Free Goblin Quest by Philip Reeve

Redcap with all the other Chilli Hats.”
    â€œMaybe he’s forgotten about the Elvenhorn,” said Zeewa hopefully. “Maybe he’s found something else to scratch his back with.”
    â€œI hope you’re right,” said Skarper. “I hope we never hears another word about that rubbish old horn.”
    But he was out of luck, because they had no sooner passed inside the wall than Fentongoose and Dr Prong came running out to meet them.
    A “Hello, Henwyn,” might have been nice, Henwyn thought. Or even a “Henwyn, how pleased we are that you are still alive!” But the two old philosophers had no time for pleasantries of that sort.
    â€œSkarper! Zeewa!” they shouted. “Do you still have the Elvenhorn?”
    â€œTell us you do! Tell us you did not give it to the Sheep Lords!”
    â€œIt is vitally important that, whatever happens, we must not let Prince Rhind take it!”

While Skarper and Zeewa had been fetching the Elvenhorn and exchanging it for Henwyn, Fentongoose and Doctor Prong had been hard at work in Fentongoose’s library. This was an old guardhouse near the cheesery, its walls lined with badly made bookshelves on which the former sorcerer had arranged all the books and maps and scrolls and papers that he had been able to salvage from the goblins’ bumwipe heaps. The Lych Lord, back in the days when he ruled Clovenstone, had gathered books from all the lands that he had conquered; so many books that, even though the goblins had been ripping them up to wipe their bottoms on for the past hundred years, the ones which were left still formed a collection bigger than any other in the Westlands.
    Fentongoose delighted in his library. When he was not too busy trying to teach manners to the goblin hatchlings, he would spend his time reading and rearranging the books. Sometimes he arranged them alphabetically by title, sometimes by the name of the writer. Sometimes he grouped them by subject.
    At present, they were arranged by age. The newest volumes – fine leather-bound folios and grimoires no more than a few hundred years old – were at one end of the long stretch of shelves. Beyond them lay older books – handwritten, with pages made of parchment and vellum instead of paper. Then came the tight-rolled scrolls, dating from a time before books had been invented, and the bundles of clay tablets, baked in the book ovens of Barragan in days of old. And stacked on the floor in the furthest, darkest corner of the library lay the stone books, which were not really books at all, just leaves of slate or black marble on which some long-ago scribes had scratched crude word-pictures.
    Not many of these stone books had been gathered into the libraries of the Lych Lord, for they were rare. But the ones which had, had all survived because they were tougher by far than the books of baked clay, parchment or paper, and because the goblins never, ever used them for bumwipe – they were not very absorbent.
    It was on one of these ancient stones that Fentongoose had found a reference to the Elvenhorn. “I knew I had seen it mentioned somewhere before,” he said, while Skarper, Zeewa, Henwyn, and a few goblins who were not still asleep came clustering round the big table in the middle of the library.
    He and Dr Prong had spent all night trying to translate the ancient letters on the stone. They were faint and faded, and to untrained eyes they looked like rows and rows of tiny diagrams of different types of gate. Scrumpled and scribbled scraps of paper scattered on the floor showed what a struggle Prong and Fentongoose had had trying to tease out their meaning. But they had succeeded at last. What they had learned made everyone unhappy.
    â€œ Chronicle of the Autumn Islands, Recounting Our Salvation from the Great and Terrible Cushions ,” read Dr Prong, his face close to the stone, the tip of his finger running along the lines of scratchy