Goblin Quest

by Philip Reeve

  “Oh dear, it looks like I is needin a new second in command,” said Grumpling. His evil little eyes swept across the faces of his burly goblin warriors, and then looked down at Flegg.

  “Flegg. He’ll do. He’s twice the goblin any of you rubbish lot is!”

  Brilliant! thought Flegg. Go, Flegg! From the pooin holes to Grumpling’s right paw in the space of one night!

  “An the first fing he’s goin ter do fer me,” said Grumpling, “is he’s goin ter get my scratchbackler back what Skarper and that softling robbled.”

  Which was not so brilliant, thought Flegg, cos it was probably going to end up in a fight and if it ended up in a fight he, Flegg, as Grumpling’s second in command, would be expected to be right in the thick of it. But he didn’t want to follow Widdas on a one-way flight to the land of splat, so he grinned and said, “I will, O mighty and magnificent Grumpling! You can rely on me!

  Grumpling smiled a fangy smile. “Magnifificent,” he said. “That’s me.”

  Up on the high tops of the towers the echoes of the Elvenhorn lingered yet, as though the old stones held the sound, or the towers themselves were tuning forks, still vibrating faintly to the horn’s high note. Human ears, or even goblin ones, could not detect it now, but the birds heard it, and so did the dragonets which nested in the charred rooftimbers of Sternbrow Tower.

  Sternbrow had burned out in a goblin versus goblin battle two years before, shortly before the Keep fell. The Blackspike Boys had made an alliance with the Chilli Hats and the Sternbrow Crew and launched a wild raid on the eastern towers. During the fighting, some goblin had dropped a burning brand down Sternbrow’s pooin holes, and the gas which had built up over the centuries in the thick layers of poo in the basement had ignited. A great belch of flame had rushed up through the heart of the tower and blown the roof off. The Sternbrow goblins referred to this dreadful event as the Apoocalypse, and they had never returned to their tower since.

  So the dragonets roosted there undisturbed, up among the charred timbers and the blowing weeds. Little things in dragon form they were, like miniature versions of the evil fire breathers that haunted the Westlands’ oldest legends. The dragonets did not breathe fire, and they were not evil, although one of them was called Nuisance. Henwyn had given it that name because it was fond of him, and often it would seek him out and show its affection by biting his earlobes, or his nose, or sharpening its claws on his head.

  The other dragonets were shy of humans and goblins. They kept themselves to themselves, up in that blackened chimney of a tower, and it was easy to forget that they were there at all. But that morning the music of the Elvenhorn seemed to have roused them. They burst from their roosts and went whirring and whirling in ever-wider circles around the tower’s heights, calling out to each other in their high voices, which sounded a bit like the calling of buzzards. Far out over the ruins their wild flights carried them, until the goblins at work in the cheesery and in the fields outside the Inner Wall looked up at them in wonder.

  At long last Nuisance spied something moving on the long, straight road that ran from Southerly Gate to the Inner Wall. He left his brothers and sisters to their circling and dived, folding his wings and dropping like a golden dart, down through the sunlight and the new green leaves of the trees.

  Henwyn, Skarper and Zeewa were making their weary way home. They had just crossed the troll bridge and were climbing the stairs on the Oeth’s northern bank. Here the goblins had once fought a terrible battle against the twiglings and Fraddon the giant. It seemed strange to remember it now, thought Henwyn, as he climbed wearily up the mossy steps. Nowadays, with Clovenstone at peace, the twiglings had put away their withy spears and their wild wood-magic. They were content to no more than flick a few acorns down at travellers who passed beneath their trees.

  Deep in thought, he didn’t notice the little dragonet until it landed on his shoulder and bit him painfully on the ear.

  “Ow!” he shouted. “Why, you little—”

  Nuisance took wing again and whirled around Henwyn’s head. Then he whirled around Zeewa’s head, and finally around Skarper’s. “Prriiiiip!” he chirruped. “Prrriiiiiip!” It was the dragonets’ alarm call.

  “It’s as if he is trying to tell us something!” said Zeewa.

  “I’ll be telling him something in a minute!” grumbled Henwyn, rubbing at his punctured earlobe. “I mean – ow!”

  “What does he want, do you think?” asked Skarper.

  The dragonet was doing all sorts of acrobatics, and still making that frantic “Priiiip! Prriiiiip!” But what did it mean? Henwyn sighed, and shook his head in frustration.

  In the stories of adventure which he had loved to listen to before he came to Clovenstone and found adventures of his own, the hero would often have a clever dog (or horse). “Woof, woof!” it would say (or “neigh”, if it were a horse). Then it would stamp its paws (or hooves), and toss its noble head. And the hero would say, “What’s that Rover/Dobbin? Someone’s in trouble? At the old silver mine?” And together they would go running (or riding) to the rescue.

  But in real life it wasn’t always that easy to tell what a dragonet meant when it started doing loop-the-loops in front of your nose and going, “Prriiiip!”

  “Maybe there are some more eggs hatching?” suggested Skarper, because the eggs of dragonets were so thick-shelled that the hatchlings often couldn’t break their way out without the help of someone on the outside with a hammer.

  “Is that it, Nuisance?” asked Henwyn. “Do your hatchlings need our help? Can you lead us to where the eggs are?”

  But that didn’t seem to be it. Nuisance just bit him again, on the other ear this time, and took off through the trees like a golden arrow, straight up into the sky, where the rest of his little brood could be seen calling and circling.

  Too weary to worry much about dragonets, the three travellers trudged on up the long road, and came at last to the gate in the Inner Wall. Skarper’s batch-brother Bootle was on duty that morning, and before they passed inside Skarper asked him if there had been any trouble with Grumpling after the excitements of the previous night.

  “Nuffin,” said Bootle. “He’s just shut up inside the Redcap with all the other Chilli Hats.”

  “Maybe he’s forgotten about the Elvenhorn,” said Zeewa hopefully. “Maybe he’s found something else to scratch his back with.”

  “I hope you’re right,” said Skarper. “I hope we never hears another word about that rubbish old horn.”

  But he was out of luck, because they had no sooner passed inside the wall than Fentongoose and Dr Prong came running out to meet them.

  A “Hello, Henwyn,” might have been nice, Henwyn thought. Or even a “Henwyn, how pleased we are that you are still alive!” But the two old philosophers had no time for pleasantries of that sort.

  “Skarper! Zeewa!” they shouted. “Do you still have the Elvenhorn?”

  “Tell us you do! Tell us you did not give it to the Sheep Lords!”

  “It is vitally important that, whatever happens, we must not let Prince Rhind take it!”

  While Skarper and Zeewa had been fetching the Elvenhorn and exchanging it for Henwyn, Fentongoose and Doctor Prong had been hard at work in Fentongoose’s library. This was an old guardhouse near the cheesery, its walls lined with badly made bookshelves on which the former sorcerer had arranged all the books and maps and scrolls and papers that he had been able to salvage from the goblins’ bumwipe heaps. The Lych Lord, back in the days when he ruled Clovenstone, had gathered books from all the lands that he had conquered; so many books that, even though the goblins had been ripping them up to wipe their bottoms on for the past hundred years, the ones which were left still formed a collection bigger than any other in the Westlands.

  Fentongoose delighted in his library. When he was not too busy trying to teach manners to the goblin hatchlings, he would spend
his time reading and rearranging the books. Sometimes he arranged them alphabetically by title, sometimes by the name of the writer. Sometimes he grouped them by subject.

  At present, they were arranged by age. The newest volumes – fine leather-bound folios and grimoires no more than a few hundred years old – were at one end of the long stretch of shelves. Beyond them lay older books – handwritten, with pages made of parchment and vellum instead of paper. Then came the tight-rolled scrolls, dating from a time before books had been invented, and the bundles of clay tablets, baked in the book ovens of Barragan in days of old. And stacked on the floor in the furthest, darkest corner of the library lay the stone books, which were not really books at all, just leaves of slate or black marble on which some long-ago scribes had scratched crude word-pictures.

  Not many of these stone books had been gathered into the libraries of the Lych Lord, for they were rare. But the ones which had, had all survived because they were tougher by far than the books of baked clay, parchment or paper, and because the goblins never, ever used them for bumwipe – they were not very absorbent.

  It was on one of these ancient stones that Fentongoose had found a reference to the Elvenhorn. “I knew I had seen it mentioned somewhere before,” he said, while Skarper, Zeewa, Henwyn, and a few goblins who were not still asleep came clustering round the big table in the middle of the library.

  He and Dr Prong had spent all night trying to translate the ancient letters on the stone. They were faint and faded, and to untrained eyes they looked like rows and rows of tiny diagrams of different types of gate. Scrumpled and scribbled scraps of paper scattered on the floor showed what a struggle Prong and Fentongoose had had trying to tease out their meaning. But they had succeeded at last. What they had learned made everyone unhappy.

  “Chronicle of the Autumn Islands, Recounting Our Salvation from the Great and Terrible Cushions,” read Dr Prong, his face close to the stone, the tip of his finger running along the lines of scratchy letters.

  “I am not at all sure that ‘cushion’ is the right translation for that word,” said Fentongoose. “We are still working on it.”

  Dr Prong read on. “For many years the peoples of these Isles have lived in terror of the dreadful Cushions which come from across the ocean from the land in the west. There is a bit missing here – we could pick out only a few words – ‘fire’, ‘death’…”

  “I am almost sure that word cannot be cushion,” said Fentongoose.

  “And ‘west’ can’t be right, either,” said Zeewa. “There is no land west of the Autumn Isles. The ocean stretches on for ever. Unless…”

  “West of the Autumn Isles, down the path of the Setting Sun,” said Henwyn. “That is where Prince Rhind said Elvensea once lay.”

  “They came,” said Dr Prong, impatient at all the interruptions, “across the sea. And wherever they went, death and fire did follow. But then it says, In this year, in the month of Trevas-Billas – the harvesting of the oats – there came from the east in black ships seven wozzards.”

  “I’m sure that says wizard, actually,” said Fentongoose. “There is no such thing as a wozzard.”

  “Wozzard is quite definitely what it says here,” said Dr Prong firmly. “It must be an old-fashioned form of the word.”

  “Well, it’s a very silly one,” said Fentongoose. “But have it your own way.”

  “Now, where was I?” said Prong, scowling at him. “Ah yes: black ships … seven wozzards…”

  “You see?” asked Fentongoose excitedly, turning to the listeners. “these wizards…”

  “Wozzards!”

  “These wizards must have been the Lych Lord and his six fellow sorcerers, the ones who helped him raise the Black Keep and build the seven towers of Clovenstone!”

  Skarper and Henwyn both knew that story, which Fentongoose had first told them while they sat with Princess Ned in her old ship, balanced on Westerly Gate, on the evening of Henwyn’s arrival at Clovenstone. Long ago, seven sorcerers had tamed the power of the slowsilver lake which lay beneath this place, and they had grown great and powerful and set out to right the wrongs of the world, until one of them had argued with the others, and cast them down, and become the Lych Lord. So this stone book came from a time before that happened – a time so long ago that it made you feel dizzy just imagining such a depth of years.

  “Seven wozzards,” said Dr Prong, going on with his reading in a loud voice, as if daring Fentongoose to interrupt again. “These seven vowed that they would defeat the Cushions. (Perhaps it says pillows? No, that still does not make sense…) So they sailed into the west, despite our warnings, and we feared that they would be… (Now, this word means, ‘to render something into a paste, or purée, by jumping up and down on it whilst wearing stone-soled sandals’, but I do not think it is meant to be taken literally, I think it just means that they feared the seven wozzards would be killed. It is certainly a rather colourful way of putting it.) However, seven nights later (or possibly nine, or thirty six) we beheld a mighty fire upon the western sky, as of a terrible battle raging. And the sea was troubled, and the sun grew dark. And soon after that, the wozzards in their seven ships returned to tell us that, by their magic, the Queen of Elvensea has been cast down, and her Cushions had been scattered…”

  “So they were scatter cushions?” asked Skarper.

  “…and her land was sunk beneath the waves. Many of our ships have sailed there since, and our sailors report that there is nothing to be seen of it, only a wild waste of waters restlessly rolling.

  “The wozzards told us that they achieved all this through the use of a magical trumpet. This trumpet, having done its work, was cast into the depths of the sea, there to remain hidden until the world ends. Do not try to seek it, reader! One blast of that horn will part the waters, two shall raise the drowned land, and then the world will tremble again before the terror of the Cushions.”

  “Elves,” said Skarper. “That’s what that word must mean. Nobody’s scared of cushions, not really. They mean elves.”

  “I am certain it is not elves,” said Dr Prong. “It is something else…”

  “The land that the Lych Lord and his wozzard friends sank with this magic trumpet business,” said Henwyn, “that must be Elvensea, mustn’t it? There can’t be two sunken continents out in the Western Ocean.”

  “But elves are good, aren’t they?” Zeewa asked. “I mean, it was the Lych Lord who defeated them, and he was evil, so…”

  “The Lych Lord was not always evil,” said Fentongoose. “Even if he was, you should not fall into the trap of thinking that his enemies were always good. There was wild magic in the world in those days. Perhaps the Lych Lord and his fellow sorcerers saw Elvensea as a threat to themselves – another land of magic, far out there in the Western Ocean, but not far enough for comfort. Perhaps the people of Elvensea – these elves, or cushions, or whatever we choose to call them – were really their bitter rivals? This old stone recalls a war between two powerful bands of magic-users. Clovenstone defeated Elvensea. But we must not imagine that the sorcerers of Elvensea were any less power-hungry or dangerous than them. Why else would the folk of the Autumn Isles have been so afraid of them?”

  “I wish we’d never even heard of that blimmin’ Elvenhorn,” said Skarper.

  “But we have heard of it,” said Zeewa. “And now Prince Rhind has it, and he imagines the masters of Elvensea were good and kindly folk, and that everyone will thank him for waking their magic again.”

  “Well, we must stop him!” said Skarper. “We don’t want a load of blimmin’ elf magic all over the place – it’ll be a proper bother.”

  “Rhind can’t have got far,” said a small goblin called Spurtle. “He only set off at sunrise.”

  “His horses are faster than any we have in Clovenstone,” said Henwyn.

  “Goblins go fast!” said Yabber.

  “Gob
lins can hunt!” said Libnog.

  “Goblins can follow softling scents through marsh and moor and mountains,” said Spurtle.

  “We ought to have a quest of our own!” said Skarper suddenly. “Why do only softlings and princes and such get to go on quests and have songs sung about them an’ stuff? I say we should have our own goblin quest to fetch this Elvenhorn back and smash it, or plop it back into the deepliest depths of the sea, whichever is most convenient.”

  Around the table, goblin eyes shone. They liked this idea. It had been brilliant last year when they had biffed those stupid dwarves and all the softlings had said what heroes they were. Now they would be heroes again.

  “I’ll go!” yelled Spikey Peet.

  “An’ me!” shouted Libnog.

  “Me too!” said a dozen more.

  “Steady!” said Fentongoose. “You can’t all go – that wouldn’t be a quest, it would just be chaos.”

  “Seven sorcerers once set out from Clovenstone to defeat the power of Elvensea,” said Dr Prong. “Perhaps seven of us should go to make sure that it stays defeated. Also, seven is a very auspicious and magical number, and it will sound good if anyone writes songs about us.”

  “I should go,” said Henwyn, “because it is sort of my fault that he was able to take the Elvenhorn in the first place.”

  “Me too,” said Skarper. He could not say why, exactly; it was just a sudden, wild feeling that he had, a need to see lands he had never seen, and sail theseas he had read about while he was a hatchling in the bumwipe heaps. But it would be impossible to make his fellow goblins understand that, so he just said, “Me an Henwyn always go together. An Zeewa should go, cos she’s a brilliant hunter. And what about Libnog? He’s cunning and brave.”

  “Hear that?” asked Libnog, looking round proudly at the other goblins. “Cunning and brave, that’s me.”

  Henwyn shook his head. “Libnog will be needed here.” He knew that Libnog was one of the few goblins with any brains; without him, the others could not be trusted to keep doing all the things that needed doing to keep Clovenstone running – they would just muck about.