Nine Goblins (14 page)

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 earplugs 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.”

Which was true. Which Murray shouldn’t have
had to tell her.

“Move him into the shade, at least.” She and
Murray each took a side and carried him back inside the house.
There was a pallet on the floor—not much of one, but better than
the walkway.

“Right. Let’s move. Blanchett, if you hear
anyone crying out, let us know.” He nodded. She put her earplugs
back in.

There were cattle in the town square. Some of
the humans had died when the cattle crushed them. It was a mess, a
horrible mess, which was a laughably ineffective word for the scene
before them.

At least if she thought of it as
mess
she didn’t have to think of it as
people
.

Nessilka was glad Sings-to-Trees hadn’t come.
Or Algol. She didn’t know if the elf could handle it, and while she
knew Algol had been on battlefields, at least everybody there had
been trying to kill you
back.

There probably wasn’t much point in sneaking,
but they kept to the shadows and the corners of buildings
anyway.

Murray tapped her shoulder, and she pulled
the earplug loose again—really, why was she bothering? The moss was
coming unwrapped by now—and whispered “Yes?”

“Eleven humans so far,” he whispered back.
“Maybe more in the buildings, but I don’t think too many. They all
seem to be trying to get into the town.”

“Where are they going?”

Murray leaned out from the shadow of the
building and pointed. “At a guess, that building there.”

They studied the building in question.

“Pointy,” said Blanchett finally.

“It’s a steeple. Some kind of church, I
think. In a town like this, probably the main meeting hall
too.”

“All right. Stay low. We’re in enemy
territory and don’t anybody forget it,” said Nessilka.

Murray looked around and said, “How could we
forget, Sarge?”

They skulked from the shadow of one building
to another. Nessilka thought that one was probably a bar, judging
from the smell of spilled beer and rotting sawdust. She crouched
behind a rain barrel and looked over at the church.

“The bear doesn’t like it,” said Blanchett
suddenly.

Nessilka paused. “Does the bear have any
suggestions?” she asked delicately.

Blanchett conferred with the bear, and said
“He says not. Just…it feels like a trap. Not for us, maybe, but for
everybody.”

“I hate this,” said Nessilka to no one in
particular. “Tell the bear I agree with him. If he has any
thoughts, tell me immediately.”

“Will do, Sarge.”

They crept closer.

The greatest concentration of the dead was at
the end of the street, where the church sat in what had formerly
been a village square. They were pressed right up against the walls
of the church, close to the doors. They looked like they’d trampled
each other, and then the cows had trampled
them
. In a couple
of places there were three or four bodies piled together.

The church had big wooden double doors. The
worst concentration of bodies was around the doors, and what looked
like most of a steer had beaten itself to death against one,
blockading it with a half-ton of rotting meat.

The other door was ajar.

She and Murray exchanged glances. She had the
fight the urge to meet the teddy-bear’s single button eye as
well.

“Somebody moved those bodies away from the
door,” Murray hissed.

“Going in or coming out, that’s the—ah!” She
grabbed Murray’s shoulder and yanked him back into the shadows.

A small figure—taller than a goblin, but not
so broad—came out of a building across the square. It wore a cloth
over its head and a bright blue coat. Its arms were full
of…groceries? Nessilka could make out the corner of a sack of flour
and some jars of preserves.

The goblins watched, hardly daring to
breathe, as the figure looked around the square, then threaded its
way nonchalantly through the bodies toward the open door.

“Human,” whispered Murray. “Sub-adult. Can’t
do the genders from here.”

“How can it even breathe?” asked Nessilka.
The stench of the piled bodies was enough to knock her over, and
she was twenty yards away and a goblin to boot.

“Maybe it’s had time to get used to it.”

The figure stopped at the door, balanced the
load of groceries on one hip, and pushed the door open with its
free hand.

One of the corpses shifted slightly when the
door hit it, a limp arm flopping in the dust. The figure shoved the
arm aside with its foot, caught the door with the edge of its
shoulder, and slipped inside.

The goblins sat in the shadow of building.
Nessilka crouched behind a water barrel on the edge of the street
and stared at the building.

Nothing happened.

“Maybe its parents are dead and it’s just
trying to eat until someone gets here to find it,” she said,
without much conviction.

“Uh-huh,” said Murray.

“The bear is pretty sure that’s a load,
Sarge,” said Blanchett.

She sighed. “Yeah, me too.” The casual way it
had moved the corpse aside with its foot—that screamed “murderer”
and “crazy person” and “do not touch.”

“Think it’s a wizard?”

“It’d almost have to be, wouldn’t it?”

“There could be a grown-up wizard in there
doing the actual magic.” Murray chewed at his lower lip.

“Children are vicious little bastards, some
of ‘em,” offered Blanchett.

Flies buzzed. Across the square, two crows
got into a brief squabble over a tasty bit of carrion.

“Now what do we do, Sarge? Go back?” Murray
glanced behind them.

Nessilka would have loved to go back. Going
back sounded like a
great
idea.

But if they went back and told
Sings-to-Trees, he’d insist on coming out to see if the human
really was a child who needed help, and if his rangers showed up,
they’d probably do the same, and if it was a goblin child they’d be
on their guard, but since it was a
human
and humans were
nice
…

There were already a whole lot of dead people
out there. Nessilka didn’t care very much for faceless unknown
rangers, particularly not elves, but Sings-to-Trees didn’t deserve
to wind up in that pile of bodies.

And the Nineteenth—what there was of it—still
had to get home, and if the weird voice magic could reach as far as
the treeline, then they’d have to go
miles
out of their way
to get home, and that would undoubtedly lead them into trouble with
somebody who wasn’t nearly as nice as Sings-to-Trees.

“We have to get a better look. Murray, you
and me—Blanchett, stay here.”

“Sarge…”

It was a poor day when Blanchett was
questioning orders, Nessilka thought grimly. Still—“You’re the only
one we know is immune, so you’re the only one who can get a message
back if it gets us. If it’s a kid…fine. If it’s a grown-up
wizard…well, we’ll find out.”

Blanchett hunched his shoulders and looked
mulish, but perhaps the bear had a word with him, because he said
gloomily “If you say so, Sarge.”

She took one final look at the church and the
bodies, shoved her earplugs back in—Murray did the same—and made a
move out
gesture with her fingers.

Nessilka and Murray moved out.

Sings-to-Trees stood just inside the forest
and fretted.

He’d lost sight of the goblins fairly
quickly—for all their apparent clumsiness, they knew their way
around a hedgerow.

He hoped they would be okay.

He couldn’t believe he’d nearly attacked the
cervidian.

He should go back to the farm and send a
pigeon. He should send a pigeon about the mage, and about the weird
noise. The goblins would be fine. The goblins could take care of
themselves.

Sings wrung his hands together.

The goblins could probably take care of
themselves better than Sings himself could.

It was so
quiet
. The quiet bothered
him almost as much as the memory of the voice did. Forest edges
were hopping with life—birds and bugs and lizards and squirrels.
There should be scurrying and scuttling and chirping and
singing.

There should be—

Something stamped.

He turned his head slowly, already knowing
what he would see.

Ah.

Yes.

The empty eyes of the cervidian stag stared
back him.

“I won’t go out there,” he told the stag.
“It’s okay.”

The stag rattled and stamped again.

“Er? Is there something else?”

He looked for the bone doe, but she wasn’t
there. Perhaps the stag had seen her somewhere safe, then
returned.

The stag paced toward him. Sings held his
ground.
I almost attacked him. He didn’t attack me, and he
didn’t hurt that goblin, even though he could have. If anything,
he’s got the moral high ground on
me.

A few feet away, the cervidian halted. Hollow
eyes gazed into his.

And then the stag turned slightly, stretched
out a forelimb, and…knelt?

Why is he—

“Oh
no,
” Sings-to-Trees said out loud.
“Oh no! Ride you? You can’t be serious!”

The stag rattled with impatience.

Sings-to-Trees eyed the exposed knobs of the
stag’s backbone and imagined then against his tender bits. He
shuddered.

“Are you sure I can’t just follow you?”

The stag rattled again and pawed at the
ground.

“I’ll—but your back—oh, dear….”

Sings-to-Trees was not any more fond of pain
than any elf, but he had chosen a life that involved a certain
degree of personal discomfort. It appeared that this was going to
involve more of the same.