by Philip Reeve
“But although they set out meaning to do good, it did not stay that way. Their magic gave them great power, and we all know what even a little bit of power does to people.”
Skarper said, “Like King Knobbler. It makes tyrants and bullies of ’em.”
“Quite so,” agreed Princess Ned, glancing at him a little nervously (for she still felt uneasy about letting a goblin into her ship). “My uncle was just such a man, and King Colvennor was another. And there are plenty of queens who are just as bad, not to mention dukes and landlords and teachers. When you give someone power over other people they soon grow mean, cruel and self-righteous, unless they are the very best of people. The sorcerers of old were not the very best of people, and they had more power than we can easily imagine. They turned the goblins into their soldiers and began to conquer all the lands around, and when all the kings of men were their slaves they turned on each other, until only one was left.”
“The Lych Lord!” said Henwyn.
“His real name is no longer known,” said Ned, “but that is what men called him, when he sent his armies out to strip their granaries and mines, and when his black fleet set out on winds of magic from the havens of the Nibbled Coast to take tax and tribute from lands beyond the sea.
“Then, slowly, the powers of the earth began to wane. The magic faded. Instead of breeding goblins by the millions the lava lake began to cough out only thousands, and then hundreds. The spells of the Lych Lord lost their potency. His empire crumbled. The kings of men threw off his yoke; they gathered under the banner of King Kennack. On the plain of Dor Koth they routed his armies, and even the walls of Clovenstone could not protect him. So perished the last of the sorcerers of the world, and good riddance too, most people say. But here at Clovenstone the old powers linger, or at least a faint echo of them does. And that is why the old things of the world still find their way here, and make their homes among the ruins.”
It was late, and owls were hooting in the woods around Westerly Gate. The fight with the goblins and the frightening trek through the trees were just unpleasant memories now. Fraddon stood guard outside in the night like a watchful tree. Everyone else was sitting with Ned in the stern-cabin of her old ship, eating apple cake and drinking tea. It was a snug and happy feeling to be packed into that crowded cabin, seated on packs and blankets because there weren’t enough chairs, listening while the princess told her story.
Of course, when it was over, they had many questions.
“Where do you get hold of tea?” Henwyn wondered. “And flour and sugar and things?”
“Oh, one of those heroes who tried to rescue me when I first came here turned out to be quite nice,” she explained. “He had never really wanted to marry me in the first place, being in love with someone else already, so when I explained that I was happy here with Fraddon he rode down to Netherak and made arrangements for me with a merchant there. There was a great deal of treasure in this old ship’s holds, and in exchange for some of it the merchant sends me a cartload of life’s little luxuries twice a year. He leaves it by a stone out on the moor, poor man, being afraid to pass the walls of Clovenstone.”
“Sensible fellow,” muttered Prawl, who was regretting his own eagerness to come to Clovenstone.
“How did your giant carry this ship so far from the sea, and lift it up on to this tower?” asked Fentongoose. “He doesn’t look big enough.”
“Oh, Fraddon was larger then,” the princess told him. “Giants grow down, not up: they start large and shrink, like mountains do. I have gone walking in the Bonehills with Fraddon and talked with new-born ones; rock-faces, just shouldering their way out of the earth. And I have met Fraddon’s great-great-grandfather, who has been worn down by years of wind and weather till he can sit quite comfortably upon my open hand.”
“What is this ‘tea’ stuff, anyway?” asked Skarper, sniffing suspiciously at the steaming mug he held between his paws.
“What I want to know,” said Carnglaze, before Ned could start telling them about the tea trade, “is this: is Clovenstone really awakening again, as this old fool Fentongoose keeps telling us?”
“Old fool?” cried Fentongoose. “I may not be as ruthless or as wise as the men who founded our conclave all those years ago, but I still know the promise that they made to we who come after them.”
“Promise?” asked Ned.
“It is more of a prophecy, really.”
“Oh, one of those.”
Fentongoose closed his eyes, put his hands against his temples to make the sign of the winged head and said ominously,
“When the Lych Lord’s light within the Honeybag doth burn
Then magic shall return
And the Lych Lord’s heir shall come to Clovenstone
To take his place upon the Throne of Stone.”
“But what does that mean?” asked Ned, frowning. “It doesn’t even scan.”
“It’s not meant to be poetry,” Prawl said primly. “It’s a prophecy.”
“Prophecies are rubbish,” said Ned. “There are only two sorts of prophecy. The ones which fortune tellers make because they know that people want to hear them, like ‘You will meet a handsome stranger,’ or, ‘You will come into some money,’ and the dotty ones that are always about the far-off future, about the world ending on a certain day or some such, when the prophet knows he’ll be safely dead and buried by that time so that nobody can complain to him when it doesn’t. Or, of course, they’re wrapped up in such a lot of silly riddles that you can make them mean anything you like. What does it mean, ‘The Lych Lord’s light within the Honeybag doth burn’?”
“It is a secret,” Fentongoose said primly. “It is not meant to be understood by any but adepts of the Sable Conclave.”
Ned was not satisfied. “How can you have a light in a honeybag?” she asked. “Who keeps honey in a bag anyway? You’d think it would get awfully sticky. . .”
Henwyn looked up hopefully. Ned was not the sort of princess he’d been expecting, but she seemed very kind and clever and he was keen to impress her in some way. “The country folk around Adherak use that name for one of the constellations; the five stars we usually call the Spoon. And a light does burn in it! I mean. . . I noticed it from my window in the cheesery, a few weeks ago. There are six stars in the Spoon now.”
Ned’s frown grew deeper. She put down her mug, and rose, and opened a small door in the bulkhead behind her and stepped out into the cold night air on the open balcony at the old ship’s stern. The others trooped out to join her, even Skarper, although he didn’t have much idea what they were looking at; he’d never paid very much attention to stars. Fraddon stood among the beech trees at the far side of the garden, fast asleep and snoring. Beyond him in the moonlight the tumbled, tree-drowned ruins stretched away and up towards the Inner Wall, where the great towers stood black around the darkness of the Keep.
“Look,” said Henwyn, pointing to a constellation that was just rising from behind the Bonehill Mountains.
“It doesn’t look anything like a spoon or a honeybag,” complained Skarper.
“Constellations never look like the things they’re named after,” said Henwyn. “Have you ever looked at the Great Huntsman? If you join up the stars in that you get a shape more like a squashed pasty. . .”
“Henwyn is right,” said Ned. “I am not usually awake at this hour, or perhaps I would have noticed it for myself. There is a sixth star. . .”
Skarper shaded his eyes from the moonlight with one ear and looked where she was pointing. There, in the heart of the Honeybag, one star shone brighter than the rest, and paler too. It didn’t even twinkle like the others. It looked to him like the ghost of a tadpole, hanging in the sky.
“It is bigger than when I first saw it,” said Henwyn.
“It is the Lych Lord’s star,” said Fentongoose. “It is the star that looked down upon the Lych
Lord and his fellow sorcerers when they first raised Clovenstone from the earth.”
“It is a comet,” said Ned. “Comets do return. Is it possible that this one was somehow connected with the Lych Lord and his power? And perhaps. . . Perhaps Clovenstone does feel strange these days. As if something more than just the spring is coming. . .”
“Why would it be bigger, though?” asked Henwyn.
“Because it is coming closer,” said Ned. She sounded half worried, half excited. “I suppose, as it draws closer still, that all sorts of strange things may start to stir, and waken. . .”
All over Clovenstone, strange things were stirring; strange things were wakening. In the heights of the Keep itself things moved; a rustle of dry, papery skin, a tiptoeing tread of clawed feet. They came to the windows and peered out through the thick, rippled, reddish panes of lychglass, and the light of the comet gleamed in their slowsilver eyes. At another window, further down, a tiny crack had opened in the lychglass and a little batlike something struggled and battered there and finally squeezed its way out and went fluttering up into the moonlight, screeching in a thin, high voice, flying and flying around the Keep’s black walls until at last, exhausted, it dropped upon a passing cloud.
The cloud maidens came creeping to where it lay and looked down wonderingly at it. One of them – her name was Rill, and she was the kindest of them; the same one who had pleaded for Skarper the day before – picked it up gently in her cloudy hands, spreading the webs of its wings between her fingers.
“Sisters, look!” she said. “It is a little dragon!”
In Blackspike Tower King Knobbler rubbed ointment on the scrapes and bruises of that day’s battle and made his plans for tomorrow night’s raid, when he would lead his own lads and all of kingless Slatetop’s against the unsuspecting goblins round on the eastside. Mad Manaccan was no more, knocked for six by Fraddon’s club, so he was king of two towers now, not one.
And why stop at two? thought old Breslaw, as he climbed stiffly up the stairway to Blackspike’s roof and stood beside the bratapult, looking along the moon-shiny curve of the Inner Wall at Slatetop, Grimspike and Growler. A bright, silvery star shaped like a tadpole hung above Slatetop, and there was something in the air that made him feel unusually chipper. Knobbler’s an idiot, he thought. He’s got no ambition. Why stop at two towers? He could be king of all of them. King Knobbler of all Clovenstone, with old Breslaw the power behind the throne. Think of all the treasure I could get my paws on if I had the run of all the towers! Why, I might even be able to find a way inside. . .
And he turned his greedy eye towards the Keep, and wondered.
In the northern parts of Clovenstone the Lych Lord’s servants had dug great cellars once, and underground chambers full of furnaces and smithies, but since his fall the streams and rivers of the Bonehills had flowed into them and flooded them, and now a great swamp called Natterdon Mire sprawled between Northerly Gate and the Inner Wall. It had undermined the foundations of Natterdon Tower, causing it to slump down into the ooze. Since then the goblins of the other towers had learned to leave that part of Clovenstone alone, and they had blocked up all the passages and walkways which used to link their towers to Natterdon.
What had become of the Natterdon Tower goblins nobody knew; all that was certain was this: deep in the marsh’s poisoned pools, little globes of grey jelly appeared, and clumped together like frogspawn, and hatched out things that seemed half goblin, half frog. Boglins, they were called, and the Natterdon Mire was their domain.
They had taken the rubble of the ruins there and heaped it into a shapeless, ramshackle hall, moss-thatched and draughty, which they named Bospoldew in honour of their king, an ancient, bloated, toad-like thing called Poldew of the Mire. There he squatted, lit by moonbeams poking through the rotting thatch, and fiddled with scraps of mist which blew in through the glassless windows.
In the Lych Lord’s day the boglins had known the knack of weaving mist; they’d plaited it into traps and snares to catch unwary travellers in the great marshes to the north, and no enemy had dared to approach Clovenstone from that direction, for fear that they’d end up as boglin snacks. For years beyond number the secrets of mist-weaving had been lost, but lately Poldew had begun to feel a tingling in his webbed fingers, and now, as his boglins crowded close to watch him with their lamplike eyes, he looped the strands of mist around his finger ends, and twisted, and pulled, and knotted, until a pale cat’s cradle stretched like a web between his hands.
“Look!” he bubbled delightedly, holding the little snare aloft. “The mist obeys us! The mire is waking up again!” He let go of it, and it drifted upwards like a smoke ring to hang beneath the mossy rafters. He made another, and scowled thoughtfully for a while, wondering how best to use this gift. “Find me some softlings,” he said at last. “Fetch ’em here. Soon ’drakes will be stirring down in the deeply pools and we’ll need hot softling blood to fetch ’em to the surface and fresh flesh to tame ’em with. With ’drakes’ help we can spread the mire and drown all Clovenstone in lovely marsh, but not without ’drakes, and ’drakes won’t rise for nought but blood. Find me some blood to wake them with, my dears.”
“B-b-but there in’t no softlings in Clovenstone,” said one of his war chiefs.
Poldew shot out his long, pink, muscly tongue, snatched up the chief and swallowed him whole. A wide, contented grin spread across his face as he crunched and munched. “Find me softlings,” he ordered, spitting out the bones.
Skarper slept late next day, as goblins will when there are no other goblins to kick them awake or steal their bedding, and they don’t have to worry about fighting for their breakfast. When at last he opened his eyes, it took him a long moment to remember where he was. There were no piles of straw as soft and clean as this in Blackspike. . . These wooden walls were not the stones of Blackspike. . .
He was in a little narrow cabin or storeroom on the bottom deck of the old ship, and daylight showed through the gaps between the planks. He scrambled out from under the old blankets which Princess Ned had given him and set off to see what was happening. Outside his cabin door there was a porthole, and through the glass he saw low grey clouds rushing over Clovenstone on a south-west wind, with spokes of sunlight spiking down between them, trailing over the ruined rooftops.
Skarper looked around the cabin. There were shelves on the walls, and on the shelves sat little knick-knacks; things that Princess Ned had brought with her to Clovenstone or found upon her walks among the ruins since. Some of them looked valuable, or at least shiny, and with a goblin’s instinct he started to fill his pockets with them, quickly assembling the beginnings of quite a decent hoard. Then, feeling hot and angry at himself, he stopped, and slowly started to return the things to where they belonged. Princess Ned wasn’t some goblin to be robbed and sneaked from: she’d been – kind, Skarper supposed was the word. Hospitable, even. He could tell that she didn’t think well of goblins generally – she had looked quite afraid of him when he was first introduced – but she hadn’t said, “Eugh, a nasty goblin, he’s not coming inside my ship-balanced-on-a-building.” No, she’d mastered her dislike and smiled and welcomed him. It seemed to him suddenly that it would be pretty mean, low-down, gobliny sort of behaviour to steal her knick-knacks.
So he left the cabin and climbed a companionway to the upper deck and peeked into the larger cabin where they had all sat and talked the night before. They were there again, and when the princess looked up and saw Skarper standing uncertainly in the doorway her eyes went wide and her face pale and for a moment she looked scared, but then she smiled and said, “Master Skarper. . .”
“Skarper!” said Henwyn happily. “Won’t you join us?”
Skarper was a bit unnerved by that – he wasn’t used to people being pleased to see him – but he trotted in anyway. There had been some eating going on, and all kinds of breakfast things were still laid out on a long table un
der the window: fresh baked bread, goat’s cheese, honey, and a pot of Princess Ned’s tea.
While Skarper was piling his plate, Carnglaze said, “Tell me, Princess, in all your time here, have you ever found a way to get inside the Great Keep?”
“Not that there’s any point now,” said Fentongoose wistfully, and his hand went to the place at the base of his throat where the Lych Lord’s token used to hang.
Ned looked at them thoughtfully. Then she shook her head. “I have never looked,” she said. “Let old evil lie, that is what I say. Besides, I have a great dislike of. . .” (She stopped herself; looked warily at Skarper.) “But Fraddon has looked in over the Inner Wall sometimes,” she went on, “and he says the Keep is sealed tight.”
“You have never heard of the secret way?” asked Prawl.
“No,” said Ned, looking blank.
“I never heard of any way in,” said Skarper, through a mouthful of toast. “Old Breslaw is the only one in Blackspike with any brains, and he never mentioned no secret way.”