“One more…and…there we go.” He tied off the thread. “Okay. I’ll keep him for a few days and make sure it heals up clean, and he gets a couple of square meals.” He accepted the fox again. “Thank you and—oh, no!”
“Grah?”
Sings-to-Trees leveled an accusing finger at Frogsnoggler. “Why didn’t you tell me he was biting you?”
“Grah…” The troll shrugged and scuffed the dirt with one hoof, like a small child caught at mischief. Its left arm was full of tooth marks, most of which had skidded off the thick hide, but a few were filling up with blood.
“Stay right there. I’m cleaning those.”
“Graww…”
The fox went into an empty hutch, most recently home to an infant manticore. Sings-to-Trees put a bowl of water in with him, and draped the towel in the corner. He went back out to the porch.
Frogsnoggler had waited. Sings-to-Trees picked up the bottle of iodine, turned around, and sighed.
The troll’s eyes riveted on the bottle. Its mouth sagged in a parody of despair. “Grawh.”
“Come on, you’re a big troll,” said Sings-to-Trees. This was something of an understatement—Frogsnoggler was probably close to two tons and stood nearly eight feet tall. “And I know you’re brave. You stood there while that fox bit you and never a peep.”
“Graww…”
The elf put his hands on his hips. Frogsnoggler cowered away, one arm over its eyes. Trembling, the troll held out its injured arm. Tears welled in dinner-plate sized eyes.
This was the standard trollish response to all medical treatment, and Sings-to-Trees knew full well Frogsnoggler would have done the same thing for removing a splinter or splinting a bone, but he was still torn between wry amusement and feeling a bit like an ogre.
In truth, it was probably nothing—trolls sustained worse every time they went after a billy goat—but still, foxes weren’t known for their clean mouths. He brandished the iodine bottle and a clean rag.
The troll sniffled through the whole operation. Finally, Sings-to-Trees set the rag aside. “All done!”
Frogsnoggler inched its hand down from its eyes and gazed at him worriedly.
“Really, all done,” said the elf, and patted the troll’s shoulder. “And you were very brave. I’m proud of you.”
A smile cracked the immense face. Frogsnoggler leapt up and cut an elephantine caper around Sings-to-Trees. “Grah! Grahgrahgrah!”
“Now, if that gets infected—if it turns red, or it starts to smell bad—I want you to come back here, okay?”
“Grah!”
“Then go on home before the sun fries you.”
The troll nodded, reached out a hand, and patted Sings-to-Trees rather heavily on the shoulder.
“Oh—” The elf patted the troll’s knuckles in return, which had wiry black hair growing from them. “I’ll probably release the fox in two or three days, if you want to come back and see him.”
“Graah!” Frogsnoggler said happily, and turned and scampered—insomuch as something the size of a team of oxen can scamper—into the woods.
Sings-to-Trees chuckled to himself. He did love trolls. They were so immensely good-hearted. He didn’t know how they managed to be voracious predators—every time they saw a wounded animal, they brought it to him instead of eating it. This wasn’t the first patient that had come to him in the arms of a troll.
(Once it had been a half-grown moose. The moose had been a fairly straightforward job—barbed wire wrapped around one leg—but treating the addled troll, who’d been kicked half senseless, had taken most of the night.)
He went back in and checked on the fox. It was resting now, still breathing more shallowly than he’d like, but sleeping all the same. There were herbs he needed, but his supply was running low. He really needed to go out to the bog-meadow and pick some, before the season turned completely and everything dried out.
And there, of course, went the rest of the afternoon.
He laughed a bit to himself as he picked up a basket. He should have known, of course—there was never any free time that wasn’t filled immediately with a crisis—but he felt good anyway. Between the sleeping fox and the capering troll, his earlier glum mood had broken up. Maybe he would be doing this when he was old. Someone had to.
And if he needed a seeing-eye troll to help him around the farm, he suspected he only had to ask.
Stepping out onto the porch again, he glanced around for the trap. It wouldn’t do to step on it, but he hadn’t seen where Frogsnoggler had dropped it.
He got down the front steps and saw it. The troll, casually and without fanfare, had reduced the trap to fragments of twisted metal. Sings-to-Trees could not have duplicated the destruction without a hammer and possibly a forge.
The elf made a faint, thoughtful sound to himself, and went off to gather herbs.
TWELVE
The farmhouse was very quiet.
It was too quiet.
Generally when people say it’s “too quiet,” it’s a prelude to a monster with a lot of teeth jumping out of the grass. In this case, however, since the only thing that could qualify as monsters with a lot of teeth were the goblins themselves, it was just plain too quiet.
The farmhouse was a small sod building—and that was odd, too, since there was a whole forest right there, and who builds out of sod when they have wood?—and the fences were the low dry-stone affairs that look cute and quirky and charming until you realize they’re made of all the rocks that some poor farmer had to haul out of a field by hand.
There was wood, but not much. The timbers were in place only where nothing else would do. A few scattered tree stumps around the farm showed where they had probably come from.
It was a neatly kept yard, with a thatch roof and a small henhouse and a pigpen. Around back, a low stable held three empty stalls.
It was very, very quiet.
“Perhaps they went into town. The horses aren’t here.”
“And took the pigs and chickens with them?” asked Murray skeptically.
A rising, rattling hum startled them all, until they realized that one of the trees dotting the property had cicadas in it. The insects buzzed their way up the register, and then fell silent.
It was still too quiet.
“Maybe it was market day? They took the pigs and chickens in to sell?”
“Every single one, Sarge?”
“Do you have a better explanation?”
Algol cleared his throat. “They must have looked pretty odd carrying all those chickens and walking. The wagon’s still here.”
They all looked at the wagon. It was distinctly wagon-like. The cicadas buzzed again.
“Check the hen-house.”
They made their way around the farmhouse. Coming out of the woods, they had been moving like goblins on a raid—low to the ground, skulking, hiding behind things. It was beginning to seem silly in this deep, abandoned silence, but Nessilka hadn’t lived this long by going into enemy territory and sauntering around in the open.
Besides, it was so quiet that it was almost comforting to crouch behind water barrels and old haystacks. It made you feel like you could hide from that terrible silence.
The last stretch to the hen-house had no cover for anyone over six inches tall. Crouched behind the compost bin, the three goblins eyed the distance. Nessilka gritted her teeth, squared her shoulders, and said “Wait here.”
She didn’t run. Goblins know all about monsters—they’re related, after all—and they know all about the rules. Like small children, they know the rules in their bones. If there was something out there, something cloaking itself in the silence, if she ran, it could run, too.
She walked, therefore, to the door of the henhouse, over earth packed hard and littered with old chicken droppings and bits of straw, while the skin on the back of her neck crept and crawled and cringed. Algol and Murray crouched together, shoulder to shoulder, biting their lips. The sergeant reached out, caught the wire door, and
flung it open.
Sunlight lanced down through cracks in the ceiling, and made pale spots on the straw. Old dust, old straw, old feathers. There were reasonably fresh droppings near the door, but no clucking greeted her, and there was no movement of nervous chickens along the walls.
She considered looking behind the door. She decided not to tempt fate.
She closed the door instead, and walked back across the courtyard with a deliberately steady tread.
“Empty,” she said in a low voice. “For a few days, probably.”
Algol, without saying anything, crab-walked over to the pig pen and looked over the fence. The other two followed him.
“There’s still a half-bucket of slops here, Sarge,” he said quietly.
“Well, that’s not that weird—”
“Have you ever known pigs to leave any slops behind ‘em?”
They stood around the slop bucket like three witches around a cauldron. It was indeed half full. The sides of the bucket had crusted and dried, and there was mold growing in the bottom.
Algol dipped a finger in, pulled it out covered in gunk, and popped in it his mouth, rolling the tastes around like a gourmand.
“More than three days. Less than a week. Needs more salt.”
They stood in silence, then, as one, looked at the farmhouse. Nessilka sighed.
“Okay, what are you guys thinking?”
“Plague, maybe?” said Algol.
Murray shook his head. “No bodies. And where’d the chickens go?”
“Maybe they buried the bodies and took the chickens.”
“Doesn’t explain the pig slop. And I haven’t seen anything that could be grave markers.”
“Maybe they left suddenly? Bandits?”
“No blood, and they wouldn’t have taken the chickens. And it still doesn’t explain the pig slop.”
“Maybe bandits killed the pigs before they were done eating.”
“No blood in the pen. And the place is in pretty good shape. Bandits would have wrecked the joint.”
“Could they be hiding?” Algol jerked his chin at the farmhouse.
“With the pigs, and the chickens, and the mules or whatever ought to be in those empty stalls? It’s not that big a house.”
They all looked at the house in question again. Nessilka nodded.
“Okay, let’s go in. Don’t bother sneaking, let’s just get this over with.”
In a properly run universe, the door would have opened with one of those long creaks that go on forever, but it was hung on leather strap hinges and swung open silently.
The interior was dark and quiet. Two chairs, one table, one bed. A thin film of dust lay over everything. The goblins looked towards the bed, which was unmade, but empty, and breathed a sigh of relief.
A plate of food lay on the table, with a fork next to it. There was a piece of elderly broccoli speared on the end of the fork. Mold fuzzed most of the other contents of the plate.
Algol stepped onto something that groaned, and they all jumped. He leapt back, revealing a square wooden trapdoor set in the floor.
“Root cellar, probably,” said Nessilka. Her father had been a mountain goblin, and she had no fear of tunnels or holes, but she found she really, really didn’t want to go down there.
Algol and Murray looked ready to bolt. She reminded herself that it was just as alarming for them, and they were from hill and marsh and didn’t even have the advantage of having tunnels in their blood.
“You two stay up here until I call.”
The corporals visibly relaxed.
She grabbed the handle on the trapdoor, counted to three, and yanked it up.
Dust rattled down from the opening, but that was all. A ladder led down into the earth.
Nessilka pulled her stub of candle from her kit and lit it. “Here goes nothing…”
She didn’t know what she was expecting. No, that was a lie. She was expecting to find a couple of dead bodies, and possibly something gnawing on them. Please gods, let me be wrong. Please let it be empty…
The gods were kind. The root cellar was barely large enough to turn around in, full of shelves that groaned under the weight of canned preserves. The floor was dirt, the walls were dirt, and somebody had tossed an old burlap sack on the ground to soak up spills. And that was all.
There were no bodies, unless somebody had canned them.
I really wish I hadn’t thought that.
“Well, at least we won’t starve. Murray!”
Murray’s head appeared in the hole. “Yes, Sarge?”
“Have Algol stand guard, and help me lug these up. See if there’s a blanket we can carry this stuff in.”
There was a set of rough blankets on the bed, which were a welcome find all on their own. Murray rigged two slings with harness leather scavenged from the stable, and they filled them with jars of indeterminate preserves. Most of them seemed to be peaches, with some dark red things that might have been meat, tomatoes, plums, or oddly colored peaches thrown in for good measure.
Thus loaded, Murray and Nessilka did a quick sweep of the farmhouse. A frying pan and an iron pot were too good to pass up—Nessilka did not want to be making tea in Blanchett’s helmet on a regular basis—along with a small sack of salt and a bigger sack of flour.
They emerged from the house, heavily laden and clanking as they walked. Despite the mysterious emptiness of the farm, discovering the food couldn’t help but raise their spirits. This lasted for a good five seconds, before Nessilka said, “Where’s Algol?”
The two goblins looked around. “He was right out here…” Murray said.
“Algol!” hissed Nessilka. She didn’t want to yell. She couldn’t shake the feeling that yelling would bring something down on them. “Algol, where are you?”
The cicadas were the only answer.
“He can’t have gone far,” muttered Nessilka.
“Unless whatever got the farmers got him, too,” said Murray glumly.
“Put a lid on it, Corporal.”
Murray gave her the look that said you know I’m right, but it’s okay, I understand you have to say that. She hated that look. She just couldn’t do anything about it, because he usually was right, hang it all.
“We can’t just leave without him,” she said slowly, scanning the fields. “But I don’t want to stay out here in plain sight, either…” Far across the fields, she could just make out the town. It wasn’t close enough to see any people, and they probably couldn’t have seen the goblins either, but still, better safe than sorry.
Murray dug out his looky-tube-thing. Nessilka opened her mouth to say that she’d check behind the farmhouse, and then stopped. Splitting up did not seem like a good idea.
She fiddled with a strap on her sling.
“Sarge…”
“Did you find him?”
“No. But—Sarge—there’s no smoke over at the town.”
“It’s pretty warm out. Why would there be smoke?”
“A town that size is going to have a blacksmith. Plus there’s a windmill over there, which means there’s a miller, and where there’s millers, there’s usually a baker, except there isn’t. And even when it’s warm, people have to cook. But none of the chimneys are going at all. There’s no smoke in the sky anywhere. And I don’t see any horses or cows in the fields.”
He raised the tube again, and stopped. Nessilka pushed the tube gently back down. “Corporal,” she said quietly, “let’s not borrow trouble. Let’s just find Algol and get out of here.”
He wasn’t behind the farmhouse. He wasn’t in the chicken coop. Nessilka’s nerves were fraying badly and there was a cold stone in her gut. Murray kept yanking on his ponytail as if hoping to find Algol hiding somewhere inside it.
“Well,” she said finally. “I suppose—”
“Sarge!”
Murray pointed. She whirled.
Across the fields, coming out of a drainage ditch, was a familiar tall gray-green figure.
Nessi
lka exhaled. It seemed to come from her toes. She stomped towards him, furious and relieved all at once.
“Corporal, what in the name of the great grim gods do you think you’re—”
“Look, Sarge!” he cried, holding something over his head.
It was small. It was muddy. It wiggled.
It was a kitten.
Algol was covered in mud, and grinning from ear to ear.
“Oh, for gods’ sake…” said Nessilka, covering her eyes.
“I heard him mewing! He was stuck down in a pipe in the ditch, and I got him out. Can I keep ‘im, Sarge, can I? Please?”
“Corporal—” she began, and stopped, because she didn’t know what she was going to say after that. She should never have let him name the supply goat. Once you started naming goats, it was all downhill from there. She massaged the bridge of her nose and tried again. “Corporal, we’re goblins. The scourge of the night! Stealers of children! Marauders of the dark! The terror of…well, fairly terrible anyway.”
Algol looked at her blankly, petting the kitten.
“We aren’t kitten people!”
Algol stared at her, still petting the kitten. It made a little mrrp! noise and butted its head against his big fingers. “But Sarge, he was stuck.”
“We’re behind enemy lines! We don’t know how we’re going to get back! And you want to adopt a kitten?”
Algol sniffed. The sergeant could see a traitorous moisture beginning under his eyes.
“We can’t leave ‘im,” he said quietly. “He’s the only thing alive out here. He’ll die.”
“Corporal—”
His lower lip wibbled.
“Oh, fine,” she said, relenting. “If somebody eats it, don’t come crying to me.”
“Thank you, Sarge!” Algol thrust the kitten at her face. Nessilka recoiled. “Look, kitty! This is Sarge! She says I can keep you! Say hi!”
The stealer of children and marauder of the dark grudgingly reached up and petted the kitten. It licked her finger with a raspy little tongue. She grumbled. It purred.
“By rights I oughta have you thrown in the stockade, abandoning your post like that…” she muttered.
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