Nine Goblins (6 page)

Sings-to-Trees was tired, but he felt good.
This was his normal state of being, so he didn’t stop to notice
it.

The bone doe, now with a splint and a tightly
wrapped cast, had melted into the trees, followed by her brooding
companion. The stag hadn’t liked him messing around with the doe’s
leg and had rattled near-constantly, like a furious rattlesnake,
until the doe had turned her head and snapped her exposed teeth in
the stag’s direction.

Sings-to-Trees gazed off in the middle
distance with a vague, pleasant expression, the way that most
people do when present at other people’s minor domestic disputes,
and after a moment, the stag had stopped rattling, and the doe had
turned back and rested her chin trustingly on Sings-to-Trees’
shoulder.

This would have been a touching gesture, if
her chin hadn’t been made of painfully pointy blades of bone. It
was like being snuggled by an affectionate plow.

But the leg had gotten splinted and wrapped,
and the doe was walking more easily on it already, and beyond that,
it was in the hands of whatever gods looked after the articulated
skeletons of deer.

He pulled on the rusted handle of the pump
until water gushed out. He washed his hands, then plunged his whole
head briefly under it. Refreshed and spluttering, he headed back up
to the farmhouse to look something up.

Sings-to-Trees, while not having many fragile
things, did own a small library, which he kept locked in a cedar
chest for safekeeping. One look at the outside of the chest—it was
scorched by fire, scored by claws, chewed by teeth, and some kind
of acid had etched a random design in the lid—made it obvious why
something as fragile as paper was on the inside.

He had several herbals, full of small, neat
drawings of plants and careful notes (two of which he’d written
himself.) He had
Sleestak’s Guide to Common Farmyard
Maladies,
and
Diseases of the Goat,
(it was amazing how
many of those showed up in trolls) and
Thee Goode Elf’s
Alamanack
(which contained many, many ‘E’s, and not much useful
information), and the exhaustive
Herbal Remedies
, which was
six inches thick and full of bookmarks. He even had a dog-eared
copy of
Medica Magica,
which was full of outright lies and
falsehoods, but every now and then had something worth paying
attention to.

The book he really wanted was near the
bottom. Sings-to-Trees dug down, building up precarious stacks of
leather bindings on either side of the trunk, until he found the
volume and lifted it into the light.

The silver leaf had long since flaked off the
cover and the letters had become a series of flat spaces in a sea
of tooled leather, read as much with the hand as the eye. In the
language of humans, it read
Bestiary.

The elf sat down and began turning pages
carefully.

There was no index. The author had been a
wizard, and had been doing well to hold it together long enough to
write the descriptions, which were rambling in places and painfully
abrupt in others, when they weren’t downright insane. There were no
chapters, and nothing resembling alphabetical order. The entries
showed up where they showed up, and given the nature of some of the
comments interspersing the text, the reader was generally grateful
to get that much.

The pictures, though…the pictures practically
moved on the page. Even in scratchy black and white, they shone
like little gems. The elegant neck of the unicorn flexed, the
serpentine mane of the catoblepas writhed, muscles pulsed in the
shoulders of the great boar.

Magic may have been involved. Sings-to-Trees
rather thought that the author’s gift had been visions, because the
creatures gave every evidence of being drawn from life, and in some
cases, like the kraken or the ice-moles, that would have been quite
a feat.

He was two thirds of the way through the
book, scrutinizing each illustration carefully, before he saw
it.

The carefully articulated skeleton of a stag
gazed back at him from the page.

“…
thee cervidine or cervidian does range
widely through the wold, being in all ways like unto a true deer,
saving that it be made of Bones and not of Flesh. (Whyfor are you
poking at me? Stop! Stop, I implore you!) The cervidian reproduces
by manner unknown, though it is said that they may build a fawn of
bones, and so imbue it with essential life, (the poking to cease!
To cease!) but I have not been witness to this and consider it may
be folly. It is known the cervidian is much fond of magic and very
curious, like unto a magpie, and will oft be found in areas of
great mystical disturbance, which perhaps it may eat, for it takes
no sustenance of grass, (I will become angry if there is more
poking!) and only damps its bones in water and dew.

(Why do you not stop…?!)”

It went on in that vein for quite a while,
and by the time the author had gotten control of himself again, he
was talking about the limerick contests held by manticores.

Sings-to-Trees closed the book thoughtfully.
Of course, just because the cervidian was attracted by magical
disturbance, it didn’t follow that there was one happening nearby,
but it was still…interesting. He hadn’t seen such a creature in all
the years he’d been out here.

He should probably send a pigeon to the
rangers and ask them if anything weird was happening.

There was an almighty crash from the hearth.
Sings-to-Trees bolted to his feet.

The raccoon had learned how to open the
hutch, and had celebrated its newfound freedom by knocking the
hutch over, along with the iron fire grate and the tea kettle that
had been warming there. It sat in the midst of the wreckage, paws
clasped in glee, and greeted Sings-to-Trees with a happy
“Clur-r-r-r-r-p!”

The elf sighed. He had enough trouble without
borrowing more. He scooped up the raccoon cub, rescued the kettle,
and began putting books away before his patient got any more bright
ideas.

The sergeant’s head hurt.

Somebody was singing under their breath.
Thumper again, probably. “With a whack-whack here…” Gods, her head
hurt. She wanted to go back to sleep. Sleep was good.

“Sarge?”

Oh, lord. They wanted her to wake up.

“Sarge, we have a problem.”

Worse and worse. They wanted her to wake up
and be the sergeant.

She didn’t
want
to wake up and be the
sergeant. Being the sergeant was thankless, and they didn’t pay you
very much more, and when something went wrong, you were the one
that had to fix things. Responsibility was lousy.

“Sarge…”

On the other hand, if you didn’t see things
were done right, it’d get done badly, and watching the resulting
inefficiency was like being poked repeatedly in a sore tooth. It
galled at her.

Besides, if she didn’t get up, Murray would
be in charge, and he hadn’t done anything bad enough to deserve
that.

She opened one eye. Algol was shaking her
shoulder.

“Ungghffff….”

That didn’t sound right. She paused, licked
her lips, tried again. Her mouth was dry. “Yes, Corporal?”

“Um, we have a problem, Sarge.”

Of course they had a problem. Everybody
always had a problem. There was a war on, after all.

She sat up.

“Where’s the battle?”

“We don’t seem to be there any more,
Sarge.”

“Don’t seem to…” Nessilka looked around.

Most of the Nineteenth Infantry was sprawled
on the ground. Murray was on the other side of what looked like a
small clearing in the woods, except they’d been on a hillside, not
in the woods. Where had the woods come from?

“Did these trees grow while I was
asleep?”

Algol considered this dutifully. “I think
they take longer than that, Sarge.”

“Is the battle over? Did you carry me back
the way we came?”

Algol shook his head. “I just woke up,
Sarge.”

Murray came over, folding up a little glass
and brass contraption in his hands. “We’re not at the
battlefield.”

“Thank you, Corporal Obvious,” said Nessilka,
ignoring that she had said something similar about half a minute
before.

“No, Sarge, you don’t understand. We’re not
anywhere near the battlefield. We’re miles off. There’s a break in
the trees over there, and I got a sighting on a mountain. I think
it’s Goblinhome.”

“Well, that’s fine, then,” said Nessilka. “I
mean, Goblinhome—”

“Sarge, it’s at least fifty miles away. We’re
on the wrong side of it.”

She considered this.

“The sea side?”

“The
human
side, Sarge.”

Sergeants don’t scream. They shout at
people quite a lot, but they do not scream.
Nessilka took a
deep breath, and let it out cautiously. She didn’t scream. Okay.
That was fine, then.

“So what you’re saying is…we’re behind enemy
lines.”

Murray laughed. There was a slightly
hysterical edge to it. “Sarge, we’d have to move about forty miles
up to just be behind enemy lines. We’re practically behind the
enemy
nation.”

“Ah.”

There was a long moment, while Murray fiddled
with his glass and brass thing, and Algol stared up into the trees,
and Nessilka’s mind was an absolute blank. She was a sergeant by
virtue of always being the responsible one. She’d had the same two
weeks of boot camp as everybody else. At no point had they covered
what to do when you are accidentally whisked into the heart of
enemy territory.

Still, you had to do something.

“Alright,” she said finally. “Murray, Algol,
get everybody awake and on their feet. Check for wounded. See who
came with us.”

They saluted and peeled off. Nessilka got to
her feet, and looked around.

It wasn’t a bad forest. Other than the fact
that they absolutely weren’t supposed to be there, it was a
perfectly nice forest. It was deep and green and the ground was
covered in a soft mat of some little plant or other. The spots
under the trees were deep with pine needles and leaf litter. Birds
were calling from the canopy. The branches whispered and shifted
gently in the wind.

It was a nice forest. It had probably
belonged to goblins once. It was a shame they couldn’t stay here
for a bit. She sighed. Up in the trees, a crow went “ark!” and the
call seemed to hang in the air for a long time.

“Everybody’s up, Sarge,” said Murray.
“Nobody’s bad hurt, but Blanchett’s got a twisted ankle.”

“He says I can walk on it,” said Blanchett,
nodding to the teddy-bear. “Probably not a full march, though.”

“Tell him thank you,” said Nessilka
absently.

About two-thirds of the Whinin’ Niners had
come through the hole in the air with her. Algol, Murray,
Blanchett, Thumper, the recruits—gods, the recruits—plus Gloober,
who always had a finger in some orifice or other, and Weasel, who
was tiny and slender and of completely indeterminate gender, and
who stuttered when you tried to talk to—for lack of a better
word—her. (Nessilka was pretty sure she was a girl, but if Weasel
wasn’t going to say anything about it, neither was she.) Everybody
else was back at the battlefield.

“And we found the wizard, too,” said
Algol.

“Oh, dear.”

The wizard was in a lot worse shape than any
of them. He was still unconscious, his breathing was shallow, and
his skin was grey. This would have been normal in a goblin, but he
was one of the pinkish humans, so it probably wasn’t a good sign.
He had a thin, worried face, and badly bitten fingernails. He
didn’t look like a lunatic killing machine, but then, who did?

There didn’t seem to be any marks on him, and
Nessilka was pretty sure she hadn’t run into him that hard.

“It’s probably the magic,” said Murray. “I
bet he was trying to cut and run—that thing in the air was an
escape route. Maybe it takes energy to go through it, and when we
all fell through it, it knocked him out.”

“What do we do…”

“…with him now?” asked the recruits
meekly.

The Nineteenth all looked at each other,
while carefully not meeting each other’s eyes, which is a pretty
neat trick.

Nessilka sighed.

They ought to kill him. They all knew they
ought to kill him. He was the Enemy, and he was a wizard, and he’d
probably killed a lot of goblins shooting that blue stuff out of
his mouth. He’d kill them all if he had a chance.

The problem was that it’s one thing to kill
somebody when they’re charging at you with a sword, or shooting
blue things, but it’s an entirely different thing to kill somebody
who’s lying unconscious on the ground. The one is just war. Wars
are like that.

This, though….This felt like murder.

Goblins are nasty and smelly and grumpy and
have bad attitudes, but they’re not inherently
bad
. They’re
pretty much like anybody else. They don’t kill people for fun,
regardless of what the propaganda posters say. And this guy was a
wizard, and wizards were scary, but you had to feel a little sorry
for them, too. They probably hadn’t wanted to wake up one day with
the power to unmake the world.

Nessilka shook her head. “We’re not going to
kill him.”

Everybody relaxed imperceptibly.

“We can’t tie him up, though,” Murray pointed
out. “When he wakes up, if he gets his hands or his mouth free, he
could magic us.”

“So we’d better be a long way off when he
wakes up,” said Nessilka. “Everybody, get ready to move out.
Thumper, cut a crutch for Blanchett. Gloober, get your finger out
of there. Algol, do we have any blankets?”

“No, Sarge. We don’t have much. Nobody took
their full kit into the battle. Murray’s got some mechanical stuff
in his pack, and I’ve got a rope, but beyond that, it’s basically
whatever we’ve got on our backs, and our field kits.”