Michael had slipped into the light doze that had been his equivalent of sleep for the past months when Cat's gentle shake woke him. He was sitting up in a second and fumbling for his sword, blinking. About the camp silent figures moved out to the perimeter in the dying flush of the fires. The warriors.
'What is it?' he whispered to Cat. Then he realized.
Lights. Flickering blue witch lights in the trees. They guttered and leapt like candle flames but burned as blue as deep ice.
'Bale-fire,' Cat muttered. They had seen them before, of course, but never in such numbers. Michael's grandmother would have called them 'will-o'—thewisp' and told him that they led travellers to their deaths. Here in the Wildwood they were the toys of the Forest-Folk, harmless if they were ignored. But there were hundreds of them out there and, standing up, Michael saw that they ringed the camp entirely, like the watchfires of a besieging army.
He sought out Ringbone whilst Cat settled her bow and quiver on her back, crushing dried kingcup on the flint arrowheads. It was not an especially potent herb, but the best they could do. The most effective weapon in the camp was Michael's iron sword.
Owls called in the trees, and once they heard the howl of a wolf a long way off; but otherwise there was no sound. The Fox-People built up their fires until the campsite was as bright as sunlit amber in the night. Women gathered their children in close whilst the men patrolled the perimeter.
An hour passed, and nothing happened. Michael staggered where he stood, eyelids fighting to drop. Cat was on the alert, however, and the fox men were leaning on their spears talking quietly or squatting with their backs to trees. The fires burned low for want of fuel, for Ringbone would let none leave the camp to gather more and the ground within was bare. A few women had put green boughs on a fire, only for it to smoulder and smoke uneasily. Most of the children were asleep, an amorphous huddle cloaked with hides and furs. The tension had left the air.
Someone screamed, a high yell of pain cut off in mid-flow. At once half a dozen warriors congregated on the area of the sound, flashing noiselessly over the ground and casting about for its source. They found a spear lying on the earth and a spatter of shining blood. Further away a trio of fingers lay pale as grubs amid the decaying leaves.
'Jesus,' Michael said.
The flickering bale-fires suddenly went out. In the moments it took for his eyes to adjust to the deeper darkness, Michael could feel the beating of his own heart, a fast pulse at his throat.
Then madness erupted.
A boiling tide of squat, dark shapes seemed to rise out of the very soil around the confines of the camp and swarmed forward. They were pitch-black, broad as tree trunks, and they loped along on tiny legs and overlong arms, agile as apes. They glinted with bone weapons and ornaments, and made no sound.
One warrior was caught by the bristling horde and immediately swamped. They engulfed him like a mass of black maggots so that he went down and disappeared with one arm still swinging his club. They came on into the dim fire glow at terrifying speed, and here Ringbone's people made their stand: whilst the women helped or carried children into the branches of the trees the men stood in an evershrinking circle and began to fight for their lives.
For Michael it was an unreal nightmare of halfguessed shapes and clawing limbs. The goblins thronged before him waist-high and so dark-skinned that even with the aid of the low fires he could make out little in the way of features. He felt the rake of claws, the agonizing bite of fangs, and he kicked back bodies that were compact and heavy, furred as finely as rabbits. He saw the shine of eyes that were without pupil and as blank as stones, and all the time he swung the heavy sword down again, again and again so he heard the crunch of bone, the pulp of broken flesh and his breeches became soaked with blood. Only when they were hurt did they make any sound, a thin, high squealing like a hare caught in a trap, and after three had fallen before him in quick succession they started to avoid the deadly iron of his blade— one nick was poison to them—and concentrated their attacks elsewhere. His leaden arm came down and for an instant he chanced a look around whilst the fox men battled on at his shoulders.
They were being overrun. He saw Cat flailing about her with her stone knife, her hair a raven billow about her head. He watched, aghast with fear for her, as she slashed the throat of an adversary, booted another aside and stabbed a third through the heart, all the while avoiding the deadly flicker of the bone skewers many of the goblins bore.
Nearby Ringbone fought with a grim economy of effort, his face bitten with a frown of concentration. He had lost his headdress and blood slicked his torso. His or his enemies' Michael could not tell.
Semuin went down, tripped up and stabbed in the eye with a bone sliver. Michael leapt into his place and split a long-eared skull, smashed back a snarling face with the sword pommel, ground the point into the mouth of another. They drew back, snarling. Even their fangs were as black as ebony.