by Philip Reeve
“I shall take it back as a present for Princess Ned,” he said. “To make up for slipping off like this.”
The statue stared down at him, and its marble mouth seemed twisted in a sneer.
At first, everything went brilliantly. The goblins Knobbler had left behind were all up in the top of the tower, busy rummaging through the possessions of those who’d gone on the raid. There was no one about at all in the middle section as Skarper hurried up the stairs from the bumwipe chamber to Breslaw’s hatchery. When he paused outside the hatchery he could hear the old goblin’s slow and heavy breathing, and when he stooped and peeked through one of the holes in the door (for it was very old and wormy) he saw Breslaw asleep on his nest of old tapestries in the far corner, an empty wineskin on the floor beside him.
Quietly, Skarper lifted the latch and slipped inside. He stood by Breslaw’s nest and reached over the sleeping hatchling master to remove a small stone from the wall behind him. It made a little stony rasp as it came free, and Breslaw stirred and muttered, “Eh, what’s that?” before mumbling off into his dreams again.
In the space behind the loose stone his secret treasures gleamed: an old gold ring; a couple of jewels prised out of sword hilts; and the misshapen orb of stolen slowsilver, faintly shining. Skarper lifted it out. It was as big as a duck’s egg, surprisingly heavy, and faintly warm to the touch. Hopefully I can just scrape off a little bit to burn and see the secret writing by, he thought. And the rest I’ll keep for me. It would be a good start to his new treasure hoard.
He put it in his pocket and carefully replaced the loose stone. Then he let out his pent-up breath and turned to go back to the door, but his tail whisked against one of the training cudgels which stood propped in a row against the hatchery wall. It fell and hit the cudgel next to it, and that one hit an old halberd, which toppled against a blunted battleaxe, and the whole row of weapons went crashing and clattering down. The last in the line was a three-pointed spear, and as it fell it hit Breslaw’s food bowl, balanced on a high shelf. The bowl dropped, and Skarper leapt forward and caught it just before it hit the floor, but the shelf had been struck too; it came away from the wall at one end and a cascade of old eggstone shards came clattering down, pummelling Skarper like angry little stone fists and dancing on the wormy boards around him.
He stood there for a few seconds in the silence after the noise had finished. Slowly he started to hear the sounds of the tower again. The goblin voices still hooted and laughed way up above, and they did not seem to be coming any closer. Was it possible that they had not noticed the din? Perhaps it had not been as loud as he’d feared. . .
He looked round.
Breslaw had lifted his head off the mound of tapestries, and was regarding Skarper with one bleary yellow eye.
Skarper waved the bowl at him. “I’m just a dream,” he said. “It’s all that wine that’s done it. You’re dreamin’ me.”
It was worth a try. Any other goblin would probably have taken Skarper’s word for it and gone back to sleep, but Breslaw was wilier than most. “Skarper?” he said. For a moment he looked almost pleased to see his old star pupil standing there; then, as more bits of his brain stirred and yawned and came awake, he scowled suspiciously. “What you doin’ sneakin’ about. . .?” He scrambled up and snatched the loose stone from its hole.
“Thief!” he bellowed.
Skarper was already running. Out of the hatchery, down the spiral stairs so fast it made him dizzy. Behind him he could hear other feet pattering down higher stairways as the goblins at the top of the tower came running down in answer to Breslaw’s shrill shouts.
“Thieves! Burglars! Invaders!”
Down in the cellar, even Yabber had been woken by the noise. “Halt, who goes – Skarper?” he said, blocking the way as Skarper bounded down the final flight of stairs.
Luckily Skarper had forgotten to let go of Breslaw’s bowl. He smashed it over Yabber’s bony head and scrambled over the other goblin as he subsided, burbling. A moment more and he was outside, breathing clean, cold air again and looking for Henwyn among the shadows and the moonlight. Behind him, though, he could hear the snarls of angry goblins, the stamp of their feet and the clang of arms and armour as they came hurrying after him.
“Help!” he shouted, trying to drag the stone back over the hole, but it was too heavy for him to move. Then a hand grasped him by the back of his tunic and it was Henwyn, pulling him back towards the woods with one hand while with the other he waved his sword so that the blade flashed in moonlight.
The cold reflections flicked across the angry faces of the Blackspike Boys emerging from the tunnel, and they hung back, remembering how fiercely the softlings had fought yesterday and ignoring Breslaw’s angry voice that shouted orders at them from below. Henwyn let go of Skarper, and they fled together through the ruins and into the deep shadows of the woods until they reached a clearing where moonshine lay like a grey carpet on the stony ground.
“Did you get the map?” panted Henwyn.
“’Course I did,” said Skarper. He patted his trousers again. The slowsilver ball was still there, and Stenoryon’s map gave a comforting papery rustle.
“Does it show the secret way?”
“I don’t know, do I? I haven’t had time to go burning up any slowsilver next to it, have I?” Skarper chuckled, remembering old Breslaw’s face. “I got some, though. That’s what they was all chasing me about.”
“We will take it back to Ned’s ship and show it to her,” said Henwyn, smiling as he thought how pleased and impressed the princess would be with what they’d done.
“Oh, we don’t want to bother her with it,” Skarper protested. “Not with her so busy and all. Why don’t we just keep it between ourselves, like. . .”
“Ned and the others must know of this,” said Henwyn firmly. “Or shall I leave you here to find your own way home?”
He walked off through the woods, setting a brisk pace, and there was nothing that Skarper could do but follow.
“Henwyn!” called Princess Ned, going out across her garden in the moonlight. She had been looking forward to another night of talk and stories, but Henwyn was nowhere to be found, and it would not be the same without him.
“There is no sign of Skarper either,” called Fentongoose, from up on the stern gallery of her ship. “Perhaps they’ve gone off together somewhere?”
The princess felt a little chill settle on her. She remembered seeing Henwyn and the goblin talking that afternoon, wreathed in the steam that rose from the dung-filled barrow. She had wondered at the time what it was that they had been discussing. She wondered again now. Henwyn was lovely, and if he had only turned up thirty years earlier she would have rather liked to be rescued by him, but he was not very wise, and she was afraid he did not understand how treacherous goblins could be.
Not all goblins, she told herself. They can’t all be bad, any more than all men are good, and Skarper wasn’t even hatched when the goblins attacked Porthstrewy. But beneath all her good sense she could still hear the pleading voice of that deceitful goblin whose trick had led to the deaths of her mother and father. Spare me! Spare me! it said, and mingled with it in her memory there were other voices, the fierce voices of the raiders as they burst into her father’s castle, bellowing, Blackspike! Blackspike! Wasn’t Skarper a Blackspike goblin?
“Oh, Henwyn,” she said softly, crossing the garden, finding her way to the clapper bridge by the sound of the water that gurgled beneath it. “I do hope you have not let him lead you into a trap. . .”
The moonlight that fell in patches through the branches showed her their footprints clearly, in the muddy hollow at the bridge’s end. As she stopped to peer closer she noticed other footprints too, pressed in the mud and glistening wetly on the granite of the bridge itself; the prints of big, triangular, web-toed feet.
She had never seen marks like those before.
The chill deepened. She straightened up, and there in the shadows all around her the moonlight reflected on watchful eyes.
She cried out and turned to run, but a net dropped over her, white and cold, tangling and tripping her, trapping her in strands of marsh mist as strong as any rope.
In Blackspike Tower, Breslaw was searching through the bumwipe heaps. “He came in here,” he grumbled to himself. “His footprints is all over. He came in here and took something and then he came and stole my stuff. But why?”
Outside, he could hear the tower’s guards shouting, “That’s right, Libnog, you take that alleyway,” and “Come on, let’s check this building.” He knew they weren’t really looking for Skarper and the softlings, though; they were just standing in a scaredy bunch at the tunnel entrance, shouting those things to make him think that they were searching. He snorted. Why would Skarper have taken up with softlings? What could they have wanted from the bumwipe heaps? He looked at the books and papers scattered all around him, and thought, That map. Maybe it’s that map he wanted. But why steal my lovely slowsilver too? What are you playin’ at, Skarper?
Dimly, a faint memory came back to him; something he’d heard an old goblin tell him years and years before. “When slowsilver burns,” he muttered, “it can show up secret writings sometimes; worms and lettuces what the old-times men wanted hidden. . .” Of course, he’d never tried it for himself: slowsilver was shiny and precious; why waste it peering at a bunch of old secret scribble?
“But if there was scribblings on that map, they must show the way to something. The way to something that the softlings want. . .”
There was only one thing worth going to that much trouble for. Breslaw’s eye glowed with goblin greed.
“Treasure!”
Long before they crossed the clapper bridge and came in sight of Westerly Gate, Skarper and Henwyn could tell that something was wrong. The woods smelled damp, and they were too quiet; no twiglings rustled in the treetops or scuttled along the branches. There was one sound, though. Drips were falling all around; drops were patting on to wet earth.
“It’s been raining,” said Henwyn.
“I saw no clouds,” said Skarper.
The path filled with puddles. The two companions squelched through mud that rose past Skarper’s knees. They sloshed through fresh puddles, kicking the moon’s reflection into dancing shards.
“A real storm, by the look of it,” said Henwyn.
“I didn’t hear no thunder,” said Skarper.
They reached the clapper and barely recognized it; the swollen river had risen to brush its underside, and sprawled out in wide moonlit pools upon the bank. Eluned’s garden had a wilted look; the shrubs were beaten flat as if by heavy rain. The old ship was gone from the gatehouse.
“A hurricane!” gasped Henwyn.
“I didn’t hear any wind,” said Skarper, and they both began to run, splashing through the streamlets which trickled down the path, slithering on patches of transparent slime. Everywhere there was the sound of water trickling.
The ship lay on its side at the tower’s foot, its prow staved in by the fall. Some of the ropes which had been used to pull it down were still around it: thick white ropes with a strangely smoky look about them, as if they could not quite decide whether they were real or not. There were dozens of them. Henwyn seized the trailing end of one.
“Eugh! It’s all wet!”
From the shadows inside the fallen ship there came a loud sneeze.
Henwyn stepped forward. “Who’s that?”
“Henwyn?”
Three pale shapes emerged into the moonlight.
“Henwyn?” said Fentongoose, stifling another sneeze. “Skarper? Oh, thank badness! We thought those creatures had taken you too!”
“What creatures?” Henwyn asked. “Taken who? Taken where? Where is Princess Ned?”
“Gone!” said Carnglaze. “Those slimy goblins wrapped her up in nets of mist and carted her away!”
“Slimy goblins?” said Skarper. Goblins had been called many things in the long history of the world, but he’d never yet heard anyone call them “slimy”. “This isn’t goblin work. Goblins hate damp and wet.”
“Well, whatever they were,” said Prawl, “they came from the north, beneath a cloud of thick fog.”
“North?” asked Skarper uneasily. “That would be Natterdon Mire. Goblins don’t talk about Natterdon Mire, but there’s supposed to be things living there. . .”
“What sort of things?” asked Prawl.
“I don’t know. We don’t talk about it.”
Fentongoose said, “The first we knew of them was when they looped their white ropes around the ship. We didn’t think that they could pull it down, but there were many of them, and they must have been stronger than they looked, for down it came. After that they were everywhere, the slimy devils. They wrapped the princess up in more of their filthy mist ropes and dragged her away. There were so many of them; there was simply nothing we could do. They would have taken us too, except that our arcane wisdom gives us the ability to conceal ourselves from mortal eyes.”
“He means we hid in a cupboard,” explained Prawl.
“Didn’t you try to stop them?”
“Stop them? When they had such powerful spells?” demanded Fentongoose.
“We were afraid,” sniffed Carnglaze shamefacedly, and the sorcerers all hung their heads.
“Where did they take Princess Ned?” asked Henwyn.
“We don’t know,” replied Carnglaze.
“It was quite a dark cupboard,” said Prawl.
“We heard them chuckling and chanting as they carried her off.”
“They were singing something about ‘Bospoldew’.”
“If you can call that racket ‘singing’.”
“The noises faded away towards the north, into the woods.”
“Back to Natterdon Mire,” said Skarper.
“But what do they want with the princess? What are they going to do with her?”
“Nothing nice, that’s for sure,” said Carnglaze. “If they had just wanted Princess Ned to visit them for supper they would have asked, not tied her up and kidnapped her.”
“Maybe Ned is supper,” said Skarper. He had an uneasy, queasy feeling that he could not name. “It’s my fault, isn’t it? I’m to blame. If we’d not gone off to Blackspike tonight we’d have been here. We might have done something. . .”
Henwyn patted him encouragingly on the back. “Yes,” he said, “we might have got ourselves wrapped up and stolen like Princess Ned. But thanks to you we’re free, and we can go and rescue her.”
“Rescue her?” croaked Skarper. The idea had not occurred to him, and now that it did it seemed like a bad one.
“It should be easy enough to track them,” Henwyn went on, and he turned to look north. The rags of mist tangled in the trees there seemed to form a line, like a ghostly paper trail, leading away through the woods and over the high ridge that thrust out to the west of the Keep. “Fentongoose, you must come with us. We shall need your magic.”
“But I don’t have any magic!” cried Fentongoose, aghast. “I don’t even have the Lych Lord’s amulet any more. . .”
“You should have more faith in yourself,” said Henwyn. “Your spells worked well enough on my cheese. They may work again.”
“But what if they don’t?” said Fentongoose. “What if we confront these bog creatures only to find that the magic falls flat? Then we should feel like idiots.”
“Don’t you feel like that already?”
“Yes, but at least here we are safe idiots,” said Prawl. “We are not warriors or adventurers. We are scholars. We shall stay here. Look at all poor Princess Ned’s belongings, scattered around in the damp. How upset she would be, if she came home to find it all in such disorder. We shall stay here and tidy up and wa
it for your return.”
“An excellent idea!” Fentongoose said firmly. “I’m sure such brave and noble souls as you will have no trouble tracking these moist bandits to their lair, and fetching back their fair captive. We would only slow you down, and get in your way.”
“I could stay behind too,” offered Skarper hopefully.
Henwyn shook his head. “I need you, Skarper; you are my guide to Clovenstone.” Of the sorcerers he asked, “What did these creatures look like, by-the-by?”
Carnglaze led him across the garden. There in the shadow of the fallen ship lay four of the attackers, who had not jumped out of the way quickly enough when their ropes pulled it down. The ship had rolled over them before it settled into its present position. So far as it was possible to tell they’d been wet, grey-greenish things of goblin size, with the wide mouths and broad speckled faces of evil toads.
“They looked like that,” said Carnglaze, “only not flat.”
The woods of Clovenstone seemed stunned and silent. Traces of the raiders’ magic mist still lingered in the trees, but there was no sign of the twiglings; they were hiding in hollow trunks somewhere, in spaces between roots, waiting for the danger to be gone.
And Henwyn and Skarper were going towards the danger, following it as fast as they could along paths floored with puddles and covered with the wide, webbed prints of three-toed feet.
“What are these things, Skarper?” Henwyn asked, as the wet woods deepened round them. “I know you don’t talk of them, but you must know something. . .”
“Boglin,” said Skarper, dredging up a name he’d heard old goblins mutter sometimes. “That’s what they’re called, I think. Swamp things. Slime things. Bad things always. They’ve not left their marshes before; not in my time.”
“That star’s to blame, I expect,” said Henwyn. “Princess Ned said herself; all manner of old things are waking.”
Above the trees, the comet burned. The moon was low; the shadows long. The muddy path took them uphill to where an old road rose in zigzags past ivied temples with domes bashed in like breakfast eggs, mossy observatory towers where the Lych Lord’s astrologers might have watched his star the last time it swooped over the Westlands. From the top of the ridge they looked north and east. Trees were fewer there, and instead of oak there were stands of alder lying like smoke in the hollows of the ground and birches standing ghostly in the moonlight. As their eyes moved away from the wall, out across the broad bowl of the marsh, there was nothing but mist, with here and there a gaunt tower or a tall tree’s crown poking up above the billows.