Nine Goblins

by T. Kingfisher

  The stag was apparently not inclined to bluff. It swung its head sideways and white bone cracked against Murray’s chest, knocking him down.

  “Murray!”

  Murray rolled over and began crawling determinedly forward. Could he get between the stag’s feet? Nessilka cursed the fact that there wasn’t room for two of them.

  Sings-to-Trees’ face twisted. “I don’t want to hurt you,” he pleaded with the stag. “I really really don’t. I helped your mate! Please, just let us pass!”

  Another rattlesnake clatter. The stag danced in place, feet falling perilously close to Murray’s head.

  There was a second warning rattle. Nessilka looked over her shoulder and saw a bone doe standing there, watching them with empty eye sockets.

  The voice continued to talk, a conversation that was probably about nothing, but it might be something fascinating and anyway, she’d know in a minute if she could just get a little bit closer—

  And then it stopped.

  Sings-to-Trees, who had been about to charge the deer, completely bare-handed, stopped with an expression of horror on his face and looked down at his hands. “Oh,” he said. “Oh. Oh, no…”

  Murray said, “What in the name of the dead orc gods am I doing?”

  Nessilka, seeing bone deer hooves like lances around the head of her second-in-command, reached down and grabbed him by the ankles. She hauled. Murray was very heavy but female goblins tended to be strong all out of proportion to their size. He left long furrows in the mud behind him.

  The bone deer stamped a hoof and nodded to Sings-to-Trees. Then it turned and reached the top of the narrow defile in a single leap. There was a second clack of bone, and the skeletal doe followed.

  “She’s still a bit short on the front foot,” said Sings-to-Trees vaguely. “I hope its healing. She shouldn’t be making jumps like that. Oh gods, I was going to attack that poor creature!” He put his face in his hands.

  “I suspect that poor creature would have torn you to shreds,” said Nessilka drily. “Murray, how’s your ribs?”

  “Sore,” said Murray. “It hit me, didn’t it? I don’t think it wanted to hurt me, though, whatever it was. No holes.” He slid a finger under his leather breastplate and winced. “Nothing broken. Gonna have some fantastic bruises to show the recruits.”

  “It was a cervidian,” said Sings-to-Trees. “They’re attracted to magic. I saw it the other day—I can’t believe I wanted to hurt it—”

  Nessilka thumped him on the shoulder, which was the highest point she could reach. “Get over it, soldier,” she snapped, forgetting he wasn’t one of her soldiers. “You didn’t, and that’s the important thing. The most important thing, though, is what the hell was wrong with us?”

  They all stared at each other.

  “I heard a voice,” said Murray uncertainly.

  “So did I.”

  “I couldn’t hear what it was saying,” said Nessilka. “I almost could, but I thought if I could just get closer—”

  “It had to be right around here, didn’t it?” Sings-to-Trees peered around the woods, puzzled. “I mean, we were really close to it…weren’t we?”

  “I don’t think we were,” said Murray slowly. “We’ve been running, haven’t we? Blanchett couldn’t keep up…”

  “Oh gods, Blanchett!” Nessilka spun around. “We have to go get him!”

  “He’ll be fine,” said Murray. “The bear’ll take care of him”

  Sings-to-Trees looked at them as if they were insane, which they probably were, but Nessilka did feel a bit better. “How long were we running?”

  None of them knew.

  “At least a mile, I think,” said Murray. “It’s hard to tell, because it’s cold out and the terrain’s twisty, but I don’t think I usually get this sweaty over anything less.”

  “We can’t have been that close to the conversation for a whole mile,” said Sings-to-Trees.

  Nessilka had already come to that conclusion, and a couple of others she didn’t like at all.

  Murray tugged on his ponytail. “It was magic, Sarge. Had to be.”

  “A voice that makes you want to get closer to it…That could explain why the farms were empty. They all left to get closer to the voice.” Nessilka chewed on her lower lip. “Maybe it worked on the animals, too.”

  Sings-to-Trees looked around. “I don’t hear any birds,” he said. “But that could just as easily be the cervidian. It got real quiet around my farm when they showed up. I think they’re just too uncanny.”

  “Well.” Nessilka rubbed the back of her neck. “Options?”

  “Find the source,” said Murray immediately.

  “Find out what happened to the farmers,” said Sings-to-Trees.

  Nessilka sighed. “Normally, I’d say we should go back and report this, but I don’t know who we’d report it to.”

  “I could send a pigeon to the rangers,” said Sings-to-Trees.

  “How long would that take?”

  “Um. It depends. A few hours at least. Probably more. I didn’t actually send the other one yet—it’s dark, they won’t fly, so I was going to wait until we get back. Although I’m surprised they’re not investigating already, frankly—nothing this big should be able to go down without them noticing.”

  “Unless they sent somebody to investigate and the voice got them too,” said Murray. Sings-to-Trees winced.

  “Okay,” said Nessilka. She mostly wanted to run away screaming, but she was in command, and Sings-to-Trees was a civilian and thus should probably be protected as much as possible. And he didn’t seem to be much good at sneaking.

  Also, there was the small problem of the village being between them and Goblinhome, and the grim gods only knew how far the range on that magic extended.

  “Here’s what we’ll do. We find Blanchett, first. Then Sings-to-Trees goes back to the farm and we’ll scout the village.”

  “We should wear earplugs,” volunteered Murray. “I can rig something up. I don’t know how well they’ll work, but if it really is a sound, we should be able to block it.”

  Nessilka was getting ready for the inevitable argument—Sings-to-Trees looked like he was about to argue—when there was a very welcome interruption.

  “Sarge? Sarge!”

  “Blanchett!” She turned and waved. A familiar teddy-bear, atop an equally familiar helm, appeared over the top of the low cliff edging the road..

  “There you are, Sarge! Didn’t know why we were running, but the bear said you were somewhere around here…”

  “Can you get down here?”

  “Sure, give me a minute…” The helm disappeared.

  “And while we’re asking questions…” said Nessilka slowly, “why wasn’t Blanchett affected?”

  “Maybe the bear’s immune,” said Murray. And then, when Nessilka stared at him, “Have you got a better answer, Sarge?”

  She didn’t. For any of it, apparently. “All right,” she said. “Make up your earplugs. I want to move out as soon as he gets here.”

  SIXTEEN

  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 o
ur 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.

  Nessilka 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 earplug
s 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.”