the ground, rolled over, and looked up into the mole’s mouth, which hung above him like a hot cave, with two long teeth poking from its roof like stakes of pale wood, poised to crash down and impale him.
But they didn’t. Instead, the mole flinched backwards, It scrabbled back a little way down the hill. Skarper half rose, trembly, looking up at the dwarves on its back. They were cursing the creature, jabbing their goads down into its fur. One saw Skarper staring up at them and snatched up a throwing axe, but before he could throw it a spear sprouted suddenly and mysteriously from his chest and he dropped the axe and came tumbling down the mole’s side. The creature seemed terrified now, squealing and panting as it struggled to turn. Skarper knew he wasn’t that scary. He looked behind him to see what had frightened it.
Zeewa was striding down the hill towards him, and all around her her ghosts ran and flew and bounded, like a zoo made of moonlight. The ghost of Kosi flung phantom spears at the dwarves, which, unlike Zeewa’s spear, passed through them without doing harm. But the diremole was as frightened of the ghosts as all the dogs and horses in Coriander had been. Ignoring the angry shouts and snapping whips of its drivers, it turned and started lumbering back towards its molehill.
“Hooray!” shouted Skarper, doing a little victory dance and making rude gestures at the mole’s retreating rear. He waved at Zeewa. “Thanks!”
The girl nodded. “It was Kosi who heard your cries, goblin,” she said. “The ears of the dead are sharp.” She looked with a kind of grudging affection at the young man’s ghost. Skarper was about to thank him too, when suddenly something tightened around his ankle and yanked him off his feet.
“Oof!” he said. And then, “Aaargh!”
Trailing from the back of the mole’s armour was a long chain. What it was doing there, Skarper couldn’t imagine. Perhaps it was meant to be coiled up in the castle on the mole’s back and the panicky crew had dropped it. Perhaps the mole had been meant to tow something, or the dwarves had been planning to hook their chain to the gate and have the mole pull it off its hinges. The one thing it probably wasn’t intended to do was to catch goblins, but that was what it had done. The snaking iron links had knotted tight around Skarper’s left ankle, and as the frightened mole went scrambling back into its burrow, it dragged him with it.
“Help!” shouted Skarper, bouncing over the broken paving slabs. He clutched at a clump of dead thistles, but they tore free of the ground. He grabbed at the hand of the dead dwarf Zeewa had speared, but the dwarf’s iron gauntlet came off in his paw. “Ow! Ooh! Oof!” he complained, as the mole started to tug him up the side of its hill. Above him he could see its giant bum up-reared against the stars. Head down, forepaws furiously digging, it spattered him with clods of wet earth. Zeewa came running, shouting, “Take my hand!” But her ghosts could not help coming with her, and that only made the terrified mole dig faster. Although Zeewa took hold of Skarper’s paw with both hands, she could not hope to win a tug of war with the gigantic creature.
“Arkkk!” shouted Skarper, afraid that he was going to be pulled in two. “Find an axe! Cut the chain!”
“No time!” grunted Zeewa.
“We must chop his leg off!” said Kosi, swinging his sword at Skarper’s shin. But it was a ghost sword, of course, and no sharper than smoke, and Zeewa’s spears were made for throwing or for stabbing, not for chopping.
“I’m sorry!” she said helplessly, as Skarper’s paw slipped from her hands.
He had a last glimpse of her standing there, dark against the pale crowd of ghosts, as he went bumping up to the summit of the molehill. Then the soft, crumbly earth closed over him, and he was following the mole down through choking blackness, back into the underground world of the dwarves.
Zeewa stood staring at the place where he had vanished, until another flaming missile roared overhead and burst against the Inner Wall. The bloom of light reminded her that the battle was still raging. From here on the molehill she could see the struggling mass of dwarves and goblins at the main gate. The goblins were falling back now, scrabbling up the wall to vanish in through windows and squeeze through arrow-slits. Henwyn’s sword still flashed, and his fair hair gleamed, in the midst of a fierce battle near the gate, but he and the goblins who stood with him were surrounded by dwarves, and a line of the great diremoles was tramping up the road to help them.
“The battle is lost!” whispered Kosi.
“What do you know about battles?” asked Zeewa crossly. “You were only ever in one, and you got killed. Come on!”
For the first time she felt glad of her ghosts. They ran with her as she sped towards the fight, and the dwarves who saw them coming were startled and not sure who to aim their darts and axes at. She tore through a small rank of them, bowling over two, spearing one who tried to cut her down. Then the road was ahead, and the lumbering diremoles sensed the ghosts and started to squeal and fidget like the first.
Looking over the heads of his fearsome but short-legged foes, Henwyn saw what was happening. He was the sort of person who always hoped for the best, but during those last few minutes even he had been starting to think that things were looking a bit gloomy. Now, seeing the huge moles rear up in terror, seeing their crews tumble off them, he found all his natural optimism returning. “Clovenstone!” he shouted, picking up a startled dwarf and flinging him bodily into the rank of dwarfs behind him.
“Er . . . Clovenstone!” hollered the half dozen goblins who still fought beside him. And away in the darkness Fraddon, emerging from the woods again, took up the cry and shouted, “Clovenstone!” in a voice like a gale among the treetops, bringing his club down with a splintering crash on one of the dwarven catapults.
The tide turned then. Stampeding diremo
les crashed through the dwarf lines, flattening some of them, ruining the battle plans of all the rest. Henwyn and his goblins charged downhill to help Zeewa, who was holding off a ring of angry dwarves. Other goblins, who had fled the fighting earlier, looked out from the cracks and crannies of the Inner Wall, saw which way things were going, and decided to join in again, scampering down to harry the dwarves as they fell back. Here and there among the ruins and the clumps of trees small groups of dwarves rallied and made a stand, but Zeewa and her ghostly menagerie kept herding the diremoles back towards their burrows, and after a while the dwarves gave up and followed them, scrambling up the dark mounds and vanishing back into the earth.
By first light the battle was over. Fraddon strode about like a gigantic gardener, stamping molehills flat and trampling in the runs which led to them.
The sun came up bloody behind veils of smoke. The road to the inner wall was littered with dead dwarves, dead goblins, mole droppings, and here and there the carcass of a diremole. Fires still flickered among the towers. The dwarf battering ram lay where they had dropped it. Goblins were busy picking up fallen helmets, shields and swords, and checking the pockets of the dead for valuables. Henwyn, wandering homeward through the wreckage, remembered something Garvon Hael had said. A battle is a dreadful thing, Henwyn of Adherak, even when you win. But the thought of Garvon Hael jolted him out of the mood of weary sadness which had settled on him at the battle’s end. A fat lot of use that so-called hero had been!
Near the gate he saw Garvon Hael himself, looking grey-faced and groggy, leaning on his sword while Princess Ned talked to him. Henwyn went towards them, and was grimly pleased to see the old hero turn away in shame as he came near. He started to think of something really cutting to say about people who woke up and pulled on their fighting trousers only when the battle had been won, but before he could get the words quite straight in his head he noticed that Princess Ned was also looking pale, and clutching her side with one hand.
“Are you all right!” he shouted, bounding up to where she stood. “Oh, have you been wounded?”
Ned looked almost crossly at him. She hated people fussing over her and treating her as if she were made of porcelain. “Oh, Henwyn,” she said, “you are like a mother hen! I have pulled a muscle, that is all.”
“Would you like me to look at it?” asked Dr Prong, who was crouched nearby with Fentongoose, wrapping bandages around a goblin’s head. “Perhaps a nice hot poultice would help?”
Ned waved him away. “No, no; it is just a twinge and it will pass; there are others hurt far worse than me.” She looked again at Henwyn, and suddenly she was laughing. “We saw them off!” she said. “All their tunnels and moles and war machines, and yet we sent them packing!”
Henwyn grinned too, because although it was sad to see Clovenstone all covered with molehills and the smoke drifting from the damaged bits of the Inner Wall, it wasn’t as if the place had not been a ruin to start with. He had not expected the dwarves to be beaten back quite so fast.
“It was too easy,” said Garvon Hael.
Henwyn glared at him. “How can you say that? I did not see you doing any fighting! You just lay in your bed, drunk! You let the rest of us risk our lives, and now you have the nerve to come and tell us it was easy!”
“Henwyn. . .” said Ned gently, laying a hand on his arm.
“I am sorry that I was not with you,” said Garvon Hael. “But the fact remains, it was too easy. This is not ended. They are playing at something, these dwarves. Testing your defences maybe, drawing your attention in one direction while they make their real attack somewhere else. You should beware.”
“Round on the north side, maybe,” said Ned. “Perhaps they have found a way through the bogs, or under them. Perhaps even now they are making tunnels beneath the Inner Wall there. It seems strange that folk so keen on tunnelling should come trying to break our gate down.”
Henwyn almost glared at her, too. Why was she trying to belittle the victory they had won? But he had to admit she might be right. He said, “As soon as we have breakfasted, Skarper and I will go and look along the north side.”
“Where is Skarper?” asked Fentongoose. “I haven’t seen him since I sent him to fetch water for us, in the midst of all the tumult.”
“He is around somewhere. . .” said Henwyn, and then realized that he hadn’t seen Skarper since the height of the battle. “Look,” he said, “here comes Zeewa: perhaps she has seen him.”
But Zeewa brought only bad news. When they asked if she’d seen Skarper she stood there silently amid her cloud of ghosts and said, “He is gone. One of those mole creatures dragged him down with it into the underworld. I am sorry, Henwyn. Your friend is dead.”
*
Dead. I’m dead. That was what Skarper thought, when he woke. He was in darkness, buried under soft earth and heavy stones, with the stink of diremole all about him. At least, if he wasn’t dead, he was pretty sure he would be soon. Slowly, he started to remember how the mole had dragged him down inside its hill, the hill collapsing on top of it as it went. How it had fled along twisting miles of tunnel with Skarper bumping and barrelling behind it, its huge, panic-stricken body knocking pit props aside, bringing down whole sections of the roof. How the dwarves had shouted and snapped their whips, seeking to calm it and only making it more frightened. How, when it finally stopped, Skarper had found the strength to untangle the chain that was around his ankle before slumping back unconscious amid the rubble of the fallen roof.
More of the roof must have come down later, hiding him. Loose earth shifted and sloughed off him as he stood up. Most bits of him ached, but they were all still attached, and none seemed to be broken. His goblin eyes were growing used to the dark now, and he peered warily about.
In one direction a tunnel stretched away in darkness. In the other direction . . . well, more tunnel: more darkness. He looked up at the roof, and wondered what lay above it. Was he still beneath Clovenstone? It seemed unlikely: he remembered being dragged for miles through the dark. He must be somewhere outside, in some dwarven burrow under Oeth Moor or the Bonehills. . .
“Oh bumcakes,” he said, and started walking.
The three trolls, Torridge, Cribba and Kenn, had done their bit to win the battle, dragging huge bits of rubble to the bratapult, and they proved themselves just as useful in its aftermath. They worked tirelessly that day, clearing wreckage and gathering the dead bodies into one great big pile, which Princess Ned set a torch to.
The smoke of the pyre drifted across Clovenstone on the south-west wind, and Henwyn saw it blowing past as he and Zeewa started to pick their way along the foot of the Inner Wall, round on its marsh-bound northern side. They were looking for any sign that dwarves had been at work there. Above them, on the battlements, a gang of goblins led by Libnog kept pace with them, ready to throw ropes down and haul them up at the first sign of any dwarvish mischief.
In some places the bogs reached right up to the foot of the crag on which the Inner Wall stood, and Henwyn and Zeewa had to pick their way across the bleak, black pools on the lumps of fallen masonry which lay scattered in them like stepping stones. In others, they scrambled over stony ridges, or through abandoned, weed-grown buildings. Always they kept watch for any sign that dwarves had been there, but they saw none. Zeewa’s ghosts drifted and tangled with the mist.
Eventually they reached the foot of Growler Tower. A mass of rubble and roof slates lay there, which had been Growler’s top until one of the dwarven war machines lopped it off. Small, wet splay-toed footprints covered the fresh-fallen stones. Henwyn looked at them, and shuddered.
“What is it?” asked Zeewa. “Have dwarves been here?”
“Not dwarves,” said Henwyn, studying the froggly prints. “Boglins! They live out there in the swamp. They captured Princess Ned once, and me and Skarper had to rescue her. They are wicked creatures. They had a huge monster called the
dampdrake living in one of the meres, and they planned to give Ned to it for its supper. . .” Then, fearing that he might be frightening Zeewa, he added, “Of course, they are more frightened of us than we are of them. We’ve had no trouble with them since the Keep came down.”
Zeewa wasn’t really listening. She was staring out across Natterdon Mire. Far away, beyond the mires and the rotten, subsiding buildings, the land rose again, climbing towards the northern circuit of the Outer Wall. A shaft of sunlight struck down through the mist there and lit up a scattering of square, pale buildings on a hill.
“What are those?” she asked. “Are they the tombs which Fentongoose spoke of?”
“Yes,” said Henwyn. “There are acres and acres of them. Big burial vaults where the Lych Lord’s captains and their families were buried.”
“Do ghosts walk there?”
“I’ve never seen any,” said Henwyn. “But I’ve only ever been near the tombs in daylight, and then only on the edges, not right in among them.”
“The Houses of the Dead,” said Zeewa.
“They are a bit like houses. Little windowless houses with the doors sealed up and nothing but bones inside.”
She turned to him. “That’s where I must go. Remember? If I am to rid myself of these ghosts that follow me.”
Henwyn nodded seriously. Then he said, “What? You don’t mean, go there now?”
“Why not?” asked Zeewa.
“It is too far,” said Henwyn. “To reach the tombs you would have to go all the way to Easterly Gate, then follow the Outer Wall round almost to Northerly Gate.”
Zeewa frowned, as if she thought he might be making fun of her. “Why can we not just cut across the marshes? It does not look far.”
“Well, it isn’t,” admitted Henwyn. “But the marshes are dangerous! Weren’t you listening? There are boglins out there!”
