There was a soft tearing noise, a louder whoof, and he landed heavily on something that yielded beneath his weight like a blanket bog. I’m dead! he thought, and then realized that, if he was thinking it, he couldn’t be. He opened his eyes, which he had shut tight as he landed, not wanting to watch bits of himself being strewn about the landscape.
He was lying in thick, cottony white fluff at the bottom of a deep, Skarper-shaped shaft. The walls of the shaft were all made of the same pale fluff, and at the top of it there was blue sky in the shape of his own spread-eagled silhouette. He realized that he had plunged into the top of a low-flying cloud, and sunk about halfway through it.
At about the same moment that he worked this out, a face appeared at the top of the shaft, looking down. It was a cloud-white face with a lot of smoky hair, and when it saw Skarper it frowned and flushed an angry bruise-grey. “What do you think you’re doing on our cloud?” it demanded.
Skarper groped through all the memories of all the books he’d read, searching for a witty or a courteous answer.
More heads were appearing at the top of the hole he’d made. “What is it, sister?” asked one of them.
“Is it a prince?” asked another, hopefully.
“Of course not! It’s much too small.”
“Perhaps it’s a very small prince?”
“Anyway, what would a prince be doing up here?”
“It’s just a horrid goblin!”
“Seize him!” said the first cloud maiden. She darkened like a thunderhead and little zigzag sparks of lightning started to dance in her cloudy hair.
“If you don’t mind,” called Skarper hopefully, “that would suit me very well. Just set me down anywhere and I’ll trouble you no more.”
The cloud maidens peered down at him suspiciously.
“He’s very polite, for a goblin,” said the one who’d hoped he was a prince.
But the rest blushed black, spitting and sparking with lightning. “Take him to the ground? The very idea! We must cast this creature back into the sky, sisters, before his weight drags us to the earth!”
“Seize him!” shouted the cloud maidens.
But Skarper wasn’t waiting to be seized. He had spent enough time escaping from other goblins to know when to make himself scarce. He started to writhe and wriggle against the cloud that pressed around him, and found that it had the texture of light, dry snow. He could kick holes in it, and dig out handfuls. Turning over on to his hands and knees, he started digging like a dog, shovelling up great handfuls of the dense vapour and flinging it over his shoulder, where it drifted uncertainly up the shaft. By the shrieks and hisses coming from above he could tell the cloud maidens didn’t much like him doing further damage to their home and, when he glanced up, he saw that several of them had started to climb towards him down the shaft he’d made, kicking footholds in its vapoury walls like climbers coming down a snow-face. Their faces glared angrily at him with eyes as hard and bright as hailstones; in their smoky hands were blades of ice.
Skarper whimpered and dug faster. He’d rather be smashed on the flagstones after all, he thought, than sliced to bits by angry cloud maidens. He dug and dug, clawing up big handfuls of cloud and throwing it frantically over his shoulder, fighting his way down into the deepening hole. The further he went, the darker grew the cloud, and soon the handfuls that he was scooping up became wetter and heavier, packed with hailstones or sodden with unfallen rain, like cold grey sponges. At last, through a growing crack in the bottom of the cloud, he glimpsed daylight.
A cloudy hand reached down and grabbed him by the tuft on the tip of his tail. Considering that it was made of cloud, the hand was surprisingly strong, but it was not as strong as gravity, which seized Skarper from below at exactly the same moment, because the thin cloud floor had given way beneath him. He dangled there a moment, screaming, “Let me go! Let me go!”, suspended by his tail while the cloud maiden’s wrist stretched out longer and longer, thinner and thinner. Finally it tore, and Skarper was tumbling again, only to land with a soft squelch in thick mud about six feet below.
Freed of his weight, the cloud bobbed upwards, caught by the breeze that curled around the base of Blackspike Tower. Bits of it had unravelled like fraying banners, and Skarper could see the cloud maidens scrambling about all over it like sailors on a ship, trying to plait it back together. He wondered why he had never noticed such interesting clouds before. Presumably they were rare, and their crews stayed out of sight of groundlings. It was a pity they’d been so unfriendly, he thought, flicking wisps of the cloud maiden’s fingers from his tail like clinging smoke. He would have liked to ask them about their life in the sky.
He stood up shakily and looked around. He was standing in a bleak little bog about a mile from the base of the Inner Wall, formed where a leat of fresh water overflowed from its channel and spread across a weed-grown area which had once been a square between two massive ruined buildings. On either side of this marsh were stretches of ancient paving, the huge flagstones cracked and tilted by misshapen trees which had grown up from beneath them.
I’m outside the Blackspike! he realized suddenly. Beyond the Inner Wall! Never having set foot outside his home tower before, he felt frightened by the huge space around him, so much wider and brighter than the halls and passageways that he was used to. All his life he had been trying to find peace and quiet and places away from other goblins, and now that he had finally reached one he found he missed the sounds of their constant squabbling and bickering, their snores and farts and burps. For a moment he felt tempted to run straight back to the Inner Wall, climb inside Blackspike Tower again, say he was sorry and beg King Knobbler to forgive him. But goblins were not good at forgiveness. He would have to find somewhere else to make his lair, he decided. He looked south, at all the old bastions and towerlets which rose among the trees between the Blackspike and the Outer Wall. Surely one of those could hide him? He’d hole up there and think what to do. Maybe there’d be treasure to find; just a few small trinkets, left behind in those old buildings. He’d sort out a nice new hoard for himself. There might even be goblins down there; some little outcast tribe that wouldn’t mind an extra member. . .
So he turned his back on his home, squelched his way out of the bog, and set off southward down a broad, paved road, stopping now and then to munch a handful of the dead thistles which stood man-high between the flagstones.
At first the margin of the road was marked by mounds of tumbled masonry, with the chimneys of fallen-down buildings sticking up like bony fingers, and meres between them where water had flooded the old cellars. But as it sloped downhill, away from Blackspike Tower, the trees came to meet it: Skarper could see them crowding in ahead until they appeared to close over the road like a twiggy tunnel. He began to feel uneasy. He didn’t know much about trees and growing things. The saplings which sprouted from the crevices of Blackspike made good eating, but these great trees were so big and old, and their creaks and rustlings had the sound of secret whispers. Skarper couldn’t help noticing the ease with which their roots had managed to split and crumble huge slabs of stone.
He walked slower and slower, and he was about to turn back when there was a crackle, a flash, and a clump of alders that had been minding its own business nearby burst suddenly into flames. Skarper yowled and looked round again, then up. The cloud which had broken his fall had recovered itself, and it was hovering over him, black as wet slate, with lashes of lightning flicking from its belly. It looked like a fierce, shaggy monster with electric legs.
Skarper set off at a loping run while lightning bolts lanced down all around him, sizzling when they hit the meres and starting small fires when they touched the dry bits in between. Above the steady boom of thunder and the fizz and prickle of the lightning he caught another sound: the high, scornful laughter of angry cloud maidens.
Zigzagging between forks of their white fire, jumping a li
ne of fallen pillars which had collapsed across the old road, he sprinted towards the edge of the woods. The trees looked more welcoming than forbidding now. Big and bare and wintry, they clustered close together, branches bearded with lichen, forming a cage of green shadows. Once he was under there, surely the cloud maidens would not be able to see him. . .
Krazzzzzap! A lightning bolt crisped past his ear, making his hair stand on end.
Pfritzzzz! Another touched down in a puddle just ahead of him and turned it to scalding steam.
Krakkk! A wobbling globe of witch-fire drifted by and blasted a nearby boulder into bits.
Skarper zigzagged his way between the explosions and threw himself into the shelter of the woods. There he lay, bruised and panting, on a bed of thick, wet moss under a fallen tree, while his heartbeat thundered in his ears like all the war drums of all the goblin holds of Clovenstone.
The cloud maidens steered their thunder-grumbling cloud around above him, trying to peer down through the dense branches. “Oh, goblin!” they called. “Come out, little goblin!” They sent a few more lightning bolts down just for fun, and then let the wind take their cloud and blow it away towards the east, to join a herd of others above the Bonehill Mountains.
Skarper waited until the last faint sounds of their voices had faded, then slithered out of his hiding place, checked the corners of the sky for lurking clouds, and set off again through the trees, looking for his new home.
After that, several whole hours went by without anybody trying to kill him. No tree monsters or angry dryads appeared to drive him from the wood, and he saw that goblins had sometimes been this way on raids, because he recognized their crude graffiti on the ruined buildings which stood on either side of the roadway. That made him feel a little more at home, and he decided that things were looking up (although he kept looking up, too, checking those tiny flakes of sky which showed between the bare branches, just in case that cloud was still around).
Skarper cast his mind back again to Stenoryon’s Mappe of All Clovenstone (how he wished he could have brought it with him!). The vast Outer Wall which ringed Clovenstone was roughly circular, with four gates in it: north, south, east and west. This road that he was walking down must be the way from the Keep to Southerly Gate. In the days of the Lych Lord whole armies had marched down it, off to carry terror and war to the lands of men. The buildings on either side would have been their barracks and armouries, their kitchens and saddleries and the stables for their steeds. Now there were only ruins, subsiding into the undergrowth like sinking galleons. Everything was furred thick with dense green moss and filled with dim green light and the song of unseen birds and the chuckle of running water. Streams which had once run obediently along neat channels of dressed stone had now escaped to find their own ways through the wood, sometimes flowing knee-deep across depressions in the old roadway.
Leaving the road, Skarper pushed his way through the undergrowth to start exploring the old buildings. He soon decided that he did not much like them. Even before they rotted into ruin they must have been mean, cramped, low-ceilinged places. Now they were floored with heaps of slates or mouldered thatch that had slumped down through their roofs as the rafters rotted. Goblins from Blackspike and the other towers had long since taken any treasure they had held, but in many of the rooms lay bones, and in high corners the black bees of Clovenstone had built huge paper nests from which low and dangerous buzzings emerged whenever Skarper blundered too close. He was pretty sure that worse things than bees had made their homes among the ruins, too. His ears kept prickling: a sure sign that he was being watched. Scuttling sounds and half-glimpsed movements filled the shadows. The trees creaked and whispered, peering down at him through the holes where roofs had been.
Warily, he found his way back to the old road. He could do better for himself, he decided, if he kept going south; Stenoryon’s map had shown great bastions just inside Southerly Gate, and now that he cast his mind back, Skarper thought that he might have glimpsed them for himself, while he was falling. So he kept walking, picking handfuls of dead thistles to munch and enjoying their peppery flavour, until the road turned into shallow stairs, descending into a valley where the trees grew even more thickly, winding their leafless, moss-shaggy branches together in great green nets which overhung a river full of big stones.
Skarper guessed at once that this must be the River Oeth, which flowed down out of the Oeth Moors and curved through the outer regions of Clovenstone before flowing on to meet the sea. It was swift and white and startlingly loud, but he was glad to see it, because he knew that once he was on the far side of it he would be only a short way from Southerly Gate. The old buildings crowded empty-eyed along either bank of the river, their walls so thick with moss that they seemed to be made of green fur. The road spanned it on a bridge; not one of the primitive clapper bridges which goblins made to cross the streams behind the Inner Wall, but a proper, man-built bridge, with piers and buttresses and things. It must have been elegant back in better days but was now looking overgrown and crumbledown and rather sorry for itself.
It was just the sort of place where trolls might lurk, according to the books that Skarper had read. He had never seen a troll and wasn’t completely sure that they existed, but after his meeting with the cloud maidens he wasn’t going to take any chances, so before he crossed the bridge he went carefully down the riverbank and peered beneath it.
Nothing stirred in the green shadows, but the place still made him uneasy. The ferns and mosses grew so thick beneath the bridge that he could not see all the way through. He climbed back to the road and was about to go down and take a look from the other side when a voice from the far side of the river called: “Aha!”
Skarper looked up. There, striding towards him across the bridge, was a softling; a human; a real, live, actual human being: quite a young one by the look of him, with a dark cloak, travel-stained boots and breeches and a leather tunic with iron studs. Skarper stared at him. He had heard of softlings venturing into Clovenstone – outlaws and fortune hunters, drawn by stories of the Lych Lord’s treasure chambers – and he had seen the skulls of some of them, decorating King Knobbler’s kinging chair. But it had not occurred to him that he might actually meet one, and he could only stand and watch as the softling swung a long sword down from his shoulder. Hanging from its notched and obviously not very sharp blade were various bags and satchels and blanket bundles, which the softling hastily unhooked and shed on the flagstones of the bridge as he hurried across it towards Skarper.
Skarper ducked, and felt the blade slice through the air where his head had just been.
“Stand and fight, foul troll!” the softling shouted.
“I’m not a troll!” Skarper said indignantly, scuttling sideways.
The softling swung at him again. “I saw you with my own eyes!” he cried. “You were creeping out from under this bridge to waylay me!”
“I’m not waylaying anybody!” shouted Skarper.
“You lie!” said the softling, panting with the effort of swinging that big sword to and fro as Skarper ducked beneath it. “Stand still, can’t you? Make your peace with your fell trollish gods and prepare to die!”
“Trolls are taller!” shouted Skarper. “Much taller! I’ve seen woodcuts. . .”
Dodging past the swordsman, he turned and started to flee over the bridge, but as he set his foot on it there came a wet, echoey roar from below, and out from among the moss and the ferns beneath the arch there oozed a great grey-green shape. Thick-fingered hands seized the parapet as the figure heaved itself up to block the bridge; dull dark eyes gleamed hungrily behind a fall of pondweed hair; a gout of vapour and a musty smell enveloped Skarper as its broad mouth opened to let out another roar.
He pointed at it, and turned to look back at his attacker. “Now that’s a troll,” he said.
Skarper had expected the troll to reach straight past him for the softling, who
was so obviously larger and more tender and better to eat. Instead, to his surprise, it closed one of its big hands about his leg and lifted him upside down in front of its face, blinking at him with those black, wet-pebble eyes. Trolls, he realized, as it opened its spike-toothed maw to gulp him down, are really stupid. . .
The softling must have been stupider still. He came charging in under the dangling Skarper and swung his blunt and rusty blade straight at the troll’s chest. Had no one told him that troll hide was as tough as stone? The sword rebounded; it clattered to the flagstones as the softling yelled in pain and stuck his jarred hands in his armpits. The troll knocked off his hat and lifted him by his curly golden hair. As it did so, Skarper managed to lash out with one foot and catch it in the eye with his heel. The troll grunted and stepped backwards. Overbalanced by the weight of its struggling prey, it stumbled against the bridge’s parapet, and the rough old ivied stones gave way. Down they went, man, troll and goblin, into the cold dark swirl of water under the bridge.
The troll let go of Skarper, but that didn’t help much; water is no place for goblins. He sank, choking and flailing, until a firm hand grabbed him and heaved him up into the air and then ashore. The softling let him go and turned back to the river, drawing a knife from his belt as the water heaved in the bridge’s shadow and the troll burst up roaring, looking for its prey.
“Over here, spawn of evil!” shouted the softling, waving his little dagger.
“Hush! Shhh! Psst! Don’t attract its attention! Running’s our only hope!” hissed Skarper, grabbing the flapping end of the softling’s sodden cloak and trying desperately to pull him backwards.