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Authors: T Kingfisher

Tags: #elves, #goblin, #elven veterinarian, #goblin soldier

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BOOK: Nine Goblins
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Thus loaded, Murray and Nessilka did a quick
sweep of the farmhouse. A frying pan and an iron pot were too good
to pass up—Nessilka did not want to be making tea in Blanchett’s
helmet on a regular basis—along with a small sack of salt and a
bigger sack of flour.

They emerged from the house, heavily laden
and clanking as they walked. Despite the mysterious emptiness of
the farm, discovering the food couldn’t help but raise their
spirits. This lasted for a good five seconds, before Nessilka said,
“Where’s Algol?”

The two goblins looked around. “He was right
out here…” Murray said.

“Algol!” hissed Nessilka. She didn’t want to
yell. She couldn’t shake the feeling that yelling would bring
something down on them. “Algol, where
are
you?”

The cicadas were the only answer.

“He can’t have gone far,” muttered
Nessilka.

“Unless whatever got the farmers got him,
too,” said Murray glumly.

“Put a lid on it, Corporal.”

Murray gave her the look that said
you
know I’m right, but it’s okay, I understand you have to say
that.
She hated that look. She just couldn’t do anything about
it, because he usually
was
right, hang it all.

“We can’t just leave without him,” she said
slowly, scanning the fields. “But I don’t want to stay out here in
plain sight, either…” Far across the fields, she could just make
out the town. It wasn’t close enough to see any people, and they
probably couldn’t have seen the goblins either, but still, better
safe than sorry.

Murray dug out his looky-tube-thing. Nessilka
opened her mouth to say that she’d check behind the farmhouse, and
then stopped. Splitting up did not seem like a good idea.

She fiddled with a strap on her sling.

“Sarge…”

“Did you find him?”

“No. But—Sarge—there’s no smoke over at the
town.”

“It’s pretty warm out. Why would there be
smoke?”

“A town that size is going to have a
blacksmith. Plus there’s a windmill over there, which means there’s
a miller, and where there’s millers, there’s usually a baker,
except there isn’t. And even when it’s warm, people have to cook.
But none of the chimneys are going at all. There’s no smoke in the
sky anywhere. And I don’t see any horses or cows in the
fields.”

He raised the tube again, and stopped.
Nessilka pushed the tube gently back down. “Corporal,” she said
quietly, “let’s not borrow trouble. Let’s just find Algol and get
out of here.”

He wasn’t behind the farmhouse. He wasn’t in
the chicken coop. Nessilka’s nerves were fraying badly and there
was a cold stone in her gut. Murray kept yanking on his ponytail as
if hoping to find Algol hiding somewhere inside it.

“Well,” she said finally. “I suppose—”

“Sarge!”

Murray pointed. She whirled.

Across the fields, coming out of a drainage
ditch, was a familiar tall gray-green figure.

Nessilka exhaled. It seemed to come from her
toes. She stomped towards him, furious and relieved all at
once.

“Corporal, what in the name of the great grim
gods do you think you’re—”

“Look, Sarge!” he cried, holding something
over his head.

It was small. It was muddy. It wiggled.

It was a kitten.

Algol was covered in mud, and grinning from
ear to ear.

“Oh, for gods’ sake…” said Nessilka, covering
her eyes.

“I heard him mewing! He was stuck down in a
pipe in the ditch, and I got him out. Can I keep ‘im, Sarge, can I?
Please?”

“Corporal—” she began, and stopped, because
she didn’t know what she was going to say after that. She should
never have let him name the supply goat. Once you started naming
goats, it was all downhill from there. She massaged the bridge of
her nose and tried again. “Corporal, we’re goblins. The scourge of
the night! Stealers of children! Marauders of the dark! The terror
of…well, fairly terrible anyway.”

Algol looked at her blankly, petting the
kitten.

“We aren’t kitten people!”

Algol stared at her, still petting the
kitten. It made a little
mrrp!
noise and butted its head
against his big fingers. “But Sarge, he was
stuck.”

“We’re behind enemy lines! We don’t know how
we’re going to get back! And you want to adopt a kitten?”

Algol sniffed. The sergeant could see a
traitorous moisture beginning under his eyes.

“We can’t leave ‘im,” he said quietly. “He’s
the only thing alive out here. He’ll die.”

“Corporal—”

His lower lip wibbled.

“Oh,
fine
,” she said, relenting. “If
somebody eats it, don’t come crying to me.”

“Thank you, Sarge!” Algol thrust the kitten
at her face. Nessilka recoiled. “Look, kitty! This is Sarge! She
says I can keep you! Say hi!”

The stealer of children and marauder of the
dark grudgingly reached up and petted the kitten. It licked her
finger with a raspy little tongue. She grumbled. It purred.

“By rights I oughta have you thrown in the
stockade, abandoning your post like that…” she muttered.

“We don’t really have a stockade, Sarge,”
Murray pointed out.

“I oughta make him build one, then!”

Algol, besotted with his kitten, ignored
this.

Nessilka threw her hands in the air. “Don’t
do it again, Corporal, or I’ll bust you back down to Private so
fast…”

“I think I’ll name him Wiggles. He looks like
a Wiggles.”

Nessilka knew when she was beaten. Wiggles
perched on Algol’s shoulder and purred the entire way back to
camp.

 

The teddy-bear, by way of Blanchett, had
nothing to report. The twins were asleep in a pile, looking like
lumpy green kittens themselves. Gloober was exploring the inner
reaches of his left ear. All appeared right with the world.

The returning goblins slung the preserves off
their shoulders, and set about making tea, in the pot this time.
Blanchett was pleased to get his helmet back.

Nessilka had just taken the first sip—sweet,
gritty, fairly revolting, exactly what she’d been looking for—when
Weasel burst out of the bushes.

“S-S-SARGE!”

Aw, crud.

The little goblin was scarlet-faced, and her
hair had come out of its tight tail. Sweat glued it across her
cheeks. Her chest heaved.

“It-t-t’s Th-th-th—”

“Calm down, kiddo.” Nessilka knew it was the
height of rudeness to finish sentences for somebody with a stutter,
but this sounded like an emergency. “Something’s happened to
Thumper. Sit down, take a deep breath…okay, now tell me what it
is.”

“He’s hu-hu-hurt! It’s el-el-el—”

“Elves?”

Weasel nodded furiously.

“Did elves hurt him?”

She nodded, then shook her head, then threw
her hands in the air. Nessilka interpreted this, correctly, as a
sign of a tale too complex to be summed up in yes or no
questions.

“Okay, guys, let’s move. Take me where you
last saw him, kiddo, and tell me on the way.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

THIRTEEN

 

 

As near as Nessilka could piece together from
the badly upset Weasel, she and Thumper had been doing fairly well.
They’d flushed a bird, and Weasel had dropped it with her
sling.

Then it started to go bad.

 

When they’d startled the bird, they had also
startled a deer. The deer took off across a clearing, and Thumper,
seeing a whole banquet on the hoof, took off after it.

The fact that a goblin couldn’t possibly
catch a deer on foot had apparently not occurred to him. The deer
ran, he ran, they broke into a clearing in the woods, and then he
put his foot in a hole and went down hard.

Weasel’s first thought was that he’d broken a
leg, but she didn’t get close enough to see, because the other
occupant of the clearing had straightened up at that point.

It was an elf.

The elf had gone over to Thumper and crouched
down, and Weasel didn’t know what to do. Was he killing Thumper?
Was Thumper killing him?

Minutes dragged by. If it had been anyone
else, Nessilka would have wondered why they didn’t attack, but she
wouldn’t have put Weasel up against an injured field mouse. Sure, a
sling could kill somebody if you used it right, but she’d have laid
odds the thought hadn’t even occurred to the little goblin.

The elf stood up with a grunt. An unconscious
Thumper was slung over his shoulder. There was blood on the
goblin’s head, and a crude bandage. Bent nearly double, the elf
made his way slowly across the clearing, and into the woods.

At this point, Weasel proved her worth
completely. She knew she couldn’t track the elf once he was gone,
and she was pretty sure no one else in the Nineteenth could either.
Quick and quiet as her namesake, she followed.

The elf had gone for nearly a mile, stopping
occasionally to rest and set Thumper down. Weasel noted that the
elf was being surprisingly gentle with his captive, and that he
checked bandage, pulse, and pupils at every stop. It wasn’t the
behavior she’d expect from elves, but then, she’d never seen one
anywhere but the other end of a sword before.

At last, the elf emerged into a large meadow,
bright with wildflowers and dotted with bumblebees. On the far
side, a large cabin rose under the trees, surrounded by a neat
garden and a ramshackle barn.

The elf set Thumper down and went to the
barn. As soon as he vanished, Weasel darted out and shook Thumper’s
shoulder, but the big goblin was out like a light. His forehead was
sporting an enormous lump. Either the elf had clobbered him a good
one, or he’d smacked his head on a rock when he’d fallen in the
meadow.

The elf re-emerged from the barn, pushing a
wheelbarrow. Weasel dropped low and scurried back to the tree line.
As she watched, the elf set Thumper into the wheelbarrow and took
him up to the cabin.

Weasel had watched only until Thumper
vanished inside the cabin, and then had turned and run like a
rabbit back to the Nineteenth.

 

It took all the way back to the clearing to
get this story out of the agitated Weasel, and even then, seeing
the scene helped solidify the details.

It was a very pastoral clearing, one of those
that look lovely and lush and green and turn out to be sopping wet
marsh under the plants. Sweet flag irises poked up proudly over the
long grass. Nessilka went over the ground carefully, and found the
hole. It had a large goblin footprint in the mud at the bottom of
it. A handprint skidded off to one side.

There was a rock the size of a pig directly
in front of it, with blood on it.

“Hmm.” Murray crouched down and looked. “I’d
say he stepped, fell, tried to catch himself, his hand slipped, and
he whacked his head. And then the elf came up here.” He pointed to
a line of heavy bootprints.

“Believe it or not, I could probably have
figured all that out on my own,” said Nessilka a bit dryly.

“Sorry, Sarge.”

“It does mean that the elf probably didn’t
hit him. Which may mean he’s not violently opposed to all goblins.
It’s possible we’ll be able to get Thumper back peacefully.”

“And if we can’t?

Nessilka stood up and looked around at the
other seven goblins. The teddy-bear and Wiggles the kitten watched
from atop their respective owner’s heads. They did not look very
war-like, but they were what she had.

“Then,” she said, “we’ll get him back by any
means necessary.”

 

The elf was out in his garden, with his back
to them. As the goblins approached, he straightened, rubbing his
back and grimacing. Nessilka couldn’t blame him—lugging someone
Thumper’s size over his shoulder must have been agony.

Nessilka figured stealth wasn’t exactly
called for here. She cleared her throat.

He turned around.

Eight goblins in a tight knot, bristling with
swords, clubs, and boards-with-nails-in-them, faced him.

The elf was about six feet tall and lanky,
with white hair in a loose braid and quizzical eyebrows.

His clothes were odd. Elves usually looked
immaculate. It was how you could tell they were elves. You could
cut an elf’s leg off, and he would contrive to make it look as if
two legs were unfashionable. Elves were just like that. It was one
of their more annoying traits.

This one wore a loose shirt that had been
washed so many times the sleeves had shrunk, revealing bony wrists,
and pants with carefully patched knees. He had the usual elven
cheekbones, but they were smudged with dirt. He was practically
scruffy.

He didn’t look scared. He didn’t look angry.
He didn’t even look very surprised—probably he’d known that where
there was one goblin, more would be coming—but he did look a little
bemused.

His almond-shaped eyes traveled over the
goblins, not missing either Wiggles or the teddy-bear.

“Say something!” hissed Nessilka, elbowing
Murray in the ribs.

“What? Why me?”

“You speak Elvish! Say something useful!”

“I—but—”

“Do it!”

Murray gulped, faced the elf, and stammered
out a long phrase in Elvish, like a child repeating a speech it has
learned by heart.

The elf’s eyebrows climbed until they nearly
touched his hairline. He said something brief, and jerked a thumb
to the left.

Murray nodded weakly.

“What did you say?” Nessilka demanded.

“I asked him where the bathroom was.”


What?
Why?”

“It’s the only sentence I know! I think he
said it was around back!”

“I thought you spoke Elvish!”

“Not very well!”

Nessilka ground the heel of her hand into her
forehead.

When she looked up, the elf was watching her.
She was expecting to find an expression of contempt or hatred or
something
, but he met her eyes with unexpected camaraderie,
like the only other babysitter in a room full of children.
How
odd that our lives should bring us to this point,
that look
said.

BOOK: Nine Goblins
7.68Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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