Goblins (16 page)

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-rims 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. . .

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 dared 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.