Carnglaze was as good as his word. At low tide the next morning Knobbler went hurrying along the causeway to the High King’s castle, wearing his fanciest frock and bearing a letter that explained the urgency of Henwyn and Skarper’s mission. But kings like to do things in their own good time. Three days passed, and still the two friends were lodging at the house of Carnglaze, awaiting their summons to Boskennack.

At least they knew their dwarvish rivals were waiting too. Each morning Skarper left the house on the Street of Antiquaries and went scampering goblin-fashion over the city’s rooftops and chimney pots until he reached the tavern called The Sleepy Mermaid. By listening to the potboys and ostlers who lounged about in its courtyard on their breaks, he soon learned that the dwarves had rented rooms down in the cellar. (It was obvious, when you thought about it, that dwarves would feel more at home underground.)

For someone who had grown up slinking and sneaking around in the goblin mazes of Blackspike Tower, it was easy to creep unnoticed down the steps into the gloomy, paved area outside the cellar entrance. The cellar had a door and a window, and the dwarves kept the door bolted and the windows shuttered, but Skarper’s sharp goblin ears had no trouble hearing their gruff voices as they talked together inside. There were four of them: Surveyor Durgar, his daughter Etty, and two lesser dwarves, Langstone and Walna, who seemed to have come along mainly to carry things and be scolded by Durgar. Each morning Skarper heard Durgar tell the others, “We must send word to Boskennack again. We have to see that bigling king at once, so we can give our side of the story before these goblins and their friends can ask his help.”

“The bigling king would not help goblins, would he, Dad?” asked Etty, the first morning.

“Who knows, with biglings?” Durgar had replied gloomily.

It was all welcome news to Skarper. The dwarves were no closer to a meeting with the High King than he and Henwyn were, and they did not have Carnglaze to speed things along for them. The more gloomy Durgar got, the better, as far as Skarper could see.

Then, on the third morning, Skarper was caught. He was hanging from a water pipe that ran down the wall beside the cellar window, listening to Durgar grumble inside, when suddenly someone took hold of his tail by the ginger tuft on the end and tugged it as if it were a bell pull.

“Bumcakes!” said Skarper, losing his grip and landing with a thud on the cobbles below.

The dwarf girl, Etty, was looking down at him. She must have come outside very quietly while he was busy listening to the others. Usually the scent of her would have warned him, but Mistress Carnglaze had made him wash that morning, and the clean ungobliny odour of the soap still clung to him, spoiling his sense of smell. Not only that, but Etty had been using the same soap – it was a Coriander speciality, made from kelp and sold in big cakes at the Soapmarket – so she smelled just the same, and not like a dwarf at all.

“Ugly gargoyle!” she said angrily. “What are you doing? Spying, I’ll be bound!”

There was no point in denying it. “I have to have some way to pass the time,” Skarper said. “We’re waiting to see the High King, just like you.”

The girl’s anger faded. After being cooped up in a cellar with only three grumpy dwarves for company, she was glad of somebody new to talk to, even if he was only a goblin. “Oh, isn’t it boring?” she said. “We’ve been waiting for days and days. And my father won’t even let us leave our rooms, for fear we’ll be jeered and pointed at by biglings, or trampled by their great big horses, or run over by their mighty wagons.”

“How did you get here?” asked Skarper, thinking that the dwarves should have got used to being pointed at and trampled if they’d come along the main road like Henwyn and himself.

“Through the tunnels, mostly,” Etty said. “Dwarves mined all this country long before biglings came, and a lot of the tunnels are still open. They are quicker than your roads, and we travel easier in the dark. But oh, I would dearly love to see something of this city of men! Is it very splendid?”

“Why not come with me now and take a look?” asked Skarper.

“Because you are a foul goblin!” said the girl, shocked. “Because you’re a sneaking, thieving maggot man who’ll murder me most probably!”

“No I wouldn’t!” said Skarper (although actually he did have a vague, goblinish plan to kidnap her and send notes to her father saying things like Leave Coriander NOW or you’ll never see your girl again).

Etty looked hard at him. “No,” she said, “I don’t believe you would.”

“Well, come on then,” said Skarper. “It can’t do any harm, unless your father finds out.”

Etty shrugged. “We dwarves mostly sleep by day. They’re all off to their beds now, and they think I was in mine ten minutes ago.”

“Come on, then,” Skarper said.

The girl pulled her black glass goggles out of a pouch on her belt and put them on as she followed Skarper up the steps, out of the basement shadows. Skarper wondered whether he should kidnap her straight away or wait a bit. He decided to wait: she was a sturdy little person, and seemed more than able to look after herself. In fact, he realized, kidnapping her would probably be impossible unless he could find Henwyn and persuade him to help, and he was fairly sure that Henwyn did not approve of kidnapping.

So he abandoned the kidnap plan and came up with an easier one. He’d just learn all he could from Etty about the dwarves and their designs on Clovenstone. As he followed her through the streets he began thinking up cunning questions which would make her reveal all sorts of secrets about the dwarves and their schemes.

But Etty had questions of her own.

“Why such big houses?” she asked. “And why so many?”

“Softlings – biglings as you call them – are big folk,” said Skarper. “And they have a home for each family, if they can.”

Behind her tinted goggles Etty’s eyes were two O’s of amazement. She turned around, staring up at the tall fronts of the houses. “Just one family in each of these great places? Oh, what wanton waste!”

“Don’t dwarves have houses, down underground?” asked Skarper, pulling her out of the path of a passing cart.

“Oh no!” said Etty, and began to tell him in great detail about how dwarves lived. In their great dark burrows each family was allowed one small cell. They did not need much space because they had no possessions; they just signed out the clothes and tools and lanterns that they needed from communal stores, and returned them when they needed them no longer. It sounded horrible to Skarper, but he kept listening politely, and went “Oh!” and “Mmm,” and “Really?” whenever he felt that Etty expected it of him. By the time they reached the flower market he had learned far more than he could hope to remember about the ways of the dwarves, and each new thing she saw set Etty off on a new tale of Life Underground.

“Oh, so these are flowers! They are pretty! All we see of flowers usually is their roots, dangling down through the ceiling where a burrow goes too close to the surface. I’ve often wondered what the top parts look like!” Then the sight of all the people milling about among the market stalls caught her attention, and before Skarper could think of anything useful to say about flowers she was off in another direction. “Aren’t there a lot of different jobs for biglings? With us there are only a few. You are a miner or a smith or a surveyor, or a farmer or a warrior or a dwarfwife. I should have liked to be a surveyor like my pa, but the Head says I’m to be a dwarfwife, so that’s that. In two summers’ time, when I am old enough, I shall be wed to Langstone, Father’s deputy.”

Skarper had seen Langstone at The Sleepy Mermaid. He was a rather pompous young dwarf, with a splendid, gingery, forked beard, which he kept combing the tangles out of with a little bone comb. Hurrying to keep up with Etty as she strode on through the market and out into the streets beyond, Skarper wondered who had the right to tell her she had to get wed at all, especially to someone like Langstone. “Who is this ‘head’?” he asked breathlessly. “I remember old Glunt mentioning him. . .”

Etty stopped and stared at him. “Of course! You don’t know about the Head! Poor you! Imagine having to live without the Head to guide you and tell you what you must do!”

Skarper recalled the shining head he’d seen upon the shields and banners of the dwarves. “Who is he, then?” he asked again. “Some super-dwarf? A king?”

Etty laughed. “Dwarves do not have kings! Kings are just people, and might have silly ideas, or make bad decisions based on nothing but how they happen to be feeling that day. That is why all the wisest of the dwarves got together, long ago, and made the Brazen Head.”

“So it’s a statue?”

“Yes, I suppose so. And it tells us what to do.”

“You mean it talks?”

“Not in words; not speaking, like. But the overseers write questions for it on stones, and it answers on other stones. It is magic, I suppose. Dwarf magic. Smithy magic. It tells us what to mine and where, and it decides whether young dwarves should become miners or surveyors or farmers or whatever.”

“But what if they want to decide that for themselves?” asked Skarper, who would have hated having some bossy Brazen Head telling him what to do. “Like you: you want to be a surveyor, so why can’t you? Why can’t you do what you want?”

“Oh, that wouldn’t work!” said Etty. “What if everybody wanted to be surveyors and nobody wanted to be a miner? What if everyone decided to be farmers? ‘The Head Knows All, and the Head Knows Best’, as we say in Dwarvenholm. Like at the moment, it must have known we were going to have a war with you goblins because it has been telling the overseers that we need more warriors. And more dwarfwives, of course, to have babies to replace the dwarves who fall in battle.”

“But why have a war at all?” said Skarper. “Why come pinching our slowsilver when you could go and mine something else, in some other place. It’s not like the north is a busy place. It’s not like it’s crowded.”

Etty shook her head firmly. “The Head has told us to mine slowsilver,” she said. “For years it has been asking us for iron and tin and bronze, but now it wants slowsilver, and the only fresh slowsilver we know of is at Clovenstone.”

Skarper decided that he definitely didn’t like this Head.

They came to Coriander’s waterfront. The tide was right out now. People were walking and riding across the causeway which separated the city from Boskennack. Up in the High King’s citadel, trumpets sounded, announcing the start of the new day.

“Oh!” said Etty, delighted with it all. “How I wish I could go surveying, and see something of this big old world!”

“If you’d stop listening to that old Head of yours, you could,” said Skarper. “You could stop pestering other people and trying to take what’s theirs, too.”

“‘The Head Knows All, and the Head Knows Best’,” Etty repeated sternly. Then, as if sensing that she’d hurt Skarper’s feelings, she rummaged in her pouch again and pulled out a strange object. “Here,” she said. “Breakfast for you. Supper for me. We’ll share.”

“What is it?” asked Skarper. It looked like a fat envelope made of concrete.

“’Tis a pasty, of course!” said Etty. “Proper dwarven food. Meat and vegetables in one end, fruit in the other. Which will you have?”

“Bit of both, please,” said Skarper.

So Etty broke bits off for him and they sat together on the sea wall eating it, waving their arms occasionally to ward off hungry gulls. It was, to Skarper’s surprise, Quite Tasty. And when it was finished, Etty said that she must be getting back to her people, and Skarper agreed that he must be getting back to Henwyn, and so they parted, still not sure if they were friends or enemies.