Izzy Chapter 26: If You Wanna Stir A Big Pot, You’re Gonna Need A Big Stick (Patreon)

Izzy didn't have much good to say about the humans, but she had to give them this: they were determined not to be messed with.

As the scrum made their way toward the village they had to go slow. Squirrel and Howl took the lead, one with her eyes on the ground, the other with her eyes on the forest. They'd found their first pit trap when Crash stepped through the cover, only barely managing not to fall onto the sharpened stakes two feet below. The decomposing gnoll they found not much later hadn't been so lucky.

Stake pits of different kinds, snares, and deadfalls littered the forest between the ruins of the goblin camp and the human village. The humans weren't content to rely on their traps to protect them, either — Caj returned from one of his ranging flights to tell Izzy that there was, “Some dead idiot fuzzer’s been staked up a minute yonder. Damn near chopped in half with a sword or something.”

The message was clear: this was human territory. Gnolls were not welcome. Nor, presumably, were goblins.

Well, goblins were neither as loud, as clumsy, or as stupid as gnolls. They made their way past the traps with care, if not always with ease. And if there were some unseen human gnoll-slayer lurking about, they snuck past him or her as well. Nobody bothered them.

The goblins all knew the way to the human village, and they reached it in a few fingers of the sun moving across the sky. When they reached the edge of the forest, however, they stopped.

The edge of the forest had moved.

The last time they were there the village had abutted the forest. Now the trees had been cleared back, leaving a field of fresh stumps. The village was so far off that Izzy could easily cover the closest of the huts with her little finger. How the hell were they supposed to cover that unseen?

“We aren't,” was Mash’s simple answer when Izzy asked. “That's the point.”

“But why?!”

“To keep goblins and gnolls from just jumping out of the forest and into their village, like we always did.”

“Oh. Yeah, that makes sense.”

“Yep. What I’d like to know is how they did this so quickly. They must have cut hundreds of trees. They even cleared the logs!”

“Hundreds. That's… a lot,” Izzy said uncertainly. One hundred was a bigger number than she'd ever really needed.

“It is!” Mash agreed. Then, after a moment, she said, “The tribe was about a hundred goblins. So as many trees as two or three tribes, maybe more.”

“Damn,” Izzy whispered. “What do you think they did with them?”

“They must be doing something. All that noise can't be for no reason.”

There was a constant, distant cacophony of hacking and banging, but whatever the humans were doing it was hidden by distance and the village itself. Every so often someone would yell an order, but that, too, was too far away to make out.

“They must be building something,” Stick said. Izzy nearly jumped with surprise — she hadn't even noticed him sneak up beside her. “All that noise. They’re splitting logs. Sawing them to size.”

“You know about how humans build things?” Izzy asked curiously.

“My teacher knew many things. She lived with a human Witch in a village for a year, or so she said. But she told many stories like that, some true, some not. This one, though… she had too many details that never changed. I think it was true.”

“Living with a human? Among humans? Sounds dangerous.”

“Oh, yeah. She had to hide when anyone else came to visit, or there would have been a bunch of trouble. But the Witch lived alone away from a village, so that wasn't too often from what she told me.”

“What happened? With the Witch, I mean.”

“I don't know,” Stick said wistfully. “She never said. But she was always very sad when she talked about leaving.”

“Weird,” Izzy muttered. “Living with humans.”

“She is,” Stick said, appearing not at all offended. “How about we circle around and see what they're actually doing?”

  *

“Well, that's no good.”

Izzy didn't at all like what they saw at the other side of the village. That side faced the fields and meadows of the human lands beyond the forest, and they'd had to go in a wide circle to look at the place from the side. They were much farther from the village now, but that didn't matter much. They could see everything they needed to. They knew where all the trees were going 

There were more humans than there should be, and they were building some kind of tall, wooden structure. It was almost like a whole other village had moved in, and were now putting up a single enormous hut for them all to live in. Some of the humans were walking around wearing leather and bits of metal, carrying spears or bows, and watching the forest.

Any idea of avenging themselves on the humans would have to wait. At least until these newcomers left, or the goblin tribe had grown much stronger. Although…

“I don’t think all these new humans are here for us,” Mash said. “Not with so many gnolls in the forest.”

Izzy agreed. “Just our bad luck they came now.”

“Well, yes and no. We want revenge on the humans, and we want revenge on the gnolls. Maybe we could make them take our revenge on each other?”

Izzy frowned as she parsed that. “Make… our… what?”

“I think what your familiar means is that we could try to make the humans and the gnolls fight. Lead them to each other, and rescue our people while they kill each other.”

“Oh! Yeah, that's a great idea!” She looked around, making sure she had the whole scrum’s attention, then said, “ You all hear that? Try to think of ways to get the humans and gnolls fighting!”

“Humans killed a bunch,” Twitch pointed out. “Fighting already.”

“Well, yes. But all of them!” Izzy clarified. Then she told the same thing to Caj, though she stuck a “please” in there for his benefit. He was kind of part of the scrum, but she wasn’t his Boss. Really, he was more like a friend than anything else. A friend who constantly cursed at her, called her names, insulted her, and taught her underlings bad words in Fairy. The point was that he was very useful and oddly fun to have around, but he could also leave anytime he wanted to; a little politeness couldn’t hurt.

They spent some more time getting a good look at the humans and what they were building. There were a lot fewer of the humans than there were gnolls, but they didn’t fight each other at all. They were more like the goblins, really, except without the constant bickering and tussling. They had a chief, a surprisingly scrawny guy, who told his underlings what to do, and then they told the others, and everybody just did it!

“Good cohesion,” was Mash’s assessment. She added, “Means they work together well.”

Izzy silently thanked her for the explanation. That was good. It meant the humans might be able to make a dent in the gnolls before they got wiped out. Now they just needed to get them fighting.

  *

“Why didn’t I think of this?” Mash grumbled, floating above Izzy’s head.

Izzy grinned. It was nice to hear the spirit admit that she didn’t know everything. Although, to be fair, what they were doing hadn’t been her idea either. It had been Caj’s.

“What about those vine-and-bone horrors ye used when we killed the spider?” he’d asked. They’d been following the road back toward where they’d turn to return to the Tree, when Squirrel had found another gnoll staked up as a warning to its mates. “Those were fecking awful, but they worked! Make yon rotting fuzzbut run into the human village and take a bite outta someone! That ought to stir them up!”

“You can animate the dead?” Stick had asked with wonder. “That’s much more advanced Death magic than anything I can do!”

That had led to Izzy demonstrating Create Vineling, and once the gnoll corpse was shambling around there really wasn’t any reason not to try Caj’s idea. It was that or cancel the spell — it wasn’t like they could sneak with the loudest, most foul smelling abomination in the forest following them. It took a while to get back to the humans, but nobody minded much. They were all pretty curious about what would happen.

That led to them again hiding at the edge of the forest, watching the screaming commotion of the human village after they’d put the gnoll vineling down. If their goal was to rile the humans up, they’d well and truly accomplished it.

“That was a great idea, Caj,” Izzy said, beaming at the fairy.

“Course it feckin’ was,” he replied proudly.

“How much did that take out of you?” Mash asked.

“About a third of my gourd,” Izzy said. “More than a normal sized vineling. But it used the same amount to keep it alive, until it got really far away from me. Then I started losing a tiny bit every so often.”

“Oh, good! Good! Tell everyone that we need to find more dead gnolls!”

“I was thinking the same thing,” Izzy said with a feral grin. “Her, everyone! Let me know if you find any more rotting fuzzbutts! If we keep doing this the humans will have to do something about it, right?” After a moment’s consideration she added, “Keep thinking of other ways to make them fight, though. Especially ways to get the gnolls moving. The more, the better.”

The scrum replied with varying levels of enthusiasm as Izzy repeated the same thing to Caj. Izzy felt pretty good about this. Throwing vinelings at the humans might not be enough, but judging by the angry human voices that she could hear all the way across the clearing, it was a good start.

  *

They didn’t go back to the tree that evening. There was no compelling reason to. They wanted to keep harassing the humans, and going to the Tree and back again would take forever. Besides, they were in an area of the forest that they knew well, especially the two Huntresses. Over the years various goblins had found plenty of good, safe hidey-holes where you could spend a night if you couldn’t be bothered to get back to the camp, so they simply picked one of the larger ones — some kind of den under a huge rock — and spent the night there, eating worms, bugs, magically enlargened roots and leaves, and all the blackberries they could stomach, thanks to Bramble Growth.

As they settled in to sleep, Izzy whispered into the dark, “Next time, I’m getting that Bountiful Growth specialization for my brambles.” The blackberries were good already; she could only imagine how amazing they’d be with a whole Spell choice spent to make them better.

“Sure,” Mash said, and she didn’t sound annoyed or anything. “Please just look at your new spell option before you do it.”

“Yeah, I can do that,” she agreed. “But I’m making all the final decisions!”

“Fine. It’s your Levels. Your Skills and Spells. As long as you promise to listen to my advice and really think about it, I won’t argue.”

“I can do that too,” Izzy said. Then she added, so low that she was sure that no one else would be able to hear, “Good night, Mash.”

“Good night, Izzy.”