by Philip Reeve
Zeewa looked at the marshes, then at Henwyn. Her nostrils flared. “And you are scared of these boglins, are you?”
Henwyn was not sure what to say. Of course he was scared! Of all the adventures that had befallen him within the ruins of Clovenstone, the one he had enjoyed the least had been his encounter with the boglins, and their horrid pet the dampdrake, that great glistening underwater dragon thing which breathed wet fog and had almost eaten him and all his friends. He still had nightmares about it. But Henwyn was the sort of person who could never bring himself to admit that he was afraid of anything, especially not to a girl, and especially not if the girl was a princess, which of course Zeewa was.
So he gave a wobbly sort of laugh and said, “Afraid? Afraid of a few boglins? Me? Of course not!”
Zeewa smiled. “Then you will come with me? I’m glad.”
And there was nothing that poor Henwyn could do as she started into the mires, following the mysterious winding paths which wound between the reed beds, towards the distant Houses of the Dead.
There was no denying it, decided Skarper. He was lost. For hours now he had been wandering in the blind dark, searching for a way out of the dwarf holes. All he had found were ways that led deeper in, and dwarves; lots and lots of dwarves. Each time he saw light ahead, beyond some twisting of the passage, it turned out to be only the light of dwarvish torches coming from some big burrow or marshalling yard where dwarf warriors were resting, or dwarf grooms feeding buckets of fat worms to tethered diremoles. In other places he came across dwarf miners, hard at work enlarging tunnels, or repairing places where the roof had caved in, or tinkering with nameless contraptions made from thick iron tubes.
If I had been going in the right direction, Skarper realized, I’d have banged my nose against the roots of Meneth Eskern hours ago. But he did not know how to retrace his steps: he’d had to turn back so many times to avoid dwarf repair gangs, and dart down so many side tunnels to avoid the marching squads of warriors, he no longer had any idea which way he’d come or which way he was heading. He wondered if the battle was still going on above him somewhere. He wondered if any of his friends were still alive.
The only bit of luck he had was that no dwarves noticed him. They passed quite close sometimes, but he flattened himself against the wall, and they went by without seeing him. It was true that he was smeared with earth and much the same colour as the walls themselves, but even so, it was surprising. He guessed that the dwarves were so sure of themselves they didn’t imagine a goblin could have found his way into their diggings. Dwarves are stupid, he decided.
Then, as he scurried on, he imagined what Princess Ned would say about that. “Not all dwarves are the same, Skarper, any more than all goblins or all men are the same. Some of them may be a little dense, but there are probably others who are as sharp as nails.” And she’d be right, thought Skarper, because he’d already met one: the dwarf girl Etty. Now if only he could find her again. . .
And luckily, he could.
Like many goblins, Skarper had a keen sense of smell, and he guessed that Etty would not smell quite like other dwarves, not now she’d spent some time in Coriander. He started to sniff and snuffle at the air, and after an hour or so he picked up a familiar scent: the soap he remembered from Carnglaze’s house. It certainly wasn’t coming from him, because on the morning he left Coriander he’d rolled and rolled in the roadside grass to get the stink of it off. Etty! he thought. They’d used the same soap at The Sleepy Mermaid.
Nose twitching, he began to follow the scent. It was just a ghost of a scent, really, and often he lost it and had to go hunting for it again through broad drifts of furnace stink and smells of unwashed dwarf, but always he picked it up again and slowly it grew stronger and more certain, until at last it led him into a dim burrow where dwarf miners slept in cubbyholes hollowed from the walls, each screened by a heavy moleskin curtain.
The scent was strong there. Skarper went quietly from cubbyhole to cubbyhole, until he found the one where it was strongest. Carefully he lifted a corner of the curtain, reached a paw inside and shook the sleeper by a shoulder.
“Etty!” he hissed urgently. “Psst! Hey! Etty!”
“Mmmblgrff?” said the dwarf, and rolled over to reveal a beardy face with a big, bluish nose and two eyes which opened wide at the sight of Skarper. It wasn’t Etty at all, but the dwarf called Langstone who’d been with her and her dad at Boskennack!
“Bumcakes!” said Skarper.
“Goblin!” gasped Langstone, springing up so fast he cracked his head on the roof of his cubbyhole. “Ow!” he shouted. “Goblin!” He jumped up to give chase, nightshirt flapping around his short, fat, hairy legs.
Skarper was already running from the chamber. Near the doorway a lot of tools had been stacked against the wall. Skarper kicked them over as he scampered past, and heard the pursuing dwarf curse as they tripped him. The whole burrow was coming awake now, grumpy dwarf voices complaining that it was not time for their shift to begin and asking what the matter was. “Goblin!” Langstone kept yelling.
Running on, Skarper rounded a corner and crashed hard into something that said, “Oof!”
“Ark!” yelped Skarper, knocked off balance, sprawling on the tunnel floor. He rolled over and looked up the fierce face of a dwarf who raised a pickaxe over him.
“Etty?” he squeaked.
“Skarper?” Her face stopped being fierce; she lowered the pick. Behind her the tunnel was filling with lantern light and the angry voices of approaching dwarves.
“Help!” whimpered Skarper.
Etty glanced behind her. Dwarf shadows were dancing on the tunnel walls, waving shadowy pickaxes and hammers. “Goblin! Get the goblin!” their gruff voices shouted. Etty took a deep breath, and made her decision. There was an alcove in the wall nearby where tools and pit props could be stored. She kicked Skarper into it and stood in front of him as the other dwarves came rushing around the corner.
“Etty!” shouted Langstone. “There was a goblin spy! In our burrow!”
Etty shook her head. “He didn’t come this way. I’d surely have seen him if he had.”
The dwarves all stared at her for a moment. Then one of them yelled, “He must have doubled back!”
“After him!” roared the rest. “Get the goblin!” They turned as one, and went dashing off.
Etty stood trembling for a moment, while the noises of the wild hunt faded. A good, well-brought-up dwarf girl did not betray her own people, or help goblin spies. What had she been thinking of? But it was done now. Reaching down, she gripped Skarper’s paw in her small, strong hand and pulled him out of the alcove. He started to thank her, but she shushed him and led him quickly down tunnels and flights of stone stairs to an old, mined-out gallery where she hoped they could talk undisturbed.
“Now, what are you doing here?” she asked.
“I didn’t choose to come!” protested Skarper. “There was this mole, and. . .”
“What were you thinking of, sneaking into our burrow?”
“I was looking for you! That’s how I woke Langstone – I thought he was you! He had that Coriander soap stink all over him, same as you, only stronger. . .”
Etty sighed. She almost laughed. “Langstone is a very vain dwarf. He brought a whole cake of that soap home with him to wash his beard. But why were you looking for me? It’s so dangerous for you here!”
“That’s why I need you,” said Skarper. “That’s why I need your help.”
“The others will kill you if they find you!”
“Yes, but you won’t.”
Etty looked at the pickaxe she was still clutching, then gently set it down with a clank on the stony floor. “No,” she said. “No, I won’t.”
“You’ve got to get me out of here!” said Skarper. “I have to get back up top. There’s a battle going on up there!”
He point
ed up at the cavern roof, but Etty shook her head. “No, no: Clovenstone is not up there. It’s twenty miles west of here.”
“Oh!” said Skarper, stunned. He had feared as much, but he hadn’t realized that his wanderings in the dark had led him quite so far.
“Anyway,” Etty went on, “the battle’s over.”
“So Clovenstone has fallen?” Skarper wailed. “They’re all dead, Henwyn and Ned and the others!”
“Shhh!” hissed Etty. “No! I don’t think so. Our warriors pulled back from Clovenstone.”
Skarper perked up. “So we defeated you? Yay!”
“Not exactly,” said Etty. “It was all part of the Head’s plan.”
Skarper scratched his head. He’d never heard of a battle which ended in victory for both sides. “But if your warriors were driven back. . .”
“I didn’t say that they were driven back,” said Etty. “I said they pulled back.” She looked away, biting her lip. She had never imagined herself turning into the sort of girl who betrayed the secrets of dwarvenkind to their enemies. But she seemed to be the only one of her people who understood that not all goblins were enemies. Besides, what did it matter now? She said, “That attack last night was just a diversion. It was meant to distract your attention from our real plan.”
“It was distracting all right!” said Skarper, remembering the whooshing missile that had torn his bedroom wall away, the boom of the battering ram against the gate, the flash and clash of weapons in the firelight. Then he quirked an ear and said suspiciously, “What real plan?”
Etty took his paw again. “Come with me,” she said. “I’ll show you.”
In Clovenstone, the tidying up was still going on. The three trolls were busy heaving fallen stones back up the stairways of the Inner Wall to repair the holes dwarf catapults had made, while Fraddon and a working party of goblins went about opening all the dwarf tunnels they could find and then filling them with rubble so that they could not be used again.
Garvon Hael sat beside a fallen statue outside the gate in the Inner Wall, moodily polishing his sword. He had a headache from the wine he’d drunk, and far worse, he was remembering how badly he had failed. He knew that Henwyn had been right to fling those angry words at him. I did not see you doing any fighting! You lay in your bed, drunk! You let the rest of us risk our lives. . . It was true, thought Garvon Hael. Even the goblins had fought more bravely than him.
A pattering of feet behind him, a whispering, alerted him to the presence of the hatchlings. Soakaway was not the only one who had been killed during the battle: several of the other young goblins had fallen too, and many in the little group that now approached Garvon Hael were missing paws or tails, or had their heads turbanned with Dr Prong’s neat bandages. Garvon Hael rose and sheathed his sword, hanging his own head as they gathered around him. He was expecting them to blame him for the deaths of their friends.
Instead, the hatchlings said, “We’re here, Garvon Hael.”
“We’re ready!”
“You said you’d teach us!”
“To be great warriors!”
“Like you!”
The warrior looked up, half angrily, thinking that they were mocking him. He was wrong. The ugly faces of the hatchlings were quite earnest. They clutched swords and axes, salvaged spears and dented dwarf shields.
“I’m not much of a teacher,” said Garvon Hael. “Not much of a warrior either, if truth be told. It was more luck than skill that brought me victory in the fight at Far Penderglaze, and I have lived off the glory of it ever since. I’ll tell you a secret, you little blighters: I was terrified that day. Only wine gave me the courage to fight those pirates. But it gave me no courage last night; just robbed me of my wits, so that I lay uselessly abed and let others fight in my place. Soakaway might be alive now if I’d gone out when I should.”
The hatchlings looked blankly at one another. Then they rattled their swords against their shields and drummed their spear butts on the ground. “Teach us!” they said. “Teach us to fight, for when the dwarves return, so we don’t end up getting splatted like Soakaway!”
Fentongoose went looking for Princess Ned, and found her standing with Dr Prong on the northern part of the wall, looking down into the mists of Natterdon Mire.
“Henwyn and Zeewa have not returned,” she said. “They called up to tell Libnog that they were going to the Houses of the Dead. That was hours ago.”
“Well, it’s a long way to the Houses of the Dead,” said Fentongoose.
“Long and dangerous!” said Dr Prong. “Princess Eluned has been telling me of the fell creatures which inhabit that marsh.”
“They will be all right,” Fentongoose said. “Henwyn is a brave lad, and that Muskish girl is braver still, if anything. Besides, her ghosts will frighten off any wild beasts that dwell in the marsh. Maybe they’ll frighten off the boglins, too.”
“I do hope so,” said Ned.
Fentongoose hesitated. He felt almost embarrassed to lay another worry on her, but he had bad news, and he knew that she must hear it. “Princess,” he said, “I have cares of my own. Will you come with me?”
She turned and looked at him, and saw the concern in his face. “Why, what is it, Fentongoose?”
“I’m not sure,” he replied. “Best if you see for yourself.”
So he led her and Dr Prong down to the base of the wall, and then down again by the old secret ways which led deep under the roots of Meneth Eskern. There, beneath the crag, lay the great cavern, filled with the silvery light and slow, pale roilings of the lava lake. It was very beautiful, and for a moment, standing upon the black stone shore, Princess Ned forgot her worries about Henwyn and her fear of the dwarves.
“Extraordinary!” murmured Dr Prong. (He had devoted a whole chapter of his book to explaining that slowsilver was a mythical element, made up by third-rate storytellers.)
Fentongoose, however, looked more troubled than ever. “Look,” he said, pointing at a big rock near the lake’s edge. The paddle which he used to scoop up new-made goblin eggs was propped against it.
“What is wrong?” asked Ned.
“The lava used to lap around that rock,” said Fentongoose. “Last month when I came down here gathering eggstones I stood on top of it so I could reach out into the lava with my paddle and catch a floating one. I could not do that now, could I?”
A yard or more of bare stone separated the rock from the edge of the slowsilver. Princess Ned felt a prickling sense of dread.
Dr Prong said, “So the level of the lake is falling?”
“It is going down fast,” agreed Fentongoose. “Look; I set this small stone here this morning as a marker. The lake has fallen by six inches just since then.”
“It must be those dwarves and their beastly tunnelling!” cried Princess Ned.
“It could be,” agreed Dr Prong. “They may have caused some fissure to open deep in the earth, like a hole in a bucket, and the slowsilver is leaking away down it!”
“And no more slowsilver means no more goblins,” said Fentongoose. “Not ever.”
“It’s funny,” said Princess Ned. “There was a time, not so very long ago, when I would have thought that ‘no more goblins’ was a good thing.”
“It’s not, though, is it?” said Fentongoose. He looked gloomily out across the strange lake, and sighed. “No more goblins, no more Clovenstone.”
What it was in the Natterdon Mire that brewed up such mists, Henwyn did not know, but they seemed thicker by far than mists elsewhere. A few moments after he and Zeewa left the Inner Wall, he had looked back to find it already hidden by the vapours. He remembered uneasily the mist-woven traps which Poldew of the Mire, King of the Boglins, had made to snare his enemies. But Poldew was dead, and the mists which closed over Henwyn and Zeewa as they found their way slowly north were only mists; they did not cling and trap in the way
the bog king’s snares had done.
Behind the mist, old buildings reached up on every side of them: ruinous towers and crumbled walls, so thickly covered with moss that they looked as if they had been made out of moth-eaten green velvet. Between them the pools and puddles of the mire lay like dim mirrors. Reeds, taller than Henwyn, grew in wide, whispering tracts, and the reed beds were full of movements: rustlings and scurryings, croaks and squeaks and splashes. Once, through a thinning of the mist, Henwyn glimpsed one of the giant grey raft spiders which haunted the mire, but it seemed afraid of Zeewa’s ghosts, and skated quickly away.
“We are being watched,” said Zeewa uneasily. “I can feel eyes upon us.”
Her ghosts were uneasy, too. They stayed close to Zeewa, and even the lion and the hyenas seemed wary of those walls of reeds and the things that hid in them. Only Kosi dared to go ahead, drifting like mist through the mist and the reeds, spying out paths for the wanderers and reporting back. And with his help, to Henwyn’s surprise and relief, they crossed the marshes without making a wrong turning, and came before too long to a place where the land rose up, and the air was clearer. The sun showed itself again, a pale, cool disc behind the thinning mist, and then broke through in places, scattering dapples of golden light on the short green grass of the little hill they stood on. All over the hill, like the houses of an empty town, the silent tombs stood, little low buildings, ivy covered, carved with inscriptions in dead alphabets, decorated with gargoyles, and statues of the shrouded dead.
Henwyn drew his sword and went uphill between the tombs, through the shadow of trees which had been planted beside them. Zeewa followed him, and her ghosts followed her like a streamer of marsh mist, except for Kosi, who ran lightly ahead.
“Are there ghosts here?” Zeewa asked. Her words fell flatly, not echoing as they should among the tall walls of the tombs. Even the air of this place seemed dead.
“I cannot feel them. . .” said Kosi. “But there is something – I do not know what. . .”
