The Goblins at Fort Briggs

By Ben Wright & James Powell
Arpad stared out over the battlements and into the pass. Snow was still everywhere, despite the thaw.

The soldiers next to him were nervous - any why shouldn't they be? They'd never had to face a situation like this before. Some were still hauling baulks of timber to reinforce the fort's main gate. The walls were short enough that Arpad could have reached down to help.

Arpad was determined to help. They were good people. The night before the officers had arranged a hearty meal to improve morale, but the cold morning air seemed to have leached all the bravado out of them. Arpad was made of sterner stuff. He'd been in dire situations before. He'd walked away from all of them, but sometimes in defeat. There'd be no holding back if he wanted to save the previous night's drinking companions.

The thief, Zsuzsa, was watching the same horizon from a different section of wall. Arpad had met her once before, and she'd disappeared with a small fortune of his. Arpad didn't bear a grudge. A good sword and a sturdy shield were more important to him than gold or jewels. He knew she could handle herself at least as well as he could. She'd claimed to be just passing through, but passing through to where? She must have realised, as he had, that the invasion was coming and come here to help hold it back.

Every spring the thaw came. Every year an army would descend from goblin lands as soon as the mountain pass was clear. Every invasion was met by an army here at Fort Briggs. The stronghold provided a safe place to take the wounded and a vantage point for archers while the main battle happened on open ground. There was no army this year. When the the thaw finally came after the Year of No Summer the rivers had burst their banks, washed away bridges and turned roads in quagmires. The human armies, already depleted following the poor harvest, could not make it to the Fort in time. The goblin horde, however, was likely to be the largest ever seen after being pent up behind the mountains for over a year. If the Fort couldn't hold the pass, the farmlands were undefended.

Down in the ward, the young ex-cleric, Sandor, was putting the final touches to his improvised field hospital. Arpad found him young and nervous, but anyone who got thrown out of holy orders for answering back was all right in his book.

Along the valley, Arpad spotted the other veteran, Wiola, waving frantically. She was an archer, and a bloody good one from what he'd seen. He didn't understand her journey or vision quest or whatever she called it, but the steel he'd seen in her eyes when he'd explained the situation here had told him she could be relied on. From her position next to the rock traps the soldiers had prepared, she had seen the advancing army.

Arpad watched the rabble appear around a rocky outcropping. Hundreds, no, thousands of goblins screeching their anger. Good news, then. Plenty for everyone.

As the goblins advanced towards the wall, Arpad glanced towards the other two members of his party. An hour ago, Jakab and Kelemen – Magister Kelemen, as he insisted on being addressed – had been engaged in light-hearted bickering about whose was the correct path towards arcane enlightenment. At least, Arpad assumed it was light-hearted – it was difficult to tell when Kelemen was being frivolous, with his flat voice and his flat stare. Now each was focussed intently on mustering their strength for the battle ahead.

Jakab was flicking furiously through the pages of a large, tatty book, although his eyes never left the crystal orb that was floating, unsupported, in front of him. Arpad had worked alongside the young wizard once before, when the Fire Lizard Crusade had been brought to a halt at the gleaming citadel of Xajorkith. The bookish youth’s help could be… erratic, yet always valuable. Kelemen was a stranger to him, a slightly aloof man of indeterminate age, with a ritually shaved head and azure blue robes that Arpad would have found hugely impractical, yet did not seem to restrict the magister’s movements at all. He was engaged in slow, sinuous exercises which reminded Arpad slightly of slowed-down versions of the most graceful dancers he had seen back in Lhun. Back when there had been a Lhun.

Suddenly, there was a pair of goblins in courtyard – clearly, two of the advanced wave had been eager, and dashed over the back wall. Jakab didn’t look up from his sphere, just waved a hand and the goblin that had been charging towards his unprotected back went down as a dart of silvery light struck him in the chest. The other goblin thrust a vicious shortspear towards Kelemen, but the man flowed out of the way, without appearing to shift his stance at all – and suddenly, the goblin was falling forward, an arrow between its eyes.

Arpad looked up: since he had last glanced at her, scant moments ago, Wiola had found her way to the top of the massive oak which grew, incongruously, through the centre of the courtyard. She stuck to fingers in her mouth, gave an ear-piercing whistle, and then disappeared into its branches. Sandor came running up to him, the young cleric clearly shaking with both anticipation and fear. “What did that mean?” he asked.

Arpad pitched his voice to carry across the court yard. “Make ready!” he shouted, and then, to Sandor: “It means that the head of the army is in range. It’s time.”

* * *

The battle raged, broiled all around him. Arpad’s shoulder throbbed from a knife cut he’d taken… how long ago? He ignored it as best he could; a freakishly large goblin was charging towards him, scimitar raised above its head, flanked by two guards. Arpad felt so tired as he placed himself in its path, but then Sandor’s hand was on his shoulder, and he felt the would knit closed, and his fatigue wash away. Nearby, he saw Jakab wave his hand and mutter a few words, and Arpad’s own scimitar began to glow with a pale, golden light.

Beside him, Kelemen stood still for a moment, and then thrust forward in the air with his weirdly-shaped punch dagger. Thirty feet away, one of the goblin guards collapsed, an impossible torrent of water gushing out of its open mouth. A whistling sound, and one of Wiola’s arrows took the other; Arpad didn’t have time to look and see where the Huntress had got to, as the goblin monster was upon him, and they traded blows – even with his enchanted sword, Arpad felt himself staggered, beaten back by the creature’s ferocity. Then, suddenly from behind one of the fallen grain casks, where there could not have been nearly enough space for her to hide, was Zsuzsa. She opened her palm, and there was a dagger in the goblin’s heel. The wound couldn’t have been more than a sting, but it provided the moment of distraction that Arpad needed. He stepped forward, swung his blade, and bifurcated the horror.

For a moment, he just stood there, panting with relief, trying not to notice the line of sticky warmth across his face. And then the second wave was upon them.

* * *

It was over. Around – and within – Fort Briggs lay the broken bodies of about a third of the goblin horde. The rest had all turned tail once the last of their leaders had fallen, fleeing back to their homes in the mountains. Goblins had two basic settings, avarice and fear, and it didn’t take too much to set them back to the second one. Already, though, Arpad could picture new leaders rising from among the goblin ranks, dreaming and whispering of the rich spoils to be found in the farmlands below. He knew that, as surely as the thaw would come again next year, with it would come a fresh wave of avarice.

Still, for now he could relax. The horde was gone, and sun stood high in the sky, the brightest it had been since the Solstice. For now, and for the summer months ahead, they were safe. So why did he feel a sudden chill?

He heard a gasp, and looked toward Wiola; she was staring out at the walls, which suddenly were covered in a thick layer of frost. This made no sense – the snow was melting, slowly to be sure, but it was melting, and there had been no frost this morning. “How can there be frost at midday?” muttered Arpad, half to himself.

Across the courtyard, Kelemen’s head snapped up, and he followed Arpad’s puzzled gaze. His face, impassive throughout the entirety of the goblin onslaught, fell into a mask of horror, his voice, until now as calm as the surface of a still pond, screamed out, “Back to your posts! Man your positions! Make ready the–”

And that was when the first corpse forced its hand up through the ground.