Free Runemarks by Joanne Harris

said the goblin. “The minute the Captain learns you’re here—”
    “Then you’ll have to make sure he doesn’t,” she said. “Now, I can’t possibly find my way around this place on my own—”
    “Look,” said the goblin, “if it’s the ale you’re after, then I can get it back, no trouble—”
    “It isn’t the ale,” said Maddy.
    “Then what is it?”
    “I don’t know,” she said. “But you’re going to help me find it.”
             
    It took some minutes to convince Sugar that he had no choice. But goblins are simple creatures, and he was not blind to the fact that the sooner Maddy had what she wanted, the sooner she would be out of his way.
    However, he was clearly very much in awe of the individual he called the Captain, and Maddy soon realized that it would be best if she did not confront her new ally with too great a conflict of loyalties.
    “So who is he, this captain of yours?”
    The goblin sniffed and looked away.
    “Oh, come on, Sugar. He must have a name.”
    “Course he has.”
    “Well?”
    The goblin shrugged expressively. It was a shrug that began at the tips of his furry ears and went all the way down to his clawed feet, making every link of his chain mail shiver.
    “Call him Sky Trekker, if you like, or Wildfire, or Crookmouth, or Hawk-Eye, or Dogstar. Call him Airy, call him Wary—”
    “Not his nicknames, Sugar. His
real
name.”
    The goblin made a face. “You think he’d tell
me
?”
    For a while Maddy thought hard. One-Eye had warned her that he might not be the only one with interests under the Hill, and the webwork of glamours she had encountered on her way in confirmed his suspicions. But the goblins’ captain—most likely a goblin himself, or maybe a big cave-troll—could
he
be the one of which her friend had spoken? It seemed unlikely—no goblin had woven those spells.
    Still, she thought, it was worth finding out more about this captain person and any threat he might represent. But Sugar was annoyingly vague; his attention span was catlike at the best of times, and as soon as the conversation turned to details of where, why, and how, he simply lost interest.
    “So, what’s your captain like?” she said.
    Sugar frowned and scratched his head. “I think the word is
volatile,
” he said at last. “Yeh, that’s the word I’m lookin’ for. Volatile and
narsty.
Tricky too.”
    “I meant, what does he
look
like?” persisted Maddy.
    “Just pray you don’t see him,” said Sugar darkly.
    “Great,” said Maddy.
    In silence, they moved on.

2
    According to legend, the world beneath the Middle World is divided into three levels, linked by one great river. World Below is the realm of the Mountain People, the goblins, trolls, and dwarves. Beneath that is Hel’s kingdom, traditionally given over to the dead, then Dream, one of the three great tributaries of the Cauldron of Rivers, and lastly, at the very door of Chaos, Netherworld, known to some as the Black Fortress, where Surt the Destroyer guards the gate and the gods themselves have no dominion.
    Maddy already knew this, of course. One-Eye’s teachings had been thorough on all matters concerning the geography of the Nine Worlds. But what she had not suspected was the monstrous
scale
of World Below: the countless passageways, tunnels, alcoves, and lairs that made up the underside of the Hill. There were rifts and fissures and crannies and nooks; and dugouts and dens; and side passages, storerooms, walkways, and potholes, burrows and warrens and larders and pits. And after what seemed like hours of searching through these, Maddy’s excitement at actually being in the fabled halls was starting to fade visibly as she began to understand that, even with Sugar’s reluctant help, she was unlikely to be able to cover even the hundredth part of them.
    They found goblins only on the top level of the great gallery. Cat-faced, golden-eyed, squirrel-tailed, all dressed in mail and rags and leather, they