Nine Goblins (4 page)

The mayor came out to meet them. To give what
little credit he was due, he probably thought he was trying to be
kind.

“Goblins, huh? You-um want beer?” he asked,
hunkering down in front of Severspine, the heir to Clan Uggersplut.
“We-um give you beer, you go away.”

“We have come to discuss the ongoing human
expansion,” said Severspine coldly. “We want our lands back.”

“
Good
beer,” said the mayor, winking
at the townspeople over Severspine’s head.

Negotiations did not proceed well after
that.

Three days later, the war had started, and
nothing much would ever be the same again.

They’d been marching half the night. A halt
had been called for fifteen minutes, which was time enough for
Murray to whip out his small travel stove and make tea. The
Nineteenth crowded around, brandishing their tin mugs and watching
with owlish intensity.

Goblin tea resembles a nice cup of Earl Grey
in much the same way that a catfish resembles the common tabby.
They share a name, but one is a nice thing to curl up with on a
rainy afternoon, and the other is found in the muck at the bottom
of polluted rivers and has bits of debris sticking to it.

Murray poured the tea. Hands went into packs
and came out with fistfuls of crude rock sugar. The resulting brew
resembled a kind of sweet gritty mud. Sounds of slurping were
followed immediately by cheerful complaints.

“Tastes like rat squeezins’.”

“Huh, we haven’t had anything as good as rat
squeezins’ for six months. Tastes like a water buffalo got
sick.”

“I’d
kill
for some good rat
squeezins.’”

Thus complimented, Murray beamed.

A pig-rider cantered down the road, and
pulled up in a squealing cloud of dust in the center of the Whinin’
Niners. Nessilka saluted in a desultory fashion. Pig-riders were
generally a higher class of messenger idiot than runners, but still
nothing to get excited about.

“What’s the word, then?” she asked.

“Another hour, then we’re in position and
make camp. Dawn attack, so sleep fast.”

“Dawn? We’ll get, like—” she did a little
mental math, “—four hours of sleep! After a day’s march!”

The messenger grimaced. His pig danced under
him. “General’s orders.”

“Yeah, not your fault.” Nessilka waved him
on. “Thanks.”

It always takes longer to get somewhere than
you think it will, and this is twice as true in the military, so
the goblins marched into camp a mere three hours before dawn.

“Okay, troops, equipment check, and then get
some sleep. We’re getting up too damn early, so catch what you
can.”

The tents went up quickly. When your tent is
three sticks and a whole cowhide, there’s not a lot of time spent
dithering. At the beginning of the campaign, the cowhides had been
uncured, with the resulting smell of rotting leather and ripe
goblin, but Murray had gotten the bright idea to salt the things.
The end result was a kind of tent jerky. It still didn’t smell
great, but it kept the rain off, even if folding the hides was
becoming increasingly problematic.

Nessilka figured if worse came to worse, they
could always eat the tents.

“Is it even worth…”

“…going to sleep?” asked the twins.

“Boys, it’s always worth going to sleep.
Sleep whenever you get the chance, because you don’t know how long
it’s going to be until the next time.”

“And eat,” said Algol from behind her.

“Thank you, yes, Corporal. If there’s food
available, eat it. Meals can get awfully thin on the ground
sometimes.”

She glanced around the group to see who
looked the least tired. “Gladblack, you’re on second watch. I’ll
take first.” Since there were plenty of sentries around the edge of
the army, there wasn’t much point in watching for the enemy, but
you never knew when one of the other units was going to sneak over
and try to nick your goat.

A teddy-bear popped into her field of view.
Nessilka winced, but it was only Blanchett.

“He wants to know when we’re attacking,” said
the owner of the teddy-bear.

“Tell him dawn,” said the sergeant.

Blanchett, unlike much of the Nineteenth,
wore a helmet. It was a complicated mass of fangy bone and spiky
metal. He had taken it from a dead orc and it didn’t fit terribly
well, but Blanchett almost never took it off, even to sleep.

You couldn’t really blame him. A few months
back, the Mechanics Corps had been working on a design for a new
showerhead. The resulting explosions had involved terrific loss of
life on both sides, and Blanchett had taken a flying log upside the
head.

A battle had been raging at the time, so
nobody really noticed this, and had chalked him up as missing,
presumed dead.

Two days later, covered in soot, with a knot
on his head the size of an eagle’s egg, Blanchett had staggered
into camp, clutching the teddy-bear. It was ragged and moth-eaten
and was missing an eye, which gave it a permanent squint. As
teddy-bears go, it would be difficult to find a more disreputable
specimen. Nobody knew where he’d gotten it, and nobody was quite
willing to ask.

The teddy-bear, so far as Nessilka could
tell, was now the brains of the pair. Blanchett refused to answer
any query that was not directed at the bear, and only spoke when
translating for the bear. In battle, the bear rode on top of his
helmet.

It had been a long war. By that point,
everybody had just figured it was easier to go along, particularly
since Blanchett seemed rather more intelligent and helpful these
days, under the bear’s direction.

“He says okay,” said Blanchett.

Nessilka nodded. Blanchett made the
teddy-bear salute and went off to get some sleep.

Weatherby stood up, tugging at his clothes,
and said “Right, then! I’m—”

“Not tonight, Weatherby. There’s a battle
tomorrow.”

Weatherby heaved a sigh. “Fine…”

“You can desert next week. That’ll be fun,
won’t it?”
Gods
, thought Nessilka, listening to her own
wheedling voice,
these troops don’t need a sergeant, they need a
babysitter.

“Wanna desert
now
…” Weatherby
muttered, slouching off to his tent. He kicked sullenly at a rock.
Nessilka stared up at the sky and counted to ten.

She finally looked down, and then around the
Nineteenth. Algol and Murray, her corporals. Thumper and Weatherby
and the twins. Blanchett and his teddy-bear. The half-dozen others
who didn’t make trouble and just kept their heads down and tried to
get through things. The great grim goblin gods only know who’d be
alive after the battle tomorrow. All you could do was pray.

She wasn’t very good at it—her prayers tended
to sound like “You! Up there! Pay attention and heaven help you if
you don’t keep an eye on my boys!”—but as she had every night since
becoming sergeant, Nessilka prayed.

The unicorn was gone, and the foal with her.
Sings-to-Trees felt a moment of pure relief. The stall needed
mucking out, but that was fine. He’d rather have mucked a dozen
stalls than deal with a grumpy post-partum unicorn.

It was, all things considered, a glorious
late spring morning. Birds sang in the trees and the air was that
tantalizing temperature which was just warm enough so that it
didn’t feel like anything, until a delicious cool breeze would
flicker across your skin. The leaves had come in brilliant,
blinding green, and glittering like hot stained glass when the sun
lanced through them.

Sings-to-Trees went around the side of the
ramshackle barn, found his shovel, and went to work on the stall.
It was hot work, lifting each shovelful into the wooden
wheelbarrow, and he was sweating by the time he wheeled the first
load up to the garden. Unicorn dung was pretty safe fertilizer.
Sometimes the magical creatures had pretty unusual things in their
waste. He’d once nursed an injured peryton, a great grey stag with
the wings of a heron and the carnivorous diet of a lion, for two
weeks. He’d gone through a lot of chickens. Afterwards, he’d put
the dung on his tomato plants, and they’d grown six feet
practically overnight. He could have handled that, but the fruit
grew tiny green antlers. He could probably have handled
that
, too, even after they shed their velvet and got
unsettlingly sharp, but he started finding the tomatoes gored and
dripping seeds in the morning. Then the nearby zucchini began
showing up with scarred rinds and suspicious gouges. Eventually he
was down to one big eight-point tomato buck, a vicious vegetable he
suspected was plotting to kill him. He’d put on his
cockatrice-handling gloves, and torn the whole patch out before
things got out of hand.

He’d left that corner empty for a year, and
then put in chard. Chard seemed pretty innocuous. Not a lot of
mayhem available to chard. He didn’t actually
like
chard,
but there were plenty of animals that came through that would. So
far it hadn’t done anything suspicious. He shuddered to think what
would have happened with potatoes.

The second wheelbarrow load came and went,
and that was it. He sluiced the stones down with water and listened
to it gurgle away, feeling the satisfaction of a dirty job done
well.

A hoof stamped on the stones. He turned.

There was a dead deer looking at him.

He didn’t yelp. On the scale of weird things
that had come to him for help, this didn’t even make the top ten.
Still, he did inhale sharply, and he was glad the shovel was within
easy reach.

It was a complete skeleton, fully
articulated, standing framed in the square of light of the open
barn door. Its filigreed shadow streamed away into the darkness of
the barn and was lost.

He knew it was a deer because of the hooves
and the skull and the build, but the delicacy of the thin bone legs
was belied by the great rack of antlers on its head, a massive,
labyrinthine rack, more than he’d known a deer could possibly fit
onto its skull.

For one horrible moment, he wondered if
thinking about the peryton had summoned its ghost—but no, there
were no wings, and so far as he knew, the beast was still alive.
This creature was probably not alive. At least, not in the
conventional sense.

It looked at him.

It didn’t have eyes, and its empty eye
sockets weren’t full of eldritch fire, or even darkness. They were
just eye sockets, full of ivory shadows and little more.
Nevertheless, it looked at him.

“Can I help you?” he said.

It kept looking at him.

He spread his hands and took a cautious step
forward, then another. It tilted its head, very slowly, and one
hind hoof lifted a little, and scraped at the cobbles, the faintest
sound, like a tree branch creaking in a soft breeze.

“Do you need help?” he tried again, and took
another step.

It rattled at him. He froze.

The skeleton was articulated, so far as he
could tell, by a kind of fine dark webbing at the joints. It looked
almost like dried algae, brownish-black and forming organic loops
and swirls over the balls of the joints. The deer had given a kind
of rolling full-body shrug, down the length of its spine, and the
clatter of vertebrae together had made the rattling noise he
heard.

Sings lifted his hands, palms out. He didn’t
know what that was supposed to prove, if anything. No reason to
think it would recognize any humanoid body language at all. It
might understand him, or it might not—some of the odder creatures
were able to understand human speech, and some were no different
from regular beasts.

They stood there, for a few minutes, the man
and the dead deer, and then it swung its head away, the long,
smooth nasal bones pointing into the trees nearest the barn, and
stamped its hoof again.

A skeletal doe melted out of the trees. She
had an awkward, hopping gait, completely at odds with the ossuary
grace of the buck. Sings could see immediately that her right front
leg was broken. She held it hitched up in front of her, the naked
hoof dangling awkwardly.

“Oh, you poor thing,” he said, and quite
forgetting the enormous buck standing there, started towards
her.

A warning rattle stopped him. He turned, and
saw the buck eyeing him eyelessly, the head lowered just a little.
He lifted his hands again.

“I’ll do what I can,” he told the bone stag.
And then, hoping he wasn’t about to be spread-eagled on that
gigantic antlered mass, he bowed deeply to the stag.

And straightened.

And waited.

They stood there for a long moment. The
leaves whispered in the trees, in a brief, cool breeze, that
chilled the sweat on Sings-to-Trees’ body.

The stag lifted its head.

Sings turned away. The skin between his
shoulderblades crawled. He bowed to the doe, for good measure, and
she gazed at him with empty eye sockets.

There was no flesh on her, there was nothing
that could pull the face into any shape beyond the mute grin of a
skull, but still, he thought he could see pain.

He knelt in front of her, and very carefully,
took the injured leg in his hands.

He was shocked immediately by the warmth.
This was no dead thing—this was
living
bone. The break was
reasonably clean. He had wondered why, lacking muscle and skin to
hold it in place, it hadn’t just fallen off. Now he saw that the
bones were threaded through and around with the black webbing, and
a thick skein of it, through the hollow center, was still
attached.

Hmm.

Had this been a real deer, he wouldn’t have
tried it. Such breaks were extremely difficult to fix—while setting
the bone was straightforward enough, you had to keep them
practically immobilized for weeks to keep them from breaking it
again, and the captivity and stress killed them more surely than
the break would. A wild deer could get by on three legs, and other
than putting out food, there wasn’t much you could do that wasn’t
worse than the injury. It was different with fawns. He could manage
fawns, and although he couldn’t return them to the wild, more than
a few half-tame deer in parks in the elven city had started life on
his farm.