by Philip Reeve
He was halfway up it when he heard the sound he had been fearing: the whoosh and crack of the dragon’s wings. It had learned to fly again, despite the injury he’d done its tail. He climbed faster, and the scaffolding tower shook as the dragon crashed against it, clinging to the struts with the claws of its feet and wings, shoving its hungry, angry head in through the gaps between them. Its roar rolled through the cathedral. The scaffolding swayed, wood grinding against the stone of the new walls.
Above him now there was light. Wooden hoardings screened the spire’s unfinished top, but there were gaps, and through one of these he saw the moonlight shine. He scrambled over the ladder’s top onto another platform and hurled himself at the opening.
Out in the open again, he fell, and landed hard on a stone ledge, where carved gargoyles looked out across the town toward the dragon’s mountain. Below him — a terrifyingly long way below — smoke was ghosting above the rooftops, and the streets were full of confused flocks of townspeople, some fleeing the dragon while others tried to fight the spreading fire.
He listened, ignoring the noises from below, and heard the dragon’s claws go by a few inches from him as it climbed up the inside of the spire. The wooden hoarding lurched, and workmen’s tools and fresh-cut stones went avalanching down over the roofs and buttresses into the square. It lurched a second time, then the planking gave way and the dragon writhed itself out through the wreckage like some enormous hatchling freeing itself from a wooden egg.
It crouched on the spire’s unfinished top, silhouetted against the sinking moon, like the king of all the gargoyles. It did not seem to see Ansel. Perhaps the smells of burning from below disguised his scent. Perhaps it had forgotten him. It was staring toward the black bulk of its mountain.
In his room at the inn, Brock found himself being shaken awake. Found himself being pummeled and slapped and treated in ways that no hero deserved. He groaned, half rising, regretting all the cups of wine he’d emptied, which had bred a hard ache in his head and made the inn’s floor tip like a ship in steep seas.
“It’s loose!” someone shouted, right in his face, and by the gathering glow from his window he saw that it was Else.
“What — sun coming up already?” he asked mildly, squinting at the window, where the girl’s mother stood, having just flung wide the shutters. Outside, there was some shouting and screaming going on, and people running.
Else slapped him again. “Your dragon’s got loose, and it’s eating people and shoving houses down and what are you going to do about it?”
“It has set the whole town blazing with its fiery breath,” said her mother.
“Loose …” mumbled Brock, beginning to understand. But by then Else and her mother and half a dozen other people of the town were around him, buckling him into his armor, pressing a sword into his hand. He lost sight of Else as they manhandled him downstairs and out into the smoky, screamy night, but some of the braver townsfolk went behind him to the square to watch him slay the monster.
From high above Ansel saw him step out into the open space between the cathedral and the landgrave’s palace. His armor swirled with reflected flames. His face showed pale as he looked up to where the townspeople pointed. “Worm!” he shouted nervously. “Come down and face me!”
The dragon heard and looked down at him. A tremor ran through its body. It half opened its wings. Shifting its perch on the spire, it dislodged a gargoyle, and Brock had to jump aside as the stone figure shattered in front of him.
Don’t heed him, dragon, thought Ansel, hiding there in the sky. Don’t fly down there. He’ll kill you this time, or you’ll kill him, and then the townspeople will kill you.
The dragon watched Brock. Its maimed tail flexed, rasping over the spire’s stones. Low in its throat it made a gurgling growl.
Go home, thought Ansel. Because it belonged on its mountain, and he wished that it would just fly away there, and live quietly, up high somewhere, keeping out of the way of people now that it knew what trouble people were, and maybe someday finding another of its kind….
It shrieked suddenly, drowning all his thoughts, driving everything but fear out of his head. It spread its wings and pitched forward, launching itself clear of the spire and dropping into the square. Ansel heard the wind rushing through its tattered flight feathers as it went. Below him, Brock saw it coming and made ready, knowing he must not fail this time, with all these people watching. He gripped his sword and set his feet well apart and tried not to cringe as the dragon’s cry filled the square.
It dropped till it was almost upon him, and then, with a twitch of its wings, it saved itself and soared upward, over the upturned faces of the watchers crammed in the narrow street behind Brock, over the roofs of the burning buildings. Its wounded tail swiped down a chimney pot from the landgrave’s palace. It circled the cathedral tower and Ansel looked down on it and saw the fire shining upward through its spread wings, showing him every bone and quill of them, like sunshine streaming through two leaves.
It gave one last cry, then flew away. The town’s walls could not keep it in. It went like a dark, ungainly bird, low over the farmlands and the woods, and Ansel lost it for a while against the shadows of the land, and then saw it one last time, far off, black as a bat against a patch of moonlight on the distant snows.
When the landgrave rode back into the town late the next morning he found no dragon waiting for him, just three streets burned down to ash and rubble, the palace roof and the tower of the new cathedral damaged, and his people more fearful and superstitious than ever. This did not please him. The emperor’s own envoy and half the young men of the imperial court had ridden with him to see the strange beast that Brock had brought down from the mountain. He felt like a fool for believing the message that had drawn him home.
“But it was a dragon,” his secretary said, showing him a handful of feathers, a few scales, and a scratchy, hesitant drawing of something that looked like a toothy chicken.
The landgrave held his drawing up in the light from a window and frowned. “Johannes Brock has made fools of you all,” he declared. “What he brought down from the Drachenberg was nothing but a big bird. An eagle, no doubt, with some of its feathers shaved off.” He flung the picture aside and gnawed at his fingers as he tried to think how he could apologize to his important guests. “Where is Johannes Brock anyway?” he asked darkly.
But when his servants went to look for the dragon hunter, there was not a trace of him to be found.
Nothing more was ever seen of the Drachenberg Worm. The scales and feathers were kept, along with the drawings. Some centuries later a descendant of the landgrave found them in his cabinet of curiosities, and showed them to a natural philosopher, a pupil of the great Linnaeus, who studied them for a while and then concluded that the whole thing was a medieval hoax. Those moth-eaten feathers proved nothing, he said, while the scales had perhaps been taken from a pangolin. As for the drawings, they were as crude as one would expect from such a brutish era, and portrayed a most unlikely creature, part reptile and part bird. He was far more intrigued by the remains of a skull discovered beside a river on the Drachenberg, which seemed to prove that crocodiles had once lived upon the mountain….
ANSEL, LIKE HIS MASTER, GUESSED THERE’D BE NO WELCOME anymore in that town for dragon hunters. He remembered that guard who had shaken and shouted at him in the square. For all he knew the whole town blamed him for letting the dragon out of its cage.
He scrabbled back inside the spire and down into the nave again, climbing down the scaffolding itself for the last few fathoms, where the dragon had knocked away the ladder. Outside, the town was still burning merrily. Brezel was in the stable behind the inn, tethered and kicking at his stall while flags of burning thatch eddied across the yard. Ansel untied him and rode out of the stable with his head down in case the townspeople saw him, but he need not have worried; they were all too busy running about shouting and trying to organize chains of buckets to douse the blaze.
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There were no guards at the town gate. The boy and the pony slipped out unnoticed into dark and silent countryside. There Ansel found a hollow under a stand of birch trees, and lay down and slept.
The dragon got into his dreams again, as he knew it always would. It was as if it had not flown away at all, just made itself small and crept inside his head.
By the time he woke again the sun was already high in the sky. Brezel was cropping the grass a little way off. Ansel scrambled to the top of his dell and lay on his stomach and looked back at the town. A thin haze of smoke still hung above it, but the fires were out. He wondered if he should go back and look for Brock. He wondered if he should go south, back to his father’s inn. And as he lay there wondering, he saw a little wagon come out through the town gates and start along the lakeside road toward him. Brezel stopped eating and raised his head, and his ears went up inquiringly. A tiny, shabby painted wagon it was, drawn by two horses. As it came closer, Ansel too could hear it jingling. Strings of small bells hung from its roof, sparkling and clanking in the sunlight. It was a tinker’s cart, he guessed, selling knives and needles from town to town.
He saw no reason to hide himself from tinkers, so he came out of the hollow under the birches and went closer to the road to watch it pass. He was surprised when the driver reined the horses in and sat looking at him. He wondered if he was in trouble, and was getting ready to run when a girl climbed out of the cart and came limping across the grass toward him.
It was Else. Who else but Else? The driver was her mother. So they had bought their cart and they were leaving.
“Ansel!” said Else. “We heard the dragon ate you!”
She took him by his hand and led him down to the road where the cart waited. Brezel ambled after them, flicking his tail to whisk away the flies that were waking in the spring sunshine. The horses turned their long heads to stare at him, and Else’s mother nodded at Ansel and smiled her shy smile.
“We’re bound for the lowlands,” Else said. “We’ll buy things and sell them, in the towns we pass. You want to come?”
Ansel wondered what to do. He looked back at the town again.
“Don’t worry about him,” said Else, guessing that he was thinking about Brock. “He left in the night, not long after the dragon. He’s safe.”
How does she know? thought Ansel. He looked at the wagon again. It was old and shabby, and Else and her mother did not seem to have any goods to sell, only a bundle of blankets. Then the blankets lifted, and Brock’s face grinned out from under them.
“Come on, Ansel,” the dragon hunter said. “You can’t stay in this town. They are ill-tempered, unforgiving people. Do you know, they blamed me for setting loose the dragon? Said I was in league with it, and had plotted with it to destroy their new church? I believe they might have burned me for a witch if Else and her good mother hadn’t taken pity on me….”
He sat up, shedding the blankets. He had taken off his armor and he was wearing the old stained tunic that he’d worn when he and Ansel rode north together. “I don’t know where we’re bound,” he said. “Warm countries, without mountains, for a start. And after that, perhaps Carpathia. I’ve heard the peasants there live in terror of make-believe beings called vampyrs, who drink blood and shun the daylight. And the best part is, they are said to crumble into a mere handful of ashes when you kill them. Ashes are easier to come by than corkindrille skulls. And you do not even need armor, or a sword; apparently some wreaths of garlic and a pointy stick suffice. We could set up as vampyr slayers….”
Else’s mother laughed wearily from the front of the cart. Else said, “Don’t mind him, Ansel. But you’re welcome to come with us. If you want to.”
Ansel just stood there. He wasn’t used to deciding what his life should be. There had always been someone to tell him what he must do before, but Else wasn’t telling him, she was only asking. She looked at him, and after a while she shrugged and turned away and limped back around the cart. Ansel watched her climb back onto the seat beside her mother. He watched her mother gather up the reins, and the horses shake themselves and start to walk. The wagon rolled off slowly, bells jingle-jangling, Brock looking back at Ansel from under the canopy.
Ansel remembered the roar that had come out of him the night before. He had grown so used to being silent that he had not tried to speak since; he wasn’t sure that there were any sounds left in him. But he opened his mouth and there were the words, waiting inside him to be spoken, his gift from the dragon, better than gold. He spoke them. He shouted them. He scrambled onto Brezel’s back and grabbed two handfuls of mane and smacked his heels against the pony’s flanks and kept on shouting as he cantered after the cart. It was good to shout, and to feel the big sounds pouring out of his throat. He shouted to urge Brezel on, and to make Else’s mother stop. He shouted the way all boys shout, the same way the birds were singing in the blackthorn trees, for sheerest joy.
“Wait! Wait! WAIT FOR ME!”
With thanks to my editors at Scholastic,
Marion Lloyd and Alice Swan
Turn the page to read the first chapter of Goblins, an exciting fantasy novel by Philip Reeve!
In the lands of the west, where men are few and some of the old magic lingers still, there stands the ancient fortress of Clovenstone. A wide wall rings it, tumbled now and overgrown with weeds. The trees and waters of the wild have crept inside and made their home again among its steep, deserted streets and crumbling buildings. At its heart a crag rises, Meneth Eskern, most westerly of the Bonehill Mountains, and on the summit stands a black Keep, tall as the sky, with sheer walls and horns of stone. Around this dark tower, like a stone crown on the crag’s brow, there runs a lofty inner wall, guarded by seven lesser towers. All are in ruins now, the men who raised them long since gone. Crows caw about their sagging roofs, and gargoyles lurk in their ivy like lice in beggars’ beards.
The highest of these seven towers is called the Blackspike. Although it is dwarfed by the great mass of the Keep behind it, it is still taller than any tower in the lands of men. From its snow-flecked battlements to the ground at the crag’s foot is a very long drop indeed …
And that was bad news for Skarper, because he had just been catapulted off the top of it.
“Aaaaaaah!” he screamed, rising up, up, up, pausing a moment, flailing for handholds on the empty air, and then beginning his long fall. “Aaaaaaaaa …” But after the first thousand feet or so he realized that he was just going “… aaaaaaaaaaaa …” from force of habit, so he stopped, and from then on the only sounds were the whooshing of the cold air past his ears and the occasional cottony rustle as a cloud shot by.
Of course it’s not so much the falling that bothers me, thought Skarper, as the ivied stones and mean little windows of the Blackspike rushed past him. It’s the hitting the ground that’s the trouble. …
Below him — now that he had got used to the feeling that the wind was pushing its thumbs into his eyes — he could see plump white clouds dotting the middle air like sheep. Below them the bleak buttresses of Meneth Eskern spread out like the fingers of a splayed stone hand, with ruined buildings clustering between them. Weeds and little trees had rooted themselves in the rotting roofs and between the flagstones of the silent streets, and as the land sloped downward toward the Outer Wall, five miles away, the trees grew thicker and thicker, forming a dense wood, from whose canopy old bastions and outbuildings poked up like lonely islands.
This was Skarper’s world, and as he looked down upon it he was interested to notice several details that Stenoryon’s Mappe of All Clovenstone had got wrong. But not that interested, because the details were rushing toward him at great speed, and long before he could tell anyone of his discoveries he was going to be splattered all over them like a careless delivery of raspberry jam.
Indeed it was maps, and books, and things of that sort that were to blame for Skarper being in this sticky situation in the first place. He felt quite bitter when he thought about it, and
glared fiercely at a passing crow.
Skarper was a goblin, as the crow guessed at once from his amber eyes, clawed paws, long flapping ears, and the tail that snapped behind him like a whip as he fell. There were goblins in all the seven towers of Clovenstone. They were born of the stone of the mountains, and they had a fierce greed for gold and silver and other shining things, which they spent most of their time searching for in the ancient armories and storerooms, or stealing from one another, and from the goblins of the other towers.
There had been a time when all goblins had been servants of the same great sorcerer, the Lych Lord, who had raised Clovenstone and ruled the whole world from his Stone Throne, high in the Keep. But years without number had passed since the Lych Lord’s army was defeated at the battle of Dor Koth by the armies of the kings of men, and for as long as any living goblin could recall, each of the seven towers had been home to a separate goblin gang. Sometimes the gangs from two or three different towers would form an alliance and go roaring out of Clovenstone to raid the fisherfolk and miners of the little man-kingdoms on the Nibbled Coast, but they were untrusting, untrustworthy creatures and their alliances didn’t last. It was never long before they were fighting one another over the loot, safe in their home towers again with the entrances blocked up by barricades of rubble and old furniture.
Blackspike Tower, where Skarper lived (or had lived, until he was catapulted off its roof that morning) was ruled by a large and dangerous goblin named King Knobbler, and the goblins who lived in it were called the Blackspike Boys. There were no crueler raiders, greedier hoarders or more ruthless robbers anywhere in Clovenstone. Fighting and loot was what they lived for; fighting and loot and eating. Fighting and loot and eating and then more fighting.