I did not go that day. I am a careful man, and a careful man does not follow a goblin into the deep woods because she whined at him.
I went the next morning instead, which I am told is the same thing with better paperwork.
I packed the way I would pack for a business trip I suspected would go badly: the dagger, the tool roll, two days of smoked meat, a skin of water, the ledger, and the marionette tucked into the front of my hoodie. Clara was the problem. She is a hundred and ten centimeters tall and does not fold. I could not leave her. I had not left her for a single night since the wall opened, and I was not going to start now on account of a goblin with ambitions. So I made a sling from the boar hide and strapped her to my back, upright, facing behind me.
"You're on rear guard," I told her.
She took the post with her usual composure.
Bead nearly burst. She trotted ahead and came back, ahead and came back, circling me in tight, delighted loops and making the bright kee, kee call until I asked her, quite seriously, to stop. She did not stop. She did not know what stop meant unless I said it with my hand up, and my hands were full.
We walked north.
The forest changed as we went.
Near my house the trees were old and patient, wide-spaced, with ferns between them. Further north they crowded closer, and the ground climbed, and the air began to smell of stone. On the second day the canopy thinned and I saw, for the first time in a year and a half, a long gray line of mountains along the horizon. Their peaks were white. I stood and stared at them until Bead tugged at my sleeve.
I had known, in the abstract, that the world went on past my creek. I had not believed it.
On the afternoon of the third day, we came to a ravine.
A long split in the land ran east to west, with a dry streambed at the bottom, and on its far side, through a screen of birches, I could see a strip of packed earth worn into two deep ruts. A road. I knew what ruts like that meant. Wheels, and plenty of them.
Bead did not go toward the road. She scrambled down into the ravine and along it to a place where a huge dead oak had fallen across the gap, roots and all, leaving a hollow underneath like the mouth of a cave. She ducked into the dark, and her voice came back to me, muffled and ecstatic.
Kee. Kee. Kee-kee-kee.
I got down on my knees, with Clara's head bumping the roots above me, and crawled in after her.
I need to describe what I found in there carefully, because I have never felt two things so strongly at the same time.
The first thing I felt was joy.
The hollow was a treasure house. Not of gold. Of things. Heaped in drifts against the walls of earth, glinting in the light from the gap, there were tools: hammers with their heads worn bright, a set of chisels in a leather wrap, a hand drill with a crank, pliers far finer than mine. There were spools of wire, copper and iron and one, small and precious, of something silver. There were boxes of nails and tacks. A whetstone. A little brass vise. A coil of fine chain. A broken clock with its back off and its gears shining like a cutaway of a heart. A wooden box of tiny screws, each with its own groove.
In one corner, half buried in leaves, there was a music box. I wound it with trembling fingers, and it played four bright, crooked notes before it caught on a bent tooth and stopped.
I sat there in the dirt with a pair of fine-nosed pliers in one hand and a spool of silver wire in the other, and I could have wept. For a year and a half I had been making joints out of hide and patience. I had counted eleven feet of wire every morning like a miser counts his coins. And here was a craftsman's paradise, hidden under a dead tree, and a goblin had led me to it because I had seemed to like shiny things.
The second thing I felt came a moment later, and it was colder.
None of this had been dropped. None of it had been lost. The tools had makers' marks stamped into their handles: a small anvil inside a circle, the same mark, again and again. The boxes had been pried open. There was a strap of leather harness, cut through, with a buckle still on it. And at the very back of the hollow, under the music box, there was a heavy cloak of thick gray wool, folded small, with a long, dark, dried stain across its shoulder.
I put the pliers down.
Bead was rolling in a drift of nails like a dog in grass, purring. She looked up at me, delighted, and held out a tack, the way you offer a guest the best seat.
"Bead," I said quietly. "Where did all of this come from?"
She did not understand me. She never did. She gave me the tack.
I already knew the answer. I had seen the road.
I heard them before I saw them.
It began as a sound I almost did not recognize, because I had not heard it in so long: voices. Not goblin chatter. Words. Deep, rough, carrying voices, and laughter, and the creak and jingle of harness, and the slow, heavy grind of wheels in ruts. Then a song, bellowed by several voices at once and very badly, about a woman named Hilde and the size of her anvil.
I went rigid in the hollow. Bead stopped purring. Her ragged ears came up.
I crept to the gap under the roots and looked out through the birches.
The caravan was coming along the road from the east. There were four wagons, each pulled by a pair of shaggy ponies, piled high under oiled canvas. Around them walked a dozen figures, and for a long moment my brain refused to tell me what they were.
They were short. Not one of them would have come higher than my chest. But they were broad as doors, with arms like legs of lamb, and every single one of them had a beard. Long beards, braided beards, beards tucked into belts, beards with iron rings in them. They wore mail, and carried axes, and two of them had crossbows on their backs.
Above them floated tags.
Dwarf Lv. 19 Warrior
Dwarf Lv. 13 Smith
Dwarf Lv. 18 Tinker
I had never seen a tag with a class in it before. Not on anything that walked on two legs and sang about anvils. My heart started hammering so hard that I could hear it.
People.
I did not have time to feel it properly, because Bead squeezed past me to see.
She was curious. That is all she ever was. She stuck her head out of the gap between the roots, into the sunlight, to look at the noise, and one of the dwarves at the front of the caravan, a scarred one with a red beard bound in three iron rings, turned his head and saw her.
He stopped singing.
"GOBLIN!"
Everything happened very quickly after that.
The caravan did not scatter. It turned, To face. Axes came off backs. The two crossbows came up. The scarred dwarf vaulted the ditch at the side of the road with a speed I would not have believed from something built like a stove, and three more came behind him, roaring, and they were across the birch screen and sliding down into the ravine in a shower of stones before I had finished drawing breath.
And then they saw me.
I was crouched at the mouth of the hollow, with a doll strapped to my back and a goblin beside me. I do not know exactly what I looked like to them. A thin, bearded, wild man in a filthy black hoodie, I suppose. A lunatic in the wilderness. A man in a cave with a monster.
The scarred dwarf skidded to a halt with his axe raised. His eyes went from me to Bead. I watched his face change, from fury to confusion, and then to something hard and certain.
He had decided what he was looking at. A human, alone, cornered by a goblin.
"Get behind me, lad!" he roared. "Down!"
The crossbow on the bank above went thock.
The bolt hit the root an inch from Bead's head and stuck there, humming. She shrieked, a high, terrified, little sound, and I saw her yellow eyes go to me, wide, for one half of one second. As though I might tell her what to do.
I did not say anything.
I did not say stop, and I did not put my hand up, and I did not say her name. I knelt there, frozen, with the words in my mouth, and I let the second crossbow come up.
She ran.
She went out the far end of the hollow and up the side of the ravine on all fours, scrambling, sending leaves and stones down behind her, and the second bolt went thock into the earth where her foot had been, and then she was over the lip and into the trees and gone, and two of the younger dwarves went bellowing after her. Enjoying the story? Read on at novelping.com.
"Leave it!" the scarred one shouted. "Leave it! There'll be fifty more in those trees. Back to the wagons!"
They came back, muttering. One of them spat.
And I knelt in the dirt and looked at the place where she had been, and I thought of the night she had sat on my step with a little carved goblin in her lap. I thought of the comb. I thought of my apology that she had not understood, and I understood, with a terrible plainness, that I had just done something to her that I would never be able to explain, either.
I had chosen. I had not even had to say a word.
"You all right, lad?"
The scarred dwarf was standing over me. Up close he smelled of smoke and iron and pony, and he had a face like a split log, and kind, small, deep-set eyes.
I opened my mouth. Nothing came out. I had not spoken to a person who could answer me in five hundred days, and my throat did not seem to remember how.
"He's in shock," said someone. "Look at him. Look at his hands."
"Gods, look at the size of him. How long's he been out here?"
I understood every word.
It took me a moment to notice, because it felt so natural. Then it struck me, and I nearly laughed out loud in the middle of the ravine. They were not speaking Japanese. I could hear that much. The sounds coming out of their beards were round and rough and utterly foreign, nothing like any language I had ever heard on television or in a classroom. But the meaning arrived in my head clear and whole, the way the Registry's panels did.
And somehow I knew, before I even tried, that it would work the other way too. That if I opened my mouth and spoke plain Japanese, they would hear their own tongue, and no one would frown, or ask me to repeat myself, or look at me the way people look at a foreigner.
I felt something in my chest go loose and bright. For a year and a half I had talked to a doll, a marionette, and a goblin who could not understand a single syllable. I had narrated my whole life into silence. And here, at last, were people, and the world had quietly arranged for us to understand each other.
I decided, in the same breath, that I would tell no one. Not about the wall, or the apartment, or the country I came from. If no one could hear that my words were strange, then no one needed to know that I was. I had been a curiosity for long enough. I wanted, very badly, to simply be a man.
I tucked the thought away for later and tried to make my mouth work again.
"Kenji," I managed at last. It came out as a croak. "My name is Kenji."
"Kenji." The scarred dwarf tried it out like a new tool. "Hagen Stonefist. Captain of this lot. What in the Deep are you doing in a goblin hole, Kenji?"
I had said my name in Japanese. He had heard it in his own language. Neither of us blinked, and I had to bite the inside of my cheek to keep from grinning like a fool.
I opened my mouth to answer, and found that nobody was waiting for one.
Hagen was looking at me the way you look at a dog that has been left out in the rain. So were the others. One of the younger dwarves had taken off his helmet and was holding it against his chest. Another had gone a little pale.
"Gods," Hagen said quietly. "How long did they have you, lad?"
I did not understand the question.
"A year and a half," I said. It was the only number I had. "About."
A murmur went through the ravine. The gray-bearded dwarf with the limp closed his eyes.
"Year and a half," someone repeated. "In a goblin hole."
"Look at him. He's skin and bone."
"He's still got his wits, at least. Mostly." That was Bolli, eyeing the doll on my back. "I think."
"That one that ran," said the young smith, low. "Did you see it? That was a she."
There was a silence in the ravine of a very particular kind, the silence of a dozen people deciding, all at once and in exactly the same way, not to say the next thing.
Hagen put a heavy hand on my shoulder and squeezed it. He did not look at my face. "You don't have to tell us anything," he said. "Not a word. Not now, not ever. You hear?"
It took me an embarrassingly long time to work out what they thought had happened to me. When I did, I felt the heat climb all the way up my neck to my ears, and I very nearly laughed, and then very nearly wept, and in the end did neither.
I should have corrected them. I knew it even then. But a correction would have meant explaining the house, and the step, and the beads, and the eight small figures who came every evening to watch a wooden man trip over his own feet. It would have meant explaining Bead.
So I said nothing. I let them think it. A man rescued from a goblin hole is a story people understand. A man who keeps goblins for company is not.
"Right," Hagen said, a little too loudly, and stood. "Lads! Lads! Get down here and see what the little beasts have been sitting on."
They emptied the hollow onto the floor of the ravine, and as each thing came out, the dwarves went quieter.
They knew the tools. They knew the marks. A young smith picked up the chisels in their leather wrap and held them in both hands and did not say anything. Another found the clock and swore under his breath. Then a gray-bearded dwarf with a limp crawled into the back and came out with the cloak, and unfolded it, and the whole ravine went silent.
"That's Orrik's," said the gray-beard. "That's Orrik's cloak. From the spring run."
No one asked what had happened to Orrik.
Hagen sat down on a rock across from me, and wiped his face with his hand.
"Two caravans this year," he said, to no one in particular. They come out of the trees at night, a hundred of the little beasts, and they go for the ponies first. Then the cargo. Anything that shines. Anything with an edge. "
"And worse," said the gray-beard.
"And worse," Hagen agreed. He looked at me, and I saw him decide how much to say. "You've been out here, so maybe you know. Maybe you don't. They don't just steal things, goblins. They take people, too. Women, mostly. Any kind. Dwarf, human, it doesn't matter to them." He paused. "My sister's girl was on the run last spring. We found her six weeks later, in a pit in those woods. She was alive. She doesn't talk anymore."
I could not look at him. I looked at my hands.
"They breed like rats," said the young smith, low and hard. "Kill ten, there's twenty next season. The Hold pays three bits an ear and it's not near enough." He jerked his chin toward one of the others, a youngster with a sparse ginger beard, who had a string hanging from his belt. I did not look at what was on the string. I had already seen enough of its shape. "Bolli's got eleven. Haven't you, Bolli?"
"Twelve," said Bolli, "if that one today counts."
"It ran off, you lump."
"It was going to count."
They laughed. It was a tired laugh, a soldiers' laugh, a laugh with a great deal of grief underneath it, and I sat on the floor of the ravine with my hands between my knees and laughed along with them. I want to be honest about that. I laughed.
I did not tell them about the neighbors. I did not tell them that I had carved a fox for a goblin and that he wore it like a medal, or that eight of them came to my step every evening to watch a wooden man trip over his own feet. I did not tell them about the beads or the bent spoons or the night a goblin with a crooked ear had laughed so hard she fell over backward.
I did not tell them that I had named her.
I do not know if I was protecting her, or myself. I think, at the time, I genuinely did not know the difference.
The dwarf with the gears in her beard found me while the others were loading the wagons.
I had noticed her before, a little apart from the rest, broad and gray-eyed and frowning. Her beard was the color of iron filings, braided into a single thick rope that hung to her belt, and woven into the braid were dozens of tiny brass gears. They clicked softly when she moved. Her tag read:
Dwarf Lv. 18 Tinker
She did not say anything at first. She just stood in front of me and looked, very hard, at Clara.
I had forgotten Clara was there. She was still strapped to my back, upright in her sling, facing the ravine with her glass eyes and her serene painted face. The dwarf walked all the way around me to see her properly, and then she held out a broad, scarred hand.
I unbuckled the sling with clumsy fingers and set Clara down on the stones in front of her.
The dwarf knelt. She did not touch Clara's face, or her hair, or her dress. She went straight to the hip, the left one, the one I had mended with putty the night I fell through a wall. She turned the leg slowly through its arc, feeling for the catch. She bent the knee. She lifted the arm and watched the elbow take the weight. Her brass gears clicked.
"That's not dwarf work," she said.
"No," I said.
"It's not human work, either. Not any human work I've seen." She put her thumb against the hip joint. "Who mended this?"
"I did."
She looked up at me sharply. Then her eyes went above my head, the way people's eyes do when they read a tag, and I knew what she was seeing.
Human Lv. 14 Puppet Maker
Her eyebrows went up into her hairline.
"Puppet Maker," she said. "A crafting class. Out here?" She sat back on her heels and stared at me as though I were a clock with too many hands. "Show me something else."
I took the marionette out of the front of my hoodie and gave it to her.
She turned him over. She tested every joint, the hide ones and the one at the neck with the little twist of wire. She looked at the splinted arm, and at the round pink spot of red ochre on his cheek, and she made a sound in the back of her throat that I could not interpret.
"These hinges are hide," she said.
"I didn't have wire."
"They should have worn through months ago." She flexed the elbow back and forth, and back and forth. "They're tight as the day you made them."
"I picked an effect," I said, without quite meaning to. "Durable Creations."
She looked at me for a long, long time.
"Torvi Greymantle," she said at last, and held out her hand. "Tinker of Khazrund. I build toys, mostly. Music boxes. Clocks with little men who come out and strike the hour." Her mouth twitched. "I've never met another one of us who wasn't a dwarf."
I shook her hand. It was the first hand I had shaken in five hundred days, and it was hard as a tool handle, and warm.
"What's your evolution?" she asked. "At twenty-five."
I blinked. "How did you know I had one?"
"Everyone in a crafting class has one. Mine's Clockwright, and I'm still seven levels shy of it." She snorted. "Twenty-five's a wall, lad. Most never climb it. The ones who do end up running guilds. What does yours say?"
"Magic Puppet Maker," I said. "It's locked. The requirement is to craft a puppet from a magical material." I hesitated. "I don't know what that means. I don't know what a magical material is, or where to find one. Nobody's ever..." I stopped, because my voice had done something embarrassing. "Nobody's been here to ask."
Torvi Greymantle threw her head back and laughed. It was a big, rough, delighted laugh, and it rang off the walls of the ravine, and the other dwarves stopped loading to look.
"Oh, lad," she said. "Oh, lad. You've wandered into the right ditch."
She noticed the copper wire as I was strapping Clara back into her sling.
I had forgotten it, too, coiled at the bottom of my pack, forty-two feet of soft green copper. Torvi glanced at it, and then looked at it again, and reached in and drew out the end, and turned it in the light. I saw the little mark stamped into the copper every few feet: an anvil in a circle.
I felt the blood leave my face.
She ran the wire through her fingers, slowly. She looked at the marionette in my hoodie, at the hide hinges and the single precious twist of wire at his neck. Then she looked at me.
"Found this, did you?" she said.
I could not lie to her. I could not tell her the truth. I just stood there.
Torvi coiled the wire back up, neatly, and put it back into my pack, and pulled the flap down over it.
"Call it an apprentice's first wage," she said quietly. "Hagen doesn't need to know." She patted the pack. "The caravan makes Halvard in nine days. Then we go home to the Hold. You'll come with us as far as the city, and you'll show me how you did that hip, and I'll show you what a magical material is." She raised one heavy eyebrow. "Unless you've somewhere more pressing to be."
I thought of my house by the creek. The round table, with its two stools. The dollhouse on the shelf. The step where the beads and buttons used to wait for me in the mornings.
"I'll have to come back," I said.
"Everybody comes back to something." Torvi stood, brushing off her knees, and her gears chimed. "Doesn't mean you can't leave first."
We camped that night beside the road, with the wagons drawn into a ring and a big fire in the middle, and a dwarf with a terrible voice singing the rest of the song about Hilde and her anvil.
They fed me a stew of mutton and onions, and real bread, and a mug of something brown and bitter that made my eyes water. I ate it all. It tasted like being alive. Hagen slapped my back so hard I nearly went into the fire, and Bolli asked me eleven questions about the Forbidden Woods in a row and did not wait for the answer to any of them. Torvi sat across from me and turned the marionette over and over in her hands, muttering about hinges.
It was the warmest I had been in a year and a half. I want to say that clearly. I was happy.
Late, when the fire had burned low and most of them were snoring under the wagons, I got up and walked to the edge of the firelight and looked back toward the south, toward the dark wall of the trees.
There were eyes in the tree line.
Just two. Small and yellow, low to the ground, at the very edge of the woods, a long way off. They did not come closer. They did not go away. They only watched the fire, and the wagons, and me.
I raised my hand. Not a gesture she would understand. Just a hand.
From the dark, very faintly, so faintly that I may have imagined it, came the rising click. Where are you?
Then the eyes were gone.
I stood there a long time. Then I went back to the fire, and sat down beside Clara, and took out the ledger, and wrote by the last of the coals.
Day 505.
Level: 14. XP: about 8,400.
Wire: eleven feet, forty-two feet of copper. (Stolen. Given back. Given again.)
Met: twelve dwarves. One tinker, Torvi Greymantle. She says I can be her apprentice.
Goblins: I did not tell them.
Bead: ran.
Question: what is a magical material?
I looked at the last line for a long time. Then I closed the ledger and lay down on the hard ground beside the wagons, among people, for the first time since the wall opened.
I did not sleep for a long time. But it was not because I was afraid.