by Philip Reeve
More desperate than ever to escape, he looked up at the sky again. Black dots circled up there; carrion birds whose sharp eyes had spotted the three prisoners waiting in the bowl. Over to the east there hung a little puffball cloud, the first he’d seen, but it was not big enough to blot out the sun for long. Then, as he looked at it, Skarper realized that Etty had been wrong. There was hope after all!
The dwarves looked on in bewilderment as he jumped up and started shouting. They’d never paid much attention to the sky. They’d never looked with any interest at clouds, and had certainly never noticed that some clouds didn’t always go where the wind blew them. They’d never guessed there were such things as cloud maidens, air-headed spirits of the skies who travelled the world aboard their magic clouds and who could sometimes be persuaded to take passengers.
“Cloud maidens?” growled Durgar, when Skarper tried explaining. “Are they friendly?”
That made Skarper hesitate for a moment. Cloud maidens weren’t exactly friendly; not really; not to goblins. The first time he’d dropped in on them, they’d been ready to hurl him off their cloud, and when the fall proved not enough to kill him they had chased after him, slinging lightning bolts and hailstones. No, you couldn’t really call them friendly at all. But they were the only scrap of hope he had, so he went on leaping up and down, waving his paws and tail in the air and shouting, “Hello! Over here!” They were flighty creatures, but there was always a chance that they might decide to help. And if they didn’t, well, it would probably be better in the long run to be roasted quickly by a thunderbolt than slowly by the sun. . .
Etty joined in, waving her short arms and yelling, and eventually Durgar started shouting too. The dwarf sentries at the foot of Dungeon Crag looked up and shook their heads and grinned, imagining that their captives were screaming for mercy as the sun rose. But at last the cloud seemed to swivel a little in the air, and then it drew closer, as if blown towards them by a wind they could not feel. As its shadow fell over the Bright Bowl, the wispy faces of the cloud maidens appeared around its edges, looking down. Their high, fair voices carried clearly on the morning air.
“It’s that horrible goblin again!”
“What is he doing here?”
“And some dwarves. . .”
“Come, sisters, let us leave this dismal place. I told you there would be no princes here.”
“No!” shouted Skarper, as the cloud began to rise again. “Don’t go! Please help us! We’ll die if we stay here!”
“Then you shouldn’t have climbed up there in the first place, should you?” said a cloud maiden tartly. “You have only yourselves to blame, you know.”
“Please!” begged Etty.
The cloud came down again, but only so that the cloud maidens could peer at Etty. They hadn’t realized she was a girl until she spoke, and they wanted to make sure that she was not prettier than them. When they saw that she wasn’t, they giggled at her.
“Have you heard what has happened at Clovenstone?” asked Skarper slyly. “There’s been a great battle there! Henwyn led a charge against the dwarves!”
Just as he’d hoped, the cloud maidens stopped tittering and stared at him. They were all crazy about Henwyn.
“Is he. . . Is Henwyn all right?” they asked.
“Oh yes,” said Skarper, hoping it was true. “You know Henwyn: brave as a lion and twice as clever. He defeated the dwarves. But now they are planning some new trouble; building a great engine of war or something, and there’s little doubt they’ll use it to take Clovenstone by force.”
“Oh! And dear Henwyn would sooner die than let that happen!” wailed one of the cloud maidens.
“That’s why I need you to help us, see?” insisted Skarper. “We have to get home and warn him.”
“Oh, sisters,” said Rill, the kindest of the cloud maidens, “we must do as the goblin asks.”
“But why?” asked the others. “He’s horrid and he’ll get our cloud all dirty. We can fly to Henwyn faster if we are not weighed down by nasty goblins.”
“But think how cross Henwyn will be if he hears you’ve left me here to starve and parch!” said Skarper.
“Oh, that’s true,” admitted a cloud maiden. “Remember, sisters, Henwyn is fond of the ghastly creature for some reason.”
“Oh, very well,” said the others.
“And my friends must come too,” said Skarper, pointing to Etty and Durgar. “I can’t leave them behind.”
If the cloud maidens had thought about it for a moment they would have realized that all they needed to do was fly away: if Skarper was left behind to die, how would Henwyn ever know that they had even spoken to him? But the cloud maidens weren’t all that bright, and at the moment there was not much room in their cloudy heads for any thought except Henwyn. Most of them were just staring into the middle distance with soppy smiles upon their faces, imagining his blue eyes and blond curls. “Mmm, he’s so dreamy!” they murmured, while their cloud drifted sideways on the morning breeze.
“Come on then!” shouted Skarper, before they blew away entirely, and Rill and a few of her sisters came to their senses and lowered cloud ladders for the prisoners to climb aboard.
“You must all take your boots off,” they said. “We don’t want grubby footprints all over our cloud.”
Meanwhile, two of the dwarf sentries down at the foot of the crag had decided that they really should investigate the conversation that was going on above, and the strange cloud that was hovering above the Bright Bowl. They hurried up the long stair and emerged on to the bowl’s brim just in time to see their prisoners climbing up a cobwebby ladder which had descended from the belly of the cloud. Their eyes went wide behind their black glass goggles. They shook their halberds in a threatening way and shouted, “Stop!” but the prisoners just kept climbing. Then the sentries did the only thing they could think of: they shouted to their friends for help, then jumped into the bowl and went slithering down into its middle, where they grabbed at the bottom of the cloud ladder and started climbing it.
But the cloud maidens were unhappy about letting two dwarves on to their cloud; they certainly weren’t going to welcome any more aboard. As Durgar clambered up to sit panting beside Skarper and Etty on the cloud’s cushiony top, the maidens let their magic ladder melt back into plain ordinary cloud. The dwarves below yelled in anger and surprise as the woolly rungs which they’d been climbing turned suddenly to mist. They yelled again, in pain mostly, as they dropped heavily down on to the heap of dry bones in the bottom of the bowl. The cloud twirled above them, scattering maidenly laughter, and the last Skarper saw of them they were trying desperately to scrabble back up the bowl’s sides and calling out to their friends to bring them ropes and real, solid, metal ladders.
But their friends were not paying them much attention; they stood on the bowl’s brim and on the stairs that led to it, staring north towards the doors of Dwarvenholm, and as the cloud rose and flew out across Delverdale Skarper stared with them, for something was happening in the country of the dwarves.
The road which led up to the great doors was lined with onlookers. Streams of dwarves were pouring out of all the little hidden doors which speckled the lower slopes of the hollow mountain. They kept to the shadows where they could, but where they could not they braved the sunlight, shielding themselves with umbrellas and moleskin screens. Like the guards on the crag, they were all staring towards the main doors, which Skarper now saw were swinging open.
“Hang on!” he told the cloud maidens, who had lifted their cloud up into the clear, cold river of wind which swirled over the mountain’s shoulder, and were starting to steer it towards Clovenstone. “Wait! What’s going on down there?”
“Oh, what now?” tutted the cloud maidens, but when they looked where Skarper was pointing they fell silent too, and watched. It was not every day that the Doors of Dwarvenholm were opened.
> The great burnished metal plaques which sheathed the doors flashed and rippled with sunlight as they swung wide. Behind them lay shadows: a dark opening leading into the heart of the mountain, like the earth’s mouth. Then, in the darkness, Skarper started to make out the twinkle of dwarf lamps, and the glint of light on the armour of marching dwarves. Hundreds of warriors were coming up out of the deeps, up the great paved way which led to the doors, and out into the morning sunlight. Banners with the device of the Brazen Head flapped in the breeze, and so did the broad moleskin awnings which the marchers on the edges of the column held up to shade their comrades.
“Marching above ground?” said Durgar, frowning at the spectacle below. “It don’t make sense. Why send an army marching in hot sunlight when we have tunnels and delves below ground that will take us all the way to Clovenstone?”
But behind the marching warriors, something else came striding: something far too big to fit in any delve or tunnel. It was the shape of a dwarf, but as tall as the tallest giant, and it was made all of shining metal. On its shoulders sat the Brazen Head, and as it stepped out through the open doors and started to follow the army down the road that led through Delverdale, the Head swung watchfully from side to side, as if it were gazing down upon the dwarves who lined the way.
“They have built a body for the Head!” said Etty, clinging to the thick, cottony cloud-stuff and leaning far out over the edge to stare down.
“So that is what that maggot Glunt meant!” said her father. “I have heard stories of storerooms deep beneath the mountain where mighty limbs were stored; legs and arms, built out of iron. So they were meant for the Head, and Glunt and his friends have assembled them, and now he has slowsilver enough to set them moving. . .”
“The Head walks! The Head walks!” dwarves were chanting, down in the valley, their massed voices loud enough to be heard clearly on the cloud. The cloud maidens steered it lower, and soon Skarper and the others could make out the tubby form of Overseer Glunt, standing with some other dwarves upon a railed platform which circled the Head’s brow like a crown. Glunt had a huge brass trumpet in his hands, and when he bellowed through it his words came out loud enough to be heard even over the chanting.
“Behold!” he announced. “The Giant Dwarf! The slowsilver of Clovenstone runs in its veins! The magic of our spell-smiths makes it move! No army can defeat it! No wall, no tower, no bastion raised by men can stand against it!”
“That’s Clovenstone done for, then,” said Skarper sadly, ears drooping.
“Poor Henwyn!” whispered the cloud maidens. “It will stamp him flat!”
“The day long foretold has dawned at last!” Glunt roared. “The day when dwarves look down again on men! They called us short! They laughed at us! We’ll see who laughs last when they look up and see the Giant Dwarf coming to trample their palaces underfoot! To Coriander!”
“To Coriander!” shouted all the dwarves in the valley – at least it sounded like all of them; their voices merged into one vast voice which echoed and re-echoed from the steep sides of Delverdale.
“Did he say Coriander?” asked Skarper.
“So they aren’t going to Clovenstone at all!” sniffed a cloud maiden, looking disdainfully at the footprints the passengers had made in the cloud. “The goblin lied to us!”
“I thought they were!” said Skarper. “I thought. . . Why do they want to go to Coriander?”
“To drive men out,” said Durgar. “To open up the mines of the sea coast again. To take back what was ours in the long ago. Dwarves were wronged, and the wrong must be righted.”
“But not this way!” cried Etty. “Not this monstrous thing, trampling folk and bringing death and disaster! Dwarves should be makers, not breakers of things!”
“We must still take word to Clovenstone!” said Skarper. “Henwyn should hear about this, and Fentongoose, and Princess Ned. . . Maybe they’ll know what to do. . .”
Just then the shadow of the cloud fell over the Giant Dwarf. Glunt looked up and saw the faces of the cloud maidens and their passengers peering down at him. He shouted something that they could not hear. Dwarf crossbowmen on the Giant Dwarf’s shoulders raised their weapons. A flight of darts went chirring into the sky like starlings, and thudded into the underside of the cloud. They did no harm, except to make it look rather odd, like a flying pincushion, but the cloud maidens quickly took it higher and, flinging a storm of hailstones down at the dwarf army, soared up into the river of wind again and let it carry them west, away over the empty valleys and stony summits of the Bonehills, whirling towards far-off Clovenstone.
A dreadful noise filled the cavern beneath Meneth Eskern, echoing and re-echoing from the stony ceiling.
SQUksWKSwKKRKkkkggKKrrrrRRRggKK
it went, rather like the noise you get when you’re drinking milkshake through a straw and reach the bottom of the glass, or when the last of the bathwater goes gurgling down the plughole. The pipe which the dwarves had driven through the crag had finally drained the last of the slowsilver from the lava lake.
Princess Ned and Fentongoose, standing on the beach, looked down into a broad, empty pit where the slowsilver had been, and saw the mouth of the dwarf-pipe far below them. A few small pools and puddles of the magic metal still glimmered in crevices of the stone around it, but they had lost their silvery glow, and showed no sign of spitting out any eggstones.
They had known of the pipe’s existence – or at least guessed it – ever since Henwyn and Zeewa came back out of the marshes with the tale of their strange meeting with the boglins. Fentongoose and Dr Prong had spent a long time hunting for it, hoping that it could be blocked. But they had soon realized that the pipe must open at the very bottom of the lake, and there was simply no way to reach it. Slowsilver is not like water, or even like ordinary lava; it is more magical and mischievous than that. The hooks and poles which the two philosophers lowered into the lake in the hope of finding the pipe dissolved in puffs of steam, or froze and shattered. A goblin called Spurtle, who was helping them, fell into the slowsilver by accident and was instantly transformed into a small sofa. The pipe remained hidden. It seemed immune to the strange powers of the slowsilver. It kept on sucking and sucking away, invisible down there in the depths. Every half-hour Fentongoose checked the stones he had set on the beach to mark the edge of the slowsilver, and every half-hour he found that the level had dropped. It had gone down with horrifying speed, and now the lake was empty.
“That is that,” said Fentongoose sadly. He was thinking of all the eggstones he had collected on the lakeshore, and how he had kept them warm and helped the hatchlings inside them to emerge (and forgetting how the hatchlings had hit him with planks and bitten his fingers). “It is the end of Clovenstone!” he said.
“There must be some way we can get our slowsilver back!” said Princess Ned. “What if we sent some of our smaller goblins along that pipe? Perhaps they could find whatever tank or reservoir the dwarves have taken all our slowsilver to, and – oh, I don’t know – reverse the flow somehow? Pump it back to us?”
Fentongoose shook his head. “I do not think so. Apart from anything else, the pipe will be smeared with slowsilver. It must have been wrought by spell-smiths out of dwarven iron to be proof against the slowsilver’s effects. Our goblins are not, and they would probably be transformed into frogs or puffs of smoke before they had crept more than a few feet along it. Remember what happened to poor Spurtle. . .”
“Of course. How is Spurtle?”
“Oh, he is comfortable enough. We just have to plump up his cushions from time to time. But Ned, these dwarves do not do things for fun. I daresay they have plans for our slowsilver. They are probably putting it to use already.”
“But to what use?” wondered Princess Ned.
Flat feet flapped on the stone floor of the passage behind her and a panting goblin came running up to her. It was Yabber, and he had new
s. “The cloud maidens are back!”
“Oh, that is all we need,” groaned Fentongoose, who had always found those airy young ladies most annoying. But Yabber hopped up and down and waved his paws excitedly. “They ain’t alone! Skarper’s with them!”
“Skarper?” cried Fentongoose and Ned together, and they went hurrying up the long, winding passageway and out into the afternoon light.
It was a cloudy day at Clovenstone, and for a moment it was quite difficult to make out which of all of those clouds was the exciting one. Then they saw it; there was Skarper, dancing up and down on top of it as it came slowly down to brush against the battlements of the Inner Wall. A huge crowd of goblins had already gathered there to greet it. Others, who had been practice-fighting with Garvon Hael in the old tilt yard behind Growler Tower, were running up the stairways in a yowling, cheering throng.
Outside the wall, Henwyn heard the cheering, but he was busy helping Cribba, Torridge and Kenn block up dwarf tunnels, and he did not see the cloud descend. Stupid creatures, he thought bitterly, listening to the whoops and howls of the excited goblins echo among the ruins. That was a bit unfair, but it was certainly true that most goblins weren’t all that bright. How can they be celebrating, thought Henwyn, when Skarper is dead, the slowsilver lake is being drunk dry and goblinkind is facing its doom?
“What’s that?” asked Torridge just then, pointing up.
“It’s a cloud, stupid,” said Cribba.
“But it’s got people on top of it!” said Kenn.
“Henwyn!” shouted Zeewa, running through the ruins with her tangle of ghosts behind her. “Henwyn! It is Skarper! He is alive! He has come home!”
They ran towards the wall together, Henwyn and Zeewa, the trolls and the ghosts, almost getting stepped on on the way by Fraddon, who had come up from the woods to see what was happening. Rushing inside the wall and shoving their way past the yapping, yahooing goblins who clogged the stairways, they reached the battlements just as the cloud bumped gently against the top of Blackspike Tower. Skarper jumped off, followed by Durgar and Etty, who looked about uncertainly at the goblins who surrounded them and peered down at them from the Blackspike’s mossy roof. The whole cloud blushed sunset pink as the cloud maidens spotted Henwyn: they waved shyly, and shook their hair out into long cloudy streamers, which they hoped he’d think pretty. But Henwyn wasn’t paying them any attention at all; he ran straight to Skarper, picked him up, and swung him round and round.