Nine Goblins
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
Nessilka had been in any number of battles, and she couldn’t remember the first ten minutes of any of them.
She had a theory that if you could remember the first ten minutes, you’d never, ever charge at anybody again, so parts of your brain blotted them out.
The problem was that she couldn’t imagine why her brain would want her to continue charging at people, and this then led her to the theory that parts of her brain worked for the Goblin High Command, which she didn’t like at all.
Regardless, it was ten minutes into the battle, and she couldn’t remember what had just happened. There’d been a lot of yelling. Everyone yelled. No matter what species you were, elf, human, goblin, orc, random bystander, you yelled. There had been a lot of hitting things. Her shield was bent in four or five places, and her arms ached dreadfully.
Algol went by at high speed, shield raised, with Mishkin and Mushkin practically stepping on his heels. Mishkin had gotten a sword from somewhere, and was waving it dangerously close to Algol’s kidneys.
She had no idea how the battle was going, but she didn’t seem to be dead, so from her perspective, everything was really going rather well.
Unfortunately, Sergeant Nessilka had just seen a problem.
The problem stood on a little rise, just enough to lift him out of the battle proper. He looked human, and he wasn’t wearing armor, or carrying any weapons.
He was doing something with his hands, and there was a blueness in the air around him—not really a blue light, per se, but the world around him was turning shades of blue, like something behind a pane of cobalt glass. That wasn’t right. That was magic, that was.
A bolt of blueness streaked out from his open mouth, and hit a knot of goblins, who fell down.
Aw, hell, Nessilka thought. It’s a wizard...
Customer Reviews
Awesome!
This is a delightful book! It had me laughing at the second sentence. It made me giggle, it made me re-read things out loud, it made me avoid looking over my shoulder in fear there would be something there. And it's not all jokes and jumps: somehow, Kingfisher manages to fit both a capturing story and an astounding amount of worldbuilding, backstory, and characterization into a shortish novella. Hopefully, Kingfisher's inspiration will lead her to a sequel!
Seriously, this book is awesome.