by Philip Reeve
At the hill’s top stood a ring of stones, older than the ornate tombs which surrounded them, not carved or dressed but set upright rough and shapeless, just as they had been found. Lichen and moss had grown on them; a buzzard had used one for a perch and left white streaks of bird poo down its sides. On all sides of the ring the hill sloped away, covered with tombs, so that it was like looking down over the rooftops of a miniature city whose only inhabitants were statues.
Kosi slipped between two of the standing stones and floated into the centre of the ring. Some of the animals followed him, sniffing at the stones, nibbling hopefully at the thick, short grass which grew around them.
“I can smell something. . .” Kosi said, sounding excited.
“What is it?” asked Henwyn, who could smell only wet earth and the scent of the marsh.
“I don’t know,” the ghost replied. “That’s not the point. The point is that I can smell anything at all! I have not smelled anything, tasted anything, touched anything, not since Zeewa split my heart with her spear.”
“All right, I’ve said I’m sorry, haven’t I?” grumbled Zeewa.
But Kosi hadn’t been trying to make her feel guilty. He wasn’t even looking at her. He was turning around and around in the heart of the ring of stones, his head up, his nostrils flaring, trying to catch the mysterious scent again. Around him, the ghost animals seemed excited too; the gazelles pranced, and the hyenas stuck their spotted noses in the air, sniffing deeply. Even the ghost flies seemed to buzz more happily.
Henwyn went to follow Kosi, but as he passed between two of the stones a thin, chilly clang resounded, like the tolling of a lonely bell. From the green grass at the centre of the ring a dark vapour arose, and shaped itself into the form of a cloaked and hooded figure. Zeewa cried out in alarm. Henwyn, aghast, stumbled backwards, bumping against one of the standing stones. The wraith swirled towards him, raising its bony hands. One clutched a goblet, the other a half-eaten chicken leg. (This seemed an odd detail to Henwyn, but he was too busy being terrified to pay it much heed.)
“Who dares to trespass among the Houses of the Dead?” the phantom asked, in a cold and dreadful voice. “Only the dead live here, and the living should leave us in peace, or. . . Ow! Stop it! Get off!”
Busy looming over poor Henwyn, the phantom had not noticed all the ghostly animals, twitching their noses at the smell of the phantom food it held. Tau the lion was the first to spring. The phantom gave a yelp as the great jaws closed on his chicken leg, and if he hadn’t drawn his hand back quickly he would have lost that too. “That’s mine!” he said, but Tau had already gulped the chicken leg down and was looking eagerly for more. The phantom scowled at Henwyn. “You interrupted me in the middle of my dinner,” he complained.
“How can this be?” asked Zeewa, stepping between the stones and confronting the phantom, her hands on her hips. “How can ghosts taste, smell, eat dinner? I thought they could do none of those things.”
“Ah, well, they can’t,” agreed the phantom, fishing a couple of ghost flies out of his wine goblet and taking a quick slurp. “It’s a nothing-y sort of place, the afterworld; very grey and uninteresting. But here at the Houses of the Dead we have made special arrangements.”
“What do you mean, ‘special arrangements’?” asked Henwyn, who was recovering his courage, and trying to look as if he had never been scared of this ghostly presence in the first place. “How can ghosts make special arrangements?”
“Ah, we who dwell at the Houses of the Dead are not just any ghosts,” the phantom said. “It’s very exclusive. Those who were buried on this hill were among the greatest sorcerers the world has ever known: seers and necromancers in the service of the Lych Lord. We looked ahead. We made plans to keep ourselves in old age, and beyond. While we still lived, we summoned the spirits of the dead, and learned from them what a cheerless, uninviting time awaited us, as ghosts in the world to come. It sounds bad to you, I expect: being see-through, unable to touch anything, to smell or eat or feel. Think how much worse it seemed to us, who were among the great lords of the world, used to eating the finest foods of every land! So we resolved to do something. With spells and incantations we opened a way into the afterworld, and set about improving it. In olden times great kings and princes were buried with their best belongings, believing that they could take such treasures with them. We found a way to actually do it: our furniture and favourite clothes, our pets and pastimes, came with us as ghosts to decorate our homes in the afterworld. We filled our tombs with food and finery, and as these things rotted here in the living world, their ghosts appeared in ours. And they never run out! That chicken leg your cat just ate will reappear as succulent as ever on the ghost plate in my ghost larder, where it has sat these many centuries. Yes, on the whole it is a nice life, being dead.”
Zeewa looked the phantom up and down. “If you have such fine clothes, why do you dress in these gloomy robes?”
The phantom shrugged. “These old things? To be honest, I put them on to scare you. That is my job, you see; to scare away robbers and intruders who might disturb the peace of this place. They call me the Gatekeeper.”
“We are not robbers!” said Zeewa.
“Though I suppose we are intruders,” admitted Henwyn.
“I came here because I was told that you might rid me of my ghosts,” said Zeewa.
“Yes, you do seem to have rather a lot,” said the Gatekeeper, turning to gaze upon the crowd of animals that filled the ring of stones.
Kosi turned to Zeewa. “Princess, if we are to leave you, then this is the place where we would best like to be left. To smell and taste and touch again! It will be better than the world of shades which G’angooli’s spell dragged us from!”
“Ah,” said the Gatekeeper. He put one bony hand into the shadows of his hood to scratch his ghostly nose. “Well, it’s not so easy as that; the spells which created this afterworld of ours were most specific. Not just any ghost is allowed entry. It is only the dead of Clovenstone who may enter. That’s the other part of my job, you see: I have to keep out those ghosts who do not belong. Not that it wouldn’t be nice to have a few lions and antelope and things about the place! And you too, young fellow. . .” He nodded at Kosi’s ghost. “We’ve grown rather stuffy and set in our ways over the years; a few new ghosts would brighten up the place no end. But rules are rules, and you can’t go meddling around with spells – at least, we can’t, not any more, being dead. So I’m afraid you cannot join us. Not unless you are from Clovenstone.”
Zeewa shook her head. “Kosi comes from the Tall Grass Country, West of Leopard Mountain. Half the world away.”
“Hmm,” said the gatekeeper sadly.
“I am from Clovenstone,” said Henwyn. “At least, I live here. Would I do?”
“Admirably,” said the gatekeeper. “But you are not dead. If you were, you would be welcome in a flash, and you could bring this young man and these animals as your retinue. I suppose if the young lady were to kill you. . .”
“No!” cried Zeewa. “That seeress at Coriander said nothing about killing anyone! She told me that I should come to the Houses of the Dead and there I would be freed of my ghosts. She did not say that anyone had to die!”
“Hmm,” said the Gatekeeper again. “Perhaps she was not a very good seeress; even the best of them overlook these minor details sometimes.”
“Minor details?” gasped Henwyn, who was rather afraid that Zeewa might be tempted to do him in, if it would rid her of her ghosts.
“Very well,” said Zeewa. “I have had a wasted journey. I shall return to the Inner Wall, and talk to the wise ones there; to Princess Ned and Fentongoose and Dr Prong. Perhaps they will know some way to alter these spells which bind you, Gatekeeper.”
“I hope so,” agreed the Gatekeeper, and he bowed low, like a column of smoke wavering on the wind.
“Come, my ghosts,” said Ze
ewa, turning away. Kosi followed her. The animals did not want to leave, but they had no choice; they were dragged after her like iron drawn by a magnet, funnelling away between the standing stones and back down the slope of the hill.
Henwyn lingered there on the hilltop. As the phantom gatekeeper began to fade he called out, “Wait!”
“What?” the phantom replied. “Only, the rest of my dinner’s getting cold, you see. . .”
“What about goblins?” Henwyn asked. “Do they come to your afterworld? There is one who was a friend of mine, who was lost in the battle with the dwarves. I wondered if you might have seen him at all?”
“I’m sorry,” said the Gatekeeper. “There are no goblins at the Houses of the Dead. They have their own afterworld, I believe. A noisy, smelly place. What goes on there, who the latest arrivals are. . .” He gave a ghostly shrug. “I’m sorry. But good luck to you, young fellow; to you and your princess from the Tall Grass Country, west of Leopard Mountain. I hope to see her ghosts again. And, of course, I shall see you again, sooner or later, for all the dead of Clovenstone come here. I’ll look forward to having a nice long chat, when you join us.”
He sank back down into the earth, and Henwyn, with a shudder, turned away. For a moment, as he looked downhill between the old stones, it seemed to him that lamps were burning in the tombs, and that he could see the dead walking to and fro between them, and riding by on ghostly horses, as if this town of tombs was a real town, and the air was full of faint voices, laughter, and the ghosts of smells. Then it faded, and there was only the hillside, and the silent tombs, and Zeewa going back down towards the marshes with her ghosts behind her.
The tunnels down which Etty led Skarper were busy with bustling dwarves, but she found him an old cloak and a spare miner’s helmet, and they did not give him more than the briefest of glances as he hurried along at her side. Etty was more worried that they would notice her: the red tabs on her cloak collar marked her as a member of the night shift, who were all meant to be sleeping at this hour.
Luckily the passing dwarves had other things to think about. The Head had set them a challenge. It was the biggest feat of engineering that dwarves had undertaken in that age of the world. They were all busy making sure it worked.
Etty led Skarper out of a side passage and into a wider tunnel; a big delve that ran straight as an arrow for as far as he could see in either direction. A fat pipe ran along it, much like the pipes which he had glimpsed earlier in other tunnels, further west. The pipe passed through a stone-built shed in which a diremole trotted endlessly in a big wheel, turning a series of cogs and shafts.
“That’s a pumping station,” said Etty. “There are dozens of them, one every few miles. This pipe goes under the roots of the Bonehill Mountains all the way to Delverdale.”
“So if it ends at Delverdale,” said Skarper, “where does it start?”
“At Clovenstone,” said Etty. “In the slowsilver lake beneath Meneth Eskern. The attack last night was staged to stop you hearing our diggers and diremoles at work as they drove their last mine through the crag and tapped the slowsilver. Now all Clovenstone’s slowsilver is being pumped north to Delverdale.”
Skarper gawped. He tried to imagine the slowsilver gushing and gurgling through that pipe. He couldn’t. Slowsilver wasn’t like other substances. Slowsilver was magic. It did what it wanted, not what you told it to. It spat out eggstones, or formed itself into shimmery firefrost stairs.
“You can’t pump slowsilver!” he blurted.
“Dwarven iron is proof against all magic,” Etty said. “Dwarves learned that long ago. So you see, we have got our slowsilver after all, and there will be no need for more fighting.”
“But . . . but . . . but. . .” Skarper hopped and jittered like fat in a hot pan. “You can’t! You mustn’t! Slowsilver is the heart of Clovenstone! It’s where goblins come from! If you take our lava lake away, you’re taking our whole future from us!”
Etty bit her lip again. “It’s the Head’s orders, Skarper, and the Head knows best. The Head probably has a much better use for all this slowsilver. . .”
“What, better than making goblins?” asked Skarper. “We don’t live for ever, you know. A hundred years or so and then we crumble back into stone. That’s if we don’t get stabbed or strangled or squashed or splatted first, and stabbings and stranglings and squashings and splattings happen to goblins a lot; we’re very accident prone. What will happen when all the goblins living now are gone, and there isn’t any lava lake to spit out eggstones and make new goblin hatchlings? There won’t be any goblins left! What sort of a world will it be without goblins?”
“A better one, of course,” Etty started to say, because that was what she’d been taught to believe, all her life. The trouble was, she didn’t really believe it any more. She’d been told that goblins were mindless, savage monsters, but Skarper wasn’t mindless, or savage, or even particularly monstery. The Head Knows Best and the Head Knows All, she told herself. But it seemed the Head didn’t know all about goblins.
She looked down at her feet and listened to the soft, sad sighing of the pipe as it carried Clovenstone’s lava lake away.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Well, sorry’s not much good!” complained Skarper. “Sorry won’t fetch our slowsilver back! We have to do something! You have to stop it! Block the pipe, or make it flow the other way or something!”
“I can’t!” said Etty. She drew Skarper aside into the shadows near the tunnel wall as a gang of dwarf workers came by, listening to the pipe with long brass ear trumpets to check that the stuff inside was flowing smoothly. By the time they had gone past, Etty had made another decision.
“We must talk to the Head,” she said. “You and me, Skarper. We’ll go to Delverdale and tell the Head that goblins these days aren’t like the goblins of old. Perhaps . . . perhaps the Head doesn’t understand how things have changed.”
Skarper pricked up his ears and nodded cautiously. He thought it might be worth a try. After all, if these dwarves were stupid enough to do whatever a big brass head told them to, maybe a really cunning goblin like him could trick them somehow. He’d creep inside that head and say loudly in a head-ish voice, “Goblins are all right! Put that slowsilver back where you found it!” Or he could just grab a hammer and smash the head to bits. Goblins were good at smashing stuff to bits.
“How far is it to Delverdale?” he asked.
“More than a hundred miles,” said Etty.
“And over the mountains!” Skarper’s ears drooped. “That will take weeks!”
“Under the mountains,” Etty corrected him. “And it won’t take more than a day, not if we go by railway.”
Her eyes shone. It could be done; she was sure it could. Every dwarf had the right to lay their troubles and complaints before the Brazen Head, and although she had never actually heard of any dwarf who’d done so, she was sure the Head would hear her, and decide what was best for dwarves and goblins.
Skarper just looked blank. “What’s a railway?” he wondered.
Slowsilver was not the only thing the dwarves were sending home to Delverdale. Wherever they went they sought out veins of ore, seams of coal, diamonds, crystals, and all the fruits of the underworld. Some of these things they used in the places where they were mined: coal to heat their furnaces, iron to make new tools. Most was sent north, however, to the great smithies and storerooms of Delverdale. To make this easier, they had a built a railway. A set of iron rails snaked under the Bonehills, and along these rails there trundled carts full of ore and precious stones. On the uphill stretches the carts were hooked to winches powered by diremoles. On the downhill sections they rolled free, and gravity did the work. The dwarf engineers were so clever that very few diremole winches were needed: the track had been planned in such a way that the carts picked up enough speed on the downhill stretches to carry them up all but th
e steepest inclines.
The railhead was in a huge, noisy cavern, into which a dozen tunnels opened. Ore and coal from all the mines of the Bonehills were brought there, and tipped into little high-sided wooden carts which waited on the rails. When eight or ten carts were filled they were linked together by dwarf labourers and shoved off down the track, vanishing into the low, dark mouth of a tunnel which opened at the cavern’s end.
It all looked like chaos to Skarper, but Etty understood the system well enough. She led him quickly through the toiling gangs of workers, between the waiting heaps of coal and ore. A train of carts was being linked together by big metal hooks. Etty and Skarper hung back watching, waiting nervously for the right moment. Above them, hanging from the cavern’s roof, a huge banner with a likeness of the Brazen Head stared down, rippling in some underground breeze.
As they watched, the last cart was filled with ore and linked on to the train. Dwarfs took hold of handles on the sides of each cart and started to wheel them down the track. “Now!” said Etty. She grabbed Skarper’s paw and they ran forward together. The railway dwarves, used to their steady, unchanging routine, were too confused to do anything but keep pushing as the goblin and the girl ran past them and scrambled up on to the leading cart.
“Hey!” said one of the dwarves. “Get off there! That’s not allowed!”
“No!” said Etty. She started to throw chunks of ore over the cart’s side, making a nest where she and Skarper could sit on the knobbly cargo. The dwarves pushing the cart along shouted again, but there was nothing they could do; the heavy carts were moving under their own momentum now, coasting down an incline towards the tunnel mouth. The ones shoving Etty and Skarper’s cart along did their best to slow it, but it was too heavy and moving too fast, and the dwarves holding the handles of the carts behind kept pushing, breaking into a run as the carts moved faster and faster.