by Philip Reeve
“Etty!” roared a voice, louder than the rattle of the wheels on the tracks.
“Oh crikey!” said Etty.
Her father had arrived in the cavern. He was running along beside the rumbling carts, with Langstone and and another dwarf puffing and panting behind him. “You come down off of there, young lady!” he bellowed.
“I can’t, Father!” Etty shouted back.
“She can’t,” agreed one of the dwarves pushing the carts. “It’s moving too fast. Won’t stop now till Moledale Steep.”
“Etty!” yelled Durgar.
“I’m sorry, Father!” she called back.
“Etty, DUCK!” her father shouted.
Etty and Skarper both looked round, and saw just in time what he meant. The mouth of the tunnel was rushing towards them. It was a low tunnel, just high enough for a fully laden cart of ore to pass through. The dwarves had hacked it through the living rock of the mountains, and they hadn’t wasted any effort by making it higher than it needed to be: high enough to take a fully laden cart with a goblin and a girl on top, for instance.
Squeaking with fright, Skarper and Etty threw themselves flat on top of the ore and tried to press themselves down into it. Everything went black as the cart rushed into the tunnel, and all the noises of the cavern, the shouts of Durgar and the other dwarves, were suddenly cut off, replaced by the echoing rattle of the wheels on the tracks.
Henwyn and Zeewa set off again across the marshes, but although they followed the same track that had brought them to the Houses of the Dead, something had altered, and they were soon lost. The mist swirled around them again, thicker than ever. The path twisted and turned in ways that it had not that morning, as if the whole dank maze of reed beds, pools and ruins had rearranged itself while they were talking with the Gatekeeper. Within twenty minutes, Henwyn no longer had any idea of the way to the Inner Wall, nor could he have found his way back to the Houses of the Dead.
Of course, he could not admit that to Zeewa.
“It’s perfectly all right,” he said, pulling his boot out of a black, sucking mudhole which had almost swallowed him. “Wrong turning. We’ll bear left a little. Soon hit higher ground, and maybe this mist will clear.”
Zeewa did not look as if she believed him. “I am certain we have passed that building before,” she said.
They sent Kosi on ahead as path-finder again. Being a ghost, he was able to float above the travellers and spy out the way, but being tied to Zeewa by the wizard’s curse, as if by invisible string, he could not float very far above them; not high enough to see over the mist and tell them if they were still heading towards the Inner Wall. Several times he found good, broad tracks leading through the reeds and ruins, but each time the path petered out and vanished after a few hundred yards.
Then, at last, they struck one which did seem to be going somewhere, following the route of an old paved street, now half swallowed by the mire. The ground seemed to rise beneath Henwyn’s and Zeewa’s feet as they hurried along it, Kosi gliding in front of them, the storm of other ghosts following close behind. Ahead, through the mist, the shape of a large building loomed.
“Have we walked in a circle?” asked Zeewa. “Is that one of the Houses of the Dead?”
“It could be,” said Henwyn, although it looked a bit too lumpy to be a tomb. Then he stepped through a last veil of mist and saw it clearly, and realized just how lost they were. The winding paths they’d followed had led them into the heart of the mire. He stood staring at the crumpled ruins of the boglin king’s hall, Bospoldew, with the wide dark mere in front of where the dampdrake dwelled.
“We have come the wrong way!” he said. “This accursed mist. . .” He remembered the strange traps and snares which Poldew of the Mire had woven from the marsh mists. Poldew was dead, but maybe other boglins had power over the mists as well. As he thought back, it seemed to Henwyn that ever since they left the Houses of the Dead the mist had been misleading them; hiding the right path and herding them along the wrong one, until it had brought them here.
Zeewa kicked angrily at a tussock and crouched down, weeping with frustration. Her ghosts fluttered anxiously, and Kosi went close to her and tried to lay a hand on her shoulder, but of course it slid straight through. Looking at his pale, transparent face, Henwyn realized that the young ghost was in love with Zeewa. He felt rather pleased with himself for noticing that, because he didn’t usually understand other people’s feelings very clearly. Then he felt sorry for Kosi, because it must be sad to be in love with somebody who was alive when you were just a ghost and couldn’t even hold her hand.
Tau the ghost lion growled suddenly, soft and low, and Henwyn drew his sword and spun around, eyes on the reeds and the ruined hall, thoughts of love forgotten. “This is a bad place,” he said. “We must go at once!”
Kosi said suddenly, “There are creatures moving. All around us.”
“Where?” asked Henwyn. He sensed the cold black eyes of boglins watching him, but he couldn’t see anything.
“Behind the mist,” said Kosi. “Behind the reeds.”
Zeewa stood up, pulling her stabbing spear from its quiver, shrugging her shield off her shoulder.
The reeds rustled, and the boglins were there. They had surrounded the travellers, making a ragged circle which slowly shrank and tightened as they came out of their hiding places and stalked forward. Froglike they were; speckled and bow-legged, with broad mouths and bulging eyes, and they moved like frogs on their long web-toed feet. But in their hands they carried glass knives and stone-tipped spears, and some wore armour made from old roof slates. They looked curiously at Zeewa’s ghosts, and a few flicked out their long sticky tongues trying to catch phantom flies, but they were not afraid. One, a little larger than the rest, hopped right up to Henwyn and stood sniffing at him.
“We mean you no harm,” said Henwyn. “We are lost, and found our way here by accident. We were looking for our way home from the Houses of the Dead, but we took a wrong turning in all this mist and came by chance to Bospoldew.”
“Not called that any more,” croaked the boglin. “It’s Bosfetter now. That’s my name, see. Fetter of the Mire. I’m king in the reed maze now. Got any crumbles?”
“What?” said Henwyn.
“Crumbles,” said the boglin, and licked his lips. “The lady leaves it for us sometimes, down by the Inner Wall. Tasty.”
Henwyn remembered the morning – it seemed like years ago – when he and Skarper had talked to Princess Ned while she sat watching for boglins, with a dish of fresh apple crumble cooling on a tussock. How the boglins had made off with it so slyly, while no one was looking. He said, “I don’t actually have any with me now, but I’m sure that if you let us go. . .”
“So you been to the Houses of the Dead,” said Fetter. His big golden eyes peered up intently at Henwyn’s face. “We saw you. We watched. Nothing at the Houses of the Dead but old bones, old moaning ghosts. Why do you want to go there?”
“My friend Zeewa wished to talk to those ghosts,” said Henwyn. He glanced behind him, past the hall, towards the mere. He was afraid that while Fetter kept him talking, the dreadful dampdrake might be rising again, ready to gobble him up and Zeewa too.
Fetter of the Mire guessed what was on his mind, and gurgled with laughter. “Scared, are you, warmblood?”
“Well,” said Henwyn, “it’s just that last time I was here, your dampdrake. . .”
Fetter’s long mouth turned downwards in a sad frown. The other goblins muttered dolefully. “Dampdrake all gone,” said one.
“No more dampdrake,” said another.
“It is the burrowers,” said Fetter. “They have driven him away, our dear, darling dampdrake.”
“Burrowers?” asked Henwyn. “You mean dwarves? They have been tunnelling here, too? Under the mire? I should have thought they would have drowned!”
“U
nder the mire is the stone,” said Fetter. “Under the stone the burrowers dig their holes. Bash, crash, shake, shudder. The dampdrake doesn’t like it. He has gone; left us and swum away, through the secret waters, away into the big marsh in the north.”
“Good riddance!” said Henwyn, very relieved, and then hastily added, “I mean, what a terrible shame!”, because he knew the dampdrake was important to the boglins; it was their god and their pet, and they loved it.
“Burrowings must stop,” said Fetter.
That reminded Henwyn of the dwarves. What were they doing under this part of Clovenstone? There had been no attacks on the northern stretch of the Inner Wall. He had seen no sign of molehills rising in the north. “They must be very deep,” he said aloud. “I wonder what they are doing down there?”
“Tunnelling,” said Fetter. “Just one tunnel they have been making; very long, very straight. Boglins listen. We puts our ears to the floors of the meres and we hears. Clanging things they have down there; bong, clong. Bangings and hammerings, and diggings. They came from the west, and they made their burrow long and straight, and last night, while you warmbloods were busy fighting, they dug through the foot of the crag to where the lava lies. Like poking a hole in a wineskin; like sucking broth through a straw. You go back to your princess lady, warmblood. You tell her that. Tell her she must stop the burrowings. Also, send more crumbles, please.”
Fetter stepped backwards, and as he did so the mist seemed to thicken, swallowing him and all the other boglins. At the same time, a patch on the far side of the hall thinned, and sunlight shone there, lighting up the entrance to a broad track that led away through the reeds.
“Fetter!” shouted Henwyn.
There was no answer. The reeds rustled. The boglins were gone.
Zeewa looked uneasily towards the gap in the mist and the path through the reeds. Kosi said, “Is it a trick? Are they hoping to trap you?”
Henwyn shook his head. “If they had wanted to kill us they could have done so easily. I think he was granting us safe passage. What did he mean, ‘sucking broth through a straw’?”
“Does he want Ned to send him soup as well as more crumble?” wondered Zeewa.
Henwyn shook his head. The Muskish girl had never seen the lake of slowsilver lava under Meneth Eskern. Henwyn had, and he was starting to get an unsettling idea about what the boglin king had meant.
“This is important!” he said. “We must warn Ned and the others at once!”
“Why? What is it?” asked Zeewa, running beside him as he turned and hurried towards the path which Fetter had revealed. It stretched away ahead of them through the reeds, with thick walls of mist towering up on either side, and at its far end, very dimly, the sun was shining on the battlements of the Inner Wall.
“I’m not certain,” said Henwyn. “But I think . . . I think all our battling was in vain. I think the dwarves have won!”
Onwards and onwards raced the cart, rattling and swerving through the tight, black bowels of the Bonehills. At last Skarper found the nerve to open one eye and peer upwards. Not even goblin eyes could see anything in that inky, roaring darkness, but he could imagine the low, jagged rock of the tunnel roof speeding by just inches above him.
“I don’t think this was such a good idea,” he told Etty.
“Perhaps it will get better. . .” Etty started to say.
But it got worse. The dwarves who built the railway had planned it so that their carts would pick up plenty of speed at the beginning of their journey. As Etty spoke, the track seemed to drop away beneath the cart, and it went plummeting down, down, down through the dark. Sparks flared wildly from the wheels, lighting up the rushing tunnel walls.
“Aaaaaaaaaaargh!” screamed Etty and Skarper together, and the long echoes were torn away behind them.
Then the echoes changed. The cavern widened, and there was light again as the carts reached the bottom of that long drop and went rattling across a rickety-looking bridge above a glass-clear, glass-still, underground lake. The light came from the torches of dwarves on a road that ran beside this lake, threading its way between stalagmites and tall, slender columns of stone. The dwarves had heard Etty and Skarper’s screams, and stopped to stare as the train of carts went clattering by. In the front one Etty and Skarper busied themselves throwing out more chunks of ore so that they could burrow down deeper. The ore fell with white splashes into the water below, and the spreading ripples broke and scattered the reflections of the watching dwarves and their torches, freckling the cavern walls with shifting light.
The railway curved, and the cart started to gather speed again, descending towards the entrance of another tunnel. “Etty!” called a voice from behind. Skarper looked back and saw Durgar and Langstone scrambling over the ore in the last cart.
“Look!” he said, tugging at one of Etty’s braids to catch her attention. “They must have jumped in as we were leaving!”
“Oh, Father!” said the girl.
Ignoring the wobbling and juddering of the carts, old Durgar clambered unsteadily to his feet and sprung across the gap which separated his cart from the one in front of it. “Never fear, Etty!” he shouted. “I’ll save you!”
“He must think I’ve kidnapped you!” said Skarper.
“I’m not afraid!” Etty shouted back. “Eeeeek!”
They were in darkness again, plunging through another rock-walled tube, the cart leaning so far to one side that Skarper felt sure it was going to fall over, but it was kept on the rails by its own rushing weight. He thought of Durgar and Langstone, just seven carts behind, but the sparks which kept flashing from the wheels showed him that the tunnel roof had closed down again; there was not even room for him to raise his head above the brim of the cart, let alone look back. That meant the two dwarves could come no closer: they’d be cowering in their own cart for the moment.
On and on the carts went thundering, slowing now as they climbed long, shallow inclines, then gathering more speed as the track sloped downwards again. Several times the tunnel opened into wider caverns, and once by spark-light Skarper and Etty saw Durgar jump from the seventh cart to the sixth. The cart rattled across sets of rusty points where other rails joined the main one, branch-lines coming in from other mines. Once it crossed a bridge which seemed to span some unimaginable abyss: Skarper had a sense of a great space opening below him, and thought he saw red veins of molten stone glowing sullenly, miles below. For the most part, though, the headlong journey was spent in blind, black darkness. After a while Skarper grew so used to the careering of the cart that he stopped being scared by it. Carts of ore must come this way every day, he told himself. These clever old dwarves wouldn’t have made the bends and drops of their railway sharp or steep enough to derail their trains and spill their precious cargoes. He snuggled down into the ore next to Etty and tried to relax, telling himself that the only things they had to fear were Durgar and Langstone, and there was little chance of them making it all the way to the front cart at this rate.
“I never realized there was so much going on down under the mountains,” he said, having to shout a bit over the thundering wheels and their echoes. “Railways and stuff, and these great big holes.”
“We are deep in Dwarvendom now,” said Etty, close to his ear. “Some of these caverns we pass through are old mines, dug when the world was young, before Men came to live in it. Things were better then; when dwarves ruled above the land as well as beneath it. . .”
And then, as people in the Westlands so often did when they started thinking about history, she began to sing:
It was an age of gold and stone
The dwarvenking sat on his throne
In Dwarvenholm where halls were hollowed
By the first dwarves, and those that followed
Had dug them deeper, made them fine
With silver’s glimmer; diamond’s shine.
; Said the dwarves,
“By land or sea, there are none mightier than we.”
Dwarves were lords of all things then,
Until into the land came Men
The Dwarvenking heard of their fleet,
He said I shall go forth and meet
These strangers: at my feet they’ll fall,
For I am so strong, so very tall.
Said the dwarves,
“By land or sea, there are none mightier than we.”
This great king stood full four feet tall!
Proudly he ventured from his hall;
He did not think to find that Men
Were half as tall as him again.
And when they met him, looking down,
They laughed, “A king? This little clown?”
Then cried the dwarves,
“Across the sea have come some mightier than we!”
The pride of Dwarvendom was gone
And many a mirthless, bitter song
Tells of the mockery Men brought
Of how they pointed, called us “short”
And crueller names, the least of which
Were “half-pint”, “stumpy-legs” and “titch”.
Now groaned the dwarves,
“By land or sea, there are none lowlier than we.”
And so in darkness dwarfkind dwells,
In halls and delves beneath the fells,
Waiting for the great day when
Dwarves will look down again on Men.
“So is that why dwarves are so grumpy, then?” asked Skarper, when she had finished. “Because you’re short?”
“We aren’t grumpy!” said Etty. “And WE ARE NOT SHORT!”
The cart shot out again just then into a larger stretch of tunnel, and her voice echoed loudly from its curving walls and roof: “SHORT . . . ORT . . . ORT. . .” This cavern was lit by mole-dung lamps, which burned outside a little building beside the tracks ahead. The cart veered around a series of tight bends towards it, the rails snaking through a forest of huge stalagmites and stalactites, some of which had joined in the middle to form wasp-waisted pillars. Clinging on tightly to Etty as the cart threw him them from side to side, Skarper looked nervously behind him. Old Durgar was springing nimbly from the sixth cart to the fifth, the fifth to the fourth. Langstone followed behind him, but failed to notice a low-hanging stalactite. “Oof!” he shouted as it swiped him, and he tumbled down out of sight below the tracks.