Originally appeared in The Secrets of Magic

By Jim Bishop

For the fifth time in as many days, Warmaster Jaxle Brey returned to camp red-faced and furious. His shield boys and squires saw him coming across the mud flats, and the talk froze on their faces. His big iron shield hit the mud, then his helm a second later.

“Wings!” he roared, his bushy moustache catching most of the spittle. “A month in the swamp, and they grow wings!” He unbuckled his sword belt and hurled it at the closest squire. The rest scattered toward the line of tents and knights’ pavilions. They’d all felt Brey’s hand since marching from King’s Head.

Inside the council tent, the floor was carpeted in rich wool, now ruined by mud and the endless rain. Brey slogged into the smoky light of the oil lamps and brought a fist down on the map table.

“They’re flying over us.”

“The goblins, Lord?” The scribe Wolsey looked up in owlish surprise through his thick glasses. He hadn’t heard Brey approach, and his hands were occupied with the toy army of tin soldiers laid out on the battlefield map. Brey’s advisors were arrayed around the tent in folding campaign chairs: his captains of foot, horse, and archers in their full regalia, the siege master with one mailed foot resting on the table’s edge, and Wolsey, the idiot professor. The tent smelled of wet wool and blood.

“Yes, Wolsey, the goblins. The army of goblins.” He reached over his shoulder and pulled a black-fletched arrow from his cuirass with a grunt. “Out there.”

“Wings, Lord?” Wolsey’s bad eye winked at him. Brey found himself wishing he could throw out the old man’s books again. That he could find some excuse to smash his glasses or toss him to the greenskins as a peace offering.

“They fly, Wolsey. We lost a dozen mounted and twice that in foot, because they flew. Over your wall.” He slammed the scribe’s brass spyglass on the table for emphasis. The stout earthen wall surrounding the camp had been Brey’s idea, but none of the officers dared correct him. It had taken a week to build. A week they could have been riding, trying the goblins’ defenses.

Brey turned to address the rest of the table, ignoring Wolsey’s look of horror as the spyglass rocked on its bent frame. It was a present from his parents, both long dead, on earning his commission to the university.

“I want new plans drawn up in an hour. Contingencies, retreats, everything. Better plans. And build more siege wagons. I want cover for our next mission.”

The warmaster turned to leave when Wolsey recovered his voice. “I’ll need descriptions, Lord. Sketches would be better. Of the winged goblins.” He indicated the ranks of tin figurines on the table: faithful miniatures of the king’s army that faced ten times their number of tiny, leering goblins, each hardly more than a forge-drop. “For the simulations, Lord.” He glanced around, finally realizing he’d said the wrong thing.

But Brey favored him with a smile, and a light shone in his dark, close-set eyes. “I think that can be arranged, Wolsey. You’ll ride with the next scouting party into the mountains. You can sketch them all the better from close up.” His teeth gleamed as he threw open the flap and strode out into the miserable rain, scattering squires like rats before a hound.

Inside the council tent, Wolsey rolled his spyglass in his hands and shook his head. The siege master touched his shoulder, but he barely noticed.

“Oh dear.” He repeated, “Oh dear, oh dear.”

Hours later, as his mule picked its way along the narrow trail behind the line of soldiers, Wolsey’s mind wandered in thickets of language. Goblin, he thought. Strange that the word so closely resembled Go-blan, or “Many Kings” in the Sarpassian. The word was probably older than that, originally from the dwarves or first men. He’d have to check the university library when he returned to King’s Head. If he returned, he thought with real regret.

The world of books and maps was far away from Gaslight Swamp, and he knew he wasn’t prepared for the realities of war. The clatter of mail and plate around him reminded him that he was unarmored and unarmed but for the dagger the First Chair of History had pressed on him after the dinner in his honor.

“In case you’re captured,” he’d said. The bright steel of the blade was marked at the tip by a smear of blue alloy. Poison. Salts of cyanide and tincture of cobalt, he thought automatically. He was familiar with die metallurgy of it but had never seen one up close. He thought of finding a vein with that deep blue point and shuddered.

His mount was loaded down with leather map cases and surveying gear, and a wicker trunk held his small field furnace, ingots of tin and lead, and a dozen molds. Metals were his true love. He wished they’d listened to him when they ran down their list of “volunteers” for the king’s army three months ago. He was no soldier.

The sergeant called a halt, and Wolsey found himself studying the man in profile, as a painter studies a landscape or a surgeon a wound. The helmet with its tall crest, the quiver of javelins, breastplate layered over mail and leather—all of it became bits of detail in his mind’s eye, a future model to complete his human army. The sergeant ordered that camp be set and called out names for the watch. Wolsey only half listened. The soldiers cursed and laughed as they staked tents and dug latrines, but Wolsey barely saw, instead thinking back to the beginning.

* * * * *

The king’s army, they called it. Wolsey remembered the day they’d ridden from King’s Head, the whole city waving them on, a train of children in their wake. The Lord-Protector at the vanguard tipped back his helm and nodded gallantly, and ladies threw scarves and favors until his horse was festooned like a maypole. His warmasters rode behind him as an honor guard, grim and silent.

Wolsey had watched as Jaxle Brey dipped his lance to catch a scarlet favor that drifted from the pavilion seats like a drop of blood in water. Wolsey would have bet his books that the scarf was meant for another man—likely the younger captains who rode at Brey’s side, tall and strong. Although Brey fancied himself a stirring figure in full plate atop his horse, the truth was his moustache covered a sneering mouth, and his pointed chin was more cruel than dashing.

It had been just three months, but it seemed a lifetime. He had ridden from King’s Head with the field kitchens on a rickety carriage, his books and equipment crammed in with him and lashed to the roof. The plum trees were blooming, and their faint scent crept into the carriage and made him wish for his study with its patch of garden outside the high windows.

The other scribes hailed him as Brave Wolsey and Lion Wolsey, but he saw the relief and shame in their eyes. He was twice the age of Multon—why not a young man to play this game of war?

The king’s army set out in spring to take the lands of Viscount Tardis. The nobleman refused to honor his king’s apportion of iron and wheat, and spies reported a huge surplus piling up in his silos and swords being hammered in every furnace. It looked like a brewing rebellion, and Brey’s force was sent south through the Gaslight Swamp to take the rear of Tardis’s line. It had seemed like a good plan to Wolsey, indeed he had drawn it up. But they hadn’t counted on the resourcefulness of the Half-moon goblins holding the pass.

The goblins’ only frontal attack had come at dawn on the tenth day of what Brey called a siege and what Wolsey knew was a stalemate. It was the largest formation they’d seen—at least sixty green-skinned warriors in mismatched armor who marched down the mountain trail to the beat of hidden war drums. They took up a loose phalanx at the canyon wall and fixed their spears against a charge. 

The warmaster was ecstatic. He gave cavalry sergeant Bronne the honor of the first charge, then he sat back in a folding canvas chair with a smirk on his narrow, impious face. The cavalry were saddled and mailed while the archers were still stringing their longbows. They rode to meet the goblin force with lances high, horses stamping and snorting clouds of mist.

Wolsey had watched the scene through his spyglass from his carriage, switching views from knights to goblins until they merged into one. Brey was already preparing his speech to the Lord-Protector, Wolsey felt quite sure.

From rocks and ravines all around the goblin position, more warriors flooded out. It seemed to be an ordinary flanking maneuver. But canny, he admitted to himself, these greenskins have read the Phorodotus. It was textbook execution. Then the flankers headed straight into the charging horses, leaving the phalanx far behind. They must have the Viema translation—it lacks the elegance of the original, he mused. He’d have to see about a new version when he returned. It would be a nice feather in his cap, a bit more gravitas than the metallurgy texts that were his staple. Then the first goblin runner exploded, and the shock wave knocked the spyglass into his eye.

Horses and knights rocketed into the air. The lead chargers reared up and spilled their riders, then were blown to bits a moment later. The swift legs of one goblin took him under the banner man’s war-horse, and the blast that followed sent gobbets of horseflesh and smoking hide in a hundred-foot plume. Bitter permanganate, Wolsey’s mind reeled off. Oil of the shale and yellow sulfur. He remembered long hot afternoons in the stone tower set aside for alchemists, his hair always singed and hands burnt pink from the explosive mixtures. But how had they isolated the yellow sulfur? A whole shelf was given over to treatises on extracting the mineral from coked ore—and these savages had it figured?

The rearmost riders turned to escape, and now, even with his ears ringing, Wolsey could hear the screams of dying men and the frantic whinnying of crippled horses. Still more goblins surged into the line of knights—barrels of the explosive strapped to their scrawny backs—and exploded one by one like a string of midwinter firecrackers, flinging full-grown men into the air like dolls. A fresh line of goblins herded the remaining men into a circle; some threw their swords to the ground and begged for mercy. Wolsey heard a high, wavering scream from somewhere behind the crowd. It was the young sergeant pleading for mercy, his foot turned completely around on his leg, the ground around him soaked in blood. Then the goblins tightened their ring in a deafening thunderclap that rocked Wolsey’s carriage on its axles, and smoke filled the battlefield.

When the cloud cleared, nothing was left on the field but a circle of burnt ground pocked with bits of armor and blackened flesh. The tail end of the goblin phalanx disappeared back up their trail into the mountains. Their war drums picked up then stopped at a stroke. In the quiet, Wolsey heard loud cursing that could only be the warmaster. He collapsed his spyglass and stepped out of the carriage to see what he could do and was rewarded with Brey’s full fury and blame and a dressing-down that ended with Brey hurling his books—his heirloom strategy primers and handwritten histories—out the window of the carriage, where they lay in the gray mud like dead birds, their pages flapping in the wind.

Looking back, he couldn’t imagine their confidence on that ride from King’s Head. The other warmasters had chaffed Brey for his plum orders. The rest of them would face men, Tardis’ men, trained by the king’s own sergeants when the two realms were at peace. It was all bluff—in truth they must have felt sorry for poor, bullying Brey who always got the worst assignments. Only the best of the armies’ officers ever earned the rank of warmaster, and only one would become Lord-Protector when Highsmith finally passed. There was no glory in butchering goblins, and his orders meant the end of Brey’s dreams for that high post. But Jaxle had confided to Wolsey that he meant to take the pass in a week and be ready to seize Tardis’ banners before fighting broke out on the plains of Tormuk. He had asked Wolsey for a plan, and the scribe had brought him the chapter straight from Eduard’s excellent On Fighteyinge in the Fielde. The fool hadn’t read it in school, and he thanked Wolsey as though he’d handed him the Protector’s crown on a platter.

A month into the campaign, they were still three leagues from the pass, and every move east brought more attacks. The ingenuity of the goblins seemed bottomless. On the first night, Brey had ordered the camp set against the rocky side of the canyon and had posted sentries to watch for an approach across the plain. Their first night of sleep had been interrupted by the crash and rumble of falling rocks and screams of pain. Wolsey had dashed from his pavilion in time to watch a dozen goblins rocketing down the steep canyon wall on what seemed to be ice sleds, preceded by a tumbling avalanche of rock. The sentries had been a hundred yards away, facing the wrong direction.

The sleds and rocks had crashed through the footmen’s tents with a sound like melons falling onto flagstones. The goblin pilots had leaped to safety and had run through camp slashing at anything that moved. The horses had panicked and broken free from their pen to gallop through the crowds of panicked men. A page had stumbled into an oil lamp and become a shrieking firebrand when the heavy tank upended on his head. Men with crushed arms and legs, with bits of rock embedded in their chests and bellies, had lain strewn across the scene. It was pure carnage, pure chaos. And still the goblins had come, wave after wave of sleds and rocks, until the warmaster’s whole force, three thousand men and a thousand horses, had raced like whipped children for the safety of the plain. That night as they bound their wounded and sent riders for fresh reinforcements, Wolsey found he had gained a whole new level of respect for their enemy.

Brey’s force was under constant attack from that night on. The goblins fought in small units, no more than a dozen warriors, but the units were everywhere and didn’t seem to need supplies or orders. They put sharpshooters in every cave, and skirmishers waited in the swamp to slit the throats of scouts who wandered too near. They darted in to strike at the army’s flank and rear but never stayed to fight. They set fire to supply wagons and killed horses in the night.

They dug pit traps and strung game snares across pathways. It sounded comical, but horses in full barding tipped into those holes, breaking all their legs and smashing their riders to bloody paste. Brey never heard about the snares, the snipers, or the dozen other reasons why a steady trickle of casualties bled away his main force night and day. He’d taken to whipping pages that brought him reports, and by the tenth day they flatly refused to enter his tent. He sat atop his white horse, now tarred with black mud, or on his canvas chair, and contented himself that the greenskins were finally on the run. Meanwhile, the cavalry had no targets to tilt at, the archers no mass of troops to punish with flights of arrows. The foot soldiers slogged knee-deep in brackish water, growing tired and falling ill, losing their taste for war by the hour.

As if to punctuate the situation, as if this wasn’t bad enough, just yesterday the gliders had appeared. They swept in from the cliff tops and dropped stones, captured weapons, even bones and garbage on Brey’s army. For every one that fell to an archer, another ten took flight, until Brey ordered the whole force deeper into the swamp, where the camp now sat ankle-deep in mud. 

Our second retreat, Wolsey had thought, from an enemy Brey boasted he’d clear out in a week. From an enemy he’d called “little green whelps” in his farewell toast to the court. Again Wolsey had found himself feeling something like fondness for his enemies. They knew more about fighting wars—winning wars—than any commander he’d encountered. And they were humiliating Jaxle Brey, he had admitted to himself, and that put them high on his list.

One night, as the officers ate in silence, Wolsey caught himself humming the tune to Lord Chaster’s Last Ride (the comic favorite of enlisted men, featuring a fool of an officer and his many losses in the field) and looked up into shocked silence to see that he hadn’t caught himself quickly enough. Brey sat at the head of the table, his shoulder bandaged where an arrow had stuck him. His eyes were glazed with anger, but he didn’t say a word, and they all resumed eating. But when Wolsey returned to his carriage, he found most of the furniture ripped out and a crowd of apprentice carpenters hammering it apart on the muddy ground not twenty feet away. The hammering continued through most of the night, and at dawn a gallows stood tall by his gutted quarters. I get the message, Warmaster, Wolsey had thought. I get it just fine.

But even with the constant stresses of his little war with Brey and the real war outside their tents, Wolsey found time for his true love. The night his carriage had been gutted, he had set up his foundry on the bare floor and poured a dozen mini tin foot soldiers, lining them up in ranks on his valise and leaving tiny spatters of silvery metal where he worked. He sculpted during the days, sneaking time while the warmaster busied himself with reviewing his officers and men, a tiresome, morale-sapping task that Brey alone relished. He shined his ridiculous swagger stick and strode up and down the line, smacking in guts and smacking up chins, holding to absurd formalities while their food ran low, and the goblins killed them slowly, like lampreys on a fish. 

As much as he hated those pompous exercises, Wolsey appreciated the time they freed up. During Brey’s parading, Wolsey had made miniatures for the goblin sleds and a working model of a snare trap.

* * * * *

That night, as the soldiers made camp in the mountains and Wolsey stretched out on his bedroll over hard rock, he worked from sketches he’d made from a pair of wings. The armatures and delicate stretched wings were taking shape in a lump of wax and clay, and his thumb smoothed the contours of the grinning goblin face in the flicker of candlelight. If he worked through the night, he thought, he’d have a first cast by morning.

* * * * *

High in the mountains over Gaslight Swamp, King Jugrut was dying. This was the third challenge to his rule, and the smart money said it would be his last. He and his challenger faced each other across the sandy floor of the arena. Above them were the screaming masses of the Half-moon tribe. In the dim light cast by the cooking fire in the center of the arena, only the teeth and eyes of the spectators could be seen. The king and the upstart circled the fire, and the cauldron suspended above it bubbled and spat. They moved slowly on short wooden stilts, perched like seabirds on their roosts as they maneuvered for position. The challenger held a tin cup in one hand, Jugrut his scepter, a brittle wolf bone topped with a chunk of amber. The rules were firm on the stilts and the weapons. The arena measured fifty paces across, and the pot of grease had reached the roiling boil as prescribed. The forms had been obeyed.

The young buck—his name was Baglag—circled Jugrut with sure movements, stilts crunching on bones and twigs as he crept around the field of firelight. Jugrut had a bad scald over one eye, and another on his foot. The ripe white blisters chafed against the stilt’s leather strap as he strained to keep the younger goblin in view.

Baglag stomped in close to the fire and dipped his cup full of boiling oil. He grimaced with the pain but kept a brave face, his snaggleteeth pointing out of his mouth like the needles of a compass rose. He took a few tentative steps and then rushed in, battered cup held out like a hawk’s pinion. The shouts and cheers were deafening. Baglag’s supporters were stacked four deep around the pit. Jugrut saw just a few friendly faces: Liklik and Picknose, Dagdug and Wibbles, and a few others. They flinched when Baglag struck, feinting to the left and rocking his weight back to the right, splattering the full cup of boiling fat across the king’s chest. Money changed hands, the clatter of silvers drowned out by Jugrut’s yips of pain.

He staggered forward holding his chest, and strips of cooked skin oozed out between his fingers. He took three steps and fell from his stilts to one knee, his face a mask of pain. As he tried to raise himself, the scepter snapped under his weight, and he dropped face-down in the sand. The crowd erupted in screams, and someone pelted him with the coins he’d lost.

Baglag stretched his hands to the spectators in triumph, his mess of teeth and gums doing a bad impression of a smile. He made a circle of the pit, the ends of his stilts stamping little half-moons in the sand, and dipped his cup deep in the cauldron. He raised it high, and the crowd howled when they saw the sheen of grease running clear down to his elbow. He was flush with victory, too caught up in the glory of his coronation to notice the pain. He made another circuit of the arena to soak up the cheers, then made a show of setting up for the coup de grace.

The king got to his feet and mounted his stilts, swaying a little a few yards from the kettle. Lines of blood and oil ran from his chest and brow. He reached out with the stump of his scepter and took a drunken step forward, away from Baglag. The crowd booed and tossed coins and trash.

His challenger lifted the cup to his lips and mimed taking a sip to general laughter. Then he screwed up his face, set one leg of the stilts against the rock wall, and pushed off at a dead run. Jugrut never saw it coming.

The king swayed forward and stopped his fall at the last moment, jerking back in reflex. His reaction toppled him back, and he fell hard on Baglag’s outstretched stilt. The stilt dropped like the arm of a lever, and Baglag took flight, catapulting headfirst into the black iron kettle. His head and neck snapped forward into the boiling grease with a sound like a suddenly extinguished candle.

The chants and hollers from the crowd died to a worried murmur. In the sudden hush, Baglag’s head splashed up for air, his eyes already cooked egg-white, lips turned back at their comers like fried rashers. 

The king found his feet and planted the splintered end of his scepter into the base of Baglag’s skinny back. There was a grinding snap and a warm rush of blood that soaked his arms up to the shoulders. King Jugrut pushed until the jagged bone sprouted from Baglag’s chest. The challenger shook once more and was still. 

Jugrut tossed the stump up to the roaring crowd and staggered to the gate. It was good to be alive. His stomach fluttered, and he steadied himself against the stones, seeing black spots as he shook his head.

The jailer hurried to the portcullis jangling keys, with a look of terror on his face. This one bet against me, Jugrut thought as the gate rose. He would have his green head by nightfall. It was good to be alive but even better to be king.

* * * * *

The next morning Jugrut sat high above the pass to observe his troops. It was still cool, and the black flies were just beginning to come off the swamp. He had spent the night in painful consultation with the Half-moon’s chirugeon, a blind, old greenskin called “Wack Eye” for his wild strokes with the needle and knife. Wack Eye had patched him up good. The wound to his head was caked in a poultice of pigeon droppings, and his chest was newly furry where a wolf’s pelt had been stitched.

His foot was the real marvel—an enormous pink appendage rested beside its smaller green brother on the warm stone. 

“Five toes!” he said to himself. The knight who’d donated it was on the menu for supper. He wiggled the pink nubs again and laughed. What did the pink-men need with such a luxury of toes? Six inches of splotchy skin was stitched to the green stump with catgut and twine, the whole leg smeared with shiny grease. The brains of a challenger are a sovereign cure, but after his victory Jugrut had shouted that Baglag had no brains at all and had called for the oil he’d cooked in instead. His subjects howled to hear him boast, and the elders reassured themselves that he was a fine king, a born king. He wore his crown again, with its spikes of wolf teeth, and bore a new scepter carved from Baglag’s arm bone.

Far below the goblin position, a line of footmen advanced in slow, yard-by-yard fashion across the muddy flats. They formed a wedge behind a slowly trundling siege wagon, and they walked with shields raised, not taking any chances, no longer surprised to be under attack. The wagon’s big wooden wheels were studded with hobnails for traction in the slime. Even so, the barded dray horses struggled to pull it forward under the weight of a layer of hammered tin that covered the slate roof. Brey had cannibalized half their cook pots for this armor, and his vanguard walked on in moody silence, only their stomachs protesting aloud. A plume-helmed captain rode alongside on a tall courser.

From Jugrut’s vantage, the commander was no larger than a wasp. A glittering wasp with a spear in its tail, he thought. He brought his stumpy fingers up to his eye and mimed a swat. Only a wasp, he thought. A nuisance.

Ten dozen of his brothers were around him on the high mountain perch, the scouts flat on their bellies along the edge. The day was bright and clear. A storm crow settled on the arm of a dead maple and rook-rooked at their backs. When he gave the command, and the sappers dug out their tunnel posts, and the ground swallowed the line of men like a dog taking a snap of meat, there was hardly a sound.

* * * * *

At dawn Wolsey wearily folded away his lead apron and gloves, and went to cool the mold halves in the stream that cut through camp. Gold light poured over the canyon walls and filled the little ravine with a luminance, an ethereal importance that Wolsey couldn’t begin to guess at. He finished and sat down by his bedroll with the cold cast-iron halves, inspecting the mold channels for hints of rust or burnout. Satisfied, he packed them into a canvas sack, rolled it up, and was tying it with twine and looking for the cook fire when he noticed the first goblin.

It was a little one, no bigger than a small dog. It looked so harmless that he forgot all about being frightened. Only its head was visible, a squinty green head that seemed to have sprung up overnight like a misshapen cabbage, square in the center of camp. It turned slightly, and Wolsey saw that the head belonged to a neck, and the neck protruded from a tunnel. Its beady eyes rolled at the sun. Its nose twitched, rabbitlike. Then it dropped back into its hole and was replaced by another, a larger head that popped into place like a children’s atog-in-the-box.

Wolsey gathered his newest miniatures with one numb hand and crept toward his mule, moving to keep a creosote bush between him and the goblins. He didn’t dare make a noise. He mounted and got the bundle stashed in the growing light, and when he turned back, the camp seemed to explode with green-skinned goblins like an instant spring, the ground giving up its secrets in a flash. Dozens of them burst from the ground with their curved knives and set upon the sleeping men with a wild, ululating cry.

The sentries went first, as Wolsey watched, fascinated, like a spectator at an especially bloody lecture. School was in session, and the goblins had much to teach on the subject of war. They were among the men before the first soldier rose, slashing at necks and ankles of sleeping figures. Some carried torches, and as they ran, they set fire to tents, bedrolls, and wagons. Within a minute, the camp was blanketed in dense gray smoke, orange flames licking from every tent and banner-pole. The panicking coursers broke their reins and galloped through the camp, some trailing entrails where a long, curved knife had done its work.

As the men rose and began to retaliate, short, black-fletched arrows peppered their ranks. They screamed as the arrows pierced them, and it only made the killing easier for the goblins in melee, who closed with their wicked knives as wounded men begged for mercy.

Wolsey watched, still half-dreaming, still shocked, as the sergeant appeared at the door of his tent, roaring, blood soaking his cuirass and spattered across his face. He cut down two goblins blocking his way, then a third. He raised his banner and called for his men to rally, and an instant later, his head was shot full of black arrows from a dozen hidden sharpshooters. His banner man threw down his sword and instructed his guard to do the same; they showed their empty hands to the goblins and fell to their knees to surrender, and the leering goblins slit their throats with no more thought than a butcher wringing chickens.

Wolsey drew his dagger and was feeling for the pulse at his elbow when his mule reared and dumped him hard on the rocky ground. His wicker trunk slid off the mule’s flanks like a toboggan, smashing into his chest and knocking the wind out of him. 

He lay there for minutes, maybe hours, his breath harsh and gasping and legs flapping around spinelessly. Finally he pushed the trunk to the side, and it fell open with a crash, spilling ingots and finished models on the ground. Still his breath wouldn’t come. I’m a fish, he thought, remembering summers from his youth, sunfish and pickerel that flapped their lives out on the pier. They’ve turned me into a fish.

Finally his breath returned, and he dimly realized that there were no survivors. Even the squires had been rounded up and slaughtered. His poisoned dagger was just out of reach, and as he stretched for it, he saw that he was covered in drops of bright metal. No, not drops—tin soldiers. His eye settled on a goblin glider that still drooped lines of flash from the mold. He’d pressed a dozen that morning and was proud of how they’d come out. The tiny metal face peeked up from where it had fallen in the rocks, stretched wings no larger than a moth’s. He picked it up. As he admired the work, he felt rough hands on him, jerking his torso upright. A dozen beady black eyes were focused on his.

“There are many more hill over that men,” he squeaked, throat closing up tight. “Men over that hill,” he corrected. As he gestured toward the ravine’s lip, a single tin goblin fell from his shoulder and landed face-up in his lap. There was a pause, and he realized they weren’t listening to his bluff. He closed his eyes and tried to remember the Goblinese he’d studied in secondary school.

“My men,” he began in the tongue-thick tones of their language, “are full of horses. She has one thousand apologies for urinating, so you see. I’ll never return yesterday and do it repeatedly.”

He checked his throat to make sure it wasn’t running blood, and continued, “Your king is my first wife and has bedded us all before. Celebration!”

He peeked out to see how it was going. Dozens more goblins had gathered around him. They hadn’t heard a word of it. Instead, they were picking through his collection of soldiers and fighting over loose pieces on the ground.

Slowly, carefully, Wolsey extended his arm and opened his fist to reveal the tiny glider inside. They gaped. Their eyes literally bulged—something he’d have to note if he lived to write a monograph on this trip. The spears at his neck fell back a little as his captors watched him execute a barrel roll with the tin model. Then, in a stroke of inspiration, he snatched up a pinch of gravel and sent the glider on a bombing run against a collection of tin foot soldiers. He’d never enjoyed such a rapt audience. When the rocks struck home, the goblins hooted and clapped their hands. He began to feel that maybe they were the captives, that he’d captured them somehow with his picayune magic.

“I am making these all in twenty minutes,” he said, once more swooping in for the kill against a mounted knight. “Never have I eaten a batch. They are yours to take, because you are my ugly, husband-less daughters. Let me live, yes!”

They lifted the trunk with surprising care and gathered the soldiers scattered on the canyon floor. Wolsey guided them to his best work: the proud sergeant-at-arms, the stealthy sharpshooter and skirmisher, the outriders on their tall horses. They beamed at each new goblin face that appeared and snarled at the men. Wolsey felt like a primitive shaman, doling out miracles to his obedient tribe.

When the trunk was emptied, he arranged them in careful ranks, and as he had done at the map table when no one was looking, he walked the tiny soldiers forward, issuing orders in a faraway voice, his eyes detached and content. There were no longer any spears on him. As the campsite burned in pillars of oily smoke and the bodies of fifty men grew cold and white, Wolsey and his audience played toy soldiers like a pack of innocent schoolboys.

* * * * *

King Jugrut was having a day. He was almost ready to give up his crown and go back to being a humble knife sharpener for the digging corps, if it meant an end to days like this. There was a problem with the latest batch of powder, and to everyone’s misfortune, he was in a foul temper: his chest itched abominably where the wolf pelt was stitched to his natural skin. The powder was bad, according to the artisans in charge of its manufacture. It was banging goblins before they left the caves—banging, apparently, at the least jostling. A loud fart had set off a cask this afternoon.

Jugrut took two heads in his displeasure and would have taken more, but his scouts interrupted with news of the pink-men. He looked from the scouts down to the prostrate Mukel—Mukel had bet against Jugrut at the last arena. Not heavily, but he’d bet. He reached down, took hold of the artisan’s left ear, and sawed it free with two strokes. He held it up to his lips.

“I have your ear, Mukel. I tell you here—” he pantomimed a stage whisper— “and you hear wherever you are. You obey your king. Throw the junk powder to the pink-men, and make a new batch, or I’ll find a new goblin for your job.”

To Mukel’s credit, he did not cry out but backed from the throne room in silence like a beaten dog. Jugrut rounded on his scouts and motioned for seats with his curved knife, spattering blood on the faces of his advisors.

“Sit and tell King Jugrut.” Blood soaked the steps leading up to the throne, the throne itself, and Jugrut’s robes of office.

The scouts had good news, which was lucky for them. The itching had grown worse as the day passed, and now at midday, it felt as though worms were crawling under his chest. As they talked he scratched the stitches with the point of his knife, but the rounded tip was too dull to get at the deep itch. He scratched anyway, grunting in pleasure even as blood ran down his side.

They had surprised a pink-men scouting party in the foothills and slaughtered them all, with few goblin casualties. Jugrut grinned, and his advisors grinned. The Half-moon goblins agreed on this much: they liked fighting the pink-men. Fighting other goblins was work. In last year’s war against the Blood Fang, both sides lost whole generations in just a few weeks of fighting. They struck a peace to avoid the extinction of both tribes. But pink-men—pink-men stood in line out in the open, they wore noisy armor and rode noisy horses, and by the wisdom of their pink-gods, they couldn’t even see in the dark. Yes, pink-men did what they could to make goblin life easy.

But, the scouts reluctantly added, there was something else. Jugrut sat up and cleaned the point of his knife on his check. The scouts admitted that they’d taken a prisoner. Jugrut frowned at that, and the little runts edged back in their chairs. A special prisoner, they insisted. He made magic dolls that would guarantee the king’s victory. Jugrut was dubious, but he motioned for them to bring in this captive.

The pink-man was ancient and stooped, so feeble the scouts hadn’t thought to bind his hands. He shuffled in so slowly that Jugrut laughed out loud.

“Woman!” he called in his native tongue. “Pink-man is old woman!” His court laughed and pointed.

To Jugrut’s surprise, the pink-man answered in broken Goblin.

“The king is a double old woman to you, sire. You must be twice as happy to meet me, I am more famous even than you.” He made a stiff bow from the waist.

Jugrut’s itch deepened to a burn. He flashed his long curved knife and rose to answer the insult. He shook his head in mock sadness. It was bad enough that they’d disobeyed his orders against taking prisoners, but this old pink-man had insulted him in his own throne room. First the prisoner, he thought, then the scouts who’d brought him. He might saddle them with the bad powder and kick them off the cliff. Or make them fight worgs in the pit. It was shaping up to be a busy day.

But as he approached the pink-man, he looked over to make sure the scouts understood they were next, and quick as a shot, the prisoner took the dagger from his hand. Before Jugrut could call for his guard, the old man knelt and offered a long, bright-steel dagger in return. The pommel was tipped by a clear stone the size of his thumb, and the blade ended in a bluish tint—the same color the Half-moons called their own; exactly the same shade as his kingly robes. 

Jugrut was too shocked to be angry. Why does this prisoner have a weapon? his mind thundered. But look at the weapon, his eyes said. He reached out and took the outstretched blade in one hand. His guard came running in, and he stopped them with a look. The balance was perfect, the blade light and strong. One thing the pink-men did well, they made wonderful steel. He had always wanted a fine steel blade for his own, not a plain battle weapon but something polished for court. And it was just the right length to find that itch—he dug into the line of sutures on his chest with the blue tip and sighed happily as the raw flesh seemed to go numb where it touched. A fine gift.

“My shield-brother!” he called to the court. “My pink-man brother!” He had already decided to kill the old man later, but for now, Jugrut was content to watch as the pink-man paraded a fabulous army of tiny soldiers before his eyes. And they were impressive. The toy goblins were so detailed, the king had to remind himself they weren’t living creatures.

Still, he had more pressing matters to attend to. Jugrut sat back. and scratched all around the pelt line and nodded distractedly at each new miracle the pink-man set before him. Even as his head went light, he smiled and scratched.

* * * * *

They came running with curing draughts, but the poison did its work quickly—his breathing was shallow and labored, and after a few seconds, he never breathed again.

As the court gathered around their stricken king, Wolsey packed his toys back into their trunk, a smile across his thin lips, already sizing up the king’s robes against his own stooped frame. In the end, they had to cut three fingers before the dead king’s hand would release that perfect, blue-tipped blade.

Two days later, King Wolsey tipped his crown forward and winced at the pain in his hand. The entire arm from elbow to fingertip was scalded red, and where the blisters popped, a clear fluid leaked onto his deep blue robes of office. He hadn’t trusted old Wack Eye to touch the wound. When that pretender Picknose was dead—Wolsey’s stilt rammed clear through his chest—he’d wrapped the bum himself after soaking it in any icy underground pool. It wasn’t quite right to leave the challenger’s brains untouched, but Wolsey made it clear that a lot would be different under his rule, beginning with this business with the brains.

The pain aside, he was enjoying his first morning of court immensely. After instructing the artisans on how to derive a stable form of yellow sulfur from ore, he turned his attention to foreign relations. This morning his scouts brought word that the last of the human force was breaking camp, headed east. He had suspected they’d leave without him, but he was still surprised at the depth of his anger—they were leaving without him, leaving him for dead! He got over it quickly: he didn’t plan to return in any case.

“King Wol-zhee?” his advisor prompted. It was the closest they got to a proper pronunciation, but it would come in time. His own Goblinese had progressed in leaps. He smiled at the busy goblins—his subjects, he reminded himself—who thronged his throne room, cheerily hammering away at the work tables he’d put in.

Molten metal ran down a stone channel into a series of grooves that distributed the alloy into a dozen identical molds. Today it was horses. Tomorrow they’d tackle foot soldiers and archers. Perched on the arm of his throne was a tiny tin model of a bearded man, bent with age, who carried a spyglass and a sheaf of paper. A tiny crown topped its hairless head.

An enormous battlefield map filled the floor around his throne, with every detail of the canyon and swamp laid out to scale. Wolsey motioned the scouts and advisors around the map and began placing soldiers: Brey’s force in regular ranks, his own in a labyrinthine web around the canyon’s largest dogleg, where the swamp widened to a morass of knee-deep slime.

As he talked, the soldiers took on a life of their own, now charging straight into the canyon’s throat, now feinting north or south. The battle lines advanced and retreated like waves on a beach. The sharpshooters plucked their tiny short bows, skirmishers screened the advance of grenade troops, gliders in the vanguard shattered the siege wagons and heavy horse and led the wild hand-fighters into melee. It ended in ten moves, and even the goblin elders—the old greenskins who’d seen a hundred battles—even the chief advisors looked on in respectful silence. Brey’s army was shattered in six pieces, like a remote archipelago surrounded by endless green seas. Each island was cut off, isolated, surrounded. Doomed.

It had elements of Eduarde, and the spirit was all Phorodotus and Wells, but this plan, the finest of his life, worthy of a First Chair, worthy of statues and portraits, this plan would never have seen paper in the city. It was a mountain plan, a thing of the goblins themselves. He set his blistered red hand on the map, finger hovering above a single mounted figure. They’d done the cast just last night, and it was good work. You could almost make out the aristocratic sneer on that narrow face, the swagger stick tucked under the arm.

“Kill all the rest, but bring this one to me.”

They understood. They never questioned, never feared or doubted.

“The one who captures him will be shaped in metal. That goblin will be a soldier of the Half-moons forever.” He touched the crest on the warmaster’s helm and smiled as his army howled around him. It was good to be king.

* * * * *

Warmaster Jaxle Brey groaned in agony as he sat up. His stomach leaked blood from a long, jagged cut that refused to close. The wrappings soaked through as quickly as he bound them, and he had given up, content to feel the blood growing sticky, clotting to his shirt. If he had a light he could try to burn the edges, maybe staunch the bleeding. But it was dark, pitch black, and the only sound was the blood pumping in his ears and his own uneven breathing.

He couldn’t understand what had happened. Even when he had been in it, even now as he remembered every scene, he couldn’t make sense of what had happened. They had packed up the camp at dawn and marched east behind siege wagons and heavy horse. He had his archers in the very center of the formation, protected on all sides. Outriders scoured the canyon ahead to a half mile, and trumpeted back the all-clear every five minutes. They were taking the canyon, by god, and the greenskins be damned. He felt good. He felt like a conqueror.

The gliders came first, but they had been ready. A hundred archers had taken aim at the skies, and a hundred long shafts had sped to meet the swarming attack. A few had dropped, and the rest had passed overhead without loosing their cargo. 

Easy as kicking a dog, Brey had mused to himself. Easy as putting on a crown. His officers muttered that they had been just scouts, but he had waved them away.

An hour later, the front line of siege wagons had dropped into a long trench that had opened up as they stepped onto it, and he had winced to hear the screams of the broken animals. Somehow the trench had been rigged to hold the weight of a single light horse—the outriders had crossed it without a hitch. But even for this, they had been ready. Carpenters had raced to the vanguard with their lumber and set about building bridges. It had been slow work. Brey had looked around at his gleaming force in the afternoon sun. They had sparkled like cut stones, like new-minted coins. He had heard a whistling noise then and turned in time to see the next wave of gliders come sweeping around the canyon’s dogleg. Only then had he noticed that his outriders were late with their signal. 

The gliders had come in low, barely thirty feet off the ground, each pilot clutching a heavy rock in his arms for ballast. Brey had called for archers, who were bunched behind the formation of foot soldiers, too far back to see the low-flying targets. They had fired anyway, and the deadly missiles had zipped through the ranks of his knights before he could scream for them to stop. Brey had watched, helpless, as the gliders dove onto his siege wagons and his heavy vanguard like falcons. When they had released their lethal stones, the sudden buoyancy seemed to rocket them into the air, and they had disappeared above the canyon walls.

The horses and wagons were decimated. Each attack had found its costly mark in the roof of a wagon or the back of a barded courser. When it was over, rocks had staved in all but two of the wagon roofs, and the cavalry had lost half their number. The rest had been too spooked to advance, and Brey had been forced to order the heavy foot soldiers to take the vanguard as they crossed their makeshift bridges across the trench.

That was not the worst. It had gotten much worse after that. In the middle of the dogleg, where the swamp narrowed his advance to twenty across, grenadiers had come out of hiding and boomed into his right flank, while at the same instant, hidden sharpshooters on both cliff walk had let loose with a fusillade of their cursed black shafts. Brey had boomed orders in a rush of excitement—now this was battle, this was what he trained for! But he quickly found that the grenadiers were only a bluff, and the men he had sent to them had been separated from the main force by skirmishers and cut to ribbons. Rock sleds had slammed down into his rear, and panicked horses and men had rushed forward, turning his disciplined formation into a milling crowd.

Everywhere he turned, a new assault had opened up. More goblins than he dreamed were in this world had poured from their caves and hiding places, and lit into the left flank wailing horrible nonsense. The gliders had returned, this time sweeping in from the rear and raking his archers with grapeshot. The sharpshooters kept up their pace, and it had seemed the sky rained black arrows. His men had screamed and died, and with their screams in his ears, Jaxle Brey had turned his big courser westward, toward King’s Head and safety, and he had ridden for home as if all the demons of Hell were on his tail. He had cleared the first line of foot soldiers, their eyes widening in sudden realization and surprise even as the greenskins ripped into them. He had covered only ten more feet, and a tripwire had tightened at his horse’s knees. His last thought, as the ground came up to meet him, had been his relief that he wouldn’t have to explain all this to the Lord-Protector.

He had no memories of his wound or of being taken prisoner. No idea where he was or for how long he’d been here. He guessed that the jagged tear in his belly was from the fall. When he woke in this darkness, it was already festering. Without a healer, he would die of sepsis in days.

Even now his whole chest felt hot and feverish. With rising dread he pulled the wrappings away from the wound, and his fingers met a slick rope of intestine poking into the air. He breathed deeply and made to push it back inside, but it was too much. He gagged, and his vision went white, and he slumped back into darkness. Some time later, he woke to the sound of keys in a cell door.

“Spare me please … a ransom for my return. They’ll give you whatever you want.” His own voice shocked him with its frank cowardice, its pleading. He had heard that voice before, from captured officers up to their knees in their own guts, as he laughed and asked his questions. The light that poured through the open door was blinding. A small figure stood in silhouette—a single goblin. Brey’s tongue felt like a slab of hard leather as he strained to wrap it around the creature’s unfamiliar language.

“I … see all your … bigs … ?” He managed. He cursed himself for not studying harder. The language was on the curriculum at the Lord’s Academy, but by his second year, Jaxle had bullied a younger boy into writing his assignments for him. He’d never learned any Goblinese but the curse words.

“Escape me . . . yesterbody .. . one at a time .. . dog-waste?” He tried. The goblin did not speak. It stepped into the gloom, and the warmaster saw it was carrying something—a sword? He cringed back against the wall, crying out with the pain of his wound. But the goblin only chuckled at his fear and stepped closer. Brey was dimly aware of the sound of many voices outside his cell, the smell of a fire, of cooking oil.

“King Wol-zhee,” it began, better than he’d expected with the human words, “begs a moment of your time.” It dropped the objects it was carrying at his feet and stepped back. It grinned a wide, toothy grin. On the floor was a pair of short wooden stilts and a metal cup. Jaxle Brey sobbed and began strapping the stilts to his feet, his middle weeping blood. Outside he heard a mob of goblins, cheering and shouting, and Wolsey’s voice in Goblinese, urging them on, shouting above the din like a conqueror.

“Don’t be sad,” the goblin told Jaxle Brey. “Today you may be king.” And it turned back for the door.