Nine Goblins (16 page)

And then Blanchett brought his club down on
the back of the girl’s head.

The sound cut off instantly. There was a
thump as the human wizard—she couldn’t have been anything
else—folded up and hit the ground. Nessilka heard herself cry out
in anguish and relief. So did Murray.

She staggered to the door and looked out. The
one-eyed teddy-bear bobbed atop the helmet. “Sorry, Sarge,” said
Blanchett, “but he said you needed some help.”

“Tell him he’s promoted,” rasped Nessilka.
“I’ll get him some stripes.”

“He’d like that, Sarge.”

Murray looked down at the crumpled human and
nudged her with one flat foot. The human groaned. “You didn’t kill
her,” he said.

“Was I supposed to?”

“Might have made things easier. What are we
going to do now, Sarge?”

Nessilka looked at the unconscious wizard,
looked at the pile of bodies, looked up at Murray—and was spared
any kind of decision because at that moment, the rangers
arrived.

There is a game that most civilized creatures
play in times of great turmoil, which might best be called “How
Boned Are We?”

Nessilka and Murray were playing it now.

“We’re boned,” said Murray.

“Yup,” said Nessilka.

“They’re gonna think we did all of it.”

“Sings-to-Trees will set them straight.”

“If they think to ask him.”

“True.”

“And there’s no chance they’ll believe the
kid did it.”

“Doesn’t look like it, no.”

“So we’re boned.”

“Yup.”

Blanchett was sitting this one out, since the
elves had taken their weapons and his fanged orc-helmet seemed to
qualify. Without the bear, Blanchett was as silent as the
grave.

Nessilka had made an effort. When she’d been
kneeling in the mud with a sword held near her neck and an elf had
been trussing her up with grim efficiency, she’d said “That bear is
one of my men. I demand that you treat him with the courtesy due to
a prisoner of war.”

Which had gone over about as well as you’d
expect, but at least she’d seen bear, helmet, and weapons vanish
into a sack together. So that was something. Leave no soldier
behind and all.

They hadn’t been killed on the spot, and that
was also something.

She was pretty sure that goblins were
considered generally too incompetent to pull off something like
this.

Pretty sure.

Fairly sure, anyway.

Reasonably hopeful.

She’d told them the kid was a wizard. She
wasn’t sure if they’d listened. Probably not. They’d whisked the
girl away somewhere, and realistically, the three enemies of the
state standing in the town full of bodies, having just clubbed one
of the last survivors, were not the most credible of witnesses.

They had been removed from the village and
dropped in a sheep pasture about a half-mile distant. Somebody had
set up a tent and she could smell a fire burning on the other side
of the hedgerow. A silent elf with a crossbow was standing
guard.

“Do you speak this language?” he had asked.
(He had asked probably the same question three other times, in what
sounded like three other languages, but Nessilka didn’t know any of
them. She was interested to note that it was not the language the
human had spoken, so perhaps the races didn’t have that much
contact after all.)

“Yes,” she said. Murray nodded. Blanchett
stared into the distance.

“Good. I am very angry. If you attempt to
escape, I will be very glad to kill you. Do you understand me?”

They nodded.

“We didn’t do it,” said Murray
hopelessly.

“You will have a chance to speak to Captain
Finchbones in your defense,” said the elf, and then walked five
feet away and became as communicative as a stone.

“We’re boned,” said Murray glumly.

“Yup.”

“Think we can escape?”

“No.”

“If the kid does the thing—”

“Then we’ll break our necks trying to get to
her, most likely, if we don’t get trampled by the elves first.
Unless it doesn’t work on elves.” She looked at their captor. His
hair was perfect. You could braid enough coup markers in that hair
to account for a small berserker nation.

They sat in the sheep pasture and watched the
sun crawl across the sky.

Nessilka tried to engage Blanchett.
“Blanchett? Can you hear the bear?”

No response.

Great grim gods, what if his brain is melted?
What if this is what drives him over the edge?

More
over the edge?

“Blanchett, I want you to listen to me. The
bear is on a very important mission. He’s doing reconnaissance. You
need to stay with me until the bear reports back, understand?”

He turned his head half an inch toward her.
Nessilka felt a sudden enormous relief, capture by the enemy
notwithstanding. She wriggled into a more comfortable position and
leaned toward Blanchett.

The elf’s crossbow went
click.

She leaned back and addressed the sky.
“Blanchett, I know you’re in there. You just need to sit tight
until the bear comes back, okay?”

His lips moved. It might have been
Yes,
Sarge.
It might have been almost anything.

The tent flap was pulled back, and two more
elves emerged. Nessilka sized them up as they approached. Was one
Captain Finchbones?

“The one in the armor?” guessed Murray.

“No,” said Nessilka, who knew a bit more
about command. “The one who looks tired.”

And indeed, of the two elves approaching, one
looked exhausted. His shoulders were stooped and his long white
hair made him look old instead of ethereal.

He had weary eyes. Nessilka clenched her
fingers together.

If you are going to be captured—and if you
are a goblin soldier, this is always at least a possibility—it is
rarely a good idea to be captured by tired people. Tired people
make mistakes. Those mistakes are rarely in your favor. For every
guard who dozes off or who fails to lock the prison door, you get a
dozen guards who forget that they’ve taken the safety off the
crossbow, who mistake a plea for water for an assault, or who fail
to loosen the ropes before somebody’s hand turns black and falls
off.

Tired commanders are even worse. Tired
commanders have a tendency to want problems to just go away.

Nessilka knew that she, Murray, Blanchett and
a town full of corpses added up to a very
big
problem.

The tired elf squatted down in the mud in
front of her—he was wearing very good boots—and said “I am Captain
Finchbones.”

“Point to you, Sarge,” muttered Murray.

“Do you understand this language?”

“Yes,” said Nessilka. She licked dry lips and
wracked her brain, trying to remember vocabulary. “Most. Need you
explain some words.”

Finchbones nodded. “I wish to make sure there
are no misunderstandings. Explain to me why you were in the
village.”

Nessilka hardly knew where to begin. “We were
in woods. We heard very strange noise.” Should she mention
Sings-to-Trees? If they went to his farm, they’d find the rest of
the regiment. Damn. “A magic noise. We had to walk to it.”

“Why were you in the woods?” asked
Finchbones.

“A wizard—” Damn, what was the word for
transported?
“—moved us.”

Finchbones eyebrows went up at that. “A
goblin wizard?”

“No!” That was all they needed, to have the
elves thinking that they had wizards that could dump whole
regiments behind enemy lines. “No. Human.”

“Why did a human wizard send you into my
people’s lands?”

Murray muttered, “Careful, Sarge…” in
Glibber. The elf behind him made a warning noise.

Nessilka sighed. There was really no answer
that was going to paint them in a positive light. It was best to be
honest. At least if they were prisoners of war, there were supposed
to be rules about how they were treated.

“In battle. Ran at wizard.” Her hands were
tied, but she managed a vague pantomime of attack with her head and
one shoulder. Finchbones nodded. “Wizard moved. We moved too. Then
we were in woods.”

Murray cleared his throat. Apparently he
spoke this human dialect better than he spoke Elvish. “We think he
was trying to run from the battle, but he brought all of us with
him.”

Nessilka winced a little at
all of us,
but presumably that could apply to three people as easily as
nine.

Finchbones shifted so that he was addressing
both Murray and Nessilka. “Where is this wizard now?”

Nessilka shook her head. “Asleep.” That
wasn’t the right word, but it was as close as she was going to get.
“Left wizard asleep in woods.”

“Dead?”

“No!”

“Unconscious,” said Murray.

Finchbones nodded.

Nessilka tried to explain that they’d given
the wizard some water and put a blanket over him, but she wasn’t
sure how much of that came through, or whether Finchbones believed
her.

She hated not being able to speak clearly. It
made her sound stupid, and people thought goblins were stupid
enough already.

“Who is in command?”

“I am,” said Nessilka. “I am—” She looked
helplessly at Murray.

“Sergeant,” said Murray.

“Sergeant Nessilka. I am in command.” She
licked her lips again. “I ask…fair. Fairness. Treatment of
soldiers.”

“Prisoners of war,” said Finchbones.

Nessilka nodded. So did Murray.

Finchbones steepled his fingers. “And yet the
people you have killed were not soldiers.”

“Did not kill people!”

Murray said, “The village was like that
already. Already dead.”

“Days,” said Nessilka. “Many days dead. And
we only three goblins.” She jerked her chin at Blanchett and
Murray.

“You were found standing over a girl with a
club,” said Finchbones grimly. “Making pancakes.”

Part of Nessilka was enormously gratified
that the elf could see how insane it was to make pancakes while
surrounded by dead bodies. This was largely mitigated by the fact
that he thought they were
her
pancakes.

“Not us. Girl.”

“She is a wizard,” said Murray. “She made the
noise.”

Nessilka stared up into Finchbones’ eyes,
willing him to believe her. Because if he didn’t…Well, it was going
to be unpleasant for the goblins in the short term, and for
everybody in the long term.

Finchbones made a noncommittal noise and
stood up. “I am not sure that I believe you.”

Nessilka sighed. “Wouldn’t believe either,”
she said. “Hear magic noise,
then
believe.”

“By then it’ll be too late,” said Murray.

Finchbones lifted his other eyebrow. “You
will be brought water,” he said. “Do not try to escape.”

Nessilka snorted. “Where we go?”

“There’s that,” said Finchbones, and walked
away.

Sings-to-Trees had found the wizard, for all
the good it was doing him.

He hadn’t been hard to find. The cervidian
had dumped Sings directly in front of the young human’s campfire.
It wasn’t a large campfire, but it was perfectly serviceable, and
the wizard was feeding it twigs and making no attempt to hide the
smoke or his presence in the forest.

Sings could tell it was the wizard, because
he was still wearing Nessilka’s cloak. Badly cured goathide clashed
oddly with the human’s military uniform.

Also, the wizard’s response to having a
skeletal deer leap in front of him and a bruised and whimpering elf
fall off its back was to say, “Oh.”

That was it. He didn’t even make eye contact
with Sings-to-Trees. (This was all very well, as far as Sings was
concerned, because he didn’t really want someone looking at him
right at that moment. He was curled around bruises that would have
felled a trained warrior, let alone a veterinarian.)

The cervidian rattled and stamped a hoof. The
wizard fed another twig to the fire.

Sings sat up and said, “Are you the
wizard?”

The wizard looked at his face briefly, and
then back at the fire. “Yes?” He sounded unsure about it.

“Did you come through a—” Sings had to stop
and translate mentally from the goblin tongue “—a hole in the
air?”

“Yes?”

“There were goblins with you.”

The wizard nodded. “Lots of them,” he said.
“I ran away. They came with me through the hole.” He gave
Sings-to-Trees a brief, determined look. “I make holes.”

“Good for you,” said Sings. “Are you
injured?”

“No?”

“The goblins said you were unconscious.”

The wizard nodded again. “Lots of them came
through the hole. They were very heavy.”

Sings realized this was all the explanation
he was going to get. “My name is Sings-to-Trees.”

“My name is John.”

“I live here, in the woods. A few miles
away.”

John was silent for so long that
Sings-to-Trees started thinking of another question, but then the
wizard seemed to realize that something else was expected of him.
“I live in the village. Elliot’s Cross?”

He looked worried. Sings said, “That’s a nice
place,” and the wizard visibly relaxed.

Poor soul. He’s trying. People like this
shouldn’t be in wars, even if they are good at it.

“Were you trying to get back there?”

“Yes? But lots of them came through the
hole.” He furrowed his brow. Sings had an impression not so much of
lack of intelligence, but of lack of ability to communicate.
“When…when too many go through the hole…the hole won’t go far.”

“I understand, I think,” said Sings.
Elliot’s Cross is what the humans call their village, isn’t it?
He was trying to escape the battle and go back home, but when the
goblins fell through, he only got partway there, and it took so
much energy it knocked him out.
Makes sense, I guess, as
much as anything with magic makes sense.