“But there in’t no way in there. There hasn’t been since. . .”
“Maybe there is. Maybe they’ve found one. What was it that that old beardy softling was shouting about yesterday?”
“I dunno, I didn’t listen. Magic or something.”
“Magic,” said Breslaw greedily. “It’s comin’ back, Knobbler.”
“You mean there’s going to be a Lych Lord again? A big boss sitting on the Stone Throne, thinking up nasty stuff for us to do?”
“Maybe,” said the hatchling master. “Or maybe not. . .”
“You speak in riddles, Breslaw. Normally when people starts speaking in riddles I bashes them. I hates riddles.”
“It’s not a riddle,” Breslaw explained. “Why do we goblins always have to have a wizard or a sorcerer or some dark lord or other to tell us what to do?”
Knobbler pondered this. “It’s cos we’re thick and we like hitting things.”
“No! Well, yes. . . Perhaps it was. But things have changed. Maybe us modern-days goblins are wiser than we were in the old Lych Lord’s time. Maybe it’s time we started lookin’ out for ourselves. If you could sit yourself on that stone throne, you’d be more than just king of the Inner Wall, Knobbler.”
“King of all Clovenstone, you mean?”
“King of the world, maybe.”
Knobbler’s eyes glowed like embers, dull and greedy and confused. “But it’s Skarper and the softlings who knows the way inside, not us.”
“So we’ll watch them. I reckon the way in must be from down below. We’ll set a watch there, and we’ll wait. . .”
The dampdrake slobbered and slithered back into the depths of its mere, bubbling in rage and misery. With it went all Poldew’s hopes, for the marsh king had planned to keep and train the monster, and use its great strength and dismal breath to spread his swampy domain across the whole of Clovenstone. Now his dreams were all in ruins. Now he did not even have a hall any more! Like a man fighting his way out of an enormous, soggy paper bag, he punched and clawed and struggled his way out from beneath the dank heap that had been Bospoldew, and roared at his battered boglins.
“Fetch me those softlings! Find them all! Find them and bring them back! If the drake don’t want them, I’ll eat them myself!” screamed the demented bog boss, and he snacked on a hatchling for starters.
And so the hunting parties formed, and set out this way and that, criss-crossing the water mazes of the mire. The boglins hated this work, for they’d seen the silver fire the softlings had conjured, and the dampdrake’s severed tail-tip still twitching on the margins of the mere, and they were sure that their quarry were great warriors and mighty sorcerers too. But they were more scared of Poldew, so they did his bidding and looked high and low, near and far. Some harnessed the great grey raft-spiders that lived in the mire and went scudding across the lagoons to search the remotest reed beds and eyots. Some gathered marsh lights and crept sniffing into the damp green shells of the old buildings where the water slopped and echoed eerily and their own huge shadows veered up the slimy walls to terrify them. They looked everywhere; they looked and looked and looked; but when the grey dawn came they had still found no trace of the companions.
Poldew did not seem too furious when they came creeping home at sun-up, empty-handed. He bit the heads off a couple of the captains, just for form’s sake, but he already had another plan. Ever since the dampdrake sank, his fat webbed fingers had been busy weaving. Nets and skeins and snoods of mist were draped in all the trees around the ruined hall like laundry. “We’ll fence ’em in!” he burbled, passing out mist traps to his weary underlings. “We’ll string such strands around our lovely mire they won’t ever leave. If they won’t show themselves, the creeping cowards, so be it: we’ll sniff ’em out when they starve and start to moulder. . .”
Skarper and his companions had been holed up on the third storey of an old temple, waiting for the light. Half-heartedly they’d hoped the sun might show them some path that led back to drier places. But the sun barely rose in Natterdon; there was just a lightening in the greyness, and sometimes a glimpse of a pale disc behind the scudding vapours; a glitter of reflections on the puddles as Henwyn set out to scout for a way home.
As Henwyn left, the little dragon, which had been sleeping peacefully curled up on his haversack, woke and started whining. Princess Ned scratched its nose, and it lifted its head and closed its eyes, but it would not settle. “It is fond of Henwyn,” said the princess. “It misses him.”
“It misses the taste of him,” said Skarper. With all his clothes rotted away, he had made a slit in the middle of Stenoryon’s map and put his head through it. Wrapped in this parchment poncho he sat miserably in a corner, his bony knees drawn up and his arms wrapped round them.
“It is not a true dragon,” said Ned, tickling the creature’s red tummy. “The great fire-breathers of old all perished at Dor Koth, and I doubt we shall see their like again, comet or no comet. This little one is a dragonet. The Lych Lord and his captains used them for hunting in the olden times, like hawks. I wonder where this one came from? Has Henwyn given him a name?”
“He calls it, ‘Ow, you little nuisance!’ mostly. It keeps nipping his fingers, you see.”
“You did well last night,” Ned told him. “I was wrong to mistrust you, Skarper; you are brave and true. Thank you.”
Skarper felt the blood rush to his ears. “S’alright,” he mumbled.
Ned said, “The fight with the boglins would have ended badly for us if you had not thought to throw that ball of fire-stuff into the flames. That was quick thinking on your part.”
Skarper did his best to look as if it had been deliberate. He narrowed his eyes and tilted his chin like the sort of person who scared off bog monsters with magic fire most nights. “It was nothing,” he said.
“It was slowsilver,” said Ned, looking questioningly at him. “It was a ball of slowsilver so big that it would have made you a very wealthy goblin indeed if you had taken it to the markets of Clovelly or Coriander instead of staying here to help us.”
“Would it?” asked Skarper. “Bumcakes! I mean. . .”
“While it was burning, did you chance to see the secret way marked on the map?” the princess asked, and her gaze dropped to the parchment draped over his knobbly knees.
“Map?” he asked innocently.
“I presume that is Stenoryon’s Mappe of All Clovenstone that you have been using as a nightshirt?” she asked, and he could tell that she knew full well it was, and that she was laughing at him in some secret, inward way. “I saw your ears prick up when I mentioned it yesterday, and then when you went sneaking off with Henwyn. . .”
Skarper held up the parchment, and tried to look surprised at all the words and markings on it. “Oh! This old thing. . .”
“What did you see,” she asked, “when the light of the slowsilver fell upon it?”
Skarper couldn’t meet her eyes: so bright; so humorous; so wise; she seemed to be able to see what he was thinking. And what he was thinking, of course, was, The way into the Keep’s my secret! Mine! I found it, not them! He folded the map and said, “I didn’t see nothing. There was boglins tromplin’ all over me at the time, and I was more interested in rescuing you lot.”
“Most heroic,” said Princess Ned, and she smiled that private smile of hers, watching the dragonet scrabble about on her lap.
A little while after, they heard movements below. Ned reached for Henwyn’s knife, which he had left with her when he went out. But the newcomer was Henwyn himself, returning with bad news.
“There are boglins patrolling all along the borders of the mire,” he said. “They have strengthened their mist traps. There is no way out.”
“If only those nice cloud girls would come back,” said Ned. They all looked hopefully at the sky, but they knew that the cloud maidens would not see them beneath
the mist, and even if they did, they were probably too scared of Poldew to descend. The dragonet flew eagerly to Henwyn and fluttered round him, and he tried telling it, “Go find the cloud maidens, boy! Go fetch!”
“Nuisance is too little to understand you,” said Skarper.
“Nuisance?” asked Henwyn, looking surprised.
“Well, you keep calling it Nuisance so I thought that might as well be its name. It will save time.”
“Ow! Did you see that? He bit my ear!”
“What if we got it to fly up above the mist and breathe flame?” asked Skarper. “These cloud maidens might see it and guess we were in trouble.”
Ned shook her head. “Dragonets cannot breathe flame,” she said. “Anyway, cloud maidens are flighty creatures; they have probably forgotten all about you by now, and flown off to throw lightning bolts at mountain trolls up in the Bonehills.”
Nobody could think of anything else to suggest. The dragonet settled happily on Henwyn’s shoulder and did a wee down his cloak.
“Then are we to just wait here,” asked Henwyn, “until the boglins find us?”
Skarper clutched Stenoryon’s map close to himself. He could feel some dreadful words forming deep inside him. He could feel them scrambling up his throat. Now they were in his mouth. He didn’t want to let them out, but he could not stop them. They were most un-gobliny words, and they were brewed by that same un-gobliny feeling that he’d first noticed when he met Henwyn in the woods. He liked these people. He knew he could easily sneak away and leave them to the boglins while he went and explored the Great Keep and its treasures for himself, but he didn’t want to.
“I know a way out,” he said.
The others turned to look at him. Even Nuisance.
He unfolded the map. There was no sign now of the hidden words and dotted pathway that he had seen glow so brightly last night while the slowsilver blazed, but that didn’t matter; Stenoryon’s secret was branded on his memory. He drew a claw across the parchment. “It’s not far from here,” he said. “Into the stump of old Natterdon Tower and then down. Down to the lava lake. There the map will show us something called the Firefrost Stair, which leads up inside the Keep.”
“Inside the Keep?” Ned came and took the map from Skarper’s paws. “It is the map,” she said, frowning at the old brown words upon the parchment. “It is Stenoryon’s map. Thank you for sharing it with us, Skarper.” She made a little curtsey. Skarper blushed. “But dare we take this secret way?” Ned went on. “Wouldn’t going inside the Keep be rather like jumping out of the frying pan into . . . well, into a different frying pan?”
“I don’t see that we got any other choice,” said Skarper.
Henwyn said, “We must do it! Even if there was some other way to escape from the boglins, it would be cowardly to have Stenoryon’s map and not to use it!” He was gazing at the map, and there was a light in his eyes that reminded Skarper, just for a moment, of goblins he had known. “Inside the Keep!” he said. “Just think of it!”
Boglin bull-roarers were booming in the fog as the companions left their place of shelter and turned away from the borders of the mire, moving south in the direction of the Inner Wall. Twice they had to stop, crouched silent among reeds or mossy trees, while a patrol of grumpy boglins went splashing past only a few paces away. “Shhh,” said Henwyn, calming the dragonet, which had gone back inside the pouch on his belt. Luckily the swamp creatures didn’t have the same keen sense of smell as their cousins in the goblin towers; in fact, living in the damps of Natterdon had given most of them terrible colds, so that not only could they not sniff out their prey, their prey could hear them coming from a hundred yards off by their constant snufflings and snifflings and sneezes.
At last the Inner Wall emerged out of the coiling fog ahead, and the travellers cast along it till they reached the stump of Natterdon Tower, which still rose forty or fifty feet high, its shattered top lost in the greyness. Deep, dark pools had formed between the heaps of tumbled masonry at its foot, but the travellers waded across them, with Skarper riding on Henwyn’s shoulders, and came to a low doorway half blocked with stones.
“Lead on, Skarper,” said Princess Ned.
Skarper paused with one paw on the threshold. It was all very well saying, “We go into old Natterdon Tower,” but now, looking into that black opening, he was starting to think of all the horrible things that might live in there.
“Let me!” said Henwyn bravely, and pushed past him, squeezing in through the old doorway. “It stinks,” he said from inside, his voice all echoey. “And half the roof’s come down. But it’s empty. . .”
After a few moments had passed and nothing had eaten Henwyn, Skarper went in after him. The inside of the tower was not altogether dark. Cave-bat droppings had drizzled down the wall and gathered in heaps among the piles of fallen stones which covered the floor. Their soft blue glow made Skarper almost homesick.
“It’s all right, boy!” Henwyn was saying, trying to calm Nuisance, who clung to his shoulder, flapping nervously at the stench of the bats. Beyond him, in the far wall, Skarper could see a little pointed doorway. Its iron door was still in place and locked, but the fittings had been so eaten away with rust that Skarper and Henwyn were soon able to pull it clean off its hinges. Nuisance cooed, soothed by the hot air that came out of the dark behind the door. Stone stairs, shallowed with long use, descended into gloom.
“Is this it?” asked Henwyn.
Skarper nodded. “Must be the path the Natterdon goblins’ hatchling masters used to reach the lake. The map just called it, The Dark Way Down.”
Henwyn peered into the passage. “Well, it’s dark all right. And it definitely goes down. But is it a way? I can’t see how far it goes. It might be blocked by more of these stones. What if the roof has caved in?”
“We’ll need light,” said Skarper. “Bat poo will do. We just smear some on our noses and. . .”
“Eugh!” cried Henwyn, who had been thinking that the one good thing about setting off down that dark tunnel would be that he wouldn’t have to smell the stench of bat droppings any more.
Outside the tower a boglin bull-roarer blarted in the fog. Others answered it from all around, the deep notes echoing flatly off the Inner Wall. Henwyn ran to the entrance and looked out. There were shouts behind the mist, and running shadows.
“They have found us!” cried Ned, scrambling inside. “There are boglins everywhere. Henwyn, help me bar the way. . .”
Boglin darts were clattering and ticking against the stones around the door. Henwyn heaved at a huge fallen slab that lay slantwise on a pile of lesser rubble just inside. It shifted, slithered sideways, and set off a sudden avalanche. He jumped backwards out of the path of the tumbling rocks, and for a moment there was noise and dust and danger, the floor quaking, Skarper coughing, Ned shouting, “The whole tower is coming down!”
It wasn’t, but when the dust thinned enough for them to see again it revealed that the rockslide had sealed the entrance entirely. Faint boglin voices came through chinks between the rocks, saying, “They’re sealed in good and proper they are now,” and, “At-choo!” and, “Now what’ll Poldew eat for his breakfasts? Us, I reckons!”
Henwyn brushed dust from his hair in a thick cloud and said, “Does anyone happen to have a tinderbox about them? I seem to have lost mine somewhere. . .”
The princess shook her head.
“Because there is a way down from here,” Henwyn explained, “just as Skarper said, except it’s rather dark. . .”
“That does not matter,” said Princess Ned. “Dark or not, it is the only way left to us now.”
The way was dark indeed, but it did not go always down; the passage rose and fell, looped and wound, burrowing deep into the summit of Meneth Eskern. They soon reached the stone-lined chamber where the hatchling master of the Natterdon goblins had kept his egg wagon (its iron wheel-ri
ms still lay there, the wood long since rotted by the water which trickled through the chamber from the mires above). Beyond that, the way had been bored and hewn through the living rock. Water still dripped into it in places, and sometimes, too, the roots of trees reached down from the world above and caught at the companions’ hair like bony fingers.
They walked for a half a mile or so, lit only by the blue glow from the bat poo smeared on Skarper’s nose and on the hunks of wood and shards of stone the others carried. No bats lived in the tunnel. Nothing seemed to live there at all, although it was warm and mostly dry, and as they walked on the companions began to see that a faint silvery light was coming from ahead. It grew brighter and brighter until soon they were able to abandon their smelly bat-poo glow-sticks. A long stair took them winding down and down, the light gathering all the time, and they emerged at last upon a black beach beneath a vaulted roof, lit by the unearthly glow of the lava lake.
“So this is where the Lych Lord’s goblins were made!” said Ned, in awe. “But it is not really lava, is it? It is not hot enough or red enough. . .”
Henwyn ran a hand over the gleaming black walls of the cavern. The lake gave him a strange feeling, a little like that longing for adventure he had felt when he was younger, back in Adherak; a desperate yearning for something that he could not quite name. “It’s molten slowsilver,” he said. “Molten magic! This black stone is slowsilver too, but in another form. The whole Keep. . .” He looked up. “The tales are wrong. The sorcerers did not make the Keep; the Keep just grew here. . .”
Ned laughed. “Henwyn, that’s very poetic!”
Henwyn shook himself. “I’m sorry. It gives me a funny feeling, that’s all.”
Skarper had a funny feeling too as he went down to the shore, blinking into the fumes which hung above the lava, looking for a sign of the Firefrost Stair the map had told him of. He could not see anything that looked like stairs at all. There was only the lake, covered in a char-black crust which kept heaving and splitting, swelling into blisters which burst with lazy belching sounds to let white-hot slowsilver lava splurt up from the depths. Through the smoke and gases he could dimly make out other beaches where the dark ways down from other towers let out. On one of those strands his own egg had been thrown up, and been collected by old Breslaw. . .