The Hob's Bargain

"The guardian spirits like the earth spirit, mostly, I suspect." His tail slipped off the rock, almost as if it were accidental. I gave it a suspicious look. His eyes crinkled, but he kept his mouth seriously straight as he continued. "I suppose a few of them were here anyway, just hiding. The only time you'll ever find a dwarf is when he wants you to. The earthens are a manifestation of the earth spirit—not really creatures in their own right. Most of the things the village has been seeing lately are under the earth spirit's guardianship. Except, of course, the winkies that tangled the nets and made Cantier so angry. They belong to the river guardian."

"The mountain had only you?"

"Of my kind," he replied.

There was something in his voice. Pain, I thought, or at least sorrow, so I changed the subject. "Hooglins are formed from the stink of the swamp…"

The hob settled more comfortably on the rock. "Noeglins are mischievous. One of their favorite tricks is to creep up behind some poor unsuspecting traveler and scare the bejeebers out of him."

"Like a hob-of-the-bog?" I suggested.

He cleared his throat, so straight-faced I worried he was offended until he spoke. "Well, hobs don't generally eat their victims… unless they're hillgrims. Hillgrims taste really good raw, but they're best when cooked for a day in a pot with onions and butter." His tail now rested on the rock again, this time on my right (the hob sat on my left).

"How can they eat if they don't have a body?" I looked at his tail suspiciously, but it lay virtuously still.

"Very few creatures are pure spirit," he said seriously. "Ghosts are, and poltergeists. But all things are tied more strongly to either body, soul, or spirit. The ones you can call are tied strongest to the spirit. Sometimes, like the noeglins or the earth guardian, they can put off and on the physical body as easily as I shed my cloak."

"So you call them spirits, even though they have a body?"

"And a soul, most of them." He nodded. "There are three types of living creatures: mortals like humans and dwarves, soulfuls like hobs and cats, and spirits like the guardians and noeglins."

"Cats?" I said.

A flurry of sticks flew at us out of a growth of bog-weed. They hurt when they hit—and most of them hit. Caefawn snarled, startling me, for he sounded like a wolf and I'd been thinking of him as though he were human, despite his talk of eating hillgrims. Overlaying the smell of the bog was a acrid smell. After a moment I couldn't smell anything else.

"Right," the hob said after the deluge was finished. "There's a noeglin. You need to keep him from hurting you and get him out into the open."

"Come here, you nasty noeglin," I coaxed. A speaker's voice seemed to have some power with the earth spirit and the ghosts. Maybe it would work with a noeglin.

"Here I be," said a soft, sibilant, hate-filled hiss. Then, like the ghost, it attacked my mind.

It was easier to fight than the ghost had been, though the noeglin didn't attack in precisely the same way. I tried to block his advance into my head. It seemed to work best when I envisioned something solid.

So I held a mental door before the noeglin, a stout barn door that stopped it where it was. Before it could try something else, I put doors all around it, trapping it there, though I could see it hanging over the swamp like a misty clump of rotting weeds.

I don't know what part of it I held trapped, no more than I could have said what part of the ghost I'd caught. These were creatures of spirit, not body—so I thought I'd ask the self-appointed expert.

"How can I hold it in my mind and yet it is still there?" I asked, pointing at the noeglin.

"Bloodmages take a bit of an enemy's hair or skin and attach it to a vole or mouse by magic," said the hob soberly. "When they kill the mouse, they can kill their enemy, too. Sympathetic magic. You can hold a small bit of it in your mind and affect the whole of it."

The noeglin wriggled suddenly, spouting a series of sounds that boomed and hurt my ears. "Me go," it said.

"It wants you to let it go," translated the hob unnecessarily.

I opened one of the doors, releasing the noeglin from my control. The spirit sank tiredly into the dark mud of the swamp, taking the noxious odor with it.

"How is it that it—and you—speak the same language I do?" I asked, when the noeglin was gone.

" 'Tis a gift of the hobs to speak whatever tongue they hear, a gift the guardian spirits share when they will," he said. "As for the other—another human wouldn't have understood the noeglin. But you are a speaker, and what good would your gift be if you couldn't understand the spirits you call? Now about the will-o'-wisps—"