Goblins Vs Dwarves Read Free Page A

business with dwarf-holds further up the Nibbled Coast. A wild, rugged country lies there, between the Bonehills and the Winter Sea. Dwarvendom, they call it, and at its heart lies the great citadel of the dwarves, Dwarvenholm in the Delverdale. How nice they sound, those northern names! I wonder if these dwarves you saw could really have tunnelled all the way from there?”
    â€œWith those dreadful diremoles to dig their runs for them, I should think they could!” said Henwyn.
    â€œThey’ll bring trouble with them,” Skarper promised. “Dwarves is always trouble. Stubby little back-stabbing goblin-killers, that’s all they are. Every goblin knows that.”
    Ned smiled. “And every human being knows that goblins are fearsome, red-eyed people-killers, Skarper dear. These dwarves are probably not nearly as bad as you think; you just made a bad impression by falling on their heads. And as long as they stay out in the Bonehills, beyond the walls of Clovenstone, I do not see that they are any business of ours. Let them do as they like up there. It does not concern us.”
    Henwyn shook his head. Ned’s words were wise, but he was still troubled by the things he’d seen beneath the mountain. “I wish we knew more about these dwarves. What are they doing up there? And why?”
    â€œYou should ask Fentongoose,” said Ned. “He is very learned, and he is bound to know something about dwarves. You could take him my blackberry and apple crumble, too. The boglins do not seem to want it.”
    But when she turned to pick the dish up, the tussock where it had stood was empty. While the three friends had been talking, the boglins had come and taken it, then vanished like ghosts back into the mazes of the marsh.
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    Fentongoose was one of the three self-styled sorcerers who had arrived in Clovenstone the previous year, believing themselves to be the heirs of the Lych Lord. They’d been wrong about that, and two of them, Prawl and Carnglaze, had gone back home to Coriander. Only Fentongoose had stayed on, acting as hatchling master to the young goblins. In his spare time he hunted for scraps of ancient knowledge among those mounds of valuable scrolls and ancient books which the goblins called “the bumwipe heaps”.
    Fentongoose made his home in a big, dilapidated guardhouse at the foot of Blackspike Tower. That was where Henwyn and Skarper went to visit him, after their talk with Princess Ned. A fire was glowing in the hearth there, and lined up in front of it were a dozen football-sized stone eggs. Fentongoose had fetched them a few days earlier from the slowsilver lake deep beneath Clovenstone. Soon they would crack open, and a dozen new goblin hatchlings would spill out and need to be taught that Hitting Other Goblins was Bad. That sort of lesson wasn’t easy to drum into thick goblin skulls, so Fentongoose knew he had hard work ahead of him. In the meantime he was taking things easy in his favourite chair, his feet up on a padded stool, a plate of Princess Ned’s biscuits on a table beside him and an old book open on his lap.
    â€œDwarves, eh?” he said, when Skarper and Henwyn told him what they’d seen. “Yes, I know a little about them. There was a scroll I found last month. Young Libnog was heading off to the pooing holes with it, but I thought it looked interesting and persuaded him to part with it. On Dwarves and Their Ways , it was called. It came from a time before the Lych Lord, when the dwarves were still one of the powers of the world. Honest, hard-working creatures, by all accounts.”
    â€œHard-working, certainly,” said Henwyn, thinking of the huge mine the dwarves had hollowed for themselves under the Bonehills. “But are they friendly?”
    â€œNot really,” admitted Fentongoose. “They like to keep to themselves. When the first dwarves made contact with the first men they were shocked to discover that