The Farrow Ridges

Daybreak found me down at the water’s edge, as arranged, waiting for Phineal Glyfphith to appear. It was to be his last day at the Farrow Lake, and he had promised to take me down into its depths before departing. As I looked out across the still water, my heart hammering in my chest, the Spirit of Keris broke the surface. Phineal opened the glass front of the magnificent vessel, and I jumped in.

‘Of course,’ he said, as I settled myself in the seat beside his, and he bolted the door shut, ‘normally I’d travel with the Keris filled with water. It makes it far easier when I’m navigating the underground tunnels. But today, Hedgethorn, with you – a lung-breather – on board, we shall descend with her chambers filled with air.’

He reached forward, and I watched his long webbed fingers dart expertly over the dive-levers. The vessel juddered and thrummed, and we started to descend. There was a loud hiss as the propulsion jet blasted, followed by the sound of bubbling as the steam funnel was submerged.

I’d dived down into the lake before, several times, but with my eyes filled with water, everything was always blurred and indistinct. This time was different. This time, as I stared out through the glass at the underwater scene, I could see as clearly as if I were still on the lakeside – clearer, in fact, for the curve of the glass magnified the incredible scene before me.

Nothing could have prepared me for that underwater world. There were shoals of fish – red fish, blue fish, orange and purple fish; striped and spotted fish, swimming this way, that way, shifting direction together, like sheets blowing in the wind. Sometimes a brave one among them would approach the glass and peer in, its eyes wide and unblinking, before losing its nerve and darting away with a flick of its tail. There were flotillas of curious beaked crustaceans that swam upright and snapped at passing shrimps and tiddlers. And as we neared the lakebed, I saw rocklobsters and lakecrabs scuttling over the sand and pebbles, and hiding in the tall, fronded lakeweeds that swayed like a mighty underwater forest.

I don’t know how long we stayed down there, but when the air inside the Spirit of Keris began to get warm and stuffy, Phineal suggested we re-surface. I nodded, and was about to sit back in my seat, when something large and blue caught my eye.

‘Over there,’ I breathed. ‘What’s that?’

Phineal looked, and scratched the crest on his head thoughtfully, before turning to me, a look of wonder in his eyes. ‘This is truly remarkable…’

He eased off the phraxthrust, brought us round and steered us across to the rocky outcrop where I’d seen it. And as we passed through a curtain of flowing reedgrass, it appeared before us, a large blue clam, almost the size of the Spirit of Keris itself. Its shell was nobbly and rough, and encrusted with sandwhelks and ropebarnacles that had made their homes uon it. As we approached, the two halves of the great bicuspid open up, and a blue light streamed out.

Leaving me clutching the controls of the Keris, Phineal left the phraxmarine by the rear hatch and swam over to the great clam. While I watched, he communed with it, as, he later informed me, do all the webfoot goblins of the Four Lakes. When he returned, his crest was glowing blue, more brightly than I’d ever seen it glow before – the blue of the great blueshell clam itself.

We rose to the surface of the lake in silence, and Phineal steered the phraxmarine to the shallows, where I jumped out. He climbed out beside me and tethered the Spirit of Keris to the wooden jetty, next to my bobbing corracle. He seemed to be in a trance. He stood at the end of the wooden walkway, staring out across the lake, then turned to me.

‘It seems I shall be staying here at the Farrow Lake longer than I thought, Hedgethorn.’

“My name is Grut-Tugg of the four neck rings, my birthing bundle is light and my hive-hut tall. I have wandered these forests you otherlanders call ‘the Western Woods’ since I was a pup tethered to my mother’s apron, and am a veteran of twenty-two fights, including the Battle of the Skies over the Great Farrow Lake.

It is of this you have asked me, otherlander, and it is of this I shall speak.

The hammerhead clans of the Western Woods had gathered in war council with the white trogs of the caverns of the Five Falls. They told us of the great skyships of the otherlanders that had lately taken to visiting the Farrow Lake, and of the extraordinary riches they said they contained. They are a hidden, secretive clan, strong and fearsome, but not schooled in the arts of battle.

And they sought our help.

We hammerheads were keen, for this raid promised to stretch our necks with many rings if the trogs’ stories were true. This was to be my first great battle after seven or so skirmishes with the flat-heads of the red pines and several small raids on the Black Lake underbiters, and I was greatly excited.

There were three hundred of us in the war party, and we gathered in the woods by the shore of the great Farrow Lake and waited for the signal from the white trogs. Sure enough, on the third day, one of the falls ran red with ochre-root stain, and we hurried to our positions in the treetops of High Ridge to await the arrival of the otherlanders’ skyship.

I am a hammerhead warrior and death holds no fear for me, but I still recall the shudder of terror that ran through me and my hive-fellows when we saw the immense skyship approach. For many of us, it was the first phraxship we had ever seen, and the booming thrum of its phraxchamber and the billowing steam pouring from its high funnel made a fearful impression.

The skyship came in to anchor at the Needles, as the white trogs had predicted, and its passengers and crew were about to disembark, when our clan leader, Hegg-Tut-Teg gave the ululating war scream. I and my hive-fellows jumped from the surrounding treetops down onto the deck of the great skyship. It was only when we landed on the fore-deck that we realized our deadly mistake.

This was not the vessel the white trogs had been anticipating; a sky tavern, as they called it, packed with rich otherlanders and fine produce from their fabled far-off cities. No, this was a troopship – though I learnt this only later – and it was packed with otherlander soldiers returning from a distant battle called the Battle of the Midwood Marshes.

The otherlander soldiers were drawn up in ranks on the aft-deck, their phraxmuskets trained on us, and I’ll never forget the sound of their leader’s voice as he ordered them to fire. Fifty of us fell in the first volley, followed by a hundred more, as the second and third ranks discharged their terrible weapons. The deck was splintered and awash with hammerhead blood as I threw myself clear of it and fell to the forest floor, twenty strides below the skyship’s mighty floating hull. 

We hammerheads are strong, but that fall almost killed me, only the boughs of the lufwood trees breaking my descent. Above me, I heard shrieks of rage and the clash of swords as the few survivors of our war party sold their lives dearly, but I could do nothing. My leg was broken and a phraxball had shattered my shoulder.

I lay there at the foot of the Five Falls ridge for most of the night, long after that terrible skyship had thrown our dead from its deck, taken on water, and departed for the otherlands. The white trogs found me and took me to their village in the jagged roof rocks of the underground cavern where, for many weeks, they tended my wounds, together with those of the few of my fellow warriors who survived.

When I was able, I forsook the great Farrow Lake and swore I would venture far into the forests, and keep a mighty distance between me and you otherlanders. From that day to this, that is what I have done – until I came across you and your otherlander companion last evening. You carry the fearsome phraxmusket I remember with dread, and you wear the pale jacket of the otherlander soldiers who defeated me, and for a moment, at the sight of you, I imagined you had come to take vengeance on me at last for the Battle of the Skies.

But I understand now that such things are in the past for you otherlanders. And so I am honoured to invite you into my hive-hut and feast with you until our trails divide…

[Interview with an old hammerhead warrior encountered by Forden Drew, on his expedition to the Western Woods.]

‘It was the blades,’ said Phineal sorrowfully. ‘I need them, you see, to bore through the stretches of the tunnels that are too narrow for the Spirit of Keris to pass along…’

I nodded, fascinated by the story that was unfolding. It’d been news to me that there was a network of deep water tunnels beneath the ground. Stranger still that, according to the tusked webfoot, these tunnels linked all the mighty lakes of the Edge, from the Silent One, the Mirror Of the Sky, the Lake of Cloud and his own Shimmerer at Four Lakes, to the great lakes of the Free Glades. And there were more beside, he said; vast bodies of water in the furthest reaches of the Edge. Phineal Glyfphith had set himself the task of exploring them all, and had invented and built the underwater craft to do just that.

‘Of course, I realized at once what had happened,’ Phineal said. He hung his head. ‘I’d killed the creature’s young’un, and she wanted to kill me…’

‘With good reason,’ the roost marshal said gruffly.

‘I know, I know,’ said Phineal shamefacedly. ‘I didn’t know what to do…’

‘So you left,’ I said. He squirmed beneath my gaze. ‘Two moons have waxed and waned since then,’ I pressed him. ‘Now you’re back. Why?’

‘I…’ He turned and looked at his underwater vessel. ‘Let me show you.’

With that, he stepped back into the water and dived down. I watched the ripples on the surface, then they flattened out, and I could see nothing below. The minutes passed. Of course, being a webfoot, Phineal could remain under water as long as he liked, but I remained concerned for him. The currents in the Farrow Lake are treacherous. And the mother borella was still on the prowl.

All at once, some strides away, the water swirled and a crested head broke the surface. It was Phineal, and he was grinning from ear to ear. ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘I thought it might not have survived the long journey, but it was simply sleeping…’

‘What was?’ I asked, intrigued.

‘This,’ he announced, and strode forwards. And as he did so, and his chest rose out of the water, I saw that his arms were wrapped around a creature – a familiar-looking creature with a plump body and ridged skull, talon-tasselled front flippers and a bulbous snout filled with teeth and fangs that jutted out in all directions. ‘I found it, orphaned in the Black Lake. Gorge Town is not that far off, and I guessed the hairy backed quarry trogs who live there must have killed its parents… Anyway, I decided to take it.’

‘A mother without a young’un and a young’un without a mother,’ I said, nodding.

‘I wanted to make amends,’ said Phineal ruefully, as the young’un in his grasp squirmed, then let out a loud yet plaintive cry that echoed across the lake.

The mother borella must have heard it, for over by the far shore, the water fountained as she jumped high up into the air, her tail kicking and huge sail-like flippers flapping wildly. A loud, keening answering cry came bellowing across the lake. It was followed by another, and another, as the great creature came swimming towards us. The young’un wriggled all the more determinedly, twisting and thrashing until Phineal could no longer hold on to it. He opened his arms. The borella infant dropped into the water with a splash, and with a flick of its tail, disappeared under the surface.

‘Do you think she’ll accept it?’ asked Phineal quietly.

The roost marshal shrugged, and the three of us looked out anxiously over the lake. The surface was still once more, with both of the creatures submerged. I was fearful for what might happen. I’d seen tilder gore to death the orphaned young that herders tried to put them together with. Then again, the roost marshal had claimed that the lake dwellers were highly intelligent; gentle, caring…

With a loud splash and a colossal wave, the two borellas – mother and infant – broke the surface of the water together, not twenty strides off. They were face to face and looking into one another’s eyes. The mother stroked the infant with one of her huge front flippers. Then they turned to us, both of them, and the great borella called out in that strange language of hers; a cross between bubbling water and distant thunder.

The next moment, they both plunged down into the lake. They did not come up again.

‘What did she say?’ I asked the roost marshal.

He smiled, and I noticed that the hard-bitten old soldier had tears in his eyes. ‘Thank you. That’s what she said,’ he told me. ‘I shall love him like my own…‘

Nothing could have prepared me for the sight of my first hammerhead goblin in the wild. Alcestia and I had ridden through the night and most of the following day, and I had become accustomed to the great loping rhythms of my prowlgrin, Lemquinx, as it propelled itself through the canopy of the Western Woods. As the sun set in the sky before us, Alcestia reined in her prowlgrin, Larrinx, and came to a halt in the upper branches of a sturdy copperwood tree, where I joined her moments later.

‘Tether Lemquinx,’ she instructed, her voice low and urgent, ‘and follow me, making as little sound as you can.’

I did as I was told, and as I climbed down the copperwood tree to the shadowy forest floor below, I became aware of noises in the woods just ahead. We were close. Very close. Alcestia signalled to me to follow her to a moss-covered rocky outcrop a little way off, the finger pressed to her beautiful lips impressing upon me the need for silence.

When we reached the outcrop, we looked down to see a steep, wooded valley full of activity. Large, powerfully built hammerhead goblins were busy hacking down clumps of green and grey alder with razor sharp scimitars and placing them in a central pile, while other hammerheads were taking the pliant saplings and weaving them into a characteristic hive hut shelter.

Their industry was impressive, as was the speed of their work. The communal hut, a temporary shelter that would be occupied for no longer than a few days, was taking shape before our eyes. The woven walls were already in place, while the sapling struts were arching overhead and being tied together to form the high vaults of the roof. No less impressive, were the hammerhead builders themselves. Their broad heads were adorned with savage and intricate tattoos, while their brows, chins and ears glistened with rings, as did their powerful necks.

It seemed to me, as I watched this extraordinary scene, that I had stepped back five hundred years into the Second Age of Flight, and it was easy to imagine that I was a trooper in the Freeglade Lancers patrolling the borders of the old Free Glades. Before me was a typical hammerhead war party, fierce nomadic warriors wandering the great expanses of the Western Woods, stopping only to make camp or launch a terrifying surprise attack.

Indomitable and warlike, hammerheads travelled light, carrying the possessions of a lifetime in their ‘birthing bundles’ – rolled blankets which swaddled them at birth and shrouded them in death, and were carried on their backs in life.

But that was five hundred years ago, before the rise of the great cities, the dawn of phraxflight and the opening up of the Deepwoods. Wild, nomadic hammerhead warriors were a thing of the past, weren’t they?

Alcestia’s hand on my shoulder roused me from my reverie. ‘Forden,’ she said. ‘We’ve got company.’

Turning to follow her gaze, I found myself staring up at two hammerhead goblins who towered over us, their serrated thornwood lances aimed at our hearts…