by Philip Reeve
“Oh, does it? Ow! It’s a snappish little thing, isn’t it?”
By that time the cloud had drifted far out over the mire, and when they looked down the passengers could see again, in its coming-and-going way, the bulk of that great shapeless building in the mist. Lights were moving all around it, and the cloud maidens let their cloud waft over it before they made it settle towards the ground. “We must be quiet now,” the maidens hissed in stage whispers. “If Poldew of the Mire hears us he will send up snares of mist magic. . .”
“He will turn us into pillows. . .”
“Hush!”
The cloud descended, and the mist rose up and swallowed it so that you could not tell any longer where the cloud ended and the mist began. It was like sinking into a cold sea. There was nothing but pale grey darkness, and the figures of Henwyn and Skarper crouched in it (the cloud maidens were all quite invisible). The little dragon cooed, and nibbled at Henwyn’s fingers as he stuffed it carefully inside one of the pouches on his belt. Then, below them, they saw the gleam of water; a dead tree growing on a grassy knoll between two black lagoons. The tops of crumbled walls poked from the waters, forming a path of sorts.
“This is as close as we dare to go,” said a cloud maiden. “Farewell, sweet Henwyn. But we wish you would fly further with us, and tell us more about your fascinating cheese. Are you sure you would not rather come and watch the sun rise behind the Ice Crystal Mountains?”
Henwyn looked down at the dark and threatening marsh and thought that he was not sure at all, but Skarper nudged him and he remembered his farewells and scrambled quickly down the cloud’s side, down the ladder that showed dimly, a denser grey than the mist around it.
Skarper went after him, and the ladder dissolved when he was halfway down it, dropping him with a squelch on the moist earth. “Sorry!” giggled the cloud maidens, not sounding a bit sorry. He looked up angrily, but their laughter was already fading, the cloud already rising back into moonlight far above the fog.
Henwyn looked carefully around. “This way,” he decided, pointing into the greyness.
From directly behind him came that booming, hooting noise again; the pale glare of light behind the drifting vapour.
“Or perhaps that way. . .” said Henwyn.
They set off, balancing like tightrope walkers along the tops of those slimy walls which rose out of the meres, and whole sections of which sometimes slithered down into the water with sad sloughing noises. Reeds whispered, water gurgled, the branches of the mire’s sparse trees rattled dismally together, and through the fog ahead came ugly voices. Through stands of rushes they saw the hall, and beyond the hall, beside the pool that opened there, the jerky hopping movement of many boglins and the dim, fitful flickering of scores of marsh lights.
“What are they doing?” whispered Henwyn.
They crept nearer, parting the reeds and peering through. The boglins were coming out of Bospoldew in great numbers. Some held stone bowls in which marsh-gas flames stood wavering like snakes; others were dragging Princess Ned, still bound to the sled on which they had brought her there. They propped her up in the angle of an old wall on the brink of the black mere which lay before the hall. A boglin pricked her finger with a sharp glass knife. Then they all crowded backwards, leaving their captive there alone.
Out from the hall came waddling a huge boglin. “Poldew! Poldew! Poldew!” chanted the rest, bowing down as he passed, pressing their flat faces into the slime. He waved a webbed hand and they fell quiet. The wind moved in the feathery tops of the reeds; the water lapped at the mere’s edge and echoed from the green walls of Bospoldew.
“What’re they doing?” wondered Skarper.
“Waiting for something,” said Henwyn. He drew his sword, thinking that if he were to slay that fat bog king the rest might panic, and in the confusion there might just be a chance. . . But the boglins crowded so thick about Poldew that it was hard to see how Henwyn could reach him, and now the waters of the mere had started to ripple in a strange, greasy swell.
From the cut that the glass knife had made, the blood of Princess Ned dripped on to the earth, black in the glow from the bobbing marsh lights and steaming faintly. It seeped into the waters of the mere. The water, thick with mud and moss and the dust of drowned buildings, was suddenly flavoured with the faintest trace of hot and frightened human. Down in the roots of the mire a thing that had not tasted man-blood for a long, long time stirred in its sleep, and into its long, cold dreams came creeping the idea of breakfast.
“The dampdrake!” cried Poldew, and all his boglins echoed him, some in whispers, some in shouts. “Dampdrake! Dampdrake rises! Dampdrake wakes!”
“What’s a dampdrake?” asked Henwyn, hidden in the reeds.
Skarper knew. The books he had read in the bumwipe heaps hadn’t had much to say on the subject of boglins, but one or two of them had mentioned the dampdrake.
“It’s another creature from the olden days,” he said uneasily. “Also known as the Mergh Dowr or Water Horse.”
“Oh, that’s all right then! I quite like horses. . .”
The mere-waters bubbled. The mere-waters boiled. The mere-waters split, and up out of them there rose a huge, flat, pale and faintly glowing head.
Serpent-like it was, yet not a serpent; dragon-like, yet not a dragon; the head of some ancient thing that had been sleeping through centuries down among the drowned oaks in the deepest oozes of the mire, but which had begun to stir and surface as the star of Slowsilver drew near, and which Poldew’s blood offering had now brought wide awake.
“But that’s nothing like a horse at all!” he hissed.
Poor Princess Ned just hung helpless in her web of mist, looking up and up at that dreadful head. It snorted, letting out two plumes of steam which mingled with the drifting mist.
“Dampdrake!” the boglins kept calling.
“Mergh Dowr!” yelled a few of the better-educated ones.
“Quickly!” said Henwyn, turning to Skarper, his eyes shining. Here at last was a monster he could fight: a true monster, awoken out of ancient tales, and it wasn’t made of cheese, and he had a sword in his hand. “Attract its attention!”
“What? Me?” asked Skarper, trying to burrow deeper among the roots of the reeds. “You mean, Don’t attract its attention. . .”
“I have a plan,” said Henwyn.
“Oh no!”
“I’ll cause a diversion,” he explained. “You free Princess Ned.” And he gave Skarper a shove which sent him somersaulting out of the reeds into the full view of the boglins and the dampdrake and landing with a white splash in a puddle.
The dampdrake’s pale, short-sighted eyes had not seen the two companions hidden in the reeds. Their scent had been masked from it by the scents of Ned and the boglins. Now a hot waft of frightened goblin tickled its nostrils. The great head swung towards Skarper. The barbels which trailed from its lower jaw quivered, and its feathery gills batted at the air like the feelers of enormous moths. Its mouth gaped wide. It roared, and its fetid breath engulfed Skarper like the wettest and smelliest wind there had ever been.
The dampdrakes were of dragon-kind; relatives to the great fire-breathers which had laired in the Bonehills long ago. But the breath of dampdrakes was not fiery; it was as chill and stinking as the wind off a marsh. As it huffed over Skarper, water droplets swelled and trickled on his skin, while white mould furred his clothes. His belt snapped and his trousers fell down; his tunic rotted and dropped from him in wet rags; he shivered and sneezed and tried to cover his private bits with Stenoryon’s map, cowering naked in the blast of the dampdrake’s breath.
“Eugh!” he said, and, “At-choo!”
The dampdrake reared above him, ready to reach down and gobble him up, but while it was busy with Skarper, Henwyn had been running along the mere’s edge, getting round behind it. His idea had been to lure it away from Ne
d, and as he reached the far side of the mere he shouted loudly, trying to draw the attention of the boglins so that Skarper could run forward and cut her free.
“Don’t be afraid, princess!” he yelled. “I am here to save you!” – and he slipped in a puddle and went down with a splat, face first in black mud. From the far side of the mere Princess Ned saw him, and felt a deep, warm glow of thanks and happiness that he had come to rescue her. She also felt pretty sure he couldn’t manage it on his own, and she began to struggle against her mist bonds with fresh vigour.
The dampdrake had sensed Henwyn too. It turned away from Skarper, and Skarper dived back into the reeds, whimpering with the cold and frantically checking the map. It was soaked through and crinkled, and thin white mushrooms sprouted from it, but miraculously it was still in one piece, and still readable. Or maybe it wasn’t miraculous: maybe Stenoryon had woven spells into the parchment to protect it. Anyway, he gave a sigh of relief . . . and then remembered that the map was useless without the slowsilver which would show him its secrets.
He checked in his pockets, but the ball of slowsilver was gone. Actually his pockets were gone, fallen away with the rest of his rotted clothes. He peered out of the reeds and saw a whirl of confusion. Princess Ned had fought one hand out of the misty ropes which held her and was struggling to free the other. On the far shore of the mere, Henwyn was swinging his sword at the dampdrake’s tail, which had burst from the water, lashing about like a whip. Boglins were hopping and scrambling everywhere, all trying to obey the marsh king’s ever-changing orders. “Kill me that softling! No, not that one, that one!” Poldew roared. “Stop the prisoner! She’s escaping!”
Down between their feet rolled Skarper’s slowsilver, unnoticed as yet, booted this way and that like some priceless football.
Bunching the wet map in one hand, Skarper dived after it. Boglins ran over him as he scrabbled between them; boglins kicked him in the face with their stinky frog feet as he slithered on the wet earth under them, but he didn’t care; nothing comes between a Blackspike Boy and treasure. He lost sight of the slowsilver for a moment, confused by the mad shadows cast by the marsh lights, which were skittering about overhead as if in panic. A few had even fallen to the ground, and pale flames were leaping in the grass along the mere’s edge. And there was the slowsilver, trundling down the slope to the water.
Henwyn finally landed a blow on the dampdrake’s tail.
Ned ran towards the safety of the reeds, shaking off the last knots of mist as she went.
Skarper’s outstretched paw grasped the rolling slowsilver, but it was wet and it popped out from between his fingers and landed on one of the fallen marsh fires. They looked cold, those fires, but perhaps there was a magic in them that spoke somehow to the magic of the metal, for as Skarper snatched it up again the slowsilver ball burst into dazzling silver flames.
“Warggh!” he screeched, dropping it again. It lay on the wet ground and blazed, too bright to look at, giving off no heat, only a distant roaring sound and a tremendous light. The boglins hid their eyes and flung themselves face down on the ground or dived into the mere, screeching and skreeling. Black shadow wavered across the marshes. Poldew of the Mire howled and ran blindly back into his hall. The dampdrake howled too, its tail bitten through by Henwyn’s blow, its eyes smarting in the weird glare of the slowsilver. In its rage it let out a great bellowing gush of wet breath that whiffled over Skarper’s head and engulfed Bospoldew. Hundreds of toadstools sprouted instantly from the hall’s mossy thatch and from the bog-oak timbers of its doors. Livid growths of fresh green moss enslimed its stones. It shifted and shuddered, and the voices of the boglins went up in a great wail as the weight of the sodden thatch pressing downwards pushed the walls apart, and the roof settled slowly to the ground.
Henwyn came round the mire, thrusting his way through the panicky boglins to Skarper. The little dragon had escaped from his pouch and fluttered madly round his head. “Come!” he said heroically. “We must away!”
“Must away?” asked Skarper, angry at the loss of all that lovely slowsilver. “That’s not even a proper sentence. You mean, ‘We must run away.’”
“I suppose I do. It’s funny, it doesn’t sound half so heroic when you put it like that. Still, we really must run away.”
Skarper knew he was right. In a few more moments the slowsilver would all be burned away, and when they could see again, the boglins and their great wet pet would all be looking for revenge. He could not bear the thought that all his cleverness in stealing the map and Breslaw’s orb had been in vain. Frantically, he spread the map out on the moss at the mere’s edge.
The light of the blazing slowsilver fluttered and stuttered, beginning to fail. Just for a moment, as it fell across the ancient parchment, a tracery of wire-thin lines shone there, drawn centuries ago with a pen dipped in slowsilver ink. Just for a moment, as the wild blaze faded, as the boglins howled, as Henwyn shouted at him to hurry, Skarper saw the secret way into the Keep, as plain as any of the other roads Stenoryon had drawn.
The light died suddenly, and left the darkness darker than before. The burned-out slowsilver had no lustre left; it was just a little black lump of clinker, like something you might rake out of a stove. Henwyn grabbed Skarper by his tail and started hauling him bodily away. The dampdrake lunged towards them, missed, and scooped up a shrieking mouthful of boglins instead. Skarper had just time to snatch Stenoryon’s map as Henwyn dragged him into the reeds. On the backs of his eyelids the after-image of the secret path still glowed: he, alone in all of Clovenstone, knew the way into the Lych Lord’s Keep.
If only he dared to take it.
High on the Inner Wall, just west of Growler Tower, King Knobbler heard the boglin bull-roarers booming; heard the faint, far-off wailings, and the dampdrake’s roar. He went to the battlements to peer down at the moonlit mist that swirled above Natterdon Mire.
His raid on the eastside towers had gone pretty well. Just as old Breslaw had promised, the Sternbrow, Grimspike and Growler goblins had been taken completely by surprise. Now the Blackspike Boys and their allies from Slatetop and Redcap were busy ransacking the towers for loot and scoffings, and finishing off any eastside warriors who objected. It had been a good night, Knobbler thought, but now this new noise, booming up from the bogs, made him uneasy.
“What’s that?” he asked his fellow goblin king, Tanbren of Redcap, Boss of the Chilli Hats.
Tanbren scowled. Redcap was closer to the mires than any of the other towers, but his goblins had long since sealed up the old passageways which had once linked it to Natterdon Tower, and like all the goblins of the Inner Wall, they didn’t talk about the things that lived in the marshes. The Redcap goblins were smaller than most, but their territory included an area of old glasshouses where they grew small, fiery redcap peppers which they ate to drive themselves into a battle frenzy. They wore red leather hats shaped like these peppers, and so as well as Redcaps they were also known as the Chilli Hats.
Tanbren pushed his own hat back now, and a frown creased his shallow forehead. “That’s the bog boys blowin’ their bull-roarers down in their squelchy places,” he said. “We ain’t heard anythin’ outta them for a goodly while.”
Knobbler nodded wisely. “The times they are a-changin’,” he said. “You remember the old stories, how there’s going to come a time when us goblins grow strong again? I reckon it’s here. I mean, who’s left? Manaccan got hisself splatted by that giant yesterday, and we’ve done for the kings of the eastside towers tonight.”
“It’s just you an’ me then, Knobbler,” said Tanbren. “You reckon we could rule over all the towers between us? Me the westside, you the east?”
“Yeah,” said Knobbler.
“Yeah,” said Tanbren. They studied each other thoughtfully for a moment, and then Tanbren pulled out a knife and drove it at Knobbler’s belly and Knobbler jumped sideways so that the blade glanced
off his leather fighting trousers and used Mr Chop-U-Up to chop off Tanbren’s head.
Flat feet flapped along the battlement. Knobbler spun round, raising his sword again. To his surprise, he saw Breslaw standing there.
“What are you doin’ out of the Blackspike?” growled Knobbler, furtively checking his fighting trousers in case Tanbren’s knife had gashed them and let his pink frilly pants show through. “You never come on raids.”
“I came to find you,” said the hatchling master, coming closer. He was panting, winded by his long, hasty journey round the wall’s eastern rim.
“Look,” chuckled Knobbler, while Breslaw was catching his breath, “I chopped Tanbren’s body off.”
“Don’t you mean you chopped his head off?”
“No, his head’s still here; look. I chopped off everything below his head. That’s strategy, see. I reckon with Tanbren and Manaccan and the other kings out the way, I can rule over all the towers. King of the whole Inner Wall! I don’t know why I never thunk of it before.”
Of course, it wasn’t Knobbler who had thunk of it at all; getting rid of Tanbren had been Breslaw’s idea, and he had suggested it to Knobbler, in a roundabout sort of way, before the raid began, but he was happy to let Knobbler think it had been all his own. “Very wise,” he said. “And you can be king of more than just the towers, maybe. . .” He glanced behind him to make sure no other goblins were in earshot. “Skarper’s been back. To the Blackspike, tonight.”
“Who? Oh, him. That traitorous softling-loving. . .”
“He pinched an old map from me. That’s like a picture of Clovenstone, with worms on it to tell you what’s what. And he took a lump of slowsilver I happened to have lying about too, which makes me think there must be secret writin’s on that map, and him and his softling friends are planning to read them.”
“Writin’s?” This was all getting a bit complex for Knobbler.
“I think they knows of a way inside there,” said Breslaw, and he pointed a bony paw at the Keep.