“Seize him!” shouted the cloud maidens.

But Skarper wasn’t waiting to be seized. He had spent enough time escaping from other goblins to know when to make himself scarce. He started to writhe and wriggle against the cloud that pressed around him, and found that it had the texture of light, dry snow. He could kick holes in it, and dig out handfuls. Turning over on to his hands and knees, he started digging like a dog, shovelling up great handfuls of the dense vapour and flinging it over his shoulder, where it drifted uncertainly up the shaft. By the shrieks and hisses coming from above he could tell the cloud maidens didn’t much like him doing further damage to their home and, when he glanced up, he saw that several of them had started to climb towards him down the shaft he’d made, kicking footholds in its vapoury walls like climbers coming down a snow-face. Their faces glared angrily at him with eyes as hard and bright as hailstones; in their smoky hands were blades of ice.

Skarper whimpered and dug faster. He’d rather be smashed on the flagstones after all, he thought, than sliced to bits by angry cloud maidens. He dug and dug, clawing up big handfuls of cloud and throwing it frantically over his shoulder, fighting his way down into the deepening hole. The further he went, the darker grew the cloud, and soon the handfuls that he was scooping up became wetter and heavier, packed with hailstones or sodden with unfallen rain, like cold grey sponges. At last, through a growing crack in the bottom of the cloud, he glimpsed daylight.

A cloudy hand reached down and grabbed him by the tuft on the tip of his tail. Considering that it was made of cloud, the hand was surprisingly strong, but it was not as strong as gravity, which seized Skarper from below at exactly the same moment, because the thin cloud floor had given way beneath him. He dangled there a moment, screaming, “Let me go! Let me go!”, suspended by his tail while the cloud maiden’s wrist stretched out longer and longer, thinner and thinner. Finally it tore, and Skarper was tumbling again, only to land with a soft squelch in thick mud about six feet below.

Freed of his weight, the cloud bobbed upwards, caught by the breeze that curled around the base of Blackspike Tower. Bits of it had unravelled like fraying banners, and Skarper could see the cloud maidens scrambling about all over it like sailors on a ship, trying to plait it back together. He wondered why he had never noticed such interesting clouds before. Presumably they were rare, and their crews stayed out of sight of groundlings. It was a pity they’d been so unfriendly, he thought, flicking wisps of the cloud maiden’s fingers from his tail like clinging smoke. He would have liked to ask them about their life in the sky.

He stood up shakily and looked around. He was standing in a bleak little bog about a mile from the base of the Inner Wall, formed where a leat of fresh water overflowed from its channel and spread across a weed-grown area which had once been a square between two massive ruined buildings. On either side of this marsh were stretches of ancient paving, the huge flagstones cracked and tilted by misshapen trees which had grown up from beneath them.

I’m outside the Blackspike! he realized suddenly. Beyond the Inner Wall! Never having set foot outside his home tower before, he felt frightened by the huge space around him, so much wider and brighter than the halls and passageways that he was used to. All his life he had been trying to find peace and quiet and places away from other goblins, and now that he had finally reached one he found he missed the sounds of their constant squabbling and bickering, their snores and farts and burps. For a moment he felt tempted to run straight back to the Inner Wall, climb inside Blackspike Tower again, say he was sorry and beg King Knobbler to forgive him. But goblins were not good at forgiveness. He would have to find somewhere else to make his lair, he decided. He looked south, at all the old bastions and towerlets which rose among the trees between the Blackspike and the Outer Wall. Surely one of those could hide him? He’d hole up there and think what to do. Maybe there’d be treasure to find; just a few small trinkets, left behind in those old buildings. He’d sort out a nice new hoard for himself. There might even be goblins down there; some little outcast tribe that wouldn’t mind an extra member. . .

So he turned his back on his home, squelched his way out of the bog, and set off southward down a broad, paved road, stopping now and then to munch a handful of the dead thistles which stood man-high between the flagstones.

At first the margin of the road was marked by mounds of tumbled masonry, with the chimneys of fallen-down buildings sticking up like bony fingers, and meres between them where water had flooded the old cellars. But as it sloped downhill, away from Blackspike Tower, the trees came to meet it: Skarper could see them crowding in ahead until they appeared to close over the road like a twiggy tunnel. He began to feel uneasy. He didn’t know much about trees and growing things. The saplings which sprouted from the crevices of Blackspike made good eating, but these great trees were so big and old, and their creaks and rustlings had the sound of secret whispers. Skarper couldn’t help noticing the ease with which their roots had managed to split and crumble huge slabs of stone.

He walked slower and slower, and he was about to turn back when there was a crackle, a flash, and a clump of alders that had been minding its own business nearby burst suddenly into flames. Skarper yowled and looked round again, then up. The cloud which had broken his fall had recovered itself, and it was hovering over him, black as wet slate, with lashes of lightning flicking from its belly. It looked like a fierce, shaggy monster with electric legs.

Skarper set off at a loping run while lightning bolts lanced down all around him, sizzling when they hit the meres and starting small fires when they touched the dry bits in between. Above the steady boom of thunder and the fizz and prickle of the lightning he caught another sound: the high, scornful laughter of angry cloud maidens.

Zigzagging between forks of their white fire, jumping a line of fallen pillars which had collapsed across the old road, he sprinted towards the edge of the woods. The trees looked more welcoming than forbidding now. Big and bare and wintry, they clustered close together, branches bearded with lichen, forming a cage of green shadows. Once he was under there, surely the cloud maidens would not be able to see him. . .

Krazzzzzap! A lightning bolt crisped past his ear, making his hair stand on end.

Pfritzzzz! Another touched down in a puddle just ahead of him and turned it to scalding steam.

Krakkk! A wobbling globe of witch-fire drifted by and blasted a nearby boulder into bits.

Skarper zigzagged his way between the explosions and threw himself into the shelter of the woods. There he lay, bruised and panting, on a bed of thick, wet moss under a fallen tree, while his heartbeat thundered in his ears like all the war drums of all the goblin holds of Clovenstone.

The cloud maidens steered their thunder-grumbling cloud around above him, trying to peer down through the dense branches. “Oh, goblin!” they called. “Come out, little goblin!” They sent a few more lightning bolts down just for fun, and then let the wind take their cloud and blow it away towards the east, to join a herd of others above the Bonehill Mountains.

Skarper waited until the last faint sounds of their voices had faded, then slithered out of his hiding place, checked the corners of the sky for lurking clouds, and set off again through the trees, looking for his new home.