Goblinopolis, The Tol Chronicles, Book 1

by Robert G. Ferrell

  “What’s so smekkin’ funny?” Kurg growled, stepping in a pothole and splashing water in his face as he stumbled. Hnuppa tried to restrain himself, but the sight of Kurg soaking wet with the still-activated dryness amulet hanging around his neck was too much.

  “Bwaaahahahah!” he bellowed, unable to frame any actually coherent reply.

  Kurg glared evilly in his direction, but Hnuppa couldn’t stop laughing. He was still chuckling as he climbed into the dray next to his soggy boss.

  “There’s about a gumjillion goblins who’d love to have your job, you know,” Kurg said, arms folded across his chest.

  “Maybe,” replied Hnuppa, “but that’s only because they don’t fully comprehend the working conditions.”

  The dray chugged away through the ankle-deep water.

  “What, you mean slogging through the torrential rain?”

  “No, I mean putting up with you as a boss.”

  “All right, that’s it. You can just smekkin’ walk. Pull over!” Kurg barked at the driver. Slud ignored him. “Pull over, I said!” No reaction.

  “What, is this guy smekkin’ deaf?”

  “Pretty much. He’s also my uncle, incidentally.” Hnuppa started chuckling again.

  Kurg sat there and steamed in his own pungent juices. Hnuppa knew there’d be a price to pay for this later, but right now he was going to enjoy Kurg’s discomfiture as much as possible.

  They still had a few kilometers before reaching Dreadmost itself, although they weren’t sure exactly where Selpla was at the moment in relation to that fine metropolis. They figured their paths would intersect somewhere along the road.

  Selpla had a certain odd knack for finding company vehicles under difficult conditions, as evidenced by the time several years prior when she’d managed to pick a pram driven by Kurg’s ex-boss out of a crowd of some three hundred vehicles at a rally for charity. She’d broken a talon trying to pry open a package of dripple-beast chips in the stands and wanted to get a manicure as soon as was goblinly possible. Seeing his car approaching, she made one of those split-second judgments for which she was infamous and leapt down onto the road. She avoided getting run over by the other racers somehow, then flagged him down and managed to convince him to leave the rally to take her to the manicurist. When asked later how she’d accomplished this, Selpla replied, “I don’t know. He was very cooperative. He seemed sort of quiet, though, like he was thinking about something real hard.”

  That person left the station’s employ shortly thereafter, and Kurg was promoted to take his place. In a way, then, he owed his job to Selpla. It was common knowledge around the station that Selpla had something of a crush on Hnuppa, so Kurg put up with more than he ordinarily would from him for her sake. There was nevertheless a limit to his indulgence, but Hnuppa was quite adept at pulling back just a hair’s breadth from crossing that line.

  He was amused by Kurg’s brusque manner, and pushing his buttons had become one of the twisted little pleasures that kept Hnuppa relatively happy in his job. Kurg seemed to take that in his stride, at least most of the time. Once he’d suspended Hnuppa for a day as a result of a practical joke gone somewhat awry, but Hnuppa looked at it as an unexpected day off (sans pay, admittedly) and held no grudge. Besides, he had gotten one smek of a good laugh out of the episode.

  The rain seemed to be getting worse, if that was possible, as they drove south. Hnuppa couldn’t even see the pavement from his vantage point in the back seat, but Slud seemed to be having no difficulty keeping the dray on the road. He steered rather stiffly, but he obviously was totally focused on his duties. Hnuppa knew that once Slud committed himself to a thing, only some great act of divine wrath could pull him away from it. He couldn’t imagine a better pilot for this sort of weather.

  Kurg didn’t know Slud very well and wasn’t nearly as confident in the gnarled old goblin’s navigational prowess. He gripped the armrests of the front passenger’s seat as though he were struggling against a gale force wind. Hnuppa thought about suggesting that he relax but thought better of it. Kurg seemed to thrive on high anxiety.

  Chapter Eleven:

  Needles and Pincers

  Selpla sneezed violently. She had never been very ladylike when it came to expelling vapors. Her brother Grelm had been fond of comparing the sound to airbrakes being released on a heavy industrial transport dray, in fact. She wiped her nose on her sleeve and trudged along, sniffling. Water rolled down her in uninhibited abandon while she splashed in the rising river that had once been a highway. She wasn’t in a particularly good mood.

  “Where the smek is Kurg?”

  “The weather’s a bit inclement, in case you hadn’t noticed,” replied Lom, “He’s probably fighting the rain just like we are.”

  “Cept he prolly drier,” added Drin, ruefully.

  Selpla shook her head. Water flew a full two meters in a semicircle around her face. “Thanks for the weather report. I’ll be sure to grow an umbrella and gills in my next life.”

  Ahead of them a few meters, Prond was kneeling with his back to them. As they approached him he stood up, cradling something. He turned around to face them, and pulled his arms down a bit so they could see what he was holding. It was an utterly bedraggled battalo, or tree-bear. They gawked. None of them had seen one outside a zoo. They lived exclusively in tree tops of the dense southern forests that stretched from Tillimil to the Bungash Mountains.

  “Where did you find that thing?” Selpla asked, her maternal instincts struggling with her desire to be anywhere dry and warm.

  “Swimming in little circles,” Prond replied.

  “That’s a battalo. They don’t swim.”

  “Well, this one does,” he said, showing them the pronounced webbing between the furry little creature’s toes.

  “Something of an odd adaptation for a canopy-dweller isn’t it?” asked Lom. “I mean, not a lot of aquatics involved in their lifestyle, to my knowledge.”

  “Odd, all right,” agreed Selpla, “And not, I suspect, a natural mutation.”

  “If not natural,” asked Drin, “What, then?”

  Selpla frowned and scrutinized the shivering furball closely. It was still weakly paddling with its back legs.

  “Magic. A form of chimera.”

  Prond cocked his head in puzzlement. “How did the little guy even get here in the first place? It’s a good seventy or eighty kilometers to the nearest deep forest.”

  “Yeah,” Lom chimed in, “all the chimeras we saw earlier were concocted from locally occurring specimens. Maybe he escaped from a zoo?”

  “Zoo? There’s no zoo in Dreadmost,” replied Selpla, “I don’t think they even have a sewage plant.”

  Prond snorted. “Dreadmost is a sewage plant.”

  “Jest coz we only see chimeras in marsh, it not mean they not happen anywheres else,” blurted Drin.

  The other three turned to look at him in astonishment. Drin wasn’t known for his intellectual prowess, or volubility, for that matter. Selpla sometimes wondered how he managed to find his way to the studio every day.

  “That’s quite true, Drin,” Selpla said, finally, trying not to sound patronizing but failing rather badly, “We’d overlooked that possibility, it seems. Perhaps the mutations are spreading.”

  “What,” Lom frowned, “Like some sort of pathogen?”

  “Could be,” replied Prond, “There is some evidence that wild magical outbreaks follow epidemiologically predictable vectors.”

  “Wah you say?” asked Drin, shaking his head.

  “He said that magic and sickness can spread the same way,” explained Selpla.

  Drin nodded in agreement, but seemed disinclined to comment. He was behaving rather oddly, Selpla thought. It suddenly struck her that she knew next to nothing about him. He’d just appeared in the station one day. The muckety-mucks hired him and assigned him as a general gofer for the reporters. Senior management weren’t in the habit of explaining their personnel decisions to the rank and file
, so Drin became part of the team with nothing beyond a basic introduction. He never said much, and what communication he did engage in was a bit shy of sophisticated; Selpla and everyone else had naturally assumed he was uneducated and simple. He’d never done anything up to now to dispel that notion.

  Selpla’s ruminations on the true nature of Drin were interrupted by the sudden arrival of an obviously hysterical hobgoblin. She ran up to Selpla in the pouring rain and started gibbering about a mountain, switching back and forth between Goblish and Higglin, the most common dialect of the Hobgoblin language.

  Selpla, Prond, and Lom huddled around the shrieking hob, trying to figure out what she was saying using a combination of translation and context. It was an uphill struggle. They got the “mountain” part, and something about “motion” or “movement.” None of them were adept at Higglin, unfortunately, so the comprehension was tetchy, at best.

  “A moving mountain,” Prond said, at last, “Sounds like some sort of metaphor. But for what?”

  The others shook their heads. “I can’t imagine,” replied Selpla, “But whatever it is, she’s definitely put out about it.”

  “Escuse, please,” interjected Drin, who had wandered over, “She not speaking metaphorically. She say she saw a mountain moving across the landscape like some great animal. To the north. It passed from west to east less than an hour ago.”

  Once again, Drin had impressed them. “Drin, do you speak Higglin?”

  “Drin speak many tongues,” he replied simply.

  Selpla shook her head. It had been quite a memorable day already, and the end was nowhere in sight.

  “Okay, she saw a moving mountain. Ask her if she’s taking any sort of medication,” said Lom. Prond looked at him sharply. He expected Selpla to chastise Lom for his bluntness, but she did not. Instead, she and Lom both peered at Drin expectantly.

  Drin spoke to the hob in what sounded to Selpla like fluent Higglin. They conversed for nearly a full minute—she, rapidly; he, more deliberately.

  “She say,” relayed Drin, after taking a moment to sort out the translation, “that she hear deep rumble noise off to the west. After about five minutes of noise, a large mountain came out of the rain and fog and moved from west to east maybe hundred meters in front of her. It did not change shape as it moved. She say is a trail of broken trees to show if you want to see.” He raised his one eyebrow comically. “Oh, and she also say she not take any medicine. She want to know if you recommending some.”

  Lom and Prond burst out laughing at this. “Hey,” Prond said, between spasms, “You should let her try one of your wipeout pills.”

  “Yeah,” agreed Lom, “She’d be seeing whole countries stroll by wearing top hats then.”

  “Or maybe fly over,” added Prond, making a dramatic sweep with his hand.

  “You’re both about as funny as you are sensitive,” replied Selpla, “Those pills were prescribed to me for my headaches, and you know it. Anyway, I think this lady may have a story. It’s not every day you get to report on a portable mountain.”

  Lom and Prond looked at one another in astonishment. “You’re not gonna take her seriously, are you?”

  “Sure. Why not? Why would she run up to a bunch of total strangers in this deluge unless she was genuinely upset about something?”

  “Maybe because she’s as loony as a fruit-flapper,” Lom ventured, “Do you actually think she saw a walking mountain?”

  “What I think isn’t important at this point. It’s obvious that she believes that’s what she saw. Our job is to take a look and report what we find. Nothing more, nothing less.”

  Prond threw up his hands. “What the smek. I guess we can’t get any wetter.”

  Kurg still hadn’t decided whether or not he liked Slud. The old goblin was quite annoying and seemingly completely immune to intimidation by authority figures, but he was also one smekking good driver. Weather, wind, and crashing obstacles that would have unhinged any other mortal pilot had no apparent effect on Slud. He braked, smoothly dodged, and continued along his way as though he were on an afternoon pleasure cruise through the Eshvodsi Garden of Botanical Surprises. Kurg couldn’t help but admire that kind of unflappable competence, crotchety old insubordinate leatherbeak notwithstanding.

  They were close enough to Selpla’s last reported position that it was time to start looking out for her and the crew. The rain had not let up, even for an instant, but they found themselves acclimating to the poor visibility. Amazing what a goblin can train his brain to filter out when the need arises.

  Kurg scanned from the passenger’s side, and Hnuppa from behind Slud. They were seeing ever more frequent knots of what looked like refugees from the floods; presumably Selpla’s crew would be recognizable from their unmistakable equipment. “Unless, of course,” Hnuppa pointed out, “They abandoned it because of the rain.” Kurg refused to consider this; he found it impossible even to imagine that anyone would abandon video and audio equipment of that value, no matter how dire the circumstances. Hnuppa had a sudden mental image of Kurg doggedly clinging to a huge shoulder-mounted camera as he slipped beneath the waves after some catastrophic shipwreck. His last words would be, “Hey, these smekkin’ things come out of my capital budget! Blub blub.” Hnuppa chuckled in spite of himself.

  “Why don’t you share whatever it is you find amusing?” Kurg growled at him, “I’m sure we could all do with a laugh right about now.” Hnuppa caught the warning tone in his voice. “Uh, just clearing my throat, sir. Nothing funny here.”

  “Jolly, then you can return your attention to watching for Selpla.”

  “OK—I’m looking, I’m looking. Sheesh.”

  Just then Slud jerked the dray rather violently to starboard to avoid a large tree that had been swept onto the highway by a sudden onrush of water. It rolled across the road behind them and down an embankment like a giant bottle brush. This time, however, Slud was unable to regain full control of the dray; it slid off the roadway and into a water-swollen ditch. No one was hurt, nor did the dray seem damaged, but it was thoroughly stuck in the viscous blue Dreadmost mud.

  “Smek, smek, smek!” Kurg cursed, “If it ain’t one thing, it’s another. Hey, giggles—get out there and push us out of this muck.”

  “Me and what army? What do I look like, a troll? It will take both of us, and even then we’ll be extremely lucky to get out of here.”

  “I’m too smekkin’ old for this smek,” Kurg moaned as he yanked open the door and a raw blast of wind-driven rain smacked him square in the face.

  They heard a curious sound, like an ancient steam engine being powered up for the first time in fifty years. After a moment they realized it was coming from Slud. He was, for lack of a better term, laughing at them.

  “Doesn’t anyone around here laugh like a normal goblin?” Kurg grumbled. Hnuppa didn’t answer—he was too busy trying to keep from ingesting a fatal dose of the water being forcibly driven into every exposed square millimeter of his body.

  The big dray was thoroughly stuck. Kurg and Hnuppa realized more or less simultaneously that they would have to dig it out. It would be a long, dirty task, and one that neither of them felt particularly suited to perform. It was that or sit there for who knows how long, though. Reluctantly, they grabbed the small emergency shovels (more like large spades, really) from the tool box and started mucking.

  “Are we sure this is the right way?”

  “This is the direction she said.”

  “Ask her again. Drin, ask her again if this is the right way.”

  “Preshka nis cassrell mo?”

  “Diji cassol nis.”

  “Yah, she say this path is correct.”

  Lom snorted. “When are we gonna pick up this trail, then? You’d think a mountain on walkabout would cut quite a swath.” He paused to shake off a refuge-seeking dirt wrat that had apparently mistaken his leg for a tree trunk. The wrat floundered in the mud for a confused moment, and then splished off into what little undergrowth
had not already washed away. Lom watched it go disapprovingly. Only a few seconds later, Prond, who was currently taking point, suddenly blurted out, “Downed trees ahead!”

  “Did you say ‘downed’ or ‘drowned’?” Lom asked.

  “Is there an important difference?” interjected Selpla, a bit crossly.

  Prond opened his mouth to reply but at that moment the hobgoblin became visibly excited, shrieking and pointing.

  “She say this where she see mountain,” explained Drin.

  “Yeah, we managed to get that part,” Lom replied, dryly.

  The scene was one of, as they say on the news, utter devastation. A broad path of botanical destruction swept across their field of view—in many places the trees, some of them as much as thirty or forty meters tall in happier days, were literally ground into mulch. Rain had floated away many of the smaller intact branches, but a plethora of tree trunks and limbs were scattered willy-nilly. There were deep gouges where immense rocks had apparently been dragged across the forest floor by some unfathomable force. Here and there piles of broken stone lay strewn in mute testament to the shattering impact of boulder on boulder.

  The little party stood and stared in silent awe at the impressive sight, except for the hobgoblin, who had been yammering non-stop since they arrived. Even Drin seemed to have ceased listening to her.

  Finally Prond took a deep breath, “Hard to argue that something pretty impressive didn’t happen here.” The others nodded. “The question now, I think, is ‘what do we do next?’” He had to raise his voice to be heard over the hob, who was still having at it. Selpla started to reply, but then glanced at Drin. “What in the name of Grund is she gibbering about?”