A very long way down, and then some, there were Goblins. There was also a girl with a lot of incredibly messy hair. She was not a goblin, although her eyes glowed like one, and she certainly smelled like one. At this moment, she was climbing out of a storm drain.

‘Would you come on, Raggetty?’ she hissed. ‘Or do you want to wait for the sun to come up and kill us?’

‘You know I don’t,’ said a mournful voice, and a goblin’s orange, orb-like eyes rose out of the drain. He was wearing a red, knitted hat, which looked suspiciously like a child’s mitten with holes cut out for his enormous ears. He pulled the hat down as far as it would go and followed the girl out onto the Surface, his eyes darting back and forth like nervous fish. ‘What’s so great you had to drag me all the way up here, anyway?’

‘You’ll see,’ said Terra, and she darted across the street with Raggetty a reluctant shadow behind her.

Raggetty did not like Up Top. It was one of those things that seemed More Trouble Than It Was Worth, especially for a goblin whose only notable skill was the ability to cower behind his own shoulders. He was the kind of goblin content to wait in the dank, comfortable depths of World Below for the treasures of Up Top to find their way to him. Which, thanks to the many well-trafficked sewers of Oiley-Ragge, they inevitably did, albeit in a more noisome condition than he might like.

Terra, however, was not one to be content, and in quite ungoblinesque fashion she had taken to Up Top like a fish to water. Not Ragge water of course, because that occupied a niche closer to sticky pudding than to actual liquids, but some other kind of water. With rapids and such, and enough oxygen saturation to sustain aquatic life.

Wondering (very seriously) how long it would take to drown in the River Ragge, assuming that he managed to sink first, Raggetty followed Terra (or rather, her mass of tangled red hair, which was really all he could see from behind) from alley to alley. He was trying not to think about the miles of open sky above him, or the uneasy quiet of a city under curfew, and he had just worked out that he could extend his hypothetical life by a few hours by carving out an air bubble in the river around him when he realised that Terra had been talking to him for some time.

‘… And that’s where you can get the best rags,’ she was saying. ‘Ooh, this is the rubbish skip I’ve been telling you about. Amazing the things these Bigguns throw out, ain’t it? Look, these biscuits are hardly damp at all…’

She emerged from the skip in triumph and dropped the half-eaten packet into Raggetty’s arms.

‘What’d I tell you, Rags? This place ain’t half bad!’

Raggetty had to admit (around a soggy mouthful of biscuits) that no, it wasn’t. Terra smiled a toothy smile and jumped lightly out of the skip.

‘Come on,’ she said, and grabbed him by the arm. ‘You didn’t think that was it, did you?’

Raggetty’s jaws were still cemented shut, but he managed a strangled whine – sort of like the noise a day-old dead cat makes when you stand on it. Terra ignored this and continued to prance merrily onwards, humming to herself as she went. Now and then she would make a circle with her thumb and forefinger and peer through it as though looking through a telescope. Raggetty rolled his eyes and allowed himself to be dragged and spun from one greasy street-corner to the next, until –

‘Aha!’ Terra said happily. ‘Now we’re lost.’

‘Lost?’ Raggetty shrieked, his eyes suddenly the size of tennis balls. ‘What’ve you gone and got us lost for?’

‘Oh Rags, don’t you know? You never find anything worth finding if you never get at least a little bit lost!’

Raggetty was not convinced by this, and just groaned.

‘Oh, shut it. Anyway, you needn’t worry – we’re here!’

Terra had pulled Raggetty up to the most uninspiring house he had ever seen. Its brick façade was the colour of a pigeon that had been stuck down a chimney, and it seemed almost too narrow to fit actual people inside. The few windows it had were all different sizes, and the only sign that the place had ever been inhabited by the living was that someone had carefully plastered over each one with yellow newspapers.

‘Isn’t it great?’ Terra gushed. Raggetty tried to sidle away but she grabbed him again and pulled him up the stairs to the front door.

‘Terra, what-?’

‘Just feel it!’

Before he could protest, Raggetty found his face pressed against damp brick and inhaled (against his better judgement) what he was sure had to be a lungful of terminal diseases.

‘What the buggering hell, Terra?’ he managed, after he had finished coughing. ‘Why don’t you feel it!’

‘I have,’ she said, releasing her grip on Raggetty’s head. He quickly backed down the stairs in case she tried to grab him again. ‘Isn’t it wonderful? Sad, but wonderful.’

‘Mhmm,’ said Raggetty, eying the house from what he hoped was a safe distance.

Terra had placed her palms on the brick. ‘I mean, it’s magic! I think it must move from place to place, collecting stories… Minker-Sock says old stone is like that, it holds memories of where it has been and how it’s used. I think something bad happened here, once, but lots of good things too… Can you smell the magic, Rags?’ she said abruptly, turning to face him. ‘Sort of like burnt liquorice, and orange peels?’

Raggetty sniffed, but could only smell the omnipresent pong of the river. ‘Er, maybe? Look, Ker, I think it’s time we should be getting-’

And, as voices are wont to do when people are trespassing on strange properties in the middle of the night, a voice yelled: ‘Who goes there?’

And as Terra hissed: ‘Hide, Rags!’ and Raggetty jumped headfirst into the nearest drain, Terra felt her foot slip off the edge of the step and she stumbled sideways into-

‘-home?’

A place that was neither Here nor There. Terra steadied herself and looked around. The same buildings stood on either side of her, but they seemed flat, unreal, as dark and featureless as shadows. When she looked up, the sky was a blank grey sheet.

‘What?’ she said. Her voice sounded strange. Far away. As if she had spoken underwater, or as if she had not spoken at all but was simply hearing the echo of a question asked by someone else, centuries before she was born.

And she was not alone.

‘Did you see it? It went into that drain there.’

The two Priests looked into the drain.

‘Cursed thing,’ said the taller one. ‘I thought we had cleansed them all years ago!’

‘We must have missed a few,’ said the shorter one. ‘The Dark One are a wily lot, after all.’

‘More so than the Lord of Light?’

The short Priest eyed his partner through the slit in his grey mask. ‘More than some of His servants, perhaps… Look, something’s moving! Grab it, quick!’

None of the involved party were to know, of course, but the thing that had moved was nothing but an innocent sewer rat. The tall Priest lunged at his chance for glory, and in the Shade Terra saw him reach into the ground to take hold of her brother. Panicked, she stepped clumsily out of the Between and-

Take his life, Little One.

-without knowing what she was doing or why, she held the shape of the Priest in her mind and crumpled her hand into a fist. The Priest looked bewildered for a second, and then with a quiet “pop” he crumbled into flesh-coloured ash. The shorter Priest yelled and reeled to face her. Terra saw his eyes widen.

‘Demon!’ he cried. His hand moved to grab the long knife at his belt.

And Terra closed her other hand.

‘Well,’ she said, as a light breeze off the river Ragge began to whisk the flakes of dead Priest into the gutter. ‘That’s something new.’

Then, she fainted.

*

Smythe Larsson was a purveyor of what Ma Wickin-Wax might call “an-teeks”. His shop, Smythe’s Exotique Curio Emporium (est. 1246), was the sort of place frequented by opulent women with more chins than sense, who all used words like “poignant” and “alluring” to describe things that most people would simply call “a nold tin cup wiv no ‘andle”.

Larsson listened to them, nodded indulgently and commended their fine taste, and they paid him laughably well for doing very little else. It didn’t hurt that he was tall and lean, with hair so blonde it was almost white and a voice so smooth it could make silk underthings embarrassed. The women who happened upon the curious little shop and spoke with its mysterious and charming patron unfailingly left feeling so light, refreshed and beautiful that they could just float away.

But the really curious thing about it was that no matter how desperately they searched, they could never find the Emporium a second time. Where its unassuming brick façade and crooked windows had been, there was always something else; a butchery, a haberdashery, an ordinary house, a blank wall, and the Emporium would pop up in a completely different part of the city for someone else to find.

Tonight Larsson woke to the familiar odour of wet socks, dead cabbage, and general hopelessness.

‘Really, House?’ he said to the room at large. ‘The River? What sort of clientele do you expect me to pick up here? You remember those fishwives we had in here last time, don’t you? We couldn’t get the smell out of the drapes for weeks.’

The house, unsurprisingly, did not deign to answer, and Larsson settled back onto his pillow.

Somewhere, a dog was barking. Larsson ignored this. It was not until the dog had actually begun to scratch the inside of the front door that he realised that the dog was inside his house, and was, in fact, his dog.

‘I swear by all the gods, Mad-Dog,’ Larsson groaned, climbing out of bed with all the enthusiasm of a wet bus ticket, ‘if it’s another bloody squirrel I will get you fixed.’

Mad-Dog, who did not consider himself to be Larsson’s dog but more of a roommate, snorted at this and continued to paw at the door.

‘Stop that,’ Larsson said, kneeing the shaggy animal out of the way. ‘You’ll scratch the paint. You know the House doesn’t like that.’

It was then that he heard what could only described as a Commotion. There was a yell, followed by a pop and fizzle, and then a light thump as something hit the street outside.

Larsson opened the door. Mad-Dog and he looked at each other. He closed the door.

‘There’s a girl out there,’ he said. ‘Did she look dangerous to you?’

Mad-Dog blinked at him.

‘I didn’t think so either, but there’s two piles of Priest-coloured dandruff out there that suggest otherwise.’

The dog grunted.

‘What do you want me to do? Invite her in for a cuppa? There’ll be Priests swarming all over the place in a minute… I said stop it!’

Mad-Dog was scratching at the door again.

‘Have it your way, then,’ Larsson huffed, opening the door. Mad-Dog gave a howl and pelted off down the street and out of sight, leaving a very annoyed Larsson staring after him.

The girl – he assumed it was a girl, though it was hard to tell under all the hair – was still lying in the street. Larsson wandered over to her and gave her a gentle nudge with his foot. When this elicited no response he bent down and tried to move some of her hair out of the way, perhaps to check for a pulse or other signs of life, and that is when she bit him.

‘GODS’ SHIT!’ he swore, stumbling backwards. The girl hissed at him, and he caught a flash of shockingly purple eyes before she whirled and vanished, into the Shade he presumed, because how else could a solid creature disappear into thin air without falling straight down a manhole?

Mad-Dog, with the inborn sense of timing that all canines possess, chose this moment to return. He trotted up to Larsson, his one eye gleaming with self-satisfaction, and dropped something at his feet.

‘Bloody lot of good you are,’ Larsson growled, still sitting on the bones of his arse and cradling his bleeding hand. ‘Where’d you run off to anyway?’

The dog nudged the thing on the ground and barked once. Wary of being bitten again, Larsson gingerly picked the thing up and looked at it.

‘A sock?’ he said. ‘You brought me a sock.’

Mad-Dog barked again. On closer inspection the sock proved to be more of a stretched-out mitten, red, with holes cut in the sides. As if someone, or something, with very large ears had worn it as a hat.

‘Goblins,’ said Larsson. ‘So they are still around.’ He looked at the piles of ex-Priest and grimaced. ‘Though probably not for long. Come on, Dog,’ he sighed, getting up painfully. ‘Let’s get inside before anything worse happens.’

Mad-Dog wagged his feathery tail in agreement, and Larsson carefully folded the mitten and slipped it into his pocket.

*

Unbeknownst to Larsson and his one-eyed companion, something worse had already happened. They had been seen.

Wenderfold Peech withdrew his head from the open window, an unlit cigarette hanging forgotten from his lips. His hands were trembling.

‘Impossible,’ he muttered. ‘Some kind of joke. It must be.’

The cigarette fell onto the windowsill. He stared at it blankly for a moment, before picking it up and putting it back in his mouth. His hands struck a match somehow, and he took a long drag.

‘Gods,’ he said, and exhaled. ‘They were below us the whole bloody time. PAVE!’

Peech stubbed out his cigarette on the windowsill and strode into the next room, where Pave was in the process of sitting up.

‘Get dressed,’ Peech ordered, grabbing the first thing he saw (which turned out to be a single, balled-up sock) and flinging it at his bleary-eyed assistant. ‘We’ve work to do. The devils are below us. In the sewers, and lower. God only knows how far down this goes.’ He was pacing like a madman. ‘We must get a message to the Church… no, no, they won’t do a thing without some sort of proof. PAVE- oh, sorry, forgot you were there. Get your gear ready, will you?’

Pave might have been giving him a questioning look, or he simply might have been struggling to achieve enough sentience to understand why he was holding one of yesterday’s socks and being yelled at, at three o’clock in the morning. Either way, it did the trick.

‘Pave, my good fellow,’ said Peech, grinning wildly. Another cigarette had appeared in his hand. ‘We’re going goblin-hunting.’

*

Terra landed in the drain with a moist thud, her heart beating like a hammer. A swarm of wasps buzzed between her ears.

‘Rags?’ she called, as loudly as she dared. That man was still up there, he must have seen… whatever it was that she had done to those Greyfaces. Her mouth tasted of blood; she spat and wiped her lips. Gods, her hands were trembling! She looked at her grubby palms and curled and uncurled her fingers a few times, trying to recall the feeling she had had when she had done… whatever it was. She had made the shape with her hands, and there had been an almost tangible click of something falling into place. And then the rush, the terror, the exhilaration, and then-

Black. And, though she couldn’t imagine why, the smell of burning cinnamon.

She shook her head, like a dog trying to clear water from its ears (Had there been a dog, when it happened? She thought she remembered a dog), and called again.

‘Rags?’

Water, or a water-like substance, dripped in the dark. Terra picked herself up, wincing; she had fallen awkwardly and was sore in half a dozen places, though that was nothing compared to what she would suffer at the hands of Raggetty’s mother if she returned home without him. She began to walk, and then to run.

‘Rags? Raggetty, where are you?’

Oh, Ma Wickin-Wax was going to kill her.

*

‘I’ll kill her,’ muttered Raggetty, who had never killed so much as a cockroach. ‘I’ll bloody kill her for getting us lost. And for what? So she could sniff some mouldy old house! I’ll kill her, I will!’

Raggetty had been running through the sewers for what felt like years, and yet had encountered nothing familiar. He cursed himself for not paying more attention to where Terra was taking him, but most of all he cursed Terra for taking him there in the first place.

Finally, after passing the same floating dead rat for the fifth time, Raggetty stuck his head out of a storm drain to see if he could better divine his whereabouts. He covered his head with a paw, painfully conscious of the loss of his precious red hat. He felt strangely unprotected without it, more visible, though he supposed the opposite was more likely. Still, it was bad luck that he had lost it, and Raggetty had had enough bad luck tonight to last him until the End of Times.

Recognising nothing, Raggetty was about to withdraw his head in defeat when a voice behind him yelled ‘Gotcha!’ and he was lifted into the air, quite painfully, by his ears. He caught a glimpse of a man in an awful knitted sweater (he was holding a strange black box with a large, silver bulb attached to it, and Raggetty wondered, madly, what on earth it could be, before his eyes were seared by a sudden flash of white light), and then something struck him hard on the back of the head and he knew no more.

*

Pave was worried about his master. For one thing, he was smoking like a crematorium, hardly finishing one cigarette before extinguishing it under his boot and lighting another. His long fingers, his hair, his clothes, even the whites of his eyes were tinged with yellow. And the stink! Pave, straining air through clenched teeth in a vain attempt to filter out the smell of tar, found himself wishing for the ability to breathe through his ears.

And, for another, he had suddenly become obsessed with goblins.

‘We’ve been so blind, Pave,’ Peech was saying around the ever-present cigarette. He stuffed the comatose goblin into a sack and threw it to Pave, who caught it awkwardly with one hand, somehow managing to hold onto his precious camera with the other. ‘Of course the dark little beasts are involved. What better place for demons to hide than below our very feet?’

Pave gave a noncommittal shrug. He was not entirely sure of Peech’s logic, nor of what exactly he intended to do with the half-dead goblin now bouncing on his shoulder in a potato sack. Perhaps Peech did not know himself. Perhaps, after ten years of posing as a journalist for the local news rag, he had finally gone mad. Pave would not blame him; he had seen far greater men driven mad far sooner, by far less. This was Oiley-Ragge, after all.

‘Do quit dawdling, you moon-face,’ said Peech, startling Pave from his thoughts. ‘We must get this evidence to the Church!’

With that he grabbed Pave by the shirtfront and pulled him headlong into the Shade. Pave’s mouth opened in a silent “o” of surprise, stumbled, and lost his grip on the precious camera. It clattered onto the stones in the suddenly empty street and lay there, as inanimate objects are wont to do, unnoticed until the early hours of the morning, when it was picked up by a particularly enterprising bird of prey and, when found to contain nothing edible, dropped without ceremony into the River Ragge.

And that, as they say, was that.