The Goblin Corps (8 page)

And then Cræosh happened to glance over at his companion. The furry creature was staring back the way they had come, his mouth quirked dejectedly downward.

“What’s your problem?” the orc asked.

“Guards take dead human away. What guards do with body?”

Cræosh thought for a moment. It’d been a while since his lessons on human culture, but…

“Bury him, I think. Why?”

“Because,” the bugbear wailed, “Jhurpess
hungry!”

Cræosh threw up his hands and moved to catch up with their guide.

It quickly became apparent, however, that even here, at the end of their journey, nothing was going to be simple. The orc had taken perhaps a dozen more steps when he and the human were both jerked to a sudden halt by the plaintive screech from behind.

Cræosh spun, one hand already grasping at his sword, to see Jhurpess crouched in the center of the road, arms wrapped over his head as though shielding his skull from a sudden hail.

Torn between outright exasperation and a certain reluctant sense of obligation, Cræosh stomped to the bugbear’s side. He completely ignored the staring crowds that surrounded them, except for a single murderous snarl he directed at the humans nearest his odd companion. “What’s the problem now?”

“Jhurpess not like city,” the creature whined, refusing to uncover his head. “Too many! Too many!”

“Too…What’s he blithering about?” the soldier asked over the orc’s left shoulder.

“He’s a forest-dweller,” Cræosh snapped in sudden understanding. “He’s not used to this many people.” Then, in a much lower voice, he spoke directly into the bugbear’s ear.

“Listen up, Jhurpess. You don’t like crowds. That’s fine, I can understand that. We all have our problems. I, for one, just happen to hate sparrows. Can’t stand the little fuckers. Pathetic feathery little bodies, those—anyway, point is, you don’t see me goin’ around and throwing a conniption any time I see one. If you’re gonna react this way every time the humans get a little ample, we’re gonna have a serious problem, ‘cause they’re sort of common around here. Thicker than flies on a shit pie, really. You won’t be much good to me, or the rest of the squad, like this.”

“Jhurpess not want to be good to squad. Jhurpess want to go home, where it quiet.”

All right, fuck this. I tried it the friendly way!
The bugbear wailed yet again, this time in reaction to the orc’s fingers digging harshly into the fur on the back of his skull and yanking his head back.

“I ought to kill you right here, you pathetic little weasel!” Cræosh snapped at him. “You’re not a bugbear! You’re a
teddy
bear!”

A growl sounded deep in the simian’s throat, and Cræosh noted a single hand reflexively grasping at the handle of the massive club.
Good.

“But if I did that, I might get King Morthûl kind of pissed at me—and whatever else you might have heard, I never met anybody
that
stupid.” He lowered his own face, bringing it within inches of Jhurpess’s own. The bugbear’s breath spread over him in a noxious caress, and he forced back the urge to gag through sheer willpower alone. Obviously, there were still tiny bits of orc decaying between the creature’s teeth.

“Just like he’d be angry at
you
,” Cræosh concluded, “if you tried to back out of this now. You want that, Jhurpess? You want the Charnel King angry with your monkey ass?”

Eyes wide as bucklers, the bugbear shook his head as fiercely as the orc’s grip permitted.

“Well, you know how to avoid that?”

Jhurpess blinked.

“By
standing the fuck up
, that’s how! Take a good look around you! It’s crowded, it’s loud, it’s smelly, it’s annoying! See it, feel it, and then deal the hell with it and move on! You got it?”

The bugbear rose to his feet, head twisting this way and that as he tried to take in the entire scene at once.

“If it makes you feel any better,” the orc added more gently, “think of them with plates under their asses and gravy on their heads.”

Jhurpess stopped twitching. Slowly, a big grin settled over his features, and he actually licked his lips.

“Finally,” Cræosh muttered, and turned his attention back to the guide. “Now, can we get to the damn barracks already?”
Before anything
else
goes wrong!
This was looking to be a
very
long assignment….

Unless, he realized, they died fairly early on, like most Demon Squads he’d heard about. Considerably cheered, Cræosh lightened his step as the mismatched trio marched toward the barracks.

Gork watched, whiskers twitching in contemplation, as the hulking duo followed their reluctant guide through the market’s heart. For a moment, it looked as though the bugbear was about to have a relapse of the fit he’d suffered on the way in. But before his orcish companion could say anything, the simian critter had abruptly straightened himself up. With a bellow that, from Gork’s distance, sounded like “Get out of way!” he plunged through the mob, pushing, shoving, and—in a few cases—bodily tossing people from his path. Obviously, Gork realized with a sense of foreboding, the bugbear was too stupid to do anything in half-measures. Terrified or hostile—there didn’t seem to be anything in between.

And these, unless he was very much mistaken, were his new teammates.
Dragonshit.

Still, there was one distinct advantage to having so volatile an ally. It meant that, more often than not, everyone’s attention would be on the bugbear and not on his far smaller, less conspicuous companion.

Much as it was now, for example.

Once more silent as a ghost, the kobold drifted into the crowd, alert for any opportunities that might—there! One man, knocked aside by the bugbear’s passage, had just now clambered back to his feet, glaring and shouting along with the others. He seemed mostly uninjured, although his immaculately coifed black hair was now dangling in all directions and his soft green tunic was ripped along one sleeve. Even more important, though, was that his coin purse had been knocked loose when he fell. It hung now from the back of his belt, dangling by a single cord. A cutpurse far less talented than Gork could have performed the operation with no chance of discovery.

Or, to be more accurate, no chance of discovery
by the victim.
Gork’s grasping fingers were perhaps half an inch from the pouch when a hand dropped down from the side and fastened on his wrist.

I’m slipping. That’s two bystanders in two days who’ve spotted me.
A high-pitched growl building in his throat, the kobold swiveled his head, scowling at the man who’d grabbed him.

Well, at least it wasn’t one of the watch this time—or, if it was, he wasn’t on duty. This human wore a typical peasant tunic, gray in hue, and brown breeches. Dull, sandy-blond hair topped his head, and duller brown orbs peered out from beneath it.

“You shouldn’t be doing that,” he informed the kobold, as though educating an ignorant child.

Gork, for his part, wasn’t in the mood to be educated. “Get your hand off me before I eat it.”

The human just cocked his head to the side as though puzzled.

Great. Not only was I spotted, it was the village idiot who got me. How embarrassing! Time to go.

He couldn’t, due to the angle, quite get his mouth around a finger this time, so he settled for taking a small chunk from the edge of the man’s palm. The ripping noise was satisfying to hear, as always, though the absence of any cry of pain was somewhat mystifying. Still, the man let go, and Gork began to back away….

Aagh! Oh Stars, what
was
that?! Gaaahh!
Snout twisted in revulsion, the kobold spit out the flesh on which he chewed, gagging to the point of dry heaves. It was a testament to the anger of the crowd that they stayed focused on the departing bugbear, rather than devoting any attention to the retching kobold in their midst.

Finally, as his stomach ceased trying to climb up his throat and his tongue ceased trying to climb
down
his throat, Gork saw just what it was he’d been trying to swallow.

Lying on the cobblestones beside him was a puddled mass of…Well, Gork wasn’t sure
what
it was. A substance, fleshy but not quite flesh, quivered beneath the tiniest layer of a hard, thin material.
Chitin
, Gork realized abruptly. And the entire thing was coated with some off-yellow ichor that had the color and consistency—but most clearly not the taste—of custard.

“What the fu—?” Gork began to ask nervously of the man beside him. Only, even as he watched, the figure ceased to be a man at all. Over the span of perhaps twenty seconds, the stranger’s head sank to the level of the kobold’s own, the skin wrinkling horrendously as the body beneath it shriveled. The man’s—no, the
thing’s
—nose flattened and stretched, becoming nothing less than a snout! The skin retracted, tightening up so that it once again matched the size of the form that wore it, but it began also to harden, to shift in hue from an ugly human pink to a much more natural and attractive stony gray. Even the clothes twisted and writhed, altering size and shape to remain consistent with the being that wore them. Finally, Gork watched the creature’s eyes fold inward, as though turning themselves inside out, and then pop open into reflective orbs that were the mirror image of Gork’s own. Only the short sword the creature wore, which the kobold hadn’t even noticed strapped to the human’s side, failed to change shape.

Gork blinked in amazement at the kobold who now stood before him. The image was absolutely perfect—and it was blatantly obvious, now, exactly what the creature must be. “I know what you are,” Gork told it.

The “kobold” nodded his recently acquired snout. “And does this bother you?”

The kobold shrugged. “I don’t really give a damn
what
you are. What bothers me is that you soured my score.”

“A pouch, no matter how subtly taken, will be missed the moment the former owner chooses to purchase something.”

“So?”

The shapeshifter grinned, a strange, open-mouthed affair that didn’t at all resemble the expression of a true kobold. “A more patient approach. You follow the man. Sooner or later, he will go somewhere unseen by others. A slit throat gets you the money as easily as a slit purse-string—and a body, despite its size, can be hidden for a lot longer than a missing…”

As he lectured, Gork ceased paying attention to his words. Instead, he listened to the tone of the creature’s voice and watched the sharp gestures and the way he moved. Changing form was one thing; behaviors and mannerisms learned over a lifetime, something else entirely. It dawned on Gork that, with a few moments of study, he might just learn how to spot these creatures
regardless
of form. That, he decided, might just prove handy at some point in the—

His attention suddenly snapped back to the shapeshifter’s words, and he didn’t care at all for what he was hearing.

“What?! Someone as ‘careless’ as I am might
what?”

The faux-kobold blinked at him. “Might, I was saying, prove detrimental to the squad as a unit. You
are
here for squad duty, yes? It seems unlikely that you’d be hanging around Timas Khoreth, let alone following the orc and the bugbear, otherwise.”

“So what if I am?” Gork growled.

“So, I don’t intend to trust my life to a creature without sufficient sense to kill his victims.”

“Listen here, you faceless insect! I—” But the kobold’s tirade was lost in the cacophony of the crowd, for the shapeshifter had already wandered away, his form warping once more, blending in flawlessly with all the other humans who, to Gork, still managed to look the same.

Gork growled a lengthy curse that had no equivalent in any language besides Kobold—but had something to do with the other’s ancestry, various underground vermin, and a sharp stick—and drifted away from the marketplace. Not only had the damn shifter ruined his shot at the human’s fat purse, but he’d delayed long enough that Gork could no longer even risk another attempt. If he was to arrive at the barracks in time, he had to be on his way. Muttering in his native tongue, he wandered the streets in the direction the orc and the bugbear had been taken.

He’d gotten perhaps four blocks when a voice called out from behind. “There, Officers! That’s the one!”

Gork spun, one clawed hand reaching for the
kah-rahahk
at his waist—but he swiftly changed his mind upon seeing the half dozen guards rushing toward him, weapons already in hand. Instead, he raised his hands up by his ears in a clumsy imitation of the movements he’d seen humans make in the past to indicate (he hoped) surrender. “Is there a problem, Officers?”

Rather than answering, however, the largest of the humans simply grabbed him by the collar and dragged him forward. “Is this him?” he asked gruffly.

“Oh, yes, sir! That’s most definitely the one!”

Gork stared in astonishment, his ears flattened against the sides of his head. It was the human from the marketplace, the one whose purse he’d almost stolen. But the man
couldn’t
have seen him! Besides, he hadn’t actually
taken
the damn purse! It didn’t make…

And then Gork watched as the human gestured at the guards, describing—in detail—the kobold’s attempted theft. Watched the sharp, alien tilt to the movements, listened with rapt attention to the faintest trace of accent…

“All right,” the guard told him, “let’s go.”

Gork looked up, forcing his eyes wide. “But, Officer, I—”

Whatever else he might have said was driven from his lungs, along with the rest of his breath, by the soldier’s boot slamming into his stomach. The kobold collapsed to all fours, hanging limp and offering no resistance as the guards lifted him bodily off the ground and began carrying him in the direction of what he assumed was the local gaol. Still, as he was hefted away, he had the strength to raise his head and meet the gaze of the “human” standing at the end of the street and watching them fade into the distance.

You
, Gork projected at him silently,
are
so
going to die. If it takes a hundred years, I
will
kill you.