Nine Goblins (18 page)

The girl threw her arms around the
wizard—John’s—neck and said, somewhat muffled, “I knew it would
work. I knew they’d have to bring you back if there was nobody else
to take care of me.”

Nessilka twisted her head and looked up at
the creature holding her. Had it been immune to the noise?

It looked back down at her. It had a wide,
froggy mouth and enormous eyes. It looked like a toad crossed with
a bull crossed with a small hillside.

“Graw,” it said cheerfully.

“They’re trolls, Sarge,” said Murray.
“Sings-to-Trees talked about them. I think they’re friends of
his.”

“Graw!”

“Where’s Blanchett?” whispered Nessilka. “I
don’t want an elf shooting him if he’s wandering off!”

“Haven’t seen him, Sarge. Maybe he’s on the
other side of the tent?”

Finchbones managed to get the crossbow loaded
and raised it up. “Sir,” he said with a heavy accent, “must move
back from her. Now.”

Nessilka felt a distinct stab of pleasure
that the elven captain spoke this dialect rather worse than she
did.
Now who sounds unintelligent? Ha!

Wizard and girl both ignored him. The wizard
said, “Lisabet…what have you done?”

“Nothing!” said the girl. “Well, I shouldn’t
have had to do anything! They shouldn’t have taken you away!”

Finchbones tried again. “Sir. Move back.
Now.”

John not only didn’t move back, he held
Lisabet more tightly. Any crossbow bold would go through both of
them, and Nessilka was pretty sure the wizard knew it. “I’m sorry,
sir,” he said. “Did she do something bad?”

Finchbones looked tired and grim. “Killed.
Killed…village, entire. Many killed. Move back.”

“Lisabet!” The young wizard looked down at
her.

“They wouldn’t bring you back! I told them
I’d do it if they didn’t bring you back, and they didn’t
listen!”

Sings-to-Trees put his hands over his face,
looking grey.

“I had to go away, Lisabet! It’s—It’s so much
better. They explain things and nobody’s scared of me. You
shouldn’t have done this.”

Finchbones said something to one of the other
elves. The elf said, “The captain is warning you. You must step
away from the girl. She is extremely dangerous and we cannot
guarantee your safety.”

Lisabet glared up at her brother. “So you’re
glad
you went away?”

The boy was a poor liar, Nessilka thought.
She was another species, and even she could see the answer on his
face.

“Fine!” yelled the girl. “Fine, if that’s how
it is! I’m sorry I ever wanted you to come back!”

The girl pulled back. Finchbones jerked the
crossbow up.

She opened her mouth and made the noise
again.

Nessilka had to give it to Captain
Finchbones. His hands were shaking badly and the shot went wild,
but it went past her left shoulder with only inches to spare. And
he did all this while everyone else was slamming their hands over
their ears. The only reason that Nessilka didn’t cover her own ears
as well was because her arms were firmly pinned to the troll’s
side.

The trolls didn’t seem bothered by the noise.
They were looking at the humans with baffled expressions. “Graw?”
said one uncertainly.

Sings whimpered, and the troll holding him
picked him up and cuddled him, saying worriedly “Grah!
Grah-grah-aaah?”

We have got to stop doing this,
thought Nessilka wearily,
we know there’s no conversation, we
know there’s nothing to understand, my head is going to come apart
if I hear much more of this…

“Graaaah?”

Finchbones crawled, inch by agonizing inch,
toward the girl. He was still clutching the crossbow, perhaps
planning to bludgeon her to death if nothing else presented
itself.

John, closest to the source, had gone to his
knees. He reached for his sister but she stepped out of the way.
Her eyes narrowed, and the voice, if anything, got worse. Nessilka
felt as if a mule were kicking her repeatedly between the eyes.

Our brains are gonna melt. There’s going
to be blood coming out of our ears soon. It wasn’t just
trampling—those people
died
of
this.

“Grawww…” said her troll. It fidgeted,
crushing her more tightly against its side.

Nessilka’s vision filmed with red mist.

Something moved.

It strode past the fire, past the torches,
and even through the film of red, Nessilka thought it moved like a
goblin.

…
Blanchett?

Blanchett was wearing his helmet. He took one
more step forward, reached up, and plucked the bear from his
helm.

The voice redoubled. The girl had seen him.
It focused, concentrated, and Nessilka began screaming because it
drowned the sound out just a little and that was good and anyway,
everybody else was screaming, too.

Blanchett wound up, took two running strides,
and flung the bear across the sea of screaming elves.

It hit the girl square in the face.

Blanchett always did have good aim.

The voice ended in a very unmagical squawk.
Nessilka considered how long the bear had been in
battle—
months
—and how often it had been
washed—
never
—and just how foul it must be.

Probably got a lot of Blanchett’s rancid hair
gel on there, too. I don’t even want to know what that stuff’s made
of.

Even somebody who’d been surrounded by
corpses for a week might draw the line at taking that particular
bear to the face.

Sings-to-Trees yelled in Elvish.

The troll holding Nessilka dropped her,
gently, and lumbered forward. The girl’s face vanished under a
large hooved paw.

“Graw?” it said.

Sings-to-Trees nodded.

John stood up. “I’m sorry, sir,” he said, to
no one in particular. “I have to take her away. It’s too dangerous.
I’ll make a hole.”

Finchbones coughed, spat, and tried to say
something. His vocabulary did not seem to be up to either “summary
execution” or “extradition” but John nodded gravely. “I’m sorry,
sir,” he said again. “This is bad?—I think?”

“Yes,” said Sings.

John nodded again. “Yes. But it’ll be…worse.
Much worse. She’s dangerous. I shouldn’t have left her alone. She
just…wasn’t this strong before.” He nodded several times, as if
cementing this idea firmly in his head. “I’ll have to take her
away, sir.”

“Where will you go?” asked Sings.

“Somewhere—far. Remote?” John glanced at
Sings, then away. “I go there sometimes? It’s safe. There’s nobody
there.”

“That’s probably good,” said Sings.

“Yes, sir.”

John paused, closed one eye, and spat blue
light. Nessilka cringed in memory of what that blue light could
do.

Finchbones cursed and dropped his crossbow,
shaking his fingers. Blue light slithered over the weapon.

“Very sorry, sir. But she’s my
sister.”

Finchbones said something grim in Elvish to
Sings. Nessilka recognized an order when she heard it. Sings said
something right back. She didn’t recognize that, but by the tone,
Sings wasn’t particularly concerned about following orders.

He’s a civilian, Finchbones, you can’t
court-martial him…much as you might want to…

John reached up and grabbed the air, as he
had once before on the battlefield. Nessilka’s stomach lurched
again as he pulled downward, and the air showed… somewhere
else.

It was daylight there. It looked like an
alpine meadow. Mountains rose up toward a blue bowl of sky.

“Excuse me, sir?” said John to the troll.

“Graw?”

“Let her go,” said Sings, “and Matthien, you
will
not
shoot one of my trolls or I will raise hell clear
to the Great Glade.”

Finchbones looked as if he’d eaten something
extremely sour.

The troll handed her to John. She gulped a
breath and her brother promptly put a hand over her mouth. “Only
until we go through,” he told her. “Then you can do whatever you
like.”

He stepped through the hole in the air.

It hung there for a second longer—long enough
to see John release his sister and for her to gaze around with wide
eyes—and then the hole closed up and the fabric of the world healed
itself.

A silence fell. It did not break until
Finchbones let out a long, disgusted sigh, and picked up his
no-longer-glowing crossbow.

Sings reached down, dusted off the bear, and
handed it back to Blanchett.

“And now,” he said, “I think we’ve all got a
lot of talking to do.”

Three days later, Nessilka sat in
Sings-to-Trees’ kitchen and peeled potatoes.

Captain Finchbones, much-decorated leader of
elite elven rangers, sat next to her and peeled them as well. Sings
seemed to feel it would be good for him.

Finchbones could detach the entire peel in
one continuous sweep of the knife, which was very impressive, but
Nessilka’s rather cruder technique produced three peeled potatoes
for every one of his.

There was probably some kind of deep
philosophical point there, but Nessilka wasn’t inclined to go
digging for it.

It was pretty much all over now. The goblins
would leave tomorrow for Goblinhome, and would be provided a ranger
escort the entire way. Meanwhile, Finchbones and a small group of
his men had been staying with Sings. They pretended they weren’t
there as guards and Nessilka pretended her goblins weren’t being
guarded, and everyone was reasonably happy.

Thumper had made a full recovery. So had
Blanchett. The bear not only had a set of stripes sewn on his arm,
it was possibly the first teddy-bear in history to have received a
medal for service to the elven nation.

Nessilka and Murray had them as well. They
were delicate silver leafy things—about what you’d expect from
elven medals. She didn’t know how long they’d last in combat, but
it had been a nice gesture.

And…maybe more than a gesture. She glanced
over at Finchbones.

He smiled. “Thinking?”

“Wondering if this is really going to change
anything.”

Finchbones nodded slowly. His command of the
human language had improved somewhat from use, but it still took
him a minute to think through a complicated sentence.
(Sings-to-Trees had read him the riot act about not speaking the
language of people under his protection, and Finchbones, to his
credit, was trying. She suspected that his opinion of her had
increased radically when she proved more eloquent than he was.)

“Maybe change,” he said finally. “Don’t know
why anything changes. Maybe small thing.”

Nessilka tossed another potato on the
pile.

“I think things will change,” said Sings.
“It’s a good story. People latch onto stories.” He frowned into the
soup he was making. “We’ve got to do something, anyway—can you
imagine putting that poor soul in the army?”

Finchbones and Nessilka exchanged
glances.

Best place for him, really,
Nessilka
thought,
if your description’s right. He needed structure and
someone to tell him what to do. Pity they didn’t get his sister,
too, or those people might still be alive.

But you couldn’t say that sort of thing to
Sings-to-Trees. There was something very…
civilian
…about
Sings. Nessilka concentrated on her potatoes.

From what they’d been able to piece
together—from the old man, and from what Sings had learned from the
wizard in the few hours they’d spent together—a picture had
emerged. John and Lisabet had indeed been orphans in the village of
Elliot’s Cross, until the army had come to recruit John.

Contrary to Lisabet’s complaints, he had gone
willingly.

Not like you could draft someone who can
simply walk out through a hole in the air…

Lisabet’s talent had been judged both too
weak to recruit—which meant that either someone had been incredibly
short-sighted, or she had been too cunning to let anyone know the
extent of her abilities, or her powers had increased dramatically.
There were all kinds of reasons
that
could happen, from
puberty to stress, and there was just no telling.

Frankly, they might have thought that
dragging everybody toward you, friend or foe, was more trouble than
it was worth…

Now they were on shakier ground,
conjecture-wise, but apparently Lisabet had not taken kindly to the
people who were taking care of her, and refused to believe that her
brother would go off without her. She had presumably decided that
the problem was the village, and if everybody in the village was
gone, they would have to bring John back to take care of her.

It was the sort of plan a child would come up
with—simple, self-centered, and utterly heartless.

And there were over forty dead humans and a
great many dead animals as a result.

Nessilka pitched another potato in the
pile.

The rest, of course, was fate. When the
Nineteenth had charged the wizard, he had panicked and tried to
run. Possibly if they hadn’t all piled through, he might had made
it back to Elliot’s Cross, but the shock had been too much and
dropped them only partway to the goal.

We’re probably all lucky we didn’t just
vanish in some weird blue space between worlds.

Finchbones was livid knowing that there was a
psychotic wizard on the loose, but they had no leads at all for
where the pair might have gone. Nessilka was of the opinion that
they had gone very far away indeed. Something about the view
through the hole had seemed…remote. Hopefully John could control
his sister. Despite having faced him over a battlefield, Nessilka
wished him well.

Someone yanked the door open, and eight
goblins piled into Sings-to-Trees’ kitchen. Two elves followed,
slightly more decorously…or as decorous as anyone can look with an
armful of zucchini.