Goblins Vs Dwarves (21 page)

Skarper had never had a chance to see inside a gigantic mechanical dwarf before, and he had to admit that it was quite interesting. Wherever he looked, huge toothed wheels were spinning, turning mysterious shafts and causing sleek silvery pistons to pump up and down. There was a smell of slowsilver in the hot air, and all around him, like iron spaghetti, a mad tangle of pipes coiled and curved. These were the Giant Dwarf's veins, along which the slowsilver went gurgling, carrying magical power to all its metal organs.

Unfortunately there was not much time to look around, for in between the pipes and wheels and shafts and pistons there were more platforms, linked by iron ladders and lit by glowing mole-dung lamps, and on every platform clustered dwarf overseers and their followers.

If they had had crossbows, or even spears, that would have been the end of Skarper and Etty. But foolishly, the overseers hadn't imagined anyone getting inside their miraculous Giant Dwarf, and so they were armed with nothing more than the spanners and wrenches they used to keep it running. All the same, the intruders were soon captured, and forced up a ladder to the highest platform of all, just underneath the Head itself, where Overseer Glunt was poring over a thick sheaf of plans.

The angry voices of their captors distracted him, and he looked up to see the girl and the goblin standing before him. “Etty!” he said, ignoring Skarper completely. “Thank the depths! Is your father with you?”

It was not the welcome they'd expected. They had both been expecting something more along “Off with their heads!” lines. But Overseer Glunt's whole manner had changed. Gone was the sleek, pompous dwarf who had condemned them to the Bright Bowl. This new Glunt looked worn with worry. His hands shook, and his fingernails were nibbled. Beside him, holding more plans, stood Langstone. His reward for turning against Etty and her father had been to become Glunt's assistant, but he didn't look as though he was enjoying it very much.

Glunt came close to Etty and spoke in a voice as quiet as he could make it and still hope to be heard above the din of the Giant Dwarf. “This thing's mad, lass! It crushes everything in its path!”

“I thought that's what it was supposed to do,” said Skarper.

“Oh, aye, it was meant to crush everything, but not to actually
crush
everything. Not literally! We want to look down again on men, we don't want them all dead, or driven away across the sea – what use are they to us then? We need people to trade with, to buy the fine things we make. How can they even afford to trade if the Head and its new body has trampled their cities flat?” He looked around him in despair at the shining pistons and the grinding gears. “It won't stop, Etty! I thought if Durgar was here. . .”

“He's not,” said Etty. “He's up on the hill, and your tallboys may have killed him by now. Oh, Master Glunt, what have you done?”

“It wasn't my doing!” pleaded Glunt. “We overseers thought we controlled the Head, but no! It has a mind of its own, Etty! It has just been biding its time, waiting for us to build this body for it, and find slowsilver to fill its veins with!”

“The dwarves of old built the Head to make them great again,” said Langstone. “And that is just what it means to do! We cannot stop it!”

“Why not jump out?” said Skarper, not much liking the thought that he was stuck inside a runaway dwarf. “You could jump out, couldn't you?”

“Aye,” said Glunt, “but that won't stop this thing. The Head thinks for itself! It will just go crashing on!”

There was a clang from somewhere; a screech of escaping steam; shouts and running footsteps. The smell of slowsilver in the tight, lurching space grew stronger. An overseer came up the ladder and pushed past Etty and Skarper to tell Glunt, “Another of them! And Feldspar thinks some may be collecting in the S-bend behind the right hip!”

“Well get them out!” shouted Glunt, waving his short arms in fury.

“What is it?” asked Etty, as the other overseer scampered back down into the Giant Dwarf's depths.

Glunt would not answer her, but Langstone said, “Things keep appearing in the slowsilver. As if it is solidifying. They are blocking its passage around the dwarf's veins. Our spell-smiths can't explain it.”

“But that's good, isn't it?” asked Etty. “If the slowsilver stops flowing, the Giant Dwarf will stop too, won't it?”

Glunt shook his head. “It's not that simple, lass. The slowsilver rushes through these pipes under great pressure. A blockage could lead to terrible disaster. A magical explosion! We could all be drenched in slowsilver. There have already been a couple of serious leaks. Look at what happened to Overseer Bendick here.”

“Ribbit!” agreed a bearded frog, hopping across the pile of plans which Glunt had thrown aside.

“We have to open the pipes as carefully as we can and fish these stones out,” said Glunt. “It's dicey, dangerous work while the Giant Dwarf keeps moving, but the alternative. . .”

“Stones?” said Skarper. “You said
stones
?”

Glunt looked at him. “Aye, goblin. Stones. That's what these things in the pipes look like.”

“Show me!” said Skarper.

Langstone led the way, and Etty went with him. On a high, narrow platform behind the Giant Dwarf's beard stood a barrel. It was almost full of eggstones. Some were fresh, with the veins of slowsilver still glowing on their surfaces; others had cooled, and were dark as cannonballs.

“We store them here,” said Langstone. “They are too valuable to throw overboard. See how the slowsilver shines in them. . .”

“There must be dozens!” said Skarper. His mind raced. The slowsilver lake had not been due to cough up any eggstones yet. But what if the business of piping the slowsilver north to Dwarvenholm and then decanting some of it into the veins of the Giant Dwarf had made it produce eggstones early? Perhaps that was the slowsilver's way of trying to escape; turning itself into goblins, who could run away. . .

He thought some more. “Fire!” he said. “We need fire! What about those flame-hose thingies up in the nose? Can we bring one down here?”

Langstone looked uncertain. “What are you planning?”

Skarper thought it better not to say. He didn't need to, anyway: Etty took Langstone's hand and, shouting “Come on!”, led him up a ladder into the dark, turning shadows of the Head. A moment later they were back, uncoiling the long, snakey metal tube of a flame-hose behind them. A dwarf in scorched leather armour came with them, lugging the fat metal bottle which held the flame-hose's fuel, and grumbling, “What's all this then? Goblins?”

“Just do as he says!” ordered Etty, and Skarper said, “Pour fire on that barrel!” and jumped aside as the hose roared, wrapping the barrel of eggstones in gaudy flames.

At Clovenstone, eggstones took days to hatch. They sat beside Fentongoose's fire, gentled in its warmth, until the hatchlings inside them woke and bashed their way out. But Skarper didn't have time for that. He hoped this would work instead. Shielding his face from the flames with both paws, he went as close as he dared. The hose roared, the barrel burned, the fire crackled. Inside the fire the eggstones cracked and banged like popcorn.

“Stop!” shouted Skarper, adding his own voice to the voices of dwarf overseers, who had come running to see which idiot was letting off a flame-hose inside the Head.

The flames subsided, leaving only the fires of the burning barrel. In the heart of the heat, something moved. Skarper blinked away bright after-images, edged nearer – and a new hatchling, slightly singed, came tumbling out of the heap of flame-wrapped stones and landed at his feet.

“Urple!” said the hatchling, coughing smoke. Two more followed. Then suddenly there were hatchlings everywhere, and like all goblin hatchlings they were spoiling for a fight. Some snatched up still-burning barrel staves; some simply used their fists. One picked up the flame-hose (he didn't know what it was for; he was just planning to use its heavy iron nozzle to thump his batch-brothers with). But as he swung it at them he overbalanced, and plummeted with a yelp over the edge of the platform (being even littler than a dwarf, he fitted easily under the brass handrail).

With a shriek, the unlucky hatchling dropped down into the Giant Dwarf's innards; into the rolling wheels, the sliding gleam of pistons. He was still clutching the flame-hose, and as it went slinking, link by metal link, over the platform's edge, it began to tug the big iron bottle that held its fuel after it. “No!” shouted Langstone, reaching for it – but by then the hose's end was caught in the teeth of great gears far below, and although the operator and other dwarves joined him in trying to hold the bottle back, it was a tug of war that they were doomed to lose.

Over it went, and away into the depths. Skarper and the dwarves on the platform all stared at one another, appalled. Even the hatchlings stopped fighting for a moment.

A terrible red glare came up out of the dwarf's belly, and a boom. Shadows of the machinery went wavering over the faces of the watchers on the platform. The glare faded, and for a moment it seemed that all was well below. Then, echoing up through the innards of the dwarf, they heard the gush of spilling slowsilver, and the pop and crack of eggstones.

Panic took hold then. “Abandon Dwarf!” screamed Overseer Glunt.

“Run for your lives!” suggested Langstone.

All hope of salvaging the Giant Dwarf was forgotten. The overseers ran hither and thither, up and down the iron ladders, making their way to whatever doors and hatches and openings they could find. They jumped over the squabbling hatchlings, who were spilling all through the Giant Dwarf's interior. The ones Skarper had hatched in the barrel were ganging together to fight new hatchlings, who came spidering up the ladders from below. It seemed to Skarper, looking back as he reached one of the hatches, that all the slowsilver gushing from the Giant Dwarf's severed veins was turning into eggstones, and all the eggstones were hatching instantly in the heat of the fire that had started down in its belly. Even the whirling wheels and gears, which had been forged from slowsilver long ago, were developing odd warts and pimples which swelled and burst and spat out hatchlings. The clank and rattle and chunk of the magical machine was almost drowned out by the squealing voices of new goblins.

Then Etty pulled him through the hatch, and they followed the escaping dwarves, scrambling perilously down the Giant Dwarf's armour until they were low enough to jump the rest of the way to safety.

“Ghooooof!” said Skarper, landing next to Etty in a hedge. He scrambled out in time to see the Giant Dwarf reach the hilltop. The fighting there had stopped: dwarves and boglins, goblins and men, all stood amazed, gawping up at the mighty figure. But instead of raising its huge feet to trample the enemies of Dwarvendom, it stopped and stood there. Weird groans and gurglings came from its insides. If it hadn't been a two-hundred-foot-tall magic-powered mannikin, you would have said that it had terrible indigestion. A moment more, and the Brazen Head began to wobble and rattle on its shoulders like the lid of a saucepan coming to the boil.

“Get clear!” Overseer Glunt was yelling, running towards the motionless armies. He was shouting it at the dwarves, but the others heard him too, and all began to back away. “That thing's full of slowsilver! When it blows. . .”

It blew. Dark shards of its iron body went howling over the watchers' heads, and sank like blades into the ground. But no rain of molten slowsilver came spraying out. What came instead, still bickering and squabbling, were hundreds of hatchlings. A scrambling scrum of little goblins came pouring out of the holes in the Dwarf, and as they clambered down its huge legs to the ground the whole figure overbalanced and toppled backwards, crashing down in ruin on the hill.

Around it, the hatchlings started to pick up the fallen weapons of the battle and attack each other. “Stop!” shouted Henwyn, pushing his way down the old mound. The dwarves, meanwhile, looked on in amazement. Some had panicked and run when the Giant Dwarf fell; others were crowding round the Brazen Head, waiting for it to tell them what to do, but there were still some – the armoured tallboys mostly, a few surviving diremoles and their crews – who held their ground and held their weapons. The hatchlings were too busy hitting one another to be any threat to them. Their commanders ran up and down their lines, shoving dwarves into position, urging them to attack the battered army of Clovenstone.

But then like a miracle, a horn rang out: a single, high, clear note. Even the hatchlings heard it, and looked up.

Over the hill's brow, from the direction of Adherak, came a throng of riders. For a moment, in the dying light, no one could imagine who they were. Then Skarper recognized Carnglaze riding in the front rank, with Prawl beside him, and King Knobbler in a lacy fighting bonnet with pink ribbons, swinging a huge axe. Behind them rode the finest warriors money could buy; men of Musk and Barragan and the Autumn Isles, armed to the teeth and as ready for a fight as any hatchling.