Nine Goblins

by T. Kingfisher

  “Now then. Boot camp. Kill a lot of straw men?”

  “Yes, Algol!”

  “S’fine if we’re fighting scarecrows, I s’pose. Unfortunately, we’re fighting elves. You ever seen an elf?”

  “No…”

  “We heard they were eight feet tall and breathed fire from their nostrils!” said Mushkin from under his steak.

  “Generally not, no.”

  The average elf, the corporal explained, was a little under six feet tall, with pasty skin like a mushroom and long, pointy ears like a mule. “They’re fast, see? Not goblin fast, but quick as weasels. And they have really good weapons. Loot their weapons if you get a chance.” He patted the sword at his side. It had runes like wriggling worms all down the length, which Murray said meant “Blade that Dances in the Houses of the Moon” in Elven.

  Algol called it “Bob,” after his goldfish back home.

  “If you loot their packs, they’ve usually got decent vittles, too. Vegetarian, but it’s good in stew. Their armor doesn’t fit us for beans, so don’t bother.”

  Mishkin and Mushkin listened with round eyes, absorbing it all.

  “Now, if we get in a fight—err—”

  He looked at the twins. They looked back guilelessly. Algol sighed.

  “If we get in a fight, try to stay close to me.”

  He wracked his brain.

  “They’re all a lot taller than we are, so go for the legs. Hardly anybody has any armor on the back of their knees. We’ll try to find you a shield. Hold the shield over your head, and go for the knees.”

  “Always go for the knees…”

  Always go for the knees was, in fact, the family motto of Clan Uggersplut, to which Algol belonged in a roundabout fashion involving several second cousins and a yak.

  Uggersplut, as it happened, was also the clan to which the most competent of the ranking generals of the goblin army also belonged.

  It had been the scions of Uggersplut who carried the demands of the goblins to the humans, long ago, at the start of the war.

  Goblins, much like rats, prefer to flee, but when they’re cornered…well. When the goblin scout had arrived on the shore of the western sea, the goblin tribes had turned, all together, like an enormous green rat at bay, and bared their collective teeth.

  So the goblin leaders sat down, in the mountain called Goblinhome—half city, half refugee camp—and talked for three days and two nights. As the sun set on the third day, they signed the large warthog hide on which their demands were written. Then they drew straws for who would carry it to the humans.

  Clan Uggersplut had drawn the short straw.

  Mounted on their best steeds, their faces marked with elaborate tribal patterns in black earth, coup markers braided into their hair, Uggersplut rode down from the mountains to the largest of the nearby human settlements. Single-file, heads held high, they rode through the center of the town, and stopped in the central square, and demanded to see the leader of the town.

  Many of the subtleties were lost on the humans. The lean bodies of war-pigs in fighting trim looked feral and half-starved to human eyes, and the patterns of black earth, in which a goblin could have read whole volumes about tribal affiliations and clan standing, looked like streaky dirt and caked dust. Coup markers of bone and stone, denoting enemies slain and great deeds done, were seen as garbage trapped in unwashed hair. Where goblins would see high-ranked emissaries in full regalia, the humans saw a raggle-taggle band, ill-kempt and filthy, to be held in pity and contempt.

  The mayor came out to meet them. To give what little credit he was due, he probably thought he was trying to be kind.

  “Goblins, huh? You-um want beer?” he asked, hunkering down in front of Severspine, the heir to Clan Uggersplut. “We-um give you beer, you go away.”

  “We have come to discuss the ongoing human expansion,” said Severspine coldly. “We want our lands back.”

  “Good beer,” said the mayor, winking at the townspeople over Severspine’s head.

  Negotiations did not proceed well after that.

  Three days later, the war had started, and nothing much would ever be the same again.

  They’d been marching half the night. A halt had been called for fifteen minutes, which was time enough for Murray to whip out his small travel stove and make tea. The Nineteenth crowded around, brandishing their tin mugs and watching with owlish intensity.

  Goblin tea resembles a nice cup of Earl Grey in much the same way that a catfish resembles the common tabby. They share a name, but one is a nice thing to curl up with on a rainy afternoon, and the other is found in the muck at the bottom of polluted rivers and has bits of debris sticking to it.

  Murray poured the tea. Hands went into packs and came out with fistfuls of crude rock sugar. The resulting brew resembled a kind of sweet gritty mud. Sounds of slurping were followed immediately by cheerful complaints.

  “Tastes like rat squeezins’.”

  “Huh, we haven’t had anything as good as rat squeezins’ for six months. Tastes like a water buffalo got sick.”

  “I’d kill for some good rat squeezins.’”

  Thus complimented, Murray beamed.

  A pig-rider cantered down the road, and pulled up in a squealing cloud of dust in the center of the Whinin’ Niners. Nessilka saluted in a desultory fashion. Pig-riders were generally a higher class of messenger idiot than runners, but still nothing to get excited about.

  “What’s the word, then?” she asked.

  “Another hour, then we’re in position and make camp. Dawn attack, so sleep fast.”

  “Dawn? We’ll get, like—” she did a little mental math, “—four hours of sleep! After a day’s march!”

  The messenger grimaced. His pig danced under him. “General’s orders.”

  “Yeah, not your fault.” Nessilka waved him on. “Thanks.”

  It always takes longer to get somewhere than you think it will, and this is twice as true in the military, so the goblins marched into camp a mere three hours before dawn.

  “Okay, troops, equipment check, and then get some sleep. We’re getting up too damn early, so catch what you can.”

  The tents went up quickly. When your tent is three sticks and a whole cowhide, there’s not a lot of time spent dithering. At the beginning of the campaign, the cowhides had been uncured, with the resulting smell of rotting leather and ripe goblin, but Murray had gotten the bright idea to salt the things. The end result was a kind of tent jerky. It still didn’t smell great, but it kept the rain off, even if folding the hides was becoming increasingly problematic.

  Nessilka figured if worse came to worse, they could always eat the tents.

  “Is it even worth…”

  “…going to sleep?” asked the twins.

  “Boys, it’s always worth going to sleep. Sleep whenever you get the chance, because you don’t know how long it’s going to be until the next time.”

  “And eat,” said Algol from behind her.

  “Thank you, yes, Corporal. If there’s food available, eat it. Meals can get awfully thin on the ground sometimes.”

  She glanced around the group to see who looked the least tired. “Gladblack, you’re on second watch. I’ll take first.” Since there were plenty of sentries around the edge of the army, there wasn’t much point in watching for the enemy, but you never knew when one of the other units was going to sneak over and try to nick your goat.

  A teddy-bear popped into her field of view. Nessilka winced, but it was only Blanchett.

  “He wants to know when we’re attacking,” said the owner of the teddy-bear.

  “Tell him dawn,” said the sergeant.

  Blanchett, unlike much of the Nineteenth, wore a helmet. It was a complicated mass of fangy bone and spiky metal. He had taken it from a dead orc and it didn’t fit terribly well, but Blanchett almost never took it off, even to sleep.

  You couldn’t really blame him. A few months back, the Mechanics Corps had been working on a design
for a new showerhead. The resulting explosions had involved terrific loss of life on both sides, and Blanchett had taken a flying log upside the head.

  A battle had been raging at the time, so nobody really noticed this, and had chalked him up as missing, presumed dead.

  Two days later, covered in soot, with a knot on his head the size of an eagle’s egg, Blanchett had staggered into camp, clutching the teddy-bear. It was ragged and moth-eaten and was missing an eye, which gave it a permanent squint. As teddy-bears go, it would be difficult to find a more disreputable specimen. Nobody knew where he’d gotten it, and nobody was quite willing to ask.

  The teddy-bear, so far as Nessilka could tell, was now the brains of the pair. Blanchett refused to answer any query that was not directed at the bear, and only spoke when translating for the bear. In battle, the bear rode on top of his helmet.

  It had been a long war. By that point, everybody had just figured it was easier to go along, particularly since Blanchett seemed rather more intelligent and helpful these days, under the bear’s direction.

  “He says okay,” said Blanchett.

  Nessilka nodded. Blanchett made the teddy-bear salute and went off to get some sleep.

  Weatherby stood up, tugging at his clothes, and said “Right, then! I’m—”

  “Not tonight, Weatherby. There’s a battle tomorrow.”

  Weatherby heaved a sigh. “Fine…”

  “You can desert next week. That’ll be fun, won’t it?” Gods, thought Nessilka, listening to her own wheedling voice, these troops don’t need a sergeant, they need a babysitter.

  “Wanna desert now…” Weatherby muttered, slouching off to his tent. He kicked sullenly at a rock. Nessilka stared up at the sky and counted to ten.

  She finally looked down, and then around the Nineteenth. Algol and Murray, her corporals. Thumper and Weatherby and the twins. Blanchett and his teddy-bear. The half-dozen others who didn’t make trouble and just kept their heads down and tried to get through things. The great grim goblin gods only know who’d be alive after the battle tomorrow. All you could do was pray.

  She wasn’t very good at it—her prayers tended to sound like “You! Up there! Pay attention and heaven help you if you don’t keep an eye on my boys!”—but as she had every night since becoming sergeant, Nessilka prayed.

  SIX

  The unicorn was gone, and the foal with her. Sings-to-Trees felt a moment of pure relief. The stall needed mucking out, but that was fine. He’d rather have mucked a dozen stalls than deal with a grumpy post-partum unicorn.

  It was, all things considered, a glorious late spring morning. Birds sang in the trees and the air was that tantalizing temperature which was just warm enough so that it didn’t feel like anything, until a delicious cool breeze would flicker across your skin. The leaves had come in brilliant, blinding green, and glittering like hot stained glass when the sun lanced through them.

  Sings-to-Trees went around the side of the ramshackle barn, found his shovel, and went to work on the stall. It was hot work, lifting each shovelful into the wooden wheelbarrow, and he was sweating by the time he wheeled the first load up to the garden. Unicorn dung was pretty safe fertilizer. Sometimes the magical creatures had pretty unusual things in their waste. He’d once nursed an injured peryton, a great grey stag with the wings of a heron and the carnivorous diet of a lion, for two weeks. He’d gone through a lot of chickens. Afterwards, he’d put the dung on his tomato plants, and they’d grown six feet practically overnight. He could have handled that, but the fruit grew tiny green antlers. He could probably have handled that, too, even after they shed their velvet and got unsettlingly sharp, but he started finding the tomatoes gored and dripping seeds in the morning. Then the nearby zucchini began showing up with scarred rinds and suspicious gouges. Eventually he was down to one big eight-point tomato buck, a vicious vegetable he suspected was plotting to kill him. He’d put on his cockatrice-handling gloves, and torn the whole patch out before things got out of hand.

  He’d left that corner empty for a year, and then put in chard. Chard seemed pretty innocuous. Not a lot of mayhem available to chard. He didn’t actually like chard, but there were plenty of animals that came through that would. So far it hadn’t done anything suspicious. He shuddered to think what would have happened with potatoes.

  The second wheelbarrow load came and went, and that was it. He sluiced the stones down with water and listened to it gurgle away, feeling the satisfaction of a dirty job done well.

  A hoof stamped on the stones. He turned.

  There was a dead deer looking at him.

  He didn’t yelp. On the scale of weird things that had come to him for help, this didn’t even make the top ten. Still, he did inhale sharply, and he was glad the shovel was within easy reach.

  It was a complete skeleton, fully articulated, standing framed in the square of light of the open barn door. Its filigreed shadow streamed away into the darkness of the barn and was lost.

  He knew it was a deer because of the hooves and the skull and the build, but the delicacy of the thin bone legs was belied by the great rack of antlers on its head, a massive, labyrinthine rack, more than he’d known a deer could possibly fit onto its skull.

  For one horrible moment, he wondered if thinking about the peryton had summoned its ghost—but no, there were no wings, and so far as he knew, the beast was still alive. This creature was probably not alive. At least, not in the conventional sense.

  It looked at him.

  It didn’t have eyes, and its empty eye sockets weren’t full of eldritch fire, or even darkness. They were just eye sockets, full of ivory shadows and little more. Nevertheless, it looked at him.

  “Can I help you?” he said.

  It kept looking at him.

  He spread his hands and took a cautious step forward, then another. It tilted its head, very slowly, and one hind hoof lifted a little, and scraped at the cobbles, the faintest sound, like a tree branch creaking in a soft breeze.

  “Do you need help?” he tried again, and took another step.

  It rattled at him. He froze.

  The skeleton was articulated, so far as he could tell, by a kind of fine dark webbing at the joints. It looked almost like dried algae, brownish-black and forming organic loops and swirls over the balls of the joints. The deer had given a kind of rolling full-body shrug, down the length of its spine, and the clatter of vertebrae together had made the rattling noise he heard.

  Sings lifted his hands, palms out. He didn’t know what that was supposed to prove, if anything. No reason to think it would recognize any humanoid body language at all. It might understand him, or it might not—some of the odder creatures were able to understand human speech, and some were no different from regular beasts.

  They stood there, for a few minutes, the man and the dead deer, and then it swung its head away, the long, smooth nasal bones pointing into the trees nearest the barn, and stamped its hoof again.

  A skeletal doe melted out of the trees. She had an awkward, hopping gait, completely at odds with the ossuary grace of the buck. Sings could see immediately that her right front leg was broken. She held it hitched up in front of her, the naked hoof dangling awkwardly.

  “Oh, you poor thing,” he said, and quite forgetting the enormous buck standing there, started towards her.

  A warning rattle stopped him. He turned, and saw the buck eyeing him eyelessly, the head lowered just a little. He lifted his hands again.

  “I’ll do what I can,” he told the bone stag. And then, hoping he wasn’t about to be spread-eagled on that gigantic antlered mass, he bowed deeply to the stag.

  And straightened.

  And waited.

  They stood there for a long moment. The leaves whispered in the trees, in a brief, cool breeze, that chilled the sweat on Sings-to-Trees’ body.

  The stag lifted its head.

  Sings turned away. The skin between his shoulderblades crawled. He bowed to the doe, for good measure, and she gazed a
t him with empty eye sockets.

  There was no flesh on her, there was nothing that could pull the face into any shape beyond the mute grin of a skull, but still, he thought he could see pain.

  He knelt in front of her, and very carefully, took the injured leg in his hands.

  He was shocked immediately by the warmth. This was no dead thing—this was living bone. The break was reasonably clean. He had wondered why, lacking muscle and skin to hold it in place, it hadn’t just fallen off. Now he saw that the bones were threaded through and around with the black webbing, and a thick skein of it, through the hollow center, was still attached.

  Hmm.

  Had this been a real deer, he wouldn’t have tried it. Such breaks were extremely difficult to fix—while setting the bone was straightforward enough, you had to keep them practically immobilized for weeks to keep them from breaking it again, and the captivity and stress killed them more surely than the break would. A wild deer could get by on three legs, and other than putting out food, there wasn’t much you could do that wasn’t worse than the injury. It was different with fawns. He could manage fawns, and although he couldn’t return them to the wild, more than a few half-tame deer in parks in the elven city had started life on his farm.

  This one, though…gods.

  “I can splint it,” he said to her, fairly sure she didn’t understand him. “Splint it, and wrap it, and put some plaster on it. You’ll have to stay off it if you can. You probably can’t. Um.” He was very aware of the stag’s not-eyes boring into the back of his head.

  “Let’s start with that,” he said, and got up. The stag rattled a little, then stopped, as if embarrassed. Walking backwards, making “wait” gestures with both hands, he got inside the barn and began rummaging around for supplies with which to, once again, do the impossible.

  “War is just not efficient,” said Murray.

  This was such a typically Murray comment that Nessilka snorted with laughter, even under the circumstances.