Goblins (18 page)

The Keep narrowed as it rose, and a stairway spiralled through the heart of it, up and up again, winding about the warm branchings of the copper flues. Doorways opened off the stairs, some leading out on to lofty battlements where catapults and war machines stood beneath bubbles of lychglass like museum exhibits in dusty cabinets. Others led into rooms in whose shadows, dimly shining, Skarper saw chests of coins and precious stones, golden idols from far Zandegar, the skins of leopards, bears and hippogriffs. He saw curtained anterooms where harps and viols stood waiting for the ladies of the Lych Lord’s court to return and stir them into life with long, pale fingers.

Skarper’s goblin senses prickled; his paws itched with the desire to gather up these precious things and stuff them in his pockets. But the Dragonbone Men allowed no tarrying, and whenever Skarper slowed or tried to turn aside into one of the rooms they would come rustling round him, plucking at their clothes with dragon-claw hands, their dry voices rattling and buzzing in their wasps’ nest heads, urging him on and up.

Once Henwyn tried to stop too. “Princess Ned will be afraid for us,” he said.

“That does not matter,” whispered the Dragonbone Men.

“Where are you taking us?”

“The time has come,” rustled the Dragonbone Men. “The star is risen and the Stone Throne waits.”

Skarper didn’t much like the sound of that, but there was nothing he could do, only let the Dragonbone Men hustle him on up the stairs. Nuisance was still cowering under Henwyn’s cloak, and Henwyn wondered if it might be possible for the little dragonet to slip away and go winging back down to where Princess Ned waited, carrying a warning. Ned needed to know that dreadful things were loose inside the Keep . . . but he could not think how he could make Nuisance understand that, and before he could come up with an idea another staircase joined the one which he and Skarper were climbing, and up it came another group of Dragonbone Men, three this time, leading Princess Ned.

“I am so sorry,” she said, when she saw Henwyn and Skarper. Her hair had come down in a tumble of grey; she blinked at them between its strands. “They came out of the chimneys and there was nothing I could do. I am forever being captured these days. It isn’t like me at all. You must think me such a silly princess.”

Still they climbed, and still the Keep narrowed, and the doors they passed were mostly tight shut now, and made of bronze or iron, not of wood. Then, quite suddenly, there was the brightness of moonlight above, and they came up into a huge chamber; the very top of the Keep. The roof was one great misshapen dome of lychglass. Through it Skarper and Henwyn could see the weird towers and horns of the Keep’s top jutting towards the moon, the black stone of them all glittery with veins of slowsilver. Moonlight spilled in through the lychglass and lit the floor of the room, which was made of many different sorts of metal, arranged in curious, intricate patterns. There were patches of platinum, swirls of gold, broad fields of copper, green with verdigris. But the moon was not the only light they had to see all this by, for in the middle of the floor there was a round opening, fifty feet across. It was the mouth of a great copper flue, into which all the other flues that carried the warmth of the lava lake up through the Keep must feed. A faint silver light came out of it, and a haze of magic rippled the air above. A thin stone bridge arched out over it to meet a slender pinnacle which rose from its very centre, the top of a craggy stone claw which jutted through the flue’s side, further down.

Upon that pinnacle, at the top of a last flight of seven steps, there stood a stone chair. Black it was, and burnished; shining; its facets veined with slowsilver and other magic metals. Hard and high and dangerous it looked, and Princess Ned went to the bridge’s end and gazed up at it, and said in an awed and shuddery voice, “Oh! It is the Stone Throne!”

The Dragonbone Men rustled like dry leaves in a wind. “The magic has returned,” said one.

“The Lych Lord must take his seat again, and rule.”

“But don’t you understand?” shouted Henwyn. “He’s dead! He’s been dead for centuries, and the world is free of him! There is no one to sit on your horrible hard old throne. . .”

The Dragonbone Men swung their dry heads towards him. They fixed him with silverfish eyes. Folding at the waist, they bowed low before the bewildered young cheesewright and their voices buzzed like seven swarms of bees trapped in seven paper bags.

“The star has risen. . .”

“A new Lych Lord has come to wield its power.”

“Lord of Clovenstone,” they whispered.

“Lord of Ash and Shadows.”

“Come. Sit upon your Stone Throne.”

“Me?” Henwyn touched his own chest. He looked for help to Ned and Skarper. “I’m just a cheesewright!” he protested. “I’m not a sorcerer! Just because I found this silly amulet? It isn’t even mine! Perhaps it’s Fentongoose you’re waiting for. . .”

“Come.”

Henwyn took a step towards the bridge and drew back nervously, appalled by the great drop beneath it. “And again, no handrail,” he complained. “I mean, is it just me? I like to think I’m pretty steady on my feet, but when I’m crossing stairs and bridges above gulfs of magic lava I like something to hold on to. . .”

“Come,” whispered the Dragonbone Men.

And suddenly Henwyn found that he wasn’t afraid of the drop after all – or, if he was, that his need to reach that black throne was greater than his fear. He crossed the bridge and climbed the steps, and as he climbed he saw that there was something lying on the throne, and as he reached the top he realized that it was a man.

How had none of them noticed him there before? Perhaps it was because the throne was so big and the man was so small; because the throne was so richly carved and the man so plainly dressed in shabby old black robes; because the throne was magnificent, and the man was a shrivelled-up little wizened, wrinkled thing more like an old gnarled heather root than a human being. But he was alive, and watching his visitor with pale yellow eyes.

“So you’ve come at last,” he whispered. “You took your time!”

From beneath the cobweb hair at the old man’s temples black wings jutted, attached to a circlet of silver that ringed his brow.

“You are Him! You are the Lych Lord!” said Henwyn, in astonishment.

“I was,” the old man said.

“But all the songs and stories say you’re dead!”

“Of course I’m not! I’d hardly be sat here talking to you if I were, would I?” snapped the old man. He frowned – one more wrinkle in a face made of wrinkles – and just for a moment Henwyn caught a glimpse of the proud and frightening person he had been. Then his voice faded to a whisper again. “Songs are mistaken sometime, and you can never trust storytellers. They got it wrong, as usual. That last day, when the magic was fading and my people had fled and King Kennack’s armies were battering down my gates, I gathered what little power remained and cast one last spell. I sealed the Keep. I slowed time to a trickle. And here I have waited ever since. Keeping the Stone Throne warm for you, as it were.”

“For me?” said Henwyn. “That’s what they said, those leathery chaps, but. . .”

“You have my token about you, I suppose?” the Lych Lord said.

Henwyn fumbled the ivory carving out on the end of its string. He pulled the loop of string over his head and held the amulet out. “This old thing?”

The old man nodded. “He who carries my token home to Clovenstone, shall take my place upon the Stone Throne. That’s the way it works, you see.”

“But I didn’t bring it here!”

“Yet there it is, around your neck.”

“It was Fentongoose who has guarded it! Fentongoose who brought it here! Fentongoose, master of the Sable Conclave!
He
should be the new Lych Lord if anyone should! Although. . .”

“Ah!” said the old man. “But does the blood of the Lych Lord run in this Fentongoose’s veins?”

“I, er. . .” said Henwyn. “Well, it certainly doesn’t run in mine!”

“Are you certain of that, Henwyn of Adherak?” The old man heaved himself upright like a stook of dry sticks. “When I guessed that all was lost, I sent my household away. I sent Stenoryon to Coriander, to keep the knowledge of me alive till the magic grew strong again. But my daughter? My own small daughter, who was heir to all my empires, yet too little then to even know it? I could not entrust her to a lot of silly would-be wizards. I sent her where she would be safest, into the household of King Kennack himself, where, I believe, she became a dairy maid. You are of the royal line of Clovenstone, Henwyn of Adherak.”

“I’m not!” said Henwyn. “I don’t feel royal or evil or any of the things a Lych Lord ought to feel. . .”

“Have you not felt Clovenstone calling to you, all your life?” asked the old man. “Did not the Sable Conclave seek you out – led to you by the power in the amulet, although they knew it not. Did your cheese not come to life?”

“
I
did that?” said Henwyn, amazed.

“Well, sort of. I did it. I saw you through the eyes of the amulet, and I set in motion the events that would lead you here. If I could have only controlled it a little longer the cheese demon would have snatched you up and run here with you; you would have arrived weeks ago. But the magic is weak nowadays. It is hard for even I to work a spell on anything beyond the borders of Clovenstone. Only the presence of the amulet allowed me to influence the cheese at all, and when that fool of a Fentongoose panicked and ran away I lost the link; the spell was broken.”

“The cheese creature exploded. . .” remembered Henwyn.

“What sort of an evil sorcerer is it who panics at the sight of a cheese demon?” scoffed the old man. “Sable Conclave indeed. Standards have slipped. But you’ll put that to rights once you sit upon the Stone Throne.” He reached out one thin, trembling claw of a hand and took the amulet from Henwyn. He set it on the arm of the throne, and it quivered a moment like a blob of mercury, then sank into the stone.

“From the throne it was made, and to the throne it returns,” said the Lych Lord. “The throne is the source of it all, you see.” Raw magic from the deep places of the earth is stirred into life by the coming of the star. When the star draws close, the power waxes; when the star soars away it wanes. The star is coming close again now; the power is gathering. It flows up through the Keep, through the throne, out into the world.

“But it needs a
mind
. It needs a person sitting on the throne to give it shape and meaning and direction. Without that it would just flail about, creating random giants and useless woodlings and the like for want of any better way to express itself. Someone must control it or there would be chaos.”

He patted one arm of the throne. “Take your seat, Henwyn of Clovenstone. You’ll understand.”

He slid himself forward, reaching down his withered legs, his bony toes. He gave a sharp sigh as he raised himself from his stony seat. Regret? Or relief? It was hard to tell. He stood in front of the throne, and reached up to pluck the winged crown from his head. “Here,” he said, holding it out towards Henwyn. “Take it!”

“But I don’t want it,” said Henwyn, and then realized that perhaps he did. All his life he’d known that he was special; that he had a destiny. Perhaps he’d just been wrong about its nature. Perhaps that was why he’d been no use as a hero – because he’d been a villain all along! “Me?” he wondered. “The new Lych Lord? The king of all the world?”

“Take it,” said the Lych Lord, in a voice as faint as a breeze in a tomb, and he tottered and fell forward. Henwyn reached out to catch him, but it was like catching a toppling pile of sand; the dry grains and cinders that had been the old man poured between his fingers, spilling in a grey drift down the steps, settling as dust upon the dust of Clovenstone. All that remained was the winged crown, solid and cool in Henwyn’s hands.

“Henwyn!” called Princess Ned, from the far side of the bridge.

He looked back; saw her and Skarper watching him.

“Throw it away!” called Ned. “Please, Henwyn! There is dreadful magic here!”

“No, it’s all right!” said Henwyn. He wished he could explain to her that this was what he had been waiting for, all through his dull and cheesy life. He sat down upon the Lych Lord’s throne.

He felt it change. He felt it shift and stir, shaping itself to him. He set the winged crown upon his head.

There was a huge groaning sound, a cracking and a shattering, and across the lychglass dome above there reached a spider’s web of thread-thin cracks. Skarper and Princess Ned clapped their hands over their ears and cowered at the enormous noise, but Henwyn only laughed, because he knew it was not just that dome which was breaking but all the lychglass upon all the doors and windows of the Keep, as if Clovenstone was shaking off a thick frost that had settled on it while it slept.

From every window, every balcony, every battlement and arrow-slit of the Keep the plugs of lychglass cracked and fell. A great fissure opened in the lens which covered the main gate. The noise it made startled King Knobbler, who had been about to bring down Mr Chop-U-Up on Fentongoose’s scrawny neck. He stumbled backwards, gaping, and behind him his horde of goblins cowered, throwing up their shields to shelter from the shower of shards. But no jagged blades of lychglass came plummeting to spear them: it had splintered into such tiny crumbs that most of it just blew away on the breeze, surrounding the Keep with a glittering mist. The few pieces that did hit the ground came down as a gentle snowfall of crystals, shining in the moonlight and the light of the goblins’ torches, settling on their heads and shoulders like mystic dandruff.