Nine Goblins by T. Kingfisher

at
people quite a lot, but they do not scream. Nessilka took a
deep breath, and let it out cautiously. She didn’t scream. Okay.
That was fine, then.
    “So what you’re saying is…we’re behind enemy
lines.”
    Murray laughed. There was a slightly
hysterical edge to it. “Sarge, we’d have to move about forty miles
up to just be behind enemy lines. We’re practically behind the
enemy nation.”
    “Ah.”
    There was a long moment, while Murray fiddled
with his glass and brass thing, and Algol stared up into the trees,
and Nessilka’s mind was an absolute blank. She was a sergeant by
virtue of always being the responsible one. She’d had the same two
weeks of boot camp as everybody else. At no point had they covered
what to do when you are accidentally whisked into the heart of
enemy territory.
    Still, you had to do something.
    “Alright,” she said finally. “Murray, Algol,
get everybody awake and on their feet. Check for wounded. See who
came with us.”
    They saluted and peeled off. Nessilka got to
her feet, and looked around.
    It wasn’t a bad forest. Other than the fact
that they absolutely weren’t supposed to be there, it was a
perfectly nice forest. It was deep and green and the ground was
covered in a soft mat of some little plant or other. The spots
under the trees were deep with pine needles and leaf litter. Birds
were calling from the canopy. The branches whispered and shifted
gently in the wind.
    It was a nice forest. It had probably
belonged to goblins once. It was a shame they couldn’t stay here
for a bit. She sighed. Up in the trees, a crow went “ark!” and the
call seemed to hang in the air for a long time.
    “Everybody’s up, Sarge,” said Murray.
“Nobody’s bad hurt, but Blanchett’s got a twisted ankle.”
    “He says I can walk on it,” said Blanchett,
nodding to the teddy-bear. “Probably not a full march, though.”
    “Tell him thank you,” said Nessilka
absently.
    About two-thirds of the Whinin’ Niners had
come through the hole in the air with her. Algol, Murray,
Blanchett, Thumper, the recruits—gods, the recruits—plus Gloober,
who always had a finger in some orifice or other, and Weasel, who
was tiny and slender and of completely indeterminate gender, and
who stuttered when you tried to talk to—for lack of a better
word—her. (Nessilka was pretty sure she was a girl, but if Weasel
wasn’t going to say anything about it, neither was she.) Everybody
else was back at the battlefield.
    “And we found the wizard, too,” said
Algol.
    “Oh, dear.”
    The wizard was in a lot worse shape than any
of them. He was still unconscious, his breathing was shallow, and
his skin was grey. This would have been normal in a goblin, but he
was one of the pinkish humans, so it probably wasn’t a good sign.
He had a thin, worried face, and badly bitten fingernails. He
didn’t look like a lunatic killing machine, but then, who did?
    There didn’t seem to be any marks on him, and
Nessilka was pretty sure she hadn’t run into him that hard.
    “It’s probably the magic,” said Murray. “I
bet he was trying to cut and run—that thing in the air was an
escape route. Maybe it takes energy to go through it, and when we
all fell through it, it knocked him out.”
    “What do we do…”
    “…with him now?” asked the recruits
meekly.
    The Nineteenth all looked at each other,
while carefully not meeting each other’s eyes, which is a pretty
neat trick.
    Nessilka sighed.
    They ought to kill him. They all knew they
ought to kill him. He was the Enemy, and he was a wizard, and he’d
probably killed a lot of goblins shooting that blue stuff out of
his mouth. He’d kill them all if he had a chance.
    The problem was that it’s one thing to kill
somebody when they’re charging at you with a sword, or shooting
blue things, but it’s an entirely different thing to kill somebody
who’s lying unconscious on the ground. The one is just war. Wars
are like that.
    This, though….This felt