Mags looked doubtful. “Go back five mile or so, and it be the third turning on the left. But ’tis a dangerous way, Henwyn of Clovenstone. You and your goblins would be better just going home to your old towers.”
“That we cannot do,” said Henwyn. “We are on a quest, and we shall not turn for home till it is completed.”
“Goblins on a quest?” snorted the Ulawn woman. “Whoever heard of such a thing?”
Henwyn shrugged and smiled and walked back to where his friends were waiting. He sensed that Mags was a kindly woman at heart, and he was waiting for her to take pity on him and to call after him and say that it was all right, the goblins could use this road after all. But she didn’t. Prince Rhind had told his lies too well.
“There’s another way,” Henwyn told the goblins when he reached them. He took from his pack the map that Fentongoose had given him before they left Clovenstone. After peering at it for a long time he finally made out the old road which the Ulawn folk had spoken of, a faint, dotted line that wandered along the Nibbled Coast, a few miles north of where they stood.
“A cliff path?” asked Zeewa, who did not much like heights.
“A sea path?” asked Spurtle, who had heard that the sea could be dangerous.
“It is just what we need,” declared Henwyn, rolling up the map again. “Why, if I had known it was there I would have gone that way to start with. It is probably quicker than this road, and we shall reach Floonhaven long before Rhind’s gang. And the views will be lovely, and the sea air will do us all good!”
The little harbour town of Floonhaven had been doing very well for itself recently. The houses which clustered on each bank of the River Floon had a plump, well-fed look, and the castle of King Hadow had recently had a new extension built.
The reason was tin. The cliffs on either side of the harbour were honeycombed with mile upon mile of old tin mines. For years, everyone had believed that they were empty, but King Hadow had recently employed some dwarvish miners, and they had discovered whole untapped seams. The ingots of tin which they mined left Floonhaven aboard merchant ships, and the money flowed back in.
Today, the little place was looking more prosperous than ever. This was because of the beautiful white ship that was moored in the harbour. When Prince Rhind began his quest he had sent envoys to Coriander with orders to charter the finest ship that the gold of the Woolmark could buy. The Swan of Govannon had set sail at once, and it had been waiting in Floonhaven for nearly a week when Rhind and his company finally came riding down the long road from Ulawn.
The ship was well-named, for she looked like a swan, so white and so graceful, with an elegant little castle at her prow and another at her stern. Long pennants streamed from her masthead, and more fluttered from the pikes of the little band of Floonish men-at-arms who stood on the quayside with King Hadow and Queen Harlyn and a choir of children who began singing, “Welcome, Visitors from the Land of Sheep” as soon as Prince Rhind and his companions came in sight.
Prince Rhind rode forward to accept their greetings, and many high and lordly words were spoken about friendship between Floonhaven and the Woolmark and the bold quest on which Prince Rhind would soon embark. But Prawl, waiting behind with Ninnis in her wagon, could not hear them. He sat there with the sea breeze ruffling his hair, gazing dopily at Breenge, until suddenly Ninnis tapped him on the shoulder with her wooden spoon.
“Your friends have escaped,” she said.
“Oh good!” said Prawl, who had been worried about Henwyn and the others ever since Prince Rhind hid that danger sign – a most unprincely thing to do, in Prawl’s opinion. He was glad to know that they had not been harmed by whatever danger it had been warning of. “How do you know?” he asked the cook. “Have you had another vision?”
Ninnis nodded. “They were turned back in the Waste of Ulawn. The farming folk would not let them use the road.”
“I’m not surprised, after all those dreadful fibs Prince Rhind told about them…”
“But they are coming by another way,” said Ninnis. “By the old road which runs along the cliffs.”
“Oh!” said Prawl happily, and then, when he understood what that would mean, “Oh… You mean they’re coming here?”
“Yes,” said Ninnis.
“I’d better warn Prince Rhind,” said Prawl. “He won’t be pleased.”
“No, he won’t.”
“And he can be very nasty when things don’t please him.”
“Yes, he can.”
“He spoke very sharply to poor Breenge this morning when her horse stood on his toe.”
“Yes, he did.”
“So imagine what he’ll say when I tell him we’ll soon be up to our necks in goblins.”
The cook beckoned him closer. She undid a little leather bag which she always wore at her belt, and opened it. Prawl tried to peer inside, but Ninnis quickly shut it again, after drawing out two little objects. One was a small pebble with the deep blue-grey colour of a stormy sky. The other seemed to be a small, dried-up worm.
“When you’ve given His Highness your news,” she said, “go to the end of the harbour wall and drop these into the sea.”
“What will that do?” asked Prawl.
“It will make Prince Rhind think that you’re a wise sorcerer, working powerful magic on his behalf,” said Ninnis. “I’m sure Lady Breenge will be impressed, too.”
“Oh! Thank you, Ninnis!”
“Think nought of it, young man,” said the cook, beaming at him. She watched as he hurried over to speak with the prince, then strode along Floonhaven’s curving harbour wall. Her smile faded as he raised his hands and let the pebble and the worm fall into the sea. Her eyes were not twinkling any more in their usual friendly way; they were filled with a light of quite a different sort.
“Winds of the wild north, do my will,” the cook said under her breath. “Worms of the dark deeps, heed my call. Find out the folk who dog our steps, and the cold sea take them all…”
Old beyond reckoning was the road which ran along the Nibbled Coast. Once it had linked a dozen tiny harbours which had nestled in the mouse holes of the cliffs, but the sea had long since washed those harbours away, or else marauding goblins from Clovenstone in the black years had burned them, and tumbled their stones into the surf, and few used the old road any more. There was no need, anyway, since a far better road had been built inland, a road that was not forever being pounded and clawed and torn down by the wind and the wild sea.
But the old road ran there still, sometimes no more than a line in the grass on the clifftops, sometimes descending down long flights of stone-carved stairs into deep coves full of wave-boom and shingle-hiss, sometimes winding along the sheer cliff faces themselves, patched and splinted with rotten bridges of wet wood where the waves had gnawed whole sections away.
The goblins did not mind the look of it. They had all grown up bird’s-nesting among the rooftops of Clovenstone, so horrible heights and rickety walkways did not bother them, but none of them trusted the sea. Even Skarper, who had seen the sea before, at Coriander, had never seen a sea like this. The Coriander sea had been blue and sparkling and playful. This northern sea was grey and fierce, a restless, snarling thing, rushing against the black rocks like some huge and hungry beast.
Zeewa did not mind the sea too much – she had crossed it in a small boat full of ghosts when she first came to the Westlands – but she was a girl of the wide Muskish savannahs, and that sheer drop on one side of the path appalled her. She was so afraid of falling that sometimes she felt a terrible urge to just step out into that gulf and get it over with.
As for Henywn, he was afraid of both the heights and the sea, but he was much too proud to admit it. Besides, this was the only road open to them; they had no choice but to walk it.
And at first it was not too bad. They had struck the old road in one of its gentl
er stretches. It ran over the high clifftops where foxgloves bobbed and nodded, and so long as they did not glance to the right they could pretend that they were walking in sunlit meadows rather than along the brink of precipices. When the steep stairways led them down into the coves they drowned out the surf-boom and shingle-hiss with a cheery marching song.
But as they went westward, their shadows lengthening behind them, the cliffs grew higher and the road grew worse. More and more often they found themselves creeping along ledges slick with spray and seagulls’ droppings, high above the hungry breakers and the black rocks. They pressed themselves against the cliff face and edged along in a line, teeth chattering, soaked by the foam which burst high into the air each time a fresh wave broke, and which the rising wind drove hard against the cliffs.
Then, as if the ledges had not been bad enough, they came to a place where there was no ledge at all. The cliff that the road had been hewn into had fallen, and across the sheer new cliff face stretched a line of rotted wooden posts, driven into the rock like nails into a wall. These supported a ramshackle walkway of wet planks.
“We can’t go along that!” said Zeewa.
“We must turn back!” said Skarper.
But the wind was worsening, and the road behind them was being lashed by huge waves. The cove that they had just come through was deep in swirling foam. There was no turning back.
“Curse them stupid softlings fer not lettin’ us use their road!” shouted Flegg.
“I in’t wastin’ curses on them,” said Grumpling. “I’m savin’ mine fer the stupid softling what brought us this way instead.”
Few of them dared to look down as they inched out on to the creaking plankway, but Flegg did.
“Eek!” he shrieked, pointing through one of the gaps which gaped between the boards. “Sea sperpents!”
“Sea serpents, you mean,” said Skarper. And then, “What!?”
They all peered down, except for Zeewa, who was clinging to the slimy cliff face with her eyes tightly shut. A hundred feet below, the white sea writhed; the white sea roared; it worried and thundered at the jagged shore.
“I can’t see no sea sperpents,” said Grumpling.
“It’s serpents,” said Skarper.
“Flegg just saw a bit of driftwood, probably,” said Henwyn.
“I know what I seed,” said Flegg, stubbornly.
“There’s no such thing as sea sperpents anyway,” said Spurtle. And then he added, “Aaaargh!” Because at that instant a great snakey head on the end of a long, snakey neck reached lazily out of a wave, plucked him from the walkway, and vanished with him back into the sea, leaving nothing behind but a waft of fish-stinking breath to show his startled companions that they had not dreamed it.
“Spurtle!” yelled Skarper. He fell to his paws and knees on the planks, hoping he might see his batch-brother down there, clinging to a handy rock or swimming bravely in the boiling foam. He couldn’t. He saw other things, though. Long, rolling, roiling things, tumbling and tangling in the waves.
“Sea sperpents, I mean serpents!” he shouted. “Loads of them! Thick as worms in a bait jar!”
Another head came rearing up and bared its sharkish teeth. They snapped shut on nothing as Skarper dodged nimbly sideways.
“Anchovies!” wailed Gutgust.
“I think anchovies are smaller, and not so bitey,” said Henwyn, almost overbalancing and toppling off the walkway as he drew his sword. But the next serpent head that rose was too far away for him to strike at; it lunged at Zeewa, and Grumpling stepped in front of her and swung his axe at it. There was a thunk as if the blade had struck a tree. Blood spurted and steamed and the serpent dropped backwards, almost taking the axe and Grumpling with it.
After that, there came a lull in the attacks. The serpents, who were not fussy eaters, were busy squabbling over the one that Grumpling had killed. The waves that heaved against the cliff turned red as they tore it apart.
“Ick!” said Henwyn, staring down.
“Poor Spurtle!” said Skarper.
“Onwards!” shouted Zeewa.
Skarper heard her, but he couldn’t move. He kept staring down into the tumble of foam and slimy bodies, waiting in vain for Spurtle to reappear. He had known from the outset that their quest might be dangerous, but he had not really understood it till now…
Zeewa took him by one arm and dragged him after her along the walkway. “Quickly,” she said, “while they are busy feeding!” Skarper had the feeling that she almost welcomed the coming of the serpents, as if she was glad to have something to think about other than the danger of falling. “The road rises ahead!” she said. “Perhaps they cannot reach that high!”
Skarper doubted that; from what he’d glimpsed of the creatures, those coiling bodies were hundreds of feet long, and could quite easily reach straight to the clifftops. The mystery was, where had they come from, so suddenly and in such numbers? Surely they were creatures of the open ocean, not the Nibbled Coast?
But this was not a time for the pondering of mysteries. It was a time for not getting eaten by sea serpents. He took one last, despairing look for Spurtle, and let Zeewa hurry him on. The pathway of planks sloped steeply upwards, more perilous than ever, but his fear of it was forgotten now in his terror of the things below.
Henwyn was in the lead as the party slithered and stumbled to the top of the slope. The road ran high here, but it was still not high enough, for when one of the serpents below grew tired of eating serpent and decided to go in search of afters, its huge hissing head rose up level with Henwyn, eyeing him over the edge of the walkway. Festooned with barbels and trailing weed, pimply with barnacles, it bared its bone-saw teeth, but Henwyn drove his blade at it and it hissed with pain and fury and withdrew into the sea again.
“They’re back!” shouted Henwyn, turning to his companions, but he need not have bothered – they had already worked that out for themselves. A dozen of the dreadful worms were flailing at the roadway, and Zeewa’s spear and the swords and axes of the goblins shone in the dying light as they frantically fended them off.
Henwyn felt a terrible, cold fear clutch at him. Quests weren’t meant to end like this, on lonely cliffs, with no survivors to tell the tale of how brave the last fight had been. Yet he could see no way out of this for any of them. The enemy was too many and too fierce, and soon it would be night, and they would have no light to see by except the corpse-lantern glow of the serpents themselves, whose eyes seemed to be faintly luminous.
Looking desperately for shelter, but not really expecting to find any, he turned to the cliff face. There, in a sort of natural alcove in the rock, he saw a door. It was such an unlikely sight in that wild place that he thought at first he must be dreaming it. He fended off another serpent attack – a slash with his sword, the hot blood freckling him, that maw full of bony daggers hissing fury as it flinched away – and looked again.
It was a door. A newish-looking door, made from stout timbers, with neat hinges and a handle of dark iron. He tried the handle, but it was locked, of course.
“Just our luck!” he muttered.
He threw himself against the door, but whoever it was who had decided to put a door in a cliff face on that lonely stretch of coast had been the sort of person who liked to do things properly. It did not budge an inch.
“Grumpling!” Henwyn shouted. “Here! We have need of your axe!”
The big Chilli Hat came blundering along the roadway, almost knocking Gutgust and Skarper into the sea as he barged past them. When he saw that it was only a door he was being asked to chop down, he looked almost offended. Grumpling was always happy to use his axe on anything, but he liked using it best on things which went, “Ow!” or “Argh!” Still, no serpents were attacking at that moment, so he shrugged and gave it a go.
One, two, three massive blows, and still the door held firm. A fourth, and it open
ed, swinging shattered on its hinges.
“This way!” shouted Henwyn, over the sea’s roar and the battle’s din. “There’s a passage!”
“Where does it go?” asked Skarper.
“Who cares?” yelled Zeewa.
They scrambled through the doorway one at a time, Henwyn waiting until last so that he could fend off the hungry serpents with his sword. Then he followed his friends inside, into the darkness and the sudden silence, the smells of earth and the smells of stone.
“I hate caves,” said Skarper. He said it in a small voice, but the arched stone ceiling caught his words and made them echo: “hate caves, caves, aves…”
“I hate sea sperpents more,” said Flegg, and for once, everyone agreed with him.
“Them sperpents ate Spurtle,” said Skarper.
“Grumpling saved my life,” said Zeewa, as if she had only just realized.
Grumpling looked defensive. “It wasn’t on purpose.”
“Has anybody got a light?” asked Henwyn, looking in his pouch and finding that his tinderbox was full of seawater, the kindling soaked.
Everybody else was in the same position. The sea had got into everything. Even the food they had carried from Clovenstone was mostly ruined.
“I hope there’s something to eat in this cave,” said Grumpling.
They stumbled on, deeper and deeper into the cliff, while the sounds of the sea and the angry serpents faded behind them. At last the echoes of their footsteps changed and they realized that they had emerged from the first passage into a bigger chamber. Water dripped somewhere nearby with faint, musical sounds.
“I really hate caves,” said Skarper again.
“And we hate goblins!” came a voice from out of the darkness.
A light was kindled, a lantern lit. Its glow gleamed on armour, shield bosses and the blades of sharp weapons. On a ledge above the goblins’ heads stood a group of dwarves, glaring fiercely down. From openings in the cavern walls came more dwarves, clutching pickaxes, swords and hammers, candles trembling on their helmets.