Goblinopolis, The Tol Chronicles, Book 1

by Robert G. Ferrell

  “Odd,” replied the pen, “reference data indicates that golems are strictly reactive—they depend on movement and detection of the magical aura of living creatures to track their targets. It should not be able to hit you if you keep moving in unpredictable ways.”

  “I’m thinkin’ your definition of ‘unpredictable’ and his aren’t the same, ‘cause he keeps putting his fist right where I’m ending up.”

  “Interesting. I will need more data to revise my initial analysis.”

  “Too much more data collection and I won’t be around to read the final report. How about some data on how to stop this thing before it kills me?”

  “Very well,” the pen sighed, “I will scan the databases for more specific details.”

  “You mean you haven’t done that already? What the smek have you been doing?”

  “Proper analysis of a real-time tactical situation is complex and requires correlation across a broad array of information matrices.”

  “Have I ever mentioned how smekkin’ worthless you are?”

  “I believe the sentiment has been expressed previously.”

  “Good. I’d hate to think you were operating under the mistaken assumption that you served any useful purpose.”

  The feeling returned to Tol’s arms at last, and he wrenched a mangled iron bar from a destroyed seat. He used it to deflect a particularly ferocious onslaught by the golem, slicing off the lower third of the leftmost appendage: there really wasn’t enough left to call it an ‘arm.’

  “Ole!” Tol shouted, twisting out of the way of the golem’s counterpunch.

  “What does ‘ole’ mean?” asked the pen.

  “Err, nothing. It’s just a word a friend from another dimension once taught me.”

  “It does not appear in any of my dictionaries.”

  “Because it’s not of Tragacanthan origin, I told you. Forget about it and concentrate on saving my skin, will ya?”

  “If I must,” the pen sniffed.

  “Well, it might possibly justify your existence. Certainly your prowess as a writing instrument hasn’t filled the bill.”

  “If you were a little more adept at the actual process of writing, my utility might be drastically improved.”

  “Will you for the love of Gammag stop being defensive and focus? This thing isn’t slowing down, but I am.”

  “Very well. Stand by.”

  “Easy for you to say.”

  Tol had taken to staying up on the seats. The golem apparently couldn’t negotiate climbing, and was reduced to swinging at his legs. Of course, any hit that incapacitated him would put him within easy reach of his adversary, so Tol was really dodging just as much as before. Not having constantly to duck away from blows to his head and neck was a relief, though. As he was bracing for another attack, Tol caught a glimpse of something whizzing past the carriage. It took a few seconds before his brain registered just what he’d seen. It was a maintenance portal. The carriage should have stopped at it, but obviously it didn’t. That probably meant that the emergency stop system had been sabotaged. Made sense; he should have anticipated that move.

  The situation seemed a great deal less hopeful than it had a short time ago. He was trapped in a small cylindrical prison with a virtually immortal magical opponent eager to rip him limb from limb and/or beat him into a gooey pulp. There was no realistic hope of stopping the carriage, and attempting to escape it while moving would be suicide. His only ally was a wise-cracking writing instrument with an attention deficit disorder. How much bleaker could things get?

  There is an old goblin maxim to the effect that one should be careful what sorts of rhetorical questions one poses, even mentally, lest they lose their rhetorical nature. As if to illustrate that nugget of wisdom, the gods chose that moment to answer Tol’s question in an unequivocal manner. The golem caught him just behind the knee in another surprise move and slammed his relatively intact fist into Tol’s ribs as he buckled. He managed to roll away from the next blow, but his pain level had increased logarithmically.

  “I have good news and bad news,” said the pen suddenly, its electronic voice a bit muffled from the makeshift bandage Tol had wrapped around his cracked ribs.

  “I hate it when people say that to me,” replied Tol through gritted teeth, “what’s the bad news?”

  “According to my sensors you are losing blood too rapidly to sustain consciousness much longer.”

  “What did I say that sounded like ‘raise my stress level even more, will you?’ And the good news?”

  “My power consumption curve has leveled off. That means my ambient energy conversion cells have finally stabilized to their mature values.”

  “Remind me to throw you a smekkin’ party in celebration. Looks like I’ll have to do it from the afterlife, though, since I won’t actually be alive much longer.”

  He dropped to his knees as he spoke. The lack of blood was overcoming him. The golem wheeled around and moved in for the kill.

  “Oh yes, I have one more bit of news, as well.”

  “I can’t wait. What is it, did you discover some heretofore undetected mocking module in your onboard ROM?”

  “Not exactly. I have detected the presence of a magical singularity.”

  “Would I regret it if I expended my last conscious breath to ask you what the smek you’re talking about?”

  “I am talking about him.”

  “Him? Him who?” Tol gasped weakly, and swiveled his head around. There in the middle of the carriage was a small fragile-looking creature about a meter tall, with bluish skin and casting a faint pearly radiance. He looked like a tiny glowing elf seen through the wrong end of a spyglass.

  “Great. Now I’m hallucinating. What’s next, flying purple seabeeves in sequined tutus?”

  “You are not hallucinating, on this occasion. There is a creature now present in the carriage that is, as far I can tell from my telemetry, a manifestation of The Slice itself. A sort of living personification of magic, if you will.”

  Crazy though that sounded, it jiggled something in Tol’s memory. “Is there any record of such a creature in your databases?”

  “Yes. I have identified the species for you before. It is an alfar.”

  The alfar had been standing motionless, regarding the golem closely. The golem appeared confused, and stamped back and forth beating the air feebly with its fist and stump. It did not seem to be able to detect Tol’s aura any longer, probably due to the overwhelming magical presence of the alfar. Tol laid there on a seat, barely conscious from blood loss but still fascinated by this near-mythical being a scant three meters from his face.

  The alfar moved slowly, deliberately, with supernatural grace. It raised a delicate arm, spread the four fingers wide, and pushed against an invisible wall. The golem flew up into the air and crashed into the back of the carriage as though it had been hit dead-on by a fully-loaded dray. It slumped to the floor and gradually disappeared, leaving behind only a grotesquely distorted outline that gave off a soft greenish glow for some seconds before fading.

  The being turned its gaze to Tol. It had youthful, almost infantile, features, yet the eyes were infinitely deep, pools of unimaginable power and wisdom. Tol shuddered, despite his weakened condition. Here was a creature who could be the ultimate foe or the best possible ally. Tol hoped fervently for the latter. Either way, though, there was nothing he could do about it now. His field of vision narrowed, and the world began to get fuzzy around the edges. He saw the alfar raise both hands in his direction, palms up. Then darkness took him.

  Chapter Ten:

  Spot the Brain Cell

  Aspet sat slumped in his chair and fixed a blank gaze on the calendar hanging a little crookedly on the wall next to his computer. He had finally gotten up the gumption to file a challenge to the throne; it was set to take place in a little less than a fortnight. For years he’d dreamed of what it would be like to be king, but now that the prospect was finally staring him in the face, he wasn’t sur
e he could handle it. He wasn’t worried about the hacking part; he’d been doing that most of his life and as long as he thought of it as just one more online death match, he’d do fine. No, he was worried about what would happen if he somehow won.

  In his younger days, being king had sounded like the ultimate glamor job: royal treatment, royal privileges, and royal luxury. After enduring The Seminar, though, he now realized that being head of state was nothing like he’d imagined it. It was stressful, demanding, and often exhausting. You give up any hope of privacy, as well as any expectation of a full night’s sleep for weeks at a stretch. Your life is largely defined by your responsibility to the kingdom, and you must be unfailingly and fluently diplomatic to everyone. Any slip-up could start a war or uprising.

  Now Aspet was doing some serious soul-searching, trying to get to grips with whether or not he was prepared to live under these terms for the rest of his life, or at least until he lost to the next challenger. That would be no sooner than two years from now, though, as that was the time a new king was allowed to serve before fresh challenges could be set forth. The Council of Mages and Engineers had some influence over whether or not a challenge, once issued, was accepted as valid. Neither Aspet nor most of the rest of the population of Tragacanth understood the precise nature of CoME’s role, only that they were somehow involved. He assumed their decision had something to do with how well they thought the current monarch was governing the nation. Whatever the case, he was gratified they’d accepted his suit. At least, he thought so.

  He’d had a brief flurry of exchanges with Boogla, then silence. Not that this was unusual behavior for a hacker, especially one as enigmatic as the legendary Boogla (or a direct descendant thereof), if that’s who she really was. After a while he’d almost forgotten about her, but never completely. She’d established a beachhead on a remote lagoon in his mind—a presence both simple and elegant. He knew she would find him if the urgent need arose.

  As he sat and fidgeted at his computer, weighing the wisdom of his lifestyle choice, Aspet absently surfed over to the “Tragacanthanem,” a sort of underground alternative news and views site run clandestinely from an obscure branch of the Royal Network situated on an archipelago off the southeast coast. The authorities probably knew about it, but chose to look the other way because it was very popular and you didn’t risk pissing off thousands of goblins unless you had a really good reason. They’d been thrown from that humpher before. (Humphers were extremely good at throwing riders because with three legs in the front and one in the back they could buck in several directions at once.)

  Protest underway at Dreadmost Town Hall. Chimeras want larger voice in local government.

  Amusing, yet disturbing. Amusing because the tone of the story was faintly derisive and mocking, along with the pictures that accompanied it. Disturbing because it was a political issue he’d have to take seriously were he to become king. As he was ruminating over this unsettling reality, he idly scrolled down the page, staring at but not really taking in the photos, until he came to the last one. It seemed innocuous, even nondescript, at first glance—just a picture of two rather scruffy chimeras holding blurry placards. It wasn’t the chimeras or their fuzzy manifesto that caused Aspet’s double take, though. It was the cloud formation in the background.

  Another of Aspet’s passions besides hacking was meteorology. He loved studying the wide range of weather phenomena to which Tragacanth was subject. Wind-walls, spinners, ice curtains, washes, fogflows, heat bullies, ocean titans—he was fascinated by them all. He’d even spent one exciting season as a volunteer spotter with the Central Tragacanth Storm Tracking Squad. The rapid rotation of the planet N’plork, on which Tragacanth, Galanga, and three smaller nations constituted the largest of four continents, coupled with various unusual topological features such as a range of 20,000-meter mountains, several massive canyon complexes over 3,500 meters in depth, numerous volcanic hotspots scattered about the globe, and a series of truly gigantic, periodically reversing ocean currents of wildly different temperatures generated some dramatic and highly variable weather patterns.

  This complex climatic milieu resulted in an extensive catalog of cloud types, ranging from the utterly commonplace to the vanishingly rare. It was one of the latter that Aspet was sure he’d spotted in the grainy photograph on the ‘anthem page. It wasn’t just that it was a rare type, though: it was the mechanism by which that particular type was created that captured his serious attention.

  The annual journey of N’plork took it perilously close to a large and densely populated swarm of planetoids and smaller chunks orbiting rather haphazardly around N’plork’s twin suns. The scientist types of Tragacanth had gotten pretty good at tracking these beasts, turning them over to the Planetary Defense Mages for magical deflection or destruction when they got too close to N’plork’s orbital path for comfort.

  The widespread use of magic on N’plork had, over time, established an aura around the planet somewhat akin to a magnetic field. Some of the smaller near-miss asteroids—those too small to be detected and destroyed before they entered N’plorkian space—grazed this arcane envelope and took on random magical properties. In exceedingly rare instances, the property a passing ‘stroid picked up would be that of weather modification. This had only happened once in recorded history, as far as anyone knew. On that occasion the disintegration of the ‘stroid, probably no bigger than a ripe plognik fruit, in the N’plorkian atmosphere had released a weather disruption spell of epic proportions that had modified weather patterns all across the planet for well over a month.

  The only warning sign that had preceded the weather weirdness was a peculiar cloud formation generated by the ionization of the air around the plummeting space rock, enhanced by its magical properties. The result was a strange oval streak with periodic corkscrew shapes emanating from it at acute angles. Aspet had first seen the only surviving photograph of that phenomenon as a child, and it left a deep impression on him. Deep enough, in fact, that he instantly recognized the ‘anthem photo as strikingly similar.

  It was similar, but from what he could make out on the low-res picture, far grander in scale. The original cloud had been only a few tens of meters in length, with perhaps a dozen three meter-long emanations. Judging by the apparent scale of the ‘anthem shot, this example was at least an order of magnitude larger—over a hundred projections extended twenty or thirty meters from the main cloud trail, which itself appeared to be over a thousand meters in length.

  He wasn’t sure what this meant, exactly, but he had a hunch they were, at the very least, in for some unusual weather. It was the wicked stepmother of all hunches.

  • * • * • * •

  “Curse yar blotchy hide, Jizrag, I tol yer t’ hol’ thet sign up so’s th’ cam’ra kin see ‘im.”

  “Garn, eat yer maggots an’ shat up, that’s what I sez. I was holdin’ th’ bleeder up as far as I could. ‘T’wadn’t my fault th’ little snorg was filmin’ in the wrong d’rection.”

  “Nog y’are, an’ nog yuv allays been, sez I. T’would be a blessin’ for the res’ of us if th’ ground jus’ opened up and swallowed yer.”

  “Speakin’ o’ blessins’, why don’t I jus’ open up yer ‘ead right now wit’ this ‘ere sign?”

  While the two chimeras settled their differences in what was apparently the traditional manner, the camera crew took a break. They’d been filming all morning and were getting tired. A little lunch and something cold to drink sounded mighty good right about now. Besides, most of the demonstrators had wandered over to watch the combatants and cheer them on.

  Selpla, the reporter covering the demonstration, sat in a citrum-green folding chair under a natty paisley umbrella and chewed thoughtfully on her hydroponically-grown ogrecress sandwich. Tragacanth harbored a number of different races who lived together in something approaching harmony most of the time. There seemed to be significant resistance to the chimeras’ attempts to integrate themselves into mainstream soc
iety, though.

  Of course, even by exceptionally tolerant Tragacanth standards chimeras evinced an utter lack of social graces; this tended not to endear them even to the other inhabitants of Dreadmost, where the chimeras’ initial contacts with the rest of society were taking place. Offending the Dreadmost populace was something of an achievement in itself, since most of the inhabitants were already on the crude side of uncouth. The outpost was a popular spot for unsavory characters, sociopaths, drifters prone to violence, and those with shady pasts looking for a refuge from the public eye. They weren’t, as a rule, known for their strict adherence to the protocols of polite society. Most of them believed spitting to be an acceptable form of greeting.

  The mere fact that the chimeras were having trouble getting along with the Dreadmost citizenry was a strong indicator of just how few inherent social skills they possessed. In their defense, they were the product of random hybridizations triggered by errant magical processes. Those combinations which produced fertile offspring were now more or less self-sustaining, however, although their magical origin did give biology a little boost where fecundity was concerned.

  One of the most enduring of the hybrids was that of orc and crusher eel, a nasty and wholly unnatural intersection if ever there was one. Orcs were a rarity in Tragacanth, having been virtually eradicated over a thousand years ago after a particularly vicious swarm very nearly succeeded in taking over the entire continent. There were only a couple of closely-watched colonies remaining, both in the south: one outside Dreadmost and the other on the coast east of Qoplebarq.

  Goblins and orcs shared a relatively recent common ancestor, but goblins lacked the insane aggression and utter absence of morality that marked their slightly smaller cousins. No love was lost between the two species, shared family tree or not, but this was a tendency found throughout Tragacanth. No one got along with orcs; no matter how tolerant people were, sooner or later the orcs would completely and irrevocably alienate them by enslaving their children and roasting their pets; sometimes the reverse.