Goblins by Philip Reeve Page B

down.
    “We’re having a bit of trouble with, um, mice,” he said, unconvincingly.
    The people in the street stood and stared, but it was not Henwyn they were staring at. Behind him, the cheesery bulged. The roof heaved.
    “Well, rats,” said Henwyn hopefully.
    One whole wall of the building collapsed with a roar, and out through the hole the cheese-creature came sprawling, soft and glistening and shapeless, except that as it reared up part of it seemed to briefly form a face, with little holes for eyes and a wide, dark, stringy mouth.
    There were screams, shrieks, curses. The townspeople turned to run, tripping over the cats which had come scurrying to lap up the flood of cheese-milk spilling from the wreckage. Tiles and timbers smashed on the cobbles as the cheese-creature wrenched itself out of the ruins. Henwyn thanked his lucky stars that Herda, Gerda, Lynt and his mother weren’t at home. Where the cheesery had stood there was now only the cheese-thing, its hundred tentacles as thick as the ropes of a ship, lashing out to pull down chimney pots. He felt both scared and embarrassed as he stood there in its cheesy shadow, wondering what to do. If only he could think of some really brave and decisive way to deal with this thing, he might make up for having made it in the first place. He wiped the cheese from his sword as best he could and wondered how to use it. Did the cheese-thing have a heart? A brain? He looked for a head that he might lop off, but it had nothing that looked even vaguely head-like. The only good thing was that its movements were growing slower, as if it were weighed down by all the vats and benches and lumps of masonry it had engulfed. It seemed unwilling to drag its lumpy bulk far from the ruins of the cheesery, and the cats, which were the only living things left nearby, easily avoided its sluggishly groping tentacles.
    He glanced down the street, towards the heart of town, the looming grey bulk of Adherak Castle on its walled mound. Three figures watched him from the corner of an alleyway. “Fentongoose!” he shouted. “Carnglaze! Prawl! Help me! Use your magic! Undo what your potion has done!”
    He ran towards them, but the three sorcerers looked as horrified as Henwyn by the thing that their elixir had created. “Water,” Fentongoose said, in a weak voice. “Coloured water. That’s all it was. . . How can this be. . .?”
    Henwyn snatched at his beard, meaning to force an explanation and an antidote out of him, but the sorcerer was too swift for him; he ducked aside. The white beard slithered through Henwyn’s fingers, and the three sorcerers turned and fled.
    “Oh,” wailed Henwyn, turning back towards the ruins of the cheesery. “Oh, what have I done? I should have known better, after all the tales I’ve heard! I have summoned up a monster from the underworld, and it has turned on me the way they always do! I shall be destroyed by my own unholy fondue. . .”
    But even as he spoke, he saw that the cheese creature was starting to change. It was shuddering, subsiding, shrinking. With unpleasant sucking and bubbling sounds it gathered itself into a taut, quivering blob upon the ruins of the cheesery, like a vast, restless pearl. Then something picked Henwyn up and flung him at the wall behind; as he hit it and crashed down on the cobbles he heard a high-pitched boom and a ghastly belch, and, as warm, sticky cheese began to rain down all around him, he realized that the creature had exploded.
    He scrambled up, still clutching his sword, his face blackened by the blast, the rags of his clothes all scorched and smouldering. All that remained of the monster was a thick coverlet of rubbery yellowish sludge draped over the ruins of his home, making it look like a piece of toasted cheese which had been left too long in the oven.
     
    That was the reason that Henwyn was banished from Adherak. He had tried to explain about the Sable Conclave, but the sorcerers had vanished, not to be