Nine Goblins Read online

  They were standing in ranks on the top of the hill. Elves and humans stood in ranks at the bottom of the hill. In a few minutes, somebody was going to break and yell “Attack!” and the humans and elves would come up and the goblins would go down, and then it’d just be shouting and hitting and pointy things.

  “Look at this,” he continued. “They’re going to charge up here, and we’re going to beat them back, and at the end of the day, we’ll probably still be up here, and they’ll probably still be down there. We both know it. The battle isn’t going to change anything, and it’s all for control of this stupid hill, which neither of us would give a rat’s hind end for if there wasn’t a war.”

  “S’nice hill,” rumbled Algol. “S’pretty, anyway.” He had a wildflower tucked behind one ear.

  “It’s a trollslip,” he said helpfully, when they all looked at him and his flower. “They grow on hillsides like this.”

  “It’s very…um….pink,” said Murray.

  “My mom used to grow them back home.”

  There didn’t seem to be anything more to say on that front. They all looked forward again.

  He was right, so far as it went, but so was Murray. It was a hill, with big grey rocks scattered around the top, and little pink trollslips tumbling over them. Here and there, an oxeye daisy nodded in the sun. The hill had risen gently out of the woods behind them, leaving the trees behind in favor of a band of heather, and the wildflowers. The other sides ranged between steepish (in front) and suicidal (to the sides.) It had a pleasant, but not particularly dramatic view of the fields below.

  A nice place for a picnic, maybe, but probably not a place you’d build a house.

  Being the highest point for some miles, it was, however, the perfect place for a battle. Everybody wants the high ground, particularly if you’re only four feet tall and need all the help you can get.

  The elves down below looked like tall white foxes, all narrow pointy faces and broad pointy ears. Their pale silver hair floated around their heads like haloes. They stood in grim silent ranks, and watched the goblins through narrowed almond eyes.

  The humans below were a more varied lot, and came in almost as many colors as goblins, from dark brown to pasty pink. No green, though. You couldn’t trust a species that didn’t come in green.

  At least they fidgeted before the battle. Nessilka appreciated that. The elves stood like carved marble. The humans sweated and twitched and snickered and poked each other, very much like goblins.

  “They say the waiting…”

  “…is the worst part.”

  Mishkin and Mushkin had taken Algol’s advice literally, and were crowded up next to him like two ticks on a tomcat.

  Algol considered this.

  “Nah. The worst part is the bit where you hit the other guy and hope he doesn’t hit you.”

  “Oh.”

  “And the bit where they hit you, that’s the worst, too.”

  “…oh.”

  “And the bit where they’ve already hit you, and you’re not sure if you’re alive or not, that’s definitely the wor—”

  “Corporal!”

  Algol blinked at Sergeant Nessilka. “Yes, Sarge?”

  “It is possible to be too honest, Corporal.”

  “Yes, Sarge.”

  They all stood and fidgeted for a while.

  “Do you think we could make tea?” asked Gladblack, who had a purple tint to his skin most of the time, but was now a kind of unhappy grey.

  “No.”

  Weatherby was tugging at his clothes again. Behind Nessilka, Thumper was singing something tuneless under his breath. She caught something about “with a whack-whack here, and a whack-whack there…” and tuned him out.

  “Do you think—” Murray began, and then there was no time for questions, because somebody had yelled “Charge!”

  SEVEN

  Nessilka had been in any number of battles, and she couldn’t remember the first ten minutes of any of them.

  She had a theory that if you could remember the first ten minutes, you’d never, ever charge at anybody again, so parts of your brain blotted them out.

  The problem was that she couldn’t imagine why her brain would want her to continue charging at people, and this then led her to the theory that parts of her brain worked for the Goblin High Command, which she didn’t like at all.

  Regardless, it was ten minutes into the battle, and she couldn’t remember what had just happened. There’d been a lot of yelling. Everyone yelled. No matter what species you were, elf, human, goblin, orc, random bystander, you yelled. There had been a lot of hitting things. Her shield was bent in four or five places, and her arms ached dreadfully.

  Algol went by at high speed, shield raised, with Mishkin and Mushkin practically stepping on his heels. Mishkin had gotten a sword from somewhere, and was waving it dangerously close to Algol’s kidneys.

  She had no idea how the battle was going, but she didn’t seem to be dead, so from her perspective, everything was really going rather well.

  Unfortunately, Sergeant Nessilka had just seen a problem.

  The problem stood on a little rise, just enough to lift him out of the battle proper. He looked human, and he wasn’t wearing armor, or carrying any weapons.

  He was doing something with his hands, and there was a blueness in the air around him—not really a blue light, per se, but the world around him was turning shades of blue, like something behind a pane of cobalt glass. That wasn’t right. That was magic, that was.

  A bolt of blueness streaked out from his open mouth, and hit a knot of goblins, who fell down.

  Aw, hell, Nessilka thought. It’s a wizard.

  All wizards are crazy.

  Not the quaint, colloquial “crazy” where you have an offbeat sense of humor and wear brightly colored socks, not mild eccentricity coupled with a general lack of fashion sense. Not “you don’t have to be crazy to work here, but it helps.” Wizards aren’t weird. They are genuinely, legitimately, around the bend.

  This is because magic is a form of psychosis.

  Forget the bearded men wearing robes covered in stars trying to sell you bargain spellbooks. Nine times out of ten, it’s a scam, and the tenth time, they really can do magic, but it’s not something they can teach.

  Various parties have done intensive studies of Arcane Manifestation Disorder, or AMD, and the results often make for interesting reading, but they still don’t know what causes someone to have a sudden psychotic break and wake up able to throw fire from their fingertips. It just happens.

  There are basically two kinds of sufferers of AMD—the high-functioning, and the rather less so. High-functioning wizards can live on their own, and while they tend to be shy and awkward in social situations, meticulously neat, and easily startled, they’re not any worse off than the rest of us.

  The more unfortunate wizards generally require someone to dress them and can’t be allowed near any sharp objects.

  By its very nature, magic is highly complex and highly individualized. It’s hard to say what magic can and can’t do, because it varies so wildly between wizards. Some of them are battle machines, some of them are good in the garden, some of them do weather. Some of them can, on a good day, turn mushrooms into hedgehogs, and some of them can shatter mountains. There’s a young woman in East Charring who can’t talk, but can heal just about anything that ails you. You just don’t know.

  Because of this unpredictability, nobody much relies on magic. People have tried, but you get a lot of very unhappy wizards and they’re not a group you want to make unhappy. While individuals with AMD often find work suited to their own particular talents, the only large institutions with a policy of employing wizards en masse are various armies.

  Sergeant Nessilka had been in the Goblin Army since she was old enough to lie about her age, and she had encountered a fair number of enemy wizards. There’d been the one who shot smothering clouds of butterflies out of his fingertips, and the one who made peop
le’s skeletons shuck off their bodies like someone taking off a heavy coat, and the really creepy one who’d just made people go away.

  This guy shot blue out of his mouth. Nessilka had never seen anybody shoot blue from their mouths, but the goblins who’d been hit weren’t getting up again, and that was more than enough for her.

  “It’s a wizard! Get the wizard!” somebody was yelling. “Follow me! Quick!” After a minute of this, Nessilka realized she was the one doing the yelling, and cursed her traitorous vocal cords. Of all the body parts to suddenly discover patriotism…

  Then her feet appeared to discover it, as well, because she seemed to be charging at the wizard. Why, feet? Why now? Why can’t you be more like—oh, the spleen, say? The spleen never charges anybody!

  Her feet ignored her. Her vocal cords appeared to have gotten the hint, because she wasn’t yelling any more, or perhaps her blood was just pounding in her ears too loudly to tell.

  She wondered if anybody was actually following her.

  Not daring to look behind her for fear of finding that she was making a suicide charge all on her own, she continued forward. The ground slipped and slid and squelched under her broad feet. At this stage of the fight, footing was often more dangerous than the other guys having swords—all those feet running and jumping and tearing over the hillside had churned it into dirt and mud and slippery bits. If you fell down, you slid, until you hit somebody else—a dead body if you were lucky, a live, angry body carrying a blunt instrument if you weren’t.

  Goblins actually have an advantage in this terrain since their feet are so huge, but there are limits. She tripped over something—goodness, I hope that wasn’t what it looked like—and stumbled down the slope, not entirely in control of her own course.

  An elf appeared in front of her. He had a sword. Unable to stop, and for lack of anything better to do, she ran directly into him, at full speed. He squawked and went down. So did she.

  Overhead, another bolt of blue shot out and dropped a nearby goblin like a rock.

  Sometimes whoever gets up first wins, and since Nessilka was sitting on the elf’s legs, she had a tenuous advantage. The elf kicked and bucked under her. She slammed her club down on his knee, which put a stop to that, rolled to her feet, took aim, and stomped, hard.

  Male elves are no different from any other humanoid species in some regards. He probably wouldn’t die, but he’d certainly wish he had, and Nessilka didn’t have time to stick around, with the wizard still spitting bolts of blue everywhere.

  She slid and squelched forward. Then she got onto a patch that still had grass on it—oh glory!—and got traction and pounded forward.

  She was twenty feet away, and it occurred to her that her entire plan was “hit wizard with club and hope for the best.” This was not a bad plan, as such things go, but it did not seem to have a contingency for the wizard spitting blueness at her.

  There were footsteps behind her. Somebody yelled.

  The wizard looked up, and his eyes went wide.

  Nessilka had to do it. She darted a glance behind her.

  The entire Nineteenth Infantry, from Algol down to Blanchett’s teddy-bear, were right behind her.

  Shock warred with gratitude warred with the horror that she was going to get them all killed. Nessilka left her emotions to sort the matter out on their own time, raised her club, and thundered up the last few feet to the wizard.

  “Whooooohaaaaa!”

  The wizard stopped shooting blue. His mouth opened again, but this time in what looked like a cry of terror, and he reached both hands to one side and grabbed at thin air.

  Nessilka wondered briefly if he’d gone mad with terror or was trying to milk an invisible cow.

  Then—and even for magic this was weird—he grabbed the air and yanked.

  The air tore open—really tore, as if it were a big sheet of canvas with the world painted on it—and there was something on the other side. Darkness, shot with green, that moved.

  Sergeant Nessilka did not know much about magic, but she was pretty sure that tearing holes in the air meant no good for anybody.

  She tried to stop.

  The Nineteenth Infantry, led by Algol, crashed into her back.

  Her feet went out from under her and she crashed into the wizard, who in turn crashed into the hole in the air.

  The hole went “glorp!”

  The wizard went “Arrrrgh!”

  Nessilka went “Craaaap!”

  Algol went “Sarge?”

  The world went black.

  EIGHT

  Sings-to-Trees was tired, but he felt good. This was his normal state of being, so he didn’t stop to notice it.

  The bone doe, now with a splint and a tightly wrapped cast, had melted into the trees, followed by her brooding companion. The stag hadn’t liked him messing around with the doe’s leg and had rattled near-constantly, like a furious rattlesnake, until the doe had turned her head and snapped her exposed teeth in the stag’s direction.

  Sings-to-Trees gazed off in the middle distance with a vague, pleasant expression, the way that most people do when present at other people’s minor domestic disputes, and after a moment, the stag had stopped rattling, and the doe had turned back and rested her chin trustingly on Sings-to-Trees’ shoulder.

  This would have been a touching gesture, if her chin hadn’t been made of painfully pointy blades of bone. It was like being snuggled by an affectionate plow.

  But the leg had gotten splinted and wrapped, and the doe was walking more easily on it already, and beyond that, it was in the hands of whatever gods looked after the articulated skeletons of deer.

  He pulled on the rusted handle of the pump until water gushed out. He washed his hands, then plunged his whole head briefly under it. Refreshed and spluttering, he headed back up to the farmhouse to look something up.

  Sings-to-Trees, while not having many fragile things, did own a small library, which he kept locked in a cedar chest for safekeeping. One look at the outside of the chest—it was scorched by fire, scored by claws, chewed by teeth, and some kind of acid had etched a random design in the lid—made it obvious why something as fragile as paper was on the inside.

  He had several herbals, full of small, neat drawings of plants and careful notes (two of which he’d written himself.) He had Sleestak’s Guide to Common Farmyard Maladies, and Diseases of the Goat, (it was amazing how many of those showed up in trolls) and Thee Goode Elf’s Alamanack (which contained many, many ‘E’s, and not much useful information), and the exhaustive Herbal Remedies, which was six inches thick and full of bookmarks. He even had a dog-eared copy of Medica Magica, which was full of outright lies and falsehoods, but every now and then had something worth paying attention to.

  The book he really wanted was near the bottom. Sings-to-Trees dug down, building up precarious stacks of leather bindings on either side of the trunk, until he found the volume and lifted it into the light.

  The silver leaf had long since flaked off the cover and the letters had become a series of flat spaces in a sea of tooled leather, read as much with the hand as the eye. In the language of humans, it read Bestiary.

  The elf sat down and began turning pages carefully.

  There was no index. The author had been a wizard, and had been doing well to hold it together long enough to write the descriptions, which were rambling in places and painfully abrupt in others, when they weren’t downright insane. There were no chapters, and nothing resembling alphabetical order. The entries showed up where they showed up, and given the nature of some of the comments interspersing the text, the reader was generally grateful to get that much.

  The pictures, though…the pictures practically moved on the page. Even in scratchy black and white, they shone like little gems. The elegant neck of the unicorn flexed, the serpentine mane of the catoblepas writhed, muscles pulsed in the shoulders of the great boar.

  Magic may have been involved. Sings-to-Trees rather thought that the author’s gift ha
d been visions, because the creatures gave every evidence of being drawn from life, and in some cases, like the kraken or the ice-moles, that would have been quite a feat.

  He was two thirds of the way through the book, scrutinizing each illustration carefully, before he saw it.

  The carefully articulated skeleton of a stag gazed back at him from the page.

  “…thee cervidine or cervidian does range widely through the wold, being in all ways like unto a true deer, saving that it be made of Bones and not of Flesh. (Whyfor are you poking at me? Stop! Stop, I implore you!) The cervidian reproduces by manner unknown, though it is said that they may build a fawn of bones, and so imbue it with essential life, (the poking to cease! To cease!) but I have not been witness to this and consider it may be folly. It is known the cervidian is much fond of magic and very curious, like unto a magpie, and will oft be found in areas of great mystical disturbance, which perhaps it may eat, for it takes no sustenance of grass, (I will become angry if there is more poking!) and only damps its bones in water and dew.

  (Why do you not stop…?!)”

  It went on in that vein for quite a while, and by the time the author had gotten control of himself again, he was talking about the limerick contests held by manticores.

  Sings-to-Trees closed the book thoughtfully. Of course, just because the cervidian was attracted by magical disturbance, it didn’t follow that there was one happening nearby, but it was still…interesting. He hadn’t seen such a creature in all the years he’d been out here.

  He should probably send a pigeon to the rangers and ask them if anything weird was happening.

  There was an almighty crash from the hearth. Sings-to-Trees bolted to his feet.

  The raccoon had learned how to open the hutch, and had celebrated its newfound freedom by knocking the hutch over, along with the iron fire grate and the tea kettle that had been warming there. It sat in the midst of the wreckage, paws clasped in glee, and greeted Sings-to-Trees with a happy “Clur-r-r-r-r-p!”