Nine Goblins (13 page)

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.”

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 our 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?