The Goblin War (9 page)

Cogswhallop found her over an hour later, sitting in the remains of her shorn hair, with a spell book in her hands.

There hadn’t been much in the priest’s books about spirits, particularly about catching them or getting them to leave you alone.

The few references Makenna did find made tantalizing comments about something called the Great Outcasting. Had the priests once driven all the spirits out of the Realm, as they’d later tried to drive the goblins out? If so, it must have been a long time ago. None of Makenna’s mother’s teaching had even mentioned them.

In fact, the only hint she’d found that might be useful was something one of the hedgewitches Master Lazur had abandoned here to die had told him: that spells worked best against the spirits “when I put myself into them.”

To Master Lazur, that had meant a rune that represented you worked into the casting. But Makenna knew more about hedgewitches than he had.

He’d been a cold man, all in all. Reading his books and notes had given her more insight into him than fighting against him for her life. She’d once told Tobin’s brother that she pitied the man, so lost in his obsession that he’d lost his humanity. Reading about some of the things he’d done had shrunk that pity to the vanishing point—but his mind had been keen.

Makenna felt as if this trap—using her own interpretation of a clue he’d missed—was a way of fighting against him as well as the spirits.

“It looks complicated enough,” said Cogswhallop, eyeing the mass of chalked runes and the fragile cat’s cradle of silver and copper chains. Every goblin woman in the camp had sacrificed bits of jewelry for this. Makenna hoped she’d be able to return it.

“I’ll admit,” the goblin went on, “if we were still fighting settlers in the wood, and they set up something like this, I’d make it a target.”

“The more reason for us to be watching it, then,” said Makenna with a confidence that was only half feigned.

Her magic had been so much weaker than her mother’s, weaker than the magic of the goblins she lived with, that Makenna hadn’t realized how much a part of her it was till the Otherworld had drained it to the dregs. Those amulets were all that prevented their power from being leached away right now. But they were preventing it, and Makenna felt like her power had come back even stronger, in this magic-rich world. Her will to fight had returned with it.

It made the first stage, which was to go quietly off to bed, harder than anything she’d done for a long time. At least she didn’t have to sleep. Makenna lay awake, her clothing concealed under a blanket, tossing through the passing hours. She heard the first shift of goblin guards trade off with the younger, less reliable-looking shift that Miggy led. His confidence had grown since he’d left the wood, and she had no doubts about putting him in charge of this second, vital step. The departing shift warned the youngsters not to forget to wet down all the chains when the moon was high. It was nonsense, of course, but it looked like magic, and that was all she needed. It also gave her helpers a chance to mingle and chat for a bit before they separated to their stations and drifted into feigned sleep. If it wasn’t feigned, she’d have their hides off!

The first sign that the trap had been sprung was a crash that shook the earth beneath her. Makenna had bounded out of her blankets, then out of her tent, before the guards began to shout.

The moon was half full, enough light for her to see the goblins converging on the fragile web of chains. Chains that had been sundered like cobwebs by the strange being who crouched in the middle of the circle, trying to shake off the snare ropes that Miggy’s brigade had snubbed around nearby trees. It growled, its voice echoing even through the wind.

Makenna decided there was no need to run and strolled over to the shattered spellworks. They had looked so magical and fragile, and had taken so many hours for her to set up and inscribe, that she knew some spirit was bound to try to smash them.

The creature straightened at her approach, glaring. She thought this one was male, though it was hard to be sure. It was clearly a tree spirit, with a sturdy trunklike torso, gnarled features, and rough, barklike skin. It had far too many limbs to call them arms, and they moved stiffly and seemed to be jointed in the wrong places.

“What is this rope?” it said, in a voice that held the hollow boom of wood striking wood. “It
burns
.”

“Burns” was probably the ultimate curse to a tree spirit, but it didn’t seem to be in too much pain—and right now, Makenna found it hard to care.

“It’s made of clothing we brought with us and pulled apart for the threads,” Makenna told it. The rope was mostly wool from Tobin’s cloak, which they hadn’t had time to send with him—and a good thing, too. The goblins’ garments were too small to contain much thread, and Makenna had little to spare.

“It’s also full of my own hair,” she went on. “So it’s me that bound you. And finally”—she touched the amulet around her neck—“it’s woven through with these. They have an adverse effect on your folk, I’ve noticed.”

“Death bringer!” This time the voice was a hiss of whispering leaves.

“Now that’s not fair,” Makenna said. “I may have killed, but I’ve brought no death to this world. I’ve not even threatened it. Though I have to say, you folk are tempting me.”

“
That
is death.” He gestured to her amulet. “And whatever the water woman did, I will not bargain with one who carries it.”

“If you want us to go so badly,” Makenna said, “all you have to do is stop the magic drain long enough for us to cast a gate, and we’ll leave your precious world. Taking our death amulets with us. If the water spirit had given us just a bit more of that water that stopped the draining effect, we’d have been gone long ago.”

For a moment, she thought she saw temptation sweep over those rough features. She’d told the truth. With their magic fully restored, and some practice behind them, Makenna was fairly certain she could hold a gate long enough for all the goblins to escape. She’d cast the gate that had brought them here and the gate she’d used to get Tobin out—and since then, she’d had time to study Master Lazur’s spell books thoroughly. Getting herself out might be trickier. Before, the magic stored in the great wall had sustained the gate while she passed through. Makenna had no idea what would happen to a gate when its principle caster went into it. But she was willing to take the chance—if she could only find a way to stop the substance of the Otherworld from sucking down every rune she placed on it.

“No,” said the spirit. Its toes dug into the ground, and rock cracked as if a real tree had rooted there. “I’m not a traitor. I will not bargain with you, death-human.”

Makenna sighed. “Not even to get rid of us, once and for all?”

The creature shook, not its head, but its limbs. “You would only return, bringing the hunters with you—and then there will be no world free of them.”

This was new information. “Humans have hunted you?”

The glare that answered that was so contemptuous, it needed no words.

“Those were other humans,” Makenna said. “Not me. And have you ever been hunted by goblins?”

“No,” the spirit admitted. “Their kind have never done us harm. But they ally with humans!”

Cogswhallop had joined her some time ago. Now he snorted. “You’ve not been paying attention, barky. The humans have taken to hunting us too.”

“The old bond is there,” the spirit said. “Or you wouldn’t be standing at her side.”

Makenna eyed those rootlike toes that had so easily broken solid rock. “If we let you go, will you agree not to harm us in the future? Not in any way, not even by rotting the wood we cut?”

It hesitated, and she added, “If you don’t promise, there’s no way I can let you go.”

“Hey!” Miggy protested. “We had a hard time catching this one!”

“You did well,” Makenna told him. “But even if it refuses to help us, we’ve still no right to kill it. It’s doing nothing but defending its home against those who hunted it, just as we defended the wood against those who hunted us.”

Miggy’s mouth closed with a snap. Clearly he hadn’t thought of it that way.

It was also clear that Cogswhallop had. “Get its promise first,” he reminded her. “That one’s strong enough, and angry enough, to give stomping us into the ground a good try.”

“All right,” the spirit yielded. “I give wood oath I’ll not harm you or your goblins in the future, not even to rip up your puny tents or rot the wood if you try to build.”

“And your friends?” Makenna asked. “Will you keep them from harming us?”

The spirits reminded her of goblins, in their insistence that promises be kept. And they probably also shared the goblins’ tendency to interpret promises in a very literal way, when that was to their benefit.

“I can’t speak for the others,” the spirit said. “Even if I gave an oath, it wouldn’t bind them.”

“That’s honest,” said Makenna. “Though if we’ve got to capture every spirit in this world and get their oaths one at a time, it’s going to be a long process. Tell your lads to let him go, Miggy.”

The goblin cast her a dubious look, but he obeyed. With goblin hands helping, the tree spirit soon waddled off into the night.

“Was that wise, Gen’ral?” Cogswhallop asked softly. “It goes against my grain as well, harming a creature that did no worse than we were doing ourselves, not so long ago. But they’re going to get harder to catch.”

“With any luck,” said Makenna, “we won’t need to capture another. This one told me all I need to know without saying a single word. If I’m right, we’ll be out of here before the next one can do worse than tangle up our hair.”

In fact, it took most of another week for Makenna to figure it out. First experiments with the amulets, because she’d finally realized that if they negated so much of a spirit’s power and stopped the magic drain in both human and goblin flesh, they might stop the drain on her spell runes as well.

Makenna’s mother would have figured it out days ago, and that sharp priest would probably have seen it immediately. But Makenna lacked her mother’s instinctive understanding of the forces that worked on the world. There was less pain in memories of her mother now, as if the magic that hummed in her blood in this strange world had somehow drawn them closer.

Makenna would probably lose that magic in the real world—but for peace and safety, it was a better than even trade!

The spirits stepped up their harassment when she started experimenting with the amulets, but Makenna soon learned how large a piece of ground could be protected from the magic drain.

With trees she had to embed the medallions in the bark to make her runes stable, but an amulet buried under only a thin covering of earth would stabilize a circle about three feet wide. In the end, Makenna had the smiths link the amulets together, like a spider’s web.

Fortunately, that web didn’t have to be too large. Tobin’s irresponsible brother had sent all the amulets he could lay his hands on, St. Keshrah be praised. But even with the patron of responsible experimentation on their side, a score of goblins had been forced to give up their amulets to create the web, and to shield Makenna and the goblins she’d need to help her cast the spell.

Makenna then fastened the amulets on the trees that formed the gate structure to the earth web. She’d given her word to two spirits that she and the goblins would take the death amulets away with them—and her mother would never have forgiven her for leaving behind something Makenna suspected could poison the very fabric of this world.

While she worked out the details of casting a
stable
gate, Cogswhallop and Erebus organized the exodus. Makenna could hear their angry voices clear across the camp, arguing about whether each goblin through the gate had to be checked off the Bookeries’ list or if they could just line up and be counted.

Finally the time came.

The sky was barely gray with the approach of sunrise, the air cool and damp. Makenna had chosen dawn hoping that a time of transition might aid the transition from one place to another.

Her team of casters spread out the ground web, covering the amulets and their chains lightly in the earth of this world. Those who carved fresh holes in the tree bark and stuck the amulets into the sap wrapped them in threads of fiber from the real world—the home to which they hoped to return.

Makenna herself drew the runes, runes describing this world scratched in the earth—where the children had been warned not to trample, on pain of being sent to their tents for the rest of their lives.

The goblin parents kept a tight grip on their wayward offspring, as they gathered into lines to be checked off the Bookeries’ lists.

Makenna ignored the arguments about whether or not someone would be allowed to go back and hunt for a lost basket, or the pretty stone they’d meant to pick up. Cogswhallop and his troop would sort that out.

The runes of the real world went onto the trees, to lead them from this world into theirs as surely as the trees sprang from the soil into the air. Or that was Makenna’s symbol, anyway. The priests’ magic worked almost entirely with power in the abstract—which was fine, if you had so much you could afford to waste it. Hedgewitches, like Makenna’s mother, needed symbols to guide and focus what small power they possessed. And they’d done well enough with those small powers that when the church planned to do something wildly unpopular, it had perceived them as a threat.

But the priest who’d been behind all that was dead, Cogswhallop had told her. It was safe to go home.

And to guide them, each goblin carried a token from the real world, something that came from there and represented home in their own hearts.

Makenna had brought little besides her mother’s spell notes into the Otherworld, so she had chosen a handful of thread left from the unraveling of Tobin’s cloak for her token.

It was made of wool from sheep that grazed on real-world grass. It had been spun by a woman breathing real-world air. And it had been worn by a young knight who was there right now, waiting for her to join him. Symbol enough.

When all the amulets were buried, the runes drawn, the goblins who’d volunteered to lend her power formed a circle around the edge of the web, holding hands.