Goblinopolis, The Tol Chronicles, Book 1

by Robert G. Ferrell

  Tol finished a couple of songs and was about to launch into a third when a large and decidedly odiferous article of footwear came sailing out of a second-story window and plopped unceremoniously into his lap. He grinned at it and took a bite out of the upper. He chewed on it for a few seconds, rolling it around in his mouth like a dollop of vintage razzle. He swallowed with some difficulty and decided that further ingestion was not warranted at this time. It needed to age a bit more. He tossed it aside and got unsteadily to his feet (there being no one else’s feet to get to).

  He knew there was something he was supposed to be doing—something important—but his attention kept getting diverted by fascinating little details like the patina on a corroding doorknocker or the way in which a rain gutter jutted out from the wall to which it was no longer firmly attached. As Tol stood there with his head cocked and one eye shut, staring at the empty space between gutter and stone, a liripiped figure crept up on him, silent as a worm, deposited a small package wrapped in paper near his feet, and disappeared just as quietly into the night.

  He noticed it right away, as the accumulated precipitation from the cold mist that was now falling rather heavily caught the light from a street lamp and drew his attention. He knelt and picked up the package, fascinated by its sudden appearance. He turned it over in his hands; then his faced screwed up in exaggerated concern when his fingers encountered a greasy film that seemed to be emanating from within. Tol marched over to a nearby public trash receptacle and dropped the offending parcel inside. He turned away and had taken about seven or eight wobbly steps when the trash receptacle blew itself apart. The compound curves of the ornamental slats forming the outer structure of the container hurtled out in all directions, one narrowly missing Tol’s head and embedding itself in a brick facade a half meter to his right. The pressure wave from the blast knocked him to his knees.

  It took a few seconds to recover from the shock, and by that time he’d noticed a pair of luminous eyes peering out at him from a broken grate. He crawled over to the grate to investigate, serendipitously moving out of the way just in time to avoid being crushed by a gargoyle dislodged from its rooftop perch by the explosion. The stone monster shattered on the sidewalk about two meters behind Tol, spraying berzal nut-sized chunks every which way. The eyes vanished into the pitch-dark recesses from which they’d materialized.

  Tol got to his feet and brushed off the gargoyle debris. He picked up one of the chunks and regarded it briefly, wearing a frown that looked like concentration but really was more akin to hangover, and dropped the fragment absently into his overjack pocket. The gourd buzz was beginning to wind down, and he felt a growing sense that something wasn’t right. He examined the shattered remains of the gargoyle and peered up at the shadowed skyline trying to ascertain where it had fallen from. The mist had turned into light rain which streamed down his EE helmet and into his eyes. He snapped the collapsible brim into place and pulled his collar up as far as it would go against the chilly dampness. Then he remembered what he was doing out in the wet night.

  He backtracked to the last place he’d been sure of the elves’ scent and tested the air. The rain had done a thorough job of erasing any definitive trail; all he could register was a faint hint that might or might not be elf spoor. Sighing, Tol picked his way along, relying as much on professional intuition as physical evidence.

  Back at the site of the ruined gargoyle, a thickish mist, faintly blue in color, formed near the center of the debris and slowly began to rotate. It intensified and grew more substantial as the swirling increased in velocity. After half a minute the rotating column was a goblin-foot wide and the center of it radiated a strong white light that suddenly erupted in a blinding flash. When it faded the gargoyle pieces had mysteriously reassembled. This time around, however, the monster was no mere piece of grotesque sculpture. It was quite definitely alive. It shook itself, sniffed the night air, and let out a low, mournful keening. Suddenly it leapt forward and ran along at a trot on powerful, compact legs, nose jutted forward like a hound at the scent. It left a trail of warm, blue liquid oozing from a hole about the size of a berzal nut in its left shoulder.

  Chapter Two:

  Arnoc, Ferrocs & Dubers (Oh My!)

  The Council of Mages and Engineers was billeted in a rather stylish manor house at the east end of the smartly designed and landscaped Royal Tragacanthan Government Complex in Goblinopolis. The building had two distinct components: an elaborate conference suite and office block occupied by the Council and their staffs, and the heavily fortified open floor plan Royal Network Operations Center, known widely as Arnoc. This was the central nervous system of the kingdom, where four discrete network layers provided all the data and control operations for the Royal government. These layers were named for the prevailing color schemes of each: aqua, cyan, teal, and chartreuse (the chief design engineer, it later turned out, was quite color blind and thought he had picked contrasting hues).

  Each of these networks had its own dedicated core of analysts, engineers, systems administrators, operators, and programmers. They were in constant rivalry with one another; getting into any of them, however, was the pinnacle of a career in the Royal Data Corps. They were ‘the best of the best.’ The rivalries were actively supported by senior management because they tended to keep the geeks occupied and too busy to think much about hacking the systems for their own advancement/amusement.

  All of the functions of government in Tragacanth were controlled by one or more of these networks, whose terminal linkages with the rest of the country were under the oversight of either engineers or mages. Some of the interfaces were digital, some magical. A few swung both ways. There were five dual interfaces, to be exact; together they constituted what was known as “The Pentagorn.” They were located one in each of the five administrative districts of Tragacanth, called Ferrocs. Ferroc Norda was in the North, Ferroc Sutha in the south, Ferroc Osta in the West, Ferroc Oria in the East, and Ferroc Loca in the central capitol district. Each of these had a dual interface, or Duber, and each interface was under the control of a Magineer, a cross-trained mage and engineer, of which no more than ten existed at any given time, by order of the Council: one primary and one backup for each Duber.

  The significance of the Dubers was that they were the only points in the kingdom where the spheres of magic and technology truly overlapped. Magineers were equally well-versed in either realm, which made them the most valuable people around. It took a minimum of fifty years of study and an exhaustive series of progressively more demanding examinations to achieve the status of Magineers’ Apprentice, the ranks from which a new Magineer was chosen to ascend by the Council when an existing member died or retired from government service (and most chose to serve for life).

  The Magineers are imposing old farts. They’ve spent the better part of a life getting to where they are, and they don’t care who knows it. The last thing one wants to do with a fine sunny day is waste it arguing anything at all with a Magineer. You’re hopelessly outgunned, because if they can’t win you over with rational discourse they’ll just turn you into an amphibian and let you hop about until you’ve seen things their way. That can be frightfully inconvenient if you’ve planned to tee off right after lunch.

  Another useful thing to know about Magineer candidates is that they are required to live their entire lives in the district which they hope one day to represent. Each area has its own particular magnetic fields and arcanomorphology that have to be imprinted on the prospective’s psychic template in order for him (no female had ever ascended; something to do with genetics, or so the official story goes) to be able to manipulate the Duber fully. The only way to accomplish this is for him to spend many years wandering the district, absorbing its auras and tuning his bioresonance to that of his Ferroc. By the time they’ve been aligning their neurons with the local universe for that long, they just don’t give a wet slap about what lesser mortals think anymore.

  Each of them is fanatically convinced
that their district is far superior to the others, and they can work up quite a lather when someone dares to intimate otherwise. For this reason they are never allowed to associate with any of the Magineers or Magineers’ Apprentices from outside their district, even in the unlikely event they retire from the office and are then theoretically free to travel. It would be like mixing matter and antimatter without the magnetic bottle: quite untidy for the local space-time continuum. A disagreement in person between Magineers would almost certainly result in rearrangement of the nearby landscape and possibly even one or two constellations.

  The Dubers were located in highly ornate structures in the capitol of each district. The districts tried to outdo one another in providing facilities for the Duber and its Magineer, and so over the years the architecture had gotten more and more elaborate. In all four of the provincial districts now the Dubers formed the centerpiece of veritable palaces. It takes two years to fully train those who aspire to be guides for assisting visiting engineers and mages in weaving their way through the baroque maze of a Duber complex.

  The purpose of the Dubers is to provide a place for registered mages and engineers to access both the awesomely powerful Arnoc and the reservoir of magic known as ‘The Slice’ through far greater conduits than are available elsewhere. The Arnoc is a repository of all written or spoken knowledge, as well as an almost infinitely powerful computing engine.

  The reason that the Royal Network is so powerful rests with the Magineers, or more precisely, their art. When the system was first designed and constructed, the highest level mages and most brilliant engineers in the kingdom collaborated. Every data transport buss in the network’s massively parallel CPU array was suspended in a permanent temporal stasis spell that enabled the system to do its calculations, for all practical purposes, instantaneously: essentially infinity-1 flops. No matter how long it actually took to complete a calculation, the amount of time that passed in the native temporal frame was measured in nanoseconds.

  It wasn’t merely a matter of casting a spell on a piece of machinery, though. The interactions between subatomic particles operating at a quantum level and the flow of magic are extraordinarily complex; some pundits say, in fact, that magic itself is simply a manifestation of quantum energy states. It took many, many failed attempts before engineers and mages working together finally stumbled on the correct procedure, a procedure that became the most jealously guarded secret in Tragacanth. Any significant modifications to the system had to be performed by the only people with total understanding of both the technical and arcane aspects of the architecture—the Magineers.

  Custodianship of this awesome resource was the principal job of the Magineer of Ferroc Loca. The Ferroc Loca Duber was located on the grounds of the Royal Palace Complex, only a stone’s throw away from the Arnoc. While Duber Loca was the most heavily used interface in the kingdom, the Loca Magineer nevertheless spent most of his time hovering around the Royal Network. His status in the kingdom was roughly equivalent to that of the King, who was in reality the Chief Hacker, although the Loca Magineer had no formal duties as a policy maker. His influence on the king—and therefore on the king’s edicts—was usually considerable, nonetheless.

  In many ways, the Magineers were a form of clergy: they acted as priests who could commune with a higher power—the supernatural conjunction of magic and technology. Heaven in this mythos was that narrow band of overlap between physics and metaphysics, called The Slice by Tragacanthan philosophers. The Arnoc represented the temporal manifestation of The Slice: a place where cutting-edge technology and rarefied magic coexisted in one of the stranger and more sublime of all known juxtapositions.

  The current Loca Magineer was, at 62, one of the youngest ever appointed, and he was a certifiable genius even among his esteemed peers. His birth name was Gepefrindos, but he’d bowed to ancient tradition and at his ascendance taken the name Cromalin, which from Old Goblish translates approximately to “Imposer of Order.” In strict point of fact he was Cromalin II, since there had been a previous Magineer with that name, but the first Cromalin had served less than two years owing to an unfortunate fatal accident involving a spilled lightning potion and an unexpectedly well-grounded heating duct grating, so very few were even aware of him.

  Chapter Three:

  Magic Marker

  The scent trail effectively vanished at the edge of a large urban park about a kilometer from the ill-fated Balrog. Tol made several sweeping arcs centered on the last position where he’d been certain of elf scent, but to no avail. He stood at the park boundary, wondering what to do now, when an ethereal voice washed over him like an invisible wave.

  “Looking for something?”

  Tol stood up perfectly straight and spun around very slowly. After a complete 360 he wrinkled what little forehead he had and grunted into the cold air. His breath made fog sculptures in the stillness.

  “Maybe I am, and maybe I’m not. Who wants to know?”

  “I’m positively devastated. Don’t you recognize me?”

  The sensation bugging Tol the last few seconds was not, as he had first surmised, jock itch. It was a dawning recognition that made his stomach knot up.

  “Plåk? For the love of...I distinctly remember you being banished to the negative energy plane.”

  “Change is a fundamental force, Tol-u-ol. I found a momentarily unguarded teleportal and slipped through. Okay, actually I made the whole banishment story up. You don’t sound happy to see me.”

  “I’d be happier if I could see you.”

  A faint shimmering manifested itself in the air a short distance from Tol. He watched with a kind of grim resignation as it ever so gradually coalesced into a wispy generic biped. When it became apparent that the process had gone as far as it intended to go, Tol arched his eyebrows and chuckled.

  “That the best you can manage? You must not be eating right.”

  “It’s been nearly nine centuries in my personal reckoning since I possessed a physical body, goblin. I’m a bit out of practice.”

  Tol shrugged. “As I recall, you weren’t much to look at before, anyway.”

  Plåk ignored the insult. “I repeat: are you looking for something?”

  Tol rolled his eyes, “Nah, I just thought I’d go for a little midnight stroll out here in the frozen freakin’ wasteland. Of course I’m looking for something! Looking for things is part of what I do for a living—if you wanna call this living.”

  “Would that something be three rather scruffy elves?”

  A sharp involuntary intake of breath gave Tol a lung full of crisp, damp air. He coughed as the less sooty park atmosphere mixed with the polluted Sebacea glop resident in his lungs.

  “Could be. What do you (cough) know about all this?”

  Tol’s could feel his mental gears beginning to grind. True, they could stand a good lubing, but he was on the job and his favorite pub was scattered all over the sidewalk.

  “About half an hour ago three elves made a quantum portal jump, right about where you’re standing. Caused a lot of ripples. I followed ‘em for a while, but they disappeared down a wormhole that I wasn’t prepared to enter without damn good reason and a reliable map.”

  “Are you sure it was a quantum gate and not a magical door of some sort?” Tol asked, frowning.

  “Quantum portal, for sure. No magical aura, no invocation. Just an old-fashioned temporal distortion with medium-frequency rippling. Seen a lot of ‘em, back in my neck of the woods.”

  Elven teleportation: red flag.

  “Someday you’re going to have to tell me more about ‘your neck of the woods.’ It sounds like a weird place.”

  “Heh. That’s exactly what my people would think of Tragacanth. In fact, I doubt if any of them would believe me if I told them about it.”

  “Tragacanth is the real world,” Tol sniffed.

  “Sure it is,” replied Plåk, “as long as that’s where you happen to be standin.’ To me, this place is like a dream that can’t
make up its mind if it wants to be a full-fledged nightmare or just the aftermath of an over-spiced meal.”

  “Yeah? Well, the feeling is mutual. N’plork don’t need you around, anyhow. So, what brings you to our nightmare this time? Surely you didn’t tromp across the multiverse just to report sighting three fugitive elves...”

  “No, that was pure serendipity. To tell the truth, I came here to find you. I didn’t expect it to be this easy, though.”

  “To find me? I must have gone up several notches on your list of favorite people since our last encounter. As I recall, you were none too fond of me then.”

  “Nothing to do with my fondness for you, or lack thereof. This is not a social call—it’s all business.”

  Tol snorted. “Business? What possible business could you have with a goblin? You just said my world doesn’t really exist.”

  “That’s not what I said, at all. However, my business with you is predicated on an issue that is of vital concern to goblins, and in fact every creature on this entire planet. It concerns The Slice.”

  “What about it?”

  “I have strong reason to suspect that someone is plotting to disrupt it.”

  “Disrupt it? How? Why?”

  “How, I don’t really know, not yet. Why, I can only guess at. I believe that someone wants to do away with magic on N’plork altogether by making it inaccessible, or at least reducing that access drastically.”

  Tol scratched his head, in that spot right between the temporal ridges that always got sore when he tried to think about things like The Slice.