Goblin Quest (7 page)

The cry of the Elvenhorn had been heard all over Clovenstone. In the mires north of the Inner Wall the clammy boglins of the marshes heard it and looked up, listening. In the woods near Westerly Gate the old giant Fraddon lifted his head, and the twiglings who had been chasing one another through his hair went stiff and still as bunches of mistletoe, waiting for the sound to fade.

All winter Fraddon had been lost in his memories. He had been thinking about his friend, Princess Ned, and how he had brought her to Clovenstone, and how sad and strange it was that she was no longer there. He had barely noticed the thick snows of winter as they fell and drifted and thawed around him. He had not noticed the snowdrops or the crocuses or the bluebells as they pushed their way up between his giant toes. But he noticed the sound of the Elvenhorn. It came into his memories and dragged him back to the real world for a moment.
Something is going to happen
, he thought.
Something new
. And then, as usual, he thought,
I must tell Ned about it
.

But of course he couldn't, because she had gone beneath the grass. And what was the point of any new thing happening if Ned was not there to see it?

 

The horn's cry sang among the crags and corries of Meneth Eskern. It echoed around the towers of the Inner Wall and set their old stones trembling. It woke Flegg, who had fallen asleep in Grumpling's chamber up at the top of Redcap Tower. He didn't know what it meant, that faint and far-off tooting noise, but he knew that he was very happy not to be trapped down the pooin holes any more, and very pleased with himself for the clever way he'd found to weasel his way back into Grumpling's good books.

Wondering if Grumpling and the others had managed to get the Elevenhorn back, and whether they had chopped up Skarper and Zeewa, he went scuttling down the stairs. He had not descended very far before he could hear the voices of the other Chilli Hats grumbling and complaining somewhere below him.

Grumpling's lumpish henchgoblins were all clustered together at a bend in the little passageway which led out on to the wall. Flegg squeezed past them, and peered around the corner of the wall. The door on to the wall was open, but no one was going out.

“What's happenin'?” asked Flegg, tugging at the tail of Grumpling's second in command, a large goblin named Widdas.

“Grumpling's had his head chopped off!” said Widdas.

“Ooooh,” groaned Grumpling, who was sitting in the middle of the knot of goblins with his back against the wall. A couple of the other Chilli Hats were fanning him with their red caps.

“That Muskish softling did it,” said Widdas. “We wants to get after her, but we can't, because look what she left in the doorway!”

Cautiously, Flegg peered around the bend in the passage again. There was something lying on the floor there, just inside the door. A scrap of parchment with some marks on it…

“Careful, Flegg!” said Widdas. “It's a dwarf boom! It could go off bang at any moment!”

“How long has it been there?” asked Flegg.

“Hours an' hours! So it must be goin to eskplode really soon! Be quiet! Even our voices might set it off!”

Flegg sighed. Sometimes his fellow goblins were so stupid it depressed him. He strolled along the passage and picked up the parchment.

“No!” and “Aaargh!” and “Get down!” squealed the other Chilli Hats, sticking their fingers in their ears and bracing themselves for the explosion.

Flegg crumpled up the parchment into a tiny ball. He tossed it from paw to paw, while the goblins winced and gasped. Then, to their total astonishment, he batted it high into the air with a flick of his tail and opened his mouth wide. The parchment ball dropped in, and Flegg swallowed it with a loud gulp. For a moment he looked thoughtful. Then he lifted his tail and let out a long, satisfying fart.

“There,” he said.

“Wow!” said the few goblins who hadn't run away when he started his juggling act.

Flegg patted his tummy. “Dwarves!” he scoffed. “They haven't made a boom yet that can get the better of a Chilli Hat's belly. Don't you lot know that?”

The Chilli Hats shuffled their feet and looked ashamed.

“Flegg,” said Grumpling, “you saved my life! At least, you would have done if my head hadn't already got chopped off.”

“Yes,” said Flegg, “I was just coming to that, O King. You see, you does still seem to have a head.”

Grumpling felt his face suspiciously: his ears, his fangs, his snout. “That's just my imaginingings,” he said sadly. “Remember when Beaker got his leg chopped off in that fight with the Sternbrow crowd? He could still feel it for years afterwards.”

The Chilli Hats all nodded wisely. “The mind can play strange tricks,” said Widdas.

But Flegg said, “Yes, but we couldn't actually
see
Beaker's leg, could we?”

“Course not! It had got chopped off.”

“So how come we can see your head?”

The goblins all looked puzzled. One called Gove started to explain that it was an after-image, like you got when you looked at a candle flame for too long and then looked away and you could still the candle flame for a bit, but that was too scientific for the Chilli Hats and they shushed him by kicking him and sitting on his head. Slowly, as if Flegg's words had broken a spell, understanding was starting to dawn.

“You mean, I'm NOT dead?” asked Grumpling.

“You is very much alive, O King of the Chilli Hats,” said Flegg.

Grumpling stood up. He tilted his head from side to side a few times, just to check that it really was attached. Then he started walloping the goblins who stood around him. “You idiots!” he roared. “Why din't any of you lot work that out what Flegg just said?”

“But we didn't…”

“You said…”

“Don't blame us, Grumpling!”

“We're goblins, not doctors!”

“Ow!”

“An how come none of you had the nerve to eat that dwarf boom like what little Flegg here just did?”

“But…”

“We…”

“Please stop hitting us!”

“Widdas?” said Grumpling.

“Yes, Grumpling?” The massive goblin stepped forward obediently at the sound of his name. Grumpling seized him, dragged him to the open door, and kicked him out through it. Widdas vanished over the battlements of the Inner Wall, leaving a long, dwindling scream behind him. A few moments later those goblins with the sharpest ears heard the faint splat as he hit the ground far below.

“Oh dear, it looks like I is needin a new second in command,” said Grumpling. His evil little eyes swept across the faces of his burly goblin warriors, and then looked down at Flegg.

“Flegg. He'll do. He's twice the goblin any of you rubbish lot is!”

Brilliant!
thought Flegg.
Go, Flegg! From the pooin holes to Grumpling's right paw in the space of one night!

“An the first fing he's goin ter do fer me,” said Grumpling, “is he's goin ter get my scratchbackler back what Skarper and that softling robbled.”

Which was not so brilliant, thought Flegg, cos it was probably going to end up in a fight and if it ended up in a fight he, Flegg, as Grumpling's second in command, would be expected to be right in the thick of it. But he didn't want to follow Widdas on a one-way flight to the land of splat, so he grinned and said, “I will, O mighty and magnificent Grumpling! You can rely on me!

Grumpling smiled a fangy smile. “Magnifificent,” he said. “That's me.”

 

Up on the high tops of the towers the echoes of the Elvenhorn lingered yet, as though the old stones held the sound, or the towers themselves were tuning forks, still vibrating faintly to the horn's high note. Human ears, or even goblin ones, could not detect it now, but the birds heard it, and so did the dragonets which nested in the charred rooftimbers of Sternbrow Tower.

Sternbrow had burned out in a goblin versus goblin battle two years before, shortly before the Keep fell. The Blackspike Boys had made an alliance with the Chilli Hats and the Sternbrow Crew and launched a wild raid on the eastern towers. During the fighting, some goblin had dropped a burning brand down Sternbrow's pooin holes, and the gas which had built up over the centuries in the thick layers of poo in the basement had ignited. A great belch of flame had rushed up through the heart of the tower and blown the roof off. The Sternbrow goblins referred to this dreadful event as the Apoocalypse, and they had never returned to their tower since.

So the dragonets roosted there undisturbed, up among the charred timbers and the blowing weeds. Little things in dragon form they were, like miniature versions of the evil fire breathers that haunted the Westlands' oldest legends. The dragonets did not breathe fire, and they were not evil, although one of them was called Nuisance. Henwyn had given it that name because it was fond of him, and often it would seek him out and show its affection by biting his earlobes, or his nose, or sharpening its claws on his head.

The other dragonets were shy of humans and goblins. They kept themselves to themselves, up in that blackened chimney of a tower, and it was easy to forget that they were there at all. But that morning the music of the Elvenhorn seemed to have roused them. They burst from their roosts and went whirring and whirling in ever-wider circles around the tower's heights, calling out to each other in their high voices, which sounded a bit like the calling of buzzards. Far out over the ruins their wild flights carried them, until the goblins at work in the cheesery and in the fields outside the Inner Wall looked up at them in wonder.

At long last Nuisance spied something moving on the long, straight road that ran from Southerly Gate to the Inner Wall. He left his brothers and sisters to their circling and dived, folding his wings and dropping like a golden dart, down through the sunlight and the new green leaves of the trees.

Henwyn, Skarper and Zeewa were making their weary way home. They had just crossed the troll bridge and were climbing the stairs on the Oeth's northern bank. Here the goblins had once fought a terrible battle against the twiglings and Fraddon the giant. It seemed strange to remember it now, thought Henwyn, as he climbed wearily up the mossy steps. Nowadays, with Clovenstone at peace, the twiglings had put away their withy spears and their wild wood-magic. They were content to no more than flick a few acorns down at travellers who passed beneath their trees.

Deep in thought, he didn't notice the little dragonet until it landed on his shoulder and bit him painfully on the ear.

“Ow!” he shouted. “Why, you little—”

Nuisance took wing again and whirled around Henwyn's head. Then he whirled around Zeewa's head, and finally around Skarper's. “Prriiiiip!” he chirruped. “Prrriiiiiip!” It was the dragonets' alarm call.

“It's as if he is trying to tell us something!” said Zeewa.

“I'll be telling him something in a minute!” grumbled Henwyn, rubbing at his punctured earlobe. “I mean – ow!”

“What does he want, do you think?” asked Skarper.

The dragonet was doing all sorts of acrobatics, and still making that frantic “Priiiip! Prriiiiip!” But what did it mean? Henwyn sighed, and shook his head in frustration.

In the stories of adventure which he had loved to listen to before he came to Clovenstone and found adventures of his own, the hero would often have a clever dog (or horse). “Woof, woof!” it would say (or “neigh”, if it were a horse). Then it would stamp its paws (or hooves), and toss its noble head. And the hero would say, “What's that Rover/Dobbin? Someone's in trouble? At the old silver mine?” And together they would go running (or riding) to the rescue.

But in real life it wasn't always that easy to tell what a dragonet meant when it started doing loop-the-loops in front of your nose and going, “Prriiiip!”

“Maybe there are some more eggs hatching?” suggested Skarper, because the eggs of dragonets were so thick-shelled that the hatchlings often couldn't break their way out without the help of someone on the outside with a hammer.

“Is that it, Nuisance?” asked Henwyn. “Do your hatchlings need our help? Can you lead us to where the eggs are?”

But that didn't seem to be it. Nuisance just bit him again, on the other ear this time, and took off through the trees like a golden arrow, straight up into the sky, where the rest of his little brood could be seen calling and circling.

Too weary to worry much about dragonets, the three travellers trudged on up the long road, and came at last to the gate in the Inner Wall. Skarper's batch-brother Bootle was on duty that morning, and before they passed inside Skarper asked him if there had been any trouble with Grumpling after the excitements of the previous night.

“Nuffin,” said Bootle. “He's just shut up inside the Redcap with all the other Chilli Hats.”

“Maybe he's forgotten about the Elvenhorn,” said Zeewa hopefully. “Maybe he's found something else to scratch his back with.”