The Goblin Gate (7 page)

A burst of hope overcame Jeriah’s disgust. “So if I can get the spell from Master Lazur’s books, could you or one of your people cast the gate? And then help me find them? And get Tobin—”

“The finding is no problem,” the goblin replied. “If you take a few of us in with you, and those spells you’re talking about can protect our magic, there are several ways we can locate them. But not one of us can work the gate spell; that’ll take human magic. The folk you need for that”—the creature’s eyes gleamed in the darkness—“are the Lesser Ones.”

“The Lesser Ones?”

“Humans like the gen’ral, who wield the small magics. They’ve been concealing their abilities since that cursed law passed, but there’s a lot of ’em and they keep in touch with each other. Proper organized, they are.”

“Can you put me in touch with them?” Jeriah tried to sit up again, but the blankets foiled him.

The little goblin grinned. “I
could.
But what for?”

“What do you mean, what for? To save Tobin!”

“Ah, I meant what’ll you give
me
for doing it? We goblins, we don’t care for indebtedness,” he finished smugly.

“Indebtedness? After all Tobin did for your people, you don’t think you owe him?”

The goblin’s expression seemed to change, but in the dim moonlight that shone through his window it was hard to be certain. “That’s between the soldier and us. What we’re talking about now is the favor
you’re
asking for. And its price.”

That the goblins were ungrateful vermin shouldn’t surprise him. “Very well. What’s the price for your services?”

“What I’d really like,” the goblin replied, “is for you to get the Decree of Bright Magic revoked so we wouldn’t have to worry about being hunted and burned out.”

Jeriah’s jaw dropped. “That’s impossible! I’d be willing to do it if I could—it’s a bad law for humans as well—but it’s not within my power. And it never will be!”

“Aye, I figured that, but I thought I’d ask. There is something else we need.”

“What?”

“A place of safety where we can live. Quite a few of us were forced to leave the wood. It’s spring now, and summer won’t be a problem, but come winter we’ll need a place.”

At least this request wasn’t completely impossible. “What kind of place?”

The goblin shrugged. “Anything that’ll shelter a few hundred. A big cave would do, though most of us don’t care for living underground. A ruined castle or deserted village would be better, but there’s none about that we’ve been able to find. We could even build for ourselves, in a deserted field
or wood, but only if it’s somewhere humans never go.”

“I don’t know anyplace people never go. With so many Southland refugees, anything that can be inhabited is.” All the villages would be abandoned when the relocation moved everyone north of the great wall, but for now…“That’s impossible too. What else?”

“That’s all I want, human.”

“But…” How long would it take him to find these lesser magic wielders without the goblins’ help? Jeriah didn’t have any time to spare, but it went against the grain to give such greedy, ungrateful creatures what they wanted.
The heroes of legend didn’t have to bargain with vermin.

The goblin snickered. Jeriah realized he’d muttered the thought aloud, and ground his teeth.

“Well, young hero, are you going to find us a place? Or shall I be on my way?”

“Wait!” Someone had to cast the gate spell. Priests wouldn’t. Goblins couldn’t. Jeriah’s only chance was this magical underground. But how in the Bright Gods’ name was he to find a deserted village or ruin where there weren’t any? Find…or make one? His breath caught. He couldn’t do that. He
couldn’t
! Jeriah squirmed half out of the blankets, then froze as the goblin tensed to flee. “Wait! I…I can do it, I think. I might…No. You ask too much.”

The creature folded his arms. “That or nothing, human.” His face was inscrutable, but there was no yielding in pose or voice. Jeriah
had
to get Tobin back. He had no choice.

“All right, I’ll try. But I’m going to need your help to bring it off. Meet me tomorrow night, in the grove of brill trees by the river. Do you know where that is?”

“I can find it.” The creature moved toward the door, silent as a shadow.

“If I find you a safe place to live, then you’ll put me in touch with these Lesser Ones?”

“Aye.” The goblin stopped at the door, his voice so soft Jeriah could barely hear it. “We pay our debts, for good or ill. Remember it, hero.” And he was gone.

T
HEY WERE CUTTING THE FIRST
trees today, to begin drying the timber for use in the first houses, in the first village, in their new world. Growing up on a lowland farm, Tobin had never felled timber before. He’d thought it would be a task in which his greater size and strength would be useful, but now, bringing down the third tree of the morning, he was beginning to suspect that the goblins didn’t need him at all.

They’d spent the years building in the great northern woods. Their small axes cut the initial wedge into the trunk like a brigade of beavers. Now most of them had joined Tobin on the rope—a rope they had climbed up the branches to tie off—while the two best woodsmen cut a wedge into the tree’s opposite side.

Tobin’s strength was valuable in dragging the fallen tree to the open meadow, where Makenna, along with several goblin helpers, had set runes that would make the timber dry swiftly and without warping.

Tobin knew it worried her, that she’d needed the goblins’ help to cast a simple drying spell. But even tapping into the power of the ancient wall, she’d used so much of her own magic to cast the gate that it wasn’t surprising it took her a while to recover. Maybe magic came from nature, as she said, or it still might be a gift from the Bright Gods. It might even be both, as he’d once pointed out to her. But either way, it made sense that if you used it all up, it might take some time to—

The tree creaked, and Tobin didn’t wait for the woodcutters’ shouts, throwing his weight against the rope, digging his feet into the soft loam of the forest floor. For a long moment the green wood resisted; then a sharper crack sounded and the tree toppled slowly toward them. Tobin and his goblin assistants were well outside its reach, but they scrambled back a few more yards to be sure.

The rustling crash echoed through the woods, and when the branches stopped thrashing, the silence was broken only by goblin shouts.

The quiet bothered Tobin, although birds always fell silent after a noisy disturbance. There were plenty of birds in this world, though their songs were unfamiliar.

Still, there was something about this world, a waiting quality, that he sensed more clearly in the hushed quiet after a tree fell. Even more clearly than he did when he woke in the middle of the night, his heart pounding with dread for no reason at all.

He was getting fanciful. Too much stress, too much strangeness, in too short a time.

That might be part of what was giving Makenna so much trouble. As Tobin strode forward to help trim the branches, he knew he was wearier than he should be. Makenna wasn’t the only one who’d overexerted herself in the calamitous days before they’d escaped. They’d all recover in time. This world was as beautiful as anyplace he’d ever seen.

He still wished the birds would sing.

J
ERIAH WIGGLED OUT OF HIS
bed and sat a moment, enjoying the cool air. By the time he finished untying his blankets, his brain was whirling with plans and problems. He didn’t like the only idea he had, but the goblin had given him no choice. He had to think with his head, not his heart.

The major points were straightforward; it was the details that would be difficult. The first thing he needed was an excuse to ride out at night. If his father suspected what he was going to do…Jeriah shivered and pushed the thought away. No, his father had to ask…Ah, that would do it. All he had to do was kill a chicken.

Grimacing in distaste, Jeriah pulled on his tunic and crept out to the chicken coop. He chose an old hen, one that would have been slaughtered for dinner within a few months, and carried her out to the yard so as not to disturb the sleeping birds. With a murmur of apology and a sharp merciful twist, he wrung her neck. With a shudder of revulsion—knights killed men in battle and he was flinching
over a chicken?—he dropped the twitching body and went to the smithy for a nail and the rake the smith used to pull clinker out of his coals. By the time Jeriah returned to the henhouse, the body was still. A few bloodstained feathers set the stage. He’d have to bury the chicken’s body, since a predator would carry it off. But first he took the rake and dug under a corner of the fence, so it looked like it had been done by an animal’s claws. Then Jeriah found a patch of damp earth. Using his thumb and the nail, he carefully shaped two distinctive footprints.

His father came late to breakfast. “A nightstoat got one of the hens last night,” he announced, taking his place at the head of the table.

Jeriah’s mother murmured something.

“Can I see it?” Tami asked.

“The stoat will have carried it off to his den. And eaten it by now. Why do you want to see a dead chicken?”

“Because nightstoats are the worst! They have magic, so no one can catch them, not even dogs. They can kill everything on a farm in one night!” Her eyes sparkled with gruesome excitement.

Senna began to giggle.

“Where do you hear these things?” her father asked. “Almost none of that’s true, Tamilee. They have no magic. The reason dogs can’t track them is because they’re almost scentless. And their ability to see in the dark is natural—their
eyes are larger than day creatures, which is why they only leave their dens at night. Any light brighter than moonlight blinds them; they can be stopped simply by putting torches around the livestock pens.” He paused a moment, then grimaced. “Unfortunately, torches burn out, and enough to surround all the pens would cost more than a few chickens. They take livestock only one or two at a time, but they are indeed ‘the worst.’ We’ll have to hunt it down, but with the late planting I hardly have a man to spare. We’ve got to get the wheat in before the last of the rains.”

“I’m sure you’ll manage, dear,” said Jeriah’s mother, her thoughts clearly elsewhere.

“And just how, madam, do you think—”

“Could I hunt it, sir?” Jeriah’s palms were damp. “I’m not much use with planting, but I’m a fair tracker.”

Hunting the dangerous vermin that preyed on livestock was the only heir’s duty at which Jeriah had been better than his brother. His father, he noted bitterly, obviously hadn’t remembered that—the old man’s face lit with relief.

“Thank you, that’s an excellent idea. You can try tracking it this morning, get some sleep this afternoon, and start hunting tonight.”

Jeriah looked away from Senna’s startled, knowing eyes.

“I’ll do that, sir.”

A light breeze set the brill trees whispering. The moon was half full and the sky clear—a perfect night to hunt. Jeriah
wished a simple hunt were all he was engaged in.

“Well, young hero.” The voice made him jump. “You’ve got some idea?”

Too late. When had he passed the point of no return? When Tobin leapt into the light? Sometime after that? Jeriah didn’t know, but he had no choice now.

He looked around till he spotted the goblin seated on a branch. Above his reach.

“Yes, I have an idea. I’m pretty sure I can get a place for you, but…Can your people swim?”

“If we must.” The goblin cocked his head curiously.

“Then follow me. Or would you like to ride?” Jeriah maneuvered Glory over to the goblin’s tree, but he was astonished when, after a brief hesitation, the small creature scrambled down the branches and dropped lightly behind the saddle.

He didn’t much care for the company, but it would get them there more quickly. The faster this was over, the better, as far as Jeriah was concerned.

When they reached the rotten dike, Jeriah dismounted and watched as the goblin gave Glory a reassuring pat, climbed down the stirrup, and dropped to the ground. How did a goblin become accustomed to horses?

“So what are we doing here?”

“That gate is waterlogged,” Jeriah told the goblin. “If I open it—or better yet, break through the rotten wood—the river will flood these fields. That village will be deserted as
soon as the tenants can move their things out. Would that serve your needs?”

“Hmm.” The goblin scrambled up the dike and walked along it, surveying the land and the sleeping homes. Jeriah tried not to look in that direction. They’d be forced to move in a year anyway, he told himself fiercely. They all knew the dike would soon give way. He was doing no harm. Very little harm. Almost—

“Not a bad plan, human. Nearly worthy of the gen’ral. There’s a few problems, but I think we can handle them.”

“I got the idea from something she did. What problems? The water won’t be more than a few feet deep, especially when the river goes down, and you said you could swim.”

“No problem there. But what’s to stop your fa from rebuilding the gate, draining the land, and replanting?”

“I don’t think he could, this year. We’re going to start moving our people north next year, so I don’t think he’ll bother.”

“I’m not inclined to take chances on what you think. Suppose we dig a series of tunnels under this dike, so when you let the water in, it’ll flow through ’em and bring the whole thing down? Hard for anyone to be repairing that. And we can rig it so the gate’ll be washed away. Because standing down below and chopping through that wood is like to drown the chopper!”

“You can collapse the whole dike?”

“I think so. It’ll take time, and care, so’s not to bring it down on our heads while we’re digging. And we’d need your help for some of the heavy work, but I think we can manage.”

Jeriah eyed the goblin suspiciously. “That would take months! Tobin will be dead by then. You know we don’t have that much time.”

“It won’t take months.” The creature raised his fingers to his lips, seeming to whistle though Jeriah heard nothing.

“What—”

A swarm of shadows erupted around him, from the bushes, from the young corn—they seemed to spring from the earth itself. Within moments, Jeriah was surrounded by goblins.

“Two or three nights,” said the creature. “Four at most.”

Tobin had been in the Otherworld for almost a month now.

“Make it two nights,” he said curtly, “and you’ve got a deal. As long as you’re sure no one will drown. They’ll lose their homes in a year or two no matter what we do, but I won’t let anyone be killed.”

“If most of the village wasn’t on higher ground, there’d be no point to the whole thing, would there?”

Jeriah waited.

“Ah! They’ll suffer nothing worse than wet feet. My word on it.”

Could he trust the goblin’s word? And what could he do
about it if he couldn’t? If he was going to save Tobin, he had no choice.

“Then do it.”

In the morning his father asked if he’d made any progress. Jeriah said not much. His father said tolerantly that it was early yet, and changed the subject. Jeriah wished that he could find a nightstoat, so he wouldn’t look completely incompetent, but they were rare. Perhaps when no more chickens died, his father would assume the nightstoat was just passing by. Compared to the shock of losing a dozen prime fields along the west bank, the chickens would no longer matter. And perhaps his father would think Jeriah’s inability to meet his eyes was because of their fight. Perhaps.

When he brought Tobin home, none of it would matter. When he brought Tobin home, he could tell the truth and his father would forgive everything.

At night Jeriah helped the goblins, hauling away the earth they dug, scattering it in plowed fields where it wouldn’t be noticed. Sometimes he had to crawl into one of the tunnels that were eating away the underside of the dike, and pry loose a rock that was too big for them. Trapped in the narrow tunnel, Jeriah could almost feel the river pushing against the increasingly fragile barrier of stone and earth that was all that stood between him and drowning.

He was almost too ashamed to feel the terror of those underground tasks, but before he returned home in the
dawn, Jeriah washed the dirt from his hands and arms as if it were blood.

It rained that afternoon, in wind-driven showers. About an hour before dark it settled to a steady downpour, the kind of rain that sent the swollen river surging.

The goblin’s original estimate had been right—it had taken three nights to dig the tunnels, but they’d done a thorough job. Jeriah half expected to find the dikes crumbling under the weight of the rising water when he arrived. He tethered Glory in the high brill grove, where he was sure no flood would reach, and peered through the curtains of rain. He could see only about ten feet; then everything faded into night and rain. There could be goblins all around him and he wouldn’t know it. The swelling river might already have consumed—A flash of lightning painted the scene with livid light. The dikes were still standing, the fields beyond them glimmering with muddy water, but that was all.

“It’s a good night for a flooding, hero, I’ll grant you that.”

Jeriah jumped. “Don’t sneak up on me,” he snapped in a whisper. The ironic nickname stung.

The goblin’s grin was barely visible in the wind-whipped darkness. “You can yell if you want—the closest humans are in those houses.” He gestured toward the doomed village.

The sickening guilt was so familiar by now that Jeriah ignored it, like the rain soaking through the shoulders of his cloak. “Are you ready?”

“Aye. All you have to do is open the gate, and your end of the bargain’s done.”

“You’re not coming with me?”

“Not a chance. We’re a bit small to go swimming, if that dike gives way faster than we think it will. You’d best get off it in a hurry…young hero.”

Jeriah turned his back on the goblin’s smirk and scrambled onto the dike. He could just see the surface of the river, almost halfway up the other side by now. Surely he was imagining that the dike vibrated, just a little, under his feet.

The sluice gate loomed out of the darkness. For a moment Jeriah ignored the wheel that lifted the screw, looking through the rain toward the homes he was about to destroy. He couldn’t see them but they were there, their owners sleeping safely as rain drummed on the roofs.

This was the kind of thing that knights in legends were supposed to prevent! One should leap out right now, and threaten to chop off Jeriah’s hands if he dared to lay them on that wheel.

“No one is going to die,” he muttered savagely. “Nothing is going to happen that wouldn’t happen in a year, anyway. No one will get hurt.”

Jeriah grabbed the rain-wet wheel, twisted, and felt the shuddering race of water beneath his feet. He turned it again. No one leapt out to chop off his hands.

True knights ended up with dead brothers.

The wheel was level with his head when it finally
jammed—the gate wide open. Jeriah looked down at the torrent of murky water pouring through. It wasn’t his imagination; the dike was quivering. He jogged along it, moving as fast as he dared, till another flash of lightning revealed that the muddy furrows below were still free of the flood. He gave it another hundred feet, climbed down, and fumbled his way back to the grove where the goblins were concealed. Only then did Jeriah look back.

Darkness spread before him. “Can you see what’s—”

He was interrupted by a flicker of lightning, bright enough to let them see a stream of water arcing down into the spreading shimmer of a rising pond—such quiet deadliness. Thunder grumbled, and Jeriah felt a tug on the leg of his britches.

It was the smallest goblin Jeriah had seen—only half as tall as most of the others.

“Don’t be so sad,” the creature said. “They’ll be all right. And now you’ll be able to open a gate and save Tobin.”

The voice sounded like a child’s. Jeriah supposed they must have young.

“You know my brother?”

“Of course. We were all friends with him, Regg and Onny and Nuffet and me. I’m glad you’re—”

The goblin broke off and cocked his head, listening. The sound was deeper than the thunder, vibrating through the soles of Jeriah’s feet as much as in his ears.

A gasp rippled through the crowd, and Jeriah strained his eyes against the darkness. He could just make out the dark
silhouette of the dike as a whole section of it leaned forward, like a giant turning in its sleep. Lightning flashed again as the river poured through a dozen fissures. The surface of the rising water churned around the gaps. Jeriah heard another section groan and fall.

“What’s happening?” he demanded.

“The water’s going up fast.” The young goblin’s voice quivered. “It’s reached the houses now.”

“You can see—”

In the direction of the distant village, a child screamed.

Jeriah was running back to Glory before he thought, leaping into the saddle. He smashed through the wet branches and galloped down the track into the water. Only then did he realize that he was shouting; in warning, for help. He fell silent to listen as the mare waded deeper, stumbling over the rough ground below the swirling currents, snorting in dismay.

If she’d trusted her rider less, she’d have balked.

Jeriah knew he should go back—he could see for only a few yards in any direction. But he turned Glory toward the sound of shouting voices and she pressed on.