Nine Goblins Read Free Page B

sliding off his knee. The raccoon cub was
asleep on his lap, in the wreckage of what had been a saucer full
of bread soaked in warm milk. Perhaps it was just as well he hadn’t
bothered with a shirt.
    It looked like most of the milk had gone into
the raccoon, anyway, and his sandwich had a distinctly gnawed look.
Some days that was all you could ask for.
    Sings-to-Trees gave up even pretending he was
awake. He put the raccoon to bed, toweled off the remnants of both
their dinners as best he could, and limped to the bedroom. He had
just enough energy to remove his shoes, and then sleep crept up and
hit him.
     

 
     
     
     
FOUR
     
    The Nineteenth Infantry were marching, if you
could call it that.
    Goblins march badly. They have enormous thick
feet like elephants, so they are quite good at walking, but they
have no rhythm, and very few goblins have ever mastered the ability
to tell left from right without stopping to think about it. So when
somebody yells “Left foot, right foot!” there is generally a long
silence while the goblins all try to remember which is which.
    At some point, one bold goblin will step out,
and all the others follow immediately in the hope he knows what
he’s doing. It’s about a fifty-fifty shot if he’s leading with the
correct foot or not, but at least they’re all wrong together.
    On a good day, they will stay in step for
nearly a minute before somebody gets bored, or trips, or stumbles,
or forgets what he’s doing and begins skipping. Small knots break
off. Officers ride around on their pigs, shouting orders and
leaving havoc in their wake.
    Eventually the better sergeants round up
their units and herd them more or less in the direction that
everybody seems to be going. In fits and starts, the goblin army
lurches on.
    Nessilka was a fairly good sergeant, and had
most of the Whinin’ Niners aimed in the correct direction. Algol
and the pack mule formed the nucleus of the group, and since he was
taller than most of the other goblins, everybody was able to keep
him in sight.
    At the moment, Nessilka’s greater concern was
the two new recruits.
    They were identical twins, which gave her a
headache, and they were young and bright-eyed and enthusiastic and
finished each other’s sentences, which took the headache to a whole
new level.
    “Where are we…”
    “…going, Sarge?”
    “We don’t know. We just follow orders and go
there.”
    They gave her identical nods.
    “Will we be…”
    “…fighting, Sarge?”
    “Sooner or later, yes.”
    Everyone stumped along in silence for a
while. The flat stony badlands were giving way to little lumpy
hills and the occasional scrubby tree, with more trees on the
horizon. The wind that came to them smelled like pine, which was a
big improvement over goblin.
    The new recruits had the standard loincloth
from home, made out of the standard rancid goathide, and they both
had what passed for weaponry in the goblin army—a board with a nail
in it. Unless she managed to beat some kind of sense into them,
Nessilka gave them a week.
    “So you’re twins,” she said, by way of an
opening gambit.
    “Yes, Sarge!” they said in unison.
    “How should I tell you apart?”
    “You…”
    “…don’t.”
    “Not even our mom…”
    “…can tell us apart.”
    “We’ll fix that,” she said grimly, and
beckoned to Thumper.
    Thumper would need thick-soled boots to stand
four feet tall, but he was at least four feet wide. His biceps were
the size of badgers and he had no neck. He did not use a shield,
preferring to carry two large spiked maces, both taken from the
fallen foe. When he was hitting things, there was a joyful gleam in
his eye, and when he wasn’t, there was a glitter that indicated he
was probably thinking about hitting things.
    He had no personality that Nessilka had ever
been able to uncover—possibly it had gone off with his neck
somewhere—but he was an excellent goblin to have at your side in a
fight.
    “Recruits, this is