T. Kingfisher - Nine Goblins

They were nearly abreast of him when the dead man moved.

It wasn’t much, just a hand scrabbling at the packed dirt, but that was enough.

They stopped. It was one thing not to bury bodies, it was quite another to pass up a wounded man. They gathered around him. Nessilka pulled out an earplug, but held up a hand when Murray started to remove his.

“Help me,” the old human rasped, in a dialect that Nessilka could understand, even if the accent was strange. “Help me. Oh please…”

She crouched down next to him. “What happened here?” she asked.

His eyes were nearly closed and rimed with dried tears, but he cracked them open and squinted at her.

“Goblin?” he asked weakly. “You…you didn’t do this to us…”

It didn’t sound like a question. “No,” said Nessilka. “We don’t know what’s happened, either.” She pulled her water bottle off her belt and gave him a drink, trickling the water between his cracked lips. “Can you tell us anything?”

“Goblins,” he said, sounding almost wondering. “Some kind of…weapon?”

“It wasn’t us.” She gave him a little more water, and would have asked him more, but he sank into unconsciousness. She looked up at Murray helplessly.

“We’ll come back for him if we can,” said Murray, too loudly on account of the earplugs. “We should keep moving, Sarge.”

Which was true. Which Murray shouldn’t have had to tell her.

“Move him into the shade, at least.” She and Murray each took a side and carried him back inside the house. There was a pallet on the floor—not much of one, but better than the walkway.

“Right. Let’s move. Blanchett, if you hear anyone crying out, let us know.” He nodded. She put her earplugs back in.

There were cattle in the town square. Some of the humans had died when the cattle crushed them. It was a mess, a horrible mess, which was a laughably ineffective word for the scene before them.

At least if she thought of it as mess she didn’t have to think of it as people .

Nessilka was glad Sings-to-Trees hadn’t come. Or Algol. She didn’t know if the elf could handle it, and while she knew Algol had been on battlefields, at least everybody there had been trying to kill you back.

There probably wasn’t much point in sneaking, but they kept to the shadows and the corners of buildings anyway.

Murray tapped her shoulder, and she pulled the earplug loose again—really, why was she bothering? The moss was coming unwrapped by now—and whispered “Yes?”

“Eleven humans so far,” he whispered back. “Maybe more in the buildings, but I don’t think too many. They all seem to be trying to get into the town.”

“Where are they going?”

Murray leaned out from the shadow of the building and pointed. “At a guess, that building there.”

They studied the building in question.

“Pointy,” said Blanchett finally.

“It’s a steeple. Some kind of church, I think. In a town like this, probably the main meeting hall too.”

“All right. Stay low. We’re in enemy territory and don’t anybody forget it,” said Nessilka.

Murray looked around and said, “How could we forget, Sarge?”

They skulked from the shadow of one building to another. Nessilka thought that one was probably a bar, judging from the smell of spilled beer and rotting sawdust. She crouched behind a rain barrel and looked over at the church.

“The bear doesn’t like it,” said Blanchett suddenly.

Nessilka paused. “Does the bear have any suggestions?” she asked delicately.

Blanchett conferred with the bear, and said “He says not. Just…it feels like a trap. Not for us, maybe, but for everybody.”

“I hate this,” said Nessilka to no one in particular. “Tell the bear I agree with him. If he has any thoughts, tell me immediately.”

“Will do, Sarge.”

They crept closer.

The greatest concentration of the dead was at the end of the street, where the church sat in what had formerly been a village square. They were pressed right up against the walls of the church, close to the doors. They looked like they’d trampled each other, and then the cows had trampled them . In a couple of places there were three or four bodies piled together.

The church had big wooden double doors. The worst concentration of bodies was around the doors, and what looked like most of a steer had beaten itself to death against one, blockading it with a half-ton of rotting meat.

The other door was ajar.

She and Murray exchanged glances. She had the fight the urge to meet the teddy-bear’s single button eye as well.

“Somebody moved those bodies away from the door,” Murray hissed.

“Going in or coming out, that’s the—ah!” She grabbed Murray’s shoulder and yanked him back into the shadows.

A small figure—taller than a goblin, but not so broad—came out of a building across the square. It wore a cloth over its head and a bright blue coat. Its arms were full of…groceries? Nessilka could make out the corner of a sack of flour and some jars of preserves.

The goblins watched, hardly daring to breathe, as the figure looked around the square, then threaded its way nonchalantly through the bodies toward the open door.

“Human,” whispered Murray. “Sub-adult. Can’t do the genders from here.”

“How can it even breathe?” asked Nessilka. The stench of the piled bodies was enough to knock her over, and she was twenty yards away and a goblin to boot.

“Maybe it’s had time to get used to it.”

The figure stopped at the door, balanced the load of groceries on one hip, and pushed the door open with its free hand.

One of the corpses shifted slightly when the door hit it, a limp arm flopping in the dust. The figure shoved the arm aside with its foot, caught the door with the edge of its shoulder, and slipped inside.

The goblins sat in the shadow of building. Nessilka crouched behind a water barrel on the edge of the street and stared at the building.

Nothing happened.

“Maybe its parents are dead and it’s just trying to eat until someone gets here to find it,” she said, without much conviction.

“Uh-huh,” said Murray.

“The bear is pretty sure that’s a load, Sarge,” said Blanchett.

She sighed. “Yeah, me too.” The casual way it had moved the corpse aside with its foot—that screamed “murderer” and “crazy person” and “do not touch.”

“Think it’s a wizard?”

“It’d almost have to be, wouldn’t it?”

“There could be a grown-up wizard in there doing the actual magic.” Murray chewed at his lower lip.

“Children are vicious little bastards, some of ‘em,” offered Blanchett.

Flies buzzed. Across the square, two crows got into a brief squabble over a tasty bit of carrion.

“Now what do we do, Sarge? Go back?” Murray glanced behind them.

Nessilka would have loved to go back. Going back sounded like a great idea.

But if they went back and told Sings-to-Trees, he’d insist on coming out to see if the human really was a child who needed help, and if his rangers showed up, they’d probably do the same, and if it was a goblin child they’d be on their guard, but since it was a human and humans were nice …

There were already a whole lot of dead people out there. Nessilka didn’t care very much for faceless unknown rangers, particularly not elves, but Sings-to-Trees didn’t deserve to wind up in that pile of bodies.

And the Nineteenth—what there was of it—still had to get home, and if the weird voice magic could reach as far as the treeline, then they’d have to go miles out of their way to get home, and that would undoubtedly lead them into trouble with somebody who wasn’t nearly as nice as Sings-to-Trees.