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Nine Goblins

by T Kingfisher

Episode 1 – Episode 2 – Episode 3 – Episode 4 – Episode 5 – Episode 6 – Episode 7

Sings-to-Trees did argue, but it seemed to Nessilka that it was more a matter of form. The encounter with the cervidian had shaken him badly, and what he really wanted was to get home and send a pigeon to the rangers as quickly as possible.

“You don’t have to go,” he said. “We could all go back. We’ll let the rangers handle it.”

The notion that someone higher up the chain of command would be more able to handle anything was so foreign to Nessilka that she couldn’t really get her head around it. Could elves really be that different?

Naaaah. Elves were elves, but the military was the military. There was something immutable about it. Orcs were pretty different from goblins, too, but their military worked almost the exact same way, except that at the higher levels you were answerable to the priesthood, and nobody ever said anything nice about orcish gods.

“We’ll investigate,” said Nessilka. “Whatever this is, it’s between us and our way home.”

Sings-to-Trees sighed. “I’ll come as far as the tree line , then,” he said. “I promise I won’t go after you, but if you get hurt, I’m…well, a veterinarian, but I’ve worked on goblins before.”

Nessilka wavered.

“If this is affecting animals too—”

She sighed. “Fine, fine. But you don’t come after us. If something goes bad and we’re not back by nightfall, you go back to the farm and you tell Algol what’s happened.”

And gods above, don’t let Algol get a case of the heroics…

“I promise,” said Sings-to-Trees. She eyed him warily, but he was a civilian—and another species—and she probably didn’t have the authority to order him back to his farm.

Also, it was hard to assume authority when you only came up to the bottom of somebody’s ribcage.

Blanchett scrambled down to them before long, covered in leaf mold and mud but none the worse for wear. (Actually, the mud improved his odor significantly.) Sings-to-Trees checked his ankle again and pronounced it acceptable.

“Tell me,” said Murray, assembling earplugs out of moss and half an old candle, “did you hear the weird voice from earlier?”

Blanchett pushed a finger under his helmet to scratch. “I guess, yeah. Some kind of mumbling, wasn’t it?”

“And you didn’t feel any compulsion to go chase after it?”

Blanchett looked puzzled. “A what?”

“A comp—an overwhelming urge. You know?”

“Err. No?”

Murray gave it up as a bad job.

He finished the earplugs and handed them around. “This won’t block all the sound. I don’t have the equipment. But if you start to hear something, if you hum or sing, that should drown it out.”

“Can I sing “The Bird In The Bush?” asked Blanchett hopefully.

Nessilk had a brief image of exactly how absurd the three of them would look trying to sneak up on the enemy while singing dirty drinking songs, and wondered if it would be any better if they were singing martial tunes or just humming really loudly. “Sing whatever you like, Blanchett.”

“I’m not sure if they’ll work even then,” Murray said. “It might not be a real sound, you understand? If it’s magic, it could be something in our heads as easily as anything else.”

“We’ll have to hope, then,” said Nessilka. “Blanchett, this is a direct order. If you hear the weird mumbling again, and Murray and I start running towards it—you are to stop Murray by any means necessary, even if you have to hit him on the back of the head and sit on him.”

“That’s ganking-a-superior-officer, Sarge,” said Blanchett.

“It’s in a good cause, Blanchett, and that’s an order. If the wizard gets me, you two go back home, pick up Sings-to-Trees here, and go find Algol.”

“You can get court-martialed for ganking-a-superior-officer,” said Blanchett.

“I’m telling you, Blanchett, it’s on my orders.”

Blanchett screwed up his face in the bear-listening position. “He says…if you’re dead, it won’t matter if it was on your orders.”

Nessilka pinched the bridge of her nose and prayed for patience, no less so because the bear was probably right.

“…but he also says to do it,” finished Blanchett. “So that’s all right then, Sarge.”

“As long as we’re all in agreement,” said Nessilka wearily, and shoved moss and wax into her ears.

---

They left Blanchett un-earplugged, since he apparently wasn’t affected, and he had flatly refused to wear them unless the bear got a pair too. As the bear didn’t really have much in the way of ear canals, so it just seemed easier that way. There was enough crude hand-sign available in Glibber to be able to communicate simple orders, and Nessilka didn’t feel like a complicated philosophical discussion at the moment anyway.

Sings-to-Trees halted under the last trees, gazing out across the waving fields of the farmland. He frowned, and said something, and then when Nessilka pulled out an earplug, he repeated himself. “The melons haven’t been harvested. That strip along the drainage ditch—they always grow melons, it’s got the most moisture—but they all split on the ground and rotted.”

“How long does it take for melons to go bad?” asked Murray, who had also removed an earplug.

“About five minutes, sometimes,” said Sings-to-Trees. “But these should have been harvested a few days ago, I think.” He frowned.

Nessilka nodded. “Well, that gives us more of a time frame.” She reached up and patted the elf on the shoulder. “Try to stay out of sight. Hopefully we’ll be back before long.”

They put in their earplugs, looked at each other awkwardly, then Nessilka nodded sharply and signed, Move out.

There was a main road not far away, and a hedgerow running along one side of it. They stuck to it as closely as possible. It was taller than a goblin and made Nessilka feel less exposed. Small birds hopped through it. Murray pointed to one and Nessilka nodded.

So it wasn’t all the animals, then. That was something, anyway.

They crossed three fields and were midway through the fourth when they found the dead body.

Murray saw it first, in the drainage ditch. He stopped short, and Nessilka and Blanchett came up on either side of him and looked down and saw it too.

It was a human child, very young. Nessilka couldn’t do ages on humans at all, but it didn’t look old enough to walk very well yet. It was laying in the bottom of the ditch with its eyes open and flies buzzing around it.

Nessilka’s sigh sounded strange and muffled to herself with the moss in her ears. Blanchett looked as inscrutable as his teddy-bear.

It was the enemy, but it was awfully small.

It fell in the ditch and couldn’t get out again, she thought grimly. Probably following the voice, and not able to look where it was going. She wondered where it had come from—she’d glimpsed a farmhouse far across the field on the other side of the road, through gaps in the hedgerow—but if it had come from there, had human adults come with it?

Of course, an adult could just step out of the drainage ditch…

Murray caught her eye and gestured to the farmhouse, then to the child. Nessilka turned her hands up and nodded, then shrugged. Probably. I don’t know.

Nessilka gestured for them to move on. They couldn’t take the time to bury the human, and anyway, humans usually burned their dead, didn’t they? They certainly didn’t have time for that, or the wood either, and a column of smoke would announce their approach as clearly as a bagpipe corps.

They moved on.

Two fields over, they found a dead dog. It looked old and not healthy. There was a trail of broken corn stalks behind it, and crows had been at its eyes.

Whatever it is, it doesn’t affect crows, then.

Shading her eyes, Nessilka could see the town on the horizon. She wondered how many corpses there would be between here and there.
As it turned out, there were a lot. A horse with a broken leg had hauled itself an astonishingly long way and then fallen down, and by the torn up ground, it had apparently tried to crawl, which Nessilka couldn’t even imagine. A dead pig had expired without a mark on it, leaving a drainage ditch full of piglets which had probably died of starvation.

The sheep were really bad. Nessilka had seen a lot of horrible things in battle, but the entire flock of sheep had apparently run into a fence and gotten their heads stuck between slats, and then had beaten themselves to death against the fence posts. One or two were nearly decapitated.

Murray eyed them coolly, then turned to the sergeant and pulled an earplug loose. Nessilka followed suit, wincing.

“All domestic animals,” he said. “Cats, too, which I suppose aren’t really domesticated, but nothing really wild, anyway. Whatever this is, it’s not affecting deer or rabbits or wild birds, just the farm animals.”

“And people,” said Nessilka grimly.

“And people.”

They put their earplugs back in and kept moving, keeping low to the hedgerow. A flock of vultures had descended on a dead cow, which had smashed several fences and then been trampled by the rest of the herd.

There was another human, not far beyond it, who looked to also have been trampled by the cows.

After that, the humans became more frequent, the bodies more densely packed. Sometimes they appeared to have crawled over each other. Nessilka stopped seeing them. It was just like a battlefield the day after, a deep silence that seemed only to deepen behind the buzz of the flies and the croaking of the carrion birds.

They reached the farthest outlying building.

It was a little house, with a dead man lying on the front walk. He was very old, with white hair around his temples.

They were nearly abreast of him when the dead man moved.

It wasn’t much, just a hand scrabbling at the packed dirt, but that was enough.

They stopped. It was one thing not to bury bodies, it was quite another to pass up a wounded man. They gathered around him. Nessilka pulled out an earplug, but held up a hand when Murray started to remove his.

“Help me,” the old human rasped, in a dialect that Nessilka could understand, even if the accent was strange. “Help me. Oh please…”

She crouched down next to him. “What happened here?” she asked.

His eyes were nearly closed and rimed with dried tears, but he cracked them open and squinted at her.

“Goblin?” he asked weakly. “You…you didn’t do this to us…”

It didn’t sound like a question. “No,” said Nessilka. “We don’t know what’s happened, either.” She pulled her water bottle off her belt and gave him a drink, trickling the water between his cracked lips. “Can you tell us anything?”

“Goblins,” he said, sounding almost wondering. “Some kind of…weapon?”

“It wasn’t us.” She gave him a little more water, and would have asked him more, but he sank into unconsciousness. She looked up at Murray helplessly.

“We’ll come back for him if we can,” said Murray, too loudly on account of the earplugs. “We should keep moving, Sarge.”

Which was true. Which Murray shouldn’t have had to tell her.

“Move him into the shade, at least.” She and Murray each took a side and carried him back inside the house. There was a pallet on the floor—not much of one, but better than the walkway.

“Right. Let’s move. Blanchett, if you hear anyone crying out, let us know.” He nodded. She put her earplugs back in.

There were cattle in the town square. Some of the humans had died when the cattle crushed them. It was a mess, a horrible mess, which was a laughably ineffective word for the scene before them.

At least if she thought of it as mess she didn’t have to think of it as people.

Nessilka was glad Sings-to-Trees hadn’t come. Or Algol. She didn’t know if the elf could handle it, and while she knew Algol had been on battlefields, at least everybody there had been trying to kill you back.

There probably wasn’t much point in sneaking, but they kept to the shadows and the corners of buildings anyway.

Murray tapped her shoulder, and she pulled the earplug loose again—really, why was she bothering? The moss was coming unwrapped by now—and whispered “Yes?”

“Eleven humans so far,” he whispered back. “Maybe more in the buildings, but I don’t think too many. They all seem to be trying to get into the town.”

“Where are they going?”

Murray leaned out from the shadow of the building and pointed. “At a guess, that building there.”

They studied the building in question.

“Pointy,” said Blanchett finally.

“It’s a steeple. Some kind of church, I think. In a town like this, probably the main meeting hall too.”

“All right. Stay low. We’re in enemy territory and don’t anybody forget it,” said Nessilka.

Murray looked around and said, “How could we forget, Sarge?”

They skulked from the shadow of one building to another. Nessilka thought that one was probably a bar, judging from the smell of spilled beer and rotting sawdust. She crouched behind a rain barrel and looked over at the church.

“The bear doesn’t like it,” said Blanchett suddenly.

Nessilka paused. “Does the bear have any suggestions?” she asked delicately.

Blanchett conferred with the bear, and said “He says not. Just…it feels like a trap. Not for us, maybe, but for everybody.”

“I hate this,” said Nessilka to no one in particular. “Tell the bear I agree with him. If he has any thoughts, tell me immediately.”

“Will do, Sarge.”

They crept closer.

The greatest concentration of the dead was at the end of the street, where the church sat in what had formerly been a village square. They were pressed right up against the walls of the church, close to the doors. They looked like they’d trampled each other, and then the cows had trampled them. In a couple of places there were three or four bodies piled together.

The church had big wooden double doors. The worst concentration of bodies was around the doors, and what looked like most of a steer had beaten itself to death against one, blockading it with a half-ton of rotting meat.

The other door was ajar.

She and Murray exchanged glances. She had the fight the urge to meet the teddy-bear’s single button eye as well.

“Somebody moved those bodies away from the door,” Murray hissed.

“Going in or coming out, that’s the—ah!” She grabbed Murray’s shoulder and yanked him back into the shadows.

A small figure—taller than a goblin, but not so broad—came out of a building across the square. It wore a cloth over its head and a bright blue coat. Its arms were full of…groceries? Nessilka could make out the corner of a sack of flour and some jars of preserves.

The goblins watched, hardly daring to breathe, as the figure looked around the square, then threaded its way nonchalantly through the bodies toward the open door.

“Human,” whispered Murray. “Sub-adult. Can’t do the genders from here.”

“How can it even breathe?” asked Nessilka. The stench of the piled bodies was enough to knock her over, and she was twenty yards away and a goblin to boot.

“Maybe it’s had time to get used to it.”

The figure stopped at the door, balanced the load of groceries on one hip, and pushed the door open with its free hand.

One of the corpses shifted slightly when the door hit it, a limp arm flopping in the dust. The figure shoved the arm aside with its foot, caught the door with the edge of its shoulder, and slipped inside.

The goblins sat in the shadow of building. Nessilka crouched behind a water barrel on the edge of the street and stared at the building.

Nothing happened.

“Maybe its parents are dead and it’s just trying to eat until someone gets here to find it,” she said, without much conviction.

“Uh-huh,” said Murray.

“The bear is pretty sure that’s a load, Sarge,” said Blanchett.

She sighed. “Yeah, me too.” The casual way it had moved the corpse aside with its foot—that screamed “murderer” and “crazy person” and “do not touch.”

“Think it’s a wizard?”

“It’d almost have to be, wouldn’t it?”

“There could be a grown-up wizard in there doing the actual magic.” Murray chewed at his lower lip.

“Children are vicious little bastards, some of ‘em,” offered Blanchett.

Flies buzzed. Across the square, two crows got into a brief squabble over a tasty bit of carrion.

“Now what do we do, Sarge? Go back?” Murray glanced behind them.

Nessilka would have loved to go back. Going back sounded like a great idea.

But if they went back and told Sings-to-Trees, he’d insist on coming out to see if the human really was a child who needed help, and if his rangers showed up, they’d probably do the same, and if it was a goblin child they’d be on their guard, but since it was a human and humans were nice…

There were already a whole lot of dead people out there. Nessilka didn’t care very much for faceless unknown rangers, particularly not elves, but Sings-to-Trees didn’t deserve to wind up in that pile of bodies.

And the Nineteenth—what there was of it—still had to get home, and if the weird voice magic could reach as far as the treeline, then they’d have to go miles out of their way to get home, and that would undoubtedly lead them into trouble with somebody who wasn’t nearly as nice as Sings-to-Trees.

“We have to get a better look. Murray, you and me—Blanchett, stay here.”

“Sarge…”

It was a poor day when Blanchett was questioning orders, Nessilka thought grimly. Still—“You’re the only one we know is immune, so you’re the only one who can get a message back if it gets us. If it’s a kid…fine. If it’s a grown-up wizard…well, we’ll find out.”

Blanchett hunched his shoulders and looked mulish, but perhaps the bear had a word with him, because he said gloomily “If you say so, Sarge.”

She took one final look at the church and the bodies, shoved her earplugs back in—Murray did the same—and made a move out gesture with her fingers.

Nessilka and Murray moved out.

---

Sings-to-Trees stood just inside the forest and fretted.

He’d lost sight of the goblins fairly quickly—for all their apparent clumsiness, they knew their way around a hedgerow.

He hoped they would be okay.

He couldn’t believe he’d nearly attacked the cervidian.

He should go back to the farm and send a pigeon. He should send a pigeon about the mage, and about the weird noise. The goblins would be fine. The goblins could take care of themselves.

Sings wrung his hands together.

The goblins could probably take care of themselves better than Sings himself could.

It was so quiet. The quiet bothered him almost as much as the memory of the voice did. Forest edges were hopping with life—birds and bugs and lizards and squirrels. There should be scurrying and scuttling and chirping and singing.

There should be—

Something stamped.

He turned his head slowly, already knowing what he would see.

Ah.

Yes.

The empty eyes of the cervidian stag stared back him.

“I won’t go out there,” he told the stag. “It’s okay.”

The stag rattled and stamped again.

“Er? Is there something else?”

He looked for the bone doe, but she wasn’t there. Perhaps the stag had seen her somewhere safe, then returned.

The stag paced toward him. Sings held his ground. I almost attacked him. He didn’t attack me, and he didn’t hurt that goblin, even though he could have. If anything, he’s got the moral high ground on me.

A few feet away, the cervidian halted. Hollow eyes gazed into his.

And then the stag turned slightly, stretched out a forelimb, and…knelt?

Why is he—

“Oh no,” Sings-to-Trees out loud. “Oh no! Ride you? You can’t be serious!”

The stag rattled with impatience.

Sings-to-Trees eyed the exposed knobs of the stag’s backbone and imagined then against his tender bits. He shuddered.

“Are you sure I can’t just follow you?”

The stag rattled again and pawed at the ground.

“I’ll—but your back—oh, dear….”

Sings-to-Trees was not any more fond of pain than any elf, but he had chosen a life that involved a certain degree of personal discomfort. It appeared that this was going to involve more of the same.

He looked at the stag’s backbone again.

Very…personal…discomfort.

He saved us before. I healed his mate. He clearly knows more about the magic that’s going on than I do.

Oh, dear…

“Half a moment,” said Sings-to-Trees. He stripped off his tunic and began packing grass and moss into it. There was no putting a saddle on a cervidian, but perhaps he could manage some slight protection between himself and the jut of the stag’s vertebrae.

The cervidian waited. Sings-to-Trees finished stuffing his makeshift pillow, took a deep breath, and prepared to ride the bone stag into the unknown.