Nine Goblins (9 page)

“Got it…got it…There!” He reached out and
patted Frogsnoggler’s flank with his free hand. “Well done!”

The troll beamed at him. “Grah!
Grah-grah-hrragggh?”

Sings-to-Trees had no idea what the troll had
said, but he could venture a guess. “I think he’ll probably be
fine, but I need to treat this. Can you help me a little more? If
the daylight’s not bothering you too much?”

“Grah, grah.” The troll waved a hoof-like
hand dismissively.

“Then if you could take him…” Sings-to-Trees
placed the fox back into the troll’s arms and went to get catgut
and a needle.

Cleaning the wound and sewing the fox’s leg
up was a tedious process for Sings-to-Trees, and an undoubtedly
painful one for the fox, despite the sedative the elf poured down
its throat. He was rather glad the troll was holding the animal.
The fox kept snapping and trying to thrash, but it might as well
have been held down by a mountain.

“One more…and…there we go.” He tied off the
thread. “Okay. I’ll keep him for a few days and make sure it heals
up clean, and he gets a couple of square meals.” He accepted the
fox again. “Thank you and—oh, no!”

“Grah?”

Sings-to-Trees leveled an accusing finger at
Frogsnoggler. “Why didn’t you tell me he was biting you?”

“Grah…” The troll shrugged and scuffed the
dirt with one hoof, like a small child caught at mischief. Its left
arm was full of tooth marks, most of which had skidded off the
thick hide, but a few were filling up with blood.

“Stay right there. I’m cleaning those.”

“Gr
aww
…”

The fox went into an empty hutch, most
recently home to an infant manticore. Sings-to-Trees put a bowl of
water in with him, and draped the towel in the corner. He went back
out to the porch.

Frogsnoggler had waited. Sings-to-Trees
picked up the bottle of iodine, turned around, and sighed.

The troll’s eyes riveted on the bottle. Its
mouth sagged in a parody of despair. “Grawh.”

“Come on, you’re a big troll,” said
Sings-to-Trees. This was something of an
understatement—Frogsnoggler was probably close to two tons and
stood nearly eight feet tall. “And I know you’re brave. You stood
there while that fox bit you and never a peep.”

“Gr
aww
…”

The elf put his hands on his hips.
Frogsnoggler cowered away, one arm over its eyes. Trembling, the
troll held out its injured arm. Tears welled in dinner-plate sized
eyes.

This was the standard trollish response to
all medical treatment, and Sings-to-Trees knew full well
Frogsnoggler would have done the same thing for removing a splinter
or splinting a bone, but he was still torn between wry amusement
and feeling a bit like an ogre.

In truth, it was probably nothing—trolls
sustained worse every time they went after a billy goat—but still,
foxes weren’t known for their clean mouths. He brandished the
iodine bottle and a clean rag.

The troll sniffled through the whole
operation. Finally, Sings-to-Trees set the rag aside. “All
done!”

Frogsnoggler inched its hand down from its
eyes and gazed at him worriedly.

“Really, all done,” said the elf, and patted
the troll’s shoulder. “And you were very brave. I’m proud of
you.”

A smile cracked the immense face.
Frogsnoggler leapt up and cut an elephantine caper around
Sings-to-Trees. “Grah! Grahgrahgrah!”

“Now, if that gets infected—if it turns red,
or it starts to smell bad—I want you to come back here, okay?”

“Grah!”

“Then go on home before the sun fries
you.”

The troll nodded, reached out a hand, and
patted Sings-to-Trees rather heavily on the shoulder.

“Oh—” The elf patted the troll’s knuckles in
return, which had wiry black hair growing from them. “I’ll probably
release the fox in two or three days, if you want to come back and
see him.”

“Graah!” Frogsnoggler said happily, and
turned and scampered—insomuch as something the size of a team of
oxen can scamper—into the woods.

Sings-to-Trees chuckled to himself. He did
love trolls. They were so immensely good-hearted. He didn’t know
how they managed to be voracious predators—every time they saw a
wounded animal, they brought it to him instead of eating it. This
wasn’t the first patient that had come to him in the arms of a
troll.

(Once it had been a half-grown moose. The
moose had been a fairly straightforward job—barbed wire wrapped
around one leg—but treating the addled troll, who’d been kicked
half senseless, had taken most of the night.)

He went back in and checked on the fox. It
was resting now, still breathing more shallowly than he’d like, but
sleeping all the same. There were herbs he needed, but his supply
was running low. He really needed to go out to the bog-meadow and
pick some, before the season turned completely and everything dried
out.

And there, of course, went the rest of the
afternoon.

He laughed a bit to himself as he picked up a
basket. He should have known, of course—there was never any free
time that wasn’t filled immediately with a crisis—but he felt good
anyway. Between the sleeping fox and the capering troll, his
earlier glum mood had broken up. Maybe he
would
be doing
this when he was old. Someone had to.

And if he needed a seeing-eye troll to help
him around the farm, he suspected he only had to ask.

Stepping out onto the porch again, he glanced
around for the trap. It wouldn’t do to step on it, but he hadn’t
seen where Frogsnoggler had dropped it.

He got down the front steps and saw it. The
troll, casually and without fanfare, had reduced the trap to
fragments of twisted metal. Sings-to-Trees could not have
duplicated the destruction without a hammer and possibly a
forge.

The elf made a faint, thoughtful sound to
himself, and went off to gather herbs.

The farmhouse was very quiet.

It was too quiet.

Generally when people say it’s “too quiet,”
it’s a prelude to a monster with a lot of teeth jumping out of the
grass. In this case, however, since the only thing that could
qualify as monsters with a lot of teeth were the goblins
themselves, it was just plain too quiet.

The farmhouse was a small sod building—and
that was odd, too, since there was a whole forest right there, and
who builds out of sod when they have wood?—and the fences were the
low dry-stone affairs that look cute and quirky and charming until
you realize they’re made of all the rocks that some poor farmer had
to haul out of a field by hand.

There was wood, but not much. The timbers
were in place only where nothing else would do. A few scattered
tree stumps around the farm showed where they had probably come
from.

It was a neatly kept yard, with a thatch roof
and a small henhouse and a pigpen. Around back, a low stable held
three empty stalls.

It was very, very quiet.

“Perhaps they went into town. The horses
aren’t here.”

“And took the pigs and chickens with them?”
asked Murray skeptically.

A rising, rattling hum startled them all,
until they realized that one of the trees dotting the property had
cicadas in it. The insects buzzed their way up the register, and
then fell silent.

It was still too quiet.

“Maybe it was market day? They took the pigs
and chickens in to sell?”

“Every single one, Sarge?”

“Do you have a better explanation?”

Algol cleared his throat. “They must have
looked pretty odd carrying all those chickens and walking. The
wagon’s still here.”

They all looked at the wagon. It was
distinctly wagon-like. The cicadas buzzed again.

“Check the hen-house.”

They made their way around the farmhouse.
Coming out of the woods, they had been moving like goblins on a
raid—low to the ground, skulking, hiding behind things. It was
beginning to seem silly in this deep, abandoned silence, but
Nessilka hadn’t lived this long by going into enemy territory and
sauntering around in the open.

Besides, it was so quiet that it was almost
comforting to crouch behind water barrels and old haystacks. It
made you feel like you could hide from that terrible silence.

The last stretch to the hen-house had no
cover for anyone over six inches tall. Crouched behind the compost
bin, the three goblins eyed the distance. Nessilka gritted her
teeth, squared her shoulders, and said “Wait here.”

She didn’t run. Goblins know all about
monsters—they’re related, after all—and they know all about the
rules. Like small children, they know the rules in their bones. If
there was something out there, something cloaking itself in the
silence, if she ran, it could run, too.

She
walked
, therefore, to the door of
the henhouse, over earth packed hard and littered with old chicken
droppings and bits of straw, while the skin on the back of her neck
crept and crawled and cringed. Algol and Murray crouched together,
shoulder to shoulder, biting their lips. The sergeant reached out,
caught the wire door, and flung it open.

Sunlight lanced down through cracks in the
ceiling, and made pale spots on the straw. Old dust, old straw, old
feathers. There were reasonably fresh droppings near the door, but
no clucking greeted her, and there was no movement of nervous
chickens along the walls.

She considered looking behind the door. She
decided not to tempt fate.

She closed the door instead, and walked back
across the courtyard with a deliberately steady tread.

“Empty,” she said in a low voice. “For a few
days, probably.”

Algol, without saying anything, crab-walked
over to the pig pen and looked over the fence. The other two
followed him.

“There’s still a half-bucket of slops here,
Sarge,” he said quietly.

“Well, that’s not that weird—”

“Have you ever known pigs to leave
any
slops behind ‘em?”

They stood around the slop bucket like three
witches around a cauldron. It was indeed half full. The sides of
the bucket had crusted and dried, and there was mold growing in the
bottom.

Algol dipped a finger in, pulled it out
covered in gunk, and popped in it his mouth, rolling the tastes
around like a gourmand.

“More than three days. Less than a week.
Needs more salt.”

They stood in silence, then, as one, looked
at the farmhouse. Nessilka sighed.

“Okay, what are you guys thinking?”

“Plague, maybe?” said Algol.

Murray shook his head. “No bodies. And
where’d the chickens go?”

“Maybe they buried the bodies and took the
chickens.”

“Doesn’t explain the pig slop. And I haven’t
seen anything that could be grave markers.”

“Maybe they left suddenly? Bandits?”

“No blood, and they wouldn’t have taken the
chickens. And it still doesn’t explain the pig slop.”

“Maybe bandits killed the pigs before they
were done eating.”

“No blood in the pen. And the place is in
pretty good shape. Bandits would have wrecked the joint.”

“Could they be hiding?” Algol jerked his chin
at the farmhouse.

“With the pigs, and the chickens, and the
mules or whatever ought to be in those empty stalls? It’s not that
big a house.”

They all looked at the house in question
again. Nessilka nodded.

“Okay, let’s go in. Don’t bother sneaking,
let’s just get this over with.”

In a properly run universe, the door would
have opened with one of those long creaks that go on forever, but
it was hung on leather strap hinges and swung open silently.

The interior was dark and quiet. Two chairs,
one table, one bed. A thin film of dust lay over everything. The
goblins looked towards the bed, which was unmade, but empty, and
breathed a sigh of relief.

A plate of food lay on the table, with a fork
next to it. There was a piece of elderly broccoli speared on the
end of the fork. Mold fuzzed most of the other contents of the
plate.

Algol stepped onto something that groaned,
and they all jumped. He leapt back, revealing a square wooden
trapdoor set in the floor.

“Root cellar, probably,” said Nessilka. Her
father had been a mountain goblin, and she had no fear of tunnels
or holes, but she found she really, really didn’t want to go down
there.

Algol and Murray looked ready to bolt. She
reminded herself that it was just as alarming for them, and they
were from hill and marsh and didn’t even have the advantage of
having tunnels in their blood.

“You two stay up here until I call.”

The corporals visibly relaxed.

She grabbed the handle on the trapdoor,
counted to three, and yanked it up.

Dust rattled down from the opening, but that
was all. A ladder led down into the earth.

Nessilka pulled her stub of candle from her
kit and lit it. “Here goes nothing…”

She didn’t know what she was expecting. No,
that was a lie. She was
expecting
to find a couple of dead
bodies, and possibly something gnawing on them.
Please gods, let
me be wrong. Please let it be empty…

The gods were kind. The root cellar was
barely large enough to turn around in, full of shelves that groaned
under the weight of canned preserves. The floor was dirt, the walls
were dirt, and somebody had tossed an old burlap sack on the ground
to soak up spills. And that was all.

There were no bodies, unless somebody had
canned them.

I really wish I hadn’t thought that.

“Well, at least we won’t starve. Murray!”

Murray’s head appeared in the hole. “Yes,
Sarge?”

“Have Algol stand guard, and help me lug
these up. See if there’s a blanket we can carry this stuff in.”

There was a set of rough blankets on the bed,
which were a welcome find all on their own. Murray rigged two
slings with harness leather scavenged from the stable, and they
filled them with jars of indeterminate preserves. Most of them
seemed to be peaches, with some dark red things that might have
been meat, tomatoes, plums, or oddly colored peaches thrown in for
good measure.