The Goblin War

by Hilari Bell

  “They’re all so stubborn,” Jeriah fretted.

  “They’re frightened,” Koryn said. “In fact, they’re terrified. But sooner or later we’ll find someone who’ll listen. Because when it comes to stubborn, Jeriah Rovan, you’ve got them all beaten!”

  “Thank you so much,” said Jeriah. “I think. Do you realize that’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me?”

  She didn’t answer, but below her hat’s floppy brim he saw her mouth twitch—surely a sign that forgiveness was on the way.

  The purple Southland dusk had settled into the rolling hollows when they rode up to the fourth estate of the day. The landholder listened to Koryn and Jeriah, then read Commander Malveese’s letter in silence. He was an old man, with a fringe of ragged white hair around his bald crown. His manor was small—little more than a sprawling farmhouse that had been extended and enlarged over many generations.

  He said nothing for a long time after he finished reading, but finally . . .

  “Yes.”

  “Yes?” Jeriah asked. “What do you . . . You mean yes?”

  The old man snorted. “You hard of hearing, boy? I’m not a fool. I’ve seen too many estates fall to the barbarians, and my sons are fighting on the border. They tell me the same things about the barbarians that Mistress Koryn does. If no way to stop them is found, sooner or later my lands will fall. This wild plan of yours may not give us much of a chance—but it’s better than no chance at all.”

  Jeriah hardly dared believe it. “You know you’ll have to evacuate, sir? You, and all your people.”

  “Better now, with time to pack what we can, than fleeing for our lives with barbarian troops on our heels,” said the landholder. “This way there’s some slim hope we might be able to return. From what my sons say, once the barbarians overrun this land, there’s no hope our army will ever take it back.”

  Jeriah drew in a breath. “Any chance one of your sons commands the troops that guard this section of the border?”

  Chapter 13

  Makenna

  MAKENNA AND HER GOBLIN HELPERS had practiced the gate spell so often that drawing the runes around the cupboard door in Chardane’s herbery felt almost routine, even in the goblins’ absence. Makenna had no doubt of her ability to create a small gate into the Otherworld. If she wasn’t able to keep her amulet, she wouldn’t have enough power to get out on her own—but she’d still forbidden any of her assistants to accompany her.

  One way or another, she’d escape. And if she didn’t, she had no intention of allowing anyone else to be trapped with her. Not this time.

  Besides, going back into the Otherworld—the Spiritworld, she should be calling it—gave her a chance to shed those absurd skirts.

  “I wish you’d take me along,” said Chardane. “Especially if you won’t take your own casting circle with you. Between my power and your knowledge of the spell, we could probably create a gate big enough for at least one of us to get out.”

  “I’ll be satisfied with creating a gate that lets one of us in,” said Makenna.

  The only way to keep her goblins from going in with her was to create this gate without their assistance. Makenna hadn’t realized that sensible Chardane would give her the same problem.

  “You’ll have more than enough to do here,” she added. “You’ve got to learn to cast the spell yourself, and then gather enough priests to make a gate so big a whole army can ride through it. And you’ll not only have to teach those priests to work with goblins, you’ll have to convince my goblins to work with priests! Dealing with a bunch of human-hating spirits sounds easy, compared to that.”

  In truth, it didn’t. But Chardane had never dealt with the spirits, so the lie passed unchallenged.

  It felt strange to create a gate with only one person feeding her power, and human magic had a different flavor than that of the goblins. Slower, stronger, dimmer, less ephemeral—lava instead of lightning.

  Whatever it felt like, the whirling disk of light slowly formed in the frame of the cupboard door, and a meadow lay beyond it.

  Makenna turned to the priest. “I thank you for this. For everything.”

  “Even court gowns?” Chardane’s fascinated gaze was on the shimmering portal. “Be safe, girl. And get it done. For all our sakes.”

  Don’t worry. I’ll manage. You can count on me. All the easy promises flowed into Makenna’s mind, but they were lies, and she and Chardane both knew it.

  She shrugged and crawled through the gate into the Spiritworld.

  It looked so much like the real world. The meadow stretched to the foot of some rolling hills, where the trees began to thicken. Bees hummed among the plants, birds twittered in the brush—and none of it was real, none had life of its own. Knowing what she now did, Makenna was amazed that the plants had nourished them and the water quenched their thirst. This wasn’t a different world; it was a beautiful replica of the world the spirits had left behind. Been forced to leave behind? She bet they missed the real thing. In fact, she was betting her life on it. That, and one other thing.

  Makenna drew in a slow breath and summoned up memories of the place she wanted to reach. If she’d had something from that area, she could have set a spell to find it. But when she’d left, she hadn’t thought she’d ever return, so there’d been no reason to pick up a flower or a river-smooth stone.

  She had to do it the hard way. Makenna closed her eyes, the better to see the lay of the land around the twisting curves of the streambed. The place where she’d crouched with Cogswhallop for several nights, hiding, waiting. The pattern of the stones the ice had claimed when they cast the amulets into the water.

  Makenna was wearing one of those amulets now. She knew she was taking a risk—and breaking a promise too—but even angering the people she wanted to negotiate with had seemed preferable to returning to this place with no defense at all.

  Holding on to the memory of the spirit’s angry face, of her vivid, crystalline power, Makenna started walking. If she was right about the nature of this world, the direction didn’t matter. If she was wrong, then she’d start again with a different spirit. Sooner or later, the result would be the same.

  It was hard to say how long she traveled. The sun moved across the sky, but whether it moved at the same rate it did in the real world depended on the spirits’ whim. Eventually the curves of the land became familiar, and Makenna found herself passing the bush where she and Cogswhallop had hidden. She walked up to the stream, seated herself on a rock, and waited.

  It didn’t take long. The water spirit rose out of the stream in a spinning fountain, then settled into the dripping woman shape Makenna remembered.

  “You promised to go! You promised you’d go, and take that thing with you!” There was so much anger in the bubbling voice, Makenna half expected her to start steaming.

  “Aye, and I meant it at the time. But I need to talk to you, and I have no way to summon you into the real world to meet with me. So I came to you. I’m sorry about the promise,” she added politely.

  “We don’t care if you’re sorry or not,” the spirit said. “Yet another lying human has cheated us! You think the death you wear will keep you safe, but you’re wrong!”

  “Aren’t you going to ask why I came back?” Makenna said patiently.

  The spirit blinked, in an amazingly human expression of surprise. “I don’t care about that either.”

  “All right,” said Makenna. “But the reason I came is something you will care about. Because I can offer you a chance to get your hands on the humans who made these death amulets.” She touched the one she wore, in case the stupid creature missed the point. “I can give you a chance to avenge yourselves, on humans who are still using the death of both your kind and mine to power the magic that helps them kill us. Not just some stranger who happens to be wearing the thing, like me, but the ones who do the killing. Interested?”

  The spirit’s arrested expression was answer enough, but the water woman shook her head—
another incongruously human gesture. “I can’t call a council into the presence of that thing. Not on the word of someone who’s already broken one promise!”

  “This amulet is my only way to get home. Without it, I can’t create a gate.” Makenna hated to say it. She hated the idea of doing it even more. “If I take this off, will you promise to give it back to me?”

  “You think I’ll keep my word better than you kept yours?” the spirit asked. “My promise wouldn’t bind the others, anyway. So you might as well leave now. Though I wouldn’t mind hearing the killing-the-death-wielders part before you go.”

  Makenna had always known it might come to this. She took off the amulet and held it out, dangling on its chain. The moment the medallion left her skin, she felt the Otherworld leeching her magic, taking her energy, her life joy with it. It felt like growing old, all at once, without the comfortable cushion of years.

  “Don’t drop it in the water!” the spirit said sharply. “Take it to that muddy place and put it down.”

  Makenna did so, and she watched in fascination as the damp earth softened until the medallion sank into it. Then, before her disbelieving gaze, the mud around it turned to stone. Not ice, she found as she reached out to touch it, but a solid round rock the size of a small melon.

  “There!” The spirit shook herself, sending small droplets flying. “That’s much better. Though I don’t suppose the stone spirits will approve.”

  “Mind if I carry this with me?” The mud was cool and gritty under Makenna’s fingers as she dug. The stone was heavy, but carrying it along was better than leaving it behind. Makenna could probably chip the amulet out of its shell, eventually—though she wouldn’t begin to have time, if the earth decided to soften and swallow her up as well!

  But the water spirit looked . . . thinner, somehow. Perhaps the effort of softening and hardening an unfamiliar element drained even a creature of magic. Perhaps something as large as Makenna was safe . . . as long as she had something to offer them.

  “Maybe it’s time to call this council of yours,” Makenna added, lest the flighty spirit forget the point of this dance.

  She needn’t have worried.

  “Certainly.” A feverish light transformed the spirit’s face. “For a chance to kill the death wielders, they’ll all come.”

  Makenna had been counting on that. Known she could rely on it, that it would be a stronger motive even than the spirits’ longing for the real world. She, of all people, understood the power of hate.

  The spirit had told Makenna to wait while it arranged a conference. It was dark beside the stream, and those strangely patterned stars lit the sky.

  If Makenna had needed confirmation that this world wasn’t real, the full moon that rose many hours after the sun set provided it. The thought of a world whose people controlled the moon and sun chilled her, but at least the moon lit the rushing stream and slopes of the hills around it.

  Only there seemed to be more piles of tumbled boulders than there had been before, and the woods had moved closer.

  The spirits came forth, shambling, slithering, drifting on the breeze, made of tree or stone or wind-tangled grass. So many spirits pulled themselves from the stream that Makenna expected the water level to sink, but it never did.

  A creature she might have taken for a pile of rock, if not for the glittering eyes, opened its jagged mouth and rumbled, “You say we can kill the death wielders? How?”

  “With your permission,” said Makenna, “with your help, we think we can open a portal between the worlds large enough for their whole army to ride through. If we close it up behind them . . .” She shrugged. “I know you can’t directly attack anyone who wears one of these.” She thumped the stone gently on the ground. They knew what was in it—every spirit who’d approached had eyed the innocent-looking rock with loathing. “And I know that their shamans can trap and kill you. But I also know that you control this world in ways their shamans can’t even imagine. And death doesn’t have to be direct, now does it?”

  The rock spirit’s quartzlike eyes were so hungry, it made Makenna shiver.

  One of the tree spirits stepped forward, a white-barked sapling who moved with lithe grace. It still had too many limbs to suit Makenna.

  “Why should we let them in?” The leafy whisper sounded feminine, but the body was so much more tree than human that Makenna couldn’t be sure. “We live safe here. They can kill us. We might be able to slay most of them, to hide, to run as we once did. But the humans are bound to kill some of us.”

  A boy who looked to be made of twisting grass and flowers said, “If it gives me a chance to get my roots around their throats, I don’t care.” His voice was pure hate.

  Makenna listened to the debate for a time. Quite a long time, for the spirits seemed willing to rehash the same ground endlessly. Some didn’t want to risk losing the sanctuary they’d created, but others hated the wielders of death so much, they wouldn’t mind dying if they could take their enemies with them.

  Makenna understood both sides. The fiery seduction of vengeance was something she had once succumbed to herself. But in the end life had called her back to the living, and she wasn’t sorry to have left hatred behind.

  She’d made up her mind more quickly than these spirits, too! They really weren’t very bright. So maybe she’d best help them along. Because the whole Realm could get conquered before they made a decision.

  “Look here.” Makenna broke into a rock spirit’s plea to be left to sit in the sun and snow and rain in peace. “Some of you want to fight and some don’t. Right?”

  “Have you no ears?” The question came from a tree spirit who hardly had a face. Snickers bubbled and knocked and grated through the clearing.

  “Then why not let both sides do what they want?” Makenna continued. “Let those who want to stay here and fight do that. For those who don’t want to fight, we’ll hold the gate open a bit longer and you can come back to the real world. If the bar—the death-wielding humans are all in here, you’ll be safe there. Or do you like this world better?”

  She wouldn’t care for it herself.

  “We yearn for the living world, for real streams, real earth, with every beat of our hearts.” The spirit who spoke seemed to be made entirely of water, with no heart at all. “But when we went to war with the death wielders, they burned the meadows and groves to force the spirits who lived there to come out and defend their soul homes. And when we left . . . we had learned from them. The stream spirits flooded the meadow and drowned the grass. The grass spirits choked off the roots of the trees. The earth spirits poisoned the streams so that everything in or around them died. We left the killers with nothing—but they left us nothing as well. Between us we drained the land so badly that only rock spirits can live there, and they’re too vulnerable to the hunters. The rest of us cannot live in a desert.”

  Had their war with the spirits created the drought that had driven the barbarians to cross the great desert and conquer the Realm? It sounded like it, which meant that these spirits might not make comfortable neighbors. But the Realm humans wouldn’t know how to kill them, so perhaps her idea would work out. And they couldn’t be worse than the barbarians. She hoped.

  “The Realm’s not a desert,” Makenna said. “Indeed, half the Midlands are a swamp! Even the Southlands, where the gate would open, isn’t a desert. And you can spread out from there.”

  Her heart beat fast with hope.

  The contemptuous snort of a rock spirit was an awesome thing. “It’s not a matter of your feeble gate. We can pass from this world to the true one at will. And we could live there, but we cannot. The ancient binding forbids us to dwell in the Bright Gods’ Realm unless we are invited to do so.”

  Whose binding? The priests’? The Bright Gods’ themselves? Makenna was meddling in matters far beyond the scope of a girl her age—but there wasn’t much new in that, and only one question really mattered.

  “Who has to issue this invitation?”

/>   If the Bright Gods had to do it, she was foxed, but if it was just the priests . . .

  “It must be issued by the humans who live there,” one of the tree spirits said. “We never understood why they cast us out in the first place, for we did no harm. Well, not much harm.”

  “That sounds like the priests to me.” And Makenna had no qualms about thwarting them. “I’m human.” For the first time in years, she was glad of it. “And I live in the Realm. Can I invite you back?”

  The fact that the Hierarch and landholders who ruled the Realm might not approve of her actions didn’t matter to Makenna—and she didn’t think it would matter to whatever magic kept the spirits out, either. The Realm’s government wasn’t the Realm, and magic would recognize that truth—even if the government didn’t.

  The spirits were all staring now. “Yes,” a rock spirit replied. “Any human of the Realm can permit our return. But you have to invite us.”

  And just saying “come in” wasn’t enough. Makenna thought quickly. “I invite you to return to the Realm of the Seven Bright Gods. I invite you to take up your homes in meadow and stream, rock and tree, wherever a spirit might choose to dwell. I invite you to share that land with the humans and goblins and gods who dwell there, in peace and friendship, giving up your hatred of humans as long as they offer no hatred to you. Welcome home.”

  There. With luck, that should keep the spirits who chose to return from starting a new little war with the humans of the Realm—humans who had no reason to hate the spirits, for as far as Makenna knew, most of the Realm had no idea these creatures existed.

  An excited babble sprang up among the spirits. Most were jubilant at the prospect of returning to the living world. A few grumbled about having to tolerate humans to do it. But these aren’t the death wielders, others replied. These were other humans. How do we know that?

  A sudden silence fell, and a tree spirit, dark barked and gnarled, pushed his way to the front of the crowd. “How do we know this isn’t some death wielders’ trick, to bring us back into the living world where they can slay us? Why should we trust this human, who’s already broken one promise by returning here? Wearing death magic on her own body! If you want to kill humans, there is one human we can kill right now.”