Goblins on the Prowl (6 page)

The goblins of Nilbog have no bigger friend than Bonecracker John. This is literally true, because of his great size. It is even more true because of his great heart.

—Stanklo the Scribbler

CHAPTER EIGHT

FOLLOW THE BUTTPRINTS

Clutching his bear to his chest, Igor said, “Igor remem­ber time long back his friend Bonecracker John say, ‘Igor, one day that toad will be big trouble.'”

“Who's Bonecracker John?” I asked.

“A old giant Igor friends with.”

“He's the one who bwoke Sih Mohtimeh!” Bwoonhiwda cried.

Igor chuckled. “That John!”

Karl sighed. “Giants don't exist. They're made-up stories.”

Bwoonhiwda flipped up her spear so swiftly, I didn't see it happen. Pressing the point to Karl's chest, she said, “Ah you saying I'm wying, or just that I'm stupid?”

“Don't mind Karl,” Igor said. “He smart, just not smart as he think he is. Igor say, visit Bonecracker John. Igor say, get John to tell what he know. Igor say . . . uh, Igor say that good idea.” He paused, scowled, then shook his bear at us. “That all Igor got to say!”

“But what about William?” I cried.

“All right, here's a suggestion,” said Karl. “Fauna and Igor and anyone else who wants to can take some torches and try to track William. The trail should be fairly easy to follow, but if you lose it, change course and visit the giant. Meanwhile, I'll start my research here to see what I can learn about the toad.”

I hadn't expected Karl to say anything so sensible. Even so, I saw a problem. “What if you find something we need to know? How will you tell us?”

Before Karl could answer, I felt Solomon's Collar tingle. At the same time, Werdolphus appeared and said, “I can help with that.”

Karl—who couldn't see the ghost—staggered backward at the voice from nowhere.

He almost fell over Igor, who had his bear raised above his head, looking for something to bop.

Bwoonhiwda shrieked, causing several cannonballs to fall off the mantel.

Herky leaped into my arms and buried his face against my neck.

And Hulda . . . well, Hulda turned toward the voice, shook her partial finger in that direction, and shouted, “You have a lot of nerve showing up after all this time!”

“I've been here all along!” Werdolphus replied.

“Not so that anyone would know it, you haven't!”

“Well, we haven't had an emergency like this before.”

“Hulda, can you see it?” Karl asked.

“I am
not
an ‘it'!” Werdolphus sniffed. Then he put a hand to his brow and said, “I am a tragic spirit, doomed to haunt these halls.”

Then he moaned for good measure.

“He's not an it,” Hulda agreed. “And I don't have to see him to know who he is. His voice gives him away. He used to work here, until he got careless and died.”

“Cruel, Hulda. Cruel,” Werdolphus said.

I was tempted to ask Hulda how the ghost had met his doom, but figured if I did, he would disappear again. Since he had offered to help, I didn't want that to happen. So instead I asked, loudly, the other thing I was wondering about: “How can you hear him?”

Hulda blinked, as if she hadn't realized how odd
it was. Before she could answer, Werdolphus said, “It's one of my ghostly powers.”

“And how can you get information to us?” I asked. “I thought you couldn't leave the castle.”

“Almost true, but not completely.” The ghost drifted over to the cannonballs that lay in front of the fireplace. He pointed to one and said, “If you take along the small cannonball that's second from the right, I will be able to come to you at any time.”

“Why would a cannonball let you leave the castle?” Karl asked.

Spreading his arms and making his tragic face, Werdolphus said, “It was the instrument of my demise. I am bound to it as much as I am to the castle.”

Hulda snorted but said nothing.

Bwoonhiwda picked up the cannonball. It was black and about the size of a goose egg, though round, of course. She hoisted her right braid. The sphere at the bottom was about the same size.

“No pwobwem,” she said.

“You're coming with us?” I asked.

“Natuwaw . . . Of coah . . . Yes!”

“Why?”

“The queen sent me to see about the toad. Wheah it goes, I go!”

Her thick fingers moving more swiftly than I would have thought possible, she undid the bottom of the braid, took out the ball that was there, replaced it with the cannonball, and wove that into place. When she was done, her head tilted to the right, pulled down by the weight of the cannonball.

“Dwat!” she said. “Too heavy!”

She studied the remaining spheres, then picked up a highly polished one of about the same size. With more quick movements she used it to replace the ball in her left braid, then said, “Ah! Now I am bawanced!”

“What a woman,” murmured Igor, clutching his bear and looking moony-eyed.

“Good,” I said. “Let's get going!”

“I think I'll come too,” Werdolphus said. “I haven't been out of this place since I died.”

I glared at him. “I thought the whole idea was that you would bring us word if Karl found something.”

“You might need to
send
messages too. I can move back and forth between the castle and the cannonball.”

“How fast can you travel?” Karl asked.

Werdolphus made a face, which only I could see. “I'm not sure. I do know that I can zip around the castle much faster now than when I was alive.”

“You didn't do
anything
fast when you were alive,” Hulda said scornfully.

The ghost stuck out his tongue, which looked particularly odd, given his partly bashed-in head. Fortunately, Hulda couldn't see it, so it made no difference.

We still didn't get out the door immediately. First I had to fetch my coat. Then we had to gather torches. And Hulda insisted on packing provisions. When we finally did set out, we had an argument about who should lead. Bwoonhiwda said she should go first, but I convinced her that I had the most experience as a tracker.

“Aw wight,” she agreed at last. “But I pwan to be wight behind you. If twubble comes, get out of the way so I can cwobber it!”

Igor sighed and squeezed his bear.

The final order of travel was me, followed by Bwoon­hiwda, with Igor at the rear to handle any attack from behind. Herky couldn't manage to stay in line, of course. As for Werdolphus, he sort of floated along beside us. Since no one else could see him, I was the only one who knew where he was from moment to moment.

“I'm so happy to be out of the castle!” he whispered to me shortly after we set out. “After all those years, I was bored to death.”

I decided not to point out that he was dead already.

We tromped over the drawbridge, stepping around the boards the toad had broken while leaping across.

A heavy frost covered the ground. This made me worry about William all the more, since he had not been wearing outdoor clothes when the toad snatched him. I hoped it was warm inside the beast's mouth!

The trail itself was easy to spot. The toad landed hard at the end of each jump, which left a deep buttprint. And the push-off for its next leap left clear prints from its webbed feet. Following these, we were able to move quickly back to Bwoonhiwda's camp.

I had wondered about her traveling in this cold. It turned out she had a large wagon, like a little house on wheels. But something was missing.

“Did the toad frighten off your horses?” I asked.

Bwoonhiwda snorted. “I dwag my own wagon. Keeps me stwong!”

“Igor pull wagon for you,” Igor said eagerly.

“I need no man to dwag my wagon!” Bwoonhiwda bellowed.

Igor turned around and hugged his bear. I had never seen him look so sad.

It was at Bwoonhiwda's camp that we hit our first snag. Knowing that the creature had passed through
her camp, she had quickly directed us back there. And the regular marks of the toad's landings had confirmed we were on the right path. The problem now was that we had no idea which way the toad had hopped next.

What made this tricky was the size of its leaps. If we had been following a man, the footprints would have been close together. But the toad's buttprints were twenty or thirty feet apart. So for each new hop we had to scan an arc between twenty and thirty feet away to find where it had landed. Fortunately, a hop had to go in a straight line. Since the toad couldn't hop
through
a tree, the number of directions it might have gone was somewhat limited.

Even so, it was slow work.

Herky was best at finding the spots where the toad had landed. There were three reasons for this. First, he moved more quickly than the rest of us. Second, being so small, he was closer to the ground. Third, his huge goblin eyes were made to see in the dark, so he didn't need a torch the way we humans did. (I'm counting Igor as human, though no one is entirely sure about that.)

To my surprise, even Werdolphus turned out to be helpful. Two or three times he managed to spot the next buttprint by floating high enough that he could scan a wide stretch of ground.

“You see,” he sniffed, “there are times when it pays to be dead!”

Once, when I was a little way from the others, I saw a terrified rabbit cowering under a bush. When I knelt and quietly asked the little guy if he had seen a giant toad, he nodded and pointed me in the right direction.

I also got advice from an owl and two hedgehogs.

In each case I did this quietly so I wouldn't have to explain to the others why I could talk to animals.

We had been at it for hours, and the moon was low in the sky, when I heard a suspicious noise behind us.

It was answered by a spooky laugh from ahead.

“Fauna!” cried Herky. “Trouble coming!”

He was wrong. Trouble wasn't coming.

It had arrived.

It is my observation just before young ones become adults they go through a stage that is . . . difficult. This seems to be true for all species. Certainly it is true for the scamps of Nilbog.

—Stanklo the Scribbler

CHAPTER NINE

BWOONHIWDA EXPWAINS

Chanting “Blackstone! Blackstone! Blackstone!” a goblin twice as tall as Herky barreled out of the darkness and leaped at me.

I ducked just in time. The goblin sailed over my head. He landed hard, but that didn't slow him down. Goblins are fairly bouncy. With a wild laugh he rushed back at me. I swung my torch at him. As I did, I saw that he wore a red headband like the goblins who had searched my cottage. Then another goblin jumped me from behind.

I fell, dropping my torch.

From all around I heard more cries of “Blackstone! Blackstone! Blackstone!”

It was clear my friends had fights of their own. I couldn't see Igor, but I heard him roar, “Bop! Bop! Boppity bop bop! Bop them goblins on their top!”

I also heard goblin yowls and saw two go flying through the air.

Bwoonhiwda yodeled, “Hoya hoya ho!” which seemed part song, part battle cry.

I rolled across the ground, wrestling with the goblin who had tackled me. He had orange skin, blazing green eyes, and pointed ears the size of my hands. He had pinned my arms, so I wasn't able to get at my knife. Finally we slammed up hard against a tree, me on my back. From that position I saw a squirrel staring down at us.

“You woke me up!” he complained.

“Could you help, please?” I shouted, counting on Solomon's Collar to make my need clear.

The squirrel raced up the tree, away from the fight. I cursed him for a coward as I continued to squirm in the goblin's grip. I had just given my attacker a solid head-butt when a rain of furry bodies made me realize I had been unfair to the squirrel. The little guy had returned with a couple dozen relatives! The squirrels swarmed over my goblin foe, scratching and biting. Yelping in astonishment, the goblin released me and
ran into the night, squirrels still clinging to his head and shoulders.

I scrambled to my feet and looked around. I saw Igor send another goblin flying with a mighty bear-bop, but two more clung to his legs. They tripped him and he fell, roaring in anger.

Bwoonhiwda was spinning in a circle. She moved so fast her braids flew out to the sides. With those cannon­balls tied into the ends, it was worth a goblin's life to try to get past them. In fact, I spotted two goblins she had knocked out lying motionless on the ground nearby. But I also saw another goblin dangling in a tree, about to drop onto her head.

Little Herky clung to a goblin's neck, yelping in rage as a second goblin tried to pull him away.

That was when the bear came charging into the clearing. He reared up on his hind legs, stretched out his forelegs, and unleashed the most terrifying roar I had ever heard. Then he pulled one of the goblins off Igor's legs and flung it so far I couldn't see where it landed. He lunged for another.

Yelping in terror, the remaining goblins fled into the darkness, leaving behind the two near Bwoon­hiwda, who were either dead or unconscious.

Igor stopped midbop. He looked at his bear, then at the real bear, then at his own bear again. “Uh-oh,” he said.

Bwoonhiwda stopped spinning.

Herky, who had leaped away from the goblin he had been riding, hung upside down from a tree branch.

Werdolphus floated close to the bear, studying his face.

“Do you mind?” growled the bear.

Werdolphus floated backward in alarm.

Clearly, my earlier guess about Mervyn, that animals could see ghosts, had been right.

Turning to me, the bear said, “The squirrels told me you needed help.”

I made an awkward bow. “We did indeed. My thanks to you for coming to our aid.”

“How could I not, when you wear that collar?”

I felt myself blush and wondered if I should confess that I wasn't supposed to have it. I decided to keep my mouth shut.

As long as I wasn't talking, I wasn't lying.

The others took a step closer.

“Fauna talk to bear?” asked Igor.

It would have been stupid, not to mention dangerous, to lie and say I wasn't. So I simply nodded.

Bwoonhiwda thumped the base of her spear on the ground. “Pwease say to this hewoic beah that Bwoonhiwda, agent of the Queen of the Fowest of Wondah, thanks him.”

I was surprised. Given the way she had been spin­ning, I would have thought she would be dizzy, even throw­ing up. But she looked as if nothing had happened.

When I repeated her words to the bear, he bowed to her, then turned to me and said, “Tell the warrior woman that my uncle was a close friend of the queen's, and I am glad to be of service.”

I translated. The bear smiled, which was somewhat terrifying, given the size of his teeth. “If you have no more need of my services, I will be going.”

“Wait! Have you . . . have you seen any sign of a giant toad leaping through the woods?”

“A
what
?”

I sighed and made a quick explanation.

“Ah! No, I didn't see it, but that does explain the thumping and crashing I heard a while back.”

With that, he dropped to all fours and trotted away.

I looked and saw that the two goblins were gone
too. I wondered if they had woken and sneaked away or if their friends had carried them off.

When the bear was out of sight, Igor said, “Fauna know how to talk to bears?”

It was either tell the truth or ignore him, and I didn't think I could get away with that. So I said, “It's this collar, Igor. I got it from Granny Pinchbottom.”

He clutched his bear and looked around nervously, as if Granny might be behind any tree. “Fauna brave” was all he said.

We resumed our search.

About the time the sun was rising, I noticed we were stepping around patches of ice. I looked ahead, then groaned.

“What's wong?” Bwoonhiwda asked.

“We've reached Bogfester Swamp. It goes on for miles.”

The others gathered beside me. We could see the place where the toad had launched a hop that had ­carried it into the swamp. The problem was, it could easily have landed on any one of the hummocks that rose here and there ahead of us. But those small chunks of solid ground were separated by twenty feet or more of ice—thin ice covering frigid water that I knew could
be waist deep. There was no way we could search in that direction! Anyone who plunged through the ice would freeze to death.

“I thought toads were supposed to slow down when it's cold,” I said bitterly.

“We fowwow no ohdinawy toad,” Bwoonhiwda replied, thumping down the butt of her spear. It cracked through some ice and sank about a foot into the boggy ground. With a scowl that dared anyone to laugh, she pulled it out.

“Well,” said Werdolphus, “guess we'll be visiting Bonecracker John after all.”

As it turned out, we had to do something else before visiting the giant . . . get some rest!

I hated the idea—stopping for even a moment felt like betraying William. But as we turned from Bogfester, I found that I was groggy and stumbling. I realized I had never gone to sleep the night before.

The others were not much better off, having had only an hour or two of rest before the uproar with the toad had roused them. Only Werdolphus was not tired.

It was Bwoonhiwda who put the situation into words.

“We must sweep!”

“Can't sweep,” Igor said. “Got no bwoom!”

It was the first joke I'd ever heard him make. From the look on Bwoonhiwda's face, I thought it might also be his last—in fact, maybe the last time he ever said
anything
. Eyes blazing, the warrior woman snapped, “Ah you making fun of me, you big wug?”

“Uh-oh,” Werdolphus whispered.

Igor's eyes widened in alarm. Backing up a step, he said, “Igor not make fun. Igor make joke! Igor want to be friend!” He looked at me helplessly. “Fauna! Tell Bwoonhiwda Igor want to be friend!”

I stepped between them. “Igor didn't mean to insult you, Bwoonhiwda. He's just not very good at, um . . . people stuff.”

Bwoonhiwda hoisted a braid. The cannonball at the end of it dangled a foot below her hand, and I could tell she was trying to decide whether to use it to clonk Igor. Finally she said, “Tew the big wug that one moh joke wike that, and I cwack his head open wike an egg! Now wet's go back to the wagon so we can
sweep
.”

She turned on her heel and started to retrace the route that had brought us to the swamp. I glanced at Igor. His lower lip trembled, and his face was pulled down in the saddest look I had ever seen. He sighed, tucked his bear under his arm, and started after Bwoonhiwda.

A few minutes later Herky, who was walking in front of me, stumbled and went down. When I ran to him, I realized he hadn't tripped. . . . He had actually fallen asleep while walking! It was all the proof I needed that we truly did have to rest before continuing.

I scooped the little nuisance into my arms and trudged on.

When we reached the wagon, Bwoonhiwda pulled open the door and said, “Cwimb in!”

I blinked at her. “All of us? It's so small, we'll have to sleep standing up!”

Bwoonhiwda laughed. “Come inside and wook.”

I climbed the little steps at the back, went through the door, and cried out in wonder. The inside of the wagon was far bigger than the outside. Beautiful paintings hung on the walls. Thick carpets covered the floor. Though there was no fire to be seen, it was pleasantly warm, just as Bwoonhiwda had promised.

“The bedwooms ah at the fah end,” she said, climbing in behind me.

“How many rooms does this thing have?”

“Depends on how many we need. It's enchanted.”

“How did you get an enchanted wagon?”

“The queen knows a wot of wizahds.”

Bwoonhiwda and I shared a room. The “boys”—Igor and Herky—shared another. Werdolphus, who had no need to sleep, decided this would be a good time to go back and check in with Karl.

I agreed.

When I followed Bwoonhiwda into our room, I saw that it held two beds and a wardrobe. The wardrobe was even bigger than the one in my room in the castle.

I slipped off my coat and boots. Still wearing the rest of my clothes, I climbed between the sheets of one of the beds. It felt good to lie down!

Bwoonhiwda stepped into the wardrobe. When she came out again, she had taken off her helmet and was wearing a long white nightdress. I had wondered if she would unbraid her hair to sleep. She didn't. Instead, she carefully lifted the braids as she climbed into bed, then arranged them so that they dangled over the sides.

The cannonballs made a clunking sound as they hit the floor.

She folded her hands over her bosom and said, “Sweep well, Fauna.” Then she called, “Wights out!”

The room went dark.

After a moment I said softly, “Bwoonhiwda, may I ask a question?”

“Cewtainwy.”