The Silver Beetle

The Bone Perimeter came out of the mud behind him like the ribcage of something enormous that had died badly. Wolf, boar, and a few long pieces that were neither, all of it jutting at angles nobody had ever bothered to straighten. It marked the exact place where the Red-Tooth Clan's authority ended and the world stopped caring what the Red-Tooth Clan thought.

Getting through it had cost him most of an hour. The patrol swept the line every three minutes, two Green Shards glowing faintly through the evening mist, and Gesbiek had lain flat in the cold mud among the bones and counted their boots twice while they passed. Left. Right. Left. Right. Say what you liked about being the weakest creature in the clan, it did remarkable things for a goblin's stealth.

The hard part had not been the guards. The hard part had been the woodsmoke that came across the clearing while he waited, carrying the fat, rich smell of roasting boar with it. His stomach had closed like a fist. He had bitten down on his own lip to keep from making a sound and lain there in the filth doing arithmetic about how many warriors it took to finish one boar.

Then the patrol turned, and he went.

Now he was inside, and the Darkwood was making its position clear.

The temperature had dropped the moment he crossed. The air had gone thick and wet and full of the smell of things breaking down slowly. Roots twisted over the ground like sleeping serpents, furred with moss that held a faint green light of its own. All the sound of the camp had cut off as though a door had shut behind him, and what replaced it was wind through pine needles and a great deal of small skittering from directions he could not identify.

Gesbiek rose to a crouch, shaking from a combination of terror and not having eaten.

He moved deeper. His fingers traced the moss on the trunks as he went, using the damp of it as a guide, the way Zog had taught him on the foraging trips that neither of them had ever mentioned to anyone. His other hand kept finding the river stone at his throat and rubbing it, which was not a decision he made.

Patches of glowing fungus dotted the ground, throwing pools of sickly green. He went around every one of them. Light meant being seen. Being seen meant being eaten. He had been raised on that sentence.

A branch snapped to his left.

Gesbiek stopped moving so completely that he might have been a root himself. He put his back against the nearest trunk and made his very small frame smaller, and he let his breathing go shallow and slow until it disappeared under the noise of the forest.

Something came through the underbrush. Large. Unhurried. He caught matted fur and the wet shine of an eye before it went behind a thicket. Green-Tier wolf, most likely, and big enough to manage him in two bites, which was the sort of arithmetic he preferred not to complete.

It moved off along some other trail. Gesbiek stayed where he was until his heart came down from a gallop to something merely energetic.

Everything in here was a hunter. He was the only thing present that was not.

He went on anyway, counting his paces, because Zog had counted everything and the habit had taken.

Two hundred northeast from the Bone Perimeter. Far enough out that the patrols never came, close enough that he could get there and back without spending a whole night in the trees.

At one hundred and ninety-three the trunks opened up.

The Ironwood stood in the middle of the clearing, split down its length by lightning some year before Gesbiek was born, roots sprawling across the ground like a hand that had grabbed at something and never let go. Inside the roots sat a small cairn of river stones.

Gesbiek made it four steps into the clearing and then his legs stopped negotiating.

He went down hard, catching himself on his forearms before his face reached the dirt. Everything hurt. His vision swam with black spots that arrived, left, and came back with friends.

The cairn was three feet away. Twenty stones, each one smooth and round, stacked knee-high. He had carried them up one at a time from the stream east of the clan's ground over the course of a week, four and five to a trip, past a patrol line that would have opened him up for being on the wrong side of it.

Zog was not under them.

Zog was up on the ridge above the pits, where the clan put the dead it did not honour, in a scree field of markers that had mostly fallen over. Somebody had stacked his with a little care and then nobody had gone back. Gesbiek had climbed up there twice in the week after and had sat in the thin dirt and had not been able to do it a third time, because the whole slope was a place where things were put down and left, and his grandfather had spent nine years being one of those things while he was alive.

So he had built this instead.

It held nothing. He was entirely aware that it held nothing. It was twenty stones under an Ironwood two hundred paces inside country that would kill him for entering it, and it was the only ground anywhere that had been chosen rather than assigned.

Nobody had come to the burial either. Crippled Green Shards did not get ceremonies. They got a grandson and whatever the grandson could lift.

"Grandfather," Gesbiek said. His voice came out in pieces. He crawled the last of the distance and got his fingers onto the cold stones. "I came back."

The cairn declined to comment. Dead goblins were reliable that way. Gesbiek knew this perfectly well and kept talking regardless, because the alternative was silence, and he had quite enough of that at home.

He got himself propped against the base of the stones. The cold went straight through his rags and he found he did not mind it. Out here nobody called him the Grey Stain, or waste-scraper, or the mistake. Out here he was a grandson visiting the only person who had ever checked whether he was still breathing.

* * * *

Zog had brought him out this far exactly once, on a leg that did not bend, over the course of an afternoon that had taken until nearly dark.

"Moss," the old goblin had said, slapping a trunk. "Thickest where the light comes least. You want to go deep, you follow the thick. You want to come home, you follow the thin. Say it."

"Thick in, thin out."

"Good. Now the rule."

"There is a rule?"

"There is always a rule." Zog lowered himself onto a root in stages, like a badly built thing being dismantled by someone careful. "Anything you find out here, you eat. Where you stand. You do not carry it home, because they will smell it on you and take it and beat you for having it. You do not save it for later, because there is no later, there is only now and a slightly hungrier now."

"What if it is a rock?"

"Then you will bite a rock, and you will learn something, and I will laugh." Zog considered this. "I will laugh for a long time, Gesbiek. Possibly for years."

"That is not teaching. That is entertainment."

"At my age they are the same activity."

Gesbiek had found a beetle grub under a rotting log that day, a fat pale thing the length of his thumb, and had held it out because that was what you did with food when someone else was hungry too.

Zog had looked at it. Then he had looked at Gesbiek, at the ribs plainly visible through his skin, and he had made a face that Gesbiek did not have a name for until much later.

"Where you stand," the old goblin said. "That was the rule. I made it. I am not going to be the first one to break it."

* * * *

Sitting against the cairn now, Gesbiek's stomach twisted hard enough to fold him in half.

Three days since the last of it. A handful of grubs under a log, which he had eaten where he stood, because he did what he was told. His body had started on itself since then, working through what little muscle he had in order to keep the important things running.

There was moss on the grave stones. Thick and green and, from a certain angle, food.

He looked at it for a while. Would moss kill him, or only make him wish it had? The ground here was too hard to dig for worms. Bark had something in it. Probably. Somebody had told him bark had something in it.

Back at the camp, right now, warriors were pulling a boar apart with their hands.

The comparison was not flattering to anybody.

"Why?" he asked the stones. "Why Grey?"

Nothing.

"I did not choose it. I did not ask to be made wrong." His voice climbed and cracked. "I only want to eat. I want to stop hurting for one day."

Tears came up whether he approved or not, and cut two clean lines down through the grime on his face.

"Send me something," he said. "A beetle. A root. Anything at all. Just enough to see tomorrow."

The wind moved through the Ironwood's dead branches. An owl said something to another owl, some distance off. The forest carried on with its own considerable business, entirely unbothered by the smallest goblin in it.

Gesbiek slumped back against the stones and let his eyes close. The black spots had stopped being spots and become curtains.

This was not the worst place. Dying here, with Zog, and no audience, and nobody laughing.

Light flickered at the edge of his vision.

Not the warm yellow of a firefly. Not the sick green of the fungus. This was cold and sharp, and it did not glow so much as throw back what little moonlight got through, the way polished things did.

He opened his eyes. It was still there, which ruled out at least one theory.

He leaned forward, and his muscles filed their objections, and he ignored them. His fingers pushed dead leaves away from the base of the cairn and found something half-sunk in the dark loam, about the size of a walnut.

It came out of the ground easily. Easily enough that the word *offered* went through his head and he pushed it back out again.

The cold hit first. Not cool. Cold, in a way that went into his palm and pulled the heat out of it and left the whole hand numb and complaining. And heavy. Far heavier than a thing that size had any business being.

He held it up to what light there was.

A beetle. Beetle-shaped, at least: smooth, seamless, with no joints and no legs and no antennae, an insect that somebody had thought about and then made out of solid metal. The surface threw back the moon and a small distorted version of his own face.

The world ran on coloured shards. Green for life, blue for strength, red for leadership, purple for the ones in stories. This thing had no colour whatsoever. It sat outside the whole arrangement, which as far as Gesbiek understood anything was not permitted.

He turned it over. It hummed. Not a sound exactly, more a vibration that arrived through the bones of his hand and went up his arm and set his teeth buzzing.

It smelled wrong, too. Not rot and not musk. It smelled the way the air smelled after lightning, sharp and thin and entirely out of place under a tree.

"What are you?" Gesbiek whispered.

The beetle continued to be cold and heavy and quiet, having no interest in the question.

His stomach made a noise like something trapped.

The sensible part of him began listing outcomes. Metal was not food. Metal would cut him open on the way down. Metal would poison him, or choke him, or lodge somewhere important and stay there.

The sensible part of him had been in charge for five years and had produced a goblin who weighed less than a bucket.

*Anything you find out here, you eat. Where you stand.*

"You made the rule," Gesbiek said to the cairn. "I am not going to be the one who breaks it."

He put the Silver Beetle in his mouth before the sensible part could revise its position, and he bit down.

The shell went like glass. Sharp, brittle, nothing like the resistance he had braced for. Fragments opened small cuts inside his cheeks, and something burst out of the middle of it and went across his tongue.

The taste arrived like a blow. Copper wire. Something acidic and burning. Cold lightning, if lightning could be tasted, spreading over every part of his mouth at once.

Everything he had screamed at him to spit it out.

Gesbiek swallowed.

It went down like broken glass wrapped in ice. His throat seized. His body tried, with real urgency, to send it back up. He clamped his jaw shut and refused, because he had never once in his life wasted food and he was not going to start now.

Then it reached his stomach, and it did not digest.

It opened.

Cold went out of his middle in every direction at once, threading down his arms and legs faster than blood had any right to move. Gesbiek went over backward into the dirt beside the cairn and tore his shirt open with both hands.

His veins were glowing. Silver lines under the skin, bright as mercury, running from his stomach toward his heart and pulsing in time with it.

He tried to scream and produced a thin wheeze. The cold had got into his throat and shut it.

The silver reached his chest and did not stop there. It went in.

The Grey Shard lit up. The dull stone that had never once answered him blazed white and turned the whole clearing into daylight, and Gesbiek's back came off the ground, and every muscle in him locked at once.

Then all the sound in the world went out.

Wind, owl, forest, gone. Total silence, pressing on his ears from the inside.

What came into that silence was a whine. High and mechanical, metal turning against metal at a speed nothing should turn, and it was not coming from the clearing. It was coming from inside his skull.

Something was moving his mind aside. That was the closest he could get to it. Something large and patient was clearing out a space, the way you shift furniture to make room for furniture you like better.

Blood came out of his nose and ran warm down his cheek.

And then, into all of it, arriving with the calm of a thing that had never once hurried:

[HARDWARE DETECTED: GOBLIN (GREY VARIANT)]
[COMPATIBILITY: ACCEPTABLE]

Not heard. Not spoken. Simply known, stamped into him with absolute certainty, in the way a person knows their own name.

Inside his chest something cracked with a small clean sound, like the first split in river ice, and silver light came leaking out through the break in the Grey Shard.

His vision went to static from the edges inward. His hand fell open in the dirt.

The last thing he saw was a blue rectangle hanging in the air above him, perfectly still despite the wind, with words in it that he could not read and understood anyway.

[WELCOME, ADMINISTRATOR]

Then the dark took him, and Gesbiek's final thought was that Zog's rule had been a bad rule, that the shining thing had been poison after all, and that he had killed himself over a beetle nobody would ever find him next to.

His body lay still beside the stones, and the hairline crack across his Grey Shard went on glowing quietly, silver, in a clearing where there was no one at all to see it.