From the beach where the companions stood, a long black promontory reached out almost to the centre of the lake. Skarper picked his way along it while the others hung back and watched him.
“Is that the way?” called Henwyn. “Can you see the Firefrost Stair?”
“Oh, not more stairs!” said Princess Ned. “My knees aren’t as young as they once were.”
“I see no stair,” said Henwyn. “What did the map say, Skarper?”
“It just said, ‘Here the map will show you the Firefrost Stair,’” Skarper replied irritably. He was irritable because he had come all that way on the promise of a Firefrost Stair and there was simply no stair there; only the black shores, the glowing lake, the fumes, and, high above, a cluster of big, round openings in the domed roof of the cavern, as if he was standing inside an enormous pepper pot and looking up at the holes which let the pepper out. He could feel the others all watching him. He had a feeling that he had let them down, and this made him angry and inclined to snap.
“Perhaps if you had another look at it?” urged Henwyn.
“All right!” snapped Skarper. “I know! What do you think I’m doing?” He pulled the map off over his head and held it out in front of him, hoping desperately that he’d see something there which would jog his fading memories of the slowsilver writing. He could see the very place where Stenoryon’s spidery words had shone: he could see them in his mind: “Here the map will show you. . .”
“Have you got it the right way up?” asked Henwyn helpfully.
“Of course I have!” shouted Skarper, rounding on him and flapping the map angrily. Which turned out to be a big mistake, because he lost his grip on it and the hot updraughts from the lava lake plucked it out of his paws.
“Bumcakes!” he shouted.
It seemed impossible that such a large and weighty sheet of parchment should just take to the air, but it did. It fluttered up and over Skarper’s head like a gigantic, playful moth. He jumped up and snatched at it, but missed. He threw himself after it, but too late. It settled gently on the lava just off the end of the promontory, an inch from his outstretched paws. A white flame sprang up in its very centre. Around the flame the parchment blackened, crisped and curled, folding in on itself in crinkling charred scales and scollops. Then, with a woof, the flame engulfed it and it was gone, with only a drifting ghost of silver smoke to show that it had ever been.
“My map!” shouted Skarper, stretched out on his tummy on the hot black stone with the heat of the lava singeing all his nose hairs off. He scrambled up and turned to Henwyn. “See what you made me do, you great lumbering cheese-herder!”
Henwyn didn’t seem interested in what he had to say. Nor did Ned. They were both staring straight past him, and Henwyn was pointing. “Look!” he said, and then changed his mind and said, “I mean, Behold!” for what was happening behind Skarper’s back was definitely the sort of thing you needed to behold rather than just look at.
The patch of lava where the map had lain grew calm. Up out of it there arose a curl of something that looked like white smoke and then hardened into – no, how could it be ice? Up and up it rose, spiralling, reaching towards the high roof like the tendril of some climbing plant. It twined around a stalactite to steady itself, and its tip kept questing upwards, circling like the head of a caterpillar, high over the lake, until it found one of those circular holes and slipped inside it. Then, all down its shining length, like leaves, it sprouted steps.
“The Firefrost Stair!” cried Henwyn.
“Yes,” said Skarper, trying to look as if he had been expecting this all along. “I was wondering when it would do that.”
“Is it real?” asked Princess Ned. “Will it take our weight?”
Henwyn lobbed a stone at it. It rebounded from the stairs with a pretty chiming noise, leaving no mark. He reached out, took hold of the crystal stem, and stepped off the promontory to stand upon the lowest stair. It was firm and solid, the crystal cool to the touch.
“Stenoryon wove powerful magics into that map,” said Ned.
“I wish he had thought to give his stairs a handrail while he was at it,” said Henwyn. He did not want the others to see that he was nervous, though, so he started to climb. It was just as he’d feared; creeping up from one diamond stair to the next with nothing to hold on to but the stalk from which they’d sprouted was unnervingly like walking on nothing at all.
Skarper, climbing behind him, felt no fear at all. It was different for goblins. He’d been scrambling about on Blackspike’s roof since he was new-hatched, and besides, he could always use his tail to save himself if he fell. All he was thinking as he climbed was, I wonder if this stuff is valuable?
On the beach under Blackspike Tower two things that looked like wet rocks moved slightly, unseen by the companions toiling up the stair. Breslaw the hatchling master had wrapped himself in his old leather apron, and beside him crouched King Knobbler, hidden under a thick black cloak. Only their eyes showed, glowing watchfully in the light from the lava lake, with the frail-looking stair and the climbers reflected in their pupils.
“So that’s how you gets inside!” muttered Knobbler, and under his cloak he rubbed his paws together hungrily. “You wait here, Breslaw. I’ll fetch the lads and we’ll scamper round and get up there before those softling filth can nick all the treasure.”
“Wait!” said Breslaw. “Look!”
What was this? Unseen by the climbers on the crystal stairs, more figures were emerging from the black passage which led up into Natterdon Tower. Breslaw growled in alarm, and the apron that covered him fell aside as he straightened, pricking his ear up and staring through the lake’s smoke. Across the lava he heard ugly voices: “There they goes!”
“They’re on that shiny thingy!”
“Get ’em, boys!”
Poldew of the Mire had not been pleased when his boglins came home to his fallen-down hall to report that the softlings had escaped. He’d been so displeased that he had led them back to Natterdon Tower himself, and stood watching while they scrabbled a pathway through the fall of stones which blocked its door. Now, heaving his great grey-green bulk along the narrow passageway, he had followed his prey all the way down to the lava lake, with his boglins hopping and gibbering behind him. The heat dried out their slimy skin and the silvery light hurt their eyes, but Poldew kept pressing onwards, and none of the others dared defy him and turn back. Now they urged each other on as their king went waddling out along the promontory, squinting through the haze at the distant figures on the stair.
“What are they?” asked King Knobbler, squinting at the boglins from the far shore of the lake.
“Bog boys,” growled Breslaw. “Frog hoppers.” He’d always thought boglins were just a nasty rumour. Now it looked as if they were going to get inside the Keep while he just sat and watched, because he could see no way of crossing the lava lake and reaching the stair. He quivered with a furious envy.
Far above, Henwyn was nearing the stair’s top. “Don’t look down,” he kept telling himself, and he looked up instead, at the domed roof that was now so close, and the circular openings, which he could now see were huge, copper-lined flues, carrying the heat of the lava lake up inside the Keep. Even so, he could sense that dreadful drop below him as the stair rose up into the largest of those flues, curved round upon itself in a narrowing spiral, and ended at last against a circular metal door.
He needed all his courage to take his hands off the stairs and reach out to try the handle. What if it’s locked? he thought. We’ll have to go all the way down again!
But there had never been any need to lock that door, for the only way to it was by the Firefrost Stair. The handle was stiff, but it opened at last, and Henwyn shoved the door wide open and scrambled through it into a sort of antechamber, very glad to have solid stone beneath him again. Skarper followed, then Ned. None of them, not even Skarper, had dar
ed look down during the final few hundred feet of the climb; none of them had seen the pale little figures of Poldew and his boglin huntsmen below them, clustering at the end of the promontory, jumping across one by one on to the stairs.
They lay catching their breath for a while on the floor of the antechamber, watching the light from the lava below play on its high, stony ceiling. Strange noises came to their ears, like deep voices singing an unearthly song. “It is only the wind,” said Ned. “It is the air stirring in all those flues and chimneys.”
“Nothing could be alive in here,” said Henwyn. “It is centuries since the Keep was sealed. Nothing could have lasted all that time.”
The others all agreed, and hoped that he was right, but even he didn’t sound very sure about it. Skarper was recalling those strange lights he’d seen behind the Keep’s lychglass-scabbed windows on the night when he lay in the bratapult. The others were all thinking of legends they’d heard about the place: how the very stones of its walls were said to breathe out evil. Those old stories hadn’t seemed important when they were fleeing from the boglins or struggling up the Firefrost Stair, but now they were impossible to forget.
At last Princess Ned clambered to her feet and went to explore. The antechamber was perhaps twenty feet deep, and quite empty. At the end furthest from the door they’d entered by there was another door, a normal rectangular one, made not of metal but of some dark wood. This, too, was unlocked. She opened it cautiously, and stepped through it, and the others heard her voice echo in a much larger space.
“Oh!”
They followed her through, all except Skarper. He could not quite bear to leave behind the lovely diamond stairs he’d conjured. That firefrosty stuff, he thought, that must be valuable. That would make a good start for a hoard, that would. As his companions vanished through the door he scurried back to the entrance and leaned out. He gripped the topmost stair firmly between his paws and heaved, but of course he could not break it off – it must be strong, he thought, to have took the weight of those great lumbering humans. He tried the tip of the stalk instead, which was as slender as a twig. As he closed his paws around it and started to strain he felt it trembling, as if with the footfalls of people coming up. He looked down, but the hot fumes from the lava got into his eyes and he could see nothing. Sort of echoes from when we climbed up, maybe? he wondered.
Then he blinked away his tears and saw the boglins, about thirty feet below him, ungainly as frogs as they scrambled from stair to stair. And Poldew of the Mire looked up and saw him looking down, and reached behind him to take a blowpipe from one of his hunters. . .
At that same instant the tip of the firefrost stem broke off in Skarper’s paw with a lovely glassy chime. With tinking, chinking sounds a web of tiny cracks spread down the stem and rushed out to fill each stair, the clear crystal structure whitening as if with a sudden frost. Then, with a tuneful crash, it burst into tiny fragments, which hung in the hot air for a moment like a smoke, still in the shape of the twining stairs, before falling back into the lava, taking the surprised boglins with it. Glop, glop, glop, they went, dropping one by one into the hot lake, and then one last, particularly large GLOP, which was Poldew.
Skarper scrambled back into the antechamber and opened his paw to look at the treasure he had stolen, but that had shattered too, and when he breathed on it, it lifted from his palm and blew away like a little spreading cloud of ice crystals.
“Bumcakes!” he said, and went after the others, wondering what they were going “Ooh!” and “Oh!” and “Ah!” about on the other side of that big door, and hoping it was treasure.
Knobbler and Breslaw watched the straggles of smoke which had been boglins fade like disappointed sighs above the lava lake. “Well, that’s that then,” said Knobbler grumpily. “The bog boys can’t get up there now. But nor can we.”
“Maybe we can. . .” said Breslaw, thinking hard. “Maybe there is another way. . .”
“What?”
“You remember that softling yesterday; that beardy one? Said he could do magic? Maybe he wasn’t lying. Maybe he could get us into the Keep!”
They had climbed so far that it seemed they must be very high, halfway up the tall Keep already. But, of course, the lava lake lay deep beneath the Keep, and the antechamber they had climbed into was actually part of the Keep’s cellars. They stepped out of it into a huge space, its roof held up by black pillars. The broad copper flues, as wide as massive trees, emerged from the floor and rose up through the ceiling, carrying the heat and magic of the lava lake up into the rest of the Keep. The light which slanted down through high windows far above had a rusty colour, because the windows, like all the openings of the Lych Lord’s Keep, were webbed with lychglass.
It was what the light revealed that had made Henwyn and Princess Ned go “Oooh!” and “Ah!” This massive cellar was where the Lych Lord had kept his larger treasures. There were ships there: great warships and caravels; dragon-prowed longships won in battles against the pirates of the Nibbled Coast in olden times. There were coaches decorated in gold and silver and narwhal ivory; there were golden towers such as the Leopard Kings from the lands beyond the Musk Desert used when they rode to war upon the backs of elephants.
There was a carriage carved from one huge semi-precious stone, with gold ornaments on its roof in dragon-shape, and Henwyn’s dragonet escaped from his pouch and went whirring up to squeak at them.
There were chariots, and palanquins, and slender little sailing boats. There were kites big enough to carry a man, hanging from the roof on long wires. There was a sort of carriage that looked like a little room made of silver metal sitting on four small wheels, with a long prow poking out at the front, and a little statue of a lady with silver wings standing on the very tip of it. Skarper peered in through the windows at all the lovely red leather seats and a walnut shelf with little clocks set in it.
“I’ve read of this,” said Princess Ned, running her fingers through the dust on the curving mudguards. “It is the Rolls Royce Silver Shadow; a chariot which the Lych Lord fetched here by magic from another world.”
“Where do the horses go?” asked Henwyn.
“It needed none,” the princess said. “It was powered by sorcery. Here is your treasure trove, Henwyn. These things must be worth kings’ ransoms.”
“Even if we could slip these longships in our pockets,” said Henwyn, “there is no way out of here, is there?”
“Back down the Firefrost Stair into the mire,” said Ned. “I expect the boglins will forget us in a day or so.”
“Ah,” said Skarper.
They turned to look at him.
“About the Firefrost Stair,” he said. “It sort of cracked. Went all to pieces. Nothing to do with me. It just smashed. It was a once-only kind of thing. Cheap and nasty.”
“Accursed magic!” said Ned. “So we are trapped here in the Keep? I suppose at the top we might find a way out, and be able to signal to Fraddon; he should be coming down from the Bonehills later today.”
“Or perhaps Henwyn’s cloudy girlfriends will see us. . .” suggested Skarper.
“They’re not my girlfriends. . .” said Henwyn.
On the far side of the strange museum they found a staircase, and started up it. (“I never realized that adventures involved quite so many stairs!” said Ned.) The stairs led through a doorway, curled around inside the Keep’s thick walls, and emerged into a wide dining hall with long wooden tables down the centre, silent as a tomb, empty except for the dust, and the red light which strained in through the lychglass on the high, thin windows. Not as cold as a tomb, though, for the flues rose from floor to ceiling and sent out broad branches which vanished through the walls, so that it was like standing in a spinney of great copper oaks. The flues gave off a faint heat, filling the quiet room with the smell of warm metal. There were little doors and hatches set into their sides. Skarper opened one an
d peered in, and the light of the lava lake spilled out into the room, reflecting off the burnished inner curves of the flue. It reminded him suddenly of the lights he’d seen, or thought he’d seen, inside the Keep.
“Maybe somebody opens these sometimes,” he said nervously, “and the light shines out.”
“Who?” asked Henwyn. “There’s no one here. There aren’t even bones. Everyone must have fled before the place was sealed up. Look at the dust on the floor. The only footprints are ours. Not even a spider lives here.”
“Pity,” said Skarper, who was feeling peckish and could have done with a nice plump spider. “What are we going to eat in this place?”
It was a good question. None of them had eaten since the night before, and, although they were all too polite to mention it, the main sound in the Keep was the rumbling of their empty bellies.
“I have some flour in my pack,” said Henwyn. “And some water. . .”
“Wonderful,” grumbled Skarper. “We can make glue. . .”
“There must be kitchens here somewhere,” said Henwyn. “Larders. Perhaps there will be something there.”
“After all these years?” snorted Skarper. “If the Lych Lord left any loaves in his bread bin they will be stale as stones by now.”
“There might be something,” said Ned. “This is a strange place, and perhaps time does not pass here as it does outside. These chairs and tables have not rotted or grown wormy. . .” She settled herself gratefully in one of them and kicked her shoes off. “I’ll sit and wait, and let you young people search the rooms around and see if you can find the Lych Lord’s larder.”