Nine Goblins (5 page)

This one, though…gods.

“I can splint it,” he said to her, fairly
sure she didn’t understand him. “Splint it, and wrap it, and put
some plaster on it. You’ll have to stay off it if you can. You
probably can’t. Um.” He was very aware of the stag’s not-eyes
boring into the back of his head.

“Let’s start with that,” he said, and got up.
The stag rattled a little, then stopped, as if embarrassed. Walking
backwards, making “wait” gestures with both hands, he got inside
the barn and began rummaging around for supplies with which to,
once again, do the impossible.

“War is just
not
efficient,” said
Murray.

This was such a typically Murray comment that
Nessilka snorted with laughter, even under the circumstances.

They were standing in ranks on the top of the
hill. Elves and humans stood in ranks at the bottom of the hill. In
a few minutes, somebody was going to break and yell “Attack!” and
the humans and elves would come up and the goblins would go down,
and then it’d just be shouting and hitting and pointy things.

“Look at this,” he continued. “They’re going
to charge up here, and we’re going to beat them back, and at the
end of the day, we’ll probably still be up here, and they’ll
probably still be down there. We both know it. The battle isn’t
going to change anything, and it’s all for control of this stupid
hill, which neither of us would give a rat’s hind end for if there
wasn’t a war.”

“S’nice hill,” rumbled Algol. “S’pretty,
anyway.” He had a wildflower tucked behind one ear.

“It’s a trollslip,” he said helpfully, when
they all looked at him and his flower. “They grow on hillsides like
this.”

“It’s very…um….pink,” said Murray.

“My mom used to grow them back home.”

There didn’t seem to be anything more to say
on that front. They all looked forward again.

He was right, so far as it went, but so was
Murray. It was a hill, with big grey rocks scattered around the
top, and little pink trollslips tumbling over them. Here and there,
an oxeye daisy nodded in the sun. The hill had risen gently out of
the woods behind them, leaving the trees behind in favor of a band
of heather, and the wildflowers. The other sides ranged between
steepish (in front) and suicidal (to the sides.) It had a pleasant,
but not particularly dramatic view of the fields below.

A nice place for a picnic, maybe, but
probably not a place you’d build a house.

Being the highest point for some miles, it
was, however, the perfect place for a battle. Everybody wants the
high ground, particularly if you’re only four feet tall and need
all the help you can get.

The elves down below looked like tall white
foxes, all narrow pointy faces and broad pointy ears. Their pale
silver hair floated around their heads like haloes. They stood in
grim silent ranks, and watched the goblins through narrowed almond
eyes.

The humans below were a more varied lot, and
came in almost as many colors as goblins, from dark brown to pasty
pink. No green, though. You couldn’t trust a species that didn’t
come in green.

At least they fidgeted before the battle.
Nessilka appreciated that. The elves stood like carved marble. The
humans sweated and twitched and snickered and poked each other,
very much like goblins.

“They say the waiting…”

“…is the worst part.”

Mishkin and Mushkin had taken Algol’s advice
literally, and were crowded up next to him like two ticks on a
tomcat.

Algol considered this.

“Nah. The worst part is the bit where you hit
the other guy and hope he doesn’t hit you.”

“Oh.”

“And the bit where they hit you, that’s the
worst, too.”

“…oh.”

“And the bit where they’ve already hit you,
and you’re not sure if you’re alive or not, that’s definitely the
wor—”

“Corporal!”

Algol blinked at Sergeant Nessilka. “Yes,
Sarge?”

“It is possible to be
too
honest,
Corporal.”

“Yes, Sarge.”

They all stood and fidgeted for a while.

“Do you think we could make tea?” asked
Gladblack, who had a purple tint to his skin most of the time, but
was now a kind of unhappy grey.

“No.”

Weatherby was tugging at his clothes again.
Behind Nessilka, Thumper was singing something tuneless under his
breath. She caught something about “with a whack-whack here, and a
whack-whack there…” and tuned him out.

“Do you think—” Murray began, and then there
was no time for questions, because somebody had yelled
“Charge!”

Nessilka had been in any number of battles,
and she couldn’t remember the first ten minutes of any of them.

She had a theory that if you could remember
the first ten minutes, you’d never, ever charge at anybody again,
so parts of your brain blotted them out.

The problem was that she couldn’t imagine why
her brain would want her to continue charging at people, and this
then led her to the theory that parts of her brain worked for the
Goblin High Command, which she didn’t like at all.

Regardless, it was ten minutes into the
battle, and she couldn’t remember what had just happened. There’d
been a lot of yelling. Everyone yelled. No matter what species you
were, elf, human, goblin, orc, random bystander, you yelled. There
had been a lot of hitting things. Her shield was bent in four or
five places, and her arms ached dreadfully.

Algol went by at high speed, shield raised,
with Mishkin and Mushkin practically stepping on his heels. Mishkin
had gotten a sword from somewhere, and was waving it dangerously
close to Algol’s kidneys.

She had no idea how the battle was going, but
she didn’t seem to be dead, so from her perspective, everything was
really going rather well.

Unfortunately, Sergeant Nessilka had just
seen a problem.

The problem stood on a little rise, just
enough to lift him out of the battle proper. He looked human, and
he wasn’t wearing armor, or carrying any weapons.

He was doing something with his hands, and
there was a blueness in the air around him—not really a blue light,
per se, but the world around him was turning shades of blue, like
something behind a pane of cobalt glass. That wasn’t right. That
was
magic
, that was.

A bolt of blueness streaked out from his open
mouth, and hit a knot of goblins, who fell down.

Aw, hell
, Nessilka thought.
It’s a
wizard.

All wizards are crazy.

Not the quaint, colloquial “crazy” where you
have an offbeat sense of humor and wear brightly colored socks, not
mild eccentricity coupled with a general lack of fashion sense. Not
“you don’t have to be crazy to work here, but it helps.” Wizards
aren’t weird. They are genuinely, legitimately, around the
bend.

This is because magic is a form of
psychosis.

Forget the bearded men wearing robes covered
in stars trying to sell you bargain spellbooks. Nine times out of
ten, it’s a scam, and the tenth time, they really can do magic, but
it’s not something they can teach.

Various parties have done intensive studies
of Arcane Manifestation Disorder, or AMD, and the results often
make for interesting reading, but they still don’t know what causes
someone to have a sudden psychotic break and wake up able to throw
fire from their fingertips. It just happens.

There are basically two kinds of sufferers of
AMD—the high-functioning, and the rather less so. High-functioning
wizards can live on their own, and while they tend to be shy and
awkward in social situations, meticulously neat, and easily
startled, they’re not any worse off than the rest of us.

The more unfortunate wizards generally
require someone to dress them and can’t be allowed near any sharp
objects.

By its very nature, magic is highly complex
and highly individualized. It’s hard to say what magic can and
can’t do, because it varies so wildly between wizards. Some of them
are battle machines, some of them are good in the garden, some of
them do weather. Some of them can, on a good day, turn mushrooms
into hedgehogs, and some of them can shatter mountains. There’s a
young woman in East Charring who can’t talk, but can heal just
about anything that ails you. You just don’t know.

Because of this unpredictability, nobody much
relies on magic. People have tried, but you get a lot of very
unhappy wizards and they’re not a group you want to make unhappy.
While individuals with AMD often find work suited to their own
particular talents, the only large institutions with a policy of
employing wizards en masse are various armies.

Sergeant Nessilka had been in the Goblin Army
since she was old enough to lie about her age, and she had
encountered a fair number of enemy wizards. There’d been the one
who shot smothering clouds of butterflies out of his fingertips,
and the one who made people’s skeletons shuck off their bodies like
someone taking off a heavy coat, and the really creepy one who’d
just made people
go away
.

This guy shot blue out of his mouth. Nessilka
had never seen anybody shoot blue from their mouths, but the
goblins who’d been hit weren’t getting up again, and that was more
than enough for her.

“It’s a wizard! Get the wizard!” somebody was
yelling. “Follow me! Quick!” After a minute of this, Nessilka
realized she was the one doing the yelling, and cursed her
traitorous vocal cords.
Of all the body parts to suddenly
discover patriotism…

Then her feet appeared to discover it, as
well, because she seemed to be charging at the wizard.
Why,
feet? Why now? Why can’t you be more like—oh, the spleen, say? The
spleen never charges anybody!

Her feet ignored her. Her vocal cords
appeared to have gotten the hint, because she wasn’t yelling any
more, or perhaps her blood was just pounding in her ears too loudly
to tell.

She wondered if anybody was actually
following her.

Not daring to look behind her for fear of
finding that she was making a suicide charge all on her own, she
continued forward. The ground slipped and slid and squelched under
her broad feet. At this stage of the fight, footing was often more
dangerous than the other guys having swords—all those feet running
and jumping and tearing over the hillside had churned it into dirt
and mud and slippery bits. If you fell down, you slid, until you
hit somebody else—a dead body if you were lucky, a live, angry body
carrying a blunt instrument if you weren’t.

Goblins actually have an advantage in this
terrain since their feet are so huge, but there are limits. She
tripped over something—
goodness, I hope that wasn’t what it
looked like
—and stumbled down the slope, not entirely in
control of her own course.

An elf appeared in front of her. He had a
sword. Unable to stop, and for lack of anything better to do, she
ran directly into him, at full speed. He squawked and went down. So
did she.

Overhead, another bolt of blue shot out and
dropped a nearby goblin like a rock.

Sometimes whoever gets up first wins, and
since Nessilka was sitting on the elf’s legs, she had a tenuous
advantage. The elf kicked and bucked under her. She slammed her
club down on his knee, which put a stop to that, rolled to her
feet, took aim, and stomped, hard.

Male elves are no different from any other
humanoid species in some regards. He probably wouldn’t die, but
he’d certainly wish he had, and Nessilka didn’t have time to stick
around, with the wizard still spitting bolts of blue
everywhere.

She slid and squelched forward. Then she got
onto a patch that still had grass on it—
oh glory!
—and got
traction and pounded forward.

She was twenty feet away, and it occurred to
her that her entire plan was “hit wizard with club and hope for the
best.” This was not a bad plan, as such things go, but it did not
seem to have a contingency for the wizard spitting blueness at
her.

There were footsteps behind her. Somebody
yelled.

The wizard looked up, and his eyes went
wide.

Nessilka had to do it. She darted a glance
behind her.

The entire Nineteenth Infantry, from Algol
down to Blanchett’s teddy-bear, were right behind her.

Shock warred with gratitude warred with the
horror that she was going to get them all killed. Nessilka left her
emotions to sort the matter out on their own time, raised her club,
and thundered up the last few feet to the wizard.

“
Whooooohaaaaa!”

The wizard stopped shooting blue. His mouth
opened again, but this time in what looked like a cry of terror,
and he reached both hands to one side and grabbed at thin air.

Nessilka wondered briefly if he’d gone mad
with terror or was trying to milk an invisible cow.

Then—and even for magic this was weird—he
grabbed the air and
yanked.

The air tore open—really tore, as if it were
a big sheet of canvas with the world painted on it—and there was
something on the other side. Darkness, shot with green, that
moved.

Sergeant Nessilka did not know much about
magic, but she was pretty sure that tearing holes in the air meant
no good for anybody.

She tried to stop.

The Nineteenth Infantry, led by Algol,
crashed into her back.

Her feet went out from under her and she
crashed into the wizard, who in turn crashed into the hole in the
air.

The hole went “glorp!”

The wizard went “Arrrrgh!”

Nessilka went “Craaaap!”

Algol went “Sarge?”

The world went black.