Goblinopolis, The Tol Chronicles, Book 1

by Robert G. Ferrell

  Tol had his own personal pram—it had seen its best days during his father’s career on the force, though—but parking was at a premium in the crowded metropolitan area and prams had delicate engines which needed to be looked after. You couldn’t just pull up and leave one there indefinitely without any attention. There were draycare centers (drays were the larger cargo-carrying vehicles) scattered around the city that serviced prams as well, but in Tol’s experience they were never near enough his destination to make the effort worthwhile. Licensed public cabs tended to blow out his meager expense account; the unlicensed ones, besides being illegal, were prone to “accidental” wrong turns and stranding their fares in bad neighborhoods, where they were soon relieved of the burden of fiscal liquidity. He usually found it easiest to travel around Goblinopolis by GRUC (most people just called it ‘the Gruc’).

  For one thing, there were GRUC terminals just about everywhere. You were never more than a hundred meters from where you wanted to be when you stepped back up into the open air. And it was cheap—free for him, in fact. The department bought all detectives and foot patrol officers annual passes for business use. So, GRUC it was, dingy cabins, unidentifiable odors, and all.

  Entrances to the GRUC varied from broad, palatial affairs with gold-plated banisters and marbled floors to cramped abruptly-sloping cave-like concrete corridors barely wide enough for two abreast, depending on neighborhood and anticipated clientele. Tol usually ended up in the latter—something of an occupational hazard, it seemed. Today, however, he was going to take the No. 23 to the ‘Royal Complex: East’ stop, one of the gold and marble varieties. He wore his least damaged helmet and even polished his disruptor with an old sock. After all, one shouldn’t look too shabby if one is going to pay an official visit to the seat of government (unless one is there asking for more money for equipment and clothing, but that wasn’t Tol’s mission, on this occasion).

  When his carriage rolled up, he was pleased to see that it was one of the newer ones. That meant fewer and less intense odors and less likelihood of mechanical failure during the ride. He had a minor case of claustrophobia that he could usually control without problem, but being trapped in a ten meter-long, two meter-wide sausage full of weird smells and weirder people in a dimly-lit tunnel twenty meters below the surface had a way of intensifying the irrational closed-in feeling rapidly. He’d found the best way to cope was to close his eyes and sing, but that degraded the quality of the experience even more for everyone else. Still, sometimes you just gotta look out for number one...

  This carriage was quite clean inside, in stark contrast to most of the ones he’d ridden. There were only a couple of gnomes and another goblin already seated when he got on. Well, not many people rode the GRUC into the RC east stop. Most of the day-to-day government business offices were accessed from the south or west termini. He wondered idly where the gnomes were going. He noticed that they had matching toolboxes with Zzingler Technologies decals on them. Probably some sort of repairmen, most likely heading to the CoME Data Center or one of the public data cubes scattered around the East Complex.

  It was a little odd that they were on the GRUC, since most of these companies had their own corporate drays for the sake of customer convenience, if nothing else, but it wasn’t sufficiently strange that he felt justified in registering alarm. Paranoia was part of his job, but like his claustrophobia, he had to keep it under control.

  No one spoke. The gnomes looked around and fidgeted a bit, but the other goblin sat absolutely still, like a statue. It was a bit disconcerting for Tol. If the guy was asleep, he was managing it with his eyes open, not that such a thing was unheard of since goblin outer eyelids were more or less transparent, anyway. Whatever he was doing, it was creeping Tol out. He fixed his gaze out the windows at the murky kinetics of the tunnel wall as it smeared past and tried not to think about the zombie across from him.

  After a minute or two he caught some nearer movement out of the corner of his eye. One of the gnomes got up with his toolbox and shuffled to the far end of the carriage. Maybe he had a (silent) spat with the other one. Gnomes were hard to figure sometimes. He continued to stare out the window. A minute later, the other gnome took his toolbox and headed off to the opposite end. Tol chuckled.

  A faint but engaging noise was beginning to make itself audible. At first he couldn’t figure what it was or where it was coming from. No one else showed any indication of detecting it, although he had to admit he couldn’t read ol’ stone face at all. Bet that guy was positively deadly at poker.

  The sound remained a mystery until something in his pocket began to vibrate. He realized that it was his pen, and at the same moment suddenly recognized the noise as the pen’s alert signal, conveyed to his brain and his brain only by skin surface induction. This had better not be another malfunction, he thought as he pulled out the pen and a notepad to go with it. Departmental regulations stated that he was not to make it obvious that the pen had uses beyond scribbling descriptions of alleged purse snatchers. The jury was still out on that veracity of that claim, as far as Tol was concerned.

  This time the pen was not making any smart remarks, however. It was all business.

  “I have detected a dangerous situation,” it stated quietly. “The ambient magical flux aboard this carriage has suddenly risen to a potentially catastrophic level. A spell with significant energy components is being cast in the immediate vicinity.”

  Tol shrugged and looked around. The two gnomes, at opposite ends of the carriage, seemed supremely unconcerned with anything but staring off into space. The goblin was still semi-comatose. Tol was beginning to wonder seriously if he were even alive at all. Failure to act on that suspicion would haunt him later.

  “What sort of spell?” he whispered.

  “Unknown. It is drawing considerable energy from The Slice through two transient nodes that seem to be separated by a little less than ten meters.”

  Tol blinked. The scales at the back of his neck started chafing the way they always did when he was getting a bad feeling about something. The “ten meters” part of the pen’s warning was gnawing furiously at him.

  “Pinpoint location of nodes relative to my line of sight.”

  “Approximately three and nine o’clock.”

  Of course: the gnomes, or more likely, their toolboxes. Funny: gnomes weren’t usually known as mages. They generally preferred technology over magic. It was possible that they didn’t know their toolboxes were the epicenters of some powerful juju, but he didn’t think it likely. Gnomes also made for notoriously poor patsies. They were too astute and naturally suspicious of strangers.

  That left two gnomes who were purposefully harboring and most probably actively participating in magical activity strong enough to slam a terminally smart-aleck pen into “just the facts” mode. That alone was pretty disturbing. The ten thousand billme question was, why?

  “Any data on probable intent?”

  “Insufficient data for statistically significant analysis, but my trick ink cartridge tells me that something dramatic is about to take place.”

  “Yeah, I’d gotten that impression from you already. Any idea who or what the target might be?”

  “I would suggest you find a highly reflective surface and gaze soulfully into it.”

  Tol snorted. “Me? Why would two gnomes be after me?”

  “Insufficient data to draw any meaningful conclusions about motivation. The fact that you are an edict enforcement officer with many enemies does seem somewhat germane, however.”

  He tried to think of any gnomes he might have pissed off...there was that one he’d caught trying to rewire the betting machines in a South Sebacea casino. He’d been one utterly stoned gnome, though. Probably didn’t even remember the crime, much less the arresting officer. Tol doubted the gnome he was recalling had the intellectual capacity to plan his route to the chemist’s, much less hatch and execute an elaborate revenge scheme. No, if they were after him, they had to be coming from a
different angle.

  His introspective criminological analysis was interrupted by another, more ominous warning from the pen.

  “The bifurcated magical energy stream has ceased. Shortly before it did so, I detected a unification which seemed to be focused directly at your 12 o’clock position.”

  Tol looked up, surprised. All he saw at 12 o’clock was the motionless goblin, who was still looking mighty inert. Something was strangely amiss, however. For a few seconds he couldn’t put his finger on what it was, but then it hit him—the gnomes had disappeared, leaving their toolboxes behind. Since they had positioned themselves near the doors, it was logical to assume they had slipped out that way—but silently, and while the carriage was moving? Somewhere back there must be a couple of vaguely gnome-shaped splotches on the tunnel walls.

  “The gnomes have vanished,” he told the pen.

  “That explains the transient spikes before the streams rejoined. They must have teleported.”

  Teleported? Why bother to ride public transport in the first place if you have that capability? Something wasn’t making a lot of sense here.

  “Forgot their tool boxes, it seems.”

  “I believe they were left behind intentionally. They probably contain some sort of local magical amplifiers. I am seeing regular residual pulses in several wavelengths of the magical energy spectrum from their locations.”

  “So I’ve got two pulsing toolboxes and a comatose goblin threatening me. When is the part where I’m supposed to feel intimidated coming up?”

  “Judging from the energy dispersal pattern, I would say right about...now.”

  On cue the suddenly animate goblin across from Tol stood up and lumbered toward him menacingly. Tol couldn’t help but notice that his assailant’s eyes were glowing red. He stood up and whipped out his badge.

  “Edict enforcement officer. I’d advise you not to come any closer.”

  The goblin completely ignored him. He was looking in Tol’s direction, but his disturbingly red eyes did not seem to be focused on anything in particular. He drew back one fist and smashed it into the back of the carriage seat where Tol’s head had been a second earlier. It put a hole completely through the seat and dented the metal wall behind it rather badly.

  Tol pulled his disruptor—time to nip this nonsense in the bud. It was set to “disable,” the standard default setting dictated by departmental regs. He fired point blank at his attacker on his next swing. Didn’t even flinch. Puzzled, he jacked it up to “full stun” and fired again while rolling out of the way of a full body lunge. Got him right in the chest. The red-eyed goblin shook it off as though he’d been shot by a child’s water pistol.

  Tol was beginning to get worried. This guy wasn’t right. He longed for the days when firing his disruptor actually accomplished something besides using up a charge.

  Luckily, ol’ scarlet eyes didn’t move too fast. As he was pivoting around for another go, Tol barked into his pocket.

  “What exactly is that thing? It sure doesn’t act like any goblin I’ve ever seen before.”

  “Strictly speaking, it is not a goblin, per se. It is a magically-animated construct known as a golem,” replied the pen. “The body is that of a goblin, but the force which drives it is not metabolism, but rather magic.”

  “Great,” Tol huffed, setting his disruptor on ‘liquefy,’ “I suppose that means that this won’t do any good, either.”

  He fired at very close range into the golem’s face, narrowly avoiding being caught in a crush hold. The shot ripped away half of the flesh on the golem’s head, spewing not blood and tissue but a weird spongy gelatinous glop like pale greenish-beige packing material all over the carriage. The golem shook its gory locks and, despite now having no functional ocular apparatus, came unerringly for its quarry, who was rapidly running out of self-defense options.

  “Gah. Sometimes I hate being right.” He shoved his obviously useless disruptor back into its shoulder holster. “Any advice on what I should do now?” he yelled into his pocket as he dove out of the way of another powerful roundhouse.

  “Discretion, it is said, is the better part of valor.”

  “What the smek is that supposed to mean?”

  “Employing the vernacular, it is time to split.”

  “Gotcha.”

  Splitting was going to be problematic, unfor-tunately. The carriage was traveling at quite a respectable clip through a tube specifically designed and constructed to house a speeding carriage of these dimensions and nothing else. The gap between outer carriage skin and tunnel wall was never more than about fifty centimeters. That just wasn’t room for a full-grown goblin, even one in relatively good shape like Tol. He reached above his seat and pressed the “Emergency Stop” button. That would bring the carriage to a halt at the next exit, be it a station or just a service access tunnel, where GRUC authorities would be waiting. Theoretically, anyway.

  He had no idea how far it was going to be to the next possible stop, though, and it was promising to be quite a challenge to stay out of the way of the rampaging golem until then. He found himself devoting a fair amount of energy to that goal. As he began to tire from the constant dodging, his strategy got necessarily more creative. Perhaps he could lead the golem to one of the doors and trick it into leaping out. After barely escaping a particularly vicious lunge, he decided now might be a good time to try it.

  Tol jumped up and stuck out his tongue at the golem, making a derisive noise with his lips and lower nostrils. When the enraged monster came after him, he led it toward one end of the carriage. As he approached one of the toolboxes, he heard a muffled exclamation from his pocket.

  “Use caution. Something has just triggered a transient planar magical power flux perpendicular to the long axis of the carriage.”

  At that moment Tol encountered something invisible but very, very solid about a meter from the exit. It left him rolling on the floor in pain, which at least made him a more difficult target for his less than agile pursuer.

  “A smekkin’ force field. Ow.”

  “I did warn you.”

  “If you’d learn to speak plain Goblish, your warnings would be a lot more comprehensible.”

  “Look, is it my fault that you have the vocabulary of a caged mimic-bird?”

  “Ya know, if your little pen body happens to get smashed beyond recognition during the course of this encounter, no one could blame me.”

  “My exoskeleton is composed of reinforced anthratanium. It would take a blow of approximately 1,250 kilograms of force per square centimeter to deform it significantly. Such an impact would pulverize your biological structure utterly. In other words, anything that manages to ‘smash my body beyond recognition’ would do far worse to you, although one might argue that any such action would present no serious detriment to society at large.”

  Tol looked up and saw the golem heading in his direction. He waited until the last possible moment before leaping aside. The golem smashed into the force field with considerable momentum, losing several large skull fragments in the collision. His head was now reduced to less than half its original mass, and had gone from horrific to faintly ridiculous. The golem lined up on him, and again Tol leapt aside. The force field was becoming increasingly spattered with magical golem guts.

  “Hey, I could start to like this,” Tol chuckled as he jumped again and watched his literally mindless assailant lose yet another round with the force field. Golem debris was beginning to pile up at his feet.

  “How long can this thing keep attacking? I mean, how many parts does it have to lose before it gives up?”

  “It will never ‘give up.’ So long as there are any contractile muscle fibers remaining, whatever body remnants contain them will continue to strive in your direction. Think of it this way: each cell in the golem’s body is under magical geas to kill you—alone, if need be.”

  “Super. The quest for the holey gore,” Tol muttered.

  “I beg your pardon?”

 
; “Nothing. So, what can bring an end to this geas, other than my untimely demise?”

  “Not much. You could incinerate every last cell of the golem, or get a mage of sufficiently high level to cancel the spell.”

  “How high a level?”

  “Depends on the level of the caster. From the nature of the energy being drawn from The Slice, I would venture to speculate a very high level indeed.”

  Suddenly the golem’s fist came crashing down on Tol’s shoulder from the side. He hadn’t expected that move, since his assailant had been lumbering straight at him up until now. The force of the blow drove him to his knees.

  The monster immediately followed through with a blow to Tol’s head, which fortunately didn’t fully connect because Tol was in the process of slumping to one side at the time. The fist missed his head and hit his other shoulder, driving him fully to the ground.

  “I...can’t feel either of my arms,” he said through gritted teeth.

  “Trauma to the suprabrachical plexi,” the pen diagnosed, “sensation will return in a few minutes if there is no further damage. Roll around randomly on the floor; it cannot anticipate your movements, and it has not the dexterity to hit you if you roll quickly enough.”

  “Oof,” Tol replied as he rolled, “Ugh...mmf...argh...ow...”

  He sat up and struggled to his feet, bleeding from several new wounds. “I beg,” he began, narrowly avoiding a hit that tore a seat from its moorings, “to differ.”