Nine Goblins(27)

“Well,” she said finally. “I suppose—”

“Sarge!”

Murray pointed. She whirled.

Across the fields, coming out of a drainage ditch, was a familiar tall gray-green figure.

Nessilka exhaled. It seemed to come from her toes. She stomped towards him, furious and relieved all at once.

“Corporal, what in the name of the great grim gods do you think you’re—”

“Look, Sarge!” he cried, holding something over his head.

It was small. It was muddy. It wiggled.

It was a kitten.

Algol was covered in mud, and grinning from ear to ear.

“Oh, for gods’ sake…” said Nessilka, covering her eyes.

“I heard him mewing! He was stuck down in a pipe in the ditch, and I got him out. Can I keep ‘im, Sarge, can I? Please?”

“Corporal—” she began, and stopped, because she didn’t know what she was going to say after that. She should never have let him name the supply goat. Once you started naming goats, it was all downhill from there. She massaged the bridge of her nose and tried again. “Corporal, we’re goblins. The scourge of the night! Stealers of children! Marauders of the dark! The terror of…well, fairly terrible anyway.”

Algol looked at her blankly, petting the kitten.

“We aren’t kitten people!”

Algol stared at her, still petting the kitten. It made a little mrrp! noise and butted its head against his big fingers. “But Sarge, he was stuck.”

“We’re behind enemy lines! We don’t know how we’re going to get back! And you want to adopt a kitten?”

Algol sniffed. The sergeant could see a traitorous moisture beginning under his eyes.

“We can’t leave ‘im,” he said quietly. “He’s the only thing alive out here. He’ll die.”

“Corporal—”

His lower lip wibbled.

“Oh, fine,” she said, relenting. “If somebody eats it, don’t come crying to me.”

“Thank you, Sarge!” Algol thrust the kitten at her face. Nessilka recoiled. “Look, kitty! This is Sarge! She says I can keep you! Say hi!”

The stealer of children and marauder of the dark grudgingly reached up and petted the kitten. It licked her finger with a raspy little tongue. She grumbled. It purred.

“By rights I oughta have you thrown in the stockade, abandoning your post like that…” she muttered.

“We don’t really have a stockade, Sarge,” Murray pointed out.

“I oughta make him build one, then!”

Algol, besotted with his kitten, ignored this.

Nessilka threw her hands in the air. “Don’t do it again, Corporal, or I’ll bust you back down to Private so fast…”

“I think I’ll name him Wiggles. He looks like a Wiggles.”

Nessilka knew when she was beaten. Wiggles perched on Algol’s shoulder and purred the entire way back to camp.





The teddy-bear, by way of Blanchett, had nothing to report. The twins were asleep in a pile, looking like lumpy green kittens themselves. Gloober was exploring the inner reaches of his left ear. All appeared right with the world.

The returning goblins slung the preserves off their shoulders, and set about making tea, in the pot this time. Blanchett was pleased to get his helmet back.

Nessilka had just taken the first sip—sweet, gritty, fairly revolting, exactly what she’d been looking for—when Weasel burst out of the bushes.

“S-S-SARGE!”

Aw, crud.

The little goblin was scarlet-faced, and her hair had come out of its tight tail. Sweat glued it across her cheeks. Her chest heaved.

“It-t-t’s Th-th-th—”

“Calm down, kiddo.” Nessilka knew it was the height of rudeness to finish sentences for somebody with a stutter, but this sounded like an emergency. “Something’s happened to Thumper. Sit down, take a deep breath…okay, now tell me what it is.”

“He’s hu-hu-hurt! It’s el-el-el—”

“Elves?”

Weasel nodded furiously.

“Did elves hurt him?”

She nodded, then shook her head, then threw her hands in the air. Nessilka interpreted this, correctly, as a sign of a tale too complex to be summed up in yes or no questions.

“Okay, guys, let’s move. Take me where you last saw him, kiddo, and tell me on the way.”





THIRTEEN





As near as Nessilka could piece together from the badly upset Weasel, she and Thumper had been doing fairly well. They’d flushed a bird, and Weasel had dropped it with her sling.

Then it started to go bad.

When they’d startled the bird, they had also startled a deer. The deer took off across a clearing, and Thumper, seeing a whole banquet on the hoof, took off after it.