The Goblin War Read online

  THE

  GOBLIN

  WAR

  HILARI BELL

  Dedication

  For those wonderful readers who’ve been sending me fan email, posting great online reviews, and talking up my books to others who might like them—you know who you are. But what you may not know is how much I appreciate you!

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1 - Makenna

  Chapter 2 - Tobin

  Chapter 3 - Jeriah

  Chapter 4 - Makenna

  Chapter 5 - Tobin

  Chapter 6 - Jeriah

  Chapter 7 - Makenna

  Chapter 8 - Tobin

  Chapter 9 - Jeriah

  Chapter 10 - Makenna

  Chapter 11 - Tobin

  Chapter 12 - Jeriah

  Chapter 13 - Makenna

  Chapter 14 - Tobin

  Chapter 15 - Jeriah

  About the Author

  Also by Hilari Bell

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter 1

  Makenna

  SHE WAS BEATEN. SHE’D NEVER accepted that before; not when the villagers she’d grown up with had drowned her mother. Not even when she’d taken her goblins to war against the whole human race. But now she knew that, sooner or later, the spirits were going to win.

  Probably sooner.

  Makenna gazed out between the flaps of the big tent. Goblins were only two feet tall, so several dozen goblin families had sacrificed the tents they’d carried through the gate with them to create a shelter for Tobin. And others had donated the thread to sew it together, after the nettle flax that had seemed so sturdy and promising had turned fragile as cobwebs almost as soon as it left the spindle.

  There was something wrong with the very fabric of the Otherworld, but it wasn’t until Makenna had tried to investigate what was happening to their building materials that she’d realized what it was. She had thought her magic was weaker because she’d drained herself casting the gate, but the goblins’ magic had vanished too—because the Otherworld itself was draining all of them.

  Makenna scowled at the array of goblin tents scattered along the shore—a shore that had receded almost a hundred yards in the scant week they’d been camped here. At least the spirits hadn’t been able to make the whole lake dis-appear overnight, but the stream that had fed it had dried to a trickle in the first day, and the lake itself was vanishing at an unnatural rate. It would be gone in another week. The nearest lake her scouts had found was smaller than this one, and far enough off that they needed to set out for it now, before food grew scarcer. Before the evaporating water grew more foul.

  They had to have water, therefore they had to leave. Makenna had ordered the goblins to take down their tents and prepare to depart . . . but she knew why they hadn’t obeyed her.

  Tobin’s ordinary face was thin now, and flushed with fever, his brown hair wet with sweat. Makenna wasn’t a healer—that had been her mother’s gift. But even before Charba told her, she’d known that Tobin was too weak to survive another move. The last one had been hard enough, even though the goblins had carried him on the stretcher they’d rigged, using new-cut pines for the poles. When those poles had rotted and broken within a day, they’d simply cut more. Tobin had been conscious then, some of the time, and he’d hated being a burden. But he could no more stop the drain of strength from his body than the rest of them could halt the slow seeping away of their magic. And none of the goblins was willing to leave their soldier behind.

  “He saved us all from that priest’s army,” Miggy had told her. “So we’re indebted. Even if this place isn’t exactly working out.”

  Isn’t working out. What a kind way to avoid saying that Makenna had led them to their deaths.

  Tobin would only be the first. The Greeners already had to go too far afield to find enough edible wild plants to feed them, and they couldn’t simply move from lake to lake forever. And even if they managed to adapt to that roving life, scavenging enough to survive, the spirits would find some other way to destroy them.

  It was Regg’s little brother, Root, who’d told Makenna that the strange inhabitants of this place called themselves spirits. They’d let no one but the youngest of the goblin children close enough to learn even that much. But Makenna was enough of a tactician to read their purpose from their actions. They were trying to drive the invaders out of their world, just as she’d driven so many settlers out of the Goblin Wood. And like her, they really didn’t care if they killed a few in the doing.

  Makenna rubbed her face with her hands, brushing away tears, but the facts didn’t change. She should leave Tobin behind. With inadequate food and spoiling water, they’d soon be too weak to pack up and escape themselves. Since Tobin couldn’t survive being moved, they had to leave him . . . and she couldn’t, no more than the goblins could.

  He’d risked his life for her, and for her people. How could she abandon him to die alone?

  As the goblins’ commander, could she do anything else?

  She was wasting precious water, allowing the tears to roll down her face, when a small hand fell on her shoulder.

  “Gen’ral?”

  Cogswhallop was the only goblin who called her that, but she’d missed him so much, so often mistaken another’s voice for his, that she didn’t lift her head.

  The hand on her shoulder tightened and shook her. “I thought you’d more iron in you than to sit there spouting like a lass at the first sign of trouble. We’re not beat yet.”

  No other goblin spoke to her with that gruff tenderness. Makenna’s eyes snapped open.

  “Cogswhallop?”

  If this world started throwing hallucinations at them, they were done for—but the familiar long-nosed face didn’t vanish.

  Cogswhallop snorted. “You didn’t think you could leave me behind for long, did you? A good thing too, from what I’m seeing here. Bend down.”

  Still half disbelieving his presence, Makenna bent her head.

  Cogswhallop slipped a chain over it, the green and brown of unpolished copper, and a crude medallion thumped against her chest. It was round, with runes inscribed around a hole in the middle—though they were nothing like the runes in her mother’s books.

  “What’s . . . ?”

  The moment her fingers closed around the medallion, the aching drain on Makenna’s magic stopped, as abruptly as turning off a tap. Makenna stared at her small lieutenant for a moment—then she pulled off the chain and spun to slap the charm against the exposed flesh of Tobin’s throat.

  If she’d hoped for a miracle, it didn’t happen. Perhaps his eyelids fluttered, but they’d done that before in his feverish dreams.

  “It should stop the life drain,” Cogswhallop told her. “But I don’t know much more than that. And we’ve enough to go round.”

  Another chain fell over her head, and she slipped a hand under Tobin’s sweat-soaked hair and pulled the chain of the first amulet around his neck, settling the medallion against his damp skin.

  “Will it save him?” She had a thousand questions, but that was the one that mattered.

  “I don’t know,” Cogswhallop admitted. “But the answer may be here.” He pulled out a bundle of notes, in a neat cramped hand that Makenna recognized. Her breath caught.

  “Aye,” Cogswhallop confirmed. “It’s the priest’s own spell notes—all that’s known about the Otherworld, and casting gates. There’s a bit about these amulets as well, including how they’re made. Nasty, that.”

  Makenna didn’t care. “Will they get us home?”

  “Am I a hedgewitch?” Cogswhallop asked sardonically. “There’s a lady priest as thought they mi
ght, but she said you’d have to figure out a way to cast the spell, in the midst of a world that sucks up magic like a drunkard sucks up beer. Or a Bookerie sucks up knowledge.”

  “I heard that.” Erebus popped his head through the tent flaps. He’d hardly left his post outside since Tobin had finally collapsed, and Cogswhallop must have passed him on the way in.

  Their familiar bickering brought such a painful rush of joy that the tears started down Makenna’s cheeks once more. She had to swallow before she could speak.

  “I’d appreciate it, Erebus, if you and your folks could go through these notes and organize them for me. If there’s anything on healing someone stricken sick by this world, Charba needs to hear it now. Then I need to see everything about the nature of the Otherworld, and any clue about building a gate out of it. I don’t care who’s looking to kill us back home. It’s got to be better than staying.”

  Erebus cast Tobin a concerned glance and took the notes away at once. Cogswhallop cleared his throat.

  “As to folks killing us, there’s been some changes since you’ve been gone, Gen’ral. Turns out the soldier’s brother isn’t quite the feckless fool we thought him.”

  It didn’t sound like much, but from Cogswhallop that was high praise. Especially for a human. The same human whose bungled plots had put Tobin in the power of an evil priest and nearly gotten all of them killed. Makenna didn’t think much of Tobin’s brother Jeriah, no matter what he’d done recently.

  Charba slipped into the tent, and Makenna led Cogswhallop out, guiltily glad to be away from the stench of illness and Tobin’s rasping breath. She was a terrible nurse. Evaluating a situation and deciding what action to take was something she was better at, but the story Cogswhallop told her strained that capability.

  “So Master Lazur, the Dark One seize his bones, was cheating on his own people as well as trying to destroy us,” she finally summed it up. “And he got caught, and hanged, and now it’s safe for us to go back.”

  “He didn’t so much get caught as young Jeriah exposed him,” Cogswhallop said. “He wants his brother back, and I more or less promised to deliver him—though I didn’t realize it was so urgent at the time. What’s going on here, Gen’ral?”

  “It didn’t seem so bad when we first arrived,” Makenna told him. “The Greeners soon found plants we could eat. And it was beautiful.”

  She gestured around them, although the lush forest no longer looked beautiful to her, and the drying lakebed stank.

  “But then we tried to build. The Stoners were the first to come to me, when they started working on the foundations. They said the stone was funny. I was in the midst of settling some dispute, and . . . I just ignored it. We were beginning to notice the power drain, and there was so much else going on. . . .”

  Cogswhallop listened quietly as she told him about stones that looked like granite but cracked like unfired clay. About timber that dried straight but warped a day after you pegged it into a wall.

  “And then the stream dried up,” said Makenna. “No, that’s not right. The stream stopped. We went to bed with it bubbling away, and when we woke in the morning, there were only puddles among the rocks. I went with the scouts who tracked it back to see what had happened. There was a hill right across the streambed. A whole hill, with grass and well-grown trees. The second stream—”

  “A whole hill?” Cogswhallop asked incredulously.

  “With grown trees,” Makenna confirmed. “But it’s not such a feat as all that when you know the trick.”

  “What trick?”

  Makenna smiled grimly. “There’s a reason I asked the Bookeries to pull out any notes Lazur had on the nature of the Otherworld. Because I’ve come to think that the spirits themselves created it, shaping it out of magic like a child pinching clay. If that’s the case, it’s not so surprising that they could move a hill, or change the nature of wood and stone, or even drain a lake at will.”

  Cogswhallop walked in silence for a several seconds. He must have arrived a little ahead of the rest of his party. Dozens of goblins ran among the tents, looking for loved ones amid shrieks of welcome. Joy glowed in their small, sharp-featured faces.

  “Then it seems to me,” said Cogswhallop, “that you’d best be making peace with those spirit folk. If they can command the earth itself to change, there’s no way you can beat them.”

  “We’ve tried that,” said Makenna. “They won’t talk to us, won’t let anyone but the children come near them. But the Bookeries have managed to piece together a little, from the bits the children have told us. As far as we can tell, they don’t want anyone to live in this world except them. They don’t like goblins, and they hate all humans with a bitter passion. They want us out, or dead, or both. The Bookeries say which one they want might vary a bit from one spirit to the next. They have no idea why the spirits hate us so much—though they’ve plenty of theories, which they argue about. . . . Well, you know Bookeries.”

  “If you can’t make peace with them, then you’d best get out as soon as you can,” said Cogswhallop. “I shouldn’t be keeping you from those notes. I can tell you the rest of it later.”

  A mob of goblin children darted past like swallows—Onny and Regg, reunited with their friend Daroo. They were heading in the direction of Tobin’s tent, where Onny and Regg had kept watch even more faithfully than Erebus.

  Cogswhallop had been searching for his son when the gate closed, trapping him and his family in the real world. Trapping Makenna and her goblins in this one. But now, feeling magic seep back into her bones, Makenna knew she might finally have a chance to free them all.

  The first attempt failed. The glowing gate runes still sank into the trees she’d chosen as an anchor, just as the healing runes she’d placed around Tobin’s bed had vanished into the ground.

  The amulet he now wore—as did every goblin Makenna had dragged into this world with her—prevented more of his life energy from draining away, but he was still terrifyingly weak and had barely surfaced to consciousness a few times. He’d survived being carried to the next lake, and Charba said he’d probably grow stronger on his own, eventually. But Makenna wasn’t sure.

  Master Lazur’s notes had revealed that all the humans who’d gone into this world without the ability to work magic had died within three months. And those who had magic must also have died at some point. At least, Makenna had seen no sign of them.

  Ruthless as he’d been about collecting his information, the priest had learned less about the nature of the Otherworld than she had—though that didn’t surprise Makenna. She’d been living here for over two months; all Master Lazur had done was thrust a handful of condemned criminals through a gate, then open a few holes to get back reports.

  The only part she hadn’t known already, aside from a few refinements on the gate spell, was his speculation that the spirits who controlled this world might be related to the barbarian’s “gods,” and that was why the barbarian blood amulets worked here.

  If Makenna and the goblins couldn’t use magic to affect anything in this world, then getting their power back wouldn’t do much good.

  “We’ve got to find a way to get the earth, or wood, or whatever, to stop sucking up the magic we’re trying to use on it,” she told Cogswhallop. “I think, given these notes on power sharing, that I could link together a group of goblins large enough that I could cast a gate. At least a small one.”

  “But all our powers are different,” Cogswhallop objected. “The Greeners’ power only works on plants, the Stoners’ on stone, the Bookeries’ on useless scribbling.”

  “Not so useless,” Erebus put in. “Galavan, in Essential Nature of Things, speculated that all magic was the same at its source. Maybe we could pass the pure form of it on to the mistress, and she could use it. Or perhaps passing it to her, or through her, might transform—”

  “I think it would,” said Makenna, absently rubbing her amulet—a nervous habit a lot of them had adopted. “But none of that will do us any
good unless we can keep our power from sinking into this world and feeding it. If this world is made of magic, maybe it needs to eat magic to survive? But if that’s the case, what does it eat if it doesn’t have folk like us?”

  “Maybe it eats the spirits’ magic,” Cogswhallop said. “It may be eating thistledown and moonshine, but I don’t see how that helps us! We need a plan, Gen’ral.”

  Makenna shook off speculation. “As it happens, I’ve got one. If the spirits control the nature of this world, then maybe one of them could stop it sucking up our magic long enough for us to cast a spell or two. That seem right to you?”

  “Aye, could be. But they’ve shown precious little interest in helping us so far. And since the children started wearing the amulets, the spirits won’t even talk to them. Much less a ‘filthy human’ like you.”

  “Then maybe it’s time to try something stronger than asking them nicely. You’re a fair hand at ambushes, Cogswhallop. Could you capture a spirit for me?”

  He must have thinking along the same lines, for he answered instantly. “I might. The pen pusher tells me they’re avoiding these amulets like plague, so I’m thinking they might make a fair trap. And I’ve some ideas about where to set the snare as well. Though if I’m wrong about how they react, it might take one or two tries before we succeed.”

  “Set your trap,” Makenna told him—and for once she’d no compunction about using those words. “And if you’re looking for a target, I know just the spirit I’d like to have a chat with.”

  One of the things about the Otherworld Makenna found most disturbing was that it was so similar to the real world but not quite the same. It grew dark at night. The moon—now nearly full—sailed through the sky and changed its phases just like at home. But the stars around it formed different patterns, and they were too large, too bright. The scent of damp earth was familiar from dozens of night raids and watches, but the branches that brushed her face had a subtly alien smell.