Chapter 2: Goblins, Always Goblins

Dawn came grey and wet over Eastbrook. Erlich walked the byres with Godwin at his shoulder and the reeve a step behind, and Tomas trailing them like a man afraid the dark would take him back if he let the rangers out of his sight.

The goat-pen told the same story the slate had. Gate whole on its hinges. Mud scored deep with drag-marks, broad and even, running clean through and down toward the river meadow. Erlich crouched and laid his spread hand inside one of the scars. It was wider than his fingers reached. He stood and said nothing.

"The byre," he said.

Tomas led them. Same marks there. Door unbroke. Stall empty. Godwin walked the line of it to the stockade ditch and on past the fence, and came back shaking his head.

"No burrow," he said. "No hole, no tunnel. The marks run out into the grass and just stop."

"Goblins don't need burrows," Erlich said.

Godwin looked at him. "Goblins dig, Captain. It's what they do. And these marks are twice too wide for any goblin drag."

"Then it was a lot of goblins."

He said it the way he always said it. Goblins were the answer Erlich kept ready for anything that moved in the dark — the cheap answer, the one that let him put his hand to work. He had blamed goblins for a barn fire once, and a dead sheep on a hill, and a missing child who turned up a week later with a tinker's wife. Erlich did not much care when he was wrong about goblins. Goblins were common, and common things were the work of common men, and Erlich had no wish to be anything but a common man with a spear.

Haden laid the slate out on the fence-rail. The tally was neat, in his careful hand. Three goats. Two cows. A horse. Two men — the Dellwood boy and old Brennan. Brennan's wife had died too, of the fright, but she had not been taken, so Haden had not set her among the gone.

"All night-takings," Haden said. "All the same marks. No blood, no body, no bone. Not so much as a hide left."

"Prey taken whole," Godwin said.

"Goblins take whole prey," Erlich said.

Godwin let it lie. He knew his captain.

Tomas had been standing by the fence-post, working something loose with his thumbs. He held it out. His hand was shaking.

"Found it the morning after," he said. "Caught in the post, where the marks went through."

It was a scale. A single scale, dull and thick, curved like a shallow bowl, bigger than a man's spread hand. Grey-brown, the color of river mud, smooth on the outside and rough on the inside where it had torn away from whatever bore it. Erlich took it, turned it once. Heavy for its size, and cold.

He did not look at it long. He put it in his pouch and drew the string tight.

"Bone, maybe," he said. "A bit of old harness. Could be anything."

Godwin opened his mouth and shut it again.

"Goblins," Erlich said, and that was the end of the scale, for now.

They worked the village through the morning. Haden took them to every yard that had lost a beast or a man, and every yard told the same tale — the dark, the silence, the broad scars in the mud running off to nowhere. The villagers watched Erlich the way people watch a man they have paid too much for. They had sent for a dragon-slayer, and they had gotten a tall lean man who would not meet their eyes and kept saying goblins.

Godwin slipped off after the third yard and went to walk the stockade edge alone. He came back at midday with mud on his boots and a set face.

"Whatever made these tracks is heavy," he said. "Heavy and low. The prints aren't footprints — they're belly-marks, with drag-scars behind. Come and see." He took them to the ditch. In the soft mud there was a long smooth furrow, wide as a man's body, the drag-marks running down the middle of it. "Nothing walked here. Nothing with legs. It pulled itself along."

Erlich looked at it. "Goblins carry things," he said. "A band of them could drag a goat. Could drag a man—"

"Not a cow, Captain. Not whole, and not without a drop of blood. And not leaving a furrow like that."

Erlich said nothing. He did not like furrows made by things with no legs. He put it off his face and turned back toward the hall.

Leofric found them there at evening. He had been gone all day and came in smelling of smoke and cheap ale, with a grin on his average face that said he had found something worth the telling.

"Tavern," he said, by way of excuse. Erlich waved him on.

"The baron keeps a wizard," Leofric said. "A hedge wizard, lodged up in the keep. Master Vaelin. The villagers don't like him. They say his tower stinks of bone and smoke, and that he works at night, and that servants go in and out carrying jars."

"Wizards always have bones," Godwin said. "They collect them. Trade goods."

"I know what wizards are," Leofric said. "I'm telling you what the village says. They say necromancy. They say he's the reason the dead don't stay dead and the missing don't stay found."

Erlich looked at him. "And the river?"

Leofric's grin widened. "There's a river, Captain. And across the river, they say, there's orc-sign. Old camps. Scraps of meat. The herdsmen won't drive their beasts down to the lower ford anymore."

A field of suspects. Erlich stood by the hearth and counted them on his fingers, the way a man counts coins. Goblins — his answer, the cheap one. The wizard — the village's answer, the frightened one. And orcs across the river — the answer a soldier gives, the one that smelled of war.

"Goblins," he said again, but quieter this time, and not quite like he believed it.

He pulled his cloak about him. Outside, the dark was gathering once more over Eastbrook, and in his pouch the heavy scale sat where he had put it, forgotten already, waiting to be read.