After that, several whole hours went by without anybody trying to kill him. No tree monsters or angry dryads appeared to drive him from the wood, and he saw that goblins had sometimes been this way on raids, because he recognized their crude graffiti on the ruined buildings which stood on either side of the roadway. That made him feel a little more at home, and he decided that things were looking up (although he kept looking up, too, checking those tiny flakes of sky which showed between the bare branches, just in case that cloud was still around).

Skarper cast his mind back again to Stenoryon’s Mappe of All Clovenstone (how he wished he could have brought it with him!). The vast Outer Wall which ringed Clovenstone was roughly circular, with four gates in it: north, south, east and west. This road that he was walking down must be the way from the Keep to Southerly Gate. In the days of the Lych Lord whole armies had marched down it, off to carry terror and war to the lands of men. The buildings on either side would have been their barracks and armouries, their kitchens and saddleries and the stables for their steeds. Now there were only ruins, subsiding into the undergrowth like sinking galleons. Everything was furred thick with dense green moss and filled with dim green light and the song of unseen birds and the chuckle of running water. Streams which had once run obediently along neat channels of dressed stone had now escaped to find their own ways through the wood, sometimes flowing knee-deep across depressions in the old roadway.

Leaving the road, Skarper pushed his way through the undergrowth to start exploring the old buildings. He soon decided that he did not much like them. Even before they rotted into ruin they must have been mean, cramped, low-ceilinged places. Now they were floored with heaps of slates or mouldered thatch that had slumped down through their roofs as the rafters rotted. Goblins from Blackspike and the other towers had long since taken any treasure they had held, but in many of the rooms lay bones, and in high corners the black bees of Clovenstone had built huge paper nests from which low and dangerous buzzings emerged whenever Skarper blundered too close. He was pretty sure that worse things than bees had made their homes among the ruins, too. His ears kept prickling: a sure sign that he was being watched. Scuttling sounds and half-glimpsed movements filled the shadows. The trees creaked and whispered, peering down at him through the holes where roofs had been.

Warily, he found his way back to the old road. He could do better for himself, he decided, if he kept going south; Stenoryon’s map had shown great bastions just inside Southerly Gate, and now that he cast his mind back, Skarper thought that he might have glimpsed them for himself, while he was falling. So he kept walking, picking handfuls of dead thistles to munch and enjoying their peppery flavour, until the road turned into shallow stairs, descending into a valley where the trees grew even more thickly, winding their leafless, moss-shaggy branches together in great green nets which overhung a river full of big stones.

Skarper guessed at once that this must be the River Oeth, which flowed down out of the Oeth Moors and curved through the outer regions of Clovenstone before flowing on to meet the sea. It was swift and white and startlingly loud, but he was glad to see it, because he knew that once he was on the far side of it he would be only a short way from Southerly Gate. The old buildings crowded empty-eyed along either bank of the river, their walls so thick with moss that they seemed to be made of green fur. The road spanned it on a bridge; not one of the primitive clapper bridges which goblins made to cross the streams behind the Inner Wall, but a proper, man-built bridge, with piers and buttresses and things. It must have been elegant back in better days but was now looking overgrown and crumbledown and rather sorry for itself.

It was just the sort of place where trolls might lurk, according to the books that Skarper had read. He had never seen a troll and wasn’t completely sure that they existed, but after his meeting with the cloud maidens he wasn’t going to take any chances, so before he crossed the bridge he went carefully down the riverbank and peered beneath it.

Nothing stirred in the green shadows, but the place still made him uneasy. The ferns and mosses grew so thick beneath the bridge that he could not see all the way through. He climbed back to the road and was about to go down and take a look from the other side when a voice from the far side of the river called: “Aha!”

Skarper looked up. There, striding towards him across the bridge, was a softling; a human; a real, live, actual human being: quite a young one by the look of him, with a dark cloak, travel-stained boots and breeches and a leather tunic with iron studs. Skarper stared at him. He had heard of softlings venturing into Clovenstone – outlaws and fortune hunters, drawn by stories of the Lych Lord’s treasure chambers – and he had seen the skulls of some of them, decorating King Knobbler’s kinging chair. But it had not occurred to him that he might actually meet one, and he could only stand and watch as the softling swung a long sword down from his shoulder. Hanging from its notched and obviously not very sharp blade were various bags and satchels and blanket bundles, which the softling hastily unhooked and shed on the flagstones of the bridge as he hurried across it towards Skarper.

Skarper ducked, and felt the blade slice through the air where his head had just been.

“Stand and fight, foul troll!” the softling shouted.

“I’m not a troll!” Skarper said indignantly, scuttling sideways.

The softling swung at him again. “I saw you with my own eyes!” he cried. “You were creeping out from under this bridge to waylay me!”

“I’m not waylaying anybody!” shouted Skarper.

“You lie!” said the softling, panting with the effort of swinging that big sword to and fro as Skarper ducked beneath it. “Stand still, can’t you? Make your peace with your fell trollish gods and prepare to die!”

“Trolls are taller!” shouted Skarper. “Much taller! I’ve seen woodcuts. . .”

Dodging past the swordsman, he turned and started to flee over the bridge, but as he set his foot on it there came a wet, echoey roar from below, and out from among the moss and the ferns beneath the arch there oozed a great grey-green shape. Thick-fingered hands seized the parapet as the figure heaved itself up to block the bridge; dull dark eyes gleamed hungrily behind a fall of pondweed hair; a gout of vapour and a musty smell enveloped Skarper as its broad mouth opened to let out another roar.

He pointed at it, and turned to look back at his attacker. “Now that’s a troll,” he said.