Poopy Joe walked into the wall again.

He did it with great dignity. He took three slow, creaking steps across the pool chamber, carrying Garnel’s inkpot in front of him like a crown on a cushion, and walked face first into the pale Ethium stone. Then he stood there, nose to the wall, waiting for the wall to move.

“He’s still learning,” said Garnel.

“He’s been learning for an hour,” said Nibbles.

“Left, Joe,” Garnel called. “Your other left.”

Poopy Joe considered this. He turned right, with enormous care, and walked into a pillar.

Dave laughed so hard he had to sit down. It was easy, most of the time, to forget that Dave was seven. He was six foot seven and covered in copper scales, and he could roll a ball of fire down a corridor full of duergar. But when a zombie walked into a pillar, he looked exactly like what he was, which was a small boy who had just seen the funniest thing in the world.

“Do it again,” he said. “Joe! Do it again!”

“Please don’t encourage him,” said Garnel, rescuing the inkpot.

The pool chamber had changed in the short time they had been away. The rubble was swept into tidy heaps. Garnel’s papers covered every flat surface, weighted down with brass lenses and the occasional skull. The water glowed its gentle blue in the basin, steady as a heartbeat, and the cleansed zombie Nibbles had named Poopy Joe now stood upright in his peat-stained leather, smelling only a little of compost, and bowing politely to anyone who looked at him. Garnel had worked out how the old wizard’s magic had bound him, and how the pool could soften it. The result was not quite a servant and not quite a friend, but he tried very hard at both.

Derek watched Joe bow to a bucket.

“Is he dangerous?” he asked.

“Only to furniture,” said Garnel.

---

They told Garnel everything over supper, which was dried meat, the last of the road bread, and whatever Nibbles was prepared to share. The statues that came to life when their stones were touched. The black lake, and the voice in the dark that had asked for help. The grey dwarves who could vanish and grow to twice their height. The table that showed the past, and then, with a glitch like a skipped heartbeat, the present. The worm. The gates.

Garnel listened with his spectacles pushed up into his hair and his charcoal pencil moving so fast it smoked. When they described the Viewing Table he spread Dave’s drawing out beside him and kept tapping it. When they told him it had shown them this room, and him in it, he stopped writing altogether.

“It saw me,” he said. “Right here. While I was working.”

“You were tracing runes,” said Derek. “With your tongue sticking out.”

Garnel looked at the walls around him with new respect, as if they might be listening. Then he looked at the passage leading east, towards the halls and the gates and whatever lay behind them.

“Grandmother would have given anything to see that table,” he said quietly.

Nobody said anything for a while.

Thorn was the one who said what they had all been thinking. “We’re not going back down there. Not yet.” He laid his two axes on the stone floor in front of him, the old one from home and the rune-etched Ethium blade from the alcove, and looked at them as though they had been part of the conversation. “Those dwarves had an army behind those gates. Spiders the size of carts. And something that ate a quaggoth in one bite.”

“The worm ate the quaggoth,” said Nibbles. “The dwarves ate the worm.”

“Drove off the worm.”

“Same thing, for the worm.”

“My point,” said Thorn, with the patience of a hero whose companions never let him finish a speech, “is that we have done what Tobbs asked. We have found stones. We have more stones than anyone has found in a hundred years. We should take them home.”

Nibbles had already taken them out. He had a habit, when the word home was used, of counting things. He laid the Ethium Stones out on the floor in a row, the three from the statue hall and the one from the manor cellar, and put a small heap of coins beside each, as though the stones might be persuaded to tell him how much they were worth.

“Tobbs pays fifty gold a stone,” he said. “After the first. Which is robbery. These are ancient magical artefacts that we fought animated statues for.” He pointed at the last one. “We fought skeletons for that one.”

“So we tell him that,” said Dave.

“So I negotiate,” said Nibbles, and wrote something in his ledger, which nobody else was allowed to read.

Derek, sitting slightly apart with his back against a pillar, counted the stones, then counted the companions, then counted the stones again, in the manner of someone who had been responsible for other people for a very long time and expected to be responsible for them for a long time yet.

“We go home,” he said. “We rest tonight. We leave in the morning.”

It was not a question. The thing about Derek was that it rarely was.

---

They slept by the pool, and woke healed. That was the pool’s gift, and none of them had stopped being amazed by it: the soft blue warmth that crept into stiff shoulders and bruised ribs during the night, so that by morning the cuts of the last three days had closed to thin pink lines and even Nibbles, who had been hit by more things than anyone else, sat up without groaning.

“I want one of these at home,” said Dave.

“You can’t put it in a bag, Dave.”

“I could if it was a bigger bag.”

That last morning, Garnel woke the axe.

Thorn had laid his two axes out on the stone to clean them, the way he did every morning, and Garnel came and crouched beside the rune-etched one with a lens in his eye, and a page of his grandmother’s notes in one hand, and an expression of great nervousness.

“I think I’ve found it,” he said. “A stone, a socket and the right words. Grandmother wrote down a phrase for binding things to stones. I’ve never tried it. It might do nothing. It might do something terrible.”

“How terrible?” said Thorn, who loved that axe.

“I’ll be careful,” said Garnel, which was not an answer.

Dave sat down right beside him with the back of his spellbook open, where he kept his list. He had been keeping it since the Blue Moon. Every Ethium word anyone had said in front of him was written there in large careful letters, with what it did beside it: AETHRA LUMIS = LIGHT. VAELUM THRAE = POOL (HEALING). He licked the end of his pencil and waited.

Garnel carried the axe to the nearest pillar and pressed the flat of the blade against the glowing stone in its socket. He took a deep breath.

“Kaelith Vorn,” he said.

The rune on the axe head blazed blue.

It was not the soft glow of the stones. It was a bright, hard, singing light, and it ran out of the rune and along the edge of the blade like water finding a crack, and for a moment the whole pool chamber rang with a note like a struck bell. Then the light sank back into the steel and stayed there, a thin bright line of blue along the edge that pulsed, very slowly, like the pool.

Everyone stared at it. Garnel stared hardest of all.

“It worked,” he whispered. “Bind and connect. It ties a thing to a stone. It actually worked.”

“How do you spell it?” said Dave.

Garnel spelled it. Dave wrote KAELITH VORN = WAKES THINGS UP (AXES) in his biggest letters, underlined it twice, and then, after some thought, added a small drawing of an axe with lines coming off it.

Thorn took the axe back with both hands, the way you would take back a baby that has learned to walk while you weren’t looking. He turned it in the light. He swung it, once. The air hummed. It was lighter than before, and it sat in his grip as if it had been waiting all this time for exactly this.

“Garnel,” said Thorn, very seriously, “that is the best thing anyone has ever done for me.”

Garnel went pink to the tips of his ears.

The question was what to do with Poopy Joe. He could not climb, and he could not be trusted with stairs, and he had developed an attachment to the pool that bordered on devotion. Every time anyone tried to lead him towards the passage, he turned back to the water, and stood at the edge of the basin, swaying slightly, like a sentry.

“He wants to stay,” said Garnel.

“He can guard it,” said Thorn. He said it seriously, and he meant it, and he went and stood in front of the zombie and looked him in his empty eyes. “Joe. You’re on guard. Nobody gets in. Understand?”

Poopy Joe bowed, and then, very slowly, turned to face the doorway, and stayed that way.

Dave sniffed. “He’s so brave.”

“He’s a zombie, Dave.”

“A brave zombie.”

Garnel packed his notes into three satchels and a sack, and announced that he was coming with them. He had, he said, a great deal to tell Tobbs about the pool, and the table, and the network that the table seemed to belong to, and he could not possibly explain it in a letter, and besides, he had not slept in a real bed since the Hammers had taken him from Sunfall.

“And you’ll need someone to read the runes,” he added.

“What runes?” said Thorn.

“Any runes,” said Garnel. “There are always runes.”

---

The way back was quiet, which none of them trusted.

They climbed the stair from the pool chamber, past the swinging maul still wedged harmlessly with its iron spike, past the rune chamber where they had first found Garnel, past the alcove where Poopy Joe had once grabbed Nibbles by the wrist. The ruined tower stood as they had left it. The bound Hammers were long gone, and someone had taken their tents, but the cookfire was cold and nobody waited in the trees. They walked out of the broken arch into a morning so bright and clean, after days underground, that Dave stood blinking in it like a mole.

Across the plateau they went, the same way they had come. Loki ran ahead through the long grass, came back, ran ahead again. The ruins of Ethium stretched away on every side under the wide sky: foundations and fallen walls and roads that went nowhere, the bones of the great city, and far to the north-east, on its cliff-ringed hill, the blackened outline of the castle. They did not go near it. Nobody suggested they should.

Dave asked whether they were nearly there four times before lunch.

“Nearly where?” said Derek, the fourth time.

“Home.”

“It’s three days, Dave.”

“Is it three days now, or three days from this morning?”

Derek thought about this for longer than it deserved, and then said, “Yes.”

They camped that night at the old shrine, where they had slept on the way in. It was as they remembered it: half sunk into the earth, its roof fallen, ivy over everything, and in the middle the pale Ethium altar with its little worked stones, still faintly warm, still pulsing slowly under the hand. They slept well again. Garnel spent an hour on his knees at the altar with a lens and a candle, muttering. Nibbles spent an hour trying to work out whether the warm stones would come out of the altar, until Thorn told him to stop, and then spent another hour pretending he had stopped.

In the morning, there were still exactly as many stones in the altar as there had been.

Derek checked.

---

They heard the waterfall long before they saw it: a deep, steady roar that came up through their boots. And then, under the roar, something else. Shouting. Goblin voices, high and furious. The clank of chain on stone. And a sound none of them had heard before, a bellow so low and so loud that the birds burst out of the bushes on either side of the track.

Thorn raised his hand. Everyone stopped.

They crept to the edge of the rise and looked down.

The river ran wide and fast across the top of the plateau here, the last stretch before it threw itself off the cliff in its long white sheet. A line of flat stepping stones crossed it, slick and dark with spray, each one big enough to stand on and not much more. And in the middle of the stepping stones, up to its knees in the rushing water, was an ogre.

It was nine feet tall and wider than a cart. It had a greasy leather tunic, a face like a sack of potatoes somebody had sat on, and heavy iron cuffs on both ankles, from which hung two long chains. On the end of each chain, at the riverbank, half a dozen goblins were pulling with all their strength, screaming instructions at each other and at the ogre, which was ignoring all of them. Every few seconds it swung round, yanked its leg, and sent a row of goblins skidding face first through the mud.

“Is that their ogre?” whispered Dave.

“I think the ogre has its own opinion about that,” said Derek.

A goblin waved a leg of mutton at the ogre’s head, trying to lure it towards the bank. The ogre snatched the mutton, ate it, and sat down in the river.

“They’re losing,” said Nibbles, with the critical interest of a man watching a badly run business.

“We could just wait,” said Garnel hopefully. “Let them sort it out.”

That was when the hobgoblin arrived.

He came up from below, from a little stone guard post built into the rocks at the very lip of the falls, and he was not like the goblins. He was tall and straight-backed, in armour lacquered dark red, with a long sword on his back and the bearing of someone who expected to be obeyed. Behind him came two bugbears, huge and shaggy, carrying morningstars. The hobgoblin took one look at the shambles on the riverbank, and then he turned his head and looked directly up the rise, at the six faces peering over it.

He smiled.

“Well,” said Derek. “He’s seen us.”

---

There was no more time for plans. The bugbears came up the slope, and the goblins, seeing an enemy they might actually be able to fight, dropped the chains and came with them.

Thorn met the first bugbear at the top of the rise with his shield up and both feet planted. The morningstar crashed into the shield and the shock went all the way to his shoulder, but he held, and swung back, and the Ethium axe bit deep. Loki went for the second bugbear’s ankles. Garnel, crouching behind a rock, stuck his head up just long enough to send a bolt of fire whistling past Thorn’s ear, apologising as he did it.

Dave, standing slightly too far forward as usual, flung both hands out and let fly. The potatoes came out in a tight, furious burst, three of them, each glowing faintly, and each one found a goblin. Two sat down. The third looked at the potato that had hit it, picked it up, and wondered briefly whether it was dinner.

“I meant to do that!” shouted Dave, who had.

The fight spilled down to the river. The goblins scattered along the bank and out onto the stepping stones, and the companions went after them, jumping from stone to stone with the water roaring beneath them and the spray soaking them to the skin. It was the strangest battlefield they had ever fought on. Every stone was a tiny island. You could not step back without stepping into the river. And behind it all, the edge of the world, where the water simply ended and fell away into white thunder.

The ogre, meanwhile, had noticed that nobody was holding its chains any more.

It stood up.

It looked around for the most interesting thing in the river, and the most interesting thing in the river was Nibbles, who was halfway across the stepping stones with his sword out, shouting at a goblin about the poor quality of its armour.

Nibbles was, by now, quite used to being the one who got hit. It had become, among the companions, something like a tradition. When the bugbear had come down the waterfall path, it had hit Nibbles. When the otyugh had come out of the lake, it had grabbed Nibbles. When the grey worm had burst through the wall, it had gone for Nibbles first. There was no explanation for it. Some people are lucky with dice and some people are Nibbles.

The ogre’s fist hit him so hard he left the stepping stone entirely.

He landed in the shallows ten feet away with a noise like a dropped sack, and lay there, blinking at the sky.

“I’m fine,” he said, from the water. “I’m absolutely fine. I’d like to make a complaint.”

Derek was already moving. He had been patient for a very long time. He had been patient through the goblins and the manor and the climb and the lake and the worm, and through three days of being asked whether they were nearly there. He had been patient with Nibbles, which took more patience than everything else put together. And the ogre had hit Nibbles.

Derek did not shout. He simply crossed four stepping stones in what seemed like a single stride, and the warhammer came up, and came down, and the ogre, which had never in its life been afraid of a dwarf, suddenly discovered that it had been wrong about that.

It was a short conversation. The hammer did most of the talking.

By the time the ogre sat down in the river for the second and final time, Thorn had fished Nibbles out of the shallows, and Derek was standing on a stepping stone looking slightly embarrassed, the way he always did afterwards.

“Sorry,” he said. “He shouldn’t have done that.”

---

The hobgoblin had seen enough.

While his bugbears fell and his goblins fled in every direction, he had been backing away, stone by stone, towards the far bank and the path that led up and away into the north-east, towards the great hill. He was not running. Hobgoblins do not run. But he was leaving, briskly, with the air of someone who had somewhere important to report to.

Thorn saw him go, and went after him.

The hobgoblin heard the splash of boots behind him and turned on the last stepping stone before the bank, sword drawn, perfectly balanced. He was good. Their swords met once, twice, three times, and the hobgoblin gave no ground at all. Behind them the waterfall thundered. Spray hung in the air like smoke. Thorn could feel the stone slick under his feet, and could feel, too, that the hobgoblin was waiting for him to slip.

So Thorn did not try to beat him. He did the thing his old teachers had drilled into him, the thing a fighter learns on narrow ledges: he stopped trying to hit the hobgoblin, and hit the space where the hobgoblin was standing. The axe came round flat, and the shoulder came in behind it, and the hobgoblin, for the first time, gave ground. One step. There was no ground behind him.

He went into the river.

For a moment he was up again, gasping, his red armour dragging at him, still clutching his sword, and the current had him. The companions watched from the stepping stones. The hobgoblin captain went sliding down the last smooth stretch of the river, faster and faster, and did not look frightened, only furious. Then he reached the edge, and the white water took him, and he was gone over the falls.

Nobody spoke for a little while.

“That,” said Dave eventually, in a voice full of awe, “was the coolest thing I have ever seen.”

Thorn found he was shaking slightly, and pretended he was cold.

---

They chased down the last of the goblins along the bank, and found them in the end hiding in the guard post and under bushes and, in one case, inside an empty barrel, and they tied them up, or chased them off down the slope, until the riverbank was quiet.

All but one.

None of them saw it. It had been at the very back of the chain gang when everything began, a small, thin goblin with ears like torn sails, and while everyone else was busy with the ogre it had simply put down its end of the chain and walked away into the long grass. Now it was half a mile off, and climbing, scurrying up the long slope towards the north-east, where the great hill stood against the sky with its blackened castle on top. It did not stop. It did not look back. It had news to carry, and it was carrying it to someone who would want to hear it very much.

---

The climb down the falls was wet, and slow, and blessedly uneventful. At the bottom, the old standing stones still leaned together in the spray like gossiping giants, exactly as they had on the way up. Beyond them the path wound down through the broken hills, and the next day the burial mounds rose out of the grass around them again, green-backed and silent, where the axe beaks had come thundering over the rise all those days ago.

Nibbles walked slower than usual. Derek walked beside him without making a fuss about it.

And somewhere among the mounds, without anyone deciding to, they began to remember.

It started with Dave, of course. “Do you remember,” he said, “the goblin with the curtain?”

“Ratbag’s owner,” said Thorn.

“Ratbag,” said Nibbles fondly, as one would of an old enemy.

“Do you remember Nibbles finding a button?”

“It was a very good button.”

“Do you remember the pie?”

They walked for most of a day remembering. The fake gold on the North Road, thin as cheese. Mara furious in her cage. The Blue Moon, and the tavern brawl, and Dave’s pie on the floor. The manor cellar, the skeletons, Rulden and his letter. The wolves, the axe beaks, the drumsticks the size of hams. The waterfall on the way up, which they had climbed when they were still a little bit afraid of everything. The dragon. The tower, and the alcove, and the first time they saw the pool. The dead wizard. The statues, the lake, the worm.

Garnel walked behind them with his notebook open, writing down everything they said, and occasionally asking a question, and occasionally laughing so hard he had to stop walking.

“You should write all this down properly,” he said. “One day. Somebody should.”

“Somebody should,” agreed Derek.

Thorn, at the front, said nothing. He was thinking that they had left Fallcrest as four strangers and a dog, and that he could not now remember what that had been like.

---

On the third morning the land flattened, the hedges came back, and they came out at last onto the river road, broad and pale and dusty in the sunshine. Fallcrest was less than a day away. Dave did not need to ask whether they were nearly there. They all knew.

Loki stopped.

His ears went up. His tail went still. He stared down the road to the south, where it bent round a stand of trees, and growled, very low.

Above the trees, a thin grey line was rising into the clear sky.

Smoke.