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Nine Goblins

by T Kingfisher

Episode 3

All wizards are crazy.

Not the quaint, colloquial “crazy” where you have an offbeat sense of humor and wear brightly colored socks, not mild eccentricity coupled with a general lack of fashion sense. Not “you don’t have to be crazy to work here, but it helps.” Wizards aren’t weird. They are genuinely, legitimately, around the bend.

This is because magic is a form of psychosis.

Forget the bearded men wearing robes covered in stars trying to sell you bargain spellbooks. Nine times out of ten, it’s a scam, and the tenth time, they really can do magic, but it’s not something they can teach⁵.
⁵Footnote: Some forms of insanity can indeed be taught. Unfortunately, magic doesn’t seem to be one of them.

Various parties have done intensive studies of Arcane Manifestation Disorder, or AMD, and the results often make for interesting reading, but they still don’t know what causes someone to have a sudden psychotic break and wake up able to throw fire from their fingertips. It just happens.

There are basically two kinds of sufferers of AMD—the high-functioning, and the rather less so. High-functioning wizards can live on their own, and while they tend to be shy and awkward in social situations, meticulously neat, and easily startled, they’re not any worse off than the rest of us.

The more unfortunate wizards generally require someone to dress them and can’t be allowed near any sharp objects.

By its very nature, magic is highly complex and highly individualized. It’s hard to say what magic can and can’t do, because it varies so wildly between wizards. Some of them are battle machines, some of them are good in the garden, some of them do weather. Some of them can, on a good day, turn mushrooms into hedgehogs, and some of them can shatter mountains. There’s a young woman in East Charring who can’t talk, but can heal just about anything that ails you. You just don’t know.

Because of this unpredictability, nobody much relies on magic. People have tried, but you get a lot of very unhappy wizards and they’re not a group you want to make unhappy. While individuals with AMD often find work suited to their own particular talents, the only large institutions with a policy of employing wizards en masse are various armies.

Sergeant Nessilka had been in the Goblin Army since she was old enough to lie about her age, and she had encountered a fair number of enemy wizards⁶.
⁶Footnote: The Goblin Army employs wizards as well. Due to the uncomplicated nature of goblin psychology, AMD seems to manifest as a reckless disregard for personal well-being, making the Magician’s Corps the only group more feared than the Mechanic’s Corps, and with a higher rate of turn-over.
There’d been the one who shot smothering clouds of butterflies out of his fingertips, and the one who made people’s skeletons shuck off their bodies like someone taking off a heavy coat, and the really creepy one who’d just made people go away.

This guy shot blue out of his mouth. Nessilka had never seen anybody shoot blue from their mouths, but the goblins who’d been hit weren’t getting up again, and that was more than enough for her.

“It’s a wizard! Get the wizard!” somebody was yelling. “Follow me! Quick!” After a minute of this, Nessilka realized she was the one doing the yelling, and cursed her traitorous vocal cords. Of all the body parts to suddenly discover patriotism…

Then her feet appeared to discover it, as well, because she seemed to be charging at the wizard. Why, feet? Why now? Why can’t you be more like—oh, the spleen, say? The spleen never charges anybody!

Her feet ignored her. Her vocal cords appeared to have gotten the hint, because she wasn’t yelling any more, or perhaps her blood was just pounding her ears too loudly to tell.

She wondered if anybody was actually following her.

Not daring to look behind her for fear of finding that she was making a suicide charge all on her own, she continued forward. The ground slipped and slid and squelched under her broad feet. At this stage of the fight, footing was often more dangerous than the other guys having swords—all those feet running and jumping and tearing over the hillside had churned it into dirt and mud and slippery bits. If you fell down, you slid, until you hit somebody else—a dead body if you were lucky, a live, angry body carrying a blunt instrument if you weren’t.

Goblins actually have an advantage in this terrain since their feet are so huge, but there are limits. She tripped over something—goodness, I hope that wasn’t what it looked like—and stumbled down the slope, not entirely in control of her own course.

An elf appeared in front of her. He had a sword. Unable to stop, and for lack of anything better to do, she ran directly into him, at full speed. He squawked and went down. So did she.

Overhead, another bolt of blue shot out and dropped a nearby goblin like a rock.

Sometimes whoever gets up first wins, and since Nessilka was sitting on the elf’s legs, she had a tenuous advantage. The elf kicked and bucked under her. She slammed her club down on his knee, which put a stop to that, rolled to her feet, took aim, and stomped, hard.

Male elves are no different from any other humanoid species in some regards. He probably wouldn’t die, but he’d certainly wish he had, and Nessilka didn’t have time to stick around, with the wizard still spitting bolts of blue everywhere.

She slid and squelched forward. Then she got onto a patch that still had grass on it—oh glory!—and got traction and pounded forward.

She was twenty feet away, and it occurred to her that her entire plan was “hit wizard with club and hope for the best.” This was not a bad plan, as such things go, but it did not seem to have a contingency for the wizard spitting blueness at her.

There were footsteps behind her. Somebody yelled.

The wizard looked up, and his eyes went wide.

Nessilka had to do it. She darted a glance behind her.

The entire Nineteenth Infantry, from Algol down to Blanchett’s teddy-bear, were right behind her.

Shock warred with gratitude warred with the horror that she was going to get them all killed. Nessilka left her emotions to sort the matter out on their own time, raised her club, and thundered up the last few feet to the wizard.

“Whooooohaaaaa!”

The wizard stopped shooting blue. His mouth opened again, but this time in what looked like a cry of terror, and he reached both hands to one side and grabbed at thin air.

Nessilka wondered briefly if he’d gone mad with terror or was trying to milk an invisible cow.

Then—and even for magic this was weird—he grabbed the air and yanked.

The air tore open—really tore, as if it were a big sheet of canvas with the world painted on it—and there was something on the other side. Darkness, shot with green, that moved.

Sergeant Nessilka did not know much about magic, but she was pretty sure that tearing holes in the air meant no good for anybody.

She tried to stop.

The Nineteenth Infantry, led by Algol, crashed into her back.

Her feet went out from under her and she crashed into the wizard, who in turn crashed into the hole in the air.

The hole went “glorp!”

The wizard went “Arrrrgh!”

Nessilka went “Craaaap!”

Algol went “Sarge?”

The world went black.

---

Sings-to-Trees was tired, but he felt good. This was his normal state of being, so he didn’t stop to notice it.

The bone doe, now with a splint and a tightly wrapped cast, had melted into the trees, followed by her brooding companion. The stag hadn’t liked him messing around with the doe’s leg and had rattled near-constantly, like a furious rattlesnake, until the doe had turned her head and snapped her exposed teeth in the stag’s direction.

Sings-to-Trees gazed off in the middle distance with a vague, pleasant expression, the way that most people do when present at other people’s minor domestic disputes, and after a moment, the stag had stopped rattling, and the doe had turned back and rested her chin trustingly on Sings-to-Trees’ shoulder.

This would have been a touching gesture, if her chin hadn’t been made of painfully pointy blades of bone. It was like being snuggled by an affectionate plow.

But the leg had gotten splinted and wrapped, and the doe was walking more easily on it already, and beyond that, it was in the hands of whatever gods looked after the articulated skeletons of deer.

He pulled on the rusted handle of the pump until water gushed out. He washed his hands, then plunged his whole head briefly under it. Refreshed and spluttering, he headed back up to the farmhouse to look something up.

Sings-to-Trees, while not having many fragile things, did own a small library, which he kept locked in a cedar chest for safekeeping. One look at the outside of the chest—it was scorched by fire, scored by claws, chewed by teeth, and some kind of acid had etched a random design in the lid—made it obvious why something as fragile as paper was on the inside.

He had several herbals, full of small, neat drawings of plants and careful notes (two of which he’d written himself.) He had Sleestak’s Guide to Common Farmyard Maladies, and Diseases of the Goat, (it was amazing how many of those showed up in trolls) and Thee Goode Elf’s Alamanack (which contained many, many ‘E’s, and not much useful information), and the exhaustive Herbal Remedies, which was six inches thick and full of bookmarks. He even had a dog-eared copy of Medica Magica, which was full of outright lies and falsehoods, but every now and then had something worth paying attention to.

The book he really wanted was near the bottom. Sings-to-Trees dug down, building up precarious stacks of leather bindings on either side of the trunk, until he found the volume and lifted it into the light.

The silver leaf had long since flaked off the cover and the letters had become a series of flat spaces in a sea of tooled leather, read as much with the hand as the eye. In the language of humans, it read Bestiary.

The elf sat down and began turning pages carefully.

There was no index. The author had been a wizard, and had been doing well to hold it together long enough to write the descriptions, which were rambling in places and painfully abrupt in others, when they weren’t downright insane. There were no chapters, and nothing resembling alphabetical order. The entries showed up where they showed up, and given the nature of some of the comments interspersing the text, the reader was generally grateful to get that much.

The pictures, though…the pictures practically moved on the page. Even in scratchy black and white, they shone like little gems. The elegant neck of the unicorn flexed, the serpentine mane of the catoblepas writhed, muscles pulsed in the shoulders of the great boar.

Magic may have been involved. Sings-to-Trees rather thought that the author’s gift had been visions, because the creatures gave every evidence of being drawn from life, and in some cases, like the kraken or the ice-moles, that would have been quite a feat.

He was two third of the way through the book, scrutinizing each illustration carefully, before he saw it.

The carefully articulated skeleton of a stag gazed back at him from the page.

“…thee cervidine or cervidian does range widely through the wold, being in all ways like unto a true deer, saving that it be made of Bones and not of Flesh. (Whyfor are you poking at me? Stop! Stop, I implore you!) The cervidian reproduces by manner unknown, though it is said that they may build a fawn of bones, and so imbue it with essential life, (the poking to cease! To cease!) but I have not been witness to this and consider it may be folly. It is known the cervidian is much fond of magic and very curious, like unto a magpie, and will oft be found in areas of great mystical disturbance, which perhaps it may eat, for it takes no sustenance of grass, (I will become angry if there is more poking!) and only damps its bones in water and dew.

(Why do you not stop…?!)”

It went on in that vein for quite a while , and by the time the author had gotten control of himself again, he was talking about the limerick contests held by manticores.

Sings-to-Trees closed the book thoughtfully. Of course, just because the cervidian was attracted in magical disturbance, it didn’t follow that there was one happening nearby, but it was still…interesting . He hadn’t seen such a creature in all the years he’d been out here.

He should probably send a pigeon to the rangers and ask them if anything weird was happening.

There was an almighty crash from the hearth. Sings-to-Trees bolted to his feet.

The raccoon had learned how to open the hutch, and had celebrated its newfound freedom by knocking the hutch over, along with the iron fire grate and the tea kettle that had been warming there. It sat in the midst of the wreckage, paws clasped in glee, and greeted Sings-to-Trees with a happy “Clur-r-r-r-r-p!”

The elf sighed. He had enough trouble without borrowing more. He scooped up the raccoon cub, rescued the kettle, and began putting books away before his patient got any more bright ideas.

---

The sergeant’s head hurt.

Somebody was singing under their breath. Thumper again, probably. “With a whack-whack here…” Gods, her head hurt. She wanted to go back to sleep. Sleep was good.

“Sarge?”

Oh, lord. They wanted her to wake up.

“Sarge, we have a problem.”

Worse and worse. They wanted her to wake up and be the sergeant.

She didn’t want to wake up and be the sergeant. Being the sergeant was thankless, and they didn’t pay you very much more⁷, and when something went wrong, you were the one that had to fix things.
⁷Footnote: They hadn’t actually paid anybody for the last four months, so this was really a moot point, but it was the principle of the thing.
Responsibility was lousy.

“Sarge…”

On the other hand, if you didn’t see things were done right, it’d get done badly, and watching the resulting inefficiency was like being poked repeatedly in a sore tooth. It galled at her.

Besides, if she didn’t get up, Murray would be in charge, and he hadn’t done anything bad enough to deserve that.

She opened one eye. Algol was shaking her shoulder.

“Ungghffff….”

That didn’t sound right. She paused, licked her lips, tried again. Her mouth was dry. “Yes, Corporal?”

“Um, we have a problem, Sarge.”

Of course they had a problem. Everybody always had a problem. There was a war on, after all.

She sat up.

“Where’s the battle?”

“We don’t seem to be there any more, Sarge.”

“Don’t seem to…” Nessilka looked around.

Most of the Nineteenth Infantry was sprawled on the ground. Murray was on the other side of what looked like a small clearing in the woods, except they’d been on a hillside, not in the woods. Where had the woods come from?

“Did these trees grow while I was asleep?”

Algol considered this dutifully. “I think they take longer than that, Sarge.”

“Is the battle over? Did you carry me back the way we came?”

Algol shook his head. “I just woke up, Sarge.”

Murray came over, folding up a little glass and brass contraption in his hands. “We’re not at the battlefield.”

“Thank you, Corporal Obvious,” said Nessilka, ignoring that she had said something similar about half a minute before.

“No, Sarge, you don’t understand. We’re not anywhere near the battlefield. We’re miles off. There’s a break in the trees over there, and I got a sighting on a mountain. I think it’s Goblinhome.”

“Well, that’s fine, then,” said Nessilka. “I mean, Goblinhome—”

“Sarge, it’s at least fifty miles away. We’re on the wrong side of it.”

She considered this.

“The sea side?”

“The human side, Sarge.”

Sergeants don’t scream. They shout at people quite a lot, but they do not scream. Nessilka took a deep breath, and let it out cautiously. She didn’t scream. Okay. That was fine, then.

“So what you’re saying is…we’re behind enemy lines.”

Murray laughed. There was a slightly hysterical edge to it. “Sarge, we’d have to move about forty miles up to just be behind enemy lines. We’re practically behind the enemy nation.”

“Ah.”

There was a long moment, while Murray fiddled with his glass and brass thing, and Algol stared up into the trees, and Nessilka’s mind was an absolute blank. She was a sergeant by virtue of always being the responsible one. She’d had the same two weeks of boot camp as everybody else. At no point had they covered what to do when you are accidentally whisked into the heart of enemy territory.

Still, you had to do something.

“Alright,” she said finally. “Murray, Algol, get everybody awake and on their feet. Check for wounded. See who came with us.”

They saluted and peeled off. Nessilka got to her feet, and looked around.

It wasn’t a bad forest. Other than the fact that they absolutely weren’t supposed to be there, it was a perfectly nice forest. It was deep and green and the ground was covered in a soft mat of some little plant or other. The spots under the trees were deep with pine needles and leaf litter. Birds were calling from the canopy. The branches whispered and shifted gently in the wind.

It was a nice forest. It had probably belonged to goblins once. It was a shame they couldn’t stay here for a bit. She sighed. Up in the trees, a crow went “ark!” and the call seemed to hang in the air for a long time.

“Everybody’s up, Sarge,” said Murray. “Nobody’s bad hurt, but Blanchett’s got a twisted ankle.”

“He says I can walk on it,” said Blanchett, nodding to the teddy-bear. “Probably not a full march, though.”

“Tell him thank you,” said Nessilka absently.

About two-thirds of the Whinin’ Niners had come through the hole in the air with her. Algol, Murray, Blanchett, Thumper, the recruits—gods, the recruits—plus Gloober, who always had a finger in some orifice or other, and Weasel, who was tiny and slender and of completely indeterminate gender, and who stuttered when you tried to talk to—for lack of a better word—her. (Nessilka was pretty sure she was a girl, but if Weasel wasn’t going to say anything about it, neither was she.) Everybody else was back at the battlefield.

“And we found the wizard, too,” said Algol.

“Oh, dear.”

The wizard was in a lot worse shape than any of them. He was still unconscious, his breathing was shallow, and his skin was grey. This would have been normal in a goblin, but he was one of the pinkish humans, so it probably wasn’t a good sign. He had a thin, worried face, and badly bitten fingernails. He didn’t look like a lunatic killing machine, but then, who did?

There didn’t seem to be any marks on him, and Nessilka was pretty sure she hadn’t run into him that hard.

“It’s probably the magic,” said Murray. “I bet he was trying to cut and run—that thing in the air was an escape route. Maybe it takes energy to go through it, and when we all fell through it, it knocked him out.”

“What do we do…”

“…with him now?” asked the recruits meekly.

The Nineteenth all looked at each other, while carefully not meeting each other’s eyes, which is a pretty neat trick.

Nessilka sighed.

They ought to kill him. They all knew they ought to kill him. He was the Enemy, and he was a wizard, and he’d probably killed a lot of goblins shooting that blue stuff out of his mouth. He’d kill them all if he had a chance.

The problem was that it’s one thing to kill somebody when they’re charging at you with a sword, or shooting blue things, but it’s an entirely different thing to kill somebody who’s lying unconscious on the ground. The one is just war. Wars are like that.

This, though….This felt like murder.

Goblins are nasty and smelly and grumpy and have bad attitudes, but they’re not inherently bad. They’re pretty much like anybody else. They don’t kill people for fun, regardless of what the propaganda posters say. And this guy was a wizard, and wizards were scary, but you had to feel a little sorry for them, too. They probably hadn’t wanted to wake up one day with the power to unmake the world.

Nessilka shook her head. “We’re not going to kill him.”

Everybody relaxed imperceptibly.

“We can’t tie him up, though,” Murray pointed out. “When he wakes up, if he gets his hands or his mouth free, he could magic us.”

“So we’d better be a long way off when he wakes up,” said Nessilka. “Everybody, get ready to move out. Thumper, cut a crutch for Blanchett. Gloober, get your finger out of there. Algol, do we have any blankets?”

“No, Sarge. We don’t have much. Nobody took their full kit into the battle. Murray’s got some mechanical stuff in his pack, and I’ve got a rope, but beyond that, it’s basically whatever we’ve got on our backs, and our field kits.”

The standard issue goblin field kit is a pocket knife, two bandages of dubious cleanliness, a rubber band, a stump of candle, some dried fruit and a book of matches. It fits into the standard issue tin cup, which then fits into a small pouch. It was better than nothing, but not by much.

“If I cannibalize a coupla things—” Murray patted his pack, which caused everyone to brace briefly for an explosion, “—I can probably rig another travel stove. We’ll be able to cook, anyway.”

“Does anybody have a bow and arrow?”

Nobody did. Archers were another unit entirely. The Nineteenth was strictly hand-to-hand.

Weasel put up a hand shyly.

“Yes, private?”

“I c-c-c….” Weasel turned bright red.

Nessilka put an arm around the small goblin’s shoulders and turned her around so that the eyes of the troop weren’t on her. “In your own time, private.”

“I c-can use a s-s-sling, s-s-sarge.”

“Good. We might actually eat after all.”

“We’re almost ready, Sarge,” said Algol. Blanchett was experimenting with his crutch, under the watchful eye of the teddy-bear.

Nessilka looked down at the wizard. No blankets. She sighed.

She was going to miss it tonight, but she pulled her cloak off and laid it over the wizard. Poor sod was probably in shock, and if he didn’t stay warm, it was as good as having killed him. Besides, he was a wizard, and they had a hard time fending for themselves. “Algol, see if you can get a little water into him before we go. I’d rather not leave a trail of dead bodies behind us.”

Algol nodded.

“Everybody else—I want to get at least five miles away from here, and then we’re looking for a place to hole up for a bit that’s hidden and defensible. Let’s try not to leave a trail like a wounded moose, okay?”

---

It was a beautiful day in the forest. The birds were calling. The birds were calling a lot.

Nessilka was getting a feeling that whatever they were calling was probably the ornithological equivalent of “Come get a load of this!”

Travelling through thick woods with a troop of goblins is not unlike a nature hike with a group of grumpy toddlers with weapons.

They fell into things. They fell out of things. They attacked bushes. The bushes frequently attacked back. They startled small animals, who startled them badly in return, causing them to fall over into more bushes. They stepped on things that were not good to step on, and stepped in things that squelched, or stank, or exploded with spores.

Sergeant Nessilka watched as her troop discovered a patch of poison oak, and had to look away.

Blanchett stumping up beside her, leaned on his crutch, and eyed the rest of the troop.

“He says that’s poison oak they’re rolling in,” he informed her, pointing to the teddy-bear.

“I think he’s right.”

Murray emerged from the thicket, holding a sprig of leaves at arm’s length.

“Leaves of three…” Murray was muttering. “Leaves of three…gods! Everything has three leaves! How do you tell?”

“If you touch me with that, corporal, I’ll have you court-martialed.”

“Yes, Sarge.”

They rounded up the now-itchy troop and staggered on.

“How far do you think we’ve come, Murray?”

“Maybe a mile, Sarge. Probably not much more than that. We lost some time when Gloober stepped on the wasp-nest.”

A tree had apparently offended Thumper in some fashion. He attacked it with his maces, and then with his teeth.

“Algol, go rescue that tree. Gloober, if you’ve got poison ivy on that finger, you’re going to regret sticking it in there. Weasel—whoa!”

Weasel turned scarlet and mumbled something.

“Is that a pheasant?”

“I m-made a s-s-sling, S-sarge.” She held out a strip that, in a former life, had been a section of rancid goathide loincloth. Slung over her shoulder was a very large, very dead bird, nearly as big as the little goblin’s torso and sporting a gorgeous rainbow of feathers. “I th-thought—”

“Weasel, remind me to put in for a medal for you when we get home. Bird tonight! Can you catch another one?”

The little goblin mumbled and shrugged and stared at her toes.

“Do your best. Make someone else carry the bird.”

“Sarge, there’s a break in the trees up ahead.” Murray was already digging in his backpack. “Permission to go scout the land.”

“Permission granted. What do you call that contraption, anyway?”

“What, the looky-tube-thing?”

“Yeah.”

“The looky-tube-thing.”

“Ask a stupid question…Yeah, go get the lay of the land. Everybody, take five. Gloober, I warned you about that finger!”

---

Murray returned in about ten minutes, frowning. Algol supervised the application of mud to scrapes, stings, and welts. Nessilka was mentally composing a report to the Goblin High Command detailing the need for wilderness survival training for the troops.

Heading One—Poison Oak, identification of…

“What’s the good word, Murray?”

Murray chewed on his lower lip. “Not much of a good word. We’re on the west edge of a pretty substantial forest. It runs a fair way, and it curves around to the north, so if we follow the edge, we’ll get closer to Goblinhome, but not very fast.”

“What about striking out from the forest?”

“Don’t recommend it, Sarge. It’s all farmland out there between us and home—absolutely flat for a long way, practically right up to the foothills. At least thirty miles of farm, twenty more of hills. You or I could make it in a coupla days, but with this crew—” He spread his hands in an eloquent gesture that expressed, rather better than words, the general competence of the Whinin’ Niners at anything resembling stealth. “Better part of a week, in the open, with cornfields and hedgerows for cover. You know II’ll follow you anywhere, Sarge, but I think it’s suicide.”

Heading Two—Moving stealthily, practice thereof…

“And if we follow the forest?”

“Probably closer to fifty or sixty miles, although it’s hard to tell. Could be more. We’ll still have an open bit at the end—can’t tell if the woods go up to the foothills, but I don’t think they do—but we’d be under cover most of the way.”

Nessilka nodded. She had a brief vision of herding the Nineteenth across open fields by night, hiding in drainage ditches during the day, barking dogs, men with crossbows, and shuddered. “I’m thinking we’ll go with your plan.”

“One more thing. There’s a town—probably ten miles north, real close to the woods. We can probably go deeper in and go around it, and risk getting lost, but we might want to try raiding it.”

“Raiding? Corporal, there are nine of us.” Nine goblins could, on a good day, probably disrupt a child’s tea party or decimate a chicken coop, but Nessilka wouldn’t have put them against anything bigger.

“I’m not suggesting we try to pillage the town, Sarge. I had more in mind hitting a henhouse, and maybe somebody’s laundry. Have you seen Thumper’s loincloth?”

“Thank you, I’ve been trying not to look.”

“There’s a coupla isolated farmhouses on the outskirts. I think a small group could raid one.”

“I’ve got no stomach for killing farmers, Murray, and if we do, we’re going to have hunters after us before you can say “glarguk⁸.”
⁸Footnote: “Glarguk” is a paste made of dried figs and beetle scrapings, popular as a sandwich spread among goblin schoolchildren.

“Great gods, no, Sarge, I’m hoping they won’t even see us.”

She relented. “Okay, talk to me again when we’ve found a place to hole up for a bit. I’m still hoping to put miles between us and that wizard.”

---

In the end, they found a kind of dirt cave in a mostly dried-out riverbed. If it rained, they might flood out, but the promise of even a muddy pool of water nearby was more than enough to recommend the campsite. They had made at least three miles, which wasn’t as much as Nessilka liked, but it was better than nothing.

Weasel had managed to bring down a rabbit. A rabbit and a bird weren’t much between nine people, but along with the dried field rations, it wasn’t bad, and everybody knew it could have been a lot worse. Both rabbit and pheasant were cooked on a spit, and were greeted with so many appreciative complaints—“Gah! Tough as an old shoe!” “You call this rabbit? Looks like a long-eared ferret. Tastes like one too!” “What was this bird eating, stinkbugs?”—that the little goblin was completely tongue-tied.

“Okay, guys, tomorrow we’re doing a full day’s march,” said Nessilka once the last bones had been gnawed. Groans greeted this. She waved them off. “We’ve got a route back to Goblinhome, but we’re sticking to the woods for now.”

“How far are we…”

“…from Goblinhome, Sarge?”

“’Bout fifty miles as the crow flies. We’re not crows, though, so we’re looking at seventy or eighty.”

More groans. “Why can’t we take the short way?”

“’Cos it’s through human farmland, and I don’t think they’ll be real happy to see us.”

“Perhaps we could go in disguise?” asked Gloober hopefully.

“We’re four feet tall and green. I think they’re going to notice.”

Blanchett consulted with his teddy-bear for a few minutes, and then said, “He says it’s a good plan, Sarge.” The teddy-bear had one of the pheasant tail-feathers stuck behind one ear, giving it a jaunty look.

“Err…thank him for me.” Nessilka wondered briefly what she’d have done if the teddy-bear hadn’t approved, had a brief vision of a mutiny led by a one-eyed stuffed animal, and squelched it. It had been a long enough day already.

It was a long night, too.

Goblins are good at sleeping on the ground. They had all been doing it for so long that they hardly cared any more—pack for a pillow, cloak if they had one. And tonight they had the luxury of cut pine boughs for a mattress, which was significantly better than camping on the hillside. No one was complaining there.

No, the problem was the noises.

Generally the noises of goblin digestion, snoring, and other indelicate processes were enough to drown out anything outside. This time, however, the gurgle of nine stomachs had nothing on the woods.

“Those aren’t normal,” said Thumper, the fourth or fifth time something went by with a swoosh outside, as if on enormous wings.

“It’s owls,” said Murray.

“It’s not owls,” said Thumper. “I’m a forest goblin, ‘kay? Those aren’t owls.”

“You can’t have been in the forest since you were little,” said Murray.

“They haven’t changed owls since I was a kid. Owls are silent, like. They sneak up on stuff. That’s not an owl.”

As if exhausted by speaking this many words all at once, he fell silent. Everybody listened.

Something that probably wasn’t an owl wooshed by again.

“We don’t like this, Sarge,” said Mishkin and Mushkin.

“Sarge doesn’t like it either,” said Nessilka, “but it’s out there and we’re in here, and it’ll have to come through me to get to you, so go to sleep.”

She was closest to the entrance of the cave, and she’d always had pretty good hearing. She was probably the only one who could hear the other noise—the soft, sucking sound of footsteps in mud, as something walked quietly up the riverbed, fifteen or twenty feet away.

Thhhhwuck. Thhhhwuck.

Swoosh.

She glanced behind her. Murray was the next closest, but he was half-deaf from his time in the Mechanics Corps and the daily explosions. She didn’t say anything.

Her hand tight on the handle of the club, Sergeant Nessilka stared wide-eyed into the dark.