Goblinopolis, The Tol Chronicles, Book 1

by Robert G. Ferrell

  Chapter One:

  The Bloated Balrog

  The races of N’plork all evolved from a distant common ancestor and developed their particular morphologies in response to the demands of the environments in which they lived. As a result, each can theoretically hybridize with the others, although the only relatively common such interracial assignations seem to involve ogres, trolls, and goblins. Half-trolls and half-ogres are still rare in the general population, but in certain densely urban areas of Goblinopolis (Tragacanth), Aspolia (Solemadrina), and Uzplenq (Nerr), they are not an uncommon sight.

  —Excerpt from The Mythologies of N’plork,

  CoME Cultural Sociography Series #27

  Tol-u-ol dropped heavily into a chair crafted without evidence of skill from the posterior exoskeleton of an adult pseudomale Humphing Beast. Humphers had a single central gluteal muscle, since they had only one rear leg; the chitinous butt cheek made a fairly decent lounger if properly cleaned and exfoliated. This one wasn’t, but Tol didn’t give a smek. He was dead tired, and anything between vertical and supine was fine by him so long as it was an imbibing-friendly posture.

  A barmaid slithered over. She was one of those eye-twisting orcish chimeras that caused such a stir when they first rose from the genetic cesspool called The Effluent. Despite their lumpish appearance, they were fairly normal as hybrid nightmares go. Folks had gotten pretty much used to them, but they still made Tol flinch. He was too spent tonight for flinching, though.

  “Hi, honey. An ubergourd of razzle to start with, please, and I don’t want to see any straws or umbrellas.”

  Her ten inch razor-tipped tongue flicked around and neatly bisected a pencil wasp laying eggs in one of her ear flaps. “Razzhle comin’ uph. Anythin’ elsh?”

  He waved her away. She disappeared into the murky darkness of the tavern, leaving a faint but discernible trail of slime behind on the worn glonkwood floorboards. Tol sat back and stared at it hopefully, waiting for some kobold or gnarlignome to come sauntering by and slip. None did. That figured. His day had been full of that very same lack of entertainment.

  Tol was a cop. His beat was Sebacea, one of the roughest neighborhoods in Goblinopolis, the largest city and capitol of Tragacanth. It had been an incorporated area in its own right at one time, but was absorbed into the larger city when the Lord Mayor and Town Council were imprisoned en masse for drug dealing, smuggling, money laundering, tax evasion, fraud, counterfeiting, jaywalking, transgender sexual deviation, and felonious littering. Sebacea was not known for its gentility or subtlety.

  Tol had been in on that bust. It had made his week. Under Tragacanthan law he was entitled to a share of the spoils, so he picked out a transmog unit. It was a little ratty-looking cosmetically, but it seemed perfectly functional. He used it mostly for domestic problem-solving, like zapping the next door kid’s lapspider that was constantly raiding his meat garden into a can of old dried paint and setting it out on the curb with the garbage. He also turned the insulation voles living in the walls of his townhouse into cozy foot warmers.

  Some of his colleagues in edict enforcement still used swords or magic; he’d long ago decided that a .44 neural disruptor was more his style. Let the long-haired old forensic mages cast their spells or pour their potions all over the floor after the situation was under control. He needed to get in, get the job done, and get out as cleanly and with as few complications as possible. If a three-meter greater ogress came at him with a sonic cleaver, he wanted to be able to drop her at a safe distance, not stand there waving his fool arms and chanting. That kind of nonsense got body parts separated from their owners toot sweet. A former partner of his had one of his arms torn off by a drug-crazed ogre while trying to activate a magic battle-axe in the back room of a bookie joint. Smek that nonsense.

  The barmaid oozed back with his drink. He tossed her a five billme coin and told her to keep the change. Derision looks pretty much the same as any other emotion on a normal orc, much less a chimera, but this one managed to show it surprisingly well—no doubt due to all the practice she got dealing with the regular tavern clientele. Tol beamed a smek-eating grin at her and took a hefty swig from the gourd. Swishing the inferior grade razzle around in his mouth, he thought he detected a slightly bitter taste. Probably didn’t bother to delaminate the gourd before putting alcohol in it. Smekking amateurs. Hopefully this wouldn’t be one of those genetically modified gourds with the hallucinogenic properties. He hated getting stoned by himself in public places.

  As the evening wore on, the Bloated Balrog began to fill up. It was located at a major crossroads, where the trade routes for various magic item components grown on ultra-high security plantations in the far south and the primary east-west techno-industrial interchange met. Sutha Magic Supply, headquartered in Qoplebarq, shipped most of its output to three sprawling complexes in the mountains of the far Northwest. Their exact locations were shrouded in secrecy and industrial-grade cloaking, as they were a source of almost unimaginable wealth for the mages who built and ran them. The Bungash Mountains in the East had most of the mines where raw materials for the technology trade were produced and shipped west to the great factory towns of Fenurian and Cladimil.

  Those well-traveled highways met here in Goblinopolis, which was one of the reasons it was the most populated city in the realm, and specifically they met right next to the Balrog. That made this tavern situated on one of the most economically desirable real estate tracts in the country, a fact that was to prove alternately boon and bane to Terpitude Halftroll, the proprietor. Terp was a big smekker, with long greenish dreadlocks and breath that could drop an orc at ten paces. He was ornery, but honest for all that; Tol liked him. Terp had turned down obscene amounts of money for the Balrog, probably because he sensed even more obscene profits if he held onto it longer. He was constantly being hammered by agents for this or that development company, though, and this made him even crankier.

  One night after a few gourds, Tol asked Terp where he got the name for his tavern. “What the smek is a ‘balrog,’ anyway?”

  “I don’t know,” replied Terp, wiping down the bar counter, “It just came to me in a dream. And I figure anythin’ called a balrog is bound t’ be ugly and bloated, so there ya go.”

  “What had you been drinkin’?”

  “Weren’t drink. I had a couple puffs from one of those smekkin’ gnome pipes—you know, just to be polite and all. The next day I stopped being polite and took to mindin’ my own business.”

  Tol belched and held up his gourd. “Here’s to keepin’ your nose where it belongs.”

  Tragacanth wasn’t exactly a kingdom, in the traditional sense—it was more of a Royal Technocracy. Whoever could wrest formal control of the Royal Network was declared King, although all of the new King’s edicts were initially subject to review by the elected Council of Mages and Engineers (CoME). There were several academies of different sizes and levels of reputability scattered about which purported to train royal aspirants, but so far none of their graduates had gotten very close. Tol’s little brother Aspet, or just “Pet,” as Tol mockingly referred to him in the manner of big brothers universe-wide, had recently completed the curriculum at one of them, but Tol figured Aspet’s chances of becoming king at somewhere between “no way” and “zilch.” Not that he’d spoken to Pet much since he moved out on his own. Their worlds had diverged early, as his sibling was a techno-geek almost from birth and Tol had difficulty working the toaster.

  One of the patrons in tonight’s packed house was a hobgoblin Tol recognized. Pyfox was a professional criminal, you might say, which except for the “professional” part was mostly redundant where hobgob
lins were concerned. The vast majority of the petty crimes that plagued Tragacanthan society were perpetrated by hobs; they seemed to have something of a predisposition for that sort of behavior. Although he had been under the impression that the hob was still in prison after his latest bust, Tol wasn’t particularly surprised to see Pyfox here in public. He was probably at large on some experimental amnesty program pushed by the Tragacanth Prison Reform Committee, populated predominantly by social-crusading elves. Tol didn’t have a lot of respect for elves, but he was prepared to accept that some of that was due simply to the age-old mutual distrust between his race and theirs. Even with his “edict enforcement officer’s objectivity” turned up all the way, though, he still found dealing with the pointy-eared pansies rather distasteful.

  Tol had no reason to suspect Pyfox was up to no good tonight—other than the fact that he was habitually up to no good—but decided to keep an eye on him, nonetheless, just to hone his skills. He was fairly certain his adversary had spotted him, too, so the playing field was level in that respect. Sure, Pyfox was sequestered in a horde of hobgoblins, but there was a saying on the force: One Hobmob, One Goblin. Handling hobs was like scattering scrubhounds—take a couple down and the rest head for the hills with all three of their tails between their legs (except that hobs only had the one tail, and it was really more of an elongated scab). Hobs like to dish it out, but they couldn’t take it. When you’re an EEO you have to know these things.

  Pyfox was attached through a tortuous web of associations to an organized crime syndicate of hobgoblins, trolls, and ogres (not to mention the odd gnome or gnarlignome, and even a sprinkling of disaffected goblins) that called themselves the Belladonnas. Rape, extortion, murder, double parking—these guys were a million laughs. The Capo Belladonna was a grizzled old troll named Gramidius Contentius, but everyone in the family just called him Capo, or if they were in favor today and feelin’ lucky, Grami. The Belladonnas were in and out of lockup so often several of them had their own reserved seats in the Ferroc Loca prison dining hall.

  There was no scheduled floor show in the Balrog, apart from blundering inebriates and kobolds-on-the-make, but most evenings saw at least one spontaneous outbreak of entertainment, usually precipitated by a drunken dare or a goblinspouse who’d been left at home one too many times while hubby went out carousing.

  About midway through the evening a spectacularly drunken ogress, or maybe it was a half-ogress—Tol couldn’t quite tell through the dense haze of smoke—got up to sing a couple of bawdy songs to mixed approval. The smoke was from dongelweed, the favorite inhaled intoxicant of the many gnomes with their elaborately carved labyrinth-pipes who had filled up one end of the room an hour or so ago. Looked like a convention was in town, or maybe these were part of some work convoy heading for Cladimil. Gnomes did most of the assembly work in the tech factories; they had small, very nimble fingers and were swiftest of all the races to grasp the nuances of mechanical and electronic equipment.

  At the conclusion of her performance, the ogress (it was apparent now that she was a fullblood) climbed up on the bar to dance—Terp had long ago reinforced that bar with timbers salvaged from the shipwreck of a commercial sea-going freighter in Myndrythyl Bay for just this eventuality—but before the bouncer could sweep her off with a huge metal claw designed expressly for that purpose an extremely loud and discombobulating explosion went off right outside the tavern. One wall blew in immediately, several large support beams fractured, and parts of the ceiling began to sway ominously. There was a moment of stunned silence, during which the ogress fell limply off the bar of her own accord, followed by a mad stampede for the door. Tol was too far away to have any hope of getting through the hysterical crowd. He shrugged and slipped unimpeded around the corner to the back door. Panic is a curious thing, he mused as he casually skirted the building to see what all the brouhaha was about. It makes people forget that they are sentient (where applicable).

  The front side of the Balrog, or what was left of it, was a bubbling stew of confusion, liberally sprinkled with a wide range of body parts and erstwhile architecture for condiments. Gnomes were shaking their little fists, goblins were wailing, ogres were cursing; the few elves who had been in attendance (and a couple more who were passing through at the time) were weeping quietly off to the side. Tol pushed his way through the fractured throng to examine the blast area.

  “Anyone see who did this?” he asked of the nearest circle of bystanders. An ogre wearing the livery of the Goblinopolis Transport Service, who ran the city’s cabs, stepped forward. He was old and leathern, with gobbets of what had probably until recently been tavern patrons embedded here and there in the folds of his waxy skin.

  “I seen ‘em,” he croaked, “I seen three elves come a runnin’ out from behind that there buildin’ and they drops this box undern th’ winder there. Then they goes skeddalin’ off that way and not more’n fifteen pops later there was the biggest boom you ever heard. Lucky I’s next door by then or I’d jest be leetle lumps on th’ pavement now.”

  Tol cocked his head, “Are you trying to tell me that elves blew up this pub?” The cabbie nodded vehemently in the affirmative.

  He whipped out a notebook. “OK, oldster. Can you describe these ‘elves’ for me?” He tried not to sound too doubtful, but it was a struggle. The ogre didn’t seem to notice, but then ogres aren’t famed for their mastery of linguistic nuance.

  “They’s skinny as rails, wearing light gray shimmery-lookin’ duds. One of ‘em had on a hood with one o’ them long tails on it. The other two was sportin’ what looked like some kinda red sashes er wide belts. They mighta had a metal buckle or somethin’ on th’ front—I didn’t see ‘em from thet angle long enough ta tell fer sure.”

  Tol scribbled some of this down in his leather bound department-issued notepad. His writing instrument was a clever little biomechanical hybrid thing that some misguided genius had thought it would be nifty to endow with a limited form of ‘domestic intelligence.’

  “Skinny has two ns,” it reported quietly, “and while we are on the subject of skinny, you are 14.5 kilocalories above your optimum intake for this week, and it is only Midweeksday.”

  Tol rolled his eyes. “Spare me the dietary editorials, will ya? I’m trying to take notes here.”

  There was a strategically-calculated pause, and then a very slightly affronted electronic voice replied, “I apologize. I am just a poor mechanical device attempting to carry out my programming as well as I am able. If I have offended or annoyed you in the process, I am sorry. I shall shut up now and go back to being an inert piece of elegantly crafted metal and apparently utterly wasted circuitry. Do not mind me. I shall be in ‘silent’ mode, hoping against hope that someday you will find even the smallest reason to validate my presence in the universe. The gods know I do not ask for much. I only live—wait, I am not alive, am I?—I only exist to serve.”

  Tol stuffed the pen back in the acoustically dampened lining of his overjack pocket (he’d had that lining installed specially and at considerable personal expense) and pulled his lower fangs across his upper lip in deep annoyance. He hated those stupid pens, but they were regulation for all field officers because the Edict Enforcement Commissioner’s brother owned the company that manufactured the confounded atrocities.

  He interviewed several more eyewitnesses to the bombing, but no one had seen the perps as closely as the old ogre. The others just spoke of vague figures that ran out from the shadows, dropped something near the pub window, and scurried away. They agreed that there were three of them (well, one witness said six, but he was obviously deep into his gourds since he addressed Tol as “you guys”), and that they took off in the direction of Elixir Street. No one else from EE had shown up yet—mostly because they avoided Sebacea whenever possible—and the trail was already getting cold. Tol realized that this was going to be his case for the simple reason that it already was. Every time he fought fate, he didn’t even score a point.

  H
e sighed and started sniffing around. Goblins had a pretty well-developed sense of smell; he could definitely catch a faint whiff of elf that led off in the indicated direction. It must be true, then: elves were responsible. He’d never heard of an elf willingly involved in a wanton destructive act like this. What was the world coming to? This could never have happened in the old days. He sighed again.

  This time he heard himself sigh, and the sound made him realize what nostalgic nonsense he was thinking. People were people, be they elf, goblin, troll, or even chimera, and people were capable of just about anything at any given moment. They weren’t any better or worse than they’d ever been. He was just getting more cynical. Being a street cop in Sebacea will do that to you if you keep at it long enough.

  As he tried to track the rapidly-fading scent trail, Tol was a bit put off to discover that the cobblestone walkway he was treading seemed to be dissolving under his feet. The buildings also were behaving rather oddly, in that their exterior walls were bowing out and sucking in, as though they were engaging in respiration, an architectural function he’d somehow never noticed before. The stars peering from between patches of cloud were beginning to leave contrails when he moved his head. This wasn’t normal, even for a goblin. Tol stopped for a moment and shook himself. The realization sloshed over him like a large wave of liquefied toffee that he was stoned from the smekking gourd. That would boost his detective aptitude, all righty. All righty, all reety, all reety-righty-roty. All de all de lall de lull de looloo.

  He sat down abruptly on the sidewalk and began to hum a song from his childhood. The humming turned into singing, and that turned into not very skilled goblinwarbling, which woke most of the neighborhood, or at least that contingent who had managed to get back to sleep after the explosion. Somewhere deep in Tol’s brain there was still a tiny capsule of sobriety and that capsule had just enough room for a single thought: thank the gods that being stoned on the job isn’t against regs anymore. The Commissioner’s sister owned a pharmaceutical company that specialized—under the table—in ‘recreational hallucinogenics;’ EE management as a result now tended to look the other way when officers ‘indulged,’ so long as no one got hurt or duties weren’t too grievously impacted.