Freeglader (35 page)

Flambusia Flodfox was down on her knees, her large head lowered and her great rear raised. She was feeling more sorry for herself than she had ever done before in her life. She'd lost weight on her meagre, tasteless diet of black bread and barley gruel, her chest was bad, her joints were swollen, her hands had been chafed red raw and her corns were playing up. To crown it all, she hadn't seen Amberfuce for days.

To her right stood a metal pail, filled with cold water
and overflowing with soapy suds. Time and again, as she shuffled forwards on her inflamed knees, she plunged a big, bristly brush into the water and scrubbed vigorously at the muddy marks on the white marble floor, muttering under her breath as she did so.

‘Oh, if only they'd let me see him,’ she complained, her voice weak and peevish. ‘Why, if Amby knew just how they were treating me…’

Just then she heard a noise. She paused, and pushed a greasy hank of hair back, revealing the puffy, redrimmed eyes behind. From behind her, the heavy clomping of boots came closer.

Muddy
boots, most like, she thought miserably. And then I'll have to scrub the whole floor all over again.

Not that Flambusia was about to complain out loud. She'd tried that once – and still had the angry welts across the backs of her legs to prove it. That Foundry Master was a tyrant all right. The footsteps approached and passed her by without stopping.

Casting a sideways glance round, she saw that there were two of them. Hemuel Spume was one, his longcoat hissing as it glided over the floor, the purifiers on his angular hat wreathing his head in aromatic smoke. He ignored her completely. Beside him
was his esteemed visitor, in whose honour she, Flambusia, had been ordered to scrub the marble floor spotless. Hemtuft Battleaxe, he was called, a savage-looking long-haired goblin with a long feathered cloak that swept back behind him as he and Hemuel hurried up the stairs beyond – leaving, just as she'd feared, a trail of muddy footprints behind them. A moment later, she heard an upper door slam.

Bang!

Flambusia looked up, an expression of utter misery in her rheumy eyes. ‘Oh Amberfuce, my love,’ she moaned pitifully. ‘What are they doing to you up there?’

Upstairs in the treatment room adjoining his bed-chamber, Amberfuce the Waif, once High Chancellor to the Most High Academe of old Sanctaphrax, was still not absolutely convinced he hadn't died and gone to the great Eternal Glen. The last thing on his mind was his former nurse. In fact he wasn't thinking of anything except his own pleasure. Even when Hemuel Spume knocked on the door and entered, with Hemtuft Battleaxe close on his heels, it was as much as he could do to open his eyes and raise a thin, spidery hand in greeting.

The soak-vat – or ‘cooking-pot', as his attendant gabtrolls called it behind his back – was, to Amberfuce's mind, the most wonderful contraption ever invented. It was round and squat, fashioned from burnished copper and filled with warm liquid. Amberfuce sat inside it on a small stool, only his head protruding from the top.

There was a series of pipes attached to the outer shell of the vat, delivering hot water, silken balms and salves and purified air – which bubbled through the fragrant, oily liquid inside – from the bottom, and removing the cooled overflow from the top. And as if that were not enough, the team of gabtrolls – their tongues slurping constantly over their eyeballs in the steamy room – were fussing about Amberfuce's head, stroking his ears and temples, massaging his cranium and rubbing sweet-smelling unguents into his skin.

Hemuel approached him, the stocky goblin following close on his heels. Amberfuce's eyelids fluttered as he struggled to concentrate on the visitors to his room.

Leave us a while
, he told the gabtrolls, speaking directly inside their heads.

The gabtrolls did as they were told, putting down their sponges and loofahs and vials of aromatic oils, and withdrew. Hemuel Spume stepped closer.

‘You're looking so much better, dear friend,’ he said, a smile tugging the corners of his tight mouth as he looked round the steamy room, scented candles with misty haloes burning on every surface. He pulled off his steel-rimmed glasses and wiped the steam from the inside of the glass. ‘I trust the gabtrolls are taking extra-special care of you, as I ordered.’

‘They're wonderful, wonderful,’ Amberfuce gushed. ‘I haven't felt so good in years.’

‘You've earned it,’ said Hemuel. ‘Those blueprints were invaluable.’ He raised his arm, and gestured to his companion. ‘I've just been showing our esteemed visitor
here how well our work is progressing,’ he explained.

‘Indeed,’ said Hemtuft, nodding gravely. ‘Most impressive…’

I see
, said Amberfuce, his soft voice hissing inside the long-haired goblin's head.

Hemtuft winced. He despised waifs at the best of times, with their soft, weak bodies and insidious thoughts. And this one – pampered and sibilant – was a particularly unpleasant specimen. Then again, as Hemuel Spume had explained, he'd stolen the plans from Vox Verlix which had made everything possible, and the goblin general made a note to himself to keep his contempt and disgust reined in.

‘My army is assembled,’ he told them both. ‘The Goblin Nations are ready to march!’

To march?
The waif's voice sounded contemptuous.
Don't you mean
to follow,
General?

For a second time, Hemtuft winced. He would never get used to the way the frail-looking creatures would invade thoughts, and he resented the waif's tone – but he tried to mask his anger as he turned to Hemuel.

‘The axes of the long-hairs are sharpened,’ he said, ‘the swords and scythes of the hammerheads and flat-heads whetted. The lances of the lop-ears are oiled, the quivers of the pink-eyes are full and the clubs of the tusked and underbiters all freshly studded. We are ready!’

Hemuel Spume smiled, a twinkle in his eye. ‘As are my glade-eaters,’ he rasped.

• CHAPTER EIGHTEEN •
SUNSET IN THE FREE GLADES

G
ood luck, Blad,’ said Felix, raising his tankard to the ruddy-faced slaughterer in the muglumpskin jacket who was seated beside him. ‘Here's to your new life in the Silver Pastures!’

‘The Silver Pastures!’ echoed the other ghosts clustered round the huge, circular table in the Bloodoak Tavern.

‘Though why you'd want to spend your days chasing after herds of hammelhorns beats me … Stupid great creatures!’ laughed a mobgnome named Skillet, nudging his wiry gnokgoblin companion. ‘Skut and I are off to the southern fringes to trap fromps.’

‘That's not all you'll trap if you're not careful,’ said Brove, a lugtroll, darkly. ‘That's hammerhead country, so they say. The forests up there are crawling with them.’ He shook his head and tapped his bone breast-plate. ‘Once I take this off, it's the quiet life for me. Got a nice
little cave in the northern cliffs picked out, I have, a small plot to grow tripweed, and a hammelhorn cart to take it to market…’

‘Well, now I've heard everything!’ Felix burst out, clapping the lugtroll on the back. ‘Brove Gloamcheek, the toughest troll in all of Screetown, scourge of the Guardians of Night, is about to become a gardener!’

The whole table exploded with laughter and the ghosts raised their tankards once more.

‘To fromp trapping!’

‘To tripweed!’

‘To Brove the gardener!’

The locals sitting round the tavern turned and looked at them with a mixture of curiosity and amusement. Meggutt, Beggutt and Deg toasted the rowdy group before plunging their heads back into their drinking trough. Zett Blackeye smiled a gap-toothed smile and his hefty cloddertrog sidekick, Grome, raised his drinking-pail in salute. Only the old sky pirate in the corner ignored the ghosts and sat instead staring into his goblet of sapwine with pale, unblinking eyes.

Draining his tankard in one huge gulp, Brove turned to Felix. ‘So what about you?’ he said. ‘Once we're disbanded, there'll be no one to listen to your muglump-hunting stories…’

‘Or to lead raids on the Tower of Night …’ chipped in Blad.

‘… Or to swim 'cross the Edgewater in the middle of the night,’ added Skillet.

‘In full bone-armour!’ Skut reminded him.

‘Happy days,’ said Brove, and put his tankard down on the table.

An awkward silence fell over the ghosts as they each remembered their former home; the rubble-strewn, demon-haunted desolation of Screetown, so different from the peaceful tranquillity of the Free Glades. None of them liked to admit it but, despite the dangers and hardships they'd had to endure, they were going to miss their former lives as ghosts – and none more so than their young leader, Felix Lodd.

Felix peered into the depths of his tankard thoughtfully before breaking the silence. And when he did, his voice was raw with emotion. ‘My father wants me to join him in the new Great Library.’ He shrugged. ‘He says it's my duty to the librarians – and to him…’

‘Felix Lodd, a librarian,’ said Skillett, his face cracking into a broad grin. ‘Who'd have thought it?’

The others laughed – though a little uncomfortably. They could sense their leader's inner turmoil and unhappiness.

Felix shrugged again. ‘Still, if it'll make the old bark-worm happy…’

Suddenly, the heavy ironwood door burst open with a loud
crash
that made the roof timbers of the New Bloodoak Tavern shake, and in strode Deadbolt Vulpoon, followed by a stream of sky pirates.

‘Well, lads, look what old Deadbolt's found, skulking in the woods of the western fringes,’ he said, nodding over his shoulder.

The two sky pirates behind him wrestled with a
hulking figure in an iron collar attached to a chain. The acrid smell of rotting meat and dank vegetation was unmistakable. The figure stopped struggling and straightened up, ear and chin rings glinting in the lamplight. Two bloodshot eyes surveyed the ghosts from beneath heavily tattooed brow-ridges. An upper lip curled in disdain, to reveal two rows of sharp, pointed teeth.

Felix rose to his feet. ‘A hammerhead,’ he said with awe.

Though the sky pirates on either side of the goblin were big, strapping individuals, beside the hammer-head they looked decidedly small. Luckily for them all, the goblin's wrists were tied securely behind his back and his legs were hobbled by a short length of stout chain.

‘A
warrior
hammerhead,’
said Deadbolt proudly, ignoring the murderous look the goblin gave him. ‘Fresh from the Goblin Nations. Armed to the teeth and looking for trouble. We were fromp trapping when we surprised his war band.’

‘What did I tell you?’ said Brove to Skillet. ‘Dangerous thing, fromp trapping.’

Skillet swallowed uneasily.

‘War band?’ said Felix with surprise.

‘That's what it looked like to me,’ said Deadbolt. ‘They weren't carrying their birthing-bundles or their weaving-rods, just weapons – and plenty of them! They were looking for trouble all right.’

The goblin sneered and fell to his haunches, his eyes darting round the tavern.

‘His mates turned and disappeared into the woods as soon as they saw us.’

‘
They ran away?
' Felix could hardly believe it.