The Goblin

The map grew all morning and he grew fond of watching it grow.

It had become the first thing he did whenever he stopped. Open the pane, look at the shape, see how much world he had made since the last time. There was no practical reason for it. The arrow did all the actual navigating and the arrow did not require his agreement.

He did it anyway.

The tail behind him had thickened overnight into a corridor. A long uncovered strip winding northeast through grey, wider in places, with small bulges hanging off it where he had wandered a few paces off the line to look at something.

He could read his own morning in it.

Here he had stopped, for a while, by the shape of the widening.

Here he had doubled back three times, which was the walking-backward test from yesterday, preserved in the map like a mark in wet clay.

And here the corridor bent, for a good thirty paces, for no reason he could now recall.

He looked at that bend for some time.

Something had happened there. He had turned aside for it, spent the effort of turning aside, and whatever it had been was gone out of him entirely, leaving only a curve on a pane.

He tried to retrieve it and got nothing, which he was becoming used to, and which produced in him a small pointless irritation rather than anything larger. A bird, possibly. A better-looking tree. Whatever it had been, some version of himself two hours old had considered it worth thirty paces, and that version had not left a note.

He was, apparently, already a thing with a past. It was one day long and most of it was a shape, and he found he liked having it.

* * * *

The glancing back became a habit before he noticed it forming.

It was satisfying in the same way the walking-backward test had been satisfying. It was evidence. He was not certain what it was evidence of, only that it accumulated in a direction, and accumulation was comforting to something in him he had not yet identified and did not go looking for.

By mid-morning he was checking every few hundred paces.

By noon he had to make himself stop, because the checking was eating the walking, and he had begun opening the pane at intervals that could not possibly have produced a difference.

He registered this with some amusement.

He had developed a bad habit inside a day of having habits at all.

He closed the map, told himself firmly that he would not open it again before the sun moved, and set off up the track with the arrow steady at the corner of his eye.

He lasted about a mile.

The second time he told himself, he made it half that. The third time he did not bother telling himself anything, and simply opened it, and noted with some interest that he was apparently a creature capable of losing an argument with himself twice in an hour.

It was, he decided, a harmless enough failing, and he had no others on record to compare it against.

* * * *

The scrub moved ahead of him.

It was a small movement, low down, off the left of the track, in the kind of tangled undergrowth that a large thing could not have used and a small thing could.

He stopped walking.

He had no procedure for this. That was the first and most immediate problem, and it arrived before any assessment of the movement itself.

Nothing so far had moved at him.

The forest had been, for the whole of his existence, a place that contained things. Trees stood in it. Water ran through it. Insects went about their business at a scale that did not involve him. It had been scenery, complicated and enormous and entirely indifferent, and he had walked through it the way you walk through a room.

The distinction between a place that contains things and a place that does things collapsed in the space of one rustle.

He stood very still in the middle of the track with his weight badly distributed and nothing at all in his head.

The scrub moved again. Smaller this time. Something adjusting rather than travelling.

He became extremely aware of the fact that he did not know what most things were.

* * * *

A label rose over the movement.

It floated, steady, at about the height a head would be. It was unmistakably green. It had one word in it.

[GOBLIN]

He registered, in order:

That the world labelled things.

That the label was a colour as well as a word.

That the colour was presumably not decorative, because nothing else on any pane had been decorative.

And that he had absolutely no idea what any of it meant.

* * * *

His sword was out before any part of him decided.

He did not experience it as a decision. That was the thing. There was no gap in which a choice could have occurred. There was a rustle, and then there was a blade in his hand, his weight was correct, his left shoulder had come forward, and his feet had moved apart to a distance he had not measured.

The whole sequence had happened underneath him, at a speed his thinking could not approach, arranged by somebody who was not currently available for questions.

He stood astonished at his own arm.

That was the actual event, and it happened while a goblin was looking at him.

The hand had known the grip. Not approximately. Exactly, thumb and fingers where they went, the last two doing more of the work than seemed obvious. The wrist had known the angle. The shoulder had known the draw, which was a specific and awkward motion over the back that he had never once performed, and it had performed it cleanly, and the blade had come free without catching on anything.

He had been alive since yesterday morning.

He looked at his own hand holding a sword in a position he could not have described one second earlier, and something in him went quiet and cold and very interested.

* * * *

The goblin was small.

That was the next thing he took in, and it rearranged the situation.

It was thin to the point of looking assembled rather than grown. All angles, with a chest that showed its own architecture through the skin, and the skin the colour of old lichen. Its arms were the width of the branches around it.

It was holding nothing.

It was not crouched to spring. It was standing in the scrub at a distance of perhaps twelve feet, entirely still, in the particular manner of something that has been caught out and is now doing arithmetic.

It had a face.

The face had an expression, and he could not read the expression at all.

That bothered him more than the sword had.

He had a short and simple catalogue of creatures, and it was one day old, and everything in it had been legible. The forest had been legible. The panes were legible. Even his own body, arranging itself without consultation, was legible after the fact.

There was something happening behind that face and he had no instrument for it.

He tried, for two full seconds, to work out what it wanted. Nothing came back.

He stood in a forest track holding a drawn blade at a thing he could not interpret, and the not-interpreting was the whole difficulty, because if he could not tell what it intended he could not tell what to do.

He had assumed, up to that moment, that understanding was something that arrived. Everything else had arrived. The map, the arrow, the name, the labels, all of it delivered complete by something that had decided he needed it.

Nothing arrived about the goblin.

The label said GOBLIN and the colour said green and neither of them said anything at all about what it was thinking, and he understood, standing there, that the world's helpfulness had a limit and he had just walked into it.

* * * *

Neither of them moved for three seconds.

He counted them.

He did not decide to count them. The count was simply running, low, under his breath, the way it had been running on and off all morning without his permission and most of yesterday before that.

One count.

The goblin's eyes went to the sword.

Two count.

Then to his face. It looked at him properly, for perhaps half a second, with whatever it had behind the eyes doing whatever it did.

Three.

Then back to the sword.

* * * *

Then it bolted.

Low and fast and away, through the thick of the undergrowth on a line that nothing his size could have taken, and the scrub closed behind it, and the label went with it, sliding sideways between the trunks and out of sight.

The whole departure took perhaps a second and a half.

He heard it for a few seconds more, going, getting quieter, and then not.

The track was empty.

* * * *

He lowered the sword.

His chest was going hard. His hands were unsteady, which he noticed with mild professional interest, since they had been perfectly steady during the part where the sword came out.

He stood in an empty road holding a weapon at nothing.

Then he replayed it, because replaying was what he had instead of understanding.

The goblin had been in the scrub when he came round the bend. Standing in it. Doing nothing that he could identify, in the undergrowth, off the track, in a forest that belonged to it considerably more than it belonged to him.

It had not moved toward him.

At no point in the entire encounter had it come one step in his direction. It had held still while a thing twice its size drew a blade at it, and then it had looked at the blade, and then it had left.

He worked it through twice.

He could not escape the conclusion.

He could not say which of the two of them had been more frightened, and the honest answer might not favour him.

* * * *

He tried to work out how his arm had known.

He went at it directly first, standing in the road. He reached for it the way he had reached for a name and got the same result, which was no resistance, no locked door, and nothing there. There was no place in him where that answer was kept.

So he tested it instead, because testing was his method now.

He sheathed the sword, slowly, watching his own hand.

Then he drew it again at half speed.

The hand did it correctly. Thumb where the thumb went. The reach over the shoulder at the angle that cleared the scabbard. The wrist turning at the right point so the blade came out flat instead of catching.

It did all of it at half speed, perfectly, and offered no explanation whatsoever.

He did it a third time, standing in an empty forest track like a man checking a lock he does not trust.

The hand did it again.

* * * *

He put the sword away and walked on.

He was unsettled, and the unsettling had nothing to do with the goblin. The goblin was gone and had not wanted anything from him and was, on the available evidence, having a worse day than he was.

It was the arm.

He had been treating himself, without examining it, as a thing that started yesterday morning. A man who woke under a tree with nothing in him, who had learned every single fact in his possession by walking into it.

That model had just failed.

Something in him knew a specific, difficult, practised motion, and had known it the whole time, and had produced it under pressure without asking. Which meant something in him had done this before.

He had one day of history and a corridor on a map to prove it, and now a second history had come through the floor, with no corridor and no evidence and no way to look at it, and it had come out holding a sword.

He walked northeast with the arrow at the corner of his eye.

He opened the map more often that afternoon than he needed to, and did not entirely enjoy the shape of it any more.