The Long War

45

‘YOU HAVE MORE Kinks-ss?’

‘Some,’ whispered Bill through the radio.

‘Give.’

‘No.’

‘What is your name?’ Joshua asked at last.

The kobold grinned. At least, his teeth grinned. ‘My name to menn is Finn McCool.’

‘I thought of that,’ Bill said. ‘Seemed to fit.’

‘I give no name for menn. Not my name.’

‘Finn McCool will do,’ Joshua said.

‘People of the pathless-ss world stranger than trollen,’ Finn McCool said, studying Joshua and his bits of kit. ‘How live? No weaponn?’

‘Oh, I have a weapon.’

‘But one only. You are pathless-ss. We are many.’

‘Many? Where? Where are the rest of you?’

The kobold held out his hand. ‘You give. This-ss the way, as all know. You give, I talk.’

‘Ignore him,’ Bill said. ‘We’ve given already. He’s just trying to drive a hard bargain.’

Joshua studied the kobold. ‘You trade, right? You trade with other humans?’

‘Other humans-ss. And with other, not-humann, not kobold-ss . . .’

‘With other types of humanoid? Other races?’

‘And they trade with others-ss. Others-ss, ff-rom far world-ss.’

‘How far?’

‘Worlds-ss where there iss no moon. S-ssun different colour . . .’

‘Horse shit,’ said Bill. ‘No such worlds. He’s just trying to wheedle more out of you, Joshua. Aren’t you, Finn McCool? You can’t shit a shitter, you little shit. Listen, Joshua, you have to understand what we’re dealing with here. These are slippery little buggers. They get around quick, they seem to be able to use soft places, they talk all the time, and they trade, with us and each other. But they’re not human. They don’t do business the way we do, grubbing for wealth, making as much profit as we can. They’re more like—’

‘Collectors?’

‘Something like that, yeah. Like nerds who collect comic books. Or like magpies, fascinated by human stuff, shiny gewgaws that they can steal and stare at but they never understand. There’s no logic to it, Joshua. It’s just about the stuff they want, that’s all. Once you understand that they’re not hard to handle. Big fecking ugly magpies with trousers on. That’s you, Finn McCool.’

The kobold just grinned.

‘Well, I guess you know why we’re here, Finn McCool,’ Joshua said. ‘What we want. Where are the trolls?’

‘You give—’

‘Cough up, you little gobshite,’ Bill snapped.

Finn McCool hissed, and said grudgingly, ‘Trollen in here. But not here.’

Joshua sighed. ‘Textbook enigmatic. Any time you want to jump in, Bill—’

‘Finn McCool. Are you saying the trolls are hiding out in a Joker?’

‘Not here.’

‘A Joker, but not this Joker. As I guessed. But which one?’

Finn McCool seemed to Joshua to have no intention of answering.

‘That’s it?’ Joshua said. ‘That’s all we get out of you in return for that magnificent, umm, old tape?’

Suddenly McCool stood straight. He sniffed the air with his flat, chimp-like muzzle, and laughed.

‘Joshua,’ Bill said urgently. ‘I detect nine, correction ten – no, eleven hotspots converging on you. I now have visual confirmation. Hmm.’

Joshua spun around. A morning mist swirled now between the trees, and the stream was lost to view. Anything could be out there. Water dripped off the leaves of the trees. ‘What do you mean, hmm? What do they look like?’

‘Well . . . Purposeful.’

There was a flash of teeth, Finn McCool faded for an instant, and was gone. Joshua could have been wrong, but it seemed that McCool’s grin was the last bit of him to go.

And out of the mists . . .

The rising sun sent spears of reddish light across the grassland, and the altitude of this summit lent a faint chill to the breeze. A few shreds of mist stirred down among the trees that marked the stream.

And there were shapes among the trees.

They began as mere suggestions of motion in the mist, and then solidified. The general effect was of a wheel slowing from turbine speeds to stillness. When they were still—

They were not much taller than a man, but the beanpole thinness gave an exaggerated impression of height. Their skin was greyish, and they wore their ash-blonde hair Afro-style. They could have passed muster in some of the badly lit discos Joshua had, if rarely, attended in his youth back in Madison.

Except for the ears. Which were large and pointed, and constantly flicking back and forth as though seeking the faintest sounds. And except for the eyes, that glowed a very faint green. They carried long thin double-bladed weapons of wood – swords, for want of a better word. They weren’t yelling, or waving their weapons. They just looked quietly determined.

Any child could have put a name to them. Elves. Not relatively friendly music-loving conversationalists like Finn McCool. The elves of nightmare.

And they were closing on Joshua, from every direction.

Joshua had nowhere to run. He had encountered various species of elves before. He knew that stepping wouldn’t help, not when faced with an enemy that was a better stepper than he was. His gun was somewhere in the scuffed-up sleeping bag. Only the radio was in reach, a plastic block the size of his fist. Not much of a weapon . . .

The first elf to reach him brought back its sword for a killing arc – and hesitated, as if relishing the moment.

Joshua, frozen to the spot, stared back. Close to, the creature looked like something out of a book on prehistory, though a Neanderthal would have considered it ugly. Its face was a network of wrinkles. It wore a short fur tunic, some sort of knapsack, and an expression of calculation. Maybe it was hesitating as it tried to work out which way he was going to step, so it could follow him and kill him anyway.

All this in a heartbeat. Then Joshua’s reflexes took over.

He ducked, grabbed the radio, and brought it around in a rapid swing that was interrupted by the elf’s jaw. Bits of glass and plastic erupted in a shower of golden sparks. As the elf staggered back, Joshua’s leg came up for the classic strike favoured by women’s self-defence teachers everywhere, and a high-pitched squeal of agony added to mankind’s tiny stock of anatomical knowledge of Long Earth humanoids.

And suddenly there was action all around Joshua.

McCool was back, he had brought more kobolds, and they were already fighting. The cavalry, Joshua thought with a rush of gratitude. But this was a cavalry that stepped, like its opponents. Suddenly figures from both subspecies were flashing past Joshua’s view, like fragments of nightmare.

Joshua got out of there. He ran head-down for the ladder which came dangling from the descending ship. He had to knock one fighter out of the way; he couldn’t tell if it was a good guy or a bad guy.

Only when he got to the ladder, and, with the security of an alloy rung in his hand, was already rising in the air and out of the battle, did he look back down.

The elves favoured swords, while the kobolds tended to fight barehanded – which showed rather more intelligence in Joshua’s view, because if you were grappling with your opponent he couldn’t step without taking you with him. Besides, the kobolds seemed to have elevated unarmed combat to the point where weapons would merely get in the way. He saw one kobold vanish momentarily as a blade nearly beheaded him, then reappear, grab the sword arm and with balletic grace send a kick into the elf’s chest that must have killed immediately. As usual with a humanoid fight, it wasn’t a battle so much as a series of private duels. If a fighter was victorious he sought out another opponent, but would be quite oblivious to the fact that a colleague was being backed into a corner by overwhelming odds.

And then Joshua saw Finn McCool downed by a wooden sword thrust through his arm. Maybe he tried to step, but he was stunned, confused. His elf opponent dodged a disembowelling swipe from McCool’s horny toes, and withdrew the sword for a second thrust.

Again this elf paused before the moment of the kill. His back was to Joshua.

And Joshua had a chance to intervene.

‘Damn it!’ Joshua let go of the ladder and his chance of safety, dropped heavily to the ground, picked up a fallen branch, and ran across. It wasn’t that Finn McCool had endeared himself to Joshua. But if Joshua had to choose, he’d take the side of someone who hadn’t actually tried to kill him. Had, indeed, come back to fight on his side.

Still running, he hit the elf across the neck as hard as he could. Joshua had anticipated a satisfying thunk of timber on flesh. Instead there was a soft necrotic splat, as the rotten branch disintegrated in an explosion of fungus spores and angry beetles. The elf, totally unharmed, turned slowly, its face puckered in astonishment.

Finn McCool’s good hand flashed out once, twice, and where it hit there was a sharp crack of bone. The elf folded up on itself, and stepped away before it died.

Blood was dripping from McCool’s arm, but he wasn’t paying it any attention. McCool stood up, face-to-face with Joshua – and Joshua realized that something had gone very wrong. ‘Pathless-ss one! I kill you many!’

The war around them was ceasing. Elves and kobolds alike had paused in mid-slaughter to watch them. ‘Now look—’

Finn McCool flung back his head and screamed. The flying kick he launched could have killed Joshua in a second.

But Joshua had already set off running, heading for that ladder again. He threw himself into the air and grabbed a rung, and to his credit, Bill raised the ship immediately. Joshua looked down from a few yards up, to see Finn McCool sprawled cursing under a tree, his injured arm leaking blood.

Then Joshua was rising up through the sparse canopy and into the sunlight, and the montane forest, the messy, sprawling battleground, receded from view.

He climbed up the rest of the ladder, through the hatch and into the sanity of the gondola, stood up, and cracked his head on the ceiling. He started pulling up the ladder in great tangled armfuls.

‘That is you, isn’t it, Joshua?’ Bill asked anxiously. ‘I’ve been out of touch since you used the radio to bust that elf’s jaw—’

‘Just go, go!’

Only when the ladder was up did he let himself sag down on to a couch, fighting for breath. There was no sound up here but the squeaks and groans from the gasbag as it warmed up in the morning’s heat. Below him the Shillelagh’s shadow drifted peacefully across the forest roof, as if all sorts of hell weren’t going on down there in the gloom.

He kept seeing Finn McCool’s face, a contorted Noh mask of fury and hatred. ‘I saved his life. McCool. Somehow that made me a deadly enemy. Where was the logic in that?’

‘It’s kobold logic, Joshua. Like human honour, but in a distorting mirror. You shamed him by saving him, when he was supposed to be saving you. You want to go down and have a bit of an old chat about it?’

‘Just get us out of here.’

The forest below blinked away.