The Goblin Corps (15 page)

But Cræosh himself, despite his misgivings, remained morbidly fascinated by the tableau. Without conscious thought, he found himself reaching toward the elf. He wasn’t certain what he intended to accomplish; perhaps nothing more than confirming, for his own sake, the reality of the twisted torture. The others fell into a deathly hush, their attentions fixed on the orc’s fingers as they drew closer, closer…

The elf’s hand twitched.

Five screams echoed from the underground chamber. Only Katim remained silent, though her grip on the bugbear had tightened so much that he might’ve been wailing in as much pain as terror. Those shrieks were swiftly followed by the sound of the world’s smallest stampede as Gork, Gimmol, and Fezeill dashed for the ladder. Jhurpess would have joined them, had the troll not held him with an iron fist.

Cræosh had retreated from the table—but he, like Katim, was unwilling to leave this
thing
at their backs. He gestured shallowly at the troll and received a nod in return. Katim casually shoved the bugbear behind her and drew her terrible axe. Cræosh hefted his own weapon, and the pair of them moved to either side of the table.

And then Gork, whose vantage halfway up the ladder offered a view unavailable to the others, burst out laughing.

Attention torn between the abomination on the table and their obviously insane ally, the orc and the troll tried hard to watch both directions at once. The hysterical kobold was clearly having trouble breathing, and his sides heaved so hard that he would have fallen had not Fezeill—who was directly beneath him and most certainly did not want a kobold landing on his head—reached up with a lanky bugbear arm to steady his small companion.

Trying to keep watch on the sort-of-dead elf, Cræosh stepped nearer the creaking, overcrowded ladder. “And just what the fuck is so amusing about this?”

The kobold broke into all-new hysterics. But this time, he retained sufficient strength and presence of mind to point.

Katim and the orc both followed his shaking finger back to the elf’s hand. The hand that had moved, despite all sense and all natural laws. The hand…

The hand that had a damned
stick
attached to it!

Cræosh roared with fury as he finally spotted the little wooden shaft—not much more than a sturdy twig—protruding through a tiny hole in the table and into the corpse’s wrist. Still bellowing, the orc ripped the table from the floor and heaved it bodily over his shoulder. The crack of the wood was accompanied, in an almost musical harmony, by the fainter shattering of glass. Curious, Katim knelt beside the wreckage, inspecting the shards as they glittered, reflecting the flickering torchlight.

“Eep! Irp? Bedabedat! Biroo…”

“What the
…!” Cræosh recoiled from another sudden burst of movement, then peered up at the ceiling, trying for a clearer glimpse of the gibbering creature that had just shot past him. It was tiny, he’d seen that much; shorter even than their diminutive Sergeant Shreckt. It too had wings, but they were clearly feathered, not leathery like the imp’s, and the face was a great deal flatter. The high-pitched nonsense it had spouted as it passed resembled no language the orc was familiar with.

“Abroo! Bedara bruk!”

Cræosh scowled, though his blazing fury was rapidly ebbing into a simmering frustration. “Hey, Nature-boy! You feeling better?”

“Jhurpess hurt,” came the response from atop the ladder. “But Jhurpess all right.”

“Good. You feel up to using that bow?”

A moment later, the top half of the bugbear appeared, hanging from the edge of the fireplace hatch. “What Jhurpess supposed to shoot?”

“That!” The orc pointed his weighty sword at the creature, now firmly perched on one of the rafters.

“Eroo?” the strange little thing asked.

Jhurpess drew back the bowstring and let fly. The arrow sped across the room—and with a speed Cræosh would never have believed had he not witnessed it firsthand, Katim’s
chirrusk
arced up and intercepted the missile.

The orc found himself struck nearly dumb. Nothing could have moved that fast! He wondered, with a sinking sensation in his gut, if he shouldn’t have taken his own advice and tried to kill the troll when he had the chance.

But he wasn’t about to let her
see
his worry. “What the fuck’s with you?” he ranted, fists clenched. “Why’d you do that?”

“Because we…do not want to kill…the creature. It is…not a threat.”

Cræosh blinked. “I thought trolls didn’t take prisoners. I thought you didn’t believe in mercy.”

“We do not. But…this is not an enemy. It…is nothing more than an…animal. And I am…curious about it.”

“Bejaba geroo! Urr urrup!”

“Pretty damn talkative for an animal, isn’t it?” Cræosh said sullenly. But Katim would not be budged, and Cræosh was unwilling to force the issue.

“How come we didn’t see it when we came in?” Gimmol asked, unable to look away from the corpses, perhaps still expecting them to leap up and eat him. “I mean, it’s small, but there’s not a whole lot of room to hide under those tables.”

Cræosh directed his gaze, half questioning and half mocking, back at the troll. “Well? You’re its new best friend. Why don’t you tell us how chicken-dick managed to hide from us?”

“Rucha wamma burr!”

“Yeah, you heard me! Chicken-dick!”

Katim actually sighed. “Here.” She handed the startled orc a small shard of glass.

“Oh.” And then, “What the fuck’s it mean?”

“It means…that there was a mirror…underneath the table. In…such poor lighting…it reflected the shadows…and made it appear that the space…was empty.”

“Uh-huh. And that kind of premeditation—to say nothing of the fact that it was smart enough to puppeteer a damn
corpse
—doesn’t make you think that, just maybe, the little shit’s more than some dumb animal?”

“The ‘little shit’ could…not have moved the glass…by itself. If this
was
…premeditated, it was arranged…by someone else.”

“Which reminds me,” Cræosh told her, abruptly switching track. “Weren’t we about on our way out?”

The ladder creaked even more loudly on their way up, apparently weakened by their combined weight (and undignified panic), but it held. When Katim finally clambered out onto the floor of the main room, Cræosh already had the others lined up in a vague formation and approaching the door.

The tiny winged creature shot from the massive hole, jabbering at them, clearly agitated about something.

“You sure you don’t wanna kill the little fucker?” Cræosh asked.

Katim just looked at him.

“You suppose the owner’s liable to be upset about Jhurpess ripping apart his chair?” Gimmol asked nervously.

“Oh, sure,” Gork muttered. “He won’t care in the slightest about the six-foot hole in his floor, but don’t fuck with his chair. Tell me something, Gimmol, are your people always this swift, or are you a prodigy?”

“And just what,” the gremlin asked, his face twisted in a scowl as fierce as he could produce, “is that supposed to mean?”

“It means that if you’re representative of your people, I’m astounded that you exist at all! It’s amazing to me that your species has the brainpower to remember how to breed!”

Hollering, Gimmol hurled himself at the kobold. The diminutive pair hit the ground and rolled, tiny fists flying like hailstones. The rest of the squad swiftly gathered; Gork and Gimmol would have been mortified had they seen the amusement plastered across their companions’ faces.

Cræosh watched for a couple of minutes, until the whole thing stopped being funny. Then, growing bored of the spectacle and remembering that they were supposed to be fleeing the cottage, he grabbed a combatant’s collar in each fist. He rose, dangling Gork and Gimmol like a pair of dejected kittens.

“Either put ‘em back in your pants,” he said, “or fuck and get it over with.”

Despite their precarious positions, both pint-size soldiers managed to swivel toward the orc and give him a withering look of disgust.

“All right, then. Kill each other later. Right now, we’re withdrawing.”

“Don’t you mean running away?” Fezeill asked from behind.

“Nah. Marching calmly is a withdrawal. Usually, if I’m running away, my hands are waving in the air and I’m screaming a lot.” He paused. “Or is that sex? It’s been so damn long, I can barely remember….”

Katim grimaced and headed toward the door—or rather, the empty doorframe. She had gotten to within a yard or so of the entryway, in fact, when her egress was suddenly blocked.

“Umm…Cræosh?”

“Last time was back home in Tarahk Trohm,” the orc was telling the largely uninterested—and somewhat disgusted—doppelganger. “Lovely shit-brown cutey, she was….”

“Cræosh!” Katim called, somewhat more forcefully.

“…Name of Mesharral, I think….”

“Orc!!”

“What?! I—oh.” Steel hissed against leather as his massive sword slid free of its sheath. Similar sounds followed as the entire squad drew steel, staring intently at the figure in the doorway.

He was markedly shorter than Cræosh, and slender as a reed. A dull gray cloak wrapped most of his body, and his features hid within the depths of his hood.

“I’m going to venture a guess, here,” the stranger said in slightly accented Gremlin—which, of all the goblin languages, was most pronounceable to outsiders and served as something of a common trade tongue. His voice somehow conveyed the impression of song, even though his tone was neutral, even flat. “A boulder, obviously well traveled, came bounding across the tundra, crashed through my front door, and left this rather unattractive hole in my floor. Meanwhile, you good samaritans, concerned that there might be some poor unfortunates injured by said boulder, came racing in here to see if you could help. And now, upon realizing that there is little you can do, you were preparing to sneak back out into the snows, unrecognized and unthanked for your courage and generosity.”

“How about that?” Cræosh asked. “He got it in one try! Can’t put anything past you, can we? Well, since, as you were so good to point out, there’s not much else we can do here, I suppose we’ll just be on our way. Sorry about, um, the boulder and all. Squad, move—”

The new arrival held up a hand. “I think not.”

Cræosh scowled. “You want to try to stop us? Are you stupid or just—no, you’d really have to be stupid.”

The cowled figure snapped his fingers. With a resounding whine of old hinges, the hatch beneath the fireplace slammed itself shut. The crackling of wood, a sudden loud roar, and the flames were once again blazing away in the hearth, as large and as vivid as if they’d never been extinguished.

Jhurpess whimpered. Gork ducked for cover behind Cræosh. Gimmol appeared on the verge of passing out completely, and even Katim blinked nervously once or twice.

“Of course,” the orc continued, “you could also be a wizard.”

Though they couldn’t see his face for the shadow of the hood, they were all quite positive the stranger smiled. “I could, at that.”

“You fry us, mage, and you’re gonna lose a good portion of your hut, too.”

“There
are
other ways to kill you, orc. But the truth is, I don’t want you dead. Sit, please.”

There was a great deal of muttering, of reluctance, of suspicious glances in all directions; but what there was
not
was a whole lot of any real choice. The Demon Squad could do what the stranger asked, or they could fight their way past, and while Cræosh was pretty sure they’d come out on top, he was equally certain that not all of them would survive the attempt. No need to risk it. Yet.

Of course, after the bugbear’s earlier rampage, the hut was now somewhat deficient in the chair department. Fezeill and Gimmol settled into the two plush chairs by the fire, leaving the surviving wooden seats for Gork and Jhurpess. Katim and Cræosh stood, she in the center of the room, he beside the gremlin’s chair.

“Okay,” he growled at the owner of the strange little hovel, “I’m as relaxed as I get without alcohol and nudity. So who the fuck are you, and what do you want?”

The figure pulled back his hood in reply. Dark tresses framed a slender face, sharp-featured and clean-shaven—and a pair of upswept, pointed ears.

“Elf!”
Cræosh hissed, his body tensing. Fezeill, Gork, and Jhurpess were on their feet, ready to kill the foul, hideous creature.

Katim’s
chirrusk
dangled from one hairy fist, but even as she moved to lunge, she drew to a halt, blinking.

“Are you not…kind of short for an elf?”

Cræosh scowled, though the troll’s sudden reluctance was enough to stay his hand as well. “So he’s a midget. What’s the problem? Just means I’ll have to bend over to yank out his entrails.”

But now Gork, too, had picked up on it. “No, she’s right!” he called out, as desperate to avoid this fight as he had been, just a moment ago, to start it. “Look at his eyes!”

The orc sucked in his breath. Every elf he’d ever encountered—every elf he’d ever
heard
of—had irises of woodland hue: greens, reds, and golds, for the most part. These eyes, larger than those of any elf he’d ever seen, had a reflective tint of deepest violet.

“But they’re just myths!” Cræosh protested, his gaze darting from Gork to the strange elf. “Stories, wishful thinking maybe. They don’t exist!”

“We don’t?” the elf asked, his voice suddenly concerned. “Then what am I doing here?”

“No need to get sarcastic,” the orc huffed.

“No,” Fezeill added, gesturing at Cræosh, “that’s
his
job.”

Cræosh scowled at them both—then at everyone else, just because.

“We’ve run into them from time to time,” Gork told them, his voice unusually subdued. “Kobolds, I mean. Nobody I know personally ever actually met one, though.”

“’One’? Really now, kobold, is it so difficult to say it?”

“Dakórren,” Gork finally muttered. “Dark elves.”

The stranger made a face at that. “You’ve been cavorting with the eilurren, haven’t you?”

“Eilurren?” Cræosh asked softly.

“Elves,” Gork said. “That is, uh, ‘light’ elves. The normal ones.”

The “nonnormal” elf was still going on. “…but I mean, really! ‘Dark elves’? Don’t you find that a little melodramatic? You’ve got humans fighting alongside you in the Charnel King’s armies, but you don’t hear anyone calling them ‘dark men,’ do you?”