Esmeralda slumped despondently in the bottom of the lifeboat, muttering rude things about the Fates under her breath.

Trundle looked on uneasily and gave her a cautious pat on the shoulder. “There, there,” he said. “It’ll be all right.”

“No, it won’t,” said Esmeralda. “Everything is wrong, wrong, wrong! I knew the cargo was for mine workings, but I didn’t know it would be these mines! I thought it was heading for the steam moles way out in Hammerland.”

Trundle peered out from under the tarpaulin. The dismal lump of Drune was looming larger and larger. He couldn’t see any sky at all now, and the windship was steering toward a huge round-mouthed chasm. He narrowed his eyes. Yellowy lights were glimmering all around the entrance to the cavern. Lots of lights. Scores of lights. Hundreds of them, in fact.

He let out a low gasp as the windship sailed closer. A town—a tumbledown, ramshackle shantytown—clung around the vast aperture like some kind of horrible fungus. The dilapidated buildings grew out of the rock face, one hovel atop another, the buildings crushed together, misshapen and constricted, as though struggling for space. All of them were shabbily constructed from rotten timbers and crumbling stonework and ill-laid bricks.

Jetties jutted outward, and as the windship glided into the vast cavern, Trundle could see the shapes of animals scuttling through the shadowy, narrow streets, shoulders hunched, heads down, as though they were engaged on evil errands.

“Welcome to Rathanger,” said a mournful voice at Trundle’s shoulder. “The last place I ever wanted to see again.”

He looked at Esmeralda. “If the Fates are working for us, then perhaps we were meant to come here,” he said. He wasn’t at all sure he believed this, but he wanted very much to cheer her up. If Esmeralda gave up hope, where did that leave him?

She looked at him for a few moments. “You’re mostly not as silly as you look,” she said at last. “And you’re quite right; I should trust the Fates. The Badger Blocks don’t lie. We must be here for a reason.”

They hove close to a rickety-looking jetty bending under the weight of great piles of boxes and crates and sacks and barrels waiting to be transported to the black wharves. As the windship came to a gradual halt, voices called out and ropes were thrown. Dock rats grabbed the ropes and tied them to rusty iron bollards. A gangplank was let down.

A pompous-looking muskrat in a long coat covered in gold braid and gleaming buttons walked slowly up the gangplank.

“That’s the harbormaster,” Esmeralda told Trundle. “Every ship that comes through the town of Rathanger has to register with him before it’s allowed to sail on into the mine workings.” She poked her head right out to take a better look around. “This is our chance to get away.”

She picked up a length of rope that was coiled in the bottom of the lifeboat, and Trundle watched as she tied the end of the rope to a cleat on the side of the boat. “The worm comes out of its hole, around the rhubarb stalk, and back down the hole again,” she muttered, tugging on the rope. “There! A perfect bowline, although I say it myself.”

She hefted the rest of the rope onto her shoulder and pushed out from under the tarpaulin. Trundle followed her, and the two of them balanced precariously on the windship’s rail.

Esmeralda let down the rope behind a tall stack of wooden crates. “I hope you’re good at climbing,” she said, catching the rope between her feet and gripping it with her paws as she edged over the windship’s side.

“So do I.” Trundle didn’t bother telling her that he had never climbed a rope before. If he lost his grip, she’d be the first person to know about it.

His stomach turned several somersaults as he hung grimly on to the rope. But it was thick and solid and he had strong paws, and before he knew it, the two of them were down on the jetty, dashing from cover to cover as they made their stealthy way through the wharves and into the cramped and winding streets of Rathanger.

Trundle had never dreamed of such an awful place. Not only were the buildings crushed so close together that the roofs often overlapped one another across the streets, but the whole town stank horribly. The switchback streets and alleys were piled with rubbish and filled with disreputable-looking creatures, dressed shabbily and carrying swords or knives or cudgels.

“Avoid eye contact,” Esmeralda warned him. “Keep your head down and keep moving—and try not to look like an easy target. This place is full of gambling dens and drinking houses and other much nastier places that you’d rather not know about. Treat everyone you meet as a potential thief, and you won’t go far wrong.”

“So where exactly are we going?” asked Trundle.

“We’re following our noses. The Fates will do the rest!”

Trundle wasn’t so much following his nose as holding it to keep out the unpleasant odors. They slipped through an alley. The sound of a badly tuned piano rang out from an open doorway, accompanied by a fume of pipe smoke and the foul smell of stale beer. Drunken voices caterwauled an incoherent ditty about knives and murder, with the refrain:

Blood, blood, buckets of blood,

Nothing quite like it for thick’ning the mud!

Trundle looked up at the hanging inn sign.

He thought of the kind and hospitable folk of Port Shiverstones and shuddered quietly to himself.

From the street ahead, there came the sound of voices shouting and of whips cracking and chains clanking. Esmeralda grabbed Trundle and pulled him into a shadowy doorway. “Shhh! Slave traders!” she hissed.

A few moments later, Trundle saw a long, chained line of miserable-looking animals being herded along by a bunch of burly rats wielding whips.

“Keep moving, you scum!” bellowed the lead rat. “There might be rumblings of rebellion from the mines, but there’ll be no mutinies among my band of merry volunteers!” A whip cracked, followed by cries and groans.

Trundle watched in mute horror as the line of wretched captives stumbled past the end of the alley. He looked at Esmeralda. Her teeth were gritted, and her eyes glittered with anger.

“They treated me like that a few days ago,” she muttered.

“Can we help them?” asked Trundle.

“We can’t free them, if that’s what you mean,” she replied. “We’ll do our bit by following our quest. Perhaps when the Six Crowns of the Badgers are reunited, horrid places like this will cease to exist.”

The sounds of the slave line faded away into the general discord of the town.

Trundle shook his head, wishing he were a real hero, a creature brave and strong and noble enough to help those poor prisoners.

“Something like that would probably be useful,” he said, pointing toward a dingy, dusty, murky window on the other side of the alley, through which the outline of a sword could dimly be seen. “Not that I’d know how to use it.”

Three brass balls hung above the shop door, and there was a dirty sign over it that read:

“Oh, well,” he said. “No good wishing for things we can’t have.” He turned and walked along the alley, assuming Esmeralda would come with him.

She didn’t. She stood as stiff and still as a startled starfish, staring round-eyed through the window of the pawnshop.

Trundle waited a few moments, then walked back to where she was standing.

“What are you looking at?” he asked.

“The sword!” she said, in a trembling, choking voice. “Look at the sword!”

He stepped up close to the window and looked. The sword was clearly old; it had notches in the blade and looked in need of a good polish.

“Yes?” he said. “So?”

Esmeralda whipped out the Badger Block and brandished it in front of his snout, showing him the Lamplighter picture. “See?” she said, with hardly contained excitement. “It’s exactly the same!”

Trundle looked from the real sword to the picture of the sword in the carved Lamplighter’s hand. “They are quite similar,” he admitted.

“Similar?” Esmeralda raged. “They’re the same in every detail. That’s why the Fates brought us here—to get this sword! It all makes sense now!”

Trundle brought his snout up to the dirty glass. “It has a price tag on the handle,” he said. “Twenty sunders.” He frowned. “That’s quite a lot of money. I don’t have a single sunder on me. How about you?”

Esmeralda shook her head, but Trundle could see her mind was working.

“We need to get money fast,” she said. “Tell you what—let’s find a quiet, out-of-the-way place. I’ll hide while you go up to the first person who happens along. Ask him the way to Slitherslops Street, or some such, and while he’s not looking, I’ll sneak up behind and whack him over the head with a brick. Then before he comes around, we’ll swipe his wallet, and hey presto—we buy the sword.” She paused and frowned at him. “You’ve got an expression on your face like a warthog chewing a bumblebee,” she said. “What’s the problem?”

Trundle hardly knew where to start. “We can’t attack people and steal their money!” he gasped.

Her eyebrows rose. “We can’t?”

“No! Not at all. Never. No how! It’s just wrong!”

Esmeralda shrugged. “Oh, all right, Mr. Scruples,” she said, a little sulkily. “If you say so. Come on then, let’s hear your plan for making money.”

“Couldn’t we get a job of some sort?” he suggested. “Um . . . cleaning windows, or sweeping the streets, or something like that?”

“Does Rathanger look like the kind of place where they pay people to clean their windows and sweep the streets?” Esmeralda asked. “But still, if you’re determined not to go along with my perfectly reasonable plan, I suppose we’ll have to come up with something.” She narrowed her eyes and tapped at her front teeth with her claws. “Yes!” she said after a few moments. “I think I know what to do.” She turned on her heel and strode off, Trundle trotting along to keep up with her. “Mugging is easier, but if you insist on being awkward, we’ll probably be able to make some quick money clearing glasses or serving drinks in a pub.”

She pointed to the crude illustration of a stoat being throttled that hung above the open door they had recently passed. “In that pub, to be exact.”

“It looks a little . . . um . . . rough,” Trundle pointed out.

“We could go back to plan A,” Esmeralda sug-gested, miming clouting someone with a brick.

“No,” Trundle said firmly. “We’ll try in there.”

They pushed their way into the fuggy, stinky, crowded inn, squeezing between the seedy clientele, heading for the long, stained, and dripping bar.

Esmeralda led Trundle behind the bar, where the floor was awash with spilled ale and the stench was strong enough to fell an ox. She tugged at the apron of a portly rat with a ruddy face, a crooked snout, and a mouthful of broken teeth. “Are you the landlord?” she shouted above the noise.

“What if I am?” boomed the rat.

“We’re looking for work,” Esmeralda yelled. “Anything will do. Bar work, kitchen work—you name it.”

The landlord looked them up and down. “You look too puny,” he declared.

“We’re stronger than you might think,” said Esmeralda. “I work out regularly, and my friend here is the all-in urchin-weight wrestling champion of Shiverstones.” She looked meaningfully at Trundle. “Aren’t you?”

Trundle adopted what he hoped looked like an aggressive, muscular pose.

“I certainly am!” he growled.

Punchly Backbreaker roared with laughter. “If you say so,” he gurgled. “Get into the kitchens with you, then—there’s plenty of dishes needing to be washed. Half a sunder an hour. Take it or leave it.”

Esmeralda held out a paw. “One sunder in advance, for good faith,” she said.

“Done!” Punchly Backbreaker fished a wet sunder out of his apron pocket and dropped it into her paw.

“Thank you very much, sir,” said Trundle. “We won’t let you down, I promise.”

“All-in wrestling champion!” hooted Punchly, and he howled with laughter again.

They were about to go through the door that led to the kitchens when a loud, grating voice rang out above the noise. “Tap your finest ale, landlord! Bring on the dancing girls! Clear the poker tables! The Iron Pig has just made landfall, and Captain Grizzletusk and his crew have a powerful thirst on them!”

“Lawks!” exclaimed Esmeralda, grabbing Trundle and yanking him through the doorway and into the foul-smelling kitchen. Her eyes were filled with unease. “Are they on our trail? Do they know we’re here? Are they already lying in wait for us?” She clutched at her neck, as though she could already feel the sting of a jagged blade across her windpipe.

“It’s probably just a coincidence,” Trundle said hopefully. “So long as we keep out of sight, we should be fine.” He looked around the kitchen. It was unspeakably filthy, with thick grease on every surface and squashed food all over the floor. Punchly Backbreaker had not been wrong about the washing up: plates and bowls and cutlery and mugs and cups were stacked almost ceiling high around the low butler’s sink.

“It looks as if no one’s done any washing up for ten years!” gasped Esmeralda, peering into the scummy water in the sink.

“Which means there’s enough work to earn us the money we need,” Trundle said, trying to look on the bright side. “And if the pirates come in here, we can nip out the back way.” He pointed to the glass-paneled back door, through which outside walls were visible.

“Hmmm,” said Esmeralda. She walked gingerly across the slithery floor and pressed her ear to the wooden panels of another door, set in the side wall. “Hmmm,” she said again. “Interesting.”

“What?” asked Trundle.

“Voices,” said Esmeralda. A grin spread across her face, and she spun the landlord’s sunder in the air. “You start working,” she said, turning the handle and pulling the side door open a crack. “I shan’t be long.”

“Hey, hold on—”

“Gentlemen,” Trundle heard her say as she slipped through the door and let it swing behind her, “how delightful to meet you! May I join you in your game of chance? I don’t have very much experience with poker, but I would love to learn.”

The door clicked shut. Trundle glared expressively at the cracked panels for a few moments. Then he turned to the washing up. Drat the girl, he thought, staring up at the teetering towers of filthy crocks. Typical of her to avoid the hard work! Still, there was nothing to be gained by fuming. He rolled up his sleeves and got busy, concentrating on the money that his labors would provide.

It wasn’t long before he was sick of the sight of putrid plates and dirty dishes and nasty knives and filthy forks. Every now and then he would glance angrily toward the closed door. What was that dratted Roamany girl doing in there?

Suddenly he became aware of a rumpus coming from beyond the door: furious yelling and the thud of furniture overturning. A split second later, the door sprang open and Esmeralda appeared, looking triumphant but somewhat flustered. She slammed the door and pressed her back against it, panting.

“I’ve got the money we need,” she gasped. “But I think I may have gotten us into a spot of trouble!”

Trundle stared at her in alarm. He could hear creatures shouting and pounding on the door. Clearly, Esmeralda had done something to make them very angry indeed, and the way the door was bulging inward, he guessed it wouldn’t be long before they smashed their way through, to take their revenge.