T. Kingfisher - Nine Goblins

“We have to get a better look. Murray, you and me—Blanchett, stay here.”

“Sarge…”

It was a poor day when Blanchett was questioning orders, Nessilka thought grimly. Still—“You’re the only one we know is immune, so you’re the only one who can get a message back if it gets us. If it’s a kid…fine. If it’s a grown-up wizard…well, we’ll find out.”

Blanchett hunched his shoulders and looked mulish, but perhaps the bear had a word with him, because he said gloomily “If you say so, Sarge.”

She took one final look at the church and the bodies, shoved her earplugs back in—Murray did the same—and made a move out gesture with her fingers.

Nessilka and Murray moved out.

Sings-to-Trees stood just inside the forest and fretted.

He’d lost sight of the goblins fairly quickly—for all their apparent clumsiness, they knew their way around a hedgerow.

He hoped they would be okay.

He couldn’t believe he’d nearly attacked the cervidian.

He should go back to the farm and send a pigeon. He should send a pigeon about the mage, and about the weird noise. The goblins would be fine. The goblins could take care of themselves.

Sings wrung his hands together.

The goblins could probably take care of themselves better than Sings himself could.

It was so quiet . The quiet bothered him almost as much as the memory of the voice did. Forest edges were hopping with life—birds and bugs and lizards and squirrels. There should be scurrying and scuttling and chirping and singing.

There should be—

Something stamped.

He turned his head slowly, already knowing what he would see.

Ah.

Yes.

The empty eyes of the cervidian stag stared back him.

“I won’t go out there,” he told the stag. “It’s okay.”

The stag rattled and stamped again.

“Er? Is there something else?”

He looked for the bone doe, but she wasn’t there. Perhaps the stag had seen her somewhere safe, then returned.

The stag paced toward him. Sings held his ground. I almost attacked him. He didn’t attack me, and he didn’t hurt that goblin, even though he could have. If anything, he’s got the moral high ground on me.

A few feet away, the cervidian halted. Hollow eyes gazed into his.

And then the stag turned slightly, stretched out a forelimb, and…knelt?

Why is he—

“Oh no, ” Sings-to-Trees said out loud. “Oh no! Ride you? You can’t be serious!”

The stag rattled with impatience.

Sings-to-Trees eyed the exposed knobs of the stag’s backbone and imagined then against his tender bits. He shuddered.

“Are you sure I can’t just follow you?”

The stag rattled again and pawed at the ground.

“I’ll—but your back—oh, dear….”

Sings-to-Trees was not any more fond of pain than any elf, but he had chosen a life that involved a certain degree of personal discomfort. It appeared that this was going to involve more of the same.

He looked at the stag’s backbone again.

Very… personal …discomfort.

He saved us before. I healed his mate. He clearly knows more about the magic that’s going on than I do.

Oh, dear…

“Half a moment,” said Sings-to-Trees. He stripped off his tunic and began packing grass and moss into it. There was no putting a saddle on a cervidian, but perhaps he could manage some slight protection between himself and the jut of the stag’s vertebrae.

The cervidian waited. Sings-to-Trees finished stuffing his makeshift pillow, took a deep breath, and prepared to ride the bone stag into the unknown.

The village square felt agonizingly exposed. The goblins clung to the shadow of the buildings as long as they could, and then there was a water trough for horses partway there, but after that there was nothing to hide behind except bodies.

It was not the first time in Nessilka’s life she’d hidden behind bodies, but if the great gibbering gods were kind, it’d be the last. She thought the smell might follow her for several lifetimes.

She and Murray crouched behind a cow. It was bloated and its tongue was sticking out. Its udder had puffed up like a balloon. She had never given much thought to what happened to a cow’s udder when it rotted. She wished she wasn’t giving it any thought now.

Murray jerked his chin at the door. It was still slightly ajar, and there was no cover between them and it, unless you counted the dead steer blocking the other door. They could hide behind the open door, but there were bodies there, and they’d have to actually climb on them and…no.

The dead steer it would have to be.

She flicked her fingers. Going. Cover me.

That last dash across the open square made her nerves jangle like badly-tuned bells. Goblin feet were large and flat and actually fairly good for stealth if you moved carefully and didn’t let them go slap-slap-slap, but there were patches of…mud. Let’s go with mud. Red mud. Yes. She had to be careful not to squelch. And how was Murray going to cover her, anyway? Throw a dead body at anyone who attacked her?

She fetched up behind the dead steer and waited with her heart in her throat.

Nothing happened.

Flies buzzed around her in a cloud, but no strange voice called out. Nobody came to see what was going on, or to scream because there was a goblin warrior in town.

Oh, this would be a bad time for the rangers to show up… Thirty-odd dead bodies and three live goblins…no, that didn’t bear thinking about.

Murray crossed the square and dropped down beside her.

They exchanged glances, then looked at the gap in the door. It was about six inches wide, and yawned like a chasm before them.

She flicked a finger at Murray— wait —and sidled to the edge of the door.

It was dark inside. The bright sunlight made hot bars of light across the shadows, illuminating the edge of a pew. She crouched low, squinting.

It was hard to see anything. Well, no help for it… She took out an earplug.

There was a faint sizzling sound in the darkness. It was a familiar enough sound, but so far out of normal context that she couldn’t place it.

The smell of the dead was overwhelming, but under it, Nessilka could smell…pancakes?

She could make out a shape at the far end of the gloom, backlit by the remains of a fire, and in front of the embers, humming— humming? —was the human subadult, and it was frying pancakes.

Goblins were occasionally bad. Goblins were scourges of the night. And war was war and after a battle you generally ate like a starving wolf although you couldn’t always keep it down afterwards.

But even goblins didn’t stand in buildings surrounded by the piled dead and make pancakes.

She felt a brief, blinding rage—humans might be the enemy, but these were civilians , goddamnit—and then the rage died away and was replaced with a deep, unsettled disquiet.

Because anybody who would do that was crazy—bad, bugshit crazy, deep-down crazy. People like that had a crazed animal in their head and you could see it gnawing at the back of their eyes when they talked.

And they were very, very dangerous because there was absolutely no telling what they would do next.

She didn’t look back at Murray. Her eyes would have to adjust again if she did. And she couldn’t sign what she was seeing—goblin hand-sign did not include things like “crazy psychopath making pancakes.”

She gritted her teeth and slipped inside.

The door did not quite creak when she pushed it open, but it let in more light, and if the human looked up, it was bound to see the difference. Nessilka dropped low behind the first pew, breathing silently through her mouth, listening.