Freeglader (10 page)

‘By Earth and Sky, Rook,’ he swore, stumbling on across the rocky pavement, ‘enough brave librarian knights have died because of me. I shan't let
you
become one of them.’

• CHAPTER SIX •
DUSK

The Palace of the Furnace Masters

H
emuel Spume rubbed his spidery fingered hands together and smiled a thin-lipped smile. He always enjoyed this time of day.

The furnace fires had been freshly stoked for the night shift and the tall chimney stacks were belching out thick clouds of acrid smoke that stained the early evening sky a brilliant red. Exhausted lines of workers were tramping off to the low open-sided huts to snatch a few hours of much-needed sleep amid the unceasing din of the drills and hammers coming from the metal-working shops. An undercurrent of low, muttered complaints filled the air as the night workers jostled each other to reach their benches and forges.

The Foundry Master was standing in the upper gallery of the Counting House, a tall, solid wooden tower at the western end of the magnificently carved
Palace of the Furnace Masters. The mullioned windows were grimy with soot, both inside and out, yet this did little to mar the splendour of the view outside.

As far as the eye could see, the rows of blackened chimneys pointed like accusing fingers up at the blood-red sky. Beneath them, the glowing furnaces seemed to stare back at Hemuel, like the eyes of a thousand forest demons, throwing grotesque shadows across the huge timber stacks that fed them. Everywhere there was noise, bustle and industry, just the way he liked it – and never more so than now, as dusk was falling. With the changing of the shifts, the clamour of activity in the Foundry Glades was reaching a crescendo, before settling into the night-time cacophony of hammer-blow, foundry-clatter and furnace-blast.

Hemuel traced a bony finger through the soot on the window, and pushed his steel-rimmed glasses up his long nose. It hadn't always been like this. Oh, no. When he – Hemuel Maccabee Spume – had first come to the Deepwoods all those years ago, the Foundry Glade had been an insignificant forest forge, turning out trinkets and cooking pots for itinerant goblin tribes and the odd band of wandering shrykes. The ambitious young leaguesmen back in Undertown had said he was mad to bury himself out here in the Deepwoods, but Hemuel knew better…

The corners of his eyes crinkled with amusement as he thought back to those early days. So much had changed since then, and almost all for the better – at least, for him.

Stone-sickness had put an end to sky-flight, changing

the patterns of trade in the Edge for ever. No longer could the heavily-laden league ships transport the manufactured goods of the Undertown workshops out to the Deepwoods and return with precious timber and raw materials; no longer could the sky pirates prey upon the wealthy merchants and traders. After stone-sickness had struck,
all
cargo had to travel overland. And that – as Hemuel Spume had taken note – was a costly enterprise.

Once the shrykes had taken control of the Great Mire Road, the Undertown leagues had been forced to pay them high taxes for the right to trade with the Deepwoods. Costs of their products had soared and, as a result, the Undertowners had priced themselves out of business. Hemuel Spume had seized the opportunity to fill the gap in the market. The Foundry Glade – independent of the shrykes' greedy influence – had grown and prospered.

Soon it wasn't just one glade but many, spreading through the boundless Deepwoods like a fungus. Its influence increased. Why, without the success of the Foundry Glades, the Goblin Nations themselves would never have grown to their present size. And what's more, whether they liked it or not, they were now totally dependent on the knowledge and skills of Hemuel Spume's Furnace Masters.

Yes, times were good, Hemuel Spume had to admit, but you couldn't stand still. Oh, no, not for a moment. Once you did that, you became complacent.

After all, look what had happened to the shrykes at the Eastern Roost. They'd sat back and grown rich on the
Undertown trade, putting all their eggs in one basket, so to speak. And now, if the reports he had received from his business partner were to be believed, they, along with Undertown itself, were finished.

As Foundry Master, Hemuel Spume wasn't about to stand still. He had great plans, monumental plans; plans that would change the face of the Deepwoods settlements for ever. Territory, riches, power: he wanted it all.

He turned and surveyed the ordered rows of lead-wood desks stretching off before him down the dark hall. At each one, hunched over and spattered with black ink, sat a scribe. There were mobgnomes, lugtrolls and all manner of goblins, all furiously scribbling, accounting for firewood quotas, ore extraction, smelting rates and workshop output. The air buzzed and hissed with a sound like mating woodcrickets as five hundred quills scratched and scraped at five hundred pieces of coarse parchment.

The sound was punctuated by the dry rasping cough peculiar to the Foundry Glades. Foundry-croup, it was called. Most who breathed the filthy, smoke-filled air suffered from it. The scribes, up in the Counting House gallery, got off relatively lightly – unlike the slaves who worked the foundries. Two years they lasted on average, before their lungs gave out.

Hemuel Spume made it a habit always to wear a gauze mask when he inspected the foundries. At other times, he kept to the high towers and upper halls of the palace, where the air was considerably cleaner. Nonetheless, even he was prone to the occasional coughing fit. It simply couldn't be helped. Feeling a tell-tale tickle in his throat, he reached into a pocket of his gown and pulled out a small bottle, which he unstoppered with his spidery fingers and put to his lips.

As the pungent syrup slipped over his tongue and down his throat, the tickling stopped. He returned the stoppered bottle to his pocket, removed his glasses and polished them fussily with a large handkerchief.

Thank goodness for Deepwoods medicines and the gabtrolls who dispensed them, he thought. He, personally, had ten of the stalk-eyed apothecaresses at his sole disposal. How his sickly business partner would enjoy that, he mused.

‘Excuse me, Foundry Master, sir?’ came a tentative voice.

Spume looked up, replacing his glasses as he did so. An aged clerk, Pinwick Krum, stood before him, an anxious frown on his pinched face.

‘Yes, yes,’ Spume snapped impatiently. ‘What do you want?’

‘The latest consignment of workers has arrived from Hemtuft Battleaxe,’ Krum replied.

Spume's eyes narrowed. ‘Yes?’

‘I'm afraid there's only five dozen of them,’ came the reply. ‘And they're all lop-ear goblins…’

‘Lop-ears!’ Spume cried, his face reddening and a coughing fit threatening to explode at any moment. ‘How many times do I have to tell him? It's hammer-heads we need, or flat-heads – goblins with a bit of life in them – why, those lop-ears are nothing but slack-jawed plough-pushers!’ He poked his clerk in the chest. ‘Battleaxe is not to be paid until we've tried them out. If they're no good, he doesn't get a single trading-credit, do you understand?’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Krum, his voice laden with weariness.

Hemuel Spume turned, rubbed a hand over the sooty window and peered out into the darkness. Below him were five chained columns of abject goblins, their heads bowed and bare feet shuffling, being led by guards through the filthy encampment, one after the other.

Lop-ears they certainly were, the curious tilt of their crooked ears accentuated by the number of heavy gold rings which hung from them – but Spume was relieved to see that the majority were pink-eyed and scaly goblins, fierce in battle and hard workers, rather than the indolent low-bellies that Battleaxe had tried to fob him off with before.

‘
Humph!
Better than the last lot, I suppose,’ he said peevishly. ‘But nowhere near enough.’

‘I know, sir,’ said Pinwick Krum, wringing his hands together ingratiatingly. ‘But what is one to do?’

Spume slammed his fist down on his desk, causing the great mass of scribes to look up as one, consternation on their brows and nervous coughs in their throats.

‘This is intolerable,’ he shouted. ‘Absolutely intolerable. The furnaces have to be fed! Now, more than ever. I will not allow everything we have built up here to be jeopardized by a lack of labour. Doesn't
anyone
want to work these days?’ He poked the shrunken clerk hard in the chest again. ‘I want three hundred new workers,’ he said. ‘
Good
workers!
Hard
workers! And I want them by this time next week at the latest. Do you hear me?’

‘Yes, sir. But…’

‘Hammelhorns butt,
Mister
Krum,’ Spume interrupted. ‘You are not a hammelhorn, are you?’

‘No, sir. B…’

‘If Hemtuft Battleaxe wants our goods, then he has to pay for them!’ he shouted. ‘And our price is goblin labour! And it's just gone up, tell him. Now, get out!’

Pinwick Krum turned and left, muttering quietly
under his breath as he went back down the lines of coughing, quill-scratching scribes, and over to the side door. Hemuel Spume watched him going, an unpleasant smile playing over his thin lips.

‘Three hundred, Krum. Don't disappoint me,’ he called after him. ‘Or I'll have you put on double stoking-duty in the leadwood foundry. You won't last five minutes.’

As Krum shut the door quietly behind him, Hemuel Spume returned his attention to the window. Although the sun had only just set, the thick pall of smoke that hung permanently overhead had already thrown the Foundry Glades into darkness. The tail-end of the column of lop-ears was being checked in at the slave-huts.

‘Sixty measly goblins,’ he muttered. It was barely enough for five foundries, and he had
twenty
-five to fill.

Hemuel Spume shook his head. With the projected rate of expansion, even if Pinwick did manage to secure a deal for three hundred goblins, a month later they would need another three hundred, and three hundred more the month after that … It was simply unsustainable.

He raised his head, and stared off past the great Foundry Glades to where the distant Deepwoods lay. There, far off to the north, lay the Free Glades. Hemuel Spume smiled, his small, pointed teeth glinting in the lampglow.

‘The Free Glades,’ he purred. ‘That so-called beacon of light and hope …’ His lips twisted into a sneer. ‘And a limitless supply of slaves.’

ii The Great Clan-Hut of the Long-Haired Goblins

‘So that's the great Hemtuft Battleaxe, is it?’ Lob asked, peering over the heads of the goblins in front of him, struggling to get a good view.

‘Doesn't he look fine in that shryke-feather cloak of his!’ commented his brother, Lummel. ‘They say he plucked each feather himself from a different shryke-sister.’

‘Shut up, back there,’ a voice hissed angrily. ‘Some of us are trying to listen.’