by Philip Reeve
“You think I don’t know that?” said Durgar angrily. “This goblin is the subject of Etty’s complaint to the Head. Now, will you let us pass, Slab Stonethwaite, or will you break the oldest custom of the dwarves?”
Slab Stonethwaite mumbled something about the other oldest custom of the dwarves being not to let goblins go wandering about inside Dwarvenholm, but Durgar’s fierce glare silenced him, and he and his companion stepped aside. Durgar, Etty, Skarper and Langstone passed between them, and entered a huge space: a hall hollowed from the heart of the mountain, ringed with pillars and pierced screens of living rock as delicate as lace.
In the centre of that hall, in a pool of light cast by lamps which hung on long chains from the high ceiling, there stood the Brazen Head. It was a handsome dwarf head, wrought from dull, aged bronze, and the size of a large house. There were gaps and openings in it – at its temples, and in its sunken eyes – and through these holes Skarper could see big, toothed wheels turning amid a complicated tangle of pipes and tubes. These inner workings had a silvery sheen, an owl-light glow that Skarper knew meant they were forged from slowsilver.
All around the Head, and up and down ladders and walkways which spidered over it, there hurried important-looking dwarf overseers in purple robes. Some climbed up to feed small, polished stones into its brass ears; some stood ready to catch other stones which emerged from its open mouth and slid down the flutings of its beard into their waiting hands. The stones being fed in had questions on them, runic letters carved by dwarves who sat in rows at low stone benches. The stones coming out bore the answers. The dwarves who caught them shouted out these answers to young dwarf messengers who waited eagerly in the shadows around the edges of the hall. “Excavations in the Elkendelve shaft are to proceed; send three squads of miners there. . .”
“Level Fourteen of the mine at Boldventure is to be abandoned before the yield drops any further. . .”
“Cardle’s mole cavalry may withdraw from Clovenstone.”
Awed by the ants’-nest bustle of the place, Skarper hung back in the shadows near the entrance until Etty took him by the paw and led him forward. “The Head must get a look at you!” she said.
“No!” said Langstone. He had been uncomfortable about her wild plan all the way from the worm’s hole, and now the looming presence of the Head so overawed him that he was trembling. “Don’t do this! I will not be a part of it! I am going to fetch Overseer Glunt; I shall tell him that this is all your idea and nothing to do with me.”
He reached out to pull Etty back, but Durgar thrust him away. “Fetch Glunt, if that’s what you want,” he said. “No doubt he’ll be down here soon enough anyway. The whole of Dwarvenholm is buzzing like a kicked hive with news of our coming. Etty, lass, if you’re sure you want to do this, do it quick.”
Langstone made an exasperated, strangled noise, then turned and went running from the hall. As his footsteps faded, Etty squeezed Skarper’s paw and led him on across the hall, with Durgar. Slowly the shouted orders, the pecking of the question-carvers, and the clumping footsteps of the departing messenger-dwarves fell quiet. Only the Brazen Head kept clanking and rattling and chunking, as it had clanked and rattled and chunked for centuries. The gears revolved behind its empty eyes. All other eyes in the hall were turned upon Etty and Skarper.
“Hello!” said Skarper, trying to sound friendly, and he waved a paw at the nearest overseer. The dwarf just stood glaring at him with an unread answer stone clenched tightly in his trembling hands.
“What is the meaning of this intrusion?” another overseer demanded, his long white beard quivering with outrage.
“I have a question for the Head,” said Etty.
The question carvers looked nervously at her, then at the Head, wondering what to do.
“Certainly not!” blustered the white-bearded overseer. “This is a time of great deeds and mighty undertakings. The Head is busy with important computations. It is not to be bothered with questions from a girl-child and a goblin!”
“Yet it is her right,” said another overseer.
“The right of every dwarf,” agreed a third.
“Hurry up and tell us your question, girl,” said a fourth, and signalled to the oldest of the question carvers that he should write it down.
Etty coughed twice to clear her throat. She was not used to having quite so many eyes upon her, quite so many ears waiting to catch her words. She said, “I want to ask the Head, does it know that goblins no longer want to be our enemies? And, if it does, why is it that dwarves and goblins may not live in peace?”
The question carver plucked two fresh stones from the basket that stood at his side. (Like all the question stones, they were flat, black pebbles, smoothed and rounded in the River Blindwater, which ran through deep caves far beneath Dwarvenholm.) Quickly the carver’s chisel pecked out Etty’s questions, one on each stone. Then an overseer gathered them up, climbed the spindly ladder to the Head’s ear, and fed the stones in, one by one.
The Head quivered. Clank, it went. And rattle, and chunk. Reflections of the hanging lamps danced in the flutings of its beard where the bronze had been worn smooth and bright by all the answer stones sliding down. Clank, rattle, chunk – and out came another stone; a single answer to Etty’s two questions. It dropped into the hands of a waiting overseer, who raised it and read it aloud.
“The Head says, ‘Goblins have always been the enemy of dwarves. Goblins will always be the enemy of dwarves.’”
Clank, rattle, chunk, went the Head, but no more stones emerged.
“Well, lass, you tried,” said Durgar, placing a fatherly hand on Etty’s shoulder. “The Head has spoken, and now we must leave. . .”
Etty shook herself free of him. “But it didn’t answer my question!” she said angrily. “I asked if it knew goblins had changed. I asked why goblins must be our enemies. It’s not good enough, just to say that they always have been and they always will!”
“But the Head knows all. . .” said one of the question carvers.
Etty strode to the overseer who had read the answer stone and snatched it from him. She hurled it at the floor, where it shattered, and the shards went skitter-skating across the marble and away into the shadows. “It doesn’t really know anything, does it?” she shouted, pointing up at the great, impassive face of the Brazen Head. “You ask it questions and it gives you answers, but it doesn’t know anything! It still thinks things are as they were all those years ago when it was made. It’s just a clanking, rattling, chunking contraption!”
All around her, overseers gasped, while messengers and question carvers covered their ears to try to stop themselves hearing any more of her terrible, blasphemous words. One messenger fainted. Another said, “How could she?” Even Durgar muttered, “Steady now, lass.”
“But it’s true!” shouted Etty. “We’ve all known it’s true, haven’t we, really, for years and years? It was just easier to pretend that the Head knows all!”
Not many of the dwarves in the hall were listening to her any more, and it wasn’t just because half of them had stuck their fingers in their ears and started going, “La-la-la. . .” There was a commotion going on outside: a blur of voices and a tramp of iron-shod shoes. Skarper, who had been thinking of slipping quietly away while Etty’s angry outburst was distracting the overseers, turned to find that his way was barred. A squad of armoured dwarves was marching into the hall of the Head, forming a line across the entrance with their spears levelled.
“Who are they?” asked Skarper nervously.
“Those are the tallboys,” said Durgar grimly. “The tallest dwarves of each generation are picked to serve as defenders of Dwarvendom and bodyguards for the overseers. . .”
Skarper gulped, looking at the barrier of spears. The bosses of the tallboys’ shields and the visors of their helmets were forged in the likeness of the Head, and some of them were very tall i
ndeed, real giants of dwarves, almost four and a half feet high.
Their ranks shifted slightly, and out between the spears stepped a shorter figure; one that Skarper knew. It was Overseer Glunt, whose ugly head he’d landed on when he first fell into the dwarf tunnel in the Bonehills, all those weeks before.
“All right, Durgar, this nonsense has gone far enough!” Glunt announced, with a nasty sneer. “Langstone has told me the whole sorry tale. To think, a surveyor of your age and standing, doubting the wisdom of the Head! And you, Etty – conspiring with goblins and biglings against your own people! It’s Dungeon Crag and the Bright Bowl for all of you.”
“What’s that mean?” asked Skarper. “Is it bad? Is it an actual bowl? How bad can a bowl be?”
His friends did not answer, but they did not really need to. Skarper could see the look of dumbstruck fear that had settled upon their faces. It told him that whatever this Bright Bowl was, it was something very bad indeed.
The hollow mountain that housed Dwarvenholm was high and stark, and its western face fell almost sheer, a black cliff with its feet in the stony fields of Delverdale. In this cliff there was a vast door, with ramplike roads zigzagging up to it, but it was shut and barred, and had not opened since men first came into the Westlands and the dwarves retreated in a huff into their caves.
There were other doors, though, further down the mountain, and out of one of them the tallboys led their prisoners, out under the light of a bone-pale moon. Looking back, Skarper saw the huge, shut door of Dwarvenholm towering above him, and looking ahead he saw Delverdale spread out below; the big fields divided by stony walls, the barns and pigsties clustering around windowless, turf-roofed farms from which dwarf farmers would emerge at night to plant their crops and tend their animals. Dwarf chimneys poked up everywhere, a forest of tall stone stacks that sucked in air and breathed out the smoke of the teeming city hidden beneath the fields.
But Overseer Glunt and his tallboys were not leading their prisoners down into the dale. Instead they turned south, along a narrow path whose paving had been worn smooth by the feet of many such processions. Up and up the thin way wound, to a place where a tall crag jutted out of the mountain’s flank, sharp and jagged with the moon behind it, and as black as a goblin’s toenails.
“Dungeon Crag,” said Glunt. “You may not have heard of it, goblin. To dwarves it is a name of terror; something for dwarfwives to scare their naughty children with.”
Skarper looked up critically at the crag. What did the dwarves do to their prisoners there? Chuck them off the top? His ears curled at the memory of his long-ago fall from the top of Blackspike Tower, but he did not want Glunt to have the satisfaction of seeing how afraid he was, so he shrugged and said, “I’ve been thrown off taller things than that.”
Glunt looked narrowly at him, and then laughed. “Who said we were going to throw you off it? We’re going to take you up there and leave you there, you and these traitor friends of yours. Of course, after a day or two, you may wish we’d thrown you off!”
And his nasty laughter echoed off the rocks of Dwarvenholm as he led the tallboys and their prisoners up the steep stair to the summit of the crag.
Dwarves do not build dungeons. Even in the olden days, before they started to live underground, they felt at home beneath the earth. The darkness of an underground cell holds no terrors for them, and they would probably manage to tunnel out of it quite quickly anyway. So, long ago, the Dwarvenkings had commanded the building of a sky dungeon: the dreaded Bright Bowl, a deep, steep-sided hollow which dwarf stonewrights had carved into the summit of Dungeon Crag. There traitors and murderers could be cast and left to rot. Its sides were as smooth as glass, and shone dimly with reflected moonlight as the prisoners arrived, panting, on the narrow path which circled the bowl’s brim.
There, Etty turned to Glunt and said, “Please, Overseer; my father and Skarper have done nothing wrong. It is I who should be punished, not them.”
Moonlight silvered the masks of the tallboys, and made Glunt’s ugly sneer of triumph uglier still. “Skarper is a filthy goblin,” he said. “As for your father, you should have spared a thought for him before you started shouting insults at the Head.”
“It is nothing but a machine,” said Etty. “How can I insult it?”
Those tallboys who stood close enough to hear her muttered dark mutterings behind their visors, outraged that, even here, on the brim of the Bright Bowl, she should still be telling her dreadful lies about the Head. But Overseer Glunt just leaned close to her, and winked. “A machine it may be,” he said softly, “but it shall be the salvation of Dwarvendom. The dwarves who made it were very wise, and they gave it one mission that is more important than any other: to restore the pride of dwarves. But the magic was failing in those days, and there was not enough slowsilver left in the world to make it work, so it was never finished. They did not know of the great lake under Clovenstone, or perhaps they did not think that they could drain it. Well, I, Glunt, have succeeded where they failed! The Clovenstone slowsilver is flowing to Dwarvenholm now, and the Head shall be finished at last.”
“Finished?” said Durgar. “Finished how?”
Glunt chuckled. “There was a time when our kind did as we liked in the Westlands, before the biglings came. That is how it shall be again, when the Head goes forth. The time is coming, very soon, when we shall look down in scorn upon men.”
“‘When the Head goes forth’?” asked Etty. “How can it go anywhere? It’s just a head!”
“Why don’t you think about that,” suggested Glunt, “while you wait to die?” And with that he reached out and shoved her in the chest. He did not push hard, but she was caught off guard, and she stepped backwards, slipped on the sleek stone of the bowl, and went slithering helplessly down. With armoured fists and spear butts the tallboys shoved Skarper and Durgar after her. Even Skarper’s sharp claws couldn’t find a purchase on that glassy slope, and he went skidding down to land with the others in the bottom of the bowl.
They lay there, hearing Glunt and the tallboys leave, then nothing but the soft moaning of the wind as it blew around the bowl’s brim, far above them.
Something was digging into Skarper’s bottom. He wriggled round and pulled the object out from under him. It was a bit of somebody’s skeleton, and looking around he saw that a litter of bleached bones filled the bottom of the bowl. Skulls grinned sheepishly at him in the moonlight.
“So I suppose there’s no way out of here?” he said.
“No prisoner has ever escaped from the Bright Bowl,” said Durgar doomily, which was exactly what Skarper had been afraid he was going to say.
“So why do they call it the Bright Bowl?” he asked. “It sounds quite cheerful. And it doesn’t look very bright to me.”
“Not now it isn’t,” Etty said. “But wait till morning. When the sun comes up its light will shine into the bowl, and we must lie in it till we are blinded and burned and shrivelled up. Dwarves are shy of sunlight. We have dwelled too long in shadows.”
“Oh,” said Skarper, remembering how the tallboys had stripped Etty and her father of their black glass goggles before they brought them to the bowl. Then he brightened. “Still, goblins don’t really mind the sun,” he said.
“Then you will lie here till you starve,” said Durgar. “Or die of thirst. Whichever comes sooner.”
He turned his back on Skarper and cuddled up to Etty, leaving the goblin to stare up miserably at the cold, mocking twinkle of the high stars.
“Maybe it will rain,” Skarper suggested hopefully. “Then there’ll be something to drink, and the clouds will shield us from the sun. Then we’ll have time to think of a way out. Princess Ned says there’s always a way if you just think hard enough.”
But the dwarves did not answer. Maybe they were asleep, or maybe they were just too miserable. Skarper lay awake, thinking hard for a long time, but he couldn�
�t think of a way out, and above him still the cold stars shone, promising a cloudless day to come.
Towards dawn, Skarper fell into a fidgety sort of a sleep. Bad dreams came to him; of moles and dampdrakes and long drops. He woke with a start. He was lying beside Etty and Durgar in the bottom of the Bright Bowl. Above him the sky was like another bowl, harebell blue and upended over him. It was completely clear. Soon the sun would be up, and Skarper was not sure how long Etty and Durgar would be able to withstand its scorching gaze. He wasn’t sure how long he could withstand it, come to that – goblins did not mind the daylight as much as dwarves did, but it was going to grow hot here, with no shade, no water, and the sunlight reflecting off the polished stone. He licked up some of the dew that had formed on the bowl’s sides in the night, then made another scrabbling attempt to climb out. He soon slid back again. He seized one of the dwarf bones that lay in the bowl’s bottom and tried using it as a pick, but it soon splintered on the hard stone.
Durgar, who was awake and watching him, said, “It is useless. We tried while you were sleeping, me and Etty.”
“There is no hope for us, Skarper,” Etty said sadly, hugging him. “We can only wait, and hope that the Overseers of the Dead find good work for us when we reach the afterworld.”
Skarper scratched his head. “What? You dwarves have to keep on working even after you’re dead?” he asked.
“Of course!” said Etty. “The dwarf gods are building a vast castle in the afterlife to keep out the ghosts of men. There is much to be done there!”
Skarper didn’t fancy that. Goblins were a bit vague about what went on in the afterlife, but he’d always imagined it would be a chance for a nice long rest, with maybe a bit of wafting about and scaring people like those ghosts of Zeewa’s, to stop it getting boring. It seemed to him that if he died here with these dwarves there was a good chance he would end up in the dwarf afterlife by mistake, and be set to work building their ghost castle.