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Nine Goblins

by T Kingfisher

Episode 1 – Episode 2 – Episode 3 – Episode 4 – Episode 5 – Episode 6 – Episode 7 – Episode 8 – Episode 9

Their bonds had been loosened and they had been given water. When the goblins were retied, the elves let them keep their hands in front. Nessilka debated requesting the teddy-bear again, then decided not to push her luck.

“Do you think he believes us?” asked Murray.

“No.”

“He has to know we couldn’t have killed all those people. And they’ve been dead for days.”

“He doesn’t have any way to know how long we’ve been here.” Nessilka sighed. “Think it through, Murray…”

He did. She saw his face fall. He scowled. Nessilka nodded.

“He’s caught us. There could be dozens of goblins in the woods, and he just doesn’t know it yet. We could have been transported here weeks ago. We could have been killing people all that time. We could have our own wizard with us.” She considered this. “I’d be surprised if they hadn’t heard that voice thing as they were approaching. That girl had a heckuva range.”

Murray considered this. “I think she might have been focusing it on us. When we were hearing it before, it didn’t give me that horrible headache, and we could move a lot faster.”

Knowing that your enemy has the ability to focus her powers was somehow not comforting. Nessilka rested her forehead on her knees. “Well, regardless. They don’t know how many of us there are. They may think we’ve got a wizard. Hell, maybe Blanchett here’s a wizard, they don’t know .”

Blanchett focused his eyes with apparent difficulty and said, “No.”

Nessilka forced a smile. “Glad to have to with us again, Blanchett.”

“The bear?” he said.

“Still on a mission.”

“I’ll wait, then.” He lay down on his side and, to all appearances, went to sleep.

Nessilka envied him.

A few minutes slid by, and then Murray said, “Sarge?”

“Mm?”

“It’s worse than that. It may not matter if he believes us or not.”

Nessilka glanced over at the tent. Late afternoon shadows stretched over the grass, but there was no movement. “It doesn’t?”

The other goblin gestured as well as he could with his wrists bound together. “Look, there are people who don’t like the war, right?”

“I’m not terribly fond of it myself, Murray.”

“No, no. I mean civilians.”

“Oh, them.”

“Well…Sings-to-Trees thinks the war is bad. And there’s probably more like him out there. Maybe not so many elves, but what about the humans? They’re doing most of the fighting and they’re probably getting tired of it.”

“The great grim gods know that I am.” Nessilka glanced at their guard. He had not moved an inch in the last two hours. She had to watch for a minute to make sure he was blinking.

“So…” said Murray. “Say you’re got people getting tired of the war. Then you get a bunch of goblins showing up and wiping out a whole human village. Do you think those people are still going to be tired of it?”

Nessilka scowled. “That’s politics, Murray.”

“Well, yeah. Lotta people die of politics.”

She was suddenly very glad that she hadn’t told the elf captain about the rest of the regiment, or about Sings-to-Trees.

They sat in the sheep pasture while the shadows grew so long that they joined up to each other and became evening.

“Hey, Murray?”

“Yes, Sarge?”

“Maybe they’ll figure out we were right, and they’ll give us medals.”

“Very funny, Sarge.”

Torches were lit outside the tent, and someone started a campfire. When Nessilka looked back to their guard, she saw his pupils dilated as wide as a cat’s in the dark. It was an unsettling look. Goblin eyes didn’t do that.

She engaged in a few moments of recreational xenophobia, which didn’t help at all but did pass the time.

Someone came toward them with a torch. Nessilka was hoping for food, but it was Captain Finchbones again.

He did not crouch down this time, but said without preamble, “The human girl says that you and a wizard killed everyone in the village.”

Nessilka shook her head. “No,” she said.

Finchbones narrowed his eyes. “Where is this wizard?”

“Not us. Girl is wizard.”

What’s the point? They’re not going to believe a couple of goblins. If Murray’s right, it doesn’t even matter if they do or not.

“Ask the old man,” said Murray suddenly.

It took Nessilka a minute to remember what he was talking about—it had been that long a day—and then she sat up . “Yes! Old man! Old man alive, in house. Old man saw us. Gave him water.”

And he may decide we’re responsible. Or he may be dead. But I suppose it’s better than nothing. At least he can testify we didn’t kill him when we had the chance.

Murray nodded. “We told the wizard girl he was alive. She didn’t like that.”

Finchbones shook his head slowly. “It’s very likely you are lying,” he said, “but for the life of me, I can’t figure out why you’d lie about this. It’s easily checked, anyway.”

He turned to the elf with the torch and issued a few short commands in Elvish. The man nodded and hurried away.

This left them in relative darkness. The elven captain’s eyes dilated in the same fashion as the guard’s. Nessilka hadn’t noticed that effect with Sings-to-Trees, but she supposed she hadn’t been paying attention.

What was Sings thinking, now that they hadn’t shown up? Would Algol wait until Thumper had healed, then take the group of them to Goblinhome? They’d practically walk by the elven camp if they did…

“I will get to the bottom of this,” said Finchbones. “I don’t believe you were alone out here, and I think goblins turning up in a dead village is too much of a coincidence. But there are a great many things that don’t add up, either.”

Like how three goblins caused herds of farm animals to trample themselves to death, say?

No, I suppose they’ll blame that on the hypothetical wizard we’re apparently working for. Sigh.

“We are rangers,” said Finchbones. “We can track a squirrel through a thousand-mile forest. We will find out where you came from, and what has happened here.”

Nessilka met his eyes squarely. “Good. Then will understand. Then will grant fairness as prisoners of war.”

If you can grandstand, son, so can I… She only wished she had the words to do it well.

His eyes did not look tired any longer. He nodded once, turned on his heel and left.

“Think he’ll ask her about it?” asked Murray.

“If he does,” said Nessilka, “I imagine we’ll know in a few minutes.”

---

Nessilka’s estimate was off by almost an hour. Possibly Finchbones had been subtle with his questioning, or maybe he’d sent someone to go find the old human. Nessilka rather hoped that the old man had pulled through.

Somebody ought to, and our odds don’t look good.

And then, just as the moon came up and sat on top of the hedgerow, the voice began again.

Oh hell… thought Nessilka.

Their guard’s head jerked up, and without a glance at them, he began to walk toward the command tent.

This is our chance! We can escape! We can get away! We…Yeah, no, I’m crawling toward the tent, aren’t I? Lovely.

The really obnoxious thing about this magic was how knowing what was happening to her didn’t change anything. She knew perfectly well that there wasn’t a conversation (oh but it was so close) that she’d never understand it (unless she got just a little bit closer, close enough to make out the words) that even if she did understand it (just a little closer) that it was coming from the throat of a deranged killer who’d destroyed an entire village, apparently as bait for a group of elves.

I wonder if they heard what she was actually saying before they died.

She tried to stand up, but the elves had hobbled her feet with such a short length of rope that crawling covered the ground more quickly. Murray shuffled along next to her.

“Sarge?” asked Blanchett, slow and puzzled, and Nessilka sank her teeth into her lower lip because she knew how hard it was for him to talk without the bear thinking for him but he was making it harder to hear the words and she could swear she almost got a full sentence that time, just about—

She put her arm in a gopher hole and went into it up to the shoulder. Murray crawled past her as she struggled to extricate herself. Then Blanchett went past with a very odd look on his face, except that he was going the wrong way—not toward the command tent at all, but veering off toward one of the other tents.

Nessilka managed to think: He’ll never get near the voice that way! Where is he going—oh, good thinking, Blanchett, good job—and then she found herself shushing her own thoughts, trying to listen to the voice that was almost there, just a little closer, just up to the back of the command tent now…

There were elves pushing up against the walls of the tent. One lifted his sword to cut through the fabric, and then the voice changed—Nessilka stifled a scream—and now it was the same as it had been in the church, now it was painful, now the conversation was a buzz that was going to pry the tiny bones of her ears loose and throw them like jacks inside the chamber of her skull…

Murray, a few yards ahead, sank down to his belly and tried to shield his ears as best he could with his arms tied together at the wrist.

I wonder if this is how those people died…

A mountain of flesh passed in front of her vision.

Something picked her up, one-handed, and tucked her against what felt like a wall of warty skin. Nessilka’s head was hurting terribly badly and if she could just hear what the voice was saying, the pain would stop, that must be what it was talking about, how to stop the headache, but still—what? Is something carrying me? How?

The creature reached down and grabbed Murray, too, and then began moving toward the tent. Nessilka approved of this, because it was getting her closer to the voice and it was moving much faster than she could.

Her captor came around the side of the tent, and Nessilka saw the girl.

She was standing a few feet from the front of the tent, and there was a ring of elves around her, all of them on their knees or curled on their sides, holding their heads. Finchbones had a crossbow and was struggling to raise it, but his hands were shaking so badly that he couldn’t even get it off the ground.

There was another creature there as well, like the one carrying Nessilka. It was holding a struggling Sings-to-Trees around the waist, and in its other arm—

She wasn’t going to forget that human’s face in a hurry. For one thing, he was still wearing her cloak.

The girl saw the wizard and snapped her mouth closed. “John!” she cried, dashing toward him.

Nessilka’s brain felt like a crumpled ball of paper suddenly smoothed flat. The elves gave a collective moan of relief. Finchbones lifted the crossbow and fumbled with the bolt.

The large creature set the wizard down hurriedly. Sings-to-Trees, hanging limply in the monster’s other arm, babbled something to it in Elvish.

The girl threw her arms around the wizard—John’s—neck and said, somewhat muffled, “I knew it would work. I knew they’d have to bring you back if there was nobody else to take care of me.”

Nessilka twisted her head and looked up at the creature holding her. Had it been immune to the noise?

It looked back down at her. It had a wide, froggy mouth and enormous eyes. It looked like a toad crossed with a bull crossed with a small hillside.

“Graw,” it said cheerfully.

“They’re trolls, Sarge,” said Murray. “Sings-to-Trees talked about them. I think they’re friends of his.”

“Graw!”

“Where’s Blanchett?” whispered Nessilka. “I don’t want an elf shooting him if he’s wandering off!”

“Haven’t seen him, Sarge. Maybe he’s on the other side of the tent?”

Finchbones managed to get the crossbow loaded and raised it up. “Sir,” he said with a heavy accent, “must move back from her. Now.”

Nessilka felt a distinct stab of pleasure that the elven captain spoke this dialect rather worse than she did. Now who sounds unintelligent? Ha!

Wizard and girl both ignored him. The wizard said, “Lisabet…what have you done?”

“Nothing!” said the girl. “Well, I shouldn’t have had to do anything! They shouldn’t have taken you away!”

Finchbones tried again. “Sir. Move back. Now.”

John not only didn’t move back, he held Lisabet more tightly. Any crossbow bold would go through both of them, and Nessilka was pretty sure the wizard knew it. “I’m sorry, sir,” he said. “Did she do something bad?”

Finchbones looked tired and grim. “Killed. Killed…village, entire. Many killed. Move back.”

“Lisabet!” The young wizard looked down at her.

“They wouldn’t bring you back! I told them I’d do it if they didn’t bring you back, and they didn’t listen!”

Sings-to-Trees put his hands over his face, looking grey.

“I had to go away, Lisabet! It’s—It’s so much better. They explain things and nobody’s scared of me. You shouldn’t have done this.”

Finchbones said something to one of the other elves. The elf said, “The captain is warning you. You must step away from the girl. She is extremely dangerous and we cannot guarantee your safety.”

Lisabet glared up at her brother. “So you’re glad you went away?”

The boy was a poor liar, Nessilka thought. She was another species, and even she could see the answer on his face.

“Fine!” yelled the girl. “Fine, if that’s how it is! I’m sorry I ever wanted you to come back!”

The girl pulled back. Finchbones jerked the crossbow up.

She opened her mouth and made the noise again.

Nessilka had to give it to Captain Finchbones. His hands were shaking badly and the shot went wild, but it went past her left shoulder with only inches to spare. And he did all this while everyone else was slamming their hands over their ears. The only reason that Nessilka didn’t cover her own ears as well was because her arms were firmly pinned to the troll’s side.

The trolls didn’t seem bothered by the noise. They were looking at the humans with baffled expressions. “Graw?” said one uncertainly.
Sings whimpered, and the troll holding him picked him up and cuddled him, saying worriedly “Grah! Grah-grah-aaah?”

We have got to stop doing this, thought Nessilka wearily, we know there’s no conversation, we know there’s nothing to understand, my head is going to come apart if I hear much more of this…

“Graaaah?”

Finchbones crawled, inch by agonizing inch, toward the girl. He was still clutching the crossbow, perhaps planning to bludgeon her to death if nothing else presented itself.

John, closest to the source, had gone to his knees. He reached for his sister but she stepped out of the way. Her eyes narrowed, and the voice, if anything, got worse. Nessilka felt as if a mule were kicking her repeatedly between the eyes.

Our brains are gonna melt. There’s going to be blood coming out of our ears soon. It wasn’t just trampling—those people died of this.

“Grawww…” said her troll. It fidgeted, crushing her more tightly against its side.

Nessilka’s vision filmed with red mist.

Something moved.

It strode past the fire, past the torches, and even through the film of red, Nessilka thought it moved like a goblin.

…Blanchett?

Blanchett was wearing his helmet. He took one more step forward, reached up, and plucked the bear from his helm.

The voice redoubled. The girl had seen him. It focused, concentrated, and Nessilka began screaming because it drowned the sound out just a little and that was good and anyway, everybody else was screaming, too.

Blanchett wound up, took two running strides, and flung the bear across the sea of screaming elves.

It hit the girl square in the face.

Blanchett always did have good aim.

The voice ended in a very unmagical squawk. Nessilka considered how long the bear had been in battle—months—and how often it had been washed—never—and just how foul it must be.

Probably got a lot of Blanchett’s rancid hair gel on there, too. I don’t even want to know what that stuff’s made of.

Even somebody who’d been surrounded by corpses for a week might draw the line at taking that particular bear to the face.

Sings-to-Trees yelled in Elvish.

The troll holding Nessilka dropped her, gently, and lumbered forward. The girl’s face vanished under a large hooved paw.

“Graw?” it said.

Sings-to-Trees nodded.

John stood up. “I’m sorry, sir,” he said, to no one in particular. “I have to take her away. It’s too dangerous. I’ll make a hole.”

Finchbones coughed, spat, and tried to say something. His vocabulary did not seem to be up to either “summary execution” or “extradition” but John nodded gravely. “I’m sorry, sir,” he said again. “This is bad?—I think?”

“Yes,” said Sings.

John nodded again. “Yes. But it’ll be…worse. Much worse. She’s dangerous. I shouldn’t have left her alone. She just…wasn’t this strong before.” He nodded several times, as if cementing this idea firmly in his head. “I’ll have to take her away, sir.”

“Where will you go?” asked Sings.

“Somewhere—far. Remote?” John glanced at Sings, then away . “I go there sometimes? It’s safe. There’s nobody there.”

“That’s probably good,” said Sings.

“Yes, sir.”

John paused, closed one eye, and spat blue light. Nessilka cringed in memory of what that blue light could do.

Finchbones cursed and dropped his crossbow, shaking his fingers. Blue light slithered over the weapon.

“Very sorry, sir. But she’s my sister.”

Finchbones said something grim in Elvish to Sings. Nessilka recognized an order when she heard it. Sings said something right back. She didn’t recognize that, but by the tone, Sings wasn’t particularly concerned about following orders.

He’s a civilian, Finchbones, you can’t court-martial him…much as you might want to…

John reached up and grabbed the air, as he had once before on the battlefield. Nessilka’s stomach lurched again as he pulled downward, and the air showed… somewhere else.

It was daylight there. It looked like an alpine meadow. Mountains rose up toward a blue bowl of sky.

“Excuse me, sir?” said John to the troll.

“Graw?”

“Let her go,” said Sings, “and Matthien, you will not shoot one of my trolls or I will raise hell clear to the Great Glade.”

Finchbones looked as if he’d eaten something extremely sour.

The troll handed her to John. She gulped a breath and her brother promptly put a hand over her mouth. “Only until we go through,” he told her. “Then you can do whatever you like.”

He stepped through the hole in the air.

It hung there for a second longer—long enough to see John release his sister and for her to gaze around with wide eyes—and then the hole closed up and the fabric of the world healed itself.

A silence fell. It did not break until Finchbones let out a long, disgusted sigh, and picked up his no -longer-glowing crossbow.
Sings reached down, dusted off the bear, and handed it back to Blanchett.

“And now,” he said, “I think we’ve all got a lot of talking to do.”

---

Three days later, Nessilka sat in Sings-to-Trees’ kitchen and peeled potatoes.

Captain Finchbones, much-decorated leader of elite elven rangers, sat next to her and peeled them as well. Sings seemed to feel it would be good for him.

Finchbones could detach the entire peel in one continuous sweep of the knife, which was very impressive, but Nessilka’s rather cruder technique produced three peeled potatoes for every one of his.

There was probably some kind of deep philosophical point there, but Nessilka wasn’t inclined to go digging for it.

It was pretty much all over now. The goblins would leave tomorrow for Goblinhome, and would be provided a ranger escort the entire way. Meanwhile, Finchbones and a small group of his men had been staying with Sings. They pretended they weren’t there as guards and Nessilka pretended her goblins weren’t being guarded, and everyone was reasonably happy.

Thumper had made a full recovery. So had Blanchett. The bear not only had a set of stripes sewn on his arm, it was possibly the first teddy-bear in history to have received a medal for service to the elven nation.

Nessilka and Murray had them as well. They were delicate silver leafy things—about what you’d expect from elven medals. She didn’t know how long they’d last in combat, but it had been a nice gesture.

And…maybe more than a gesture. She glanced over at Finchbones.

He smiled. “Thinking?”

“Wondering if this is really going to change anything.”

Finchbones nodded slowly. His command of the human language had improved somewhat from use, but it still took him a minute to think through a complicated sentence. (Sings-to-Trees had read him the riot act about not speaking the language of people under his protection, and Finchbones, to his credit, was trying. She suspected that his opinion of her had increased radically when she proved more eloquent than he was.)

“Maybe change,” he said finally. “Don’t know why anything changes. Maybe small thing.”

Nessilka tossed another potato on the pile.

“I think things will change,” said Sings. “It’s a good story. People latch onto stories.” He frowned into the soup he was making. “We’ve got to do something, anyway—can you imagine putting that poor soul in the army?”

Finchbones and Nessilka exchanged glances.

Best place for him, really, Nessilka thought, if your description’s right. He needed structure and someone to tell him what to do. Pity they didn’t get his sister, too, or those people might still be alive.

But you couldn’t say that sort of thing to Sings-to-Trees. There was something very…civilian…about Sings. Nessilka concentrated on her potatoes.

From what they’d been able to piece together—from the old man, and from what Sings had learned from the wizard in the few hours they’d spent together—a picture had emerged. John and Lisabet had indeed been orphans in the village of Elliot’s Cross, until the army had come to recruit John.

Contrary to Lisabet’s complaints, he had gone willingly.

Not like you could draft someone who can simply walk out through a hole in the air…

Lisabet’s talent had been judged both too weak to recruit—which meant that either someone had been incredibly short-sighted, or she had been too cunning to let anyone know the extent of her abilities, or her powers had increased dramatically. There were all kinds of reasons that could happen, from puberty to stress, and there was just no telling.

Frankly, they might have thought that dragging everybody toward you, friend or foe, was more trouble than it was worth…

Now they were on shakier ground , conjecture-wise, but apparently Lisabet had not taken kindly to the people who were taking care of her, and refused to believe that her brother would go off without her. She had presumably decided that the problem was the village, and if everybody in the village was gone, they would have to bring John back to take care of her.

It was the sort of plan a child would come up with—simple, self-centered, and utterly heartless.

And there were over forty dead humans and a great many dead animals as a result.

Nessilka pitched another potato in the pile.

The rest, of course, was fate. When the Nineteenth had charged the wizard, he had panicked and tried to run. Possibly if they hadn’t all piled through, he might had made it back to Elliot’s Cross, but the shock had been too much and dropped them only partway to the goal.

We’re probably all lucky we didn’t just vanish in some weird blue space between worlds.

Finchbones was livid knowing that there was a psychotic wizard on the loose, but they had no leads at all for where the pair might have gone. Nessilka was of the opinion that they had gone very far away indeed. Something about the view through the hole had seemed…remote. Hopefully John could control his sister. Despite having faced him over a battlefield, Nessilka wished him well.

Someone yanked the door open, and eight goblins piled into Sings-to-Trees’ kitchen. Two elves followed, slightly more decorously…or as decorous as anyone can look with an armful of zucchini.

“Sarge!”

“Sarge!”

“Sarge, the bear says—”

“Sarge, I get to take Wiggles back to Goblinhome, right?”

“I’ve been checking our maps, Sarge, against the elven ones, and our route takes us past a couple of human villages—”

“Sarge, Mishkin hit me!”

“Mushkin hit me first, Sarge!”

“I can’t leave Wiggles, Sarge! He’ll pine!”

“—and I was hoping we might be able to purchase a couple of lenses for the looky-tube thing—”

“He took my zucchini!”

“It was my zucchini first!”

Nessilka put her hand over her eyes. Finchbones grinned down at the potatoes. Weasel hooked her finger into the raccoon’s cage and stroked the top of its head.

She dealt with things in order of importance. “Wiggles goes with us. No kitten left behind. Murray, we’ll see how it goes. Blanchett, have the bear prepare a full report after dinner. Mishkin, Mushkin, I don’t care who started it, it’s my zucchini now, and you will both be washing dishes after dinner!”

She drew a deep breath, and delivered the final and inevitable coda. “Gloober, get your finger out of there!”

“Awww….”

Well, at least things were getting back to normal. And maybe nothing would change, and the war would still go on, and they’d be right back to gruel and marching up hillsides in the dark.

Maybe Finchbones was right, and you never knew why anything changed. Maybe it was all down to small things.

Like teddy-bears. And kittens.

And goblins.