The Goblin War

by Hilari Bell

  Tobin’s racing heart slowed. “Good, that gives me time to come up with a plan.”

  “Well, I’d advise you not to take too long,” Vruud said. “And, Softer?”

  “Yes?”

  “It had better not interfere with our escape.”

  Tobin wanted desperately to talk to Cogswhallop, but he didn’t dare be seen near the cage. Even if no one was suspicious at the time, once the goblin had escaped, they might remember seeing him there.

  Fortunately, Hesida had been assigned to feed this prisoner too. Unlike the bars of the human cage, nothing in the chickens’ transport pen was designed to give way—and it had been built to resist not only chickens’ beaks but foxes’ teeth. The woven bronze wires were too strong for even Tobin to break, but they’d closed the cage with a simple iron lock.

  “I can’t get the key,” Hesida told him. “Neither can you. The chief shaman’s wearing it on a chain around his neck. I can take your friend a message—he’s wearing a blood trust. But I don’t—”

  “He won’t need a key.” Tobin passed her a handful of metal scraps he’d picked up in the burned-out village. “Give him these, and ask him if they’ll do. They’re thin enough that he can bend them.”

  Hesida looked dubiously at the bits of wire and old nails. “I thought goblins couldn’t touch iron. That’s what Pram said when he put that lock on the cage.”

  “This one can,” Tobin told her. “Tell him to make sure he can get that lock open fast, and be ready to run when I give him the chance.”

  “And how will you do that?” Hesida asked.

  “I’m working on it.”

  In truth, he already had some ideas. The goat-pen gate faced the chicken cage, with only a small yard between them, and the goats were penned up at night. All Tobin needed was something to set them in motion, and he had an idea for that as well.

  “Why do you want to come with me to the Kabasi camp?” Vruud asked suspiciously. “All I’m doing there is teaching that young idiot the whole chura song cycle, instead of the four measly verses he knows. I don’t need my servant for that.”

  “The mules could use some exercise,” Tobin told him. “Which is true, anyway. But while you’re teaching song cycles, I’m going to try to convince a leopard to pee.”

  He couldn’t get the leopard to cooperate. For one thing, it was tethered in a large pen, not stuck in a cage like Tobin had hoped. And several of the Kabasi camp chanduri told Tobin it might maul anyone foolish enough to approach it. Even if he’d been willing to take that risk, it showed no sign of needing to urinate in the entire time Tobin watched.

  It was a gorgeous creature, its yellow eyes mostly shut, its tufted tail twitching as it napped in the shade. But the short fur on its legs and feet did nothing to conceal its strong arced claws. And even if Tobin had dared enter the pen, he had no idea how to obtain the result he needed.

  In the end, he located the much smaller cage where the big cat was kept at night and scraped some of the noisome earth beneath it into his jar. It might not be as intense as the pure liquid version, but it smelled pretty strong to him. It made the mules so nervous, Tobin had to seal the jar with wax and wash both the outside of the jar and his hands before he could put it back in Mouse’s saddlebag.

  Tobin chose the time just after sunset. The camp was quieting down and most had retired, but there were still enough people around that his presence wasn’t suspicious.

  He had an excuse to visit the meadow where the mules were tethered. On the way back, it took only moments to open his jar and dump small piles of the stinking dirt behind the goat pen’s fence posts, where it wasn’t likely to be noticed.

  The goats began to bleat and mill as soon as he opened the jar. Tobin smashed the crockery and buried the pieces in the midden heap. By the time he returned, the goats had gathered at the far side of the pen, pressing against the gate, leaping, muttering uneasily.

  Tobin took a quick look around. Several fires still flickered, but there wasn’t much light at this end of the camp. He hadn’t dared approach Cogswhallop. Hesida said the goblin was all right, and he trusted her.

  Looking at the chicken cage now, Tobin saw nothing but a dark lump huddled in the center.

  Had Cogswhallop opened the lock? Was he ready to run? Or was he injured, asleep, unable to pick the lock with the clumsy tools Tobin had provided?

  As he hesitated, a small pale hand thrust through the wires, flashing an unmistakable signal: “Get on with it!”

  Tobin strolled casually to the goat pen’s gate, reached down, and tripped the latch.

  He’d expected the goats to take some time to discover their freedom. He’d even thought he might have to go behind the pen and make some leopardish noise to set them in motion.

  The moment the latch opened, the gate slammed wide, banging into Tobin’s hip so hard, he staggered.

  Goats raced out in a bounding, bleating flood, almost knocking him down as they hurtled past. Struggling to keep his feet, Tobin grabbed a fence post and looked back at Cogswhallop’s cage. The door was open, the goblin gone.

  Shouts erupted through the camp. Tobin didn’t have time to get away from the pen, so he let out a shout of his own and reversed course, wading through the stream of goats toward the gate. There were only two goats in the pen when he reached it, so he shut them in and turned to see what he’d wrought.

  Goats zigzagged through the camp, leaping wildly when anyone tried to capture them. A few forgot the leopard scent, stopping to sample a bite of the tunic someone had hung out to dry or tip the lid off a porridge pot. But most of them headed swiftly away, racing right through the camp toward the desert.

  Both Duri and chanduri ran to catch them. Most of them only added to the chaos, although a couple of people were already dragging struggling, shrieking animals back to the pen.

  A black ram in the center of the jostling crowd tossed its head, and Tobin caught a glimpse of Cogswhallop mounted on its shoulders, hands buried in its rough coat.

  Unfortunately, Tobin wasn’t the only one to see him. The ram leaped, and the young warrior who’d missed his catch froze—for a moment.

  “The goblin! He’s riding that goat! Stop him!”

  He raced after the ram, only to trip over a spotted youngster that darted between his legs. But other warriors were running toward them—and one, more levelheaded than his brothers, stood off to the side stringing his bow.

  Tobin ran toward the archer, but the Duri didn’t skimp on their warriors’ training. He was still a dozen yards away when the arrow launched.

  It was too dark to follow the shot, but the black ram shrieked, staggered a few steps, and fell.

  The goats scattered, panicked anew by the scent of blood. Three Duri closed in on Cogswhallop, who was clambering to his feet when the first of them sprang . . . and collided in midair with Vruud, who had leaped to capture a goat right in front of the goblin.

  Storyteller and warrior fell in a cursing tangle, and the next Duri skidded to a stop, just as the man behind him tried to leap over them. They both went down as well, and Vruud was swearing at all three of them when Tobin bent over to extract his master from the mass of bodies.

  “Let go of me, lout!” Vruud cuffed him for emphasis—hard. “Get those goats back in their pen. If they reach the desert, we’ll lose half of them. You three, stop rolling on the ground and mount up! You can sense the creature’s magic, so it can’t get far. On horseback you can ride it down—which anyone but idiots would have realized in the first place!”

  Vruud was their teacher, even if tactics for recovering prisoners weren’t what he taught. The young warriors ran for the horse lines. By the time they’d saddled their beasts, Cogswhallop would be gone.

  Tobin turned to the storyteller. “Thank—”

  “I told you to help round up those goats!” The second cuff made Tobin’s eyes water, and he began rounding up the remaining goats without another word. Vruud had a right to be angry, after the way he’d been forced
to step in. Been willing to step in.

  After Tobin returned his first struggling captive to the pen, he walked around the fence and kicked the leopard-scented dirt out of if its piles, hoping it would dry faster and lose its intensity.

  Perhaps it worked, or perhaps the goats were becoming accustomed to the scent. Within an hour most of the flock was back in the enclosure, none the worse for their adventure.

  The Duri who’d gone to hunt for Cogswhallop returned just before dawn—empty-handed.

  The shamans investigated the incident the next day. They found a piece of bent wire in the bottom of the cage and deduced that the goblin had used it to pick the lock. It was twisted and tarnished, clearly from the village, and could easily have been buried in the dirt where the cage had been placed.

  The goats, they decided, had been spooked by goblin magic—or perhaps others of its kind had staged the rescue. Little was known of goblin magic, after all.

  The possibility of a whole band of goblins sparked a hunt that lasted three more days before the shamans pointed out, somewhat acerbically, that capturing the spirit was what mattered.

  Camp chief Morovda, who led the warriors, told the head shaman that capturing the spirit was a shaman’s job. He added that if the other camps’ shamans beat them to it because his shamans were so busy criticizing the warriors—warriors who wouldn’t have had to go goblin hunting if the shamans had been able to hold on to their prisoner—the head shaman might make a good sacrifice himself.

  Tobin waited two more nights before he took off his amulet and made his way into the desert. In the direction opposite the spring, just in case.

  The breeze was cool after dark, but heat rose from the rocks and earth. Tobin chose a tumble of boulders, far enough from the camp that even the most sensitive Duri wouldn’t be able to detect the goblin’s presence.

  He didn’t think he’d have to wait long, but Cogswhallop’s gruff voice spoke before he even sat down.

  “Not bad, soldier. The gen’ral would have planned it better, and your brother would have made it crazier, but it worked well enough.”

  Half a dozen goblins swarmed out of the shadows. Tobin had no idea how they’d known where to wait for him, but it hardly mattered. Several of the grinning faces were familiar, and one of them was very small.

  “You brought the children here?” Tobin asked incredulously. “Your own son?”

  Daroo’s beaming smile turned to a scowl that almost equaled his father’s, but Cogswhallop replied mildly, “I didn’t bring him—he chose to come. He tumbles into less trouble than you do, these days. I’ve things to tell you, and there’s things you need to tell me, so we’d best get to it.”

  The story Cogswhallop imparted left Tobin reeling. “Master Lazur was drugging the Hierarch? And they hanged him?”

  But even that was nothing compared to his astonishment that his scape-grace brother seemed to have fixed everything.

  “There was no other way,” said Cogswhallop quietly. “That priest was convinced that if you and the gen’ral got out of the Otherworld, you’d interfere with his precious relocation, and he’d let anyone die to prevent that. But there’s more . . .”

  “. . . So the relocation is well and truly dead,” Cogswhallop finished. “And on closer acquaintance, I’d take Realm humans at their worst over these barbarians of yours.”

  “It was foolish to let yourself be captured, just to make contact with me,” Tobin said. “I’m incredibly grateful, but—”

  “That wasn’t his plan.” Daroo snorted. “He didn’t—”

  “There were many plans,” said Cogswhallop hastily. “This was one of several contingencies for which I was well prepared, and don’t you forget it! But since I’ve no desire to have yon barbarians for neighbors, we’d best turn our minds to finding a way to stop ’em. You’ve been living among them for weeks, lad; they have some weakness. And remember, part of our bargain with the Hierarch is that we goblins will provide ‘material assistance’ to the fight. So how can we bring down those bloodthirsty thugs?”

  “We can’t bring them down,” said Tobin. “I’ve been living among them for almost two months, and they have no weakness. They can’t be wounded long enough to matter, they never seem to tire, and they’re cursed hard to kill. Their army outnumbers ours, and . . . they don’t care. That’s the worst of it. They’ve become so calloused, so accustomed to death, that it’s become part of them. Of the Duri, at least. Maybe it’s because their magic springs from death, but they’re so addicted to fighting and killing that I think once they’ve destroyed us, they’ll turn on one another and go right on killing. I don’t believe we can defeat them.”

  The other goblins murmured in dismay, but Cogswhallop cocked his head. “You say that too calmly, for a man talking about the death of all he loves. You’ve got an idea.”

  “I do.” Tobin clasped his hands around his knees. As he was talking to his friends, in the quiet desert night, they were shaking. “But it’s not about outfighting them. I gave up on that some time ago. And then it occurred to me that if we can’t beat them, maybe we should give them what they want.”

  “What they want is to kill us all!” Daroo protested.

  “They’d like that too,” said Tobin. “But there’s something else they want more. They want to invade the Spiritworld. They want to kill all the spirits who fled there to hide, and absorb their magic, and become as invincible and immortal as gods. I think the priests were right about one thing. I think the Duri did once worship the spirits as gods. Until they discovered they could kill them.”

  Cogswhallop was frowning. “This Spiritworld, that’s what we call the Otherworld, aye?”

  Tobin nodded. “If we open a gate, I promise you, they’ll ride right in.”

  “But that whole world, the mistress says it’s made of magic,” Daroo said. “And the spirits control it. They could open a crack in the earth and bury the barbarians alive. They could send floods to drown them all. They could create nothing but sand around them forever, and they’d all die of hunger and thirst before they ever set eyes on a spirit. Once the mistress figured that out, she said they were letting us off light!”

  “The barbarians don’t know that,” said Tobin. “All they care about is killing spirits, and they want to try. And if what you say about the Spiritworld is true, I think the spirits might be willing to give them the chance.”

  The goblins looked appalled; they were far less ruthless than humans. And this plan was as ruthless as they came.

  “It will save the Realm,” Tobin said. “It will save you goblins. It will even save the chanduri, who are still human and still care, though they’ve been taught all their lives not to.” As Vruud had been taught—but even he cared. “The Duri are the only ones who’ll die. And I’m not sure they’re human anymore. Not in any sense that matters.”

  The goblins gathered around him were far more human than the Duri, and Tobin shivered. He wished Jeriah was here. He’d have liked to discuss this plan with his idealistic brother, to see if he was right, or if the Duris’ insidious indifference had rubbed off on him. But as much as he missed her, Tobin had no desire to discuss it with Makenna. He knew she’d have approved.

  Cogswhallop nodded slowly. “I think you’re right. If that final battle is what they want most, it’s only right to give it to ’em. And if they meet the fate they’d intended for their enemies, well, you can’t say it wasn’t an honest bargain. Aside from the facts that it’s impossible to build a gate big enough for an army to ride through, that the spirits might well kick them right back out if we could get them in, and the small matter of getting the whole barbarian army to the spot where we can cast that gate in the first place, I think it’s a fine idea.”

  Tobin’s heart eased. Jeriah’s wasn’t the only opinion he valued.

  “Then we’ll work on it.”

  Chapter 12

  Jeriah

  JERIAH AND MAKENNA WERE IN the palace library when the letter arrived, which wasn’
t that surprising; they’d been spending a lot of time there. Chardane had decreed that since Jeriah was the one who’d gotten “that hellion” paroled to her custody, he was now responsible for making sure she didn’t set fire to the palace. Or declare war on the Landholders’ Council. Or murder the maid who was trying to keep her in proper court clothes.

  “It’s from Tobin!” The plump Bookerie, Master Erebus, had been working as Makenna’s secretary over the last few weeks, but Jeriah had never seen the cheerful goblin so excited. “And he must not be too badly off, because it’s a long letter. For a human, that is.”

  The humans in the library ignored them. People in the rest of the palace were still startled when goblins emerged into the open and spoke to them, but the Bookeries had taken over the library so completely that the librarians had not only grown accustomed to them, they were beginning to set them to work.

  Erebus handed the letter to Makenna. Jeriah dug his nails into his palms. He could give her ten seconds, he decided, to scan the first page before he ripped it out of her hands. One. Two.

  Makenna looked up from the letter and gave him a sardonic smile. “It’s addressed to both of us.”

  Jeriah didn’t wait for further invitation, hurrying around the table to sit beside her so they could read at the same time.

  “He says he’s fine!” The joyous relief of that news made everything that had happened in the last four months worthwhile.

  “Erebus already told us that.” Makenna was reading ahead of him. “And it sounds to me like he’s taken leave of his wits.”

  Jeriah read onward—she was right.

  He took the pages from her when she finished, and soon they began to pile up beside him. Jeriah had already learned that Makenna read more swiftly than he did, and it shouldn’t have surprised him; hedgewitches passed on their craft in written notes and spells. There were gaps in her education—that was why they were in the library—but Jeriah was amazed at the speed with which Makenna absorbed information.