Tuli in the Elsewhere

Tuli is a boy of the Dengas folk, who live above the Ice-Cliffs. Their villages look down upon the lower World, far below, a place that very few of their kind have ever visited. Down there, too far to see individually, live the Mithings, a race of farmers and professional rock-dodgers, and their neighbours the Lostdowners, the Drebs, the Gillibs and the Hertermils – all of whom have managed more or less to get on with each other for as long as anyone can remember.But that was before the S’derth came. In each of the past ten years, these large, fearsome, light-fingered creatures have swept through the lower World like a blight before returning to the mysterious Elsewhere, laden with things that don’t belong to them. Their peaceful victims have no answer to these onslaughts; they can only hide, taking with them most of their fancy goods and children of stealing age. Gradually, they come to think of the S'derth in the way they think of bad weather, failed harvests and bunions - as just another thing to put up with.This year, however, the plunderers have appeared early, and with new allies, the wily and revolting Didderiths. In Movers – vast wagons drawn by herds of ugly, irritable beasts - they intend to strip the lower World bare. No one can stop them it seems, so no-one tries.To Tuli, the lower World is a distant, blurry place, of little interest. One morning, however, occupied by a troublesome little sister and an untied bootlace, he slides backwards off the edge of the higher World and plummets into the Void. His up-kite saves him, but he falls all the way into the Lower World. There, he hopes to meet others of his kind and find the secret passages that lead back to the Dengas folk.But falling into the middle of the great raid, Tuli is seized by the plunderers and taken into the Elsewhere. On the way he tricks the Didderiths and the S’derth and sets them at each other’s throats before being sold to the rulers of Shar, the greatest, most beautiful, most corrupt city in the Elsewhere (or anywhere else, for that matter). The Sharites, to whom wealth and perfect hygiene are everything, determine to steal the secret of flight from Tuli. How he outwits them and discovers the S’derth’s great longing, how he makes an ally of the prettiest (and worst-tempered) girl he has ever met and how, together, they use the deadly power of soft furnishings, is the story of Tuli in the Elsewhere.