Nine Goblins(38)

They crossed three fields and were midway through the fourth when they found the dead body.

Murray saw it first, in the drainage ditch. He stopped short, and Nessilka and Blanchett came up on either side of him and looked down and saw it too.

It was a human child, very young. Nessilka couldn’t do ages on humans at all, but it didn’t look old enough to walk very well yet. It was laying in the bottom of the ditch with its eyes open and flies buzzing around it.

Nessilka’s sigh sounded strange and muffled to herself with the moss in her ears. Blanchett looked as inscrutable as his teddy-bear.

It was the enemy, but it was awfully small.

It fell in the ditch and couldn’t get out again, she thought grimly. Probably following the voice, and not able to look where it was going. She wondered where it had come from—she’d glimpsed a farmhouse far across the field on the other side of the road, through gaps in the hedgerow—but if it had come from there, had human adults come with it?

Of course, an adult could just step out of the drainage ditch…

Murray caught her eye and gestured to the farmhouse, then to the child. Nessilka turned her hands up and nodded, then shrugged. Probably. I don’t know.

Nessilka gestured for them to move on. They couldn’t take the time to bury the human, and anyway, humans usually burned their dead, didn’t they? They certainly didn’t have time for that, or the wood either, and a column of smoke would announce their approach as clearly as a bagpipe corps.

They moved on.

Two fields over, they found a dead dog. It looked old and not healthy. There was a trail of broken corn stalks behind it, and crows had been at its eyes.

Whatever it is, it doesn’t affect crows, then.

Shading her eyes, Nessilka could see the town on the horizon. She wondered how many corpses there would be between here and there.

As it turned out, there were a lot. A horse with a broken leg had hauled itself an astonishingly long way and then fallen down, and by the torn up ground, it had apparently tried to crawl, which Nessilka couldn’t even imagine. A dead pig had expired without a mark on it, leaving a drainage ditch full of piglets which had probably died of starvation.

The sheep were really bad. Nessilka had seen a lot of horrible things in battle, but the entire flock of sheep had apparently run into a fence and gotten their heads stuck between slats, and then had beaten themselves to death against the fence posts. One or two were nearly decapitated.

Murray eyed them coolly, then turned to the sergeant and pulled an earplug loose. Nessilka followed suit, wincing.

“All domestic animals,” he said. “Cats, too, which I suppose aren’t really domesticated, but nothing really wild, anyway. Whatever this is, it’s not affecting deer or rabbits or wild birds, just the farm animals.”

“And people,” said Nessilka grimly.

“And people.”

They put their earplugs back in and kept moving, keeping low to the hedgerow. A flock of vultures had descended on a dead cow, which had smashed several fences and then been trampled by the rest of the herd.

There was another human, not far beyond it, who looked to also have been trampled by the cows.

After that, the humans became more frequent, the bodies more densely packed. Sometimes they appeared to have crawled over each other. Nessilka stopped seeing them. It was just like a battlefield the day after, a deep silence that seemed only to deepen behind the buzz of the flies and the croaking of the carrion birds.

They reached the farthest outlying building.

It was a little house, with a dead man lying on the front walk. He was very old, with white hair around his temples.

They were nearly abreast of him when the dead man moved.

It wasn’t much, just a hand scrabbling at the packed dirt, but that was enough.

They stopped. It was one thing not to bury bodies, it was quite another to pass up a wounded man. They gathered around him. Nessilka pulled out an earplug, but held up a hand when Murray started to remove his.

“Help me,” the old human rasped, in a dialect that Nessilka could understand, even if the accent was strange. “Help me. Oh please…”

She crouched down next to him. “What happened here?” she asked.

His eyes were nearly closed and rimed with dried tears, but he cracked them open and squinted at her.

“Goblin?” he asked weakly. “You…you didn’t do this to us…”

It didn’t sound like a question. “No,” said Nessilka. “We don’t know what’s happened, either.” She pulled her water bottle off her belt and gave him a drink, trickling the water between his cracked lips. “Can you tell us anything?”

“Goblins,” he said, sounding almost wondering. “Some kind of…weapon?”