T. Kingfisher - Nine Goblins

“Tell me,” said Murray, assembling earplugs out of moss and half an old candle, “did you hear the weird voice from earlier?”

Blanchett pushed a finger under his helmet to scratch. “I guess, yeah. Some kind of mumbling, wasn’t it?”

“And you didn’t feel any compulsion to go chase after it?”

Blanchett looked puzzled. “A what?”

“A comp—an overwhelming urge. You know?”

“Err. No?”

Murray gave it up as a bad job.

He finished the earplugs and handed them around. “This won’t block all the sound. I don’t have the equipment. But if you start to hear something, if you hum or sing, that should drown it out.”

“Can I sing “The Bird In The Bush?” asked Blanchett hopefully.

Nessilka had a brief image of exactly how absurd the three of them would look trying to sneak up on the enemy while singing dirty drinking songs, and wondered if it would be any better if they were singing martial tunes or just humming really loudly. “Sing whatever you like, Blanchett.”

“I’m not sure if they’ll work even then,” Murray said. “It might not be a real sound, you understand? If it’s magic, it could be something in our heads as easily as anything else.”

“We’ll have to hope, then,” said Nessilka. “Blanchett, this is a direct order. If you hear the weird mumbling again, and Murray and I start running towards it—you are to stop Murray by any means necessary, even if you have to hit him on the back of the head and sit on him.”

“That’s ganking-a-superior-officer, Sarge,” said Blanchett.

“It’s in a good cause, Blanchett, and that’s an order. If the wizard gets me, you two go back home, pick up Sings-to-Trees here, and go find Algol.”

“You can get court-martialed for ganking-a-superior-officer,” said Blanchett.

“I’m telling you, Blanchett, it’s on my orders.”

Blanchett screwed up his face in the bear-listening position. “He says…if you’re dead, it won’t matter if it was on your orders.”

Nessilka pinched the bridge of her nose and prayed for patience, no less so because the bear was probably right.

“…but he also says to do it,” finished Blanchett. “So that’s all right then, Sarge.”

“As long as we’re all in agreement,” said Nessilka wearily, and shoved moss and wax into her ears.

They left Blanchett un-earplugged, since he apparently wasn’t affected, and he had flatly refused to wear them unless the bear got a pair too. As the bear didn’t really have much in the way of ear canals, so it just seemed easier that way. There was enough crude hand-sign available in Glibber to be able to communicate simple orders, and Nessilka didn’t feel like a complicated philosophical discussion at the moment anyway.

Sings-to-Trees halted under the last trees, gazing out across the waving fields of the farmland. He frowned, and said something, and then when Nessilka pulled out an earplug, he repeated himself. “The melons haven’t been harvested. That strip along the drainage ditch—they always grow melons, it’s got the most moisture—but they all split on the ground and rotted.”

“How long does it take for melons to go bad?” asked Murray, who had also removed an earplug.

“About five minutes, sometimes,” said Sings-to-Trees. “But these should have been harvested a few days ago, I think.” He frowned.

Nessilka nodded. “Well, that gives us more of a time frame.” She reached up and patted the elf on the shoulder. “Try to stay out of sight. Hopefully we’ll be back before long.”

They put in their earplugs, looked at each other awkwardly, then Nessilka nodded sharply and signed, Move out.

There was a main road not far away, and a hedgerow running along one side of it. They stuck to it as closely as possible. It was taller than a goblin and made Nessilka feel less exposed. Small birds hopped through it. Murray pointed to one and Nessilka nodded.

So it wasn’t all the animals, then. That was something, anyway.

They crossed three fields and were midway through the fourth when they found the dead body.

Murray saw it first, in the drainage ditch. He stopped short, and Nessilka and Blanchett came up on either side of him and looked down and saw it too.

It was a human child, very young. Nessilka couldn’t do ages on humans at all, but it didn’t look old enough to walk very well yet. It was laying in the bottom of the ditch with its eyes open and flies buzzing around it.

Nessilka’s sigh sounded strange and muffled to herself with the moss in her ears. Blanchett looked as inscrutable as his teddy-bear.

It was the enemy, but it was awfully small.

It fell in the ditch and couldn’t get out again , she thought grimly. Probably following the voice, and not able to look where it was going. She wondered where it had come from—she’d glimpsed a farmhouse far across the field on the other side of the road, through gaps in the hedgerow—but if it had come from there, had human adults come with it?

Of course, an adult could just step out of the drainage ditch…

Murray caught her eye and gestured to the farmhouse, then to the child. Nessilka turned her hands up and nodded, then shrugged. Probably. I don’t know.

Nessilka gestured for them to move on. They couldn’t take the time to bury the human, and anyway, humans usually burned their dead, didn’t they? They certainly didn’t have time for that, or the wood either, and a column of smoke would announce their approach as clearly as a bagpipe corps.

They moved on.

Two fields over, they found a dead dog. It looked old and not healthy. There was a trail of broken corn stalks behind it, and crows had been at its eyes.

Whatever it is, it doesn’t affect crows, then.

Shading her eyes, Nessilka could see the town on the horizon. She wondered how many corpses there would be between here and there.

As it turned out, there were a lot. A horse with a broken leg had hauled itself an astonishingly long way and then fallen down, and by the torn up ground, it had apparently tried to crawl, which Nessilka couldn’t even imagine. A dead pig had expired without a mark on it, leaving a drainage ditch full of piglets which had probably died of starvation.

The sheep were really bad. Nessilka had seen a lot of horrible things in battle, but the entire flock of sheep had apparently run into a fence and gotten their heads stuck between slats, and then had beaten themselves to death against the fence posts. One or two were nearly decapitated.

Murray eyed them coolly, then turned to the sergeant and pulled an earplug loose. Nessilka followed suit, wincing.

“All domestic animals,” he said. “Cats, too, which I suppose aren’t really domesticated, but nothing really wild, anyway. Whatever this is, it’s not affecting deer or rabbits or wild birds, just the farm animals.”

“And people,” said Nessilka grimly.

“And people.”

They put their earplugs back in and kept moving, keeping low to the hedgerow. A flock of vultures had descended on a dead cow, which had smashed several fences and then been trampled by the rest of the herd.

There was another human, not far beyond it, who looked to also have been trampled by the cows.

After that, the humans became more frequent, the bodies more densely packed. Sometimes they appeared to have crawled over each other. Nessilka stopped seeing them. It was just like a battlefield the day after, a deep silence that seemed only to deepen behind the buzz of the flies and the croaking of the carrion birds.

They reached the farthest outlying building.

It was a little house, with a dead man lying on the front walk. He was very old, with white hair around his temples.